"Omega" - читать интересную книгу автора (Макдевитт Джек)

chapter 4

On board the William B. Jenkins.

Tuesday, February 25.

EXCEPT FOR ONE person, the research team on the Jenkins was delighted to be diverted. The fact that an omega had veered into a planetary system might mean they were close to finding the grail, a living alien civilization. A real one, something more exotic than the Angels, who were pretechnological barbarians, or the Noks, who were industrial-age barbarians. The exception was Digby Dunn, who would ordinarily have joined in the general elation. But Digby was in love with the captain. Her name was Kellie Collier, and Digby’s passion for her was both intense and unrelenting.

On the whole, it had been a painful experience. Love affairs always include an element of discomfort; it is part of what makes them life-changing ventures. But this one had been extraordinarily difficult. Passengers may not touch the captain. Bad for morale and all that. Impossible situation, Digger. We’ll just have to wait until we get clear. Be patient and everything’ll be fine.

She smiled, that gorgeous, alluring smile, rendered even more seductive because she was trying to make it impersonal, friendly, understanding. Lose my job, she’d added on occasion when he’d tried to press her.

They’d been headed back to the station when the call came. We’ve got an omega changing course. Turn left and find out what’s going on. See what it’s after.

So Digby, an anthropologist by trade, but riding as a volunteer with a survey mission that was gathering information about local stars and planetary systems, pretended to be pleased, exchanged platitudes with everybody, and aimed pained glances at Kellie.

“Sorry,” she told him. “But look, it’ll be quick. In and out, see what’s there, and then back to Broadside. We’re only talking a couple of extra weeks.”

She was tall and lovely with soft black skin and luminous eyes and she made every other woman in his life seem hopelessly dull. Ah yes, how he’d like to take her out on an expedition to unearth a few ancient cookpots. But he resigned himself to making an occasional grab, which she usually—but not always—declined with stern disapproval. “Be patient,” she told him. “Our time is coming.”

The Jenkins was more than three thousand light-years out, and they held the current record for going farther from Earth than any other ship. They’d been away from Broadside almost a year. It had been a long and lonely voyage by any standard, broken only by an occasional rendezvous with a supply vessel.

A rendezvous was always a special occasion. There had been a push at the Academy to automate replenishment, to send the sandwiches in a ship directed only by an AI. Asquith had been unable to see the point of sending a captain along since it cost a great deal more, and it was hard to visualize a situation in which human judgment might be needed. But somebody apparently understood what seeing a fresh face could mean when you were out in the deeps.

Jack Markover had thrown his weight into the fight by threatening to quit and hold a news conference if they took the human captains off the run. The commissioner had backed down, pretended it had been someone else’s idea, and it had been quietly put aside.

Jack was the chief of mission. He was a little man with a hawk face and too much energy. He loved his work and, if he’d been forced to follow through on his threat, would not have survived. He talked about retirement a lot, usually during the gray hours when the Jenkins was in hyperflight, and the hours were long and quiet. But Digger knew he’d never step down, that one day they’d have to haul him off and lock him away.

Digger had never quite figured out what Jack’s specialty was. He was from the American Midwest, a quiet, dedicated type with doctorates in physics and literature. There seemed to be no field of human knowledge in which he did not speak as an expert. Acquainted with all, he was fond of saying, knowledgeable in none.

The comment could hardly have been less true. Where Digger knew the ground, the man inevitably had his facts down. He was the only person Digger knew who could explain Radcliffe’s equations, quote Paradise Lost, discuss the implications of the Dialogues, play Mozart with panache, and hold forth on the history of the Quraquat.

Kellie loved him, Digger thought of him as the grandfather he’d never known, and Mark Stevens, who usually piloted the supply ship, was fond of saying the only reason he agreed to keep doing the flights was to spend a few hours with Jack Markover every couple of months.

The fourth member of the research team was Winnie Colgate. Winnie had been through a couple of marriages. Both had expired, according to Winnie, amiably under mutual agreement. But there was an undercurrent of anger that suggested things had not been so amiable. And Digger suspected that Winnie would be slow to try the game again.

She had begun her professional life as a cosmologist, and she periodically commented that her great regret was that she would not live long enough to see the solutions to the great problems: whether there was a multiverse, what had caused the Big Bang, whether there was a purpose to it all. Digger thought they were adrift in a cosmic bingo game; Jack could not believe stars and people had happened by accident. Winnie kept an open mind, meaning that she changed her opinions from day to day.

