The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  Nineteen

  As gently as they could, they pulled the bodies off the wall and lowered them to the frost. All three wore the six-sided beads frozen to their foreheads. Andersen snapped them off and zipped them into the breast pocket of his airskin.

  “Demonios malvados!” Mondragon protested. “The evil demons of the ice inhabit them. Leave them here with los pobrecitos.”

  “We don’t know what they are.” Andersen shrugged. “Our job isn’t done till we do.”

  Beyond the next corner, they came back into the searchlight’s dazzle and heard Cruzet.

  “Andy? Andy? You okay?”

  “Alive,” Andersen said. “Ready to get out, if you’ll pick us up. Come up the ramp. We’ll wait behind the building.”

  They waited with the bodies till Cruzet drove around the corner and stopped the spider beside them. In his airskin, he came out to stare a long time at the creatures on the wall before he found the three stiff bodies. Gone pale in the helmet, he listened in silence to what they said and beckoned them stiffly toward the spider.

  Mondragon wanted to bury the bodies.

  “We owe them,” he said. “They died for us.”

  “No time for that,” Andersen said. “Nor tools to dig graves in the frost.”

  “Spread blankets over them,” Cruzet said. “They’ll be covered forever.”

  They spread the blankets. Standing over their heads, beneath the red-lit images of those hunting predators, Mondragon bowed his head to recite words he recalled from his mother’s funeral. Cruzet drove them back around that doorless block of coal black stone, back beneath those lofty oval windows and that vast panorama of the amphibians waddling out of the sea to unfold brilliant wings and climb into a bright blue sky. Looking back from the bubble, Mondragon crossed himself and whispered the prayers his mother had taught him when he was three years old.

  He and Andersen in the Alpha, Cruzet in the Beta, they drove back north. When they were again within radio range of the ship, they called Glengarth.

  “Thank God!” he greeted them. “I need you here.”

  Andersen told him that Singh and her crew were dead.

  “I was afraid.” His voice had fallen, but he was silent only a moment. “Make it back as fast as you can. Or we could all be dead.”

  Reba Washburn met them in the hangar balloon when they came off the ramps from the spiders.

  “They’re waiting for you,” she said. “On the concom deck. Right now.”

  With no time even to wash or shave, they followed her into the elevator and found Captain Stecker seated across the long curve of the conference table, an empty glass before him. He looked pale and puffy; gaining weight, Mondragon thought. Jonas Roak and Jesus Rivera sat at his right. Washburn took the empty chair between them, all three in black security caps.

  Silently, Glengarth rose to shake their hands and beckon them to join Sternberg, Jim Cheng, and Rima, sitting on the inside curve of the table. Mondragon saw Rima’s quick smile of relief when Andersen came out of the elevator; he wished her welcome might have been for him.

  “Sit.” With no show of pleasure, Stecker waved them into place across the table. “Give us your story.”

  “Make it complete,” Roak muttered. “If Singh and her crew are lost, tell how.”

  “They are dead.” Bleak-faced, Andersen nodded. “Frozen hard as rock. As for how it happened …” He shrugged uneasily. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s have what you do know.”

  “Sir?” Like a schoolboy, Cruzet raised his hand. “We’re worn out. Half dead ourselves. Can you get us some coffee?”

  “Jesus.” Roak scowled at Rivera. “Get it done.”

  “Hay-soos.” Rivera corrected him stiffly and disappeared into the elevator.

  “Get at it.” Roak turned impatiently to Andersen. “We’ve got no time to squander.”

  “Thank you.” Andersen turned back to Glengarth and his companions. “It’s not a pleasant story, but we did learn something about the past inhabitants. From the canal, first of all. It’s evidence that a strong industrial technology and a busy maritime commerce once existed here. The canal, however, must have been abandoned long before the oceans froze. On beyond—”

  “If they’re dead,” Roak interrupted him, “how did they die?”

  “I’ll get to it, but it won’t make much sense till you hear the whole story.”

  “Okay. Get to it.”

  “—Out of radio contact,” Andersen resumed deliberately, “we pushed on. Nothing remarkable till we came to the tip of the peninsula. We did find something there. A temple, perhaps—I don’t know what else to call it. Indra thought the skeleton she found came from a flying creature that evolved in the sea. I believe the natives—or at least whatever built that structure—were her amphibians.”

  “Huh?” Scowling impatiently, Stecker lifted his empty glass and set it down again. “What are amphibians?”

  “These could swim, and also fly. The building is convincing evidence of that, though it does raise questions we can’t answer.”

  “Get on,” Roak muttered, “with what you know. We don’t want guesses.”

  “I’m trying to tell you what we saw,” Andersen answered evenly. “I don’t pretend to understand it. One strange thing, the place looks perfectly preserved. That black tower wasn’t.”

  “Forget your black tower.”

  “Okay.” Andersen nodded rather grimly. “A very remarkable mosaic on the face of this building shows the native amphibians climbing out of the still-liquid sea. It was long ago, yet we saw no sign of damage or erosion. Which made us wonder if something is still caring for the building.”

  “What has that to do with Indra?”

  “A good deal,” Andersen said. “We found the Alpha abandoned a few kilometers off the beach. They had left it without their airskins. They came out naked—”

  “Naked?” Stecker sat up in his chair, suddenly sober. “That’s crazy!”

  “Sir, they certainly were.” Bleakly, Andersen nodded again. “Though I don’t know why they were crazed. Their bare feet had left footprints in the frost, leading away from the spider. Without airskins, totally exposed, they were somehow able to walk several kilometers to the building. They walked around it, searching for an entrance. There is no entrance. Not at ground level.

  “They died, sir, trying to climb—”

  “What the hell?” Stecker barked, and swung to glare at Cruzet and Mondragon. “Do you expect us to believe …”

  He saw their solemn nods and let his voice fade away.

  “Sir, it’s nothing we wanted to believe.” Cruzet shook his head. “But they left their airskins in the vehicle. Naked and barefoot, they walked at least three kilometers. We found their bodies frozen hard as iron.”

  “Nik and Kobo?” Jim Cheng bowed his head, whispering the names. “My best friends.” Shivering, he stared blankly at Andersen. “What got into them?”

  “One clue, which may mean something.” Andersen looked back at Glengarth. “You recall those tiny six-sided prisms Singh found with her skeleton? They all wore them, frozen to their foreheads.”

  Rima’s face went white.

  “My little girl was playing with one of those beads.” Mondragon flinched from her accusing glance. She turned to Andersen. “It gave her terrible dreams. Do you think …”

  Her lips went tight, the question unfinished.

  “Could be.” Andersen shrugged, his red-stubbled face set hard. “I want to know. I brought them back, to run them through the lab.”

  “Sir.” With a nervous glance into Rima’s anxious face, Mondragon raised his hand. “The bead little Day had was not one of Indra’s, though it did look like them. I found it on the pebble beach near Dr. Singh’s dig. It seemed so harmless that I let Dr. Virili’s children take it for a toy. She returned it to me. I gave it to Dr. Singh.”

  “It’s certainly no toy!” Rima gave him another hard look and turned to Glengarth. “Day was having
those dreadful nightmares. Walking in her sleep and trying to get off the ship. Her panda doll was left back on Earth. She grieves for it.”

  “So what?” Stecker muttered, his bleary eyes rolling uneasily toward Andersen. “A damned doll?”

  “She’s trying to save it,” Rima said. “She’s convinced herself—or something in the bead convinced her—that the doll tried to follow and got lost on the ice. One night we caught her trying to get out of the ship to search for it. With no more protection than Indra and her people had. I’m afraid of those beads. Prisms. Whatever they are.”

  “Get rid of them!” Stecker snapped at Andersen.

  “I will. But first, sir, I want to run them through the lab. They may be dangerous, but we don’t know how. They may be harmless. They’re certainly puzzling. Perhaps they can tell us things we ought to know. Early on, I wanted a chance at them, but Indra kept them for herself.”

  Stecker turned uncertainly to Roak, who only shrugged. “Okay,” he muttered.

