The Invincible

THE CONDOR

From a distance the rocket looked like a leaning tower. This impression was strengthened by the sand massed around it. Since the wind came from the west the sand wall had pulled up much higher than the east. Several tractors near the rocket had been almost totally buried by the sand. Even the antimatter mortar had been put out of action. It stood there with its hood raised, half filled with sand. But one could still see the jet openings at the ship’s nose which rested in an unobstructed depression in the ground. One had only to remove a thin layer of sand in order to reach the objects that lay strewn around the ramp.

The group stopped at the edge of the western dune wall. The vehicles they had brought along from the Invincible already ringed the area in a wide circle and the bunched rays of the emitters formed a protective energy screen. The men had left their transport vehicles and the info-robots about one hundred yards from the spot where the sand wall encircled Condor’s base. Now the men looked down onto the ridge of the dune.

The ramp was suspended about five yards above the ground, as if it had been suddenly stopped in midair while it was lowered downwards. The elevator, however, was untouched and its open door beckoned the men to enter. Nearby oxygen bottles stuck out from the sand. Their aluminum sheaths glistened brightly as if somebody had left them lying there just a few minutes earlier. Several steps further on, a blue object rested gleaming on the sandy ground. It was a plastic container, as they noticed on closer inspection. Everywhere inside the hollow around the foot of the spaceship was scattered a vast quantity of all kinds of things: cans of food, some full, some empty; theodolites, cameras, tripods, canisters, some still intact, others badly damaged.

As if someone had thrown the whole mess helter skelter out of the rocket, thought Rohan, and looked up at the darkened hole through which the crew would usually leave or enter the spaceship. The hatch was halfway open.

The small flying scouter robot that accompanied deVries’ expedition had found the dead spaceship quite by accident. DeVries had not tried to enter the Condor, but had immediately informed Horpach of his discovery. It had been decided that Rohan’s group would be the one to uncover the mystery that shrouded the Invincible’s sister ship. Now the technicians came running from their engines, lugging their toolboxes with them.

Rohan noticed something round on the ground, thinly covered by sand. With his foot he scraped away the fine sand, assuming he would dig up a small globe. Not suspecting anything, he kept on raking until he brought to daylight a pale yellow vault-like form. He recoiled rapidly, stifling a startled outcry. Alarmed, his companions turned around, looking at him. He held a human skull in his hand.

They found more bones and even a complete skeleton in a spacesuit. Between the dropping jaw and the upper teeth stuck the mouthpiece of the oxygen apparatus. The manometer had stopped at 46 atmospheres. Jarg knelt down and slowly turned the valve. The gas escaped with a hissing noise. Because of the dry desert air no trace of rust had formed on the metal parts of the reduction valve; it worked easily.

They entered the elevator but pushed the buttons in vain: there was no electrical current. It would be quite difficult to climb up the scaffolding of the elevator shaft and Rohan began deliberating whether to send up some of the men in a flying saucer robot. But in the meantime two men of the crew had already started their upward climb; they had secured themselves to each other by ropes as if they were mountain climbers. The rest of the group silently watched their ascent.

The Condor, a spacecruiser of the same class as the Invincible, had been built a few years earlier; externally, the two crafts could not be distinguished. The men were silent. Although none of them expressed the thought out loud, they all would have preferred to find the wreckage of a crash or even the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. They were all shaken by the sight of this ship in the sand, listing lifelessly to one side as if the ground had given way under the weight of the support pillars of the stern. There the apparently undamaged craft leaned in the midst of a confusion of objects and human bones; the men shuddered.

In the meantime the climbers had reached the entrance hatch, opened it fully and quickly disappeared from view. They remained there for a long while. Rohan was growing restless, when suddenly the elevator jerked upward for about one yard and then descended smoothly to the ground. At the same time the figure of one of the technicians became visible in the open door, beckoning to them to get in.

There were four of them going up in the elevator: Rohan, Ballmin, the biologist Hagerup and Kralik, one of the technicians. Out of habit, Rohan examined the mighty, rounded body of the ship that was gliding by behind the moving elevator. He was numbed with fear for the first time this day. The armored plates had been scratched and pitted by some incredibly hard tool. The marks were not especially deep, but so close together all over that the entire hull seemed to be dotted with small pox scars.

Rohan seized Ballmin’s arm but he had already become aware of this strange phenomenon. Both men tried to get a good look at the nicks and indentations. They were quite small, as if they had been chiseled out with a fine instrument. But Rohan knew for a fact that there was no chisel capable of piercing the cruiser’s hull for even the fraction of a millimeter. The titanium molybdenum skin was of such hardness that it could be affected only by chemical corrosives. Before he could come to any conclusion about this problem, the elevator had reached its destination. They entered the airlock.