She was blond, quiet, affable. It was no secret that she was entranced by Jack, would have taken him into her bed, but Jack was something of a Puritan about sex, didn’t believe you should do it outside marriage. In any case, he behaved like Kellie, apparently convinced that his position as head of mission would in some way be compromised if he started sleeping with the staff.

Digger wished for it to happen, because it would have eased his way with Kellie. But, unhappily, Jack held his ground and respected Wendy’s virtue.

JACK MARKOVER HAD spent half his career on these missions, and had come to doubt the wisdom of his choice. He’d staked everything on the glorious possibility of making the first major contact. There was a time when it had seemed easy. Almost inevitable. Just get out there and do it. But that had been during an era of overt optimism, when the assumption had been that every world on which life was possible would inevitably develop a biosystem, and that once you got a biosystem you would eventually get tribal chiefs and math teachers. It was true that the habitable worlds orbiting the sun’s immediate neighbors had been sterile, but that had seemed like no more than a caprice.

Now he wondered whether they’d all simply read too much science fiction.

He knew what his reputation was. Hi, Jack, find any little green men yet? He had, after each of the last two missions, gone home determined not to come out again. But it was like a siren call, the sense that he might quit just one mission too soon. So he knew that, whatever happened this time, whatever he might think about retiring to Cape Cod, he’d be back out again, poking a new set of worlds. Hoping to find the big prize.

To date, during the past year, they had looked at seventy-nine systems, all with stable suns. The stated purpose of the mission was strictly survey. They were accumulating information and, especially, noting planets that might become future habitats without extensive terraforming. They’d found one life-supporting world, but the life-forms were microscopic. In his entire career, across thirty-five years, Jack had seen only nine worlds on which life had gotten a foothold and been able to sustain itself. There’d been two others on which conditions had changed, an atmosphere grown too thin, a passing star scrambling an orbit, and the life-forms had died out. And that was it.

On each of the living worlds, the bioforms were still microscopic. He had never gone to a previously unvisited world and seen so much as a blade of grass.

The omega was approximately 41,000 kilometers through the middle, big as these things went. It had turned, had adjusted course, was still turning. It was also decelerating. You could see it because the cloud had lost its spherical shape. As it decelerated, sections of mist broke loose and fountained forward.

The turn was so slight as to be barely discernible. Jack was surprised it had been detected at all. Observers must have been watching the object over a period of months to make the determination. Then he realized that, because it was approaching a planetary system, the Academy would have been paying special attention.

The Jenkins spent several days doing measurements and collecting readings, sometimes standing off at thousands of kilometers, sometimes pushing uncomfortably close to the cloud front. The numbers confirmed what Broadside had: It was angling into the planetary system.

It wasn’t hard to find the target.

If the braking continued at the present level, and the turn continued as it was going, the omega would shortly line up on a vector that would bring it to a rendezvous with the third planet.

The Jenkins was still too far away to see details. But Jack reported to Broadside. “Looks like a December 14 intersect, Vadim,” he told them. “We’ll head over there and take a look.”

IT WAS THEIR custom to name each terrestrial world they investigated. Although the names were not official, and each planet would continue to be referred to in formal communications by a numerical designator attached to its star’s catalog number, unofficially it was easier to think in terms of Brewster’s World, or Backwater, or Blotto. (Brewster had been Winnie’s companion in her first foray to the altar. The world got its name because it had achieved tidal lock, so the sun, viewed from the surface, “just sat there, doing nothing.”)

It was Kellie’s turn to name the new one. “This might turn out to be a special place,” she said. “When I was a kid we lived near Lookout Point in northern New York. I loved the place. We used to go there and have picnics. You could see the Hudson in the distance.”

“So you want to call it Lookout Point?”

“Lookout would be good, I think.”

And so Lookout it became.

The ship made a jump to get within an AU, and began its approach. They were still much too far for the telescopes to make out any detail. But they discovered immediately that no electronic envelope surrounded the world.

That news produced mixed feelings. Like everyone else, Digger would have liked to see a world with an advanced civilization. It had never happened, and it would be a huge achievement. On the other hand, there was the cloud. Better, he told himself, it should be empty, and the cloud being drawn by unusual rock formations. Or by ruins, like at Moonlight.

By the third day, the disk that represented Lookout was still only a bright sprinkle of light to the naked eye. In the scopes, however, it was covered with clouds. The only visible surface was blue. An ocean. “It has a big moon,” said Winnie, watching the data come in from the sensors. “Two moons, in fact.”

The presence of a large moon was thought to be critical to the development of civilizations. Or, for that matter, of large land animals.

The filters reduced the reflection and they were watching two disks and a star, the larger several times the diameter of its companion. The star was the second moon, which was probably a captured asteroid. They brought the images up to full mag and concentrated on the big moon, looking for signs that someone had been there. But they were still too far away. A building the size of Berlin’s Bergmann Tower would not have been visible at that range.

It was a strange feeling. How many times had they approached worlds like this, literally praying for an earthwork, for a wall, for a light on the sea? And tonight—it was just short of midnight GMT—Digger hoped they would see only the usual barren plains.

The clarity of the images grew. Lookout had white cumulus clouds. Continents. Archipelagoes.

The continents were green.

They shook hands when they saw that. But it was a muted round of celebration.

The poles were white, the oceans blue.

“Looks like Earth,” Wendy said, as if she were pronouncing sentence.

ON THE FOURTH day they were able to pick up physical features, mountain ranges, river valleys, large brown patches that might have been plains. A section of the night side was visible, and they searched it eagerly for lights, but saw nothing.

They slept in shifts, when they slept at all. Usually, they dozed off in the common room, and left only to head for the washroom or to get something to eat. They began imagining they saw things. Someone would sit before a monitor tapping it with a pen, observing that there are lines here, looks like a building, or something there, in the harbor, maybe improvements. At one point, Winnie was convinced she could make out a mountain road, and Digger claimed he saw wakes at sea, maybe from ships. Kellie wondered whether she hadn’t spotted a dam on one of the rivers, and Jack saw changes in the color of the land that suggested agricultural development.

But in the growing clarity of the telescopes, everything faded, save forest, jungle, rivers, and coastline. The arc of the night side remained dark.

THERE WAS A substantial cloud cover, and storms were everywhere. Blizzards covered the high northern and low southern latitudes, a hurricane churned through one of the oceans, and lightning flickered in the temperate zones. Rain seemed to be falling on every continent. Bill did the usual measurements and posted the results. The planet was about 6 percent smaller than the Earth. Axial tilt twenty-six degrees. (Axial tilt was another factor that seemed to be significant if a world was to develop a biosystem. All known living worlds ranged between eighteen and thirty-one degrees.)

According to Bill, the atmosphere would be breathable, but they’d be prudent to use bottled air. The air at sea level was notably richer in oxygen content than the standard mix. Gravity was.92 standard.

The smaller moon had a retrograde movement. Both satellites were airless, and both were devoid of evidence that anyone had ever landed on them. Seventy percent of the surface was liquid water. And Lookout had a rotational period of twenty-two hours, seventeen minutes.

They went into orbit, crossed the terminator onto the night side, and almost immediately saw lights.

But they weren’t the clear hard-edged lights of cities. There was smoke and blurring and a general irregularity. “Forest fires,” said Jack. “Caused by lightning, probably.” He smiled. “Sorry.” Though probably he wasn’t.

Thirty minutes later they were back on the daylight side. There were no major cities. The night was dark as a coal sack. Jack sat down, visibly relieved, visibly disappointed, and sent off yet another report to Vadim, information to the Academy. “No sign that the world is occupied. No lights. Will look more closely.”

“So why is the cloud coming this way?” asked Winnie.

THEY MADE SEVERAL orbits and saw nothing. They zeroed in on numerous harbors and rivers, looking for any sign of improvement and finding none. There was no visible shipping, no indication of a road anywhere.

They were about to send off another message informing Broadside that the Academy need not concern itself with Lookout when Digger heard Jack’s raspy uh-oh. He glanced at the screens, which were showing nothing but night. “I saw lights,” said Jack.

“Where?” Digger knew that Jack had written the world off. He was not going to get excited again. Not about Lookout.

“They’re gone,” said Jack. “We passed over. They’re behind us. But they were there.”

“Bill?”

“Realigning the scopes now.”

The alpha screen, the prime operational monitor, went dark, and then came back on. “I’ve got it,” said the AI.

Several lights, like lingering sparks. But they didn’t go out.

“Fires?”

“What are we getting from the sensors?” asked Winnie.

Bill switched over, and they saw several hazy, luminous rings. “Somebody’s got the lights on,” said Digger. He looked over at Kellie.

“Could be,” she said.

It wasn’t London, thought Digger. But it was sure as hell something.

“What’s the ground look like?” asked Winnie.

Bill put the area on display.

The biggest of the continents stretched from pole to pole, narrowing to an isthmus in the southern temperate latitudes before expanding again. The lights were located on, or over, the isthmus.

It was about four hundred kilometers long, ranging between forty and eighty kilometers wide. It was rough country, with a mountain range running its length, lots of ridges, and three or four rivers crossing from one ocean to the other.

Digger didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. He was along on the mission, and he was dedicated to it like Jack and Winnie. But unlike them, he hadn’t expected to see anything. Nobody ever saw anything. It was a rule.

“How could we have missed that?” asked Winnie.

“It’s still raining down there,” suggested Bill. “Visibility hasn’t been very good.”

“Lock it in, Bill. I don’t want to have trouble finding it again when it gets out into the daylight.” Digger went back to the viewport and stared out at the long dark curve of the planet. There wasn’t a light anywhere to be seen. Well, they’d come around again a few more times before it would be dawn over the target area. Maybe the cloud cover would go away and they’d get a good look.

And then they’d zero in by daylight.

THEY DIDN’T SEE the lights again. But the weather cleared toward dawn, the target area rotated out into the sun, and Digger looked down on a long jagged line that traveled the length of the isthmus. A road! It couldn’t be anything else.

Simultaneously Kellie announced she could see a city. “One of the harbors,” she said, bringing it up on the monitor.

“Here’s another one.” Winnie pointed at the opposite side of the isthmus. And another here, where the isthmus widens into the southern continent. And two more, where it reaches up into the northern land mass.

Cities crowded around harbors, cities spread out along an impossibly crooked shore line, cities straddling both sides of rivers. There was even a city on a large offshore island in the western sea.

The telescope zoomed in, and they saw creatures on the road, large awkward beasts of burden that looked like rhinos. And humanoids, equally awkward, wide around the middle, waddling along, with reins in their hands and hats that looked like sombreros.

“I’ll be damned,” said Jack. “They’re actually there.”

They had pale green skin, large floppy feet (had their ancestors been ducks?), and colorful clothing. It was red and gold and deep sea blue and emerald green. Winnie counted six digits rather than five, and thought their scalps were hairless. They wore baggy leggings and long shirts. Some had vests, and everything was ornamented. There were lots of bracelets, necklaces, feathers. Many wore sashes.

“My first aliens,” said Kellie, “and we get Carpenter.” That was a reference to Charlie Carpenter, the creator of the Goompahs, an enormously popular children’s show. And the aliens did, in fact, look like Goompahs.

“Incredible,” said Winnie.

Somebody laughed and proposed a toast to Charlie Carpenter, who’d gotten there first. They were looking at the traffic on the central road just outside a city that stood on the eastern coast. While they shook their heads in amusement, Jack switched the focus and brought up a building atop a low ridge near the sea. It stopped the laughter.

The building was round, a ring of Doric columns supporting a curved roof. It glittered in the sunlight, which was just reaching it, and it looked for all the world like a Greek temple.

“Say what you like,” said Digger. “But these people know their architecture.”

THEY COUNTED TWELVE cities in all, eight through the isthmus, two on the northern continent, one in the south, and one on the island. It was sometimes difficult to determine where one city ended and another began because, remarkably, they saw no walls. “Maybe it’s a nation,” said Kellie, who’d come down from the bridge to share the moment of triumph. “Or a confederacy.”

There was a similarity in design among all of them. They’d clearly not been planned, in the modern sense, but had grown outward from commercial and shipping districts, which were usually down near the waterfront. But nevertheless the cities were laid out in squares, with considerable space provided for parks and avenues. The buildings were not all of the elegance of the temple, but there was a clean simplicity to the design, in contrast to the decorative accoutrements worn by individuals.

The cities were busy, crowds jostling through the commercial areas, hordes of the creatures doing that curious duck-walk, little ones chasing one another about, individuals relaxing near fountains. And Jack realized with a shock that the natives had running water.

“Can we tell how big they are?” asked Winnie.

“Smaller than they look,” said Bill. “They would on average come up to Jack’s shoulders.”