  “We’ll get at it,” Andersen promised. “I want to X-ray them, study that anomalous attraction, file samples for analysis, test them every way I can. We’ll report what we find and destroy them when we’re done.”

  Rivera came out of the elevator with a steward and a wheeled tray loaded with mugs of coffee and a platter of soyasweets. Cruzet and Mondragon reached for them gratefully. Stecker tapped his empty glass with a fingernail that had lost most of its gold enamel. The steward took the glass away. Andersen pushed his coffee aside and looked back at Glengarth.

  “That’s our story, sir.”

  The room was quiet for half a minute, people turning uncertainly to one another.

  “I don’t like it,” Stecker muttered at last, scowling at Andersen. “What does it mean for us?”

  “Sir, that’s hard to tell.” Andersen shrugged and paused to frown. “Most of what we learned is very ancient history. The amphibians may once have been the dominant race, but they had powerful enemies. One whole face of the building is covered with carvings that depict gigantic predators hunting them.

  “God knows what has happened in all the ages since, but I think something intelligent has survived. Something able to detect us far out in space and flash that signal from the ice cap. Something in that island tower able to kill Jake Hinch. And something now …”

  He shook his head.

  “Something what?”

  His shoulders hunched.

  “We’ll tell you what.” Stecker paused to let Roak speak. When Roak sat silent, he glared across the table. “We’ve got to get off the planet. As quick as we can.”

  “Sir …” Jim Cheng hesitated uncertainly. “Without Nik and Kobo, I don’t think we can ever launch—”

  Stecker stiffened. “What’s that?”

  “Nik was our systems designer,” Cheng said. “Leader of the team. Kobo was our top quantum engineer. You probably know that the wave conversion algorithm has to be recalculated for half a dozen factors before any takeoff. Gravity field, magnetic field, angular momentum, air pressure, mass balance, quantum vectors. A very slight error in any function could blow us up in the pit or drive us into collision with our own dwarf star.”

  Stecker opened his mouth to speak, but only gaped. His small eyes darted desperately around him. He looked, Mondragon thought, like a frightened animal in a trap. With a defeated shrug, he turned to beckon imperatively at Roak.

  “Mr. Glengarth—” Roak stopped for a moment, but raised his voice and stiffened himself commandingly. “Captain Stecker will not abandon our launch. You’re a trained officer. Dr. Cruzet and Dr. Andersen are competent quantum engineers. You will organize another team and complete the facility.”

  “Sir, I respect Jim’s opinion that we can’t launch.” Glengarth turned inquiringly to Cruzet and Andersen. They looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “A suicidal gamble,” Andersen muttered. “The effort would take time and resources we don’t have left.” His voice lifted. “Sir, there’s another alternative Tony and I have discussed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We still don’t know anything about our neighbors. They killed Jake Hinch when he dynamited the door to their tower, but they let the rest of us go. Maybe they felt offended when Indra tried to enter their temple. We just don’t know.”

  “So what?”

  Andersen turned to Cruzet for the answer.

  “Sir, we want to find out.” Cruzet nodded, without visible feeling. “That first flash from the ice cap came from a cluster of what appeared to be enormous artificial constructions. A city? A fortress? Anybody’s guess, but it could logically be the center of some surviving power. We want to visit it—”

  “Are you crazy?” Stecker goggled at them. “It’s halfway around the planet. Twenty thousand kilometers, a good half of it across the cap. Even if you got there, what makes you think you’d do any better than Jake and Indra did?”

  “We certainly wouldn’t dynamite anything.”

  “What the hell do you hope for?”

  “Anything.” Andersen shrugged. “Nothing. We’ve no basis for any sort of guess. No clear sign of welcome. No firm sign of malice. That’s why we must go. If something intelligent doesn’t want us here, it might just possibly help us get away. We don’t know.”

  He reached for his coffee. The steward had returned with a fresh drink for Stecker. He gulped half of it and turned expectantly to Roak.

  “In any case …”

  Andersen was sipping the coffee. Scowling at him across the table, Roak raised his voice.

