by Hans Kneifel
"Is it a memory unit failure?" the physician asked.
Rhodan's finger tapped the touchscreen on the com system. "Rhodan calling PALENQUE!" he said tightly. "Why did you break off the transmission?"
No answer. A second attempt, carried out by the Syntron using other frequencies, produced the same result.
Rhodan leaned back and closed his eyes for a long moment. "We've completely lost contact with the ships."
"It's as if ... something invisible is playing with us?" Denetree said hesitantly.
"At least it feels that way," Rhodan commented after thinking about it for a moment. "Maybe you're right. But we should do something while we still can." Forcing himself to stay calm, he called the two crawlers over the com system. "Rhodan here. I assume that you've lost contact with the PALENQUE the same as we have. Let's hope it's just temporary. We'll stay in contact and continue as planned. Have you found anything?"
The answer from Crawler VIII came almost at once.
"No, but there are many indications of rich mineral resources."
Crawler V also responded.
"No signs of current or former inhabitants. No structures, roads, or anything like that."
"If I may give you some advice," Rhodan said after a moment's thought, "stay as close together as you can. Fly low over the ground in case the invisible energy-eaters cut off the small units, too."
"Good idea. We'll do that. Thanks for the tip, Rhodan."
Rhodan rested his fingers on the controls and said, "Invisible inhabitants? A very well-concealed base? Something hiding in one of the moons? Well, it's pointless to speculate about it now." He laughed briefly and without humor. "Maybe the planet doesn't like visitors who can move freely so it cuts their energy off? Let's take off while we can still fly."
He closed the hatch and typed in the launch sequence. The Space-Jet flew at an altitude of about 100 meters behind the Shift towards the location of the cylinder. Minutes later, the four saw that the command module had landed relatively softly in a landscape of chalky sand dunes.
Invisible, the Menttia of the Flaming Autumn Forests observed the newcomers in their small flying objects. They watched as the strangers mixed with the survivors of the destruction and then departed again. They felt thin, alternating streams of energy, and noted with surprise the lack of dangerously high aggression.
—Perhaps they wish to help each other?—
—They can still communicate unhindered among themselves, but no longer with their spaceships.—
—They are members of two different star peoples. But they resemble each other as we resemble our own kind.—
Bathing in the shower of light particles from the hot mid-day sun, the organized mass of Menttia circled over the main portion of the wrecked steel intruder. A swarm formed an independent unit, exchanged information with the greater collective mass, then broke away. At first, three portions of the autonomous swarm of fire-beings decided to prevent possible danger to themselves. To this end they set up a further barrier between the depths of space and the planetary surface.
The lesser swarm swirled several times around the great gathering and then slowly followed the small, silver-gray flying object. It appeared to be heading to the place where some of the Menttia of the Singing Dunes had been waiting since many day-changes—. Surprised, disconcerted, and touched all at once—the Menttia of the Singing Dunes observed the lonely struggle of two strange individuals. Two strangers who displayed not the slightest tendency for aggression.
The Menttia could absorb the emanations of scent molecules given off by sun and dust, sand and water, and fire and smoke. A preference for certain variations of scents united a portion of the swarm. The Menttia sensitized to those odors then spun in a slow dance in the unique mixture of heat, light, and reflections.
The rich energy-filled mass of air creatures approached the place in the dunes where the tragedy had taken place. With them were the small flying objects, whose noisy, energy-devouring flight was so much more difficult for them than for any Menttia.
7
Death and the Immortal
The Commander's escape module was a cylindrical unit about thirty meters long. That was not surprising considering where it had been mounted on the ringship. It had probably been shot clear of the ark by solid-fuel rockets, and after falling had landed using thin metal parachutes and inflatable impact-absorbers. Even so, a long track showed that the speed of the cylinder must have been considerable. All the impact-absorbing rescue systems had been shredded, burned, and were full of soot. Melted cables stuck to the metal hull like gruesome decorations.
Meanwhile, the Shift had set down between the low dunes and the trail of caterpillar tracks showed that it had moved in closer. Footprints led in a snaking line to the wreckage. Rhodan guided the Space-Jet in a slow downwards spiral towards the scene of devastation. His companions were silent and stared out of the forward windshield and at the detailed holos from the exterior cameras.
"Five people," Denetree said with a hoarse voice. "There, under that awning, to the right of the open hatchway. The Akonians and a Lemurian."
Amid bent rails, burned cables and a tangle of connections that had opened widely like steel claws, gaped a burned-out hatch that had been half-torn off its hinges. A partially extended ramp with bent fold-out railings led down into the sand where a deeply imprinted trail began. The dark, blackened module and the almost white sand formed a grotesquely brutal contrast: shattered technology lay half-buried in untouched nature.
"We're landing," Rhodan announced. The Space-Jet descended towards a relatively level patch of ground and set down on the extended landing gear. The whirling sand quickly subsided.
"Given the amount of destruction," Dr. Mahal said, "we probably won't need any weapons." Then he suddenly looked embarrassed, undoubtedly regretting making such a superfluous remark.
Isaias Shimon made sure that the exterior cameras were trained on the three Akonians and the fifth figure. Denetree seemed to have seen more than Rhodan and was the first to leave the Space-Jet.
Rhodan let the others go ahead and followed them slowly through golden, crunching sand. What he had seen depressed him. Destroyed or unusable technology, and hundreds or thousands of marooned, confused, injured, or dead Lemurians, who now had to accept a new homeland. Even though he bore the experiences of nearly three millennia on his shoulders, it did not leave him unmoved. He looked at the toes of his boots as though he wanted to count the grains of sand. As snatches of conversation in the Lemurian language reached his ears, he looked up and within an endlessly long half-second he took in a very different picture that grabbed his attention.
Denetree and Solina Tormas spoke with a tall woman, a Lemurian, who towered over the others by nearly a head and stood next to a makeshift awning. Under it lay a gaunt man stretched out on a net-like couch. The worn path from the massive cylinder ended there. Hyman Mahal knelt down next to the man and manipulated a syntronic diagnostic sensor rod.
The beardless and hairless old man had closed his eyes; his lips twitched in a face full of deep wrinkles. Between the shade and the sunlight, innumerable ant-like animals half the size of a finger moved on the sand. They scrabbled out of holes in the ground carrying triangular scraps in their pincers. Rhodan heard words spoken in a strange, contralto voice.
" ... the Commander," Rhodan heard. "Atubur Nutai, the Immortal, is dying. His Metach'rath is fulfilling itself."
The words came from the tall, slender woman who was clad in a kind of uniform that had originally been white but was now soiled by soot and brown flecks and was torn in several places. Her oval face and the hands with which she calmly gestured had a stunning yet mature beauty.
Rhodan stepped nearer. She became aware of him and looked at him with a sphinx-like smile.
"I am Perry Rhodan, and I learned your language many years ago," he said, making an effort to pronounce his words particularly clearly. "These are my companions. Can we help you?"
He
r smile remained inscrutable. Then it vanished, replaced by sadness. The woman's aura held him entranced. Rhodan felt something like a choking hand around his throat.
"It would be a miracle if you could," she replied. "The Immortal is dying. How is it that you understand our language?"
"I am older than you," Rhodan said gently, "and learned it a long time ago." Denetree and Solina looked at him in silence, almost in awe. He approached the bed on which the old man lay. The man had a powerful body and the emaciated face of someone close to death. "Is this the Naahk—the Commander of the ship, LEMCHA OVIR?"
"It is. I am his life companion, Chibis-Nydele."
The tall, elderly Lemurian with the bald head on the cot wore overalls and thick boots like Nydele. In more than five places, his sun-yellow clothing was drenched in blood that had long dried. His shirt had been opened at his chest. From a thin chain of golden metal hung an ornament that resembled a strange, small animal that might have been found on a coral reef, or an exotic flower. It blinked red in a rapid rhythm, perhaps almost fifteen times a second.
