Noon, 22nd Century Page 28

  Mashka was not listening to me. I had already told her all this. She went into the tent, brought out a radio, and switched on the autotuning. Evidently she couldn’t wait any longer to catch the Voice of the Void.

  But Gorbovsky listened very attentively. “Were those two still alive?” he asked.

  “No, they were found dead. There’s an animal preserve here in the forest. Wild boars had trampled the septipods and half eaten them. But they had still been alive thirty kilometers from water! Their mantle cavities were filled with wet algae. Obviously in this way the septipods created a certain reserve of water for journeys over dry land. The algae were from a lake. The septipods had undoubtedly walked from these very lakes farther to the south, into the heart of dry land. It should also be noted that all the specimens caught up to this point have been adult males. Not one female, not one young. Probably females and young can’t live in fresh water or come out on land.

  “All this is very interesting,” I continued. “As a rule marine animals change their way of life sharply only during periods of reproduction. Then instinct forces them to go off to some quite unusual places. But reproduction has nothing to do with it here. Here there is some other instinct at work, perhaps one still more ancient and powerful. Right now the important thing for us is to follow the migratory path. So here I spend ten hours a day at this lake, under water. Today I’ve tagged one so far. If I’m lucky, by evening I’ll tag another one or two. At night they become unusually active and grab anything that gets close to them. There have even been instances of attacks on people. But only at night.”

  Mashka had turned the volume of the radio all the way up, and was enjoying the powerful sounds.

  “A little quieter, Mashka,” I requested.

  She turned it down.

  “So you tag them,” said Gorbovsky. “Fascinating. With what?”

  “Ultrasonic generators.” I pulled a charge from the tag gun and displayed the ampule. “Little bullets like this. Inside is a generator with a range under water of thirty kilometers.”

  He cautiously took the ampule and examined it attentively. His face became sad and old. “Clever,” he muttered. “Simple and clever.” He turned the ampule all around in his fingers as if feeling it, then lay it in front of me on the grass and got up. His movements had become slow and uncertain. He stepped over to his clothes and scattered them, found his trousers, and then froze, holding them in front of him.

  I watched him, feeling a vague disquiet. Mashka held the tag gun at the ready, in order to explain how it was used, and she watched Gorbovsky too. The corners of her lips sank dolefully. I had noticed long ago that this often happened with her: the expression on her face became the same as that of the person she was observing.

  Gorbovsky suddenly started speaking very softly, and with a certain mocking quality in his voice: “Honestly, it’s fascinating. What a precise analogy. They stayed in the depths for ages, and now they’ve risen up and entered an alien, hostile world. And what drives them? An ancient, dark instinct, you say? Or an information-processing capacity which had risen up to the level of unquenchable curiosity? After all, it would be better for it to stay home, in salt water, but something draws it… draws it to the shore.” He roused himself and started pulling on his trousers. These were old-fashioned, long. He hopped on one leg as he put them on. “Really, Stanislav, you have to think that these are very complex cephalopods, eh?”

  “In their way, of course,” I agreed.

  He was not listening. He turned toward the radio set and was staring at it. Mashka and I stared too. Powerful, discordant signals, like the interference from an X-ray installation, were coming from the set. Mashka put down the tag gun. “On six point oh eight meters,” she said distractedly. “Some sort of service station, or what?”

  Gorbovsky listened closely to the signals, with his eyes closed and his head leaning to one side. “No, it’s not a service station,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s me. Me—Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky.”

  “H-how can—?”

  He gave a mirthless laugh. “How indeed? I would very much like to know how.” He pulled on his shirt. “How can it be that three pilots and their ship, on return from a flight to EN 101 and EN 2657, have become sources of radio waves of wavelength six point oh eight three meters?”

  Mashka and I, naturally, remained silent. Gorbovsky fell silent too, while he fastened his sandals.

