Gift From The Stars (21 page)

Frances clenched her hands around the armrests of her chair. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of Jessie, but this is like a Sargasso of space. Ships are stuck, unable to move, unable to leave.”

“You’ve been reading too much romantic fiction again,” Adrian said.

“All this may be the realization of poor Peter’s worst fears. The aliens’ purpose in sending the plans was to collect specimens, or to restock their larder.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Adrian said. “There are easier and cheaper ways to get food.”

“But not specimens,” Frances said. “The zookeeper doesn’t even have to send out an expedition; the specimens come to him and deliver themselves up.”

“Now you’re into the horror genre,” Adrian said.

“Or maybe sick comedy.”

“So what do you recommend?” Adrian asked. “That we turn around and go back? It’s going to take a while to replenish our antimatter sup
ply, particularly from this old sun. And even if we had the fuel, how are we going to face traveling all this way and going back without any answers?”

“Maybe we should knock on a few doors,” Frances said.

“That sounds like human impatience,” Adrian said. “And, as Jessie pointed out, we’re not sure how the aliens welcome newcomers, if at all. Maybe we have to prove our good intentions by waiting; maybe a decent interval is an essential element in civilized relationships.”

“Maybe it’s hazing,” Frances said.

“Let’s give it a better name: an initiation ceremony. We’ll wait a reasonable time, and in the meanwhile, we’ll send out our antimatter collectors to replenish our fuel supply, just in case we need to leave in a hurry.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Frances said. “Are there any other antimatter collectors in orbit around that weak nuclear furnace they have for a sun?”

“Not that we can detect,” Adrian said. “But our instruments may not be sensitive enough, or the other collectors may not be the same design, any more than the spaceships that brought them.”

So they sent their antimatter collectors to orbit the K-type sun and waited. And waited.

After thirty-five days—they still counted days and weeks and even months— human impatience being what it is, they decided to do something. Frances had said a week was long enough and Jessica, a month, but Adrian wanted to give the aliens more time. Finally he decided that five weeks was sufficient delay, for the human crew if not for the aliens. “It may be unwise to investigate the other ships,” Adrian said. “Even if we knew how to enter one; even if we knew they were empty. And they probably aren’t. They’re probably filled with aliens doing their alien things.”

“You mean, it would be like us going around to the other guests at the party, asking impertinent questions, like why they got invited, what they know about the hosts?” Frances said.

“That leaves the planet itself,” Jessica said.

“But what is there to look at?” Frances asked.

“There must be something there,” Jessica said. “Clearly the other ships think it’s the focus of something, and clearly it is what drew us—and them—here.”

Adrian’s fingers moved over the buttons of the control panel. “I’ve
been using our ground-penetrating radar. There seem to be cavities.” He motioned toward the screen.

“Caves?” Jessica asked.

“Or tunnels. And scattered across that landscape”—Adrian motioned once more toward a scene that now showed, close-up, the surface of the planet—“are hot-spots. They look like ordinary rocks but they are hotter than their neighbors by one hundred degrees or more.”

“If the aliens live inside, they would need to get rid of waste heat,” Jessica said. “Particularly if they use a lot of machinery.”

Frances looked back and forth between them, as if she were a spectator at a tennis match.

“And they would have to use a lot of machinery to live inside,” Adrian said, “and those might well be radiators. They can recycle air and water and whatever else they find essential, but they can’t recycle heat.”

“So,” Frances said, “they live inside. With a world like that, it makes sense. But how do we get in to let them know we’re here?”

“That’s a good question,” Jessica said. “If they have camouflaged their radiators, it may mean they don’t want to be found.”

“But they brought us here—all this way!” Frances said.

“Maybe,” Adrian said, “they want to be found but not too easily.”

They looked at each other. It was another question whose answer could only be discovered by pursuing it to the end. “We’ll never know,” Adrian said finally, “until we make the effort. Radar suggests several places where the tunnels—if that is what they are—approach the surface. We can’t just sit here; it’s not just us—the rest of the crew is getting restless. I am, too. I suggest we go down and see.”

Frances insisted on being a member of the exploration team. It would give her a chance, she said, to feel real gravity again. Jessica, however, was placed in command of the expedition to the surface because of her greater athleticism and quicker reflexes, and both Frances and Jessica insisted that Adrian was too essential to the
Ad Astra
and its crew to risk on this kind of mission. Since he was a reasonable man, he agreed, but he grumbled about not being among those who would experience the culmination of their long labors.

“If you’re comparing yourself to Moses,” Frances said, “remember that he died before he saw the Promised Land. At least you’re still alive.”

“And, unless we run into real trouble, there will be other opportunities to get our questions answered,” Jessica said.

“And if we do run into real trouble,” Frances added, “you’ll still be here to try something else.”

So, in a small craft powered by chemical rockets, they went down to
the surface, Frances and Jessica, a pilot, and two sturdy engineers. They landed gently enough for a pilot who hadn’t had much experience in small craft and none in landings on airless planets of this size. “We’re here,” Jessica said shakily. Frances noticed that she had been holding her breath. She had been doing that a lot lately.

