Fiasco (45 page)

"The
Hermes
awaits your report."

That was Steergard. Before he could answer, another voice spoke, Harrach's:

"Must have dozed off."

Such jokes, having a little of the flavor of barracks humor, had accompanied the first space flights: to lighten the unprecedented experience of men locked in the nose of a rocket as if inside an artillery shell. Thus Gagarin had said, at the last moment, what in Russian amounted to "Geronimo!" Thus one did not say, "There's an oxygen leak. We're suffocating," but, "We have a little problem." Harrach was probably unaware that with his wisecrack he was following an old tradition. And Tempe, for no good reason, replied with, "Just flying along"—but then caught himself and switched to an appropriately professional tone:

"
Earth
here. All units normal. I have Delta Harpyiae on my axis. Entering the atmosphere in three hours. Confirm. Over."

"Confirmed. Heparia has given the meteorological conditions at point zero. Overcast. Wind, north-northeast at thirteen meters a second. Above the spaceport the ceiling is nine hundred meters. Visibility good. Want to talk to anyone here?"

"No, I'd like to look at Quinta."

"You'll see her in eight minutes, when you reach the ecliptic. Then you'll make a course correction. Over."

"I'll make the correction when the
Hermes
gives the signal. Over."

"Good luck. Over and out."

The negotiations, after the destruction of the ice ring, had lasted four days and nights. The crew dealt only with Heparia—which fact they did not learn immediately, because the ultimatum was answered by an artificial satellite so small and so well disguised as a fragment of rock that DEUS did not identify it until it spoke. Set in a stationary orbit 42,000 kilometers above the planet, it rotated accordingly, and when it went behind the edge of the disk, communication was broken off for seven hours. It talked with the
Hermes
using the twenty-one-centimeter band of hydrogen. The ship's radar had to examine the thing's cisplanetary emission thoroughly before discovering how it served Heparia as a relay transmitter. A strong underground radio station controlled it, concealed in the vicinity of the spaceport where the unmanned
Hermes
had so fatefully landed. The station operated on a ten-kilometer wavelength, which gave the physicists reason to suspect that it was a special military installation, designed to go into action in the event of a massive exchange of atomic blows. Such an exchange would be accompanied by electromagnetic shock waves disrupting all wireless radio communication, and with megaton concentrations of explosions at the targets it would also be futile to use ordinary laser transmitters. Only ultralong waves would be effective then, but their low information capacity made it impossible to transmit multibit messages in a short time. So Steergard aimed the
Hermes'
emitters at this radio station. When it did not respond, he sent the following ultimatum: either they communicated directly, or in the course of twenty-four hours he would destroy the whole range of bodies, natural and artificial, that were in stationary orbit—and if even then he received no reply, he would feel justified in raising the temperature of an area of 800,000 hectares around the spaceport, including the spaceport, to 12,000 degrees Kelvin. Which meant that the planet's crust would be pierced to a depth of a quarter of its radius. The threat worked, although Nakamura and Kirsting tried to dissuade the captain from so drastic a measure, since it would be
de facto
equivalent to a declaration of war.

"Interplanetary law ceased to bind us from the moment we were attacked," retorted Steergard. "Negotiations on kilometer wavelengths, relayed and repeated back and forth, could drag on for months, and behind the purely physical reason for this consuming of time there might be hidden the strategic attempt to delay—in order to turn the tables on us. I'm not giving them the chance. If this is an informal exchange of opinions, gentlemen, let's not hear any more about it, but if it's a
votum separatum,
then enter it in the expedition's log. I will answer for it when I resign from my command. In the meantime, I am not resigning."

In its counterproposals, Heparia asked for strict limitations on the envoy's latitude of action. The notion of "contact" became increasingly nebulous the more precisely they tried to define it. Steergard wanted a face-to-face meeting between his man and representatives of the local government and science. But either the meaning of these concepts was completely skewed between Quintans and humans, or else here, too, bad faith had crept in. Tempe flew without knowing whom he would be seeing at the spaceport, but somehow this did not bother him. He was not borne on wings of euphoria; he did not count on any great success—and was himself surprised at his calm. During his preparation on the training equipment he had said to Harrach that he did not believe that
they
would skin him alive. They might be unpitying—one expected that—but they weren't idiots.

