Collected Short Fiction, page 662
We found his teammates on a bright sundeck, high above the milky glitter of the hot Caribbean. They were quarreling about the real aims of the seeker survey.
“Security!” Erik Thorsen was a huge, red-haired Viking. He had lately shed his major’s rank in the United States Space Force—COSMOS personnel had to be civilians—but he still wore his military bearing like a uniform.
“Military security.” He banged the table with his empty beer stein. “That’s all I’m looking for.”
“Then you’ll never find it,” Yuri Marko answered. “All you’ll find is your own destruction. I’m searching for something else—”
HE PAUSED when he saw us.
Tom introduced me. Marko was a tall man, owlish behind his black-rimmed glasses, intensely serious. He seated us courteously and turned doggedly back to his attack.
“We’re looking for life,” he told Thorsen. “Nothing else is worth the cost—”
“God save us from alien life.” Thorsen waved his stein like a club. “We’ve got the people boom right here without looking for trouble on other planets.”
“Trouble?” Marko’s dark anxious eyes appealed to Tom and me. “Our space neighbors have never harmed us yet. I don’t think they will. I hope to find higher life than we are. Something with mind enough to cross the space between the stars.”
Thorsen muttered skeptically. “That’s our real goal.” Marko bent intently toward him. “I believe life can spring up on the worlds of any star. The older forms should be far ahead of us. If interstellar travel is actually possible, space explorers should have touched our worlds. We should find their footprints.”
“On the moon?”
Marko nodded.
“The airless worlds are the place to look. Wind and water wipe out everything. But the signs of a landing on the moon—a broken tool or an empty fuel container or even a literal footprint—might last a good many million years.”
“I pray to God we never meet another creature!”
Thorsen lurched to his feet and stalked away. Tom followed to soothe him. I was left with Yuri Marko. His reserved, schoolmasterish manner put me off at first, but we soon found things in common.
His parents, like my father, had been immigrants—they were Ukrainian defectors from the First Soviet. A political idealist, he had even voted for my unlucky United World candidate. I caught his contagious interest in the seeker project.
The bioforms of Mercury and Venus and Jupiter were still at that time mostly inference and mystery. Nobody had ever seriously proposed that these near neighbors in space might be advanced beyond us. Marko’s hopes took hold of my imagination.
“Just suppose we’re not alone.” His dry Slavic accents excited me with a sense of the dimensions of the universe I had never felt before. “Imagine other minds, and greater ones. Picture an intelligent society spread across the stars—a society in which our earth would be a nameless village. Perhaps you can’t quite visualize our fellow creature out in space, but at least the effort gives you a truer image of yourself.”
On our last night together at the Antilles Hudson, Robin gave a party for us in her surfside apartment. The lights were dimmed, so that we could watch the waves exploding into white phosphorescence against the glass seawall. Her father was there, the ice-eyed money-king, and at last I guessed why Tom had invited me.
Howard Hudson, with the world in his web of floating hotels, had turned acquiring eyes toward space. The Orbital Hudson and the Crater Hudson were soon to open. What he wanted from us was a quick secret report on anything of commercial promise the survey might uncover. The news was to come from Tom through me, coded into some harmless personal message.
Erik Thorsen flushed with anger when he understood what was up. He smashed his champagne glass against the glowing seawall and threatened to expose the plot. Silkily, Tom suggested that Thorsen had secret military ties to the Space Force that COSMOS wouldn’t like. Thorsen turned pale and agreed to say nothing.
I saw Marko’s hurt contempt for me.
“Listen, sir,” I begged him. “Tom’s taking too much for granted. He never mentioned a word of this to me. I won’t touch it. Believe me, sir!”
I don’t think he did.
That incident brought the party to an awkward end. Tom told me curtly that I was no longer his guest. But as things turned out, I remained at the resort after his team was gone. Marooned there, without money to pay my unexpected bill, I went to the publicity office and talked my way into a copywriting job.
