Collected Short Fiction, page 546
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 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 outcroppings. 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.”
“I know that.” The explorer nodded bitterly. “But I must have time—”
“All our reservations are already made,” the inspector broke in firmly. “I’m allowing us time enough in Dakar to make a convincing disposition of our heavy equipment, and to see that our native employees are properly cared for. We’re catching the air liner for Paris on the last day of the month. Incidental matters will occupy me at my Paris office, until we sail on the Liberte. Another outsider will be waiting at our New York hotel, to drive west with us. The patrol craft is to pick us up from a lonely side road in Arizona, a week before the supply flier is due.”
“Can’t you somehow leave me here a little longer?”
“We don’t do things that way here.” The inspector’s dust-caked lips tightened sternly. “You and I are following my schedule, together.”
The explorer shrugged helplessly. The inspector’s stubborn way of doing things had defeated him many times before, but there was nothing he could do about it. These elaborate precautions went only a little way beyond the expected duty of an undercover officer, and of course the Covenants had to be maintained.
“Very well.” He nodded, with the best face he could find. “Anyhow, I’m going to make the best of these two days. I’ll run the finder on these rocks tonight, and stake out the trenches early in the morning.”
He started back toward the trucks, but paused abruptly.
“Would you like to watch the search?” he asked. “I’ve a spare headset, and even without psionic training you should be able to see a good deal.”
“Thanks.” The big man smiled gratefully. “I’ve several other matters that need attention first—the driver of the water truck has reported motor trouble, and the cook needs dosing for dysentery, and the new men we hired in Dakar want more money. But I’ll be over later.”
For a few moments, as they plodded back down toward the camp, heads bowed and eyes squinted against the pitiless blaze of the sinking sun, the fat official seemed human and competent and almost likable. But then he snorted and exploded defiantly:
“But you aren’t bribing me. I’ll take a look through your finder, just out of curiosity. But no matter what you show me, we’re still leaving here on schedule. Precisely.”
The laboratory truck carried painted signs to warn the unconditioned natives in their own written languages: HIGH VOLTAGES—KEEP OUT! The vehicle was armored with steel plate and kept carefully locked. The native driver had been led to infer that the equipment inside was used to determine the age of objects from measurements of radioactivity.
The inspector himself had never been inside, and he entered from the breathless dusk with a quick curiosity. The steel door was still hot to his touch from the sun, and in spite of a humming fan the narrow interior was a suffocating oven. He glanced over the research equipment with a professional watchfulness, and nodded with a faint relief when he saw nothing that might betray the outside.
“This is it—really it!”
Speaking with a tired excitement, the worn little explorer plugged another headset into the finder, which had been cased to look like a portable Geiger counter of native manufacture. The inspector sat down gingerly on a flimsy folding chair and adjusted the headset. He listened expectantly, but all he could hear was the slight man’s hushed and eager voice.
It always seemed to him, through the mysterious magic of the translator, that the stooped little stranger was speaking his own Karian language, and for a moment now he sat awed by the subtle wonders of psionics and embittered because they were denied him.
The explorer replaced his own headset and leaned to adjust the finder above a chip of granite from that old lookout point.
“This wadi was once a living river,” he was saying. “It flowed out of a wide grassy valley above us, where those dunes lie now. Its waters cut the gap in the ridge, just below our camp—these heights beside the stream must have been a favorite camping place for primitive men, long before they settled down to make that first invention.”
The inspector grunted doubtfully.
“From the geological evidence in sight,” the explorer continued, “I think that valley must have been a great lake before the gap was cut, and afterwards the basin still collected underground water to feed springs and wells along the lower river channel.”
Already dripping perspiration, the inspector shook his head uncertainly. He felt uncomfortable in the stifling heat, and sharply disappointed because the finder showed him nothing. The explorer’s quiet words, however, had, given him a curiously vivid image of that lost oasis.
The river channel must have curved back from the gap toward that granite knob. His mind could almost see the low mud huts clustered along the protected strip between the river and the ridge, within hailing distance of the watchers on the knob. A thick stone wall had crossed the narrow neck of open ground to guard the village, and dusty date palms had stood clumped around the water holes, even after the stream was choked with wind-drifted sand.
“Can’t you see it?” the explorer whispered. “The dying oasis?”
The inspector caught his breath. He didn’t understand psionics; he never would. But it came to him now that the image of that mud town had reached him through the silent device adjusted over that granite flake. He nodded uneasily.
