Fiasco (46 page)

A golden spark marked the
Earth's
entry into the ionosphere. The light grew and spread; the pilot was now braking with his retros. The shadow disappeared as the rocket plunged into the clouds. After twelve minutes, the cesium clocks of projected time and real time dropped to the single digits, whereupon the spectrograph, tracking the exhaust flame of the lander, went blank and after a row of zeros displayed the last, classic word:
Brennschluss.

The
Hermes
moved high above Quinta, to keep the point of the landing directly below it, in its nadir. The main observation screen was filled with an impenetrable barrier of clouds. As was agreed, the hosts sprayed masses of metallic dust into the cloud cover above this area, creating a shield that blocked all radiolocation. Steergard had finally accepted this condition, reserving the right, however, to take "drastic measures" if so much as one of the laser flashes that Tempe was supposed to send—every hundred minutes—failed to reach the
Hermes.

In order to provide the pilot with some visibility in the final stage of landing, the physicists had equipped his rocket with an additional section filled with a gaseous compound of silver and free radicals of ammonia under high pressure. When the craft penetrated the stratosphere and stabbed it from the stern with a fiery mane that flapped up along the sides toward the prow, this ring-shaped section surrounding the funnels of the jets was blasted free with explosive charges. Preceding the vehicle, it came into contact with the flame and plasma and burst open from the heat. The violently expanding gases swirled like the funnel of a tornado and with a thunderous rush cleared a ragged, wide vortex in the heavy clouds. At the same time, liquid oxygen, pumped from the nozzles instead of the hypergol, extinguished the plasma cushion, and the rocket, descending on a cold drive, regained its vision.

Through the heat-resistant lenses of the cameras appeared the landing field, encircled by swollen storm clouds. He saw the gray, quadrilateral surface of a spaceport, cut off on the north by slopes, as of hills, and rimmed on the remaining sides by a multitude of red sparks that trembled in the curving air above them like candle flames smoking. It was these that spouted the streams of metallic dust. The exploded ammonium ions and silver were accomplishing their purpose: to dissolve the last clouds above the landing field into rain. There was such a downpour that the smoking, crimson sparks darkened for a few minutes. Darkened, but did not go out. Once again they flared, in dirty puffs of steam. Looking to the south through the vapors driven apart by the whirlwind, he saw a black structure like a flattened octopus or squid with many branchings of shiny strips. The strips were neither conduits nor roads; they were concave and transversely striated. The impression of an octopus might also have come from the single Polyphemian eye that regarded him, from the structure, with a sharp, luminous stare. An enormous optic paraboloid, perhaps, that was tracking his descent.

As he descended, the greenery of the northern hills beyond the field took on a different aspect. What from a great height had seemed a steep, forested massif, with a rectangular concrete slab carved out by leveling robots, lost the appearance of foliage. It was not the crowns of trees that merged to form a dark-green, shaggy surface, but dry, lifeless, bushlike tangles—tangles of grotesque barbed wire, or knotted tubes of some type, or cables. Forced to abandon the image of a wooded hillside where the light of occasional clearings shone through a gray-silvery mass of conifer needles, he saw the artifact of an alien technology whose skill renounced all earthly canons. Were men to have landscaped the area around a spaceport in a wide valley between a metropolis and mountainsides, they would have given care to the arrangement of the terrain, uniting utility with the aesthetics of geometry. They most definitely would not have covered the bare slopes with a jungle of thousands of wildly branching metal gnarls and knots—which, moreover, could not have been the work of engineers masking military targets under a web of pseudovegetation, since the unnaturalness of such camouflage would have betrayed itself immediately.

When the rocket, on cold drive, fell lower toward the gray concrete runway, the whole bank of hills, shrouded by the influx of returning clouds, vanished in them like a spiny lizard's skin sported with eruptions, with pustules. But before that strange hideousness could cause him to ponder the difference between designing technological devices and releasing them into a self-directed, mutating growth, and before he could look again at the structure to the south—the squid already sinking on the horizon, watching him with its luminous eye set in black—he had to take over the controls. The four g's fell to two; compressed oxygen spurted in an icy boil from the nozzles; and the arthropod legs emerged—flexing, spreading—beneath the stern. When they struck the hard ground, the engine gave a final belch and fell silent.

