Quarantine: The Complete Stories, page 27
“His life was already saved, he told me, and I saw that he was dying. He had eaten a wafer of life my brother had brought him from the temple, and he begged me to break another with him. The wafers are made of sacred drugs, that were said to assure a blessed death and an easy resurrection. He urged me with his last breath to take them, but I didn’t want to die—not then.”
The inspector drained his glass again, and wiped his sweaty face.
“I went on to the home of the girl I wanted to marry,” he whispered huskily. “It stood near the spreading fire, and sparks were falling like rain upon me before I came through the debris to her door.
“I found her with her people around the sacred hearth. Her father and her brothers were sleeping from the wine they had drunk, and her mother was busy consoling a frightened younger daughter.
“My beloved ran to greet me, crying with her gladness, and tried to lead me back to the hearth. If we perished side by side, she whispered, we would surely meet and love more happily in our next incarnation. She brought me a plate of the holy meat and a cup of the sacramental wine.
“But I hadn’t come to die with her. I told her about the great ship ready in the park, waiting to carry us away before Rigel rose again. We needn’t wait to be reborn, I told her, for the outsiders were promising that we could join the great migration to the frontier planets.
“She seemed too deeply shocked to move at first, and then she tried to stop my mouth with her hand. She begged me to kneel with her at the hearth and ask Kares to forgive my frightful impieties.
“By that time the house was burning. The red glare of the conflagration flickered through the curtained windows, and the roaring of it was like a sea. Smoke began seeping in, and the air was suddenly hot, even in the ground-floor room. We heard the roof beams crash down on an upper floor, and fear swept over me, terrible as the fire.”
Sitting miserably slumped, his fat shoulders creasing the tight blue jacket, the inspector paused to blow his nose and wipe unashamedly at his swollen eyes.
“She was too lovely,” he whispered hopelessly. “I loved her too desperately—and I had lost my faith. I was afraid to let her die. I caught her arm, when she brought me the wine and meat, and tried to make her come with me.
“She turned against me then, for she was loyal to Kares. She snatched the food of life away, and screamed to wake her father and her brothers. She made them put me out of the house—and I saw it cave in and crush them all, when a new quake struck.
“Volcanic mud had begun raining on the ruined city, too late to quench the flames. I was trapped against new walls of rubble, with sparks hissing in the mud around me and that great sea of fire rolling on behind. But I got away.”
He paused to shake his head, gasping for his breath.
“I remember climbing a building already on fire, to reach the next street. I remember another quake; I was ill from the motion of the ground, even while I tried to keep on running; and broken masonry was thundering down all around me. The next thing I knew, I was stumbling up a ramp into the rescue ship, half dead from burns and a wound in my scalp. I had saved my life and lost my soul. Now I’ll never be reborn.”
“How do you know anybody will be?” the explorer inquired.
The fat man blinked at him sadly and then continued. “Later, I went back. After I had recovered from my injuries, I joined the quarantine service. I joined it gladly, because I had seen the harm that strange ideas can do to such worlds as mine was.”
“And whom did you find reborn?”
“My brother,” he said. “Perhaps not literally reborn, but just as miraculously alive. Only twenty years had passed when I came back. Most of the planet was still a sterile desert; even the topsoil had been fused into glass. But the holy city stood unharmed, and I found my brother there.”
“But didn’t you say no cooler plant was built?”
“I did.” The big man stiffened. “And none was built. My brother told me how the shrine and the city around it had been translated intact into the new cycle, by a special miracle of Kares.”
“How did that happen?”
“At the dawn of the last day, before Rigel rose, there was a flicker of darkness in the sky. A flash of cold, my brother said, and then a flash of heat—and a year of time had gone. The burned lands were cool again, and Rigel was once more in flight from the perfect grace of Kares, and all the pilgrims crowded into the holy city had been spared.”
The explorer nodded suddenly. Such a remarkable miracle, it occurred to him, could have been wrought only by a neutrionic freezer—an exchanger designed to preserve the contents of its field at the absolute zero by converting all heat energy into neutrinos, and then in due time reconverting enough neutrionic energy to restore heat and motion.
“My brother welcomed me as gladly as if I had been reborn,” the undercover man was adding sadly. “He wanted me to leave the service and join the temple staff, but when his superiors found that I had run away from Rigel before the cycle ended, they said my soul was dead.”
Watching the big man’s unconcealed despair, the explorer began to sense a more imperative urgency in his own search for the lost beginnings of mankind. The inspector’s life, it seemed to him, had been bound and crippled by ignorance; that whole world had died for want of the truth he hoped to find beneath the ruins of Atlantis.
Suddenly, in his mind, this tormented man became a symbol standing for countless other billions, cut off as he had been from the knowledge of their own true origins, rootless and doomed. Men had left the past behind, and they were incomplete without it. Half the restless discontent that pushed the race out across the galaxy must be an unconscious need of something lost. It came to him now—a vague but driving hunger for the knowledge that alone could make men whole again.