The negotiations were accompanied by deliberations on board. Putting up constant resistance, haggling out point after point, the Quintan side finally obtained conditions for the meeting. The visitor could leave the rocket to inspect the remains of the fake
Hermes,
and could move freely within a six-mile radius of his rocket with guaranteed immunity, provided he did not undertake "hostile acts" or convey to the host side "threatening information." Great difficulty was encountered in understanding these terms. The higher the level of abstraction, the more human and Quintan semantics diverged. Such words as "authority," "neutrality," "side," and "guarantee" did not mean the same thing to both—whether due to some outside factor, such as a fundamental difference in their histories, or to intentional dishonesty. But dishonesty, even, did not necessarily imply a desire to deceive or trick: if, for example, Heparia, embroiled in a hundred-year war, was neither free nor sovereign in this matter, yet did not wish—or was not allowed—to reveal that fact to the
Hermes.
A factor here, too, as most of the crew believed, may have been that so many generations of conflict on the planet had had a cumulative effect on the way of thinking as well as on the language.

The day before takeoff, Nakamura had asked the pilot if they could converse in private. That was how he put it. He began in a roundabout way: Intelligence without courage was worth no more than courage without intelligence. The war, having escalated into space, was undoubtedly intercontinental. It would have been best, therefore, to send equally authorized envoys to both landmasses, with prior assurances that they would deliver no militarily important information to either host. The captain had rejected this variant, because he wanted to keep an eye on what happened to the envoy. The ship could not be on both sides of the planet at the same time. The captain wanted to impress upon the Quintans his intention of retaliating if the envoy failed to return safe and sound. He did not indicate the extent of that retaliation—a correct tactic, but one that did not give the envoy complete protection.

Far be it from Nakamura to criticize the captain. He had asked to talk to the pilot, however, because he considered it to be his duty. As Shakespeare once wrote, it was dangerous for a lesser being to "come between the pass and fell incensèd points of mighty opposites." There were three mighty opposites here: the
Hermes,
Norstralia, and Heparia. What did the Quintans know? They knew that the intruder enjoyed superiority in both defense and offense and was able to place blows with great accuracy. In whose interest, in light of this, lay the good health of the envoy? Suppose the envoy's health suffered. Heparia would claim that he met with an unfortunate accident, while Norstralia would prove that it was no accident. In this way, each would try to deflect the
Hermes'
retaliatory blow to hit the opposing side. The captain, indeed, had promised a total destruction—though history showed that the Last Judgment was not a workable tool in politics. A couple of Americans in the twentieth century had come up with the notion of a "doomsday machine," a cobalt superbomb that would blackmail all the nations of Earth with the threat of universal death. But no one followed through with it—and rightly so, because when there was no longer anything to lose, it was impossible to conduct
Realpolitik.
Apocalypse as a reprisal had little credibility. Why should the
Hermes
strike the entire planet if there was one kamikaze in Heparia who made an attempt on the envoy's life?

The Japanese's argument sounded convincing to the pilot. Why had it failed to convince the captain?

Nakamura, bowing politely to his guest, continued to smile. "Because we are without a surefire strategy. The captain does not want to untie knots; his intention is to hack through them. Humble Nakamura does not raise himself above anyone. He thinks his own Nakamuran thoughts. And what does he think about? About three riddles. The first riddle is the sending of the envoy. Will it lead to 'contact'? Only symbolically. If the envoy returns in one piece, having seen the Quintans and learned from them that nothing is to be learned from them, that will be a tremendous accomplishment. The pilot is tempted to laugh?

"The planet is less accessible than Mount Everest. Although on that famous mountain there is nothing but rock and ice, hundreds of people in the course of many years have risked their lives to stand there, if only for a moment. And those who returned, having climbed to within two hundred meters of the summit but no farther, considered themselves defeated, even though the place to which they climbed had no more or less intrinsic value than the place that they had hoped to reach in another few minutes. The mentality of our expedition has become like the mentality of those conquerors of the Himalayas. But this is a riddle with which men come into the world and die, so we have grown accustomed to it.