There were a variety of structures, two-story buildings that might have been private dwellings, others that looked like public buildings, shops, markets, storage facilities. Three ships were tied up at the piers, and a fourth was entering the harbor as they watched. Its sails were billowing in the wind, and sailors scrambled across its decks.

The architecture was similar everywhere. If it lacked the Doric columns of the seaside temple, it possessed the same simple elegance, straight lines, vaulted roofs, uncluttered cornices. Just the thing, Digger thought, that would attract an omega. And he was struck by how much better the cloud’s sensing equipment was than the Jenkins’s.

THE CITIES WERE surrounded by agricultural areas, squares of land given over to one crop or another, orchards, silos, barns. A few rhinos, and other smaller creatures, grazed contentedly.

Gradually the farms gave way to forest.

Beyond the northern cities, the woods grew thick, and broke on the slopes of a mountain range that rivaled the Alps. Beyond the peaks lay jungle, and the jungle, as it approached the equator, became desert. In the south, the cities stood on the edge of more mountains, which proceeded unbroken for thousands of kilometers, all the way to the ice cap.

Where were the other cities?

Digger didn’t realize he’d asked the question aloud until Jack commented that it looked as if the isthmus was the only populated section on the planet. The other continents looked empty. The land above and below the isthmus looked equally empty.

They searched the oceans for ships and found none other than those in the coastal waters near the cities. “Looks,” said Kellie, “as if they stay in sight of land.”

“Look at this.” Digger pointed at two of the rivers that crossed the isthmus. “A lock.”

They zoomed in and saw that it was so. “They have to get ships over the high ground in the middle of the isthmus,” said Jack. “So they use a system of locks to raise them, then get them back down to sea level.”

Kellie raised a congratulatory fist. “The Goompahs are engineers,” she said. “Who would’ve thought?”

Jack was getting ready to make his report. “They’ll want to know about the population.” He looked around at his colleagues. “What do you think?”

Anybody’s guess. Winnie brought the cities up one by one. The northernmost was on the western coast, and it was probably the smallest of the group. It could lay claim to a couple of spectacular buildings. The larger of the two was set in front of a pool and looked very much like the main admin building on the Academy grounds. It was long, low, only three levels, made of white stone. It was probably a bit smaller, but the same architect might have designed both.

The other structure was round, like the temple by the sea, but bigger, with more columns. It appeared to be open to the elements. And something that might have been a sun disk stood at the apex of its roof. It looked out across a park.

Crowds were pressed into the commercial section, which was too narrow. The avenues curved and wandered off in all directions. They were lined with buildings of all sizes and shapes. Minimum twenty thousand, Digger thought. Probably closer to twenty-five. The other cities appeared to be larger. Say an average population fifteen to twenty percent more. Make it thirty thousand for each. That was a conservative estimate. And it gave, what?

“Three to four hundred thousand,” Winnie told Jack.

He nodded. Kellie said the estimate was a bit low, but Digger thought she had it about right. Jack agreed and went across the corridor to record his report.

One of the sailing vessels was making its way northward up the coast on the western sea. It was under full sail, and it looked like an eighteenth-century frigate. No Roman galleys for these guys. Or Viking boats. They clearly had no use for oars.

On the other hand, they hadn’t learned how to make an outboard motor.

“THE QUESTION,” SAID Jack, “is what we do now?”

It was night on the isthmus again, but a clear night this time, and they could see the cities spotted with lights. They were barely discernible, flickering oil lamps probably, but they were there.

“We wait for instructions,” said Jack. “They’ll probably send some contact specialists.”

“I hate to bring this up,” said Digger, “but where are the contact specialists coming from?”

“The Academy, I assume.”

“It’s a nine-month flight.”

“I know.”

“The cloud is only nine months away. When they get here there won’t be anybody to contact.”

Jack looked uncomfortable. “If they get underway without wasting any time, they’ll have a couple of weeks before the cloud hits. In any case, Hutch can get back to us within a couple of weeks and let us know what she intends. Meantime, I don’t think there’s much for us to do except sit tight.”

Kellie frowned. “You don’t think we should go down and say hello?”

“No,” said Jack. “The Protocol requires us to keep hands off. No contact.”

“Nothing anybody can do,” said Winnie.

Digger frowned. “Doesn’t the policy say something about extraordinary circumstances?”

“As a matter of fact, no.”