"There's nothing I can do to help him, Perry," the doctor said calmly. His voice did not express despair. He regarded death, even in this unusual place, as irrevocable. His summary sounded matter of fact. "Internal injuries, heavy bleeding, some serious breaks. The Syntron is reacting oddly."
Rhodan nodded to him and, turning his head in small jerks, looked at the Akonians, Denetree, Shimon, Mahal, and finally Nydele. She was enchanting, about 35 earthly years old, mature, slender, and possessed of a perfect Lemurian-Akonian-Terran body. He could not think of a better description. Three delicate crests topped her velvet-brown head, the scales showing different colors with each movement like some kinds of snakeskin. Under eyebrows evenly curved like butterfly antennae, he saw large, golden blue eyes.
"He is dying. Naahk Atubur Nutai, the Star Seeker, is dying," she repeated in a voice that made Rhodan feel a lump in his throat. Rhodan suppressed the spontaneous urge to take her in his arms and console her. She smiled forlornly. "He is finally dying. I carried him out on my back and bedded him down here, on this strange sand."
"We can't do anything, Perry," the doctor said. "All I can tell is that he isn't feeling any more pain."
With a wave, Rhodan stopped him from saying more and exchanged a long look with Solina. A gesture from Dr. Mahal confirmed that there was no hope.
"Chibis-Nydele," Rhodan said softly through the whirring of the sand grains in the noon wind, "we will let him die. In dignity and in the sand of this planet, Mentack Nutai. Even immortals have a right to enter into eternity. I can see it in your look—you loved him."
"I loved only him, no others, and nothing else and no one else other than him," she said in a mild burst of trust that was directed only at him.
He reached for her hand; the slender fingers were cool and neither soft nor hard. Next to Shimon, Denetree wept silently, and so did Solina. The decorative amulet shone in rapid-fire blinking, emitted an almost inaudible hum, and then the light went out.
Could that be a cell activator? Rhodan wondered in a flash of insight. The Commander of the NETHACK ACHTON had one. But who was handing out cell activators in Lemuria 50,000 years ago? I wish I knew.
He let go of Nydele's hand. "We should bury him," he said gently. "Later Chibi-Nydele you can tell us how you came to this terrible crash. There should be spades or shovels in the Jet."
"I'll go get them," said Ameda Fayard, who up to then had been watching and listening to everything in silent emotion.
The eight-legged little animals had formed into a long column and crawled with their booty to the cleft between two heaps of sand. There was a hole there, into which they disappeared.
Chibis-Nydele bent and almost tenderly stroked the egg-sized ornament that had ceased functioning. "Nutai was a man filled with contradictions. Relentlessly hard, endlessly gentle and often like a child. This chain ... he never took it off, not even when he slept."
"Did he ever say why not?"
"It was a souvenir of his childhood, which was so long ago. She looked up at Rhodan. "Your eyes ... you have experienced as much as he did, am I right?"
"Atubur was more than five centuries old," Rhodan answered softly. Even if the ark had been under way for 50,000 years, they had to take time dilation into account. His voice was hoarse. "It is as you say. I am older and have experienced more."
"Perhaps you are also an immortal, like him," Nydele said. "But you are alive and he is dead."
Rhodan only nodded. Like a great dune, the silence that no one dared to break weighed heavily on the group's thoughts and feelings.
Wrapped in a gold-colored metal foil sheet from one of the escape module's parachutes, they laid the feather-light body of the Commander at the bottom of the grave that had been dug. As they piled sand and gravel into the grave, thin black roots moved out of the way and withdrew, then silently disappeared in the sand. Ameda Fayard held a splintered strut of shining metal, which had been twisted into the shape of a lightning bolt. She drove it into the ground at the head end of the low mound.
Rhodan ignored the curious glances his companions gave the cell activator, which Atubur Nutai took with him to the grave.
Finally Denetree touched Nydele on the arm. "You are here all alone. Where should we take you?"
