Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 10

For more than a day there had been nothing to do but wait, watch and think—and it was a time of utter strangeness.

After having adjusted to being on another world and to inhabiting a different body, Jerome had supposed himself immune to feelings of wonder—but this was a distillation of strangeness, a coming together and a culmination of every outré aspect of his new existence.

From where he sat on a portable chair he could see, to his left, the enigmatic, vacuum-suited figures of the six Guardians whose duty it had been to transport the Thabbren the full length of the tunnel and place it on the airless surface of the planet. Pirt Conforden was sitting among them, but in the half-light of the large terminal chamber it was impossible to pick him out from the others.

To Jerome’s right were the eight tunnel engineers, including Mallat Glevdane, who had been responsible for the tedious opening and closing of airlocks during the eight-kilometre journey from Cuthtranel. They were sitting near the cluster of small electric vehicles which had carried the party, and which also housed food supplies and toilet facilities.

There was a minimum of movement, and conversation was limited to brief whispered exchanges. All eyes were fixed on a large screen which was permanently attached to one wall of the chamber. The image it bore was of the Mercurian surface, so perfectly portrayed that at times Jerome felt he was looking through a picture window. It was a deep-focus view of a rocky plain, bound by jagged escarpments and illuminated by fierce horizontal rays from a sliver of unbearable brilliance on the horizon. Stars shone in a black sky, seemingly more numerous when farther from the Sun.

Jerome knew that the moon-like scene actually existed over his head, ten metres above the chamber, but he had yet to find out how it was being reproduced. Television and conventional photographic techniques were not involved, that much he knew, and he guessed that Dorrinian psychic engineers had simply arranged for the molecules of the screen to react in sympathy with others on the surface. The “camera’ may have been a normalseeming patch of rockface linked to the screen by a kind of inorganic telepathy. Totally impossible to detect, it was a perfect example of what the super-telepathic elite could do best.

Clearly visible in the middle distance were the gleaming metallic curvatures of the decoy—the huge sheet of alloy which had successfully lured a ship into crossing millions of kilometres of interplanetary space. It had been brought out of the tunnel in sections four years earlier and assembled by workers who had then used gas jets to obliterate all their footprints.

And in the centre of the foreground was the Thabbren—the most complex single artifact ever produced by human beings, the living jewel which had shaped the history of two worlds for more than three millennia.

Jerome, hoping for a direct glimpse of the Thabbren, had been disappointed to find it was encased in a protective covering which closely resembled a white pebble about the size of a golfball. Even if Marmorc were to be seen picking it up he would be able to pass it off as a mildly interesting rock specimen and await his chance to extract the fantastic kernel in seclusion. It was visible on the screen as a white fleck, carefully placed midway between two distinctive boulders which resembled human skulls. Marmorc probably had studied the small patch of ground before his translation to Earth, carrying every detail of it in his memory during his years of astronaut training, although as a supertelepath he could have been directed to the Thabbren by the Guardians watching from below.

Not having thought too much about the matter, Jerome had been surprised when, after the uneventful placing of the Thabbren by two Guardians, the entire group had remained in the terminal chamber to watch it—even though the Quicksilver had not been due to land for two days. From the little he knew about the Guardians it had seemed quite natural for them to segregate themselves in one part of the chamber, but he had been a little taken aback when the ordinary engineers, with whom he had worked closely, had isolated him from their company. Only when the vigil had been under way for some hours, giving him time to think and absorb its emotional qualities, had it dawned on him that the occasion was essentially religious in nature.

The bleakly alien environment, the dehumanizing vacuum suits, the low-pulsing engines and the rubbery smell of manufactured oxygen—all these had blinded him to the realization that for the Dorrinians, here was Bethlehem. And Mecca. And Teotihuacán. And Buddh Gaya. As he sat apart in the cavernous twilight, watching the watchers, it came to Jerome that no Earthly religion could have offered its devotees an experience of like intensity. Thirty-five centuries of effort and suffering had narrowed down and focused on this climactic event, an inconceivably massive inverted pyramid of time grinding down on a single point—and there was no guarantee that the load could be sustained. The classical Terran religions offered certitude, the commodity common to all, but there was a fearsome element of chance shot through this holiest moment in Dorrinian history.