In the clear light of that new meaning, his own personal fate was no longer important. He had grown too old in the search to have much desire for the material rewards or even the scholarly honors he had once expected, but now this haunted fugitive had given his goal a mystic significance. What he sought was no longer merely the spot where something unknown had kindled the first spark of civilization; he was looking now for the lost soul of all mankind.
“And that’s why I reject the lie of human evolution.” Defiance firmed the inspector’s sagging face. “My people are the children of Kares, and I have seen them saved from the evil fire of Rigel by his miraculous compassion.”
In fact, the explorer thought, that sacred spot must have been the site where the first settlers landed, and the neutrionic exchanger that sheltered it from the rays of Rigel must have been rebuilt from the engines of the interstellar fliers. In all likelihood, the holy fraud had been unconscious. Even the priestly engineers had doubtless forgotten the secular origins of that sacred machine, as those recurrent holocausts erased the past, until the duties of maintenance and operation must have now become a fixed temple ritual.
But he kept that to himself.
“I haven’t come to look for traces of human evolution,” he insisted, instead. “The extreme range of my portable finder is only about twenty thousand years—too short a time to show much physical change in men. All I hope to find is the site where neutrionic fliers were invented.”
“Why look here?”
“Sol III is near the geometric center of civilization, and even nearer the center of the core of older planets settled in prehistoric or prepsionic times. And I have eliminated most of the other nearby planets.”
He had found better evidence, besides, buried in the archives of the learned societies—evidence confirmed by the survey reports in the files here. All known life on Earth was biochemically akin; no trace of any rival kingdom was preserved even in the oldest rocks. Mankind must have sprung up here.
He decided to say nothing of that, but in spite of his restraint he found the inspector blinking at him with a returning antagonism.
“I still don’t think much of your project,” the big man was muttering. “Even the proof that other peoples spread from Sol III—if you could ever prove it—might do my own race harm. It could corrupt this new cycle with doubt, the way my own was corrupted—”
His hesitant voice ceased uncertainly. His dull eyes lifted in a bewildered way toward the low ceiling of the bar, peering vaguely in the direction of Rigel and its faint companion.
“Though sometimes I still don’t know quite what to think,” he whispered uneasily. “I was taught that Kares created all mankind, but since I joined the service I’ve seen more men than the wisest priest knew anything about. And the bright abode of their god is so far away from Sol that I can’t even see it, in the glare of Rigel, not even with our best telescopes.” He shook his head unhappily. “Perhaps some men did evolve without his miraculous intervention. I just don’t know. But I don’t see how men alone could have created civilization.”
“I’ve wondered, myself.” The explorer nodded thoughtfully. “Because progress is uncommon. More peoples have slipped backward, than ever advanced. Even here on Sol III, men must have existed many thousand years before the invention of civilization. There must have been some unique event—some great first invention—that kindled all the rest.”
“What could that have been?” A momentary interest flickered through the inspector’s skepticism. “Neutrionics?”
“Something simpler, surely,” the explorer told him. “I don’t know what it was, but I’m pretty anxious to get on with the search.”
“You won’t find anything,” the big man said bluntly. “I hope you don’t. Though, of course,” he added hastily, “I intend to give you all possible aid, as Denebola requested.”
The inspector refused another drink, and the explorer wandered despondently back to his bare little cubicle in the transient tunnel. Even though he had failed to crack that stubborn antagonism, however, now he understood its cause. And it seemed to him that the haunted man allowed the preparations for their trip to Earth to move a little faster after that tormented confession.
Many months later, the Starling Expedition made camp on the rim of a waterless wadi in the western Sahara. Dry gravel sloped upward from the little circle of parked trucks to a low ridge of wind-carved granite. Beyond the ridge lay a gray sea of dunes and the last hope for Atlantis.
The flags of Mauritania, France, and the United States hung wilted beneath the pitiless glare of the afternoon sun, beside the windshields of the dusty trucks. Keeping the Covenants, the two outsiders were traveling as natives. A patrol flier from Sol Station had set them down one dark night on an empty highway in western Montana, in a Ford sedan the inspector had bought on an earlier mission. Their hearing aids were really psionic translators. They wore native clothing, and carried credentials manufactured at the station laboratory.
The inspector had resumed an identity he had established before, as Colonel André Foureau, a French army veteran who had taken up the law; he used the mythical affairs of nameless clients to explain his travels and disappearances.
The explorer was now Mr. Mayhew Starling, a retired soap manufacturer from Kansas City, spending his modest fortune in pursuit of his hobby of amateur archeology. He had retained the colonel, so their story went, to arrange financial, diplomatic and personnel matters for his expeditions.
While the native members of the party were pitching their tents beside the wadi, the two outsiders left the camp and climbed the ridge. The dune beyond lay parched and shimmering in the heat, dead as the moonscape around the lunar station.
“There you are!” The fat man shrugged disgustedly, gasping from the climb and wiping feebly with a soiled handkerchief at the reddish crusts of dust and drying sweat on his face. “Though I don’t see much but sand.”
“You wouldn’t expect to find the shops and launching ways still standing, after so many thousand years,” the explorer answered patiently. “But this must be the spot from which civilization spread.”
