Chindi

Chapter 10

THE MOON WAS in its second phase. It was four hundred thousand kilometers from Safe Harbor, and it was actually one of three natural satellites, the others being negligible. It was barren, icy, mostly flat. Its surface was far smoother than Earth’s moon, prompting Pete to speculate whether it was considerably younger, or whether it was geologically active. Or whether…He went on, creating other possibilities.

The diameter at the equator was more than four thousand kilometers. A third the size of Earth. It had clouds, and Bill reported snow falling in a couple of places.

Hutch took the Memphis low, and they passed above fields of unbroken ice, occasional craters and rills, and then, unexpectedly, a chain of remarkably high mountains. Ahead, Safe Harbor was rising.

The planet was silver and blue in the sunlight, shrouded with clouds. She heard reactions from mission control, where George and his people were gathered. Beautiful world, poisoned beyond use by anybody now.

The sun set and they glided into a spectral night, filled with unearthly landscapes illuminated by the planet. Bill’s image appeared. “We’re over it now, Hutch,” he said.

The screens depicted a line of plateaus and low hills rising out of the dark. Bill put one of the plateaus on-screen, increased magnification, and rotated it for her. At the top, she saw a cluster of buildings. Domes of varying sizes, six of them, gray and drab, much the same shade as the surrounding rock. And there was a landing pad, complete with launch vehicle!

But there was no sign of life.

EVERYBODY WANTED TO make the flight down. “Can’t do it that way,” said George. “Somebody needs to stay. We have to establish an operations center here. On the ship.”

“Why?” asked Alyx, who looked genuinely distraught. This after pleading a few hours earlier to go home.

“Because it’s the way these things are done,” George said.

Hutch broke in. “He’s right. Look, there is a risk. Any deployment outside the ship always involves a risk. In this case, you’re going into an alien environment. We don’t know what might be waiting. So we want at least one person to stay here, out of harm’s way.” She was hoping to dampen the enthusiasm. In her view, no more than two people should have gone in until they knew for certain it was safe.

“I agree,” said Pete. “Best would be for George and me to go down, look the place over. Make sure everything’s okay…”

“Yes,” said Hutch.

Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Right,” he said. “And you guys be the first ones in. How about if Alyx and I go?”

“Hey,” said Herman. “I’m here, too. We’re going to be making history today. Old Herman’s not going to sit up here.” His features tightened, and Hutch saw that he wasn’t joking.

Tor made it clear he wasn’t planning on staying behind either.

George sighed. “Makes me proud,” he said.

“So what do we do?” asked Nick.

George surveyed his people for a volunteer who’d be willing to stay. But he got no encouragement. “Guess you’re it, Hutch,” he said.

“Not a good idea. You’ll want somebody along who’s familiar with the e-suits. In case there’s a problem.”

“Tor’s familiar with them,” said Herman.

She met his gaze and smiled politely. “Wouldn’t hurt to have two of us.”

“Right,” said Herman. But he was misjudging her. She couldn’t have all her passengers running around outside the ship while she sat in safety.

Hutch sighed. “Let’s let Bill keep an eye on things.”

“We should probably wait for sunrise,” said Alyx.

“That’ll be about three days,” observed Bill.

Hutch shook her head. “It is late,” she said. “Best would be for everybody to get a good night’s sleep. We’ll leave after breakfast.”

SHE TALKED WITH George for a few minutes, cautioning him about potential hazards in the moonbase, then went down to the launch bay and looked through her checklist to make sure everything was ready to go. She’d have to run some of them through a familiarity program with the e-suits. That would be another pleasure.

She loaded the harnesses, put in a couple of extra ones, checked the galley and the water supply. She connected the fuel line and told Bill to fill the lander’s tanks. Then she climbed inside, sat down in the pilot’s seat, turned out the cabin and bay lights, and began calibrating the gauges. She was suddenly aware she wasn’t alone.

Tor stood just outside the open airlock. “Hi,” she said. “Come on in.”

He smiled at her, a guy with something to say and not sure how to say it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Can I be honest?”

“Sure.”

“The Condor hit you pretty hard.”

“It hit everybody.”

“We had each other. I mean, we’re a big club. Been together for years, more or less.” His face was lost in shadow. “I understand you were a friend of, um, the captain?” He struggled momentarily to recall the name. “Brawley?”

She felt her control beginning to go again. Damn. “Yes,” she said. “We were friends.”

His hand touched her forearm. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “We’re all sorry.”

“How well did you know him? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Not as well as I’d have preferred. “We’d been friends for a few years,” she said. “How did you know? About us?”

