Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Bubble was the unofficial name given to the expanding volume of space in which every planet and asteroid had been surveyed by men. Some of the worlds examined, the best, were earmarked for colonization or other kinds of development, but only in cases where there was no indigenous civilization. The Cartographical Service’s charter empowered it to deal solely with uninhabited planets—all inter-culture contacts being the prerogative of diplomatic or military missions, according to individual circumstances.

As a result of this policy, David Surgenor—although a long-term veteran of the Cartographical Service—had never in the course of his official duties encountered members of an extraterrestrial civilization, and had no expectations of doing so…

Surgenor stood by without speaking while part of the survey equipment was pulled out of Module Five to make room for two extra seats. As soon as the work had been completed he climbed into the heavy vehicle and drove it down the Sarafand’s ramp with unnecessary speed. Only a short distance separated the survey ship from the squat bulk of the military vessel Admiral Carpenter, but Surgenor selected ground-effect suspension and made the journey amid spectacular plumes of powdery sand. His course was marked by a blood-red gash in the white desert, which slowly healed itself as the phototropic sand returned to its surface.

One of the guards at the foot of the Admiral Carpenter’s ramp pointed to where he wanted Surgenor to park and said something into a wrist communicator. Surgenor slid Module Five into the indicated slot and killed the lift, allowing the beetle-shaped vehicle to settle on its under surface. He opened the door and the hot, dry air of the planet Saladin gusted into the cabin.

“Major Giyani’s party will be with you in two minutes,” the guard called.

Surgenor gave a muted parody of a military salute and slouched further down in his seat. He knew he was behaving childishly, but the Sarafand had been grounded on this world for almost a month now—and Surgenor had not been at rest that long in all his years in the Cartographical Service. Waiting in one place, wasting the meagre ration of time granted to humans, had the effect of making him pessimistic and morose. Travel no longer had the same compulsion for him that it used to have, yet he was unable to remain in one place.

He stared resentfully at the sun-blazing white desert which stretched to the horizon and wondered why it had seemed beautiful the first morning he saw it. There had been a wind that day, of course, and its swift-moving patterns had been traced as intricate shadings of crimson-through-white, sweeping across the dunes as buried layers were exposed to the sun and then made their phototropic response to its light.

The Sarafand had landed, as always, with the intention of carrying out a routine survey operation. There were obvious difficulties in the terrain, which meant that modules could travel at top speed, and the survey would have been completed in three days had the totally unexpected not occurred.

Three of the module crews had reported seeing apparitions.

The visions had taken two different forms—people and buildings—which shimmered transparently and vanished in a way which would have prompted observers to write them off as mirages—but for the fact that a mirage had to have a physical counterpart somewhere. And an earlier orbital survey of Saladin had established that it was a dead world, containing no intelligent life or traces of its former presence…

“Waken up, driver,” Major Giyani said crisply. “We’re ready to go.”

Surgenor raised his head with deliberate slowness and eyed the swarthy, black-moustached officer who was standing in the module’s entrance and somehow managing to look dapper in regulation battle kit. Behind him was a smooth-faced lieutenant with apologetic blue eyes, and a heavily built sergeant who was carrying a rifle.

“We can’t move off until everybody gets in,” Surgenor pointed out reasonably, but in a way which was meant to express his distaste for being treated as a chauffeur. He waited stolidly until the lieutenant and sergeant were in the supernumerary seats in the rear, and the major had sat down in the vacant front seat. The sergeant, whose name Surgenor vaguely remembered as McErlain, did not set his rifle down but cradled it in his lap.

“This is our destination,” Giyani said, handing Surgenor a sheet of paper on which was written a set of grid co-ordinates. “The straight-line distance from here is about…’

“Five-hundred-and-fifty kilometres,” Surgenor put in, having performed a rapid mental calculation.

Giyani raised his black eyebrows and looked closely at Surgenor. “Your name is…Dave Surgenor, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, Dave.” Giyani gave a prolonged smile which said, See how I humour touchy civilians?—then he pointed at the grid reference. “Can you get us there by eight-hundred hours, ship time?”

