Collected Short Fiction, page 720
“Gravitophores.” His great naked double cranium nodded ponderously. “Fragmentary reports of such creatures have been sent back from two or three explorers of black holes, but you are the first to return with actual confirmation.”
The nurses were taking Snowfire to wash her black paint off, and he stayed to question Blacklantern.
“We’ve no time to waste,” he apologized. “Earth has only ten days now, before the central hole arrives. We’re anxious to initiate the research and rescue programs we have planned. A dozen major expeditions are organized and ready. Archeologists waiting to salvage the last relics of our ancestors. Anthropologists interested in the culture of our surviving cousins. Teams waiting to study the swarm o? black holes—I myself am hoping to capture one of the gravitophores you report.”
“What’s happening to the Earth-folk?”
“The portal authority is offering them free transit.” He shrugged, not much concerned. “If they decide to leave.”
A technician had come to take Blacklantern for counter-radiation. When he returned, tingling all over and pleasantly half-drunk from the treatment, the engineer was still waiting.
“One more item,” Beneath the mass of his auxiliary brain, the small eyes shone shrewdly. “If this has been enough of the Benefactors, I still want you in the portal survey division. You’ve seen the last of Old Earth. We’ve an explorer probe in orbit now around a virgin world with a rich carbon-based biosphere. I’ll make you the planet manager there, at a scale of pay you can’t refuse—”
“But I can,” Blacklantern said. “I’m still a Benefactor, and my own people need me.”
“You Benefactors!”
With a puzzled shrug, the engineer waddled away.
Snowfire came back, scrubbed golden-pink.
“You re released,” the senior medic told them. “No permanent damage from radiation or exposure, though I advise a few days of rest.”
Benefactor Thornwall was waiting with congratulations when they left the emergency center. lie kissed Snowfire and greeted Blacklantern with the palm-touch he had learned on Nggongga.
“I’m putting you up for promotion,” he told Blacklantern. “To a stellar fellowship—”
“Gunggee!” Snowfire flung eager arms around him. “You’ve earned it.”
“And I’ve a choice for both of you. You may go back to Old Earth when you feel able, to lead our effort to persuade the natives that technology might be a good thing for them. Or you may return to Nggongga, to carry on as our co-agents there. How about it?”
They looked at each other. Without the paint, Snowfire seemed strangely pale, but her green eyes were shining. She reached quickly to take Blacklantern’s hand.
“The rescue effort mustn’t wait for us,” she told the old Benefactor. “Anyhow, Blackie’s the wrong color for it.” She turned to smile at him, her tone gently mocking. “Before he tamed that dragon, the Earthfolk thought he was their devil-god. They’ll be certain of it now.”
“We’ll choose Nggongga,” Blacklantern said. “We’ve work enough waiting for us there.”
“And love.” She squeezed his hand. “We’re going to have a son.”
The Highest Dive
THE roaring woke him from a crazy dream of wild bulls bellowing. He sat up in the dark, tight with a shock of fear. One dim red light glowed over vague shapes around him, but they looked strange. His breath stopped, till he remembered that the red light was there to mark the shelter exit.
Then everything came back—Atlas, which people called ‘the impossible planet’ because it was a million times too big to be a planet at all; the Galactic Survey camp, where the shuttle ship had dropped him two Earth-days ago; Komatsu and Marutiak, the human spacemen with him.
But he couldn’t understand that roaring, which had been the bellow of bulls in his dream. It battered his body, ached in his bones, dazed his brain.
‘Komatsu!’ He shouted, but he couldn’t hear his own voice. ‘Komatsu!’
When he tried to listen, all he could hear was that near and steady thunder, always louder, louder, louder. Nothing moved in the shelter. The other men were on duty, maybe away from camp. He was all alone.
In his mind, that roar had become the yell of a black angry monster larger than Atlas. But he tried not to panic. Groping in the dark, he found the hard little disk of his voice-pack, slung from his neck.
‘Spaceman Mayfield . . .’ His scream seemed fainter than a whisper, and he cupped both hands to shield the pack. ‘Mayfield to Komatsu. What is the noise?’