They were dressed for vacuum, complete with helmets, and the voices came by way of intercoms. The surface of the planet was airless, and even if they found a way inside the likelihood of the air there being breathable , or, if breathable, not poisonous to humans, was close to zero.

They stood upon this ancient world, feet planted firmly in dust and rock, and looked around at the unpromising landscape: rocks, rocks, and more rocks illuminated by the feeble orange rays of the sun. Frances looked up at where the
Ad Astra
had orbited and saw scattered glints of orange where sunlight touched ships, probably not the
Ad Astra
, which had moved on since they had left it.

“Well,” came a voice close to her ear, “what’s going on?”

Frances started. “Nothing yet,” she said, and she heard Jessica giving Adrian technical information about their landing and their surroundings.

Frances looked around. The landing was intended to be close to a tunnel that approached the surface, but she couldn’t see anything that looked like an entrance. But then she didn’t know what an alien would build for an entrance, even if it wanted one. Of course the aliens might have no reason to come out. Without the need for an exit, the entrance might have been permanently sealed.

“Maybe,” she said impulsively, “the aliens bring other beings here to act as their eyes and ears. They sealed themselves up and don’t want to come out, but they’re curious and they have to find out about what’s going on.”

“Maybe,” Adrian said.

“Or maybe,” Frances went on, “they’re agoraphobes who
can’t
go out, and they need somebody to do the exploring for them.”

“Maybe,” Adrian said.

“And maybe we’ll find some answers if we can find a way to get this thing open,” Jessica said.

She was standing in front of a larger rock that stood like an obelisk in a field of smaller stones. She pointed to places where the rock had been chipped away, and other places where the face of the rock revealed a straight-line crack. “That isn’t natural,” she said tinnily.

“On the other hand,” Frances said, “it may not have been done by the
tunnelers but by visitors like us, trying to find our hosts. Why would they enter through a pillar?”

“Over there, then,” Jessica said. “There’s a cliff. That would be a good place.”

She bounded over to stand in front of it. Frances and the two engineers followed more sedately. It was a good place. The rock face had been smoothed in spots, although this could have been the result of fault line splits from heating and cooling cycles. Some kinds of tools had been at work there, as well; some cutting edges, some drills, some evidences of rock melting. Someone else had been eager to enter—when the tunnels were built or after they were completed and the builders sealed inside.

Most of all, however, there were incisions of some kind that looked as if they might have meaning—like writing, if something even more cryptic than hieroglyphs could be considered writing. They fiddled around with it, the engineers muttering engineering talk to each other and Frances and Jessica taking turns informing Adrian.

They took pictures. They renewed their air supplies at the landing craft, and eventually they gave up.

Frances, Jessica, and Adrian studied the alien inscriptions on the computer screen. Adrian fiddled with the keyboard, bringing the photographic images up so close that their imperfections were exaggerated like the pores of Gulliver’s Brobdingnagians. Here was a place that a micro-meteorite might have struck, there, that a flake of rock-face might have scaled away from the effects of alternating baking and freezing. On the other hand, they might have been the intention of the carvers. Clearly they had been created, and equally clearly they were indecipherable.

Hoping for a Rosetta Stone, Adrian had asked the computer for a comparison with its vast storehouse of images, including Peter Cavendish’s spaceship designs and whatever else he had inserted into the database about the aliens and never revealed, but after thirty-six hours the computer had come up with nothing.
How could human minds find a solution that this computer, with its virtually inexhaustible memory capacity and its micro-swift data processors, could not?
Frances wondered.

“One advantage we have,” Adrian said, as if answering Frances’ unspoken question, “is imagination. This could be instructions for opening the entrance.”

“Sort of an ‘open sesame,’” Jessica said.

“Or it could be a threat,” Frances said, “like the inscription on Shakespeare’s headstone: ‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear/ To dig the dust enclosed here/ Blest be the man that spares these stones/ And curst be he that moves my bones.’”

“You think they might be dead?” Jessica asked. Her eyes widened at the thought that they might have come all this long way at the invitation of creatures long deceased.

“Maybe it’s something as simple as the inscription on a cornerstone: on this date, this entrance was sealed,” Adrian said.

“Or: no tradesmen; deliveries in the rear,” Jessica added, getting into the spirit of the discussion. “Or: emergency exit only—warning will sound.”

“That’s an idea,” Adrian said. “It doesn’t make any sense to provide instructions that nobody is going to be able to read. So, maybe it tells aliens who come outside, for whatever reason, where to find the right entrance.”

“We’re assuming that the inscription was made by the aliens who carved out a habitat for themselves inside this world when their air failed,” Frances said. “But maybe it’s just graffiti, like the names and initials carved into famous places all over Earth. This world has had all kinds of alien visitors; maybe the inscriptions are the alien equivalent of ‘Kilroy was here.’”

Adrian put his hands together and pressed his lips with the triangle formed by his index fingers. “One sample isn’t enough,” he said finally. “We can’t expect to come upon the proper spot in our first attempt. Let’s try some other likely locations.”

“In stories explorers always find alien artifacts or aliens themselves on their first attempt,” Frances said, “and that is a good reason not to expect it to happen in real life. It’s just a convention—a way to get on with the action.”