Surveying the moon, as things turned out, was not the cozy little mission Tom had anticipated. Seeker One crashed behind the moon, with no survivors to report what had gone wrong. Tom and his team were called out to continue the moon survey with Seeker Two.
II
MY BROTHER was not alone in his surprise at what the seekers found. The moon had kept her secret well. The early astronauts and cosmonauts had seen too many empty craters of every size to expect much else. Their successors went on—as soon as they could—to look for more exciting worlds.
The moon was quite dead, but the planets were already promising the menace and allure of unknown life. When the robot probes on Mars began to scrape up samples for analysis their telemetry indicated complex organic molecules. The first men to touch that tawny dust caught a tormenting illness that kept them in quarantine at the COSMOS base on Phobos till they died.
The blinding clouds of Venus veiled the same sort of ambiguous mystery. Unmanned probes brought back simple organisms of microscopic beta-life from the highest levels of her atmosphere, but no vehicle, manned or not, ever returned from the unseen surface beneath.
The first men to station themselves in orbit around her found new riddles, rather than answers to old ones. They saw dark dots above the clouds—larger creatures, they suspected, in an ecological pyramid based on the beta-life. They described a sudden color change that stained the blank planet with swirls of brown and yellow. They were reporting an unexplained power loss when their signals faded out.
One lone member of the first three-man team came back from Mercury. He had seen nothing alive and he lived through his year at the quarantine station on the moon, but he brought pictures of a queer crater-ringed, iron-walled tunnel from which his companions had never returned.
Though no probe had yet come back from the atmosphere of Jupiter, a COSMOS expedition had touched the four large satellites. The first craft to visit Io, nearest the planet, reported that its takeoff had been followed by a narrow beam of intermittent radiation, as if something on the planet was observing it with radar.
Against that background of ominous uncertainty, the crash of Seeker One shocked the world. The first response was a jittery fear that something unfriendly had established itself on the back of the moon. Howard Hudson made the most of that brief panic.
I was still working in the Antilles Hudson, and what I saw was a business education. Public announcements of the crash were delayed for several hours, first by the fuddled COSMOS bureaucrats on the moon and later by official censors on earth, while Hudson’s private spy system coined money for him.
News of the crash came in on our astrofac circuit, disguised as a weather observation from the Orbital Hudson. It was decoded by a file clerk in our office, who couldn’t help talking when space issues dived on the stock market.
Hudson had his brokers sell space industries short. Next day, when the story broke, he used the publicity office to spread a wild rumor. The creatures of Venus had learned about space from the hardware raining out of their clouds. Now they were building a military base on the moon to stop our astronauts from polluting their air.
The news that COSMOS was now transmitting from the moon gave that rumor more support than it deserved. The bottom fell out of the market, and Hudson’s brokers picked up space stocks for peanuts. As office gossip had it, he cleared three billion in three days.
COSMOS tried to cool the rumors with a bulletin phrased in wooden officialese. Responsible space authorities had found no evidence of hostile action against the lost seeker from any source whatever. Neither the observers on the orbital moon platform or the crew of the seeker itself had reported anything unusual before the crash occurred. Salvage crews already at the site could find no indication of attack or sabotage. Presumably, instrumental malfunction had allowed the survey craft to drift out of its very low orbit and graze a lunar peak. The media would be instantly alerted to any new developments, but there was no reason whatever for public apprehension.
Seeker Two was standing ready to resume routine flights as soon as her crew reached the moon, the bulletin concluded. Thus far, the survey had made no newsworthy discoveries. None, in fact, were actually expected, because the moon was utterly dead. The test flights, however, had already established the value of the seeker vehicles for mapping the resources of other airless worlds.
Five minutes after that stuffy statement came over the transfac net, our office was buzzing with livelier news from the moon. It came by laser beam from the manager of the new Crater Hudson. After our laserman had relayed the message to Hudson’s office, he replayed his tape for us.
