Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  “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.”

  “Not much action around here,” Jessica said.

  “Action is usually a sign that people have made bad decisions,” Adrian said. “Frances is right: it’s a convention, like the assumption that alien worlds have a single topography and climate.”

  “Unless,” Jessica said, “like the moon and this world, they have no atmosphere to create climate and no water to change the topography.”

  So Frances and Jessica, the two engineers, and the pilot went down again to another site and another and another. Some places they found deserts of sand instead of jagged rocky terrain, some places, deep ravines and canyons cut by ancient waterways, some places, the charred remains of what once might have passed on this alien world for forests, some places dead sea bottoms full of sediment and what might once have been bones that might have told them paleontological marvels had they the time and the paleontologists to spare. On the edge of ancient canyons they came upon what might have been the ruins of buildings, but none were substantial enough to tell them anything about what kind of creatures might have constructed them or lived in them; and beside the dead sea bottoms they found piles of blackened rubble that once might have been alien cities. Like the bones, they might have had xenological stories to tell and mysteries to solve, but all Frances and Jessica had time to do was to take pictures and move on. This was a world with all of the history of Earth—maybe more, since it seemed far older—but they had their own history that impelled them forward. They weren’t explorers; they had been sent for, and they didn’t know why.

  Once they were caught too far from the landing craft when the sun set. The change between day and night was sudden, and they were wrapped in darkness. The planet was on the far side of its sun, and the sky, once the sunlight had stopped glinting from spaceships above, was totally dark. In the blackness of normal space, even interstellar space, stars shone; if they were cold and remote, at least there was light and the promise somewhere of warmth and life. Frances remembered the night sky on Earth and its seductive promise of other suns, other worlds, and the challenge of getting there. Here there was nothing but empty nothing, Milton’s “uncreated night,” Frances thought, and shivered. The darkness was like a premonition, a reminder of onrushing death, which even rejuvenation could not permanently disable; telomeres could be repaired but not restored. She looked down quickly and clicked on her helmet lights.

  In the midst of the jumbled variety of this alien world that they had decid
ed to call “Enigma,” where underground cavities approached the surface, they came upon sealed entrances—or what might have been entrances. Near a few of them they found inscriptions; some of them looked like the first inscriptions they had seen, others, totally different, which seemed to support the theory, Frances said, that they had been made by other aliens summoned like them and expressing their frustration at a lack of welcome or not finding anybody home. But they took pictures of everything and brought them back to the Ad Astra.

  “The Enigma remains an enigma,” Frances said. Weeks since they had arrived had stretched into months, and they were no closer to the basