Chindi Page 16

  There were two other chambers in the dome, and both contained variations of the ironwork. In addition, one of the spaces provided plumbing. A basin and a faucet.

  “Washroom,” said Herman.

  Alyx looked puzzled. “Where’s the toilet?”

  “Maybe they don’t produce waste,” said Nick.

  Pete laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “All living systems produce waste.”

  “I don’t think plants do,” said George.

  Tor thought about it for a moment. “Oxygen,” he said.

  George shook his head. “You know what I mean.”

  “I believe,” said Nick, glancing across the room, “that’s the answer to Alyx’s question.” He was looking at a jar-shaped metal receptacle lying on the floor. It had apparently broken free of its housing, which was mounted on the wall at about eye level. They inspected the housing and found a duct behind it.

  “That seems like an odd way to do it,” said Alyx. “You’d have to get halfway up the wall.”

  “I guess,” said Hutch, “it settles the question of whether they were bipeds.”

  They laughed, and Tor commented he was beginning to understand what the term alien really meant.

  BEYOND THE WASHROOM, they faced a choice between tunnels. There was talk of splitting up, and again Hutch cautioned against it.

  Nobody argued, and George led them off to the right. Their footsteps had a whispery quality in the thin air. They passed closed doors and emerged eventually into a large single chamber.

  Dim light leaked through the overhead. That would be the glow from Safe Harbor. They filed out onto a concrete apron that circled a section of bare earth.

  “Greenhouse,” said Pete. A few stalks protruded out of the frozen ground.

  They moved on into another dome and saw cages.

  The chamber was crowded with them, divided into a range of sizes, none bigger than one would need to contain a beagle. They were stacked on shelves and mounted on tables and sometimes built into the walls. There were maybe a hundred of them.

  “Bones over here,” said Alyx, in a small voice. She was looking down at one of the enclosures.

  They were gray, desiccated, not very big, and there were still scraps of what might once have been flesh hanging on them. Hutch got detailed pictures.

  George found more. His expression suggested he was being subjected to improprieties and bad taste.

  “What is this place?” asked Herman.

  “Probably experimental animals,” said George.

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “What then?”

  “Dining room.”

  George flinched. “Ridiculous,” he said.

  Alyx squealed and backed out into the corridor.

  It was Hutch’s conclusion, too. “Looks as if these critters liked their dinners alive.”

  “That’s ugly,” said Herman.

  Their lamps were moving around the room, throwing the silhouettes of the cages across the ceiling and walls. “I don’t know,” Pete said. “I’m not sure it’s much different from what we do.”

  “It’s a lot different from what we do,” insisted Herman.

  “Maybe we’re just a little more squeamish,” said Pete.

  They wandered through the room, peering into the cages until Herman suggested maybe they’d seen enough and might consider going back. The sense of a Sunday afternoon outing had vanished.

  “It’s the problem with looking at civilizations that are completely different.” Pete went into lecture mode. He was back on the mock-up starship bridge he’d used during the Universe shows. “We tend to have idealistic notions of what they’ll be like. We assume they’ll have abolished war, that they’ll be smart…”

  He went on in that vein for another minute or so. Hutch turned the volume down but not off while she tried to control her own imagination. The place was creepy. She’d visited a few alien sites over the years, inevitably wondering what the occupants had really been like. For the first time she was glad she didn’t have details.

  They pressed on, and descended into an underground area that housed storage tanks, engines, supply bins (filled with decayed garments whose shapes were no longer discernible), and control consoles. Nick stumbled over a pair of tracks, but there was no sign of a vehicle.

  Then they climbed a ramp and emerged in a large chamber that might have been an auditorium. One wall was completely dedicated to display systems. Another was lined with shelves, each of which was packed with plastic rings, about the size of dinner dishes. All were labeled.

  “Computer storage?” wondered Pete, who was first to enter.

  Nick shrugged. “It won’t matter much. If this place is as old as it looks, whatever was on them is long gone.”

  The rooms and corridors throughout the complex were filled with the ubiquitous ironwork. All had high ceilings. But there was something vaguely unsettling about the dimensions and the architecture, as if the proportions weren’t right.

  “More rings in here,” said Pete, from somewhere down the corridor. “And more here.”

  George and the others were hanging back, perhaps intimidated in some way nobody understood. But Pete just plunged ahead. “And still more.” He stopped. “No, I’m wrong. This one is empty.”

  “No rings?” George asked.

  “No nothing,” said Pete. “No tables. No cabinets. Not even any iron.”

  That sent everybody tracking in to take a look, but they stayed together. The herd instinct had taken over.

  The room was bare.

  “Odd,” said Pete. He knelt and examined the floor. “It looks as if the monkey bars were here. You can still see the fittings.”

  One wall was discolored in places suggesting the presence of shelves at one time. “Well,” said George, “maybe they were getting ready to remodel when the war shut them down.”

  THEY FOUND A room full of mummified things, creatures with segmented abdomens and multiple limbs and long, sloping skulls. They were hanging in the ironwork, most of them seated in loops and mounts. Several had fallen to the floor.

