Fiasco (47 page)

He found himself in a situation whose structure was typical of the algebra of conflicts. A player made a model of his opponent, a model that included the
opponent's
model of the situation, then responded to that with a model of a model of a model, and so on, ad infinitum. In such a game there were no longer any clear, reliable facts. Very tricky, he thought—devilish. Better than instruments here would have been an exorcist. The chronometer beeped in his ear: a hundred minutes had gone by. He placed both hands palm-down on the metal plates and felt the tingling of the current flowing into the computer, for it to send to the
Hermes
the single-bit laser message that its scout was alive.

Time, now, for real reconnaissance. He hurried down the ladder with the second container and from its rear compartment pulled out a folding jeep: a light frame with a saddle and balloon tires, electrically powered. As he drove north, in the direction of the mountain slopes, toward the sky-high netting where the solitary hangar stood, a fine rain began to fall. A gray mist blurred the outlines of the growing building. He stopped the open vehicle in front of it, wiped the water running down the glass of his helmet with a glove, and was amazed. The colossus was both totally alien and incomprehensibly familiar. Windowless, with bulging walls braced by the massive parallel ribs of girders, the thing produced an impression contrary to both architecture and nature. It was like the carcass of a whale into whose belly had been shot a grenade of compressed gas, to make it swell hideously, while crammed inside the trusswork of a bridge, until the dying body filled the entire frame. Between two ribs gaped a semicircular opening. He dropped the container from the jeep and trundled it before him through this gate into impenetrable darkness. Instantly a strong white light blazed up on all sides. He was standing at the foot of a hall in which even a giant strider would have been an ant. The hall was encircled by rows of galleries, one above the other, crooked, tangled together—an iron theater with the stage and the seats torn out. In the center, on a perforated metal sheet, lay a multicolored starfish of flowers that gleamed like crystals. When he drew nearer, he noticed that above it hung an inverted pyramid as transparent as the air. Its surface became visible, flashing reflected light, only at a sharp angle. Deep in this glass tetrahedron appeared the emerald letters:

THIS IS GREETING

The crystalline blossoms burst into magnificent colors, from azure-blue to rich violet. Their radiant calyxes unfolded. Inside each was a flaming diamond. The inscription gave way to the next:

WE ARE FULFILLING YOUR WISH

He stood motionless, and the rainbow of burning crystals slowly turned gray. The diamonds glowed for a moment more, ruby-red, then went out, and everything crumbled into fine ash. He stood before a barbed spool of interwoven wires, and new words shone green inside the crystal:

GREETING CONCLUDED

He looked up from the dying embers and ran his eyes along the galleries, along their drooping rails. In places the galleries were detached from the concave walls. Then he jerked, as if struck in the face. Suddenly he understood why this bizarre building was so familiar: it was an inside-out replica, expanded a hundredfold, of the
Hermes.
The galleries exactly mimicked the scaffolding that had been welded to the ship's sides during the assembly and afterward mangled in the explosion at the moment of its landing. And the ribs, indented in the façade, were the ship's ribs, now girdling its everted hull on the outside. The lights beneath the twisted balconies went out, one by one, until darkness returned and only the sign
GREETING CONCLUDED
, suspended in midair, shone a gradually dimming apple-green.

What now? Having penetrated the wrecked ship, they copied it with mindless precision—or with subtle mockery—so that he would enter it as if walking into the belly of a slain, gutted animal. Whether this was the work of gloating treachery or, instead, the ritual of a nonhuman culture actually thus displaying hospitality, his mind remained in a labyrinth that had no exit. Stepping back in the blackness, he bumped into the container, which toppled over with a loud crash. The noise both sobered and infuriated him. At a run, he wheeled the load toward the daylight and out into the rain. The wet concrete had darkened. In the distance, silver through the drizzle, stood the needle of his rocket. Dirty columns of smoke, issuing steadily from the red fire pots, joined to form a low, turbid bank of clouds. Alone over the whole waste—a dead, slanting tower—jutted the
Hermes.
He checked the time. There remained almost an hour of the second hundred minutes. He struggled to clear his head of anger, to be deliberate, calm.