  “You’ve heard Captain Stecker. He’s not crazy enough to think any friendly native is going to help us complete the launch installation. You two may want to go exploring, but we need you here. We’ve got to get back at the job, with every man we have.”

  He gave Rima a look that made her flush.

  “And every woman.”

  Twenty

  Earlier, when Kip wanted an airskin, Rima said he was still too young to need it, but Mondragon had persuaded Jim Cheng, who worked sometimes in ship supply, to cut one to fit him. She thought he was getting too fond of the Mexican, but she let him keep the suit.

  “Let me try it,” he urged her when Cheng gave it to him. “You’ve been driving the spiders. The Alpha’s just sitting there while Andy and Tony test those black beads. Let’s take it out.”

  “You shouldn’t call them Andy and Tony.” She shook her head at him. “They’re officers of the ship and quantum engineers.”

  “They’re my friends. It’s okay with them. Let’s go up the beach, to where you were digging the habitat.”

  “Not anymore.” She made a face. “They killed it.”

  “Maybe things will change.” He tried to lift her spirits. “Andy and Tony are smart. Maybe they can manage something.”

  “Maybe.” She stopped to think and nodded soberly. “Now that we’ve lost Nik and Kobo, the launch facility will take a long time to build. If we ever can. We’re all tired of dehydrated synthetics and the captain does like to eat. Maybe he could be persuaded to let us grow a hydroponic garden in the chamber we’ve already dug.”

  “Let’s try.”

  She stopped to consider and suddenly decided.

  “Okay. I’ll ask Dr. Cheng to come with us to measure the space.”

  They parked beneath the mound of rubble from the excavation, and Cheng helped him into the airskin. It felt stiff and strange at first, and the breather unit gave the air in the helmet a faint sharp scent of hot plastic, but the real space suit made him feel like he was with Captain Cometeer and the Legion of the Lost, landing on an unknown planet.

  That eagerness faded as they cycled through the lock and walked down the ramp. Even with his mother and Cheng so close behind him, he felt suddenly naked and alone. Standing here with no ship to shield him, no wall except the blackness and blazing stars standing far beyond the frozen ocean, he looked down at the icy beach where Mondragon had found that bright black bead
. He remembered what the beads had done to Dr. Singh and the engineers. The cold and the darkness seemed to close in around him. He shivered and caught his mother’s hand.

  “Come along,” she told him, “if you want to see the dig.”

  They climbed the rubble ramp into the abandoned habitat. Cheng walked ahead, his helmet light flickering over rough rock walls scarred with the teeth of the digging machines.

  “Let me see the dig,” Kip said. “Where Dr. Singh found the beads and the bones.”

  Rima led him out of the big room and into a narrow cave. Her light danced over a shelf of rock where Singh had left her small digging tools. He saw a strange seashell and the end of a yellow bone sticking out of the rock.

  “It was the floor of a lake where floods came down,” his mother said. “Creatures caught in the floods were buried with mud that finally turned to stone. It was a fabulous find, Indra said. She was bitter—really disappointed—when they shut down her dig.”

  Rima walked on with Cheng. He stood there, playing his own light over the shell and the bone, trying to imagine what sort of creatures had lived in these old seas before they froze. The planet must have been a nicer place, though Mondragon thought something evil must have died here to leave the fantasmas that haunted the dark.

  He hurried after his mother.

  “… melt water from above, with heat lamps on the ice,” she was saying to Cheng. “Soil from the permafrost. We’ll have to spray the walls with sealant, install a power source, build an air lock. I figure three hundred square meters of usable space.”

  “If they let us use it.” Cheng frowned. “Roak will want us all at work on their relaunch project.” He eyed her speculatively. “He’ll need persuading, but I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Maybe you could talk him into it.”

  Conscious of the way the airskin fitted her form, she felt a flash of anger.

  “I don’t deal with Roak.”

  Stecker sat with Roak and his black-capped security detail at the long table in the conference room. Waiting for Cruzet and Andersen, he was fondly nursing a tall gin and tonic from the precious store Jake Hinch had brought aboard. He scowled expectantly when at last they came out of the elevator.