Jerome was observing the ultimate gamble. The collective Dorrinian soul, encapsulated in a gem, was exposed on the meteor-scarred plain waiting to be transported to Heaven-on-Earth. But there would be no divine courier to ensure its safety. Instead, a complex and comparatively primitive spacecraft would grope its way down out of the void under the fallible control of men and their machines. The failure of any one of ten thousand components manufactured anywhere from Seattle to Milan to Nagasaki could terminate the ship’s mission at any time, thus slamming the doors of futurity on an entire race. Where a Christian placed his trust in the Cross, a Dorrinian was required to have faith that no microscopic circuit was developing a submicroscopic lesion, that no rivets in the Quicksilver’s flimsy structure had been given improper heat treatment.

What will they do if something goes wrong? Jerome thought. He considered the question for a short time and in his growing tiredness found it just as intractable as the other problem whose perplexities still lingered in his mind. It was impossible for him to visualize the pattern of events which would be consequent on everything going right for the Dorrinians. He close his eyes, shutting out the distractions of the unearthly scene, and allowed himself to drift, wondering at his ability even to contemplate sleep when the fate of two worlds was about to be decided…

There were no sounds of alarm—but the feeling was unmistakable.

Jerome snapped his eyes open, responding to the psychic turbulence, and scanned his surroundings. Instinct caused him to direct his attention to the panoramic image on the screen, but it was as lifeless and changeless as ever; then he noticed that one of the Guardians had crossed the chamber and was talking quietly to the group of tunnel technicians. Jerome guessed that the speaker was Conforden, whose duty it was to act as an interface between the Guardians and other Dorrinians. Ostensibly there was nothing disturbing in that, but his yammering sense of unease persisted. Toying with the idea that his inherited neural complex might have retained some telepathic ability, he watched Conforden closely until the muted conversation had ended. He waited until Conforden was returning to his place with the Guardians, then stood up quickly and intercepted him.

“It’s bad manners to whisper in company, Pirt,” he said. “You told me there were no secrets on Dorrin.”

“I thought you were sleeping,” Conforden replied. The raised circular faceplate of his helmet was haloed with reflections, and his face was almost invisible in the shaded aperture below.

“I was resting my eyes. Is there a problem?“

Conforden appeared to weigh the question. “We have just picked up some news broadcasts from Earth. The Quicksilver has reported that Baumanis is ill.”

“Is this on the radio? I didn’t know you listened on the radio.”

“It’s the easiest method of getting information,” Conforden said, moving on his way. “Take our word for it.”

Jerome side-stepped to maintain the contact. “Are you worried about him, Pirt? Do you think it’s serious, your man being sick?”

“I thought you understood these things by this time.” Conforden’s voice was oddly wooden. “A Dorrinian with Marmorc’s powers never has an illness.”

“So what’s the explanation?”

“You have already met the explanation,” Conforden said, placing one hand flat on Jerome’s chest as a signal that he was prepared to say no more. “The Prince has grown stronger than we knew.”

Jerome stared at Conforden’s retreating figure, too numbed to go after him or call out. Now and then during his time in Cuthtranel he had thought about Prince Belzor—always with a frisson of dread as he recalled the baleful eyes and the pallid, implacable face—but somehow he had relegated him to the past. Perhaps his subconscious had decreed that he had too much to contend with as it was, predisposing him to a woolly optimism which assured him the Prince would have no further influence over his fate.

But now, without warning, the situation had changed.

A bleak new version of reality was obtruding, one in which Jerome’s hopes for the future were revealed as foolishly ill-founded, impossibly precarious. Believing that his eventual return to Earth was threatened by nothing more than the possible unreliability of a spacecraft had been naiïvety. It appeared that the ominous Prince Belzor, the Dorrinian superman who had come so close to obliterating Jerome, was now intent on condemning him to…to…The thought was insupportable. Jerome’s mind rebelled against even visualizing a lifetime in the hopeless sterility of the Precinct. The life that would be one endless, silent scream.

“Don’t just walk away like that, Pirt,” he pleaded, breaking the petrifying spell. “What are you talking about? What can Belzor do at this range?”

