The Grand Wheel

SEVEN

At the end of its descent from the orbiting team ship the planetary lander, a long gondola with a lifter engine at each end, settled on to the crumbling terraces amid a skirl of dust. When the air had settled, the door opened. Hakandra, followed by his constant companion, Shane the cold-senser, stepped out.

This planet was not unlike the one he had recently left, he thought as he looked about him. Dry and bleached-looking. The sky was a very pale blue, as though all the real colour had been seared out of it. Interesting how most of the planets that bore – or had borne – life in the Cave followed the same dehydrated pattern.

In this case, some life still remained. Tough, fibrous tendrils a yard thick, looking like great white worms, snaked out across the desert, interspersed with occasional cactus-like growths. Intelligent life was gone, but the terraces characterizing this part of the desert were regular enough to betray their artificial origin. With a soft rumbling sound Caerman’s digging machines were biting into the terraces, vacuuming away the rubble to be sorted in a vibrating sieve system. Piles of skeletons and artifacts, the output of the sieves, littered the landscape. Team E-7 was archaeologizing the site, not gently, perhaps, but well.

Caerman himself, a big-boned man who moved easily and energetically, stepped forward to meet them. He had abandoned the cloak usually worn by team leaders and wore a one-piece track suit.

‘Glad you decided to drop in,’ he welcomed cheerfully. ‘Care for some refreshment?’

Hakandra replied curtly. ‘No thank you. I’d rather get down to work.’

‘Okay. Over here.’ He led the way to a nearby pavilion. As they walked he turned to Shane. ‘How do you read this place?’

Shane glanced at the yellow sun and shrugged. ‘It’s all right. We’ll be okay here for a while. Everything feels calm.’

‘That’s good to know. I’ll pass the word around – it makes me nervous seeing my men watch the sun all the time.’

‘How long since this civilization fell?’ Hakandra asked.

‘Not long. I estimate this city had inhabitants not more than fifty thousand years ago, maybe much less.’

‘And the cause?’

Caerman spread his hands, looked glum. ‘There’s nothing specific. I can only put it down to one thing: premature ecological ageing.’

‘A peculiar concept.’

‘It’s one I’ve learned to accept since working in the Cave. Here as in other places, the whole biota went, though there are still a few bits and pieces hanging on, mostly cactuses. The intelligent species lasted longer than any other animal life, which is unusual. We have reason to believe they planned to survive and were aware of the nova situation here in the Cave.’

He ushered them into the pavilion. ‘Well, here it is.’

The interior of the pavilion looked like a museum, or display, depicting the dead civilization. Adorning the walls were painted reconstructions of the natives, sad-looking creatures with lizard-like skulls and bony, scaly limbs.

But team E-7 was less interested in their physical appearance than in their technology. Caerman led Hakandra to the find that had caused him to break off his itinerary and come here.

The alien machine still showed signs of its long interment in the earth. The metal casing, though rustproof, was much corroded. It was shaped like a huge drum, the top surface of which consisted of a flat crystalline lens which sparkled vividly but was totally opaque.

‘You say it’s functional?’

‘All we know is that it responds to a power input. Until we can work out what power level and wave-form it uses we won’t really be in a position to say what sort of shape it’s in.’

‘But what about its purpose?’

Caerman pointed to a thin, nervous-looking man who entered the pavilion at that moment and went to speak to the technicians working on a transformer. ‘Wishom here can tell you more about that. He’s in charge of the technical study.’

Wishom joined them, nodding a greeting to Hakandra and listening carefully to his questions. ‘We know these people were interested in random phenomena,’ he said in a reedy voice. ‘It seems they were working on the problem of why stars in the Cave are apt to go nova. In my belief they had hoped to control the process so as to ensure their own survival.’

‘They planned to stop stars going nova?’

‘That’s what I think.’

Shane cackled wildly. ‘They needn’t have bothered – they died anyway! They never stood a chance – nobody does in Caspar!’

Caerman frowned in the sudden silence. ‘Quite right,’ he agreed quietly. ‘They needn’t have bothered.’

‘But they did bother, right up until they realized that, novae apart, they were going to become extinct biologically.’ Wishom tapped the casing of the alien machine. ‘This was found in a sealed preservation chamber – obviously they set considerable store by it. Its core is a globe of black solid material that’s opaque to everything we’ve beamed at it. We are fairly sure it’s a randomness machine of some sort, but we’re reluctant to take it apart in case we can’t put it back together again. Instead we’re giving it the black box treatment – giving it inputs and seeing what comes out.’

‘Perhaps it’s only a fermat,’ Hakandra conjectured.

‘In some ways it reminds one of a fermat, but there’s clearly more to it than that.’

Hakandra pondered briefly. ‘I’m here to decide whether this investigation should continue,’ he told Wishom in a brusque voice. ‘I can only do so if there is a significant possibility that it will be militarily useful.’

Wishom blinked. ‘By controlling the nova process?’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s a tall order,’ Wishom said doubtfully. ‘As yet I don’t know of anything that would suggest the natives were close to their goal, or even that they knew something we don’t.’ The scientist’s gaze became vague. ‘How soon do you need to decide?’

‘Immediately.’

Wishom snorted. Just then the technicians at the transformer signalled to him.

‘Better stand back,’ he advised, ‘we’re about to begin an experiment.’

The transformer hummed as it fed into the alien drum a power wave-form Wishom had calculated the machine might use. The flat crystal table-top suddenly sparkled and blazed, throwing off spears of light.

Wishom and his technicians scarcely seemed to notice the display. Wishom had returned to the transformer and was busy studying the recording instruments. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured, pointing out something to his helpers.

Suddenly a yell of fear came from Shane. He cringed away from the glowing machine, his mouth sagging open and his face white.

‘Stop it!’ he keened. ‘Stop it!’

Hakandra leaped to the boy. ‘What is it, Shane?’ he barked.

‘Uncontrollable—’ Shane whimpered.

He began to drool.

At a gesture from Caerman the transformer was switched off. Its hum died into a strained silence. Hakandra seized Shane by the shoulders, peering at him anxiously. ‘Is it all right now?’ he demanded.

Shane nodded weakly. ‘Tension,’ he muttered. ‘Tension in the air, in the stars – but uncontrollable. Uncontrollable.’ His voice faded.

Hakandra straightened, looking first at Shane and then at the machine, weighing the youth’s words.

‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘the project goes on.’