His question seemed suddenly stupid. Maybe cowardly. He didn’t want Komatsu thinking Atlas had been too much for him.
‘Spaceman Max Mayfield,’ he called again. ‘Requesting instructions.’
The pack began quivering in his fingers. When he held it hard to his ear, he caught faint words in Komatsu’s raspy voice, ‘. . . tornado . . . wild weather common . . . shelter pit . . . get there quick . . . hang on, kid!’
Briefing him after he landed, Komatsu had talked about the weird weather of Atlas and pointed out the shelter pit under the floor. He got his bearings now from the exit light and jumped for the pit.
He jumped too hard.
New on Atlas, he had forgotten how he had to move. He found himself floating in the dark above his bunk, grabbing at nothing, waiting for the weak gravity to pull him down. Before he could reach anything, the wind hit.
The blast of noise hurt his ears. The breath burst out from his lungs. The exit light winked out. Something hit him. Something spun him. Something seized him, crushed him.
No monster, of course. He knew it was only a torn scrap of the shelter, wrapped around him by the freakish gusts. But it was bad enough. It pinned his arms and covered his face. He couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe.
He thought he would soon be dead.
As he spun through the air, his mother’s face came into his mind. Her voice came through the howling storm. ‘When you’re dying,’ she was saying, ‘your whole life comes back in a single flash.’
He wasn’t sure that was true, but many thoughts rushed into his head. For a while he tried to wriggle out of the stiff fabric around him, but his strength gave out. Finally, he just let past things flash back.
He thought of the morning at breakfast, long ago on the small Earth, when he first told his parents that he was going out to Atlas with the Galactic Survey.
‘Max Mayfield!’—when his mother used his full name, he knew she was angry—‘We thought you were happy, here at home. We thought you loved poetry and maths.’ He saw she was about to cry. ‘Why didn’t you t-t-t-tell us?’
‘We were hoping you might decide to stay here at the park and be a wilderness ranger.’ Speaking at the same time, his father frowned severely. ‘What’s on Atlas?’
‘Riddles.’ He put down his fork and tried to explain. ‘Nobody knows how anything could be so big. It’s like a planet, but five thousand times as far around as Earth. I’ll be on a survey team, looking for its secrets.’
‘Out on Atlas?’ His mother’s mouth gaped open. ‘With those space m-m-m-monsters?’
‘Please, mum I’ He grinned at her tight face, but she wouldn’t smile. ‘Ozark Wilderness is a nice quiet hiding place for us and the animals—if we’re afraid of the future. But I’ve been hiding long enough. This is a new century, and I want to live in it. We have new worlds to know, and new friends in space.’
‘Giant spiders! or worse!’ She shivered. ‘I can’t abide ‘em!’
‘Maybe they do look queer, but you’ve got to admire their brains.’ He tried and failed to make his father nod. ‘They’ve taught us a lot of new maths. I’m glad they need us on Atlas, because I want to know them better.’
‘Need you?’ His mother sat sadly shaking her head. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s rough,’ he said. ‘Too rough for most of them. They hope the human teams will be tough enough -and bright enough to survive there—long enough to find out what Atlas really is.’
‘You flabbergast us, son,’ his father said. ‘Because you’ve always been such a bookworm. If we’re upset, it’s just because we’re afraid Atlas will be too much for you.’
‘Maybe I’m afraid, too.’ He had to nod. ‘But still I want to go. Because Atlas is a riddle, the biggest riddle in the Universe. I want to prove I’m good enough to tackle it.’
At that point his kid brother had come stumbling sleepily into the kitchen. The name of Atlas worked him into whooping excitement.
‘You going there? Wow-wee! Tell about it.’
They all listened while he talked about the space folk he had met and the terminal on the moon where his training would begin and the trans-sleep shots he would be taking for the long trip to Atlas. His mother was sniffling at first, but his father was soon patting her hand and they finally said they were proud that he had been chosen to go.
Atlas was nine thousand light-years from Earth, but he had slept through the flight. The orbital station where he woke was strange enough, but his training had got him used to the feel of null gravity and the queer odours of space people.