Conforden continued walking and joined the knot of five other Guardians. They had risen to their feet and were standing close together, possibly in telepathic communion, the bulkiness of their vacuum suits disguising the proportion of men to women. These were the enigmatic mandarins of Dorrinian society, remote and venerated entities, regarded as direct instruments of the Four Thousand. An ordinary Dorrinian might speak to one only once in his life, and even then with many elaborate preliminaries, but Jerome was a driven man. He strode towards the Guardians, waving his arms to gain their attention. Conforden looked around, saw him coming and quit the group to bar his way.

“Stay back,” he whispered urgently. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“That’s the trouble.” Finding himself unable to pass the Dorrinian, Jerome raised his voice. “I don’t know what anybody’s doing around here. What’s all this crap about Belzor? I demand to…” He broke off, confounded, as one of the Guardians turned to face him and even in the darkness of the helmet’s maw he saw the eyes begin to lase and felt the blossoming of pain, the special pain…

More than two thousand years of life have not been enough to satisfy the Prince. Indeed, his appetites are greater than ever. And now that he feels threatened he has become a monster in human form. He is clever, egotistical, amoral, ruthless, and dangerous. Above all, he is dangerous—the ultimate threat to the future of the Dorrinian race.

As soon as the Prince identified Rithan Tell Marmorc, incarnated on Earth as Charles Baumanis, as the Guardian who would transport the Thabbren to Earth he set out to destroy him. He was the cause of two fatal accidents on Quicksilver training missions, but Marmorc managed to escape each time. The Prince then devised a new form of attack. His enormous life-span has enabled him to develop his psychic powers to an unprecedented extent, and he began using them to mount a direct telepathic assault on Marmorc. His method was to drive a needle cone of mind-energy through Marmorc’s personal defences, to disrupt and dissipate Marmorc’s kald.

The plan almost succeeded. Marmorc came near to death, but he was saved because such an attack is as directional as a laser beam, and other Guardians were able to interpose themselves between the Prince and Marmorc. Four of them died before the Guardians could assemble in sufficient numbers to nullify Belzor’s power. From that time onwards, until he boarded the Quicksilver, Marmorc was protected continuously by a ring of Dorrinian supertelepaths. There was a brief period when it was even hoped that Belzor himself might be destroyed, because he could not attack again without betraying his own position, and by then many Guardians were mobilized and ready to go against him. He was, however, too wary to make that mistake.

Instead, he resorted for a time to the tactic he has employed against Guardians in the past—random, widely-separated attacks, often involving the use of conventional weapons, against Dorrinians, especially those who were important to the CryoCare organization. He then ceased his activities and dropped out of sight, and it was assumed that he was gathering his resources for a final onslaught, centred either on Marmorc when he returned to Earth or on the CryoCare base in the Antarctic.

It was also assumed that while Marmorc was on his interplanetary voyage he could not be harmed by the Prince, because of the supposed impossibility of focusing a kald lens on a small, remote, invisible and rapidly moving object.

That was the biggest and most disastrous error the Guardians have ever made in their dealings with the Prince.

We now realize that he has been refining his powers, developing capabilities which even the most advanced Dorrinian telepaths can scarcely comprehend. At this very instant—in spite of the astronomical distance which separates them—he is dissipating Marmorc’s kald, siphoning away his life energies, and unless he can be stopped Marmorc will die and the Thabbren may never reach Earth.

The attack on Marmorc is as directional as the previous one, but in this case the needle cone is being directed upwards from the surface of the Earth—which means that it cannot be intercepted or used to pinpoint Belzor’s position. We believe that he must be in a location from which he can maintain uninterrupted line-of-sight contact with Mercury/Dorrin for many hours, which indicates—as it is now summer in the Earth’s southern hemisphere—somewhere in Antarctica. Many Dorrinians have gone there in search of him, prepared for a fight to the death, but it is a large continent, and the time left to us is very short.

The future of our entire race hangs by the slenderest thread…

…SO BE SILENT AND BE STILL!