“George told me.”

“I’m surprised. I didn’t think anybody knew.”

His eyes grew very soft. “They all knew.”

He let her go, but she left the wrist where it was, draped across the chair arm. She had a rule about involving herself with passengers. Even passengers with whom she had a personal connection. But at that moment, she’d have liked to draw closer to him. She’d descended into a dark place, and she needed company.

He was still talking, standing just inside the lander’s airlock, but only part of her was listening. He was saying something about how confident he felt having her in command of the Memphis, and how glad he was to be there, despite everything that had happened. She looked up at him and startled herself and undoubtedly him by drawing him down onto the chair arm.

His hands went around her and held on to her and rocked her gently.

IN THE MORNING they gathered outside the lander and listened while Hutch explained and demonstrated how the e-suits worked. They were flexible force envelopes, she said, that molded themselves to the body, and which felt rather like a loose-fitting set of cotton clothes. The exception was the hard shell effect created over the face, allowing space to breathe. They strapped on the gear, activated the Flickinger fields, and made admiring sounds as they saw how the fields glowed when lamplight hit them in the right way.

Hutch showed them how to shut the fields off, explained that it took simultaneous actions by both hands so that it wouldn’t happen accidentally. She pointed out that the fields were no protection whatever if they fell from an embankment, walked into a sharp object, or got in the way of a laser beam.

When she was satisfied, they checked their gear, which included spades, wrenches, cutters, and a hundred meters of cable. Then they climbed into the lander and launched.

They orbited the moon twice while Hutch examined the area for potential danger, saw nothing, and finally (with increasingly enthusiastic passengers) descended to the surface. She set down beside the silver-gray domes, near the vehicle they’d seen the day before.

As expected, there was no reaction. No burst of radio traffic erupted from their receivers. No lights came on, no hatches opened, no vehicles lurched out onto the hard ground. The spacecraft on the launchpad remained dark. And a few flakes of snow dropped from the sky.

The domes were connected by rounded tubes, and blanketed by sand and loose earth. Hutch saw radio antennas, sensor units, and an array of solar-power collectors. The pad was covered with blown soil.

“Centuries,” said Pete.

Alyx nodded. “I think so.”

Hutch was less sure. In her experience, any complex looked old when there was no sign of life and the wind was blowing. She decompressed and opened the hatch, expecting to lead the way, but there was a general rush toward the airlock. “Easy,” she protested.

Tor grinned. “Everybody wants to be first foot.”

“First foot?”

“Sure. You know. This is a new world. ‘One small step…’”

George suggested that Herman should have the honor. He readily accepted, and lowered himself to the ground. “It’s great to be here,” he said.

“It’s great to be here?” said Nick. “Is that the best you can do?”

The vehicle on the pad was a primitive rocket-driven lifter. She saw no sign either of the magnetics that had assisted second-generation transports, or the antigravity spike technology that had come on-line only a few years ago.

The six domes ranged in size from one that would have accommodated a hockey rink and several thousand fans to the smallest, which wasn’t much bigger than a private home.

They climbed down and joined Herman. Tor began immediately sizing up perspectives while the others spread out to look for a door.

Hutch, accompanied by Alyx, went over to the spacecraft and stared up at it. It was rusted. Clay was piled high around its treads. “You’re right, Alyx,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

“Centuries?”

“Probably.”

Tor came up behind them. “This’ll be the focal point,” he said.

“For a sketch?”

He nodded. “Lost empire,” he said. “Need to put it in a setting sun.”

Alyx tilted her head to see whether he was serious. “Isn’t that using a hammer to make the point?” she asked.

“That could happen. But the thing cries out for long shadows.”

Herman, still leading the way, found a hatch. It was built into the side of the nearest dome, three-quarters buried, so they had to dig it out to gain access.

Hutch watched placidly while he and George worked. In the middle of the effort, Bill broke in: “Outpost reports support mission is on the way,” he said.

“Okay.”

“They’ve dispatched some medical people and a team of investigators to try to figure out what happened. Until they arrive, we are advised to take no action that would endanger the Memphis. Estimate TOA approximately one week.”

“Anything else?”

“They want us to record the positions and vectors of any more wreckage that we find. And there’s a detailed set of instructions how such evidence is to be handled and stored. I should add that, while no specific references to liability were made, it looks as if they’re scrambling to avoid any legal responsibility. By the way, we are also directed to attempt no landing on Safe Harbor.”

Hutch looked up at Safe Harbor. Because the moon was in tidal lock, Safe Harbor permanently occupied the same position overhead.

