The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Page 32

  “Look . . . look!”

  He saw Marlene pointing and turned to follow her gaze. The hills rising before them were dazzling with a million sparkling lights: red and blue and white and dazzling, shimmering lights as though a cascade of precious jewels were pouring down the hillside.

  “What is it?” Marlene’s voice sounded excited, thrilled, not the least afraid.

  Lee stared at the shifting multicolored lights; it was like playing a lamp on cut crystal. He took a step toward the hills, then looked down to the ground. From inside the cumbersome suit, it was hard to see the ground close to his feet and harder still to bend down and pick up anything. But he squatted slowly and reached for a small stone. Getting up again, Lee held the stone high enough for it to catch the fading rays of daylight.

  The rock glittered with a shower of varicolored sparkles.

  “They’re made of glass,” Lee said.

  Within minutes Charnovsky and the other “outsiders” were out of the ship to marvel at it. The Russian collected as many rocks as he could stuff into his suit’s thigh pouches. Lee and Grote helped him while the women merely stood by the skimmer and watched the hills blaze with lights.

  Sirius disappeared below the horizon at last, and the show ended. The hills returned to being brownish, erosion-worn clumps of rock.

  “Glass mountains,” Marlene marveled as they returned to the skimmer.

  “Not glass,” Charnovsky corrected. “Glazed rock. Granitic, no doubt. Probably was melted when the Pup exploded. Atmosphere might have been blown away, and rock cooled very rapidly.”

  Lee could see Marlene’s chin rise stubbornly inside the transparent dome of her suit. “I name them the Glass Mountains,” she said firmly.

  Grote had smuggled a bottle along with them, part of his personal stock. “My most precious possession,” he rightfully called it. But for the Glass Mountains he dug it out of its hiding place, and they toasted both the discovery and the name. Marlene smiled and insisted that Lee also be toasted, as co-discoverer.

  Hours later, Lee grew tired of staring at the metal ceiling of the sleeping quarters a few inches above his top-tier bunk. Even Grote’s drinks didn’t help him to sleep. He kept wondering about the humanoids, what they were doing, where they were from, how he would get to learn their secrets. As quietly as he could, he slipped down from the bunk. The two men beneath him were breathing deeply and evenly. Lee headed for the rear hatch, past the women’s bunks.

  The hard suits were standing at stiff attention, flanking both sides of the rear hatch. Lee was in his coveralls. He strapped on a pair of boots, slid the hatch open as quietly as he could, and stepped out onto the fender.

  The air was cool and clean, the sky bright enough for him to make out the worn old hills. There were a few stars in the sky, but the hills didn’t reflect them.

  He heard a movement behind him. Turning, he saw Marlene.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “I’m a very light sleeper,” she said.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “No, I’m glad you did.” She shook her head slightly, and for the first time Lee noticed the sweep and softness of her hair. The light was too dim to make out its color, but he remembered it as chestnut.

  “Besides,” she whispered, “I’ve been longing to get outside without being in one of those damned suits.”

  He helped her down from the fender, and they walked a little way from the skimmer.

  “Can we see the sun?” she asked, looking skyward.

  “I’m not sure, I think maybe . . . there.” He pointed to a second-magnitude star, shining alone in the grayish sky.

  “Where, which one?”

  He took her by the shoulder with one hand so that she could see where he was pointing.

  “Oh yes, I see it.”

  She turned, and she was in his arms, and he kissed her. He held onto her as though there was nothing else in the universe.

  If any of the others suspected that Lee and Marlene had spent the night outside, they didn’t mention it. All six of them took their regular pre-breakfast checks in the medical booth, and by the time they were finished eating in the cramped galley the computer had registered a safe green for each of them.

  Lee slid out from the galley’s folding table and made his way forward. Grote was slouched in the driver’s seat, his lanky frame a geometry of knees and elbows. He was studying the viewscreen map.

  “Looking for a pass through these hills for our vehicle,” he said absently, his eyes on the slowly-moving photomap.

  “Why take the skimmer?” Lee asked, sitting on the chair beside him. “We can cross these hills in the powersuits.”

  Grote cocked an eye at him. “You’re really set on getting to the coast, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  That brought a grin. “How much do you think we ought to carry with us?”

  * V *

  They split the team into three groups. Chien and Charnovsky stayed with the car; Marlene and Doris would go with Lee and Grote to look at the flora and fauna (if any) on the shore side of the hills, Lee and the engineer carried a pair of TV camera packs with them, to set up close to the shoreline.

  “Beware of the natives,” Charnovsky’s voice grated in Lee’s earphones as they walked away from the skimmer. “They might swoop down on you with bows and arrows!” His laughter showed what he thought of Lee’s worries.

