Asgard's Secret (7 page)

"It wouldn't
be the end of the world," he said. "You have skills and plenty of
experience. Lots of people would be glad to hire you."

"I'm not a
team player," I told him. "If I were employee material, I'd never
have left Earth. Do you have any news of the war, by the way?—I didn't really
get a chance to chat to the new arrival last night. Too tired by half."

"So was
I," he admitted, "but the word around the Establishment is that it's
over."

"Really? Who
won?"

He was the wrong
person to ask. He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and said, "In a war,
Michael, nobody wins. It's just destruction and devastation all round. If we
can't learn to understand that, there's no future for us in this galaxy."

I sighed. "How
long before I get a decision on my proposal?" I asked.

"Fifteen or
twenty units," he told me. He meant Tetron metric units, which are
something in the region of a quarter of an Earthly hour. "I'll call you as
soon as I know. Will you be at home?"

"I'll be back
as soon as I can," I assured him. "I have other irons in the
fire."

3

I did have a few other irons in the fire. I
spent the rest of the morning trying them out to see if any of them had warmed
up, but none of them had. I had a few more conversations like the one I'd had
with Aleksandr Sovorov before I accepted the fact that everyone else in Asgard
was even less likely than the C.R.E. to give me any money on the terms I was
offering, but in the end I went home. Six hours had passed but Sovorov hadn't
called.

When no one is
prepared to give you what you need there's really only one thing you can do,
and that's recalculate your needs. There were two ways I could do that. One
was to give up operating independently and join a team. There were at least a
dozen outfits who would hire me who kept their fieldworkers supplied with
adequate life-support systems and moderately generous pay, but the pay would be
all I'd get. If the team I was with made a significant find, its members would
get a bonus, but we'd have to hand it over the moment we found it and say
goodbye to it forever. The chance of following anything through would be gone.

I hated to give up
on the dream of turning up something big—specifically, a way down into one or
more unexplored levels. The chance of finding valuable technics was only part
of it; what really mattered was the chance to discover a whole new world. I'd
been born way too late to get in on the first race into interstellar space,
when everyone thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that the galaxy might be full
of virgin worlds awaiting discovery and gaiaformation, but that dream had been
animating human history for centuries and I'd inherited it in spite of its obsolescence.
The discovery that there was a place where the race was still on—not because
the Tetrax hadn't got there first but because they were stuck outside a locked
door with no obvious way in—had been an irresistible lure, once it had been
explained to me properly by my namesake, Michael Finn.

Even after all my
years of Asgard, I thought of my life in terms of Mickey's sales talk. I still
wanted to be the first to find a way down into the heart of the megastructure.
I still wanted all the inhabitants of Skychain City to know who I was. I still
wanted people on Earth—the homeworld on which I'd never actually set foot—to
speak my name in awed tones.

I wanted to be a
hero—a living legend. I'm not altogether sure
why
I wanted it, but
I did. It wasn't easy to surrender the possibility, however remote it might
be.

The other way I could
reduce my needs was by deciding that the equipment I had in my truck was good
for one more trip, and that everything else I owned could be sold to buy food,
water and other wasting assets. The returns from my last trip had already paid
for the most necessary repairs to the vehicle—that had been my first
priority—so I was certain that I could get myself to any pinprick I cared to
put on a map of the surface. My cold-suit could still pass the basic
safety-checks, so I'd be okay getting down to level one, but the suit was
getting old and it was by no means state-of-the-art. It would get me down to
level three or four—but would it get me back again?

The dayside
temperature on the surface of Asgard is high enough to be almost comfortable,
but level one never gets much above the freezing point of water. Level two is a
nice, steady 140 Celsius below freezing. Down in four it's still only twenty or
thirty above absolute zero. That wasn't much higher than it had been when the
artefact was in the depths of the dark cloud in which—according to the best
brains in the C.R.E.—it had spent the better part of the last few million
years, and maybe a lot longer.

I wanted to go down
to four, and I only wanted to do that in order to search for a way to go lower
down. My suit would probably be fine if I stayed on one and two, and didn't
wander too far from the truck, but if I were only going to do that I might as
well stay in the bowels of Skychain City, working inch by inch with a C.R.E.
crew. Going down to four without the best available equipment was like playing
Russian roulette with only one empty chamber; when you're leaving footprints in
oxy-nitro snow you can't afford to have a cold-suit develop a fault. It would
be a quick way to go; I'd turn into a corpsicle in a matter of seconds—and
rumour had it that the Tetrax were on the very threshold of developing technics
that would allow them to resurrect me in a hundred or a thousand years—but it
still wasn't the kind of gamble that a serious student of probability would
take.