The atmosphere was thin, and the night was still. Gravity was about a quarter standard.

Inside their force envelopes, they were all dressed casually, in shorts or jumpsuits or the baggy casuals they generally wore in the common room. “Hard to get used to,” said Nick.

“What’s that?” Hutch asked.

“People wearing light slacks and pullovers in an utterly hostile environment. How cold is it out there?”

Hutch was the exception: She was wearing a vest. “A hundred or so below.”

He grinned and looked at Alyx, resplendent in a khaki blouse and shorts. “Brisk,” he said.

They uncovered the hatch, which was a metal alloy and about as wide as Hutch could extend her arms. On the wall to the right there was a plate with markings, several lines of spidery symbols.

“Not much of an esthetic sense,” said Alyx.

“Here’s something.” Nick knelt to brush away dust and uncovered a curved panel. “A doorknob?” he asked.

“Could be,” said Pete. “Try it.”

He fumbled with it, opened it, and exposed a stud. He looked back at George.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Nick pushed the stud.

Nothing happened.

He jiggered it back and forth.

“No power,” said Hutch. “There should be a way to open it manually.”

“I don’t see anything,” said Pete.

Hutch pulled the cutter out of her vest. “If you folks will back off a bit, I’ll see if I can open it up.”

“I hate to do that,” said George, “but I don’t think we have much choice.”

There was a brief debate, which ended the way she knew it would. She powered up the laser, aimed it, and switched it on. A thin red beam licked out and touched the hatch. A wisp of smoke appeared, and the metal began to blacken. It curled and gave way. “Get farther back,” she said. “There might be air pressure on the other side.” But there wasn’t. She cut up and around until she’d completed a narrow circle. When she’d finished, she got a wrench from Herman, stood off to one side, and pushed the piece easily into the interior.

George held his lamp to the opening. “Small room,” he said.

“Airlock,” suggested Hutch. There was a second door a few meters away.

Identical patterns of ironwork extended out of the walls on either side. Handrails of some sort. Except there were several of them, and they seemed decorative. But nobody decorates airlocks.

Another odd thing: There were no benches.

Hutch went back to work and cut out a larger section. When she’d finished, George led the way into the airlock.

They repeated the procedure on the inner door, revealing a long chamber. They turned on their lamps and peered in. Shadows flicked around the room. There were two tables, long enough to accommodate about a dozen people each. But they were high, about chest high for Hutch. Devices with cords and cables sprouting from them were seated in various mounts along the walls and on the tabletops.

There was more ironwork. Some was bolted to the floor, some attached to the walls. It reminded her of the monkey bars one occasionally finds in schoolyards and parks.

The walls and overhead were gray and water-stained. They appeared to be constructed of a fibrous plastic. The floor was stone, and had apparently been cut out of the surrounding rock.

Two walls were dedicated to operational stations, containing units that looked like computers. Everything was under a thick layer of dust. When she wiped it away she saw keyboards and the now-familiar spidery characters. There were numerous dials, push buttons, gauges, screens. Even a headset. A small headset, but it seemed unlikely it could be anything else. And there were other devices whose purposes she could not guess. Whatever the occupants might have looked like, she decided, they were smaller than humans. Despite the high tables.

But they possessed fingers. And ears.

Pete had found a radio. Here was a speaker and there a channel selector and over here an off-on switch. This was the microphone.

Hutch tried to imagine the room when it had been filled with activity. What sort of creatures had been there? How had they sounded when they gave landing instructions over the circuit? Sets of monkey bars stood in front of each station.

She saw what was probably a radar unit. The screen was broken, and, of course, she couldn’t read the language. But she thought she could make out the power switch, the scanner control, and the range selector. It even had transistors, although they were corroded.

There had been no benches in the airlock; there were no chairs here.

“Monkeys?” suggested Tor.

“Serpents,” said Alyx, flashing her light into the room’s dark corners. She sounded a bit unnerved.

Hutch opened a private channel to the AI. “Bill, comm check. We are inside one of the domes. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Hutch.”

“Nothing stirring up there?”

“Negative. Everything is quiet.”

Hutch had clipped an imager to her vest and was relaying everything up to the ship to provide a visual record. To her left, Herman scooped up something from one of the computer positions and slipped it inside his vest.

She switched to a private channel. “Herman,” she said, “no souvenirs.”

He turned in her direction. “Who cares?” he asked, using the same channel. “Who’ll ever know?”

“Herman,” she said quietly, “I’d be grateful if you put it back. This stuff is priceless.”

He made a pained face. “Hutch,” he said, “what’s the difference?”

She held his eyes.