  “That’s enough for me,” said Alyx, who took one look and returned to the passageway.

  The creatures would have been, on average, about the size of cheetahs. But they had large jaws, lots of teeth, two sets of appendages ending in curled claws, a third set in manipulative digits. Their skulls might have approached human cranial capacity. There was, Hutch thought with a shudder, something spidery about the creatures. Like their alphabet.

  There were goblets and plates on the table, and bones in the plates.

  Only one of the goblets was still standing upright.

  “What do you think happened here?” asked Herman.

  Nick came up beside Hutch. “You mind company?” he said.

  She smiled. “I think we’re all a bit rattled.”

  “Looks like nine of them,” said Pete.

  “Wouldn’t want to meet one of these critters in a dark alley.”

  “Didn’t all get out after all, did they?”

  “Bones in the plates aren’t theirs.”

  “They were having a celebration.”

  “I don’t think so. Looks more like a last meal.”

  “Yes. Had to be.”

  They spread out around the room, gazing down at the corpses. Alyx lingered in the entrance, pointedly looking off in a neutral direction.

  “I thought the place was going to turn out to be pretty old,” said Herman.

  “What makes you think it isn’t?” asked Hutch.

  He gazed quietly at the bodies. “They’re not as decomposed as I’d have expected if this had happened forty or fifty years ago.”

  “This is probably a sterile world,” said Hutch. “No organisms to digest the remains. They could have been here for centuries.”

  Pete stepped carefully past the remains to study the lone standing goblet. “They look like climbers,” he said, bestowing on them the name they would reta
in forever.

  “You think the goblets were the method?” asked Alyx, of the room at large.

  “I’d think so,” said Nick. “A final meal, a last slug of wine, and exit. They were probably trapped here when the war broke out.” He shrugged. “Pity.”

  George shook his head. “Bear with me, Nick,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can feel much sympathy for something like this.”

  PETE CONTINUED TO prowl ahead of the rest. They were in the largest of the domes, on the far side from where they’d entered the complex, when his voice sounded in Hutch’s commlink. “How about that?”

  He was standing in front of an airlock. Both hatches had been cut open. Beyond, the ground was white and flat in the glow of Safe Harbor.

  “That’s the damnedest thing, George,” he continued. It looked as if someone had used a laser on the hatches. From the outside.

  “Why would they do that?” asked George.

  Hutch looked at the mutilated lock a long time, shook her head, and took some scrapings. George caught her eye, almost demanding a rational explanation.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  chapter 11

  He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.

  —HENRY THOREAU,

  EXCURSIONS, 1863

  HUTCH HAD COLLECTED some soil samples, which she added to her scrapings. She also had air samples, taken from Safe Harbor by probe. She scanned everything, and sent the results to Outpost.

  The research vessel Jessica Brandeis duly arrived, optimistically carrying a medical staff as well as a team of engineering specialists. By then, the Memphis had recovered more body parts and pinpointed the vectors of most of the larger pieces of wreckage.

  She was delighted to turn the salvage operation over to Edward C. Park, the captain of the Brandeis.

  They’d been able to identify seven of the eleven persons on board, including Preach. In his case there had only been a blackened arm, but the fourth finger had worn the eagle ring. She removed it while her stomach churned. She had swallowed her grief as best she could, said good-bye to him, giving up all hope that he’d pull off one more miracle. Then she’d set the ring for delivery to next of kin.

  When it was over, after Park officially took charge, she pointedly avoided the temptation to retreat to her quarters, but stayed instead in mission control or in the common room, where there was always someone else.

  The Memphis transferred the remains of the Condor personnel and the recovered wreckage to the Brandeis. When that painful operation had been completed, Park went looking for more debris.

  Meanwhile, the moonbase scan results came back from Outpost.

  They specified the chemical composition of the various hatches, instruments, shelves, and whatnot. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. But the age of the base was estimated at fourteen hundred standard years.

  That widened everyone’s eyes. My God, it went back to the time of Charlemagne.

  But the numbers fit with the estimates from the air samples defining when the nuclear explosions had taken place.

  There was another surprise in the report: Whoever had taken a laser to the cargo door had done it roughly twelve centuries ago. Two hundred years later.

  So apparently someone had survived.

  PARK CALLED TO inform her he’d found the stealth satellite that Preach had been taking on board at the time of the incident. “Or, more accurately,” he corrected himself, “some of the pieces.”

  “Be careful.”

  “We will.” She saw that he shared her suspicion that the stealth had been involved in the destruction of the Condor.

  “Are you scanning it?”

  “We intend to.”

  “Good. When you send the results to Outpost, ask them to check on the energy source. And we’d also like to know how old it is.”

  GEORGE RARELY CAME by the bridge, unless something was happening. She sensed that he liked being in charge, and that the bridge put him at a disadvantage. But nevertheless there he was, standing uncertainly at the door. “I’ve been thinking about this place,” he said. “And I don’t understand what’s been happening here.”