The interior of the ship was lit up. The technicians had already switched on the auxiliary generators powered by compressed air. The dustlike sand had accumulated in a heavy layer only at the threshold where the wind had driven it through the open hatch door. But there was none in the corridors. They proceeded to the third floor and found clean and neat, brightly lit rooms. Here and there they saw an oxygen mask, a plastic plate, a book or part of some protective suit. But farther down, the cartographers’ cabins, the mess halls, the dormitories, the radar rooms, all the main corridors and side passages, were in a state of indescribable disarray.

The worst was the command center. Not one single dial of the many instruments, clocks and screens had remained in one piece. Those disks had been made of a tough shatterproof glass that now covered tables, chairs, wires, plugs and sockets in the form of a fine silvery powder. Next door, in the library, were heaps of microfilms, partially unrolled and twisted into wild tangles and coils. Torn books, broken sliderules, compasses, shattered spectroscopes had been wildly thrown all over the floor. There were stacks of Cameron’s big star catalogs shredded to pieces. Somebody must have vented special fury on these thick volumes; they had ripped out the heavy, stiff folio-size pages in big bundles. The impression was one of frenzied rage combined with unbelievable patience.

Inside the club room and in the neighboring auditorium, the passages had been blocked by heaps of clothing and leather pieces cut from the upholstered seats of the chairs. According to one of the technicians, it looked as if the place had been invaded by a herd of rampaging apes,

The men were speechless at this senseless destruction. They went from deck to deck: in a small cabin, lying arched over in a heap near the wall, they found the corpse of a man clad in a dirty shirt and linen trousers. Now he was covered by a ground sheet that the technician who had been the first to enter the room had thrown over him. The dead man was mummified.

Rohan was one of the last to leave the Condor. He felt dizzy. Nausea overcame him in spurts and it took all his will power to fight off the recurring attacks. He felt as if he had just awakened from some incredibly horrible dream. But one look at the men’s faces told him that the whole thing had been real.

They sent brief radio messages to the Invincible. Part of their expedition remained on board the Condor to restore some measure of order. But before they began this gigantic task, Rohan arranged to have each room photographed and carefully described.

Together with Ballmin and Gaarb, one of the biophysicists, Rohan started on the way back. Jarg was driving. His broad and usually smiling face seemed now to have shrunk, bearing a grim expression. He was driving rather recklessly, quite unlike his customary highly disciplined self. The heavy vehicle, weighing several tons, was raked by sudden jolts and hobbled across the dunes, throwing out sandy fountains on either side. One of the energo-robots moved ahead of them at an even pace, shielding the men in the truck with its energy field. All were silent, each man busy with his own thoughts.

Rohan was almost afraid to face the astrogator; he did not know what to tell him. He had kept to himself one of the discoveries he had made, one which seemed particularly incomprehensible and insane, and thus chilling. In one of the bathrooms on the eighth floor he had found several soap bars pierced with tooth marks. Famine?

There had certainly been no dearth of food on board the Condor. The storerooms were filled with all kinds of provisions. Even the milk in the freezer rooms had not spoiled.

About midway they received radio signals from a small vehicle with a robot drive. It came toward them, raising a heavy dust cloud that followed them like a dirty umbrella. Rohan’s car braked; the other vehicle also came to a halt. Two men were in it: Magdow, a middle-aged technician, and Sax, the neurophysiologist. Rohan switched off the energy screen. This way it was possible to communicate with each other by shouting back and forth.

After Rohan’s departure they had discovered the frozen body of a man lying in the hibernator of the Condor. They thought they might be able to bring the man back to life, and Sax had brought the necessary instruments from the Invincible. Rohan decided to go along, justifying this sudden change of plans by saying that Sax was traveling without an energy field. The truth was, however, that he dreaded the confrontation with Horpach; he was glad to have an excuse for postponing this unpleasant task. Rohan’s group turned around and chased back, raising big dust clouds.

There was a great deal of activity around the Condor. Various objects were still dug up from the dunes. Off to one side was a row of corpses, now neatly hidden under white sheets. More than twenty dead bodies had been found. The ramp was in working order, the power supply had been completely restored.

The approaching convoy had been detected by the men at the Condor, for the dust cloud was visible from quite a distance. A passage into the inside of the energy dome had been readied for them. There they were greeted by a physician, Dr. Nygren, who had refused to examine the man from the hibernator without some professional assistance.