Jerome was only dimly aware of having folded at the knees, of having been helped back to his chair by Conforden. He had learned earlier that telepathy was partly a physical process, involving the teleportation of electrical charges into the receiver’s brain, which accounted for the stunning effect of the fleeting mental contact with the Guardian. But there had also been a devastating emotional component superimposed on the informational content of the transfer. For a single instant he had felt what the Dorrinians were feeling, had shared their agonies as the millennia-long racial dream was suddenly threatened with dissolution, had seen himself as a blundering and sacrilegious intruder.

He sat back in the chair, breathing deeply and trying to regain his equilibrium. There had been callousness in the way the Guardian had treated him, but he consoled himself with the reflection that on Earth lesser men would have killed him for the same kind of interference in an infinitely lesser crisis. The Guardians were still standing in a tight group, motionless as statues, and he could only speculate about the telepathic conflict in which they were engaged.

Were they, by means he would never understand, endeavouring to shield the Dorrinian on board the spacecraft? Were they in communication with their agents in the distant snowfields of Antarctica? Or were they striving to forge their kald lenses into a single insubstantial spear which could stab down through the Earth’s atmosphere and transfix the renegade Prince? Was there a possibility that Belzor could strike back at them with his incredible powers, destabilizing their needle cones of mental energy into oscillating spheres which encompassed the Sun? Might the psi gladiators suddenly burst into flame?

Awed by the sheer scope of the silent conflict, chastened by his inability to penetrate its mysteries, Jerome lapsed into a kind of gloomy watchfulness. The group of Dorrinian technicians to his right appeared to be similarly subdued. There was little activity among them and even the whispered conversations had died out. All eyes were fixed on the screen’s unchanging image of the Mercurian surface, on the white speck of the Thabbren, and the atmosphere in the chamber was one of intense, brooding apprehension. In the absence of movement, the viscosity of time seemed to increase, insensibly thickening around the watchers, smothering them in its cold clear amber.

This is never going to end, Jerome thought. We’ll be here for ever…

The Quicksilver came down so rapidly that Jerome almost believed it was out of control.

He leaped to his feet, mouth agape in readiness to shout a futile warning, then he saw the dust clouds which told him the ship’s landing jets were in operation. The flat billows, lacking air to buoy up their separate particles, dropped in an instant like heavy blankets—and, magically, the spacecraft from Earth had arrived.

It sat on the Mercurian plain, an angular edifice on a landing tripod, harshly illuminated from one side, reminding Jerome of an etched illustration in a 19th century scientific romance. The launching from Earth orbit, coupled with the use of high-efficiency, state-of-the-art engines, had enabled the mission planners to forget the astronaut’s nightmare of orbital rendezvous at destination. It had not been necessary to have a mother ship dispatch a landing module to the planetary surface. Instead, the Quicksilver itself—big as a truck, bristling with antennae, exuding the confidence of reserve power—had taken up a solid stance on the surface of an alien planet. It had touched down about a hundred metres away from the Dorrinian sensor, squarely in the flat and boulder-free area which had led to the selection of the decoy site.

Looking at the ship, Jerome was overwhelmed by a surge of pride and homesickness which simultaneously closed his throat and blurred his vision. He took a single step, a lover’s faltering step, towards the image on the screen, then it came to him that nobody else in the chamber had moved or acknowledged the momentous event in any way. The Guardians were a statuary group of six on his left; the other Dorrinians were dispersed among the vehicles, dimly-seen mannikins, seemingly devoid of life.

Marmorc must be all right, Jerome told himself. If the worst had happened, if he had died, the Guardians would have known about it, and I would have seen some reaction from somebody.

Either way—they should be responding to my beautiful ship.

Damn them, they should be wringing their hands, or ringing their bells.

Jerome turned his eyes back to the screen, baffled and embarrassed, and felt a tingle of surprise as he saw that, although not more than a minute had elapsed since touchdown, a hatch in the Quicksilver’s side was swinging open. He had expected the astronauts to spend many hours on checks and tests before they took the major step of unsealing the ship. Was this an emergency procedure? Under Jerome’s mesmerized gaze, a telescopic ladder was extended from the dark square of the hatch. As soon as it had reached the ground a figure in a white spacesuit appeared at the top. One of the Guardians near Jerome gave a low gasp.