“There it is,” the explorer said. “The way it looked from the ridge, ten thousand years ago. The soil on the drier uplands was already blown to dunes. And the wells here must have been failing, even then, because the site was soon abandoned.”
“Mud huts!” The inspector shrugged and tried to scoff. “Where are your neutrionic fliers?”
“They had been launched and forgotten thousands of years before,” the slight man answered, “if they were really built here—and they must have been.”
“Show me.”
“I’m trying.” The explorer had leaned to adjust the finder again, his pale eyes preoccupied. “But that’s the limit of this particular fragment, as an effective focal guide. Perhaps some of these others carry older impressions.”
He tried another rock chip and then a third, frowning over the instrument and whistling softly through his teeth in an absent way that annoyed the inspector. At last he sat back hopefully.
“Better, don’t you think?”
Still no sound had come from the headset. The inspector had noticed no difference at all, but now when he tried again to visualize the vanished town beyond the ridge, the mud houses appeared larger and more numerous. The defensive wall had not yet been built. A stone bridge arched the sluggish river.
The stand of palms along the channel was wider, and the dunes had not appeared. On the higher ground beyond the bridge, grassy mounds of flattened rubble lay around a tall, red-brick chimney.
“Everything looks different,” the inspector admitted grudgingly. “But still I don’t see any interstellar fliers.”
“Because we can’t look far enough.” The explorer bit his lip in disappointment. “We’re still several hundred years too late. But look at that smokestack!” A stubborn eagerness lifted his voice. “Evidence of an earlier technological culture, already forgotten.”
He bent abruptly to the dials again. Watching the sharp conflict of effort and frustration on his withered face, the inspector waited expectantly. All he could see, however, was the laboratory equipment crowded on the narrow shelves and benches around them. The breathless heat was suddenly unbearable. Dripping sweat, he felt suddenly parched and ill with thirst. He stripped off the headset impatiently, and went to drink from the water bag that hung from the back of the truck, gulping down a salt tablet from the little vial he carried in his pockets. Darkness had fallen and the air outside seemed temptingly cool, but he went watchfully back into the hot vehicle.
“I’ve found a ship.” The explorer looked up briefly, his tired eyes oddly troubled. “The image is bad, but I’m sure it’s a ship.”
The inspector replaced his own headset. After a moment of disappointment, the impressions of that ancient town came back to him—more like memories than new perceptions. The houses had been stone instead of mud, in that more distant past, neatly roofed with red tile. On the height beyond the river and the palms, long buildings were crowded around the stack. Farther beyond, on the outskirts of the settlement, stood the ship—if it had been a ship.
To the inspector, it looked more like some sort of storage tank. Built of riveted metal plates, it was an untapered cylinder with bulging top and bottom. It stood on a wide masonry platform, shored upright with heavy wooden props. He thought he could see an entrance valve at the lower end, but because of the intervening trees and buildings, and because the whole image was somehow dimmed and wavering, he couldn’t be sure.
“That thing looks too small to be an interstellar vessel,” he protested at last. “Even the first space rockets my own people built on Kares II were larger.”
“But neutrionic fliers don’t really have to be large, not even for interstellar travel,” the slight man answered thoughtfully. “With the novas for power plants, they need no fuel aboard. Because of the time-contraction, the supply-requirements of the passengers are quite small, of course, too.”
“If that’s a ship, then let’s see it fly.”
The inspector tried to watch that puzzling cylinder, while the explorer bent over the finder again, but the image of it faded, veiled by sudden clouds of red dust that came rolling out of the drying uplands beyond the river.
“Look!” the little scientist whispered suddenly. “I believe those people are boarding it, carrying loads on their backs—could it be that neutrionics came before the wheel?” His voice lifted. “Can’t you see them, rushing aboard?”
The inspector had not been aware of the people themselves before, but now when he tried he found them. Stumbling under their bundled possessions, they were crowding out of the town, crossing the bridge and climbing the heights. They leaned against the wind, and many fell as if smothered by the blinding dust. Those who reached the ship seemed to fight for space aboard.
He waited for the machine to lift, as the explorer touched the finder again, but it was hidden instead by the dust clouds. When the image cleared again, the storm was over. The vessel had vanished. He found only the empty streets of the abandoned town, and the tattered palms, and the small new dunes the drifting sand had made against the bodies of those who failed to get aboard.