Rohan availed himself of the privilege of acting here as the commander’s deputy; he accompanied the two physicians aboard. The wreckage that blocked the entrance into the hibernator had since been cleared away. The thermometers registered zero degrees Fahrenheit. The two doctors exchanged meaningful glances. Rohan understood enough about hibernation to realize that this temperature was too high for a reversible death, and on the other hand, too low for hypothermal sleep. There was no indication that this man had been intended to survive his stay in the hibernator. He had most likely stumbled inside by accident — another riddle, just as nonsensical as everything else that had happened on board the Condor. And indeed, as soon as they had changed into thermo-protective suits, turned the handwheel to “open” and lifted up the heavy trapdoor, they saw, stretched out on the floor, face downwards, the body of a man in his underwear. Rohan helped the physicians carry the frozen man to a small upholstered table with three overhead lamps that supplied light without casting shadows. It was not a proper operating table but merely a kind of stretcher for small manipulations that were sometimes carried out inside the hibernator.

Rohan hesitated before looking at the man’s face; he had been acquainted with many members of the Condor’s crew.

But this man was a stranger to him. If his limbs had not been so icy cold and stiff, one could have believed that he was simply asleep. His lids were closed. Thanks to the dry, hermetically sealed room, his skin had not lost its natural color, although he looked quite pale. His subcutaneous tissues, however, abounded with tiny ice crystals. Once again the two physicians communicated with each other by meaningful glances. They laid out their instruments.

Rohan sat down on one of the empty, freshly made up cots that were arranged in two long rows. Everything here was in perfect order. Several times he heard the clicking of some instruments, the whispered consultation between the two medical men. Finally Sax stepped back from the stretcher and said: “There’s nothing else we can do here.”

“You mean he’s dead,” said Rohan. It was not so much a question he posed as a conclusion he drew, the only possible interpretation of the doctor’s words.

Nygren had switched on the air conditioning system in the meantime. It was not long before warm air began to stream into the room. Rohan rose from the cot in order to leave the hibernator when he noticed the physician returning to the stretcher. He picked up a small black satchel off the floor, opened it and pulled out that apparatus about which Rohan had heard so much but which he had never seen until now. With slow, almost pedantic movements, Sax began to untangle the cords whose ends had flat electrodes attached to them. He placed six electrodes against the dead man’s skull and fastened them with an elastic band. Then he crouched down and pulled three pairs of headphones out of the satchel. He put on one of these and kept testing the buttons of the machine inside a plastic case. His eyes were closed, his face bore an expression of deepest concentration. Suddenly he frowned, bent over further and stopped fiddling with the button. He quickly removed the earphones from his head.

“Dr. Nygren — ” he said in a strange voice. His colleague seized the earphones in turn.

“What is it?” whispered Rohan with trembling lips.

This apparatus was referred to by the space crews as the “corpse-spy.” With it one could “auscultate the brain” of recently deceased persons, or those dead in whom decay had not yet set in, or a body like this one that had been preserved by very low temperatures. Long after death had occurred one could ascertain what the last conscious thoughts and emotions had been.

The apparatus sent electrical impulses into the brain; there they followed the path of least resistance, moving along those nerve tendrils that had formed one functional entity during the preagonal phase. The results were never too reliable, but it was said to have obtained extraordinarily significant data on many occasions. In cases like the present one use of the “corpse-spy” was clearly indicated,

Rohan somehow suspected that the neurologist had never really counted on reviving the dead man, but had only come to listen and find out the secrets buried in his frozen brain. Rohan stood without moving, aware of the dull beating of his heart and the dryness in his mouth, as Sax handed him the second set of earphones. Had this gesture not been so simple, so matter of fact, he would not have dared put on the headphones. But he felt encouraged by the steady gaze of Dr. Sax who squatted before the seats he slowly turned the amplifier button.

At first he heard nothing but the humming of the current. He felt relieved, for he did not really want to hear more. Without realizing it on a conscious level, he wanted nothing more than that the dead man’s brain remain silent.

Sax straightened up and adjusted Rohan’s headphones. Rohan saw something emerge from the white light that fell on the wall of the cabin: a gray light, dimmed as if by ashes, floating vaguely somewhere at an undeterminable distance. Without knowing why, he tightly squeezed his eyelids together.