Now, waiting to die in the core of that bellowing storm, he remembered his first glimpse of Atlas, when the mission planner guided him into an observation bay. The sight shook him up.
Atlas was too big.
Still a million miles ahead, it was too big for him to see. His own Earth, at that distance, would have been a little blue-and-white marble. Atlas was endless. It was a hazy floor, mottled dark and bright, stretching out and out for ever. Above it, space was a dead black dome.
‘It . . . it gets you!’ Its boundless flatness was too enormous for his mind to grasp. ‘What kind of world, what kind of thing can be so big?’
‘Your mission is to help us find that out.’
The planner’s human voice surprised him. Far from human itself, the space being had picked up not just the language but also the voice of Dr Krim, the black- bearded linguist he had known on the moon.
‘All we can see from here is the top of the clouds,’ the planner said. ‘You’ll be a thousand miles below; with its low gravity, Atlas has a very deep atmosphere. The clouds never break to show us anything. Down there, we hope you can see what it really is.’
He looked down, wondering what the clouds were hiding.
‘We have theories enough,’ the planner said. ‘Your team will be gathering facts to help us pick the best one. Are you ready to be briefed?’
‘Ready.’
The briefing officer looked like a big silver starfish, but, like the planner, it spoke with the rich and ringing human voice of Dr Krim. Its sour odour made his stomach churn, till he looked away and tried to remember his training on the moon.
‘I’m Spaceman Mayfield,’ he managed to say. ‘A human volunteer . . .’
He wanted to go on talking about himself, because being human made him a stranger on the orbiter. He still felt weak and giddy from the trans-sleep serums, and all these new things were coming too fast. He wanted to think about hiking with his father to holograph the wilderness creatures. About teaching chess to his kid brother, who was learning a strong end game. Even about the shelf of poetry in his room—he had enjoyed knowing the real Dr Krim, because they both liked Robert Frost.
But the briefing officer wasn’t interested in Earth.
‘You’ll be in danger, down on Atlas.’ Dr Krim’s deep voice boomed out of its silver-scaled queerness. ‘Nothing will ever be quite what you expect. Your instructions are to move with care, observe with intelligence, report every fact at once. Your first problem will be the gravity.’
The mass of Atlas, the creature explained, was too small for its size, too small to fit any reasonable theory at all. His weight there would be only a pound and a half. Unless he learned to use the hold-ropes, even a good breeze could blow him away.
Looking aside, he listened to the few known facts about Atlas, most of them hard to believe. He learned what his work would be in the team. Finally he had to look again, because the briefing officer was holding out the voice-pack.
‘Wear this. All the time. Use it. We’ll be listening.’
He took the pack from its snaky arms and tried to grin in a friendly way toward its single central eye, which looked like a huge mound of dark-green gelatine. After all, it wasn’t half so strange as Atlas was going to be.
Whirling now in the heart of that howling storm, he was barely aware of the suffocating tightness around him. Yet a dim pain nagged him. He knew he ought to be doing something to earn his place in the team. Komatsu and Marutiak were probably hurt. He ought to be helping them. At least he ought to be reporting to the orbiter. But he had no breath for speech, no strength or will for any effort at all. He let his mind flash back to his landing on Atlas.
He had been watching from the pilot bubble as the shuttle slid down through endless miles of fog. The first thing he saw was a long dark blur, dividing hazy pink from misty blue. Then the world beneath the fog came slowly into focus, like an image in a lens. The blue became a dark mountain ridge, queerly long and straight. The pink became a flat reddish desert, grey- spotted with low mounds like piles of ashes. The blue was a flatter desert, the colour of old ice.
Finally he found the camp on the ridge. The shelter was an inflated dome of yellow fabric. Yellow holdropes made a wide web around it. His new teammates crawled out across the web to meet him, looking like yellow spiders in their survival gear.
He was glad to be with men again but dismayed at the way Atlas had crippled them. Both looked ray- burnt, drawn, grim. Komatsu had lost one leg. Raw red scars were splashed across the face and throat of Marutiak, the sub-chief.