  Climbing the hills wasn’t as bad as Lee had thought it would be. The powersuit did most of the work, and the glassy rock was not smooth enough to cause real troubles with footing. It was hot though, even with the suit’s cooling equipment turned up full bore. Sirius blazed overhead, and the rocks beat glare and heat back into their faces as they climbed.

  It took most of the day to get over the crest of the hills. But finally with Sirius edging toward the horizon behind them, Lee saw the water.

  The sea spread to the farther horizon, cool and blue, with long gentle swells that steepened into surf as they ran up toward the land. And the land was green here: shrubs and mossy-looking plants were patchily sprinkled around.

  “Look! Right here!” Doris’ voice.

  Lee swiveled his head and saw her clumsily sinking to her knees, like an armor-plated elephant getting down ponderously from a circus trick. She knelt beside a fern-like plant. They all walked over and helped her to photograph it, snip a leaf from it, probe its root system.

  “Might as well stop here tonight,” Grote said. “I’ll take the first watch.”

  “Can’t we set the scanners to give an alarm if anything approaches?” Marlene asked. “There’s nothing here dangerous enough to—”

  “I want one of us awake at all times,” Grote said firmly. “And nobody outside of his suits.”

  “There’s no place like home,” Doris muttered. “But after a while even your own smell gets to you.”

  The women laid down, locking the suits into roughly reclining positions. To Lee they looked like oversized beetles that had gotten stuck on their backs. It didn’t look possible for them to ever get up again. Then another thought struck him, and he chuckled to himself. Super chastity belts.

  He sat down, cranked the suit’s torso section back to a comfortable reclining angle, and tried to doze off. He was dreaming of the towers on Titan again when Grote’s voice in his earphones woke him.

  “Is it my turn?” he asked groggily.

  “Not yet. But turn off your transmitter. You were groaning in your sleep. Don’t want to wake up the women, do you?”

  Lee took the second watch and simply stayed awake until daybreak without bothering any of the others. They began marching toward the sea.

  The hills descended only slightly into a rolling plateau that went on until they reached the bluffs that overlooked the sea. A few hundred feet down was a narrow strip of beach, with the breakers surging in.

  “This is as far as we go,” Grote said.

  The women spent the morning collecting plant samples.
Marlene found a few insects and grew more excited over them than Doris had been about the shrubbery. Lee and Grote walked along the edge of the cliffs looking for a good place to set up their cameras.

  “You’re sure this is the area where they were seen?” Lee asked.

  Walking alongside him, the engineer turned his head inside his plastic helmet. Lee could see he was edgy too.

  “I know how to read a map.”

  “Sorry, I’m just anxious—”

  “So am I.”

  They walked until Sirius was almost directly overhead, without seeing anything except the tireless sea, the beach, and the spongy-looking plants that huddled close to the ground.

  “Not even a damned tree,” Grote grumbled.

  They turned back and headed for the spot where they had left the women. Far up the beach, Lee saw a tiny dark spot.

  “What’s that?”

  Grote stared for a few moments. “Probably a rock.” But he touched a button on the chest of his suit.

  Lee did the same, and an electro-optical viewpiece slid down in front of his eyes. Turning a dial on the suit’s control panel, he tried to focus on the spot. It wavered in the heat currents of the early afternoon, blurred and uncertain. Then it seemed to jump out of view.

  Lee punched the button and the lens slid away from his eyes. “It’s moving!” he shouted, and started to run.

  He heard Grote’s heavy breathing as the engineer followed him, and they both nearly flew in their power suits along the edge of the cliffs.

  It was a man! No, not one, Lee saw, but two of them walking along the beach, their feet in the foaming water.

  “Get down you bloody fool,” he heard Grote shrilling at him.

  He dove headlong, bounced, cracked the back of his head against the helmet’s plastic, then banged his chin on the soft inner lining of the collar.

  “Don’t want them to see, do you?” Grote was whispering now.

  “They can’t hear us, for God’s sake,” Lee said into his suit radiophone.

  They wormed their way to the cliff’s edge again and watched. The two men seemed to be dressed in black. Or are they black-skinned and naked? Lee wondered.

  After a hurried council, they unslung one of the video cameras and its power unit, set it up right there, turned it on and then backed away from the edge of the cliff. Then they ran as hard as they could, staying out of sight of the beach, with the remaining camera. They passed the startled women and breathlessly shouted out their find. The women dropped their work and started running after them.

  About a kilometer or so further on they dropped to all fours again and painfully crawled to the edge once more. Grote hissed the women into silence as they hunched up beside him.

  The beach was empty now.

  “Do you think they saw us?” Lee asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  Lee used the electro-optics again and scanned the beach. “No sign of them.”