That’s Marmorc, Jerome thought as the astronaut slid down the ladder, keeping his feet clear of the rungs. His knees buckled as he impacted with the ground. He pulled himself upright with obvious difficulty, leaned his head against the ladder for a moment, then turned and stumbled towards the Thabbren, a direction which meant he was facing the underground watchers. After only a few paces he began to weave from side to side. Beyond him, two other men emerged from the spacecraft and swarmed down the ladder.

The first man’s course became more and more erratic and his progress slower until, at last, he came to a halt and stood swaying. His face was masked by moonscape reflections, but it was apparent that he was being overtaken by a personal catastrophe. He spread his arms, stood perfectly still for a second, then collapsed with the utter, slack-jointed finality of a puppet whose strings have been sheared.

Somewhere in the terminal chamber a Dorrinian emitted a wail of anguish—a thin, keening sound unlike anything Jerome had ever heard before. expressive of a pain and heart-sickness beyond human endurance. The harrowing sound was echoed by others, swelling in volume until the chamber rang with it, sang with it, exerting a terrible pressure within Jerome’s head. Over to his left, a Guardian toppled sideways and was caught and lowered to the floor by his companions.

“No,” Jerome breathed. “No, no, no!”

He backed away from the screen, which now showed the remaining two astronauts bending over the inert figure of Marmorc, and kept moving without looking around—guided by a radar-like awareness of his surroundings—until his hands encountered metal projections. Moving as in a dream, he turned and drove the engineer’s key attached to his belt into the lock of the tunnel door. It rotated easily. He threw the dogging lever, hauled the door open a short way and squeezed through the gap into the tunnel which ran from the terminal chamber to the surface.

The single globe in the tunnel roof splayed light into the dimness of the chamber, causing the nearest Dorrinians to turn in his direction.

Jerome slammed the door with all his strength and dogged it shut. This part of the tunnel was only about forty metres in length and ascended steeply to the surface. Jerome had not been in it before, but he knew that it contained two further airtight doors, for safety, and that the section beyond the nearer of them had been evacuated. He ran up the slope to the door, clamping the faceplate of his helmet down as he went, and had to stab three times with his key before managing to guide it into the lock of the equalizer valve. Air whistled through the valve as he twisted it to the open position.

He unlocked the dogging lever, threw it and—unable to restrain himself—tried to drag the door open at once. Still clamped in place by air pressure differential, it resisted his efforts. Jerome let go of the handle, suddenly fearful of rupturing his glove, and forced himself to remain motionless while the equalizer valve did its work. The ten or twelve seconds that it took passed with nightmarish slowness, and in the nightmare he was overtaken and brought down many times by pursuing Dorrinians. When the sound of escaping air became inaudible he pulled the door open and ran up the incline to the one which formed the end of the tunnel proper.

This time the rush of air was less violent when he opened the valve, the pressure in the tunnel having been halved. He began to feel safer, knowing that the door to the terminal chamber now could not be opened until every Dorrinian beyond it had sealed his vacuum suit. He opened the final door, crouched down and stepped through into a small cell which had been hewn into dark basalt. In its roof was a ribbed panel of dull plastic which closely resembled the surrounding rock. He put his hands on the panel and pushed upwards. It lifted easily and slid away to one side, and he found himself looking into a black and star-seeded sky.

He climbed up out of the cell and stood up on a gently sloping crown of rock, the cuboidal cracking of which had effectively disguised the tunnel entrance hatch. The scene before him was exactly what he had observed from the underground chamber, all its elements assembled on a natural stage.

Most distant was the complex boxy shape of the Quicksilver, and close to it was the mirrored metal of the decoy which the Dorrinians had assembled on the surface at such a great cost in human lives. In the centre of the arena the two astronauts were kneeling by their fallen companion, and closest to Jerome—flanked by two skull-shaped boulders—was an insignificant-looking white pebble containing the soul of a beleaguered race.