The three-hundred-ton rocket executed a few diminishing shifts of position on its undercarriage and then was completely still. He felt in his gut the presence of a weight other than that of deceleration. Hearing the fading hiss of the shock absorbers, he unbuckled his belts, let the air out of the impact cushions around the suit, and stood up. The straps slid from his shoulders and chest. The atmosphere analyzer showed the presence of no poisonous gases, and the pressure came to eleven hundred millibars, but he was supposed to go out helmeted, so he connected the oxygen hose to his own tank. When the cameras were switched off, the cabin lights brightened. He ran an eye over what he had brought with him. On either side of the seat lay a heavy, wheeled container that could be pulled like a cart. Harrach had painted on these, with much solicitude, an enormous "1" and "2," as if they might be confused. Harrach definitely envied him, but showed no sign of it. A good comrade, Harrach was, and the pilot wished that the man was at his side now. The two of them, perhaps, could better cope with the task.

Long before the flight, when there were only the words of Lauger, on the
Eurydice,
to assure him that he would "see the Quintans," he had fallen into a depression—which DEUS observed—but after his conversation with the doctor, Tempe rejected the machine's diagnosis. It was not his belief that communication with the Quintans was senseless, based on false assumptions—it was not that which oppressed him, but the fact that they had entered into a game of contact where violence was the highest suit. This thought he kept to himself, because more than anything he wanted to see the Quintans. How could he, despite all his reservations and doubts, turn his back on such an opportunity? Arago had taken a dim view of their policy even before the phrase "show of strength" came up. Arago had called the lie a lie, had repeated that they were entering into a contest of deceit; that they were pushing so forcibly toward communication that they were actually abandoning it; that they were covering themselves with masks and stratagems—safer thereby, perhaps, but more and more removed from any genuine opening up of a view into an Alien Intelligence. They jumped upon Quinta's subterfuges, struck at Quinta's every refusal, and made the goal of the expedition the less attainable the more brutal the blows they used in its attainment.

He activated the hatchway door but had to wait for the results of the analyses. While his computer chewed the incoming data on the chemical composition of the ground, the force of the wind, the ambient radiation (practically zero), he thought not of the next stages of the program but of all the bad things that he had suppressed until now. Nakamura was of the monk's opinion, but did not go over to his position, which meant retreat. Tempe, too, felt that Father Arago was right. Yet right and wrong could not deter him. If Quinta was a hell, Tempe was ready to descend to that hell to see the Quintans.

So far, true, the reception did not seem hellish. Wind, nine meters a second; visibility beneath the cloud ceiling, good; no poisons, mines, or charges beneath the surface of the landing field, searched with ultrasound. There was a whistle: the cabin pressure was being equalized with that of the outside. Three green bulbs lit up over the hatchway. The heavy lid made half a turn and sprang upward. He heard the scrape of the lowering ladder and the click with which its sections stiffened at an angle against the concrete. He looked out. Full daylight hit him through the glass of the helmet. From his height of four stories he saw the vast plain of the spaceport beneath—once more—a cloud-covered sky. The northern hills had vanished in mist. In the distance, brown and reddish smoke rose from a long line of well shafts. Against that backdrop stood an enormous, crooked tower, at more of a slant than the tower in Pisa: it was the fake
Hermes,
alone and odd in the desolation, rooted about a mile away. There was not a living soul in any direction.

In the direction where the hills were hidden behind the sinking clouds, at the very edge of the concrete runway, was a low, cylindrical building resembling a hangar for zeppelins. From its silhouette thin mastlike spars jutted skyward, connected by glistening threads that were like a spiderweb spun across a quarter of the horizon. The octopus-metropolis with its single eye had disappeared behind the smoke of the opposite horizon. Now, he thought, they were observing him by means of this spidery netting. He examined it carefully through binoculars and was surprised by the irregularities in the mesh. The material hung unevenly, making smaller and larger openings, like an old seine draped by a giant fisherman over masts—masts so weighed down by their own height and the netting that they bent in every direction. The appearance was sloppy. The spaceport, in any case, was deserted, like an area evacuated before the arrival of an enemy. Shaking off the impression, as repulsive as it was strong, that he was viewing not an antenna installation but the work of monstrous insects, he backed down the ladder, stooping beneath the container he carried. It was almost a hundred kilograms. He unbuckled the straps, lowered the container to the concrete, and began rolling it toward the
"Hermes,"
which rose at an angle from its shattered stern. He walked with a steady step, not hurrying, so that those who watched him (he did not doubt that there were watchers) would see nothing to make them suspicious.