  “Their footprints,” Grote snapped. “Look there.”

  The trails of two very human-looking sets of footprints marched straight into the water. All four of them searched the sea for hours, but saw nothing. Finally, they decided to set up the other camera. It was turning dark by the time they finished.

  “We’ve got to get back to the car,” Grote said, wearily, when they finished. “There’s not enough food in the suits for another day.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Lee replied. “You can bring me more supplies tomorrow.”

  “No. If there’s anything to see, the cameras will pick it up. Chien is monitoring them back at the car, and the whole crew of the ship must he watching the view.”

  Lee saw there was no sense arguing. Besides, he was bone tired. But he knew he’d be back again as soon as he could get there.

  * VI *

  “Well, it settles a three-hundred-year-old argument,” Aaron Hatfield said as he watched the viewscreen.

  The biochemist and Lee were sitting in the main workroom of the ship’s Sirius globe, watching the humanoids as televised by the cameras on the cliffs. Charnovsky was on the other side of the room, at a workbench, flashing rock chips with a laser so that a spectrometer could analyze their chemical composition.

  The other outsiders were traveling in the skimmer again, collecting more floral and insect specimens.

  “What argument?” Lee asked.

  Hatfield shifted in his chair, making the webbing creak. “About the human form . . . whether it’s an accident or a result of evolutionary selection. From them,” he nodded toward the screen, “I’d say it’s no accident.”

  One camera was on wide-field focus and showed a group of three of the men. They were wading hip-deep in the surf, carrying slender rods high above their heads to keep them free of the surging waves. The other camera was fixed on a close-up view of three women standing on the beach, watching their men. Like the men, they were completely naked and black-skinned. They looked human in every detail.

  Every morning they appeared on the beach, often carrying the rods, but sometimes not. Lee concluded that they must live in caves cut into the cliffs. The rods looked like simple bone spears but even under the closest focus of the cameras he couldn’t be sure.

  “They’re not Negroid,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone listening.

  “It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?” Hatfield asked.

  Nodding, Lee said, “They just don’t look like terrestrial Negroes, except for their skin coloring. And that’s an adaptation to Sirius’ brightness. Plenty of ultraviolet, too.”

  Charnovsky came over and pulled up a chair. “So. Have they caught any fish this morning?”

  “Not yet,” Lee answered.

  Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, “Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don’t make much of an enemy.”

  “They could have been our enemy,” Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky’s needling, but not reconciled to it.

  The geologist shook his head sadly. “Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Sid. The chances of this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances—”

  “What’re the chances that two intelligent races will both evolve along the same physical lines?” Lee snapped.

  Charnovsky shrugged. “We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent.”

  Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield, “Aaron, the biochemistry here is very similar to Earth’s, isn’t it?”

  “Very close.”

  “I mean . . . I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn’t be poisoned or anything like that?”

  “Well,” Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, “as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs are concerned . . . yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is basically the same as ours, as nearly as I’ve been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, and they make me deathly ill. You see, there’re all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses . . .”

  “We’ve been living with the local bugs for months now,” Lee said. “We’re adapted to them, aren’t we?”

  “You know what they say about visiting strange places: don’t drink the water.”

  On the viewscreen, one of the natives struck into the water with his spear, and instantly the water began to boil with the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home, and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot-long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera’s autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy.

  “Damn,” Lee said softly. “They’re as human as we are.”

  “And obviously representative of a high technical civili
zation,” Charnovsky said.

  “Survivors of one, maybe,” Lee answered. “Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup’s explosion or by war.”

  “Now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours and theirs.”

  “All right, go ahead and laugh,” Lee said. “I won’t be able to prove anything until I get to live with them.”

  “Until what?” Hatfield said.

  “Until I go out there and meet them face to face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.”

  “Live with them?” Rasmussen looked startled; the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain’s monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.

  They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the six “outsiders,” Grote, Chien, Captain Rasmussen, Pascual and Lehman.

  “Aren’t you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?” Grote asked, grinning.

  “I don’t think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,” Lee countered.

  The laugh turned on Grote.

  Lee went on quietly, “I’ve checked it out with Aaron, here. There’s no biochemical reason why I couldn’t survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we’ve seen the humanoids carrying, and I’ll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.”

  Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, “About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitive—”

  “I won’t be representing an advanced culture to them,” Lee said. “I intend to be just as naked and toolless as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black.”

  “That would be necessary in any event if you don’t want to be sunburned to death,” Pascual said.

  Hatfield added, “You’ll also need contact lenses that’ll screen out the UV and protect your eyes.”

  They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rasmussen. The idea’s slipping out from under his control. The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl. Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rasmussen finally spoke up: “One more question. Are you willing to give up an eye for this mission of yours?”