"The second riddle, for Nakamura, is the fate of the pilot. May he safely return! But if something unforeseen occurs, Heparia will argue that it was white, and Norstralia that it was black. This contradiction will push our captain from the role of avenger into the role of judge. Our threat, sufficient to have forced them to accept the envoy, will hang suspended in space.

"The third riddle is the greatest. It is the
invisibility
of the Quintans. No attempt on your life may take place. One cannot doubt, on the other hand, that the Quintans absolutely hate to show what they look like."

"Perhaps they are monstrous in appearance," suggested the pilot.

Nakamura still smiled.

"Symmetry must be observed here. If they are monsters to us, then we are monsters to them. Forgive me, but the idea is childish. If an octopus had an aesthetic sense, the most beautiful woman in the world would be a monster to it. No, the key to this riddle lies beyond aesthetics…"

"Where, then?" asked the pilot. The Japanese had awakened his interest.

"We discovered points in common between Quintans and Earthlings within the technological-military context. That commonality leads to a crossroads: either they are like us or they are 'monsters of evil.' Such a crossroads is a fiction. But it is a fact, not a fiction, that they do not want us to become acquainted with their appearance."

"Why?"

Nakamura inclined his head in commiseration.

"If I knew that, the knot would be untied and our colleague Polassar would not now have to ready the sidereals. I'll hazard only one foggy guess. The Japanese imagination differs from that of the West. Deep in the tradition of my country is the
mask.
I think that the Quintans, resisting our aims with all their might—i.e., they don't want humans on their planet—nevertheless, from the beginning, took that eventuality into account. You still don't see the connection? You may behold the Quintans without knowing that you have beheld them… We, on the other hand, beamed cartoons to the planet, which featured heroes in human form. I cannot give you courage, Mark. You have more of that, already, than you need… I can only offer you one piece of advice."

He stopped, then said without a smile, enunciating slowly:

"I advise
humility.
Not caution. Nor that you should be confident. I advise humility—that is, the readiness to admit that everything—and I mean everything—you will see may be completely other than it seems… End of conversation."

It was only when he was in flight that Tempe guessed the reproach hidden in Nakamura's words. It was Tempe and his cartoons that had revealed to the Quintans what humans looked like. (But perhaps it was not a reproach, after all.)

These thoughts were interrupted by the rising of the planet. Its innocently white face, wreathed with snowy cirri and showing no trace of the ice ring or the catastrophe, gently swam through the void, pushing the blackness and the pale dust of the stars out of the frame of the screen. At the same time, the range finder began flashing numbers with a rapid chatter. Along the coast of Norstralia, jagged with fjords, a cold front moved in a flat bank of clouds from the north. Heparia, meanwhile, was visible—greatly foreshortened—at the eastern bulge of the globe; it lay beneath a darker gloom, and only its polar skyline gleamed with peaks of ice. The
Hermes
informed him that in twenty-eight minutes he would touch the atmosphere, and it had him make a small course correction.

From the control room Gerbert and Kirsting monitored Tempe's heart, lungs, and functional brain currents, and in the navigation area the captain, Nakamura, and Polassar watched the rocket, to intervene in the event of an emergency. Although there was no clear idea what form an emergency might take, or an intervention, the fact that the chief physicist and the chief energeticist stood ready at Steergard's side strengthened the buoyant mood (the tension notwithstanding) on board the ship. The trailing telescopes gave a sharp image of the silver spindle that was the
Earth,
adjusting their magnification so that the rocket remained in the center of the milky disk of Quinta. Finally DEUS threw orange numerals onto the atmospheric monitor, empty until now: the craft was two hundred kilometers above the ocean, in rarefied gases, and beginning to heat up. Its tiny shadow fell upon the sea of clouds and sped across their immaculately white surface. The
Earth's
computer transmitted, in a salvo of impulses, the last data of the flight, because in a moment or two the cushion of friction-produced plasma in the thicker layer of air would cut off all communication.