The shuttle had brought big spools of new rope, crated ’ instruments, bales and cases of supplies. Before it took off, it gave them a pick-up date.
‘Be here.’ Though it carried no human crew, its robot controls had been programmed to speak with the voice of Dr Krim. ‘We’re shutting down this camp, because the orbiter’s moving out of shuttle range. The director expects you to find useful information before we come back to pick you up.’
The date meant nothing to Max at first, because he was still wearing the Earth-time watch his parents had given him for graduation. He translated it out of galactic time, while he stood watching the shuttle climb and vanish into the clouds, and he found that it would be his birthday, just two weeks off. That made him think of the cake his mother would have baked, if he had stayed on Earth. Dark sweet chocolate iced with white . . .
‘Let’s go, kid,’ Komatsu said.
Marutiak was picking up a great bale that should have weighed a ton. Max jumped to help, and drifted in the air till Marutiak left the bale floating and turned to toss him the end of a rope.
‘Thanks!’ he gasped.
Marutiak pointed at his red-scarred throat, and Max realised that his voice had been destroyed.
‘Hang on, kid,’ Komatsu rasped. ‘Always hang on. Enson forgot—he’s the man you came to replace.’
He pulled himself after them toward the shelter, halfway swimming. Komatsu stopped at the door and raised his voice above the lazy cat-purr of the air- pump.
‘We stand watches. One man off and two men on. On duty, we run the experiments and report to the orbiter. Off duty, we stay inside and get what rest we can. On or off, we keep alert. Down here, kid, you’ll learn that Atlas makes the rules. If you’ve got the brains and guts to play the Atlas game, you’ll be okay.’
He had tried to play the game, but Atlas was a tough opponent. His first real problem came when Komatsu asked him to come for a swim. Tired and sweaty after the long flight down, he agreed eagerly, but he wondered where the water was. Komatsu led him along a yellow rope to the edge of the ridge.
‘You first.’ Komatsu waved him ahead. ‘Dive.’ ‘Huh?’
He saw no water anywhere. The ridge was nearly flat on top, flaked and cracked with time. Ropes stretched along its rim. The reddish desert lay far, far below. Feeling bewildered, he looked back at Komatsu.
‘There’s our pool.’ Komatsu leaned out to point straight down. ‘The only open water we’ve found on Atlas.’
He gripped the rope and looked. The time-worn wall of something like black rock dropped straight down so far it made him giddy. At last he found the pool—a small round mirror of bright blue water tucked under the very foot of that frightening cliff.
‘It’s deep enough.’ Queerly casual, Komatsu pointed at another hand-rope, stretching from their feet to a rock down in the pool. ‘We climb that to get back.’ He grinned at Max. ‘Want me to go first?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Max stared at his dark, gaunt face. ‘We’re too . . . too high!’
‘Just a thousand feet.’ Komatsu’s grin grew wider. ‘About the same as ten at home. You fall slow here, kid. With air resistance, your terminal velocity is about fifteen feet a second. From any height, you never fall faster. Watch me.’
He peeled off his yellow suit, moved to the rim in a lazy, one legged dance, floated over it. Max leaned out to watch him drifting slowly down, arms spread like wings to guide him. He was a long time in the air, and his body had dwindled to a far dark speck before he broke the blue mirror of the pool.
Waiting, Max shifted his cramped hands on the rope. The clouds looked darker and lower. The desert of ice and the desert of ashes made no sense. Atlas had begun to seem a harder riddle than ever.
Komatsu came back at last, gliding up that long rope. His scarred body was already dry, and one leg seemed enough for him, here on Atlas. Still grinning, he waved toward the jumping place.
‘Next?’
‘No!’ Max couldn’t help shivering. ‘Not . . . not now!’
‘Later, if you please. But do it, kid. For your own good. Enson never learned to dive. That’s why he never got back when he was blown away.’
‘Later.’ Max felt miserable. ‘I’ll try . . . later.’
Komatsu had been nice about it, maybe too nice. He took Max around the camp to explain their duties. Weather instruments and automatic Cameras and radiation meters were scattered across the ridge. Hand-ropes led down to more experiments on the ashes and the ice.