  “Doctors examined us. Physicists examined us.” He got up and brushed sand and grass from his pants. “All of them came to the same conclusion: it’s impossible. You could die laughing, to see the surprise on their faces. But honestly, it was no laughing matter to us. Tolya Obozov refused leave and shipped out for Pandora. He said he preferred to do his broadcasting a little farther from Earth. Falkenstein went off to an underwater station to work. So here I am alone, wandering and broadcasting. And I’m always expecting something. Anticipating it and fearing it. Fearing, but anticipating. Do you understand me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and glanced sidelong at Mashka.

  “You’re right,” he said. He took the receiver and pressed it thoughtfully to his protruding ear. “And no one knows. It’s been a whole month already. It doesn’t weaken, and it never stops. Whee-waa… whee-waa… day and night. Whether we’re happy or sad. Whether we’re full or hungry, working or loafing. Whee-waa… But the emission from the Tariel is falling off. The Tariel is my ship. They laid her up, just in case. Her emissions are jamming the controls of some sort of equipment on Venus, so they keep sending inquiries from there, keep getting annoyed. Tomorrow I’m taking her a little farther out.” He straightened up and slapped his thighs with his long arms. “Well, time I left. Good-by. Good luck. Good-by, little Mashka. Don’t rack your brains over this. It’s a very complicated problem, honestly.”

  He raised his open hand, bowed, and started off-tall, angular. We watched him go. He stopped near the tent and said, “You know, you should be a bit more delicate with these septipods. Otherwise you just tag and tag, and it, the one with the tag, has all the hassle.”

  And he left. I lay on my stomach for a long while and then looked at Mashka. She was still watching him. It was clear that Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky had made an impression on her. But not on me. His notions about how the bearers of intelligence in the universe could turn out to be immeasurably superior to us had not moved me at all. So let them be. If you asked me, the more superior they were, the less chance we would have of meeting up with them along the way. It was like fishing for roach, where a wide-mesh net was useless. And as for pride, humiliation, shock—well, we would probably live through it. I myself would somehow live through it. And if we were discovering and were exploring for ourselves a universe they had tamed long ago, well, what of it? It wasn’t tame from our point of view! Anyhow, for us they were just a part of nature that we had to discover and explore, even should they be three times superior to us—to us they were part of the environment! Although, of course, if, say, they had tagged me the way I would tag a septipod…

  I glanced at my watch and sat up hurriedly. It was time to get back to work. I noted down the number of the last ampule. I checked the aquastat. I ducked into the tent, found my ultrasonic rangefinder, and put it in the pocket of my swim trunks.

  “Give me a hand, Mashka,” I said, and started to strap on the aquastat.

  Mashka was still sitting in front of the radio, listening to the unfading “whee-waa.” She helped me put on the aquastat, and together we went into the water. Under water I turned on the rangefinder. Signals rang out. My tagged septipods were wandering all over the lake in their sleep. We looked knowingly at one another, and surfaced. Mashka spat, pushed her wet hair back from her forehead, and said, “There’s a difference between an interstellar ship and wet slime in a gill bag.”

  I told her to return to shore and I dove again. No, in Gorbovsky’s place I wouldn’t be so worried. All this was too frivolou
s, like all that astroarchaeology of his. Traces of ideas! Psychological shock! There wouldn’t be any shock. Probably we wouldn’t even notice each other. They could hardly find us all that interesting.

  17. The Planet with All the Conveniences

  Ryu stood up to his waist in lush green grass and watched the helicopter land. Silver and dark-green shock waves from the rotors’ backwash swept over the grass. It seemed to him that the helicopter was taking its time about landing, and he shifted impatiently from foot to foot. It was very hot and close. The small, white sun was high, and moist heat rose up from the grass. The rotors started squealing more loudly, and the helicopter turned sideways to Ryu, then instantly dropped four or five feet and sank into the grass at the top of the hill. Ryu ran up the slope. The engine went quiet, the rotors turned more slowly, then stopped. Several people got out of the helicopter. The first was a lanky man in a jacket with rolled-up sleeves. He wore no helmet, and his sun-bleached hair stuck out on end over his long brown face. Ryu recognized him: it was Pathfinder Gennady Komov, the leader of the group. “Hello, landlord,” Komov said gaily, extending his hand. “Konnichi-wa!”