They knew that he would be inspecting the wreck, but not how. At the stern, the smashed jets of which stuck in the radially cracked runway, he stopped and looked around. Through the helmet he heard the wind gusting, though he felt almost nothing in the suit. The peep of the chronometer called him back to business. The small, folding duralumin ladder proved to be unnecessary. Right above the funnels of the jets, which were crushed into a giant accordion, a burned hole gaped in the stern. The hole had tongues of sheet metal wrenched outward, and there was a stump of a rib of the hull, twisted by the explosion. In a pinch, he could crawl in through this opening, taking care not to rip his suit on the steel edges. He pulled himself up onto the foot of a landing leg that had not had time to extend completely—such was their hurry to open fire. Which move, however, made sense, since a ship was most vulnerable in the moment that it cut the main drive and shifted its entire mass onto protractile supports.

Pulling the container in after him, he craned his neck as far as possible to assess the condition of the hull. From the bottom he could not see the prow hatches, which had been welded shut, but he did see the doors to the hold. To his surprise, they were locked and had not been forced. Those doors would not have let themselves be opened easily from without. Strange. Having destroyed the engine room with a single heavy-caliber shot—and with the ship, hit, at such a tilt—why should they have entered through a radioactive hole a meter in diameter instead of propping the thing up first with a solid scaffold and then breaking into the central holds? After a hundred years of war they didn't have sappers with the right equipment, they didn't have capable military engineers? Still puzzled by the behavior of the local army, he struggled with the container, now inside the ship. He aimed the radiometer at the darkness. The single-use reactor had melted exactly as its designers intended and flowed out, through Kingston valves installed for that purpose, onto the cracked concrete of the spaceport, creating a fairly small patch of radioactivity. Appreciating how nicely Polassar and Nakamura had thought the whole thing out, he turned on his flashlight. All around him it was dim and silent.

Of the engine room not even rubble remained. The construction had been made to withstand the lifting of two thousand tons of an empty mock-up, yet to fly apart at a puff of air. The needle of the Geiger assured him that in the course of an hour he would receive no more than a hundred roentgens. From the container he took two flat metal receptacles and dumped their contents: a tremendous number of synthetic insects equipped with microsensors. Carefully, he knelt among them, as though rendering solemn homage to the broken ship, and switched on the activating system at the bottom of the larger receptacle. The swarm, spilled across the warped metal, came to life. Haphazardly, hurriedly scrambling with their filament legs, like real beetles on their backs trying to turn themselves over, the synthecs scurried off in all directions. He waited patiently until the last ones left him. When only a couple of units, evidently defective, circled helplessly at his knees, he rose and went out into the daylight, pulling the now nearly empty container behind him. Halfway back, he took a large ring from it, unfolded its stand, directed it at the stern, and returned to the
Earth.
Fifty-nine minutes had elapsed since his landing. For the next thirty, he photographed the area, primarily the high spiderweb, using different filters and lenses. Then he went up the ladder into the rocket.

In the dark cabin, the computer monitor was already on. The synthecs were reporting, in the infrared, through the relay set up at half distance for better coherence. Together with the computer and its program they formed an electron microscope. The microscope was unusual only in that it was separated spatially into these subunits. Ten thousand of its tiny beetles rummaged through all the corners of the wreck, prying into cinders, soot, dust, debris, and bits of slag and melted metal: to find whatever had not been there originally. Their electronic heads were "ordotropic"—attracted to the high levels of molecular organization found in all living (and nonliving) microorganisms. The beetles, too stupid themselves to make diagnoses, served only as the remote lens of the microscope-analyzer in the rocket, which was already drawing the first crystal mosaics of what had been discovered and interpreting them. The technobiotic skill of the local engineers of death commanded respect. The beetles had made possible the identification, in innocent refuse, of slow-acting viruses. Millions of viruses lay in the guise of dirt. The computer had not yet determined their latency period. They were spores—eggs—slumbering in molecular incubators, to hatch after weeks or months. From this he drew an important conclusion: he was to leave the planet in one piece, in order to carry the plague on board the
Hermes.
The reasoning, irreproachable in its logic, tempted him to bold action. Only by returning, after all, would he become the bearer of doom. But here a sudden doubt assailed him. The viruses could also be fraudulent. Upon discovering them, a man would have the desire—based on the deduction just now made—to attempt something reckless. And how easy it would be for someone rash and thoughtless to meet with an accident.