There was also the
matter of supplies. Food, water, gaspacks and fuel all had to be bought, and
they didn't come cheap. Nothing came cheap in Skychain City—except, of course,
when you were trying to sell instead of buy. When I added up the resale value
of my worldly goods, it didn't come to very much at all. I had tapes and books,
and equipment to play them, but what good are tapes and books in English and
French, and equipment made to domestic specifications, on a world where only a
couple of hundred humans live?

If there'd been any
realistic hope of equipping a new expedition without borrowed money, I wouldn't
have been hanging around in Skychain City waiting for a miracle; I'd have been
on my way to middle of nowhere. I might have been a scavenger, in the eyes of
someone like Alex Sovorov, but I wasn't an idiot. If nothing turned up, I was
finished.

I remembered, yet
again, that something
had
turned up the night before, and I'd
been too tired to find out what it might be. The overwhelming probability, I knew,
was that it was nothing at all—just one more problem to add to the list—but I couldn't
help wondering whether I might have missed the last bus to Hope yet again.

My friend Aleksandr
finally called in the evening, way past the time when the C.R.E. offices would
have closed for business.

"Sorry it's so
late," he said. "You know how committees are."

"Sure," I
said. "What's the verdict?"

"They've
offered you a job," he said. "It's quite a generous package, all
things considered. They're keen to employ you, in fact—but it's a job or
nothing. They want to buy your expertise, not fund your recklessness."

"Thanks,"
I said, numbly. "But no thanks."

"I'm sorry,
Michael," he said, insincerely, "but I don't think you have any
option."

"You can call
me Mr. Rousseau," I told him, and hung

up.

My sleep was
uninterrupted by phone calls, but I can't say that I slept well. As I ate
breakfast, I assured myself that at least things couldn't get any worse—but I was
wrong about that.

I'd just thrown the
plate into the grinder when the door buzzer sounded. When I opened the door, I found
myself looking at two Spirellans.

My immediate
instinct was to close the door—not because I have anything against Spirellans
in general, but because these two were wearing gaudy clothing to signal the
fact that they were unmated males not yet established in the status hierarchy.
The ways in which a Spirellan can win a good place in the hierarchy of his clan
are said to be many and varied, but not many of them apply in a place like
Skychain City, where there are so many aliens. The ways in which Spirellans can
win status by dealing with aliens mostly involve doing them down—and to a
Spirellan, I was an alien of no particular importance.

There are half a
hundred humanoid species regarded by the Tetrax as utter barbarians, and they'd
probably reckon Spirellans to be on exactly the same level as humans. I'd have
put them a little lower, but I could see how the Spirellans might be biased the
other way.

I let them in,
politely. In order to get along in a place where hundreds of humanoid races rub
shoulders on a day- to-day basis, you have to suppress your instincts.

"My name is
Heleb," said the taller of the two, as his eyes scanned my room with
patience and exactitude. "I believe that you are Michael Rousseau."

I wasn't offended by
the fact that he wasn't looking at me. He was being polite. When one
status-seeking Spirellan male makes eye contact with another, it's a
challenge—not necessarily to a fight, but a contest of some sort. On the other
hand, I wasn't under any illusion about not being in a contest.

"That's
right," I confirmed.

"It has come
to the notice of my employer that you are looking for work," he said. He
spoke well, but he had an unfair advantage. Spirellans don't look much like
Tetrax— they have blue-and-pink marbled skin and two very pronounced skull
ridges, which make them look rather like lizards with winged helmets, while the
Tetrax look more like moon-faced gorillas with skins like waxed black tree
bark—but they have similar mouth-parts, with flattened upper palates and
protean tongues.

"Are you from
the Co-ordinated Research Establishment?" I asked, warily.

"No," he
said. "Put your mind at rest, Michael Rousseau. We do not operate in the
conservative fashion that the Tetrax adopt. I believe that you would find our
ways of working much more in tune with your own. We are adventurers."

"I'm
considering several alternative offers at present," I told him. "If
you would care to tell me the name of your employer and details of your offer,
I'll certainly consider it carefully." While I said it I watched his
junior partner moving around my room. He seemed to be going to extraordinary
lengths to make certain that there was no danger of our eyes meeting. In fact,
he seemed to be paying very close attention to the contents of my shelves, even
though he couldn't possibly have understood either of the languages in which
the titles of my books and tapes were inscribed. He was definitely looking for
something, although I couldn't imagine what.

Heleb flashed me
the Spirellan equivalent of a smile, although the fact that his eyes were
carefully averted gave it an implication of slyness he couldn't have intended.
"I would take charge of one of the trucks myself," he told me,
proudly. "There would be five of us, including my brother Lema." He
paused to nod in the direction of his companion. "We would be very glad to
have you with us. We need a man of your experience. In time, we will be
experienced too, but we need good guidance, and we know that you are the man to
provide it. We would hire you for one expedition only, and would pay you
generously. If you wish, you would then have credit enough to outfit an
expedition of your own—although we would be glad to offer you the opportunity
to accompany us again, if you prefer."