Collected Short Fiction, page 547
It seemed to the explorer that the inspector’s bulging eyes had a glint of sullen satisfaction, but even if his project had been deliberately sabotaged, there wasn’t much that he could do about it. He sank wearily back to the bench, staring at his fat antagonist with a mute bitterness.
“Have a cup of coffee.” The inspector touched his translator for an instant, to order the drink. “I’m afraid you’re allowing yourself to be needlessly upset by this little incident.”
“Little incident?” The explorer’s voice was swift and harsh with emotion. “The truth buried under those dunes is something civilization needs. Something, I think, that you need. If I don’t find it now, it may be lost forever.”
“Nobody else will be coming to look.” The inspector set down his cup with an air of cold self-importance. “I’ll take care of that, with my report on this affair. If these natives aren’t ready for civilization, then they aren’t ready to uncover Atlantis.”
“They won’t,” the explorer protested hopelessly. “This site is too remote and deeply buried. Even the artifacts I hope to find would mean very little, without psionic search.”
“Anyhow, your visa will be the last.”
The explorer studied the big official, with a bleak wonderment. Once he caught his breath as if to speak, but instead he only shrugged and sighed and sipped absently at his coffee, although he disliked the bitter native drink.
“I’m glad you’re taking this so well.” The inspector beamed at him, with a sudden unconvincing heartiness. “Do you know, I sort of like you, in spite of all your queer ideas?”
He moved his head uncomfortably. Although his dislike for this crude and intolerant man was tempered by understanding and even by a kind of pity, he found it hard to contain his hot resentment now.
“Since you’ve failed,” the inspector added smoothly, “I suppose we may as well start getting out of here this morning. I really need a few more days in Paris, on service matters, if we can get an earlier plane from Dakar—”
“But I haven’t failed.” He straightened defiantly. “I’ve already learned a good bit, and I still have two more days. I intend to use them.”
“You can’t do anything.” The big man blinked, as if dimly alarmed. “Not with the shovel wrecked—”
“We’ve spades.”
“That drift sand is too deep—”
“Where we started digging.” The explorer nodded grimly. “But farther out, where the sand is only three or four meters deep, there was a cemetery. A less promising site, but it might yield something.”
“Nothing good,” the inspector muttered. “You had better forget it.”
The slight man was rising to leave the table, but the inspector’s tone made him turn back watchfully. The big outsider sat gulping his coffee with an uneasy haste, and the heat of it was sending new rivulets of sweat down his thick-featured face, which now wore an open hostility.
“You promised me these two days,” the explorer reminded him evenly. “Will you please call all the men fit to work? Promise them double pay, and send them out with spades.”
The fat man sat motionless for an instant. His protruding eyes began to narrow, as if he intended to refuse. Instead, however, he shrugged and nodded.
“Very well,” he said flatly. “I did promise you these two days.”
The digging went slowly. Lifeless under the scorching sun, the natives worked with a limp deliberation, and the loose dune-sand caved back into the pit almost as fast as they removed it. The explorer watched with a tormented impatience, but lie was not allowed to direct the men or hurry them, or even to use a spade himself. He was a retired soap maker who didn’t even know their language, and he had to keep in character.
All that day, the spades revealed only lower layers of sand. The explorer wanted to hire volunteers to work on through the night, by lantern light. The inspector refused, however, because any such show of ‘urgency might excite the natives to begin digging for themselves, and So violate the Covenants.
Late next morning, the tools began to ring against a bed of gravel and hardened clay, that once had been the top of the cemetery ridge. The explorer worked eagerly all through the baking afternoon, crumbling and sifting the clodded ancient soil, but he had still found no new target for the finder when the inspector told the men to turn in their tools and quit.
“But it’s just getting really cool enough to work.” The dusty little scientist glanced anxiously at the red western sun. “We’ve still two more hours before the usual quitting time, and the next pick-stroke might uncover a burial, with tools or ornaments that would tell all we want to know.”
“So it might.” The big man shrugged. “But I’m sending the men to salvage the wreckage of that power shovel. We can’t leave it here.”
“Why not, if it’s useless?”
“It would mark this spot,” the inspector answered blandly. “It might cause some native to come back and dig up something that he shouldn’t know about. Now let’s go.”
But the explorer hung back, peering miserably into the abandoned pit.
“Come along.” The inspector’s voice dropped warningly. “And don’t look back. Don’t excite the natives. The search is over, and you didn’t find Atlantis—”
The slight man heard no more. He had seen a dull greenish stain on the wall of the pit, at the level of the buried cemetery. Ignoring the inspector’s harsh protest, he scrambled down to examine it. His fingers found a thin shard of corroded bronze, projecting from the hardened clay. It broke to his touch, and he straightened triumphantly with the fragment.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing that would tell the natives anything,” he answered cautiously, “but it looks like a promising guide for the finder.”
“Throw it back!” The inspector’s voice was brittle as the age-eaten metal. “I’m ordering you.”
The little scientist looked up uncertainly, and shivered in spite of the parching heat. Planted spreadlegged on the raw soil above, the fat man looked implacable enough to leave him buried here among these ancient graves, a sacrifice to Kares.