"This section of the ark is too heavy for our spacecraft," Rhodan said quickly. "It is surely filled with many important things. Not very far away, in that direction, a large piece of the OVIR came down. Would you like to join your people?"
Chibis-Nydele turned and began to walk from the grave to the ramp. Her visitors followed her. She moved as though in a trance until she came to an abrupt stop. "I don't know what I should do. I cannot take Nutai's place. Hardly anyone from the Star of Hope knows me. I am not a leader. Are ... are there many dead?"
"That is what we assume," Solina answered.
Nydele smiled absently. "Come inside with me. Let us drink to the Star Seeker. I have not even asked you how it is that you have encountered the ill-fated LEMCHA OVIR here on Mentack Nutai."
"The Terrans came across another ship by chance," Denetree answered solemnly. "The NETHACK ACHTON, in which I lived. There my new friends learned of the LEMCHA OVIR and searched for it. They are trying to learn about the ships' past. Do you have information about it in the command module?"
At the lower end of the ramp, Nydele made an inviting gesture. She now seemed to be consciously differentiating between the individual members of the visiting party. "The Commander could have told you much. Not I. I have seen how he would disappear for days on end and then reappear as though he was years younger. He had never wanted to speak of it."
Rhodan saw and sensed that his companions were just as fascinated by Nydele's appearance as he was.
"But the Net is broken down, like almost everything else. Where the data store is, I don't know. Come inside. Perhaps you will find what you seek."
The tracks in the sand that Rhodan and his companions had followed formed a half-circle around the module. He concluded that for more than a month, Nydele had attempted to ease the Commander's dying, or had hoped he would recover outside the wreck. From the look of things, she had continually run between their wrecked quarters and the shade-providing shelter. But in the end she had lost her love.
Atubur Nutai, an "immortal"—his life spanned the lifetimes of all the generations of ark inhabitants. With him, knowledge of the past had died as well. Had he kept written notes, had he collected data, were there chronicles or ark logbooks? If so, were they handwritten or stored as positronic data?
Nydele led them into the rooms that she and Nutai had inhabited, and took Rhodan's wrist. At the end of the massive cylinder, through a succession of strangely shaped hatches and compartments, past an elevator, she stopped in front of a spiral stairway.
"The elevator no longer works. You can reach the command center from here. Out of every ten hours, Naahk Nutai spent nine alone among his controls. I
t was here that he was so severely injured during the impact that ... "
"May I look around?"
"There is still a little power. Perhaps you will find what you're looking for."
Rhodan thanked her and climbed out of the realm of amber-colored lights into the twilight of a command center filled with instruments and controls. The forward section of the cylinder, whose floor lay surprisingly parallel to the planet's ground, had been glassed over. Now warm air and sunlight came through the shattered glass sheets. There was in fact still power that circulated uncertainly through some of the systems. Lights with unintelligible designations blinked irregularly, here and there something crackled and snapped, and there was a smell of burnt-out positronic circuitry. Rhodan went to the Commander's chair and tried to determine the meaning of the switches, touchscreens, blank vidscreens. He found a flickering display that showed the LEMCHA OVIR in an undamaged state: an encircling four-edged ring, divided into five decks, and marked with various coded designations. Rhodan was very familiar with similar control centers, but he found nothing that even remotely resembled a data storage unit. And of course he did not find a hypercom transmitter.
He went back, climbed up the steps, and followed the sound of voices. In an anteroom with curved walls, Rhodan noticed a picture, the sight of which gave him quite a start. He stepped closer and examined it intently.
The wide frame seemed to be cut from semi-precious stone. Under the six fingers of a delicate, dark brown hand that guided two strangely shaped brushes, a picture of a Lemurian had taken shape. The figure, in turn, had chiseled out of a block on a pedestal the form of a Halutian—a "Beast." The background of the scene showed an idealized landscape with three moons—probably a planet of the Great Tamanium. The Halutian, just as large as the sculptor, seemed surprisingly alive, but the heel of one of his massive feet and an arm had still not been carved out of the block. The block itself resembled cooled lava or soft obsidian.