The whole, with its background of scarps and crater walls, was starkly lit by the paring of the Sun’s disc which blazed on the horizon, and low in the sky was a twinned speck of blue-white brilliance. In spite of its remoteness, the Earth– Moon system was an integral part of the tableau. Not only was it the ultimate goal for Jerome and every Dorrinian, it was the emplacement from which Belzor, the malign superman, had struck down a chief actor in the drama which was being enacted. Jerome visualized him somewhere in the white wilderness of the Antarctic, perhaps lying on his back in a thermal cocoon, his unblinking gaze fixed on Mercury as he drove a lance of psychic power through millions of kilometres of space…

Tranced and bemused, Jerome replaced the hatch behind him and stepped down off the dome of rock. He felt no sensation in his body or limbs—he had become a pair of eyes, a discorporate being floating through a dream landscape. The white pebble containing the Thabbren was just ahead, calling to him. He picked it up and dropped it into the thigh pocket of his right leg and continued walking towards the Terran astronauts.

Their attention was concentrated on Marmorc as they began to lift the body, and Jerome was only a few paces away when one of them turned his head and saw him. The astronaut released Marmorc and sprawled backwards, cowering away from Jerome. His mouth was wide open, and in the airless silence Jerome was slow to realize the man was screaming. The other astronaut was on his feet and backing away, his hands outstretched as though to ward off a blow.

Jerome, recovering the ability to empathize with his own kind, suddenly understood that he had given the two men the worst shock they were ever likely to experience. They had just completed a three-month voyage to an alien world and had been in a state of high anxiety over their crewmate—and if there was anything which was not supposed to happen it was the sudden appearance of a humanoid figure in a strange design of spacesuit. Jerome took a step backwards and raised his hands, hoping to convey reassurance, then he realized he was beginning to hear the laboured breathing of the two men. The button-sized Dorrinian transceiver in his helmet was tuning itself to the frequency used by the astronauts’ suit radios.

“I’m from Earth,” he said quickly, grateful that micro-communication was one of the fields in which the Dorrinians excelled. “Everything is all right. I’m like you. I’m from Earth.”

“The hell you are,” one of the astronauts gasped. “Stay away from me.”

“I know you’ve had a shock—and I apologize—but please take some time to think.” Jerome paused, becoming aware of a problem he would have to solve within the next minute. “Look, I speak English, and I even know your names. You are Hal Buxton and Carl Teinert—although I don’t know which is which. Take a minute and think about it.”

There was a period of silence during which the recumbent astronaut slowly got to his feet. The two men faced Jerome warily, and he prayed they would not be able to think too logically about his words. By identifying them as Buxton and Teinert he had revealed foreknowledge that the dead astronaut was Marmorc/Baumanis.

“Okay, we’ve thought about it,” the taller of the two men said. “Now tell us who the hell you are and how you got here.”

Everything that had happened to Jerome since that prehistoric morning when, in all his innocence and ignorance, he had driven to Pitman’s house sped through his mind…strange images and outlandish concepts blurring in a praxinoscope of memory. The universe was waiting for him to speak.

“My name is Pavel Radanovik,” he said steadily. “I hold the rank of captain in the air force of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The Americans glanced at each other, then scanned the horizon. “Where’s your ship?”

“What remains of it is lying in a ravine about twenty kilometres from here. It developed a guidance fault at a late stage of the descent. My three comrades died in the crash.”

“I never heard anything so…” The American who was doing the talking swung his arms out and let them fall to his side, conveying his exasperation. “And how did you get here?”

“I walked, of course,” Jerome said. “I was able to carry spare oxygen cylinders—enough to get me here—then I waited for you to arrive.”

“Where are the cylinders?”

“I was discarding them as they went down. I’m wearing the last one now. You got here just in time.”

“Hell, this is the Goddamnest…”

“We’re forgetting about Charlie,” the shorter astronaut cut in, speaking for the first time. “I think he’s dead, Hal. He told us he was going to die—and he did it. This is really weird.”

“You’re telling me,” Hal Buxton replied, his gaze still locked on Jerome’s face. There was a perplexity in his eyes, a deep uneasiness, and Jerome knew exactly what was causing it. Two highly unusual events had happened almost simultaneously, and although it was patently impossible to connect them there was a voice whispering inside the astronaut’s head, a persuasive voice telling him there had to be a connection. That voice was well known to Jerome. It was the one which had assured him there had to be a link between cases of spontaneous human combustion, and he did not want Buxton to continue listening to it. “Don’t look at me that way,” he said, projecting all the sincerity he could muster. “What possible reason could I have for lying to you?”