Suddenly he could perceive clearly what it was he had just seen. It looked like one of the corridors inside the Condor; there were pipes running along the ceiling. The passage was totally blocked by human bodies that seemed to move. But it was only the image that was waving to and fro. The people were half-naked; shreds of clothing barely covered them. Their skin was unnaturally white and was sprinkled with dark spots like some kind of a rash. Perhaps these spots were not on the skin but were rather a peculiar visual phenomenon, for they were scattered everywhere: tiny black dots on the floor and the walls. The entire image seemed to fluctuate like a blurred photograph taken through a deep layer of flowing water. The picture seemed to stretch, then contracted again, billowing and swaying.

Terrified, Rohan forced his eyes open. The image faded away and vanished; only a shadow remained in the brightly lit room.

Sax began to make some adjustments on the apparatus and Rohan heard, coming from inside him a faint whisper: “. . ala… ama… lala… ala… ma… mama…” Nothing else. Suddenly wierd noises came from the earphones: caterwauling, tweeting and crowing; high-pitched sounds that repeated over and over again like some crazy hiccup or some wild horrible laughter, or tortured electronic circuits.

Sax rolled up the cords and put them back in his bag. Nygren took a sheet and threw it over the dead man, covering up his body and face. The man’s mouth had been tightly shut but now his lips parted slightly, giving his face an enormously surprised expression. It must be the heat, thought Rohan; it had become quite warm inside the hibernator, or at least it felt warm to him. He perspired heavily, the water trickled down his back. He was glad to see the face disappear under the white sheet.

“What is it? Why don’t you say anything?” Rohan called out.

Sax tightened the straps around the plastic case, then stepped closer to Rohan. “Pull yourself together, Navigator!”

Rohan narrowed his eyelids and clenched his fists. But it did not help. In such moments he would fly into a violent rage, which he could suppress only with great difficulty.

“Sorry,” he stammered. “But what did that mean?”

Sax unzipped his protective suit. The bulky garment slid to the ground; nothing remained now of his portly figure. Once again he was the same gaunt, stoop-shouldered man with the narrow chest and delicate hands.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” he answered. “Maybe even less.”

Rohan felt lost; he did not understand any longer, but he seized upon the neurologist’s last words.

“What do you mean, less?”

“Because I just arrived. I haven’t seen anything besides this corpse. But you’ve been here all day. Doesn’t this image suggest anything to you?”

“No. Those — they were moving. Were they still alive then? What were those little black spots all over them?”

“They weren’t moving. That was an optical illusion. These engrams are registered on the brain like a photographic still. And sometimes it happens that several images are present, like in a multiple exposure. But this was not the case here.”

“But those spots? Are they also an optical illusion?”

“I don’t know. Anything is possible. But I don’t think so. What would you say, Nygren?”

Nygren had already peeled off his protective suit.

“I don’t know either. I’m not sure whether they were artifacts or not. There weren’t any on the ceiling, were there?”

“The black spots? No. They only covered the dead bodies and the floor. And some of them were on the walls — ”

“If that had been a second projection, they would have been all over the image;” said Nygren. “But you can never be sure with engrams. So much is purely due to chance.”

“And that voice? That — babbling?” Rohan searched desperately for an answer.

“One word was perfectly clear: ‘Mama.’ Did you hear it?”

“Yes, I did. But there was something else. ‘Ala… lala.’ That was repeated over and over again.”

“Yes, but only because I made a systematic examination of the entire occipital lobe,” said Sax. “In other words, the area that controls acoustic memory,” he explained for Rohan’s benefit. “That’s what’s so unusual here.”

“Those words?”

“No. Not those words. A dying man might think of anything. If he had been thinking of his mother, those words would have been quite normal. But his auditory memory bank was absolutely empty. Do you understand?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. What do you mean by empty?”

“As a rule we cannot obtain any useful results when we search the occipital lobe,” explained Nygren. “Too many engrams there, too many stored words. It’s as if you would attempt to read one hundred books simultaneously. Sheer chaos. But this one,” he glanced over in the direction of the elongated shape under the white sheet, “he had nothing in it. No words, only those couple of syllables.”

“Yes, you are right. I have examined everything thoroughly from the sensory speech center to the sulcus Rolandi,” said Sax. “And the same syllables kept recurring. These were the only phonemes that have been left in there.”

“And what happened to the rest?”

“There aren’t any others.” Sax seemed to lose patience. He jerked the heavy aparatus violently upwards and off the floor, making the leather handle squeak. “They aren’t there and that’s all there is to it. Don’t ask me what happened to all the other words. This man must have totally lost his acoustical memory bank.”

“But how about the image?”

“That’s something entirely different. This he saw. He did not even have to understand what he perceived. Just like a camera that does not comprehend but still registers whatever object you aim it at. I have no idea whether he understood it or not.”