Surgenor decided, too late, that he preferred Giyani when he was being officious. He started the module rolling, switched to ground-effect suspension, and set a course that took them almost due south. There was little conversation during the two-hour journey, but Surgenor noted that Giyani addressed Sergeant McErlain with undisguised dislike, while the lieutenant—whose name was Kelvin—avoided speaking to the barrel-chested man at all. The sergeant answered Giyani in flat monosyllables in a way that remained on the safe side of insolence, but only just. Aware of the charged atmosphere in the module, Surgenor tried to remember the wisps of mess table gossip he had picked up about McErlain, but most of his thoughts were taken up with the objective of the present expedition.

When the first reports of apparitions had been radioed in to Aesop a check was made of the geodesic map of Saladin which was being built up in the computer decks. It revealed evidence of bedrock reshaping having been carried out three thousand years earlier, in locations which corresponded closely with those of the sightings.

At that stage Aesop had withdrawn the survey modules, in keeping with the limitations of the Cartographical Service’s charter, and a tachyonic transmission had been sent to the regional headquarters. As a result the cruiser Admiral Carpenter, which had been traversing that volume of space, arrived two days later and assumed control.

One of the first orders issued by Colonel Nietzel, commander of the ground forces, was that Aesop was to treat all information about Saladin as classified and to withhold it from civilian personnel. This should have meant that the Sarafand’s crewmen were completely in the dark about subsequent events, but there was some social contact between the two ships’ complements, and Surgenor had heard the rumours.

Scanner satellites thrown into orbit by the Admiral Carpenter were reputed to have recorded thousands of partial materializations of buildings, strange vehicles, animals and heavily-robed figures right across the face of Saladin. It was also said that some of the buildings and figures had materialized into full solidity, but had vanished before any of the military vessel’s fliers could reach them. It was as if another civilization existed on Saladin—one which had withdrawn beyond an incomprehensible barrier at the approach of strangers, and was determined to remain aloof.

Surgenor, who had not seen any of the apparitions, did not give much credence to the rumours, but he had seen the Admiral Carpenter’s fliers scream away across the desert at high supersonic speed, only to return empty-handed. And he knew that the cruiser’s central computer was working on a round-the-clock basis on the task of correlating the vast amounts of data coming in from the network of scanner satellites.

He also knew that the grid co-ordinates Giyani had shown him corresponded to one of the ancient bedrock excavations which had been discovered in the initial survey…

“How much further do you make it?” said Giyani, as the sun touched the distant range of hills on the western horizon.

Surgenor glanced at his mapscope, which was beginning to glow with the onset of darkness. “Just under thirty kilometres.”

“Good. Our timing is exactly right.” Giyani let his hand fall on the butt of his sidearm.

“Going to shoot some spooks?” Surgenor said casually.

Giyani glanced down at his hand and then at Surgenor. “Sorry. The orders are that I’m not allowed to discuss the operation with you. It’s nothing personal, Dave, but if we had suitable ground transport of our own you wouldn’t even be here.”

“But I am here, and I’m going to see what goes on.”

“That puts you ahead of the game, doesn’t it?”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Surgenor stared gloomily at the expanses of sand unfolding in the module’s viewscreens, watching them turn from white to blood-red as the last traces of light sifted downwards out of the slant-rayed sky. In a few minutes there would be the typical Saladinian night scene of black-seeming desert and a clear sky so packed with stars that the normal order of things seemed to be reversed, that the land was dead and the sky above was the seat of life. He experienced an intense longing to be back on board the Sarafand, and travelling to far suns.

Lieutenant Kelvin leaned forward and spoke to Giyani. “When can we expect to see something?”

“Any time now—assuming the computer prediction is accurate.” Giyani gazed impassively at Surgenor for a moment, obviously deciding whether to release information in his hearing, then shrugged. “There is some geodesic evidence that bedrock reshaping was done in this area about a third of a million years ago, just around the time we think the Saladinians were in their city-building phase. The scanner satellites have glimpsed a city here seven times in the past ten days, but there is no guarantee—so I’m told—that the pattern of appearances the computer sees isn’t purely coincidental, in which case we’ll find nothing but desert.”

“What’s so special about this particular site?” Kelvin said, echoing the question which had crossed Surgenor’s mind.