If they had designed machines of combat, had planned military operations, done engineering on the planetary scale and in space, then they had to be able to reason logically. If they did not want to show themselves, they could at least direct him, with signposts, to where their terminals would prove to him—using the code that had been transmitted for months now, using equations of the algebra of conflicts—that communication was pointless. They could repudiate the arguments of superior force with practical, rational arguments, or appeal to a higher authority, which would give them a choice, at least, between different forms of annihilation. But there were no signposts, no terminals, no devices for the exchange of information, nothing—less than nothing, considering the metallic smokescreen in the clouds; or the corpse of their ship, contaminated with a hidden plague; or its swollen copy, like a frog inflated to death by a lunatic, made to serve as a shrine of hospitality; or the crystal flower bed welcoming him by turning to ashes. A ceremony full of contradictory meanings, as if to say: "There is nothing here for you, intruders. You will wrest nothing from us, by your fire or falling ice, but traps, deceptions, and camouflage. Your envoy can do what he likes. Everywhere he will be met by the same stony silence, until, forced to part from his expectations, bewildered and defeated, he flies into a muddled rage, begins blasting at whatever is at hand, and buries himself beneath tumbling ruins—or crawls out from under them and departs skyward, not with knowledge stolen in an orderly retreat, but only in panic, fleeing." And even if he could in fact force anything, strong-arming his way into locked places, into the iron reaches of the one-eyed metropolis beyond the wall of smoke, surely in such alien, nonhuman surroundings the harder he struck the less he would learn, unable to distinguish between what was discovered and what was destroyed.

The rain fell. The clouds settled lower, enveloping the tip of the wrecked
Hermes.
From a compartment in the container he took a biosensor, an instrument so sensitive that at five hundred meters it registered strongly the cellular metabolism of a moth. The needle quivered constantly above zero, showing that life here, as on Earth, was everywhere. But bacteria or pollen provided no thread of Ariadne. Climbing the ladder, he extended the scope all the way and aimed it at the smoke columns to the south, at the structures of the branching metropolis hidden behind them. The sensor still quivered weakly near zero. He increased the focal length to the greatest range. The smoke, though metallic, presented no obstacle, nor did walls, but when he swept that horizon with the biometer, the arrow did not move. A dead city of iron? This was so hard to believe that he automatically gave the instrument a shake, as if it were a watch that had stopped. It was only when he turned around and directed the scope at the high spiderweb, blurry through the rain, that the arrow began to flutter back and forth. Moving the scope to the sides made the arrow jump erratically.

He jogged back to his jeep, set the container behind the saddle, stuck the biosensor in a two-pronged holder by the steering wheel, and drove to the foot of the netting-draped-over-masts.

It poured. Puddles of rainwater sprayed beneath his wheels. Water streamed down the pane of his helmet, blinding him, and he kept having to glance at the biosensor dial, which was jumping rapidly. According to the odometer, he had covered four miles and was therefore approaching the limit of the area of reconnaissance. In spite of this, he accelerated. Had it not been for the warning blinks of red from the instrument panel, he would have gone headfirst, jeep and all, into a deep ditch that from a distance had looked like a strip of black across the tarmac. Braked too sharply, the vehicle skidded, slid sideways on locked wheels until it came to rest at the edge of broken slabs. He got out to look at the obstacle. The mist made it difficult to judge distance; it gave the impression of depth. The hard plain ended abruptly in fragments of concrete. Many jutted into the air above a clayey bank. The ditch, not of even width but nowhere spannable with the small duralumin ladder, had definitely been created by explosive charges—not long ago, and in haste, which was evident from the clay, in places so ragged and overhanging that it could fall at any moment.

The opposite bank, with pieces of rubble driven into the soil by the explosions, rose in a wide, not-too-steep slope, above which loomed, through the mist, the meshes of the towering spiderweb. At large intervals along the escarpment on the other side he could see steel cables anchored in basins, cables of a gauge typically used to hold, on the vertical, condenser antennas that sat in a socketed base without supports. For two of the nearest spars an explosion had torn out the anchors and the counterpoises. Running his eye along their heavily drooping cables, he observed, some fifty meters higher, the trunk of a mast with telescoping segments that, thinner and thinner, curved around at the top—like an overweighted fishing rod—so that the netting, slack, sagged low. Its bottom wires almost touched the ground. As far as he could see in the mist, the slope was covered by protuberances lighter in color than the clay. Not domes of embedded tanks of liquid or gas—rather, the uneven bulges of molehills. Or shells of great tortoises, half buried. Or the caps of giant mushrooms. Or were these shelters, dugouts?