  “Konnichi-wa, Pathfinders,” said Ryu. “Welcome to Leonida.”

  He held out his hand too, but they had to cross another ten paces to make contact.

  “I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Ryu, smiling widely.

  “Did you get lonely?”

  “And how! Alone on a whole planet.”

  Behind Komov’s back someone said, “Damn!” and something dropped noisily into the grass.

  “That’s Boris Fokin,” Komov said without turning around. “An archaeologist equipped with full autodescent.”

  “At least when there’s such lush grass,” Boris Fokin said, getting up. He had a small red mustache, a freckled nose, and a white filmiplast helmet, now knocked aslant. He wiped his green-smeared hands on his pants and introduced himself. “Fokin. Pathfinder archaeologist.”

  “Welcome, Fokin,” said Ryu.

  “And this is Tatyana Palei, archaeological engineer,” said Komov.

  Ryu pulled himself together and inclined his head politely. The archaeological engineer had outrageous gray eyes and blinding white teeth. The archaeological engineer’s hand was strong and rough. The archaeological engineer’s coverall draped itself with devastating elegance.

  “Just call me Tanya,” said the archaeological engineer.

  “Ryu Waseda,” said Ryu. “Ryu is the given name, and Waseda is the surname.”

  “Mboga,” said Komov. “Biologist and hunter.”

  “Where?” asked Ryu. “Oh, forgive me. A thousand apologies.”

  “Never mind, Comrade Waseda,” said Mboga. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Mboga was a pigmy from the Congo, and only his black head, wrapped tightly in a white kerchief, could be seen over the grass. The steel-blue barrel of a carbine stuck up next to his head.

  “This is Tora-Hunter,” Tanya said.

  Ryu had to bend down to shake Tora-Hunter’s hand. Now he knew who Mboga was, Tora-Hunter Mboga, member of the Commission on the Preservation of the Wildlife of Alien Planets. The biologist who had discovered the “battery of life” on Pandora. The zoopsychologist who had tamed the monstrous Martian sora-tobu hiru, the “flying leeches.” Ryu was embarrassed by his faux pas.

  “I see that you don’t carry a weapon, Comrade Waseda,” said Mboga.

  “I do have a pistol,” Ryu said. “But not a very heavy one.”

  “I understand.” Mboga nodded encouragingly and looked about, “We did end up setting the prairie on fire,” he said softly.

  Ryu turned around. A flat plain covered with lush shining grass stretched from the hill to the very horizon. Two miles from the hill the grass was on fire, kindled by the landing boat’s reactor. Thick puffs of white smoke sailed through the whitish sky. The boat could be seen dimly through the smoke-a dark egg on three widespread struts. A wide burned-out patch around the boat showed black.

  “It will soon go out,” said Ryu. “It’s very damp here. Let’s go—I’ll show you your estate.”

  He took Komov by the arm and led him past the helicopter to the other side of the hill. The others followed. Ryu looked back several times, nodding at them with a smile.

  Komov said in vexation, “It’s always a bad show when you spoil things with your landing.”

  “The fire will soon go out,” Ryu repeated.

  He heard Fokin behind him, fussing over the archaeological engineer. “Careful, Tanya girl, there’s a tussock here.”

  “I see it,” the archeological engineer answered. “Watch your own step.”

  “Here is your estate,” said Ryu.

  A broad, calm river crossed the green plain. In a river bend gleamed a corrugated roof. “That’s my lab,” said Ryu. To the right of the laboratory, streams of red and black smoke rose up into the sky. “They’re building a storehouse there,” Ryu said. They could see silhouettes of some sort rushing about in the smoke. For an instant there appeared an enormous clumsy machine on caterpillar treads-a mother robot-and then something flashed in the smoke, a peal of rolling thunder rang out, and the smoke began to pour more thickly. “And there’s the city,” said Ryu. It was rather more than a kilometer from the base to the city. From the hill the buildings looked like squat gray bricks. Sixteen flat gray bricks, sticking up out of the green grass.