“. . . Listen, Mr. Hudson. Don’t swallow the COSMOS line. They’re covering something up. I don’t know what—maybe just the fact that this thing shows them up for idiots. But they’re sitting on something I think you ought to know.
“It’s true that Seeker One dived out of orbit for no apparent reason. She’d been flying her survey pattern, just ten kilometers high, flashing a routine report to the platform on every pass. Not a word about any trouble.
“But the story here is that the platform did observe something odd. A queer glow, down on the lunar surface. It blazed out just before the seeker passed over. Her retro-rockets fired a few seconds later. A laserman on the platform was following the seeker with a telescope and he saw it happen. He thinks the seeker was trying to land in the glow. Of course she overshot it, maybe four hundred kilometers. Came down near the moon’s south pole at half her orbital velocity. The salvage craft found nothing worth picking up. Meantime, the glow had faded out.
“That’s the story here, sir. We thought you’d want to know about that glow. Even though we can’t say what it was. The laserman says it looked like a fluorescent effect excited by the surveyor’s radar gear. The space engineers out here say radar pulses don’t excite fluorescent effects. Off the record, the COSMOS wheels think that laserman was drunk. They aren’t talking for the record.
“That’s it, Chief.”
If Howard Hudson made another fortune out of that report, I never heard about it, but my brother and his team were already on their way to Skygate, the COSMOS center on a mesa in New Mexico. By spaceplane to the earth platform, by shuttle nuke to the moon platform, by skipper craft down to Armstrong Point, the flight to the moon took a day and a half.
Up to a point, the story of Seeker Two is easy enough for me to reconstruct. I followed the official bulletins COSMOS saw fit to release and shared the private tips we received for Hudson. Later, I talked to Tom and his companions. I’ve even used the tapes and transcripts of the official investigation, which somehow still survive.
Seeker Two took off from Armstrong Point. In circumpolar orbit, radar-stabilized at ten kilometers mean elevation, she picked up the survey pattern. With gravimeters and magnetometers and radiation counters and a hundred other sophisticated research instruments, she was charting a five-kilo¬ meter strip of the moon, recording every possible detail of every crater and mascon, every significant surface and sub¬ surface feature.
In a wider orbit, four thousand kilometers out, the moon platform monitored her flight reports and kept watch for any interference. Her first transmissions were completely routine.
“All systems go. No anomalies noted.”
However, as she neared that point where Seeker One had fired her retro-rockets, the watchers on the platform made a terse report to the COSMOS center at Armstrong Point.
“Platform to Moon Control! We’ve got something. A surface glow, apparently touched off by approach of Seeker Two. A luminous streak, maybe twenty kilometers long. Arrowhead-shaped. Brighter toward the point. Location estimated six hundred kilometers from south lunar pole.”
Moon Control replied with an urgent query to Seeker Two. What was she observing?
“Lunar surface lighting up under us.” Marko’s taped voice sounds crisp and cool. “Bright rays spreading north from a small crater just ahead, which looks like an impact point. We’ve got spectrometers running on the rays. They appear to be fluorescent material scattered north from that crater. Spectral analysis not yet complete.”
“Keep in orbit.” Moon Control seems more alarmed than Marko is. “Monitor everything but don’t leave your flight pattern—”
“Seeker Two to Moon Control.” Marko’s voice is quicker on the tape, but still oddly calm. “Reporting visual contact with uncharted installation ahead. Something standing on that impact point. Position estimated sixty-nine degrees south latitude, on circumpolar survey track eighty-eight. A shining tower—”
Marko’s voice fades out.
“Seeker Two! Seeker Two!” Moon Control shouts. “Keep talking. Tell us everything.”
“A vast installation!” Even Marko sounds breathless now. “I can’t imagine why it wasn’t seen before. The tower dome stands miles above our flight path. Dead ahead! It looks like some sort of beacon. Changing color. Red, yellow, orange. It’s running through the spectrum—”
“Platform to Seeker!” A sharper voice cuts in. “We’re tracking you by telescope. We see the surface phenomenon-bright streaks converging toward the impact crater now just ahead of you. But we see no tower. No obstruction. Your flight path looks clear.”