He sighed, hesitated, and returned it.

“It sets the wrong precedent,” she said. And then, to ease the tension, “What was it?”

He directed his lamp toward the object. It was a ceramic figurine. A flower.

It looked like a lily.

Together they examined it, commented on its workmanship, which was at best pedestrian. But that of course was irrelevant.

Opposite the airlock, a passageway opened into the interior. Pete entered it and disappeared.

The man was either foolish or fearless. Assuming there was a difference. She went after him and brought him back. “It’s dangerous to wander off,” she said.

“I wasn’t wandering. I wanted to get a look at what was back there.”

It was like herding a group of schoolchildren.

SHE HAD WATCHED archeologists at work in similar sites before, and she was reluctant to allow her group of tourists to blunder about. The problem with amateurs, she’d once heard Richard Wald say, is that they don’t know they’re amateurs. So even if they don’t resort to outright theft, they move things around. They break things. They muddy the water, and they make it that much more difficult for those who follow to piece together what was really going on at the site.

She knew eventually she’d be criticized for letting George and his team wander loose there. You of all people, Hutchins…She could hear it now.

“Try not to handle this stuff too much,” she cautioned. “Look, but don’t touch.”

“Beautiful women,” said Nick, “have been telling me that my whole life.”

“I don’t wonder,” said Alyx.

In the banter, Hutch detected a sense of pride. They’d come extraordinarily far. They’d persisted in a line of inquiry that others had dismissed. And now they’d actually found something. Not the living, intelligent aliens they’d hoped for. But nonetheless they’d unearthed a major discovery. And they deserved at least the privilege of getting a close look, of feeling what it’s like to be first into a site that was once a center of ET activity.

Hutch took scrapings from shelves and walls and instruments, packing it all into sample bags, which she carefully labeled according to subject and location.

There were two other chambers in the dome, and both contained variations of the ironwork. In addition, one of the spaces provided plumbing. A basin and a faucet.

“Washroom,” said Herman.

Alyx looked puzzled. “Where’s the toilet?”

“Maybe they don’t produce waste,” said Nick.

Pete laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “All living systems produce waste.”

“I don’t think plants do,” said George.

Tor thought about it for a moment. “Oxygen,” he said.

George shook his head. “You know what I mean.”

“I believe,” said Nick, glancing across the room, “that’s the answer to Alyx’s question.” He was looking at a jar-shaped metal receptacle lying on the floor. It had apparently broken free of its housing, which was mounted on the wall at about eye level. They inspected the housing and found a duct behind it.

“That seems like an odd way to do it,” said Alyx. “You’d have to get halfway up the wall.”

“I guess,” said Hutch, “it settles the question of whether they were bipeds.”

They laughed, and Tor commented he was beginning to understand what the term alien really meant.

BEYOND THE WASHROOM, they faced a choice between tunnels. There was talk of splitting up, and again Hutch cautioned against it.

Nobody argued, and George led them off to the right. Their footsteps had a whispery quality in the thin air. They passed closed doors and emerged eventually into a large single chamber.

Dim light leaked through the overhead. That would be the glow from Safe Harbor. They filed out onto a concrete apron that circled a section of bare earth.

“Greenhouse,” said Pete. A few stalks protruded out of the frozen ground.

They moved on into another dome and saw cages.

The chamber was crowded with them, divided into a range of sizes, none bigger than one would need to contain a beagle. They were stacked on shelves and mounted on tables and sometimes built into the walls. There were maybe a hundred of them.

“Bones over here,” said Alyx, in a small voice. She was looking down at one of the enclosures.

They were gray, desiccated, not very big, and there were still scraps of what might once have been flesh hanging on them. Hutch got detailed pictures.

George found more. His expression suggested he was being subjected to improprieties and bad taste.

“What is this place?” asked Herman.

“Probably experimental animals,” said George.

Pete shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What then?”

“Dining room.”

George flinched. “Ridiculous,” he said.

Alyx squealed and backed out into the corridor.

It was Hutch’s conclusion, too. “Looks as if these critters liked their dinners alive.”

“That’s ugly,” said Herman.

Their lamps were moving around the room, throwing the silhouettes of the cages across the ceiling and walls. “I don’t know,” Pete said. “I’m not sure it’s much different from what we do.”

“It’s a lot different from what we do,” insisted Herman.

“Maybe we’re just a little more squeamish,” said Pete.

They wandered through the room, peering into the cages until Herman suggested maybe they’d seen enough and might consider going back. The sense of a Sunday afternoon outing had vanished.