“Could you help me with this, please, Nygren?” The two physicians carried their gear out of the hibernator, and the door fell shut behind them.

Rohan was alone in the room. He felt so desperate that he stepped over to the table, flung back the white sheet, unbuttoned the dead man’s shirt and carefully examined his chest. He trembled when he touched the body, for the skin had become supple again. As the tissues were thawing out, a general relaxation of all the muscles had taken place. The head, which until now had been propped up in an unnatural position, had sunk down limply. Now it seemed indeed as if he were sleeping. Rohan searched the body for evidence of some mysterious epidemic, some kind of poisoning or insect bites, but he could find nothing. Two fingers of the left hand spread apart and a small, gaping wound became visible. A few drops of blood began to ooze out of the torn flesh, and began to drip on the white foam rubber cover of the table. That was more than Rohan could stand. He did not even bother to pull the sheet back over the corpse; he ran out of the cabin, pushed aside the men who stood in his way and rushed toward the main exit as if he were being pursued. He was stopped by Jarg in the airlock, who helped him strap on the oxygen gear and pushed the mouthpiece between Rohan’s lips.

“You didn’t find anything, Navigator?”

“No, Jarge. Nothing, nothing at all.”

He was unaware of the others beside him as he descended in the elevator. Outside the motors howled. The storm had grown stronger; sand clouds whizzed past and pelted the rough surface of the Condor’s hull.

Suddenly Rohan remembered something. He walked over to the stern, raised himself on his toes and palpated the thick metal. The armored plate felt like rock, old weathered rock, dotted with hard nodules. Over near the tranporters he noticed the tall figure of engineer Ganong, but he did not even try to ask him what he might think of that strange phenomenon. The engineer would know no more than he did himself: namely, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He rode back in the largest vehicle, together with a dozen other men. From his seat in the far corner of the cabin, he heard their voices as if from a great distance. Terner brought up the question of poisoning, but he was shouted down.

“Poisoned? With what? All the filters are in top shape, the water supply untouched, oxygen tanks all full, an abundance of food…”

“Did you see what the man looked like that we found in the navigation room?” asked Blank. “I used to know him. But I would never have recognized him if I hadn’t seen his signet ring.”

Nobody answered. Back at the Invincible Rohan went directly to Horpach, who had been kept up to date on everything via television, and the oral reports of the group that had returned earlier. They had also brought along with them several hundred photos. Unconsciously, Rohan was relieved that he did not have to describe to the commander what he had seen.

The astrogator gave him a piercing glance and rose from the table where a large map of the area was spread out and partially covered by stacks of photographs. They were alone in the large command center.

“Pull yourself together, Rohan,” he said. “I can sympathize with the way you feel right now, but we need cold reason, a clear head, no emotions. Well get to the bottom of this damned story.”

“But they had every imaginable safety device: energo-robots, laser beam protectors and particle throwers. The big antimatter mortar is right there in front of the ship. They had all the same things to protect themselves that we do,” said Rohan in a toneless voice. He slumped down into a chair. “Forgive me.”

The astrogator took a bottle of cognac from a small cupboard.

“An old home remedy. Sometimes it does a lot of good. Drink that, Rohan. A long time ago people used this on battle fields.”

Rohan took the drink and swallowed it in one gulp.

“I checked the counters of all the energy aggregates,” he said in a reproachful tone. “The crew was never attacked. They never fired a single shot. They simply, simply — ”

“Went stark raving mad,” completed the unruffled commander.

“If only we could be sure of that! But how could that happen?”

“Did you see the log book?”

“No. Gaarb took it along with him. Do you have it here now?”

“Yes, I do. There’s the date of landing and only four entries, concerning the ruins, the same ones you men examined, and — the flies.”

“What flies?”

“I don’t know. This is the exact text here…”

He picked up the open book from the table.

“ ‘No sign of any life on land. Composition of the air…’ Then the result of the air analysis follows. But then — here it is: ‘At 18:40, the second armored patrol unit returned from the ruins. They encountered a local sandstorm with strong activity of atmospheric electrical discharges. Could restore communication by radio despite these disturbances. The patrol reports large swarms of tiny flies…’ “

The astrogator put down the book.

“And what else? Why don’t you go on?”

“That’s all there is. This is the end of the last entry.”

“And there’s nothing after that?”

“You had better look at the rest of this yourself.”

He pushed the log book over to Rohan. The page was covered with illegible scrawls. Rohan inspected the crazy doodling with amazement.

“This one here looks like a B,” he said softly.

“Yes. And this one like a G, a capital G. As if a small child had tried to write this. Don’t you agree?”