“If the Saladinians can move freely in time—as some of our people think they can—then the quasi-materialization of buildings might be just a by-product of the natives themselves visiting the present. It sounds like a cooked up thing to me, but the Colonel was told to tell me that it’s analogous to when you walk out of a heated building—you take some of the warm air with you into another environment. At each appearance of this city our scanners detected what seems to have been a woman standing on the southern fringe of the site.”

Giyani drummed on the armrest with his fingers. “I’m also told that this woman was solid. As solid as any of us.”

Listening to the major’s words, Surgenor felt the familiar cockpit of Module Five—in which he had spent so many hours of his life—become momentarily unfamiliar. Its dials and gauges were rendered meaningless for a brief period during which his mind was yielding to new concepts. He had been unwilling to admit his own fears that Man, perfector of a type of thinking which had given him mastery of the three spatial dimensions, had finally encountered a cooler, more judicious culture which had established its dominions in the long grey estuaries of time. But it appeared that other men were thinking along the same lines, reaching the same conclusions.

“Something up ahead, sir,” Kelvin said.

Giyani turned to face the front again and they all stared in silence at the forward viewscreen upon which the ghostly outlines of a cityscape were etching themselves from horizon to horizon. Regular patterns of light glowed where a few seconds earlier there had been nothing but sand and random stars.

The city’s transparent rectangles were surprisingly Earth-like in design, except for one incongruity—the vertical rows of lights, which looked like windows, were not always superimposed on the silhouettes of the buildings. It was as if, Surgenor thought, the city was being seen not as it had existed at a single point in time, but with a temporal depth of focus extending over thousands of years during which the slow drift of continents had moved it several metres, thus producing a double image.

In spite of Giyani’s facile explanation for what they were now seeing, or perhaps because of it, Surgenor began to feel chilled. He was beginning to appreciate the enormity of what the little expedition hoped to achieve.

“Reduce speed and go the rest of the way on the ground,” Giyani said. “We want to travel quietly from here on in. Douse lights, too.”

Surgenor eased off the lift and cut the ground speed to fifty. At that rate, and with the absence of landmarks with which to judge speed, the survey module seemed to be at rest. The only sounds in the cabin were Kelvin’s unsteady breathing and a series of faint clicks from McErlain’s rifle as the sergeant adjusted various settings.

Giyani glanced over his shoulder at McErlain. “How long is it since you served with the Georgetown, sergeant?”

“Eight years, sir.”

“Quite a long time.”

“Yes, sir.” McErlain sat quietly for a moment. “I’m not going to shoot anybody unless ordered to, if that’s what you’re getting at. Sir.”

“Sergeant!” Kelvin’s voice was scandalized. “I’m putting you on report for…’

“It’s all right,” Giyani said easily. “The sergeant and I understand each other.”

Surgenor was briefly distracted from the incredible view which lay ahead. He now knew why McErlain had been under discussion in the Sarafand’s mess. Ten or eleven years earlier the Georgetown had made first contact with an intelligent air-breathing species on a planet on the frontiers of the Bubble. And in a ghastly debacle, the details of which had never been officially released, had annihilated all the functional males in a single military action. The planet had since been sealed off from the Federation’s normal commerce to allow its final generation of females and non-functional males to make their own way into oblivion in peace. The Georgetown’s commander had been court-martialled, but the “incident’ had passed into the catalogue of self-indictments which humanity preserved in place of a racial conscience.

“Keep going at this speed till we reach the south side of the city,” Giyani ordered.

“We’ll need lights.”

“We won’t. Those buildings don’t exist, except in a very attenuated form. Drive straight on.”

Surgenor allowed the module to continue on its original course and the insubstantial cityscape faded before him like fine mist. When he judged they were in the heart of the ancient site there was nothing to be seen but for an occasional suggestion of a streetlamp of curious trapezoid design, so faint that they might have been reflections of very clear glass.

“The buildings haven’t dematerialized,” Kelvin said. “Nobody ever got this close before.”

“Nobody had sufficiently processed the data before,” Giyani replied abstractedly, tracing the line of his black moustache with a fingertip. “I have a feeling that the computer prognostication is going to check out right down to the last detail.”

“You mean…’

“That’s right, Lieutenant. To me it’s almost a certainty that our Saladinian is a pregnant female.”