“It’s the problem with looking at civilizations that are completely different.” Pete went into lecture mode. He was back on the mock-up starship bridge he’d used during the Universe shows. “We tend to have idealistic notions of what they’ll be like. We assume they’ll have abolished war, that they’ll be smart…”

He went on in that vein for another minute or so. Hutch turned the volume down but not off while she tried to control her own imagination. The place was creepy. She’d visited a few alien sites over the years, inevitably wondering what the occupants had really been like. For the first time she was glad she didn’t have details.

They pressed on, and descended into an underground area that housed storage tanks, engines, supply bins (filled with decayed garments whose shapes were no longer discernible), and control consoles. Nick stumbled over a pair of tracks, but there was no sign of a vehicle.

Then they climbed a ramp and emerged in a large chamber that might have been an auditorium. One wall was completely dedicated to display systems. Another was lined with shelves, each of which was packed with plastic rings, about the size of dinner dishes. All were labeled.

“Computer storage?” wondered Pete, who was first to enter.

Nick shrugged. “It won’t matter much. If this place is as old as it looks, whatever was on them is long gone.”

The rooms and corridors throughout the complex were filled with the ubiquitous ironwork. All had high ceilings. But there was something vaguely unsettling about the dimensions and the architecture, as if the proportions weren’t right.

“More rings in here,” said Pete, from somewhere down the corridor. “And more here.”

George and the others were hanging back, perhaps intimidated in some way nobody understood. But Pete just plunged ahead. “And still more.” He stopped. “No, I’m wrong. This one is empty.”

“No rings?” George asked.

“No nothing,” said Pete. “No tables. No cabinets. Not even any iron.”

That sent everybody tracking in to take a look, but they stayed together. The herd instinct had taken over.

The room was bare.

“Odd,” said Pete. He knelt and examined the floor. “It looks as if the monkey bars were here. You can still see the fittings.”

One wall was discolored in places suggesting the presence of shelves at one time. “Well,” said George, “maybe they were getting ready to remodel when the war shut them down.”

THEY FOUND A room full of mummified things, creatures with segmented abdomens and multiple limbs and long, sloping skulls. They were hanging in the ironwork, most of them seated in loops and mounts. Several had fallen to the floor.

“That’s enough for me,” said Alyx, who took one look and returned to the passageway.

The creatures would have been, on average, about the size of cheetahs. But they had large jaws, lots of teeth, two sets of appendages ending in curled claws, a third set in manipulative digits. Their skulls might have approached human cranial capacity. There was, Hutch thought with a shudder, something spidery about the creatures. Like their alphabet.

There were goblets and plates on the table, and bones in the plates.

Only one of the goblets was still standing upright.

“What do you think happened here?” asked Herman.

Nick came up beside Hutch. “You mind company?” he said.

She smiled. “I think we’re all a bit rattled.”

“Looks like nine of them,” said Pete.

“Wouldn’t want to meet one of these critters in a dark alley.”

“Didn’t all get out after all, did they?”

“Bones in the plates aren’t theirs.”

“They were having a celebration.”

“I don’t think so. Looks more like a last meal.”

“Yes. Had to be.”

They spread out around the room, gazing down at the corpses. Alyx lingered in the entrance, pointedly looking off in a neutral direction.

“I thought the place was going to turn out to be pretty old,” said Herman.

“What makes you think it isn’t?” asked Hutch.

He gazed quietly at the bodies. “They’re not as decomposed as I’d have expected if this had happened forty or fifty years ago.”

“This is probably a sterile world,” said Hutch. “No organisms to digest the remains. They could have been here for centuries.”

Pete stepped carefully past the remains to study the lone standing goblet. “They look like climbers,” he said, bestowing on them the name they would retain forever.

“You think the goblets were the method?” asked Alyx, of the room at large.

“I’d think so,” said Nick. “A final meal, a last slug of wine, and exit. They were probably trapped here when the war broke out.” He shrugged. “Pity.”

George shook his head. “Bear with me, Nick,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can feel much sympathy for something like this.”

PETE CONTINUED TO prowl ahead of the rest. They were in the largest of the domes, on the far side from where they’d entered the complex, when his voice sounded in Hutch’s commlink. “How about that?”

He was standing in front of an airlock. Both hatches had been cut open. Beyond, the ground was white and flat in the glow of Safe Harbor.

“That’s the damnedest thing, George,” he continued. It looked as if someone had used a laser on the hatches. From the outside.

“Why would they do that?” asked George.

Hutch looked at the mutilated lock a long time, shook her head, and took some scrapings. George caught her eye, almost demanding a rational explanation.

“I have no idea,” she said.