  “You mean what happened to the Condor?”

  “That, too. Mostly I don’t understand who got to the moon two hundred years after the war. They must have all died during the war, right? I mean, who could have survived?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody did.”

  “That’s right. Somebody cut their way into the moonbase.” He leaned back against a console. “Who?”

  “I’ve no idea, George. Nor have I any suggestion how to find out.”

  “I might.” He broke away from the console, crossed the bridge, and sat down in the right-hand chair. The navigational screens, showing images from the ground at differing magnifications, caught his eye. “I think there’s a connection with the stealth satellites,” he said. “They’re the other piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit. I mean, I can understand they might have been using them to spy on each other. But why put some of them out at 1107?”

  Hutch didn’t have an answer for that either.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I wonder how old the satellites are.”

  “We’ll find out when the next report comes in from Outpost. But I assume they’re fourteen hundred years old. They have to date from about the time of the war.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Fourteen hundred years is a long time.”

  That was true. The stealth at 1107 was still transmitting. That was pretty good for a piece of hardware fourteen centuries old.

  “Have we looked to see whether there are other stealths in orbit around Safe Harbor?”

  Hutch had considered the possibility, concluded there probably were, but didn’t see what could be gained by finding one. In fact, if there were any, she didn’t think she’d want to go near them. Damned things were dangerous.

  George read her concern. “We can be careful,” he said. “But we ought to take a look. Poke it with a stick if we have to.”

  “Why do we care?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t end here,” he said.

  “Maybe what doesn’t end?”

  “Have you considered the possibility the locals didn’t put up the stealths?”

  It was a thought. But if they hadn’t, who had? “You think somebody else was here?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  THEY ASSUMED THAT the stealths would be lined up for ideal reception, which put them in an orbit whose plane was perpendicular to 1107.

  “If that’s so,” said Bill, “it’ll look like this.” He drew a circle around Safe Harbor that varied thirty-seven degrees above and below the equator.

  At the neutron star, there’d been a signal to track. Here, they were looking at the receiving end of the system. That meant they had to go in close and try visually to find the satellites. In this, they had the advantage that the stealth methodology was far less effective than a lightbender would have been.

  The problem was to guess the altitude of the orbit. Where had the stealth been when the Condor intercepted it?

  They needed almost two days, with everyone watching the screens, before Alyx saw what appeared to be, as she described it, “some reflections.”

  Hutch looked carefully at it and saw a small patch of sky that seemed a trifle darker than its surrounding area. Furthermore, two stars appeared to be duplicated. They moved closer and aimed the Memphis’s lights at the anomaly. The beams seemed to twist.

  “What do we do now?” asked Tor. “If it’s booby-trapped, we don’t want to go near it.”

  “Let’s whack it and see what it does. Bill—”

  “Yes, Hutch?” Innocently.

  “Send something over to give it a shove.”

  The AI’s features snapped onto her comm screen. “Probe away,” he said.

  The probe was a communication-and-sensor package of the type usually dropped into hostile atmospheres. S
he watched it go, powered by its thrusters, steered by the AI.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  Bill appeared beside her. “One minute.”

  George’s people were making bets on the result. She wondered what it said about the human race that the odds were six to one for an explosion. She expected one herself.

  The package closed on the disturbance.

  The Brandeis watched from a safe distance.

  At Bill’s command, the package angled left and ran directly into the stealth. It struck the vehicle dead center, in the middle of the diamond, and wobbled off.

  Nothing happened.

  Bill brought the unit around, hit the satellite a couple more times, and then sent the package into one of the dishes. It had by then become less than fully responsive and it hit too hard. The dish broke off, popped into visibility, and drifted away, trailing cable. At about twenty meters, the cable drew taut and the dish began to drag behind.

  “Satisfied?” Bill asked.

  “Yeah. That’s enough.”

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Park.

  “Have a closer look,” she said. “I’m going over in the lander.”

  “Why?”

  Why? She wasn’t sure. She wanted to find out what had killed Preach. She owed him that much. And she felt she could do it in relative safety. Forewarned, she was sure she could take a look without setting the damned thing off. “To find out whether it’s a bomb,” she said.

  “That’s not a good idea, Hutch.”

  “I know. I’ll be careful.”

  When she got down to the lander, Tor was waiting. “I’ll go along,” he said, “if you don’t object.”

  She hesitated. “Provided you do what I tell you.”

  “Sure.”

  “No debates.”

  “No debates.”

  “Okay. Get in.”

  Park was still trying to talk her out of it. “The fact that the explosion happened while they were examining the damned thing can’t be a coincidence,” he insisted. It didn’t take a genius. “Let the bomb people come out and look at it.”

  “That’ll take forever.”

  So the Brandeis stood by while she set off in the lander. The stealth floated out there, not quite visible, but its presence was betrayed by a twisting of light, a sense of movement, a place that was alternately bright and dark for no apparent reason. It was like a ghostly presence in a dimly lit room.