Rohan was silent. He still clutched the empty glass in his hand; he had forgotten to put it down on the table.

He was thinking of the ambitions he had harbored until recently, of his dream to himself to become commander of the Invincible some day. Now he was grateful that he did not have to decide what the future fate of this expedition should be.

“Please summon the leaders of the specialist groups. Rohan, wake up, will you!”

“I’m sorry. A conference, Astrogator?”

“Yes. Have them all come to the library.”

Fifteen minutes later they were all assembled in the large square room with the brightly decorated walls and endless rows of books and microfilms. The fact that this room was decorated exactly like the library of the Condor was unsettling. No matter which wall or corner he looked at, he could not banish the images of insanity that had been etched in his brain.

They had all taken their usual seats. The biologist, the physician, the planetologist, the electronic engineer, the communication officer, the cyberneticist and the physicists were all seated, their armchairs arranged in a semicircle. These nineteen men formed the strategic brain of the spaceship.

The astrogator stood by himself at the half-lowered screen.

“Is every man here familiar with the situation on board the Condor?”

A murmur of affirmative voices could be heard.

“So far twenty-nine dead bodies have been located by the search troops in the vicinity of the Condor. Another thirty-four on board ship itself, including one person who was excellently preserved inside the hibernator. Dr. Nygren has just returned from there and will give us his report now.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t too much to report,” said Dr. Nygren as he rose to his feet. Slowly he walked over to the astrogator. Nygren was almost one foot shorter than Horpach.

“Among the corpses we found nine that were mummified, that is in addition to the one the Commander has just told you about; that one is undergoing special examinations. Outside in the sand, mostly skeletons or remains of skeletons were dug up. The mummified bodies were found inside the ship where especially favorable dry conditions are present such as low humidity, almost no putrefying bacteria and fairly low temperatures. Those bodies that remained on the outside have all decayed. This process has accelerated here in the rainy season due to the high iron oxide and iron sulfide content in the soil. These chemicals react with weak acids — but I believe these details are insignificant. In case a more thorough explanation of these reactions should be desirable, our colleagues from the chemical department would certainly oblige. In any event, mummification was impossible outside the spaceship, considering that rain water and dissolved substances from soil and sand have been working on everything in the area for several years. This accounts for the polished surface of the bones.”

“Pardon me, Nygren,” interrupted the astrogator. “The most important aspect for us is the cause of death, not what happened afterwards.”

“There are no indications of violent death, at least none we could detect in the well-preserved bodies we saw,” replied Nygren quickly. He did not look at anybody in the room, but stared at something invisible in his raised hand. “Apparently they must all have died from natural causes.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“No external causes could be detected. Several fractures of legs and arms might have come about at a later date, but it will take additional experiments to determine that. Those bodies that had been dressed show no damage either to the epidermis or the skeleton. No injuries — apart from some scratches, and they assuredly did not bring about death.”

“How then did they perish?”

“I don’t know. It almost looks as though they starved or died of dehydration.”

“There was plenty of food and water left aboard the Condor,” interjected Gaarb.

“I am aware of that.”

For a moment no one spoke a word.

“Mummification means first of all complete dehydration of the body,” explained Nygren. He was still not looking at anyone present. “The adipose tissues undergo changes, but they do not disappear. But these people had practically no fats left. As if they had starved to death.”

“But this was definitely not the case of the man from the hibernator,” remarked Rohan, who was standing behind the last row of seats.”

“Correct. He probably froze to death. It is a mystery to me how he could have ventured inside the hibernator. Maybe he simply fell asleep there while the temperature kept falling.”

“Is there any likelihood of mass poisoning?” inquired Horpach.

“No.”

“But Doctor, how can you so categorically…”

“I can very well dismiss this so easily,” replied the physician. “Under planetary conditions, poisoning is conceivable only by way of the lungs, when breathing in poisonous gases via the esophagus or the skin. However, one of the well-preserved bodies was wearing an oxygen mask. The oxygen tank was still half full and would have lasted for several more hours.”

That’s right, thought Rohan. He remembered the man, the tight skin around his skull, the brownish spots on his cheekbones, the eye sockets filled with sand.

“These people could not have eaten anything poisonous, simply because there is nothing edible to be found. At least not on land. And they never got as far as the ocean. The catastrophe occurred shortly after landing. They had sent out only one scouting troop into the interior of the ruins. That was all. But here comes McQuinn. Are you through, McQuinn?”

“Yes, I am through,” answered the biochemist from the door.