“I don’t see why.”
“You don’t want to.” A faint asperity sharpened the slight man’s voice. “Though I’ve showed you a thousand facts to prove that men existed here long before the neutrionic age.”
“Facts?” The inspector snorted. “A few teeth and bits of bone! A few chipped flints! I’ve far better evidence for the miraculous translation of our sacred city. Remember, I talked with my brother.”
The explorer merely shrugged; he knew the big man was immune to facts.
“You’ve failed to find anything at far likelier spots,” the inspector persisted. “What makes you think Atlantis ever stood here?”
“We have followed a process of elimination,” the explorer told him. “At first, because of the deluge-legend still current among the natives, I looked for a drowned continent. When we failed to locate Atlantis under the sea, I turned next to the places we have been visiting—the centers from which the crude culture of the contemporary natives seems to have spread—Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, even Mexico and Peru. But I’m now convinced that those are all secondary centers, where some dying spark of our own civilization must have lived long enough to awaken the savages among whom it fell.”
“I see.” The inspector nodded sardonically. “And now you have eliminated every possible location.”
“Except this.” The explorer nodded hopefully toward the rolling dunes. “A likelier spot than it looks,” he insisted, “because the climate has been changing. During the last glacial age, all this desert was a humid grassland. Even at the date when neutrionic flight began, there was still an inhabited oasis here.”
“How do you know?”
“Psionics,” the explorer said. “I have been searching artifacts from Egypt and those other secondary centers, with the portable finder. Each object has led me back to earlier ones, until the oldest always came from the forgotten settlement here.”
He heard the inspector’s skeptical grunt.
“An Egyptian scarab guided me to a flint hand-ax,” he explained. “When I adjusted the finder to search the image of the ax, I found a blue glass bead made at this oasis by the same people who also, within just a few centuries earlier or afterwards, must have built the first interstellar flier.”
The inspector shook his head, mopping stolidly at his mud-grimed face again.
“That’s only one line of search,” the slight man told him hopefully. “One of a dozen I’ve been able to follow. Another began in Yucatan, with a Mayan pot. That led me to a bone fishhook from Japan. Tracing the image of the fishhook, I found a stone plowshare made in the Gobi. The plowshare revealed the broken shard of another pot, made where these dunes lie.”
“Broken pots!” The inspector sniffed. “Is pottery the great invention you’re looking for?”
“I doubt it.” The explorer spoke thoughtfully, as if unaware of his derision. “Although the primary invention may have been something equally simple.”
“How do you trace such objects?” The inspector’s voice was suddenly quickened, as if he had caught the explorer’s interest in spite of himself. “Or can you explain it?”
The geometry of pisonic energy-particles wasn’t simple, not even for conditioned minds, but the explorer answered carefully, “The finder is a machine that acts almost as a new hemisphere of the operator’s brain. It expands the range and precision of the time-sense we all have—though you need conditioning to make it fully conscious. In effect, it extends a kind of mental bridge into the past.”
The inspector still looked faintly bewildered.
“Take the flint scraper I found at our Chinese site on the Yellow River,” the explorer went on. “Focused on that, the finder showed me the Neolithic man who made it. His tribe possessed a sacred blade of polished obsidian, already very old. Shifting to the blade, I followed it back to Turkestan. The trader who bartered for it there, when it was new, also owned a stone seal cylinder from Babylon. And the same trail led me on from Babylon, through several other objects, back to a spear point flaked by the people of this same oasis.”
His eager eyes explored the gray waste of shifting dunes again.
“So you see I’ve already had several glimpses of this spot, as it used to be,” he said. “They were all badly blurred, however, because in each case I was following a secondary image instead of a real object. I need artifacts, actual things that were part of the period we are searching.”
And he climbed again, to reach a weathered granite knob that stood above the other outdroppings. He began pecking at it with a geologist’s hammer, collecting the fragments.
“The people who flaked that spear point used this rock for a lookout,” he called back. “Perhaps it also witnessed the launching of the first interstellar flier.”
“If rocks could see!”
“They guide the finder.” The slight man bagged his granite chips, with a quiet nod of satisfaction. “These should show us where to start the power shovel. In a few weeks, I think we’ll be uncovering more interesting objects for the finder than spear points and beads.”
“Weeks, did you say?” The inspector straightened with a self-conscious importance. “I can’t allow you more than two days here. Not even if you’ve already found Atlantis.”
The explorer clambered feebly back down from the knob, shaken with a pained amazement.
“Just two days?” he protested huskily. “That’s not enough.”
“Your visa is expiring,” the inspector reminded him complacently. “You’ve known from the first that you had to leave on the next supply flier.”
“But that isn’t due for six weeks,” the explorer answered heatedly. “I had been counting on at least another month, and I see no reason to start back now. We can arrange to have a patrol craft pick us up on the desert, a night or two before the ship is due.”
“We don’t do things that way at this station.” The bulky man inflated himself. “We plan and conduct every undercover mission with elaborate precautions to protect the natives.”