For long seconds, the tape records no voice.
“Seeker Two!” Moon Control is hoarse with tension. “Seeker Two! Seeker Two!”
“Seeker Two to Moon Control.” Marko’s voice comes back at last, pitched lower, relieved. “We’ve made voice contact and identified the installation ahead. It’s the base of a transgalactic mission seeking peaceful interaction with man¬ kind. We’re following instructions to land at the base on our next orbital pass.”
“Don’t do that!” Moon Control sounds almost frantic. “Climb clear of apparent obstruction—don’t try to land! The platform sees no tower. We think you’re caught in some kind of trap. Remember Seeker One. Don’t touch your retro-rockets.”
The tape rustles with solar static, but there is no reply.
“Moon Control to Seeker Two!” The voice rises raggedly. “Don’t try to land. Repeat: don’t try to land. Break off contact with surface point. Change flight pattern to avoid vicinity of survey curve eighty-eight. Acknowledge and stand by.”
The tape runs on, but Seeker Two does not acknowledge.
III
MOON CONTROL at the moment was Sherman Parkinson. Like Erik Thorsen, he had recently resigned a military commission to make himself eligible for the civilian space organization. To judge him by his own standards, he was no doubt a brave and well-trained officer, loyal to the ancient traditions of the United States Marine Corps if not to the COSMOS ideal of a united mankind.
I saw him back on Earth two or three years later, confined to the alcoholics’ ward of a veterans’ hospital. The events on the moon had evidently been too much for him. Habit-driven as a dinosaur, he was not prepared to cope with anything so far beyond his own experience.
But the drinking came later. He seems to have remained sober during that crisis. The panel of special investigators saw fit, in fact, to commend him for a steadfast devotion to duty.
He was keen enough to see that Seeker Two was flying into some kind of trap, but he seems to have been taken in by Hudson’s rumor of attackers from Venus. When Marko ignored his orders, Parkinson called Skygate to ask for military support.
Space was international, Skygate reminded him. As the COSMOS administrator on the moon, he was in command, but he was not to make any use of military force without the explicit unanimous prior consent of the COSMOS directorate on Earth.
Angered, Parkinson issued new orders for Seeker Two to leave the survey pattern and return at once to Armstrong Point. Even under the kiddies’ picnic rules of COSMOS, he pointed out, Marko and his men could be taken off flight status for failure to obey direct orders, fined for misuse of COSMOS property, and imprisoned up to ten years for conduct endangering public safety. When such threats evoked no answer, Parkinson tried gravel-voiced appeals. Hadn’t the team heard the platform’s report that the transgalactic base didn’t exist? Didn’t they know the hazards of contact with alien biocosms? Couldn’t they recall their obligations to COSMOS and mankind?
Seeker Two kept on its silent path. When it went behind the moon from the platform, cutting off laser contact, Sherman Parkinson turned his attention to the platform itself, which still had that luminous streak in view. It was slowly fading behind the seeker, the platform reported. The raylike splash of scattered material was now barely visible, but the circle of the impact crater was still distinct.
The platform picked the seeker up when she came back across the moon’s north pole, reporting that she had changed course just enough to follow the rotating moon, so that she was returning along survey curve eighty-eight toward that dying gleam.
Parkinson bombarded her with desperate questions. What kind of creatures manned that transgalactic base? How had they concealed it? What language had they used for voice contact? What data had the sensors recorded?
Seeker Two flew on with no reply.
The platform tracked her back down survey curve eighty-eight. Soon after she crossed the moon’s equator, that arrow-shaped impact-splash blazed out again ahead. Presently her retro-rockets fired, lifting her on a long arc that slanted back toward the glowing crater.
The watchers on the platform followed the flare of her jets, which contracted to an incandescent point as she came down. Their instruments recorded an anomalous surge of hard radiation which peaked at the instant her jets went out.