All heads turned around. He made his way through the rows of chairs and remained standing next to Nygren. He was still wearing his lab coat and a rubber apron.

“Do you have the results of the analysis?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. McQuinn has examined the corpse we found in the hibernator,” explained Nygren. “Will you tell us what you have found out?”

“Nothing,” replied McQuinn. His hair was so light that it was difficult to know whether it was blond or gray. His eyes were just as pale. Even his eyelids were covered with freckles. But right now his big horsey face did not strike anyone as funny.

“No organic or inorganic poisons. All enzyme values normal. Nothing abnormal detected in the blood. The stomach contents were some half-digested zwieback and food concentrate.”

“But how did he die?”

“He just froze to death,” answered McQuinn. He noticed that he still had on his rubber apron. He untied the strings and threw the apron over the back of a chair before him. The slippery material slid off the chair onto the floor.

“What is your opinion, gentlemen?” the astrogator asked. He would not let go so easily.

“No opinion,” countered McQuinn. “All I can say for sure is that these people were not the victims of some poisoning.”

“How about radioactivity, some substance with a very brief half-life? Or hot radiation?”

“Hot radiation in fatal doses leaves traces such as damaged capillary walls, petecchiae, changes in the blood. There are no such changes. No radioactive substance in a fatal dose would completely vanish within eight years. There is less radioactivity here than we have on Earth. These men were not exposed to any type of radiation. I could swear to that.”

“But something must have killed them,” insisted Ballmin, the planetologist, raising his voice.

McQuinn did not speak. Nygren whispered into his ear. The biochemist nodded his head in affirmation, walked out of the room. Nygren stepped from the podium and sat down in his usual seat among his colleagues.

“That’s not too encouraging,” remarked the astrogator. “Apparently we can’t expect much help from the biologists. Would someone else express an opinion?”

“Allow me.” Sarner, the nuclear physicist, rose from his chair. “We might find a clue to what brought about this catastrophe in the very condition of the ship itself,” he began, letting his eyes run slowly along the row of his seated colleagues. He had big far-sighted bird’s eyes whose iris looked almost pale next to his pitch-black hair. “That means there is an explanation somewhere that we can’t perceive at this moment. The chaos in the cabins, the untouched provisions, the condition and location of the dead bodies, the damaged installations — all this must mean something.”

“Is that all you have to say about it?” interjected Gaarb angrily.

“Take it easy. We’re still completely in the dark, and the first thing we have to do is find the right approach to this problem. I believe we lack the courage to call some of the things we observed on board the Condor by their right name. This is why we cling so desperately to the hypothesis of some mysterious poisoning which resulted in mass insanity. Just remember, it is necessary, for our own sake as well as for that of the dead crew of the Condor, to face the facts with an open mind. I’d like to urge you — in fact, I insist — that we all speak out freely: what was it that shocked you most when you were at the Condor? Something that you have not been able to confide to anybody yet, something so horrible you’d rather forget than even mention it — ”

Sarner sat down. Rohan overcame his inner resistance and told about the soap bars he had noticed in the bathroom.

Then Gralew got up. Underneath the stacks of torn maps and books the whole deck had been strewn with dried human excrement.

Another spoke of a can of food that showed impressions of teeth, as if someone had tried to bite through the metal. Gaarb had been deeply shaken by the scrawls in the log book and the entry about the flies. But he did not stop there.

“Let’s assume a cloud of poisonous gas escaped from the tectonic vault inside the city. Couldn’t the wind have carried this poisonous air to the rocket? If they’d been careless, hadn’t closed the air hatch properly — ”

“Only the outer hatch was not properly closed, Gaarb. We know that from the sand accumulated inside the airlock. The inner hatch was tightly shut, remember?”

“They might have closed it later on, when they were already feeling the effects of the poison gas.”

“That is impossible, Gaarb. If the outside hatch isn’t locked, you can’t open the inside hatch. The two never open at the same time. The possibility of carelessness or accident is totally ruled out.”

“In any event, one thing is clear: it must have happened suddenly. Mass insanity — look, I won’t pretend we never see cases of psychosis during space flights, but never on a planet, especially not a few hours after touchdown. Mass insanity that gripped the entire crew could only be the result of some kind of poisoning.”

“Or infantilism,” remarked Sarner.

“What? What did you say?” Gaarb was dumbfounded. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I’d hardly be joking in a situation like this. I said infantilism. No one else seems to have thought of it, despite the childish scribbles in the log book, despite the star almanacs that were ripped to pieces, despite the painstakingly drawn letters. You’ve all seen them, haven’t you?”