“So it was a ship.” The explorer nodded soberly. “It carried mankind and the beginnings of civilization away to the planets of some other star.”
The big man grunted sardonically. “Just to escape a sandstorm?”
“There must have been some greater challenge than the drying climate.” The slight man sat frowning for a moment, and then turned quickly to a drawing board. “I’m going to map the site,” he said. “And plan the dig. We can’t do much more with the finder until we uncover better targets.”
The inspector started to go, because it was cooler outside, but he paused at the door to glance back curiously; what he saw made him return to watch, fascinated in spite of himself. He wiped impatiently once at the tickling drops of sweat creeping down his face and neck, and then forgot the heat.
The stooped little scientist was drawing his map of that sand-drowned city on a large sheet of common native paper with a simple native pen. The strange thing was the way he worked. He still wore the headset, and his hurried pen-strokes had an astonishing certainty.
“We’ll start the shovel at dawn, right here, stripping off the drift sand.” He glanced up briefly, but the pen seemed not to pause. “Four thousand and thirty meters due east of the lookout knob. The sand there runs from seven to ten meters deep, but a trench cut through it will cross the site of that launching pier.”
The big man bent to study the map, and shook his head with an awed bewilderment. Its look of careful accuracy made him sure that pier had stood precisely where the explorer meant to remove the dunes. He straightened uneasily, and cleared his throat.
“About that great invention—” He waited for the busy man to look up at him. “Couldn’t it have been psionics?”
The explorer laid down his pen. “Why psionics?”
“If that can show you where every house in Atlantis stood, from just those chips of rock—couldn’t it have taught men everything they know?”
“But those people had no psionic devices; the finder shows none.” Reaching for his pen, the explorer paused to add: “If they had known psionics, their children would never have relapsed into savagery on so many thousand other planets. The science seems to prevent such breakdowns.”
“I see.” The inspector’s perspiring bulk shifted uncomfortably, as if he didn’t. “Then what about neutrionics, itself? Those people can’t have known much else.”
“The inventors of neutrionics must have understood the physics of the atom,” the slight man said. “The basic invention, the thing we’re looking for, must have come long before.”
“I suppose you’re right.” The inspector turned unwillingly again to go, and swung back at the door. “But don’t think you’re tricking me.” An abrupt truculence hardened his voice. “We’re leaving here; on schedule, no matter what you. show me.”
The explorer went out at dawn, with his map and a primitive native transit, to show the native operator where to start the power shovel. He stood for an impatient hour watching the slow bucket bite drift sand from the trench, before he plodded, back across the dunes to camp. He was sitting wearily slumped on a bench in the hot cook tent, eating a gritty and indigestible breakfast, when the inspector came to tell him the machine had broken down.
“I couldn’t do anything about it.”’ The big outsider shrugged helplessly. “I did notice oil leaking out of the crankcase, soon after you left. But the native operator didn’t see it—he’s sick with dysentery—and I couldn’t say anything about it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m here as lawyer.” The inspector spoke with a ponderous complacence. “Not as a mechanic. Out of respect for the Covenants, we must keep in character.”
“But this is serious.” Dismay shook the slight man’s voice. “That sand’s too deep to move without the shovel, in the time you’re giving me. Can’t it be repaired?”
“Not in two days.” The inspector fanned himself feebly with his sweat-stained sun helmet. “The heat cracked the cylinder block, and a loose connecting rod broke through the crankcase. The operator says the engine’s finished.”
“Then we’ll pull another out of a truck.” The explorer pushed back his plate and stood up suddenly, breathing hard in his agitation. “Anything to run that shovel.”
“But the operator’s, too sick to work.” The inspector sat down deliberately at the end of the table, and called for the cook to bring him coffee. “I gave the fellow an antibiotic and sent him off to bed. We’ve nobody else to oversee the job.”
“I can do it myself.”
“No doubt you could.” The bulky man waited for the cook to pour his coffee, and then adjusted the range of his translator to keep the native from understanding. “You might even improvise a power plant from the parts of the finder, to operate that machine on neutrionic energy. But you’re not going to.”
The worn little man leaned weakly against the rough table, suddenly ill.
“Don’t forget the Covenants,” the inspector rebuked him smugly. “Or your own established identity, as a retired soap maker. I can’t let you touch that machine.”