Overhead, the downpour and the wind rocked the meshes of the loosened spiderweb. He took the biosensor from the jeep and began playing its muzzle back and forth across the slope. The needle repeatedly leaped into the red sector of the dial, fell, and again hit maximum, impelled by a metabolism not of any microscopic infusorians or ants, but of something on the order of whales and elephants, as if whole herds were sitting on that drenched hillside. Forty-seven minutes remained, to a hundred. Return to the rocket and wait? A pity to waste the time. And, worse, it might be throwing away the element of surprise. He had a vague idea, now, of the rules of the game: they had not attacked, but set obstacles so he could break his fool neck if that was what he wanted. Enough thinking on the subject. With the strange feeling that this reality was less real, somehow, than a dream, he took from the container the gear needed to jump to the other bank. He put on the jet holsters and shoulder harness and stuck a small shovel into one of his pockets. The biosensor he strapped to his back, in a knapsack. But, to play it safe, first he used a gun that shot a nylon line. Aiming low at the far slope, he shot, supporting the gun on his left elbow. The line, unwinding with a whistle, hit the escarpment, and the hooks caught—but when he pulled, the sodden ground yielded at the first tug. So he opened the valve; a flapping rush lifted him into the air easily, as on a training field. He flew over the dark trench with ooze at the bottom, cut the thrust—a cold gas that fluttered along his legs—and dropped to the place he had chosen: beyond a bulge that resembled, when he went over it, an enormous, misshapen loaf of bread with a rough asbestos crust. His boots slid from under him in the thick mud, but he kept his balance. It was not that steep here. He was surrounded by bulging, squat mounds the color of ashes, with paler lines where there were runnels of rainwater. An abandoned village of a primitive African tribe, in mist. Or a cemetery with barrows. He pointed the biosensor, taken from the knapsack, at an uneven, swollen wall a foot away. The needle shook at the red maximum, like a small voltmeter applied to a mighty dynamo. Holding the heavy instrument in front of him with its muzzle extended—like a rifle ready to shoot—he ran around the gray, crusty hump that protruded from the clay. In the clay his boots, slapping, left deep prints that filled immediately with dark water. He hurried up the slope from one shapeless loaf to the next. Flattened at the top, they were half again taller than he was. Perfect for inhabitants the size of a man. But there were no entrances, openings, spy holes, embrasures. These could not be bunkers—completely closed, unformed. Nor corpses buried in crusted graves, because no matter where he turned the sensor, life throbbed. For comparison, he directed the muzzle at his own chest. The arrow at once dropped to the middle of the dial. Carefully, so as not to damage it, he lay the biosensor aside, pulled the folding shovel from his suit's thigh pocket, and on his knees dug in the pliant clay. The blade scraped against an object. He shoveled away the muck, but water rapidly filled the growing hole. He thrust in his arm to the shoulder, as deep as he could reach, and, groping, felt a horizontal branching. A root system for petrified mushrooms? No—they were thick, smooth, tubular. They were pipes, and—what struck him particularly—neither hot nor cold, but warm. Out of breath, muddied, he jumped up and punched the fibrous crust with his fist. It gave elastically, though fairly hard, and resumed its former shape. He rested his back against it. Through the rain he could see more humps, shaped in the same random way. Some, close together, made twisting alleys that led higher up the slope, where the mist engulfed them.

Suddenly he remembered that the biosensor was two-way: it had a switch for either aerobic or anaerobic metabolisms. The aerobic variety he had discovered already. He lifted the instrument, with his glove wiped away the clay smeared on the glass, moved the setting to anaerobic, and trained the scope on the rough surface. The needle began to pulse, again and again, in a steady rhythm. Aerobic organisms mixed with anaerobic? How could that be? On this subject he was ignorant—but then no one else, probably, would have been able to figure it out. Slogging through streams of mud in the downpour, he came upon more and more humps. The metabolic pulses varied in frequency. Were some sleeping inside, and others awake? As if wanting to rouse the sleepers, he beat on the coarse, bloated mounds, but this did not affect the pulse. Such was his haste that he nearly fell, bumping into a taut antenna cable in one of the passageways. It stretched at an angle toward the netting of the large spiderweb, invisible in the milky mist. But how long had the alarm of the chronometer been on, repeating its warning louder and louder? A hundred and twelve minutes had gone by without his knowing it. Where was his head? And now what? He could have flown back to the rocket in three, four minutes, except that there was only enough gas in the tank for a two-hundred-meter jump. Three hundred, tops. To the jeep … but that was more than six miles. At least fifteen minutes. Should he try it? And if the
Hermes
struck sooner, and its envoy perished here not as a hero but as a complete idiot? He felt for the handle of the shovel—not there. The pocket was empty.