“But so what?” said Nygren. “Are you trying to say that’s a disease?”

“No. Not a disease. You are right there, doctor.” Once again they all fell silent. The astrogator hesitated.

“We might be on the wrong track. The result of necroscopy are always uncertain. But for the moment I can’t see what harm it would do. Doctor Sax — ”

The neurophysiologist described the image they had found in the brain of the frozen man in the hibernator; he also mentioned the syllables in the acoustics memory bank of the dead man. A veritable flood of questions followed. Even Rohan was cross-examined by his colleagues, since he had been present during the experiment. Still, no conclusion could be drawn.

“When you speak of tiny black spots, doesn’t that remind you somehow of the word ‘flies’?” said Gaarb. “Wait a minute. Maybe the cause of death was something else. Maybe the whole crew was attacked by poisonous insects. You can’t recognize insect bites on mummified skin. And the fellow in the hibernator was simply trying to escape from the insects that got his friends — and then froze to death.”

“But how would you account for his total loss of memory before death?”

“Total amnesia? Are you sure that diagnosis is correct?”

“Yes, as far as we can generally rely on the results of the necroscopic examination.”

“What do you think about this poisonous insect theory?”

“Let’s hear what Lauda has to say about that.”

Lauda was the chief paleobiologist on board. He stood up and waited until they had calmed down.

“It isn’t simply by accident that we haven’t brought up the matter of these ‘flies.’ Anyone who understands anything about biology knows that outside a certain biotope — in other words, a higher unit composed of environment and all species occurring in it — no organism can exist. This holds true for every corner of the universe we have explored thus far. Life either creates a large variety of forms or none at all. Thus no insects could develop without simultaneous development of plants on the dry land, or other symmetrical nonvertebrates. I don’t intend to give you a lecture on evolution; I trust it will suffice if I assure you that there cannot possibly be any flies here. Or any other arthropods, for that matter — no hymenoptera or spiders. There aren’t any related forms, either.”

“How can you be so sure about that?” demanded Ballmin.

“If you were one of my students, you would’t be here with us now,” said the paleobiologist drily. “You would never have passed the exam.” The others smiled involuntarily. “Naturally I can’t judge your knowledge in the field of planetology, but I’d give you an F in the biology of evolution.”

“Typical shop talk. What a waste of time,” someone whispered behind Rohan. Rohan turned around and looked into Jarg’s tanned, broad face winking at him.

“Maybe the insects didn’t evolve here,” insisted Ballmin. “Maybe they were brought in from the outside.”

“From where?”

“From the planets of the Nova.”

Now the whole group began to talk at once; it took a long time before order was restored.”

“Colleagues,” said Sarner. “I know where Ballmin got his idea. From Dr. Gralew.”

“Well, I won’t deny it,” admitted the physicist.

“Excellent. Let us assume we can no longer afford the luxury of plausible hypotheses and need some really wild ones. That’s all right with me. My dear colleagues and fellow biologists, suppose a spaceship had imported insects from a planet of the Nova into Regis III. Could these insects have adapted to local conditions?”

“Of course, if we want to get into wild hypotheses,” admitted Lauda. “But even wild hypotheses have to be able to supply explanations for everything.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as an explanation as to what corroded the outer armor plate hull of the Condor to such an extent that the ship can no longer take off unless it’s completely overhauled. Do you really believe some insects could adapt to a diet of molybdenum alloy? That’s one of the hardest substances in the whole universe. Engineer Petersen, tell us, what could destroy this type of armored plate?”

“If it’s been properly tempered, nothing I know of,” answered the deputy chief engineer. “You could drill into it with diamonds, but you would need a ton of diamonds and a thousand hours at your disposal. Another possibility would be acids. Anorganic acids, of course, and only at temperatures of at least two thousand degress and with the proper catalysts.”

“Then how do you explain what corroded the armored plate of the Condor?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. If the ship had been immersed in an acid solution, and at the proper temperature, it would look like that, all right. But how anyone could get the same results without arc-light plasma burners and catalysts is beyond me.”

“Well, so much for your flies, my dear Ballmin,” said Lauda and sat down.

“There is no sense in continuing this discussion any longer,” remarked the astrogator, who had remained silent until now. “Perhaps it was too soon for such a debate. All we can do now is carry on with our examinations. We’ll split up in three groups. One will explore the ruins, another the Condor, and the third will make forays into the interior of the western desert. That’s stretching our forces as far as they will go; I simply can’t remove more than fourteen energo-robots from our perimeter here, even counting some machines we might take from the Condor. Third step routine procedure is still in force, of course!”