His fingers trembled and relaxed, to drop that shapeless scrap of the lost past—but he couldn’t let it go. It might be all that he had come to find, and he could never search, again. He tried to swallow his fear, and drew his bent shoulders up defiantly, and scrambled out of the pit with the bit of metal in his hand.
“You’ve orders of your own,” he whispered huskily. “From Denebola, remember.” He met the inspector’s glassy stare, and tried to catch his rasping breath. “I’m going back to the truck, to take a look at this.”
Nodding sullenly, the big man let him go.
When the wreckage of the power shovel was loaded, and all the vehicles were ready to start back toward Dakar at dawn, the inspector plodded once more through the hot dark to the laboratory truck. His knock was not answered, but he opened the armored door without invitation.
He found the slight scientist sitting motionless in the narrow oven of the truck, seemingly unconscious of the heat. The psionic finder on the bench was adjusted over that ragged scrap of green-crusted bronze, and the explorer’s half-closed eyes and shrunken face had a look of intense absorption in whatever it revealed.
The fat official stood watching silently until the small man heard his heavy breathing and sprang up apprehensively, snatching off the headset.
“Well?” The inspector’s cold, bulging eyes shifted quickly and almost guiltily from the uneasy scientist to the thin bronze shard. “Was that a part of your great invention?”
“A lucky find, at least:” The explorer nodded, still watching him sharply. “Though I’ve only begun to search its past.”
“What is it?”
“A memorial plaque.” The slight man hesitated for an instant and then went on quickly, as if relieved to see the inspector’s interest. “It was set in the face of a stone monument, which was old but still standing when the ship took off.”
The inspector’s lusterless eyes narrowed again.
“Was it a ship?”
“A neutrionic flier.” The pale alarm and the tired age were erased from the explorer’s face, by a smile of elation. “You can see that from the way it rose, without wings or jets, when it caught the galactic wind.”
“But we couldn’t see, through that sandstorm.”
“The monument stood nearer than the lookout rock,” the slight man told him patiently. “The image is much better. It even shows men mounting the neutrionic drive, and taking up the unfinished hull to test it.”
“If that was a ship, where did it go?”
“Nothing here can tell us where,” the explorer said, “but now I know why those people fled the planet.”
“Climatic changes?”
“Disease. Men didn’t evolve alone; they were accompanied by countless parasitic things, adapted to prey on them—but you know all the pills and shots we outsiders must take, to keep alive here. Those people left to escape a great pandemic—that cemetery is full of its earlier victims.”
“Would people civilized enough to build neutrionic fliers have to run away from viruses and germs?”
“They didn’t have psionics,” the explorer reminded him. “And they hadn’t had time to accumulate the empirical medical knowledge these savages have today. They were apparently defenseless against the epidemics caused by the spread of their own civilization.”
“How’s that?”
“An unfortunate biological cycle. Rising civilization increased the population and caused contacts between previously isolated tribes—each with its own collection of malignant microorganisms to which the others had acquired no immunity. The thing has happened many times on many planets.”
“Which shows the flaw in your twisted thinking.” The inspector grinned triumphantly. “Diseases are common on nearly all these older planets—which means that your hypothetical refugees didn’t escape them, after all.”
“Some people survived,” the explorer insisted gently. “Though it seems that most of the early star ships must have carried germs as well as men—that’s another reason, besides the lack of psionics, for the frequent lapses into savagery. And this oasis is where interstellar travel began.”
His shining eyes fell to the bit of metal beneath the finder.
“We’ve found Atlantis!” he whispered softly. “Even if I carried back nothing else, that flake of rust is enough to convince every doubter that men and germs and civilization evolved right here.”
“I . . . I can’t quite believe it.” The inspector’s thick voice, had a strangled sound. A sudden sweat had filmed his broad face.
The explorer glanced anxiously up at him, as if alarmed by his voice and the sudden hurried rasp of his breath, and saw him staggering feebly away toward the door of the truck.
“This heat,” he gasped. “I don’t see how you stand it.”
The slight man followed to help him, but he seemed to recover as soon as he got outside. He stood for a moment with his head bare to the dry night wind, and then fumbled for his salt tablets. The explorer poured water for him from the bag, while he rinsed his mouth and gulped the pill and splashed his face.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I’m all right now—though I don’t see how you bear that heat.” He offered the little vial. “I think you need one of these.”
“I hadn’t really noticed, but I suppose it is hot.”
The explorer swallowed one white tablet, and turned quickly back to the finder. The big man waited at the doorway, as if reluctant to leave the cooler air outside, watching him with a sullen fixity.
“I’ve just begun to search this target.” He spoke with an absent eagerness, while he adjusted the finder again. “The plaque was already old, and the stone crumbling under it, when that ship rose. It must have seen generations of earlier history. Perhaps it can show how civilization began.”
“That bit of rust?”
The inspector shook his head scoffingly, his jaw muscles bunched and hard. He glanced out into the night as if about to go, but instead he came reluctantly back into the heat and sat down on a little folding stool with an air of troubled expectation.
“Look at it.” Abstractedly, the explorer plugged in the other headset. “When it was whole.”
The big man put on the headset and peered at that insignificant sliver of corrosion. What he saw was still the same, but his mind was already forming another image of the plaque, almost as if he had just remembered the way it once had looked.
A thick rectangular tablet of cast bronze, bearing a raised inscription. Most of the symbols on it meant nothing to him, but there was one he understood: three squares grouped to enclose a right triangle. Each square was divided into smaller units, all equal, as if to demonstrate the simple geometric theorem he had learned in the temple school on Kares II.
“The monument must have marked the grave of some great man,” the explorer commented softly. “And he must have been a mathematician.”
“Then do you think this means that mathematics is the basic invention we’re after?” The big official spoke with an uneasy haste, as if to conceal his actual thoughts. “Or writing? Or perhaps the working of metal?”
“Mathematics and writing and metal are all still known among many many peoples who have lost the spark of civilization,” the slight man answered unsuspectingly. “The vital invention must have been something less obvious—”
A gasp of pain checked his voice. His face hollowed and tightened, abruptly drained of blood. For an instant his worn body stood rigid with agony; then he sank weakly back into his chair, clutching aimlessly at the bench beside him and fighting desperately to breathe.
“Heatstroke,” the inspector murmured unfeelingly, leaning to watch his struggle with a cold intentness. “Perhaps you need another pill.”
“So . . . so that was it?” His breath and voice came back, as that sudden seizure seemed to pass, and he swung upon the impassive official with a dazed accusation in his eyes. “What have you done to me?”
“I’ve killed you.” The inspector’s voice was slow and loud and flat. “The salt tablets I offered you were mixed with the sacred wafers of life my father gave me, the night I left my native world.” Remorse flickered across the stolid blackness of his perspiring face. “I only wish I had eaten them with him, myself.
“And that won’t help you now.”
He watched with a bleak amusement as the explorer rushed abruptly to the shelves of chemicals over the sink at the end of the truck and splashed something frantically into a beaker of water.
“You’re too late for any antidote to save you,” he said calmly. “Those sacred drugs were compounded to relieve the last hours of the faithful from any disturbing indecision or uncertainty. When the pain strikes, they have already reached the nervous system. You’ll feel much better, during the time left to you, if you don’t take anything at all.”
The slight man hesitated, peering at him miserably.
“Your pain will soon be gone,” he murmured soothingly. “The wafers were made to insure the tranquil passage essential to a favorable rebirth. In an hour or so, your heart will stop, but until that time you should feel no more discomfort. You will soon be relaxed, and even elated by the exquisite grace of Kares.”
The poisoned man lifted the beaker uncertainly again, but set it down at last, untasted. He stood staring at the inspector with a bleak amazement.
“So you’ve murdered me?” he whispered harshly. “Will that go into your reports to Denebola?”
“I can report my duty done.” The big man’s voice was hoarse and uneven. “Our business here is the prevention of damaging cultural collisions. That goes beyond protecting these savages. I have acted deliberately, with a full awareness of. all the consequences, to shield all the worlds outside from that scrap of metal and the lies you make it tell.”
“Lies?” The explorer shook his head sadly. He came wearily back to his chair at the finder and sank into it hopelessly. “You have murdered the truth,” he whispered bitterly. “To protect your own ignorance.”
“What is truth—except belief?” The inspector spoke defensively, too loudly. “When all my people believed in Kares, his omnipotence was our truth. When my own belief was broken, by such unholy ideas as yours, I was robbed of certainty and the happiness it brings. Now my own soul is dead. I can do nothing for myself. But there must be billions more, content within some strong faith of their own. My duty now is to shield their happiness, from whatever you have found.”
He nodded ponderously at the bit of old bronze.
“I intend to bury that,” he said. “That, and everything else you have found here, in your own grave. The natives here will be informed that Mr. Mayhew Starling died of coronary thrombosis, but my official reports will state that you were attacked by a new mutant microorganism which makes this planet so dangerous that no more visas for exploration can be issued. I’ll add that you died convinced that Atlantis never existed.”
“You can’t—” The stricken man blinked at him incredulously, and nodded at last with a stunned acceptance. “I see that you can. You’re capable of killing the truth, even though you really know it’s true.”
Sweating again, the big man squirmed uncomfortably before that pale stare. He gulped and wet his lips and finally swung to beckon nervously at the shard of rust under the finder.
“Let’s have another look,” he urged abruptly. “You have an hour or more left, and your mind will stay clear until the end. Maybe you can still discover that lost invention.”
“So you’re uneasy?” The explorer smiled painfully. “You were afraid to die—and afraid to kill me in any honest way. And now you’re afraid to talk about the truth.”
The inspector flushed darkly, trembling with a sudden anger. New beads of sweat were rolling down his oily jowls. He wiped at them impatiently, stiffening aggressively on the stool. He caught a gasping breath but then deliberately relaxed as if restraining some savage outburst.
“Nothing you can say really matters now,” he whispered harshly, “because you can neither save your life nor alter my intentions. If you have no use for the time I’ve left you, you had better take another pill.”