  “Yes,” said Fokin. “A very unusual layout.”

  Komov nodded silently. This city was quite unlike the others. Before the discovery of Leonida, the Pathfinders—the workers of the Commission for the Research of the Evidence of the Activity of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Outer Space—had come across only two cities—the empty city on Mars and the empty city on Vladislava. Obviously the same architect had designed both—cylindrical buildings descending many levels underground, made of shining silicones arranged in concentric rings. But this city on Leonida was entirely different—two rows of gray boxes made of porous limestone.

  “Were you there after Gorbovsky?” asked Komov.

  “No,” answered Ryu. “Not even once. Actually, I had no time. After all, I’m not an archaeologist—I’m an atmosphere physicist. And then, Gorbovsky had asked me not to go there.”

  A boom! boom! came from the construction site. Red puffs of smoke flew up in thick clouds. Through them the smooth walls of the storehouse could already be made out. The mother robot came out of the smoke into the grass. Next to her hopped black cyberbuilders like praying mantises. Then the cybers formed a chain and ran off to the river.

  “Where are they going?” Fokin asked curiously.

  “Swimming,” said Tanya.

  “They’re leveling an obstruction,” Ryu explained. “The storehouse is almost ready. Now the whole cybernetic system is retiming. They’ll build a hangar and a water system.”

  “A water system!” exclaimed Fokin.

  “Still, it would have been better to have moved the base a little farther from the city,” Komov said doubtfully.

  “This is how Gorbovsky laid it out,” said Ryu. “It’s not a good idea to get too far from base.”

  “Also true,” Komov agreed. “But I wouldn’t want the cybers wrecking the city.”

  “Come now! I never let them near it.”

  “A planet with all the conveniences,” said Mboga.

  “Yes indeed!” Ryu confirmed happily. “The river, the air, the greenery, and no mosquitoes, no harmful insects.”

  “All the conveniences indeed,” Mboga repeated.

  “Is it possible to go swimming?” asked Tanya.

  Ryu looked at the river. It was greenish and turbid, but it was a real river with real water. Leonida was the first planet that had turned out to have real water and breathable air. “I think so,” said Ryu. “I haven’t tried it myself, though. There hasn’t been time.”

  “We’ll swim every day,” said Tanya.

  “I’ll say!” shouted Fokin. “Every day! Three times a day! All we
’ll do is go swimming!”

  “Okay,” said Komov. “What’s that?” He pointed to a ridge of low hills on the horizon.

  “I don’t know,” said Ryu. “No one has been there yet. Falkenstein got sick all of a sudden, and Gorbovsky had to leave. He only had time to unload the equipment for me, and then he shipped out.”

  For some time everyone stood silently, looking at the hills on the horizon. Then Komov said, “In three days or so I’m going to fly along the river myself.”

  “If there are any more traces,” said Fokin, “then undoubtedly we’d find them along the river.”

  “Probably,” Ryu agreed politely. “Now let’s go to my place.”

  Komov looked back at the helicopter.

  “Never mind, let it stay,” said Ryu. “The hippopotamuses don’t climb hills.”

  “Hippopotamuses?” said Mboga.

  “That’s what I call them. They look like hippopotamuses from far off, and I’ve never seen them close up.” They started down the hill. “On the other side of the river the grass is very tall, so I’ve only seen their backs.”

  Mboga walked next to Ryu with a light gliding step. The grass seemed to flow around him.

  “On the other hand there are birds up here,” Ryu continued. “They’re very large and sometimes they fly very low. One almost grabbed my radar set.”

  Komov, without slowing down, looked into the sky, shading his eyes with a hand. “By the way,” he said. “I should send a radiogram to the Sunflower. May I use your communicator?”

  “By all means,” said Ryu. “You know, Percy Dickson wanted to shoot one. A bird, I mean. But Gorbovsky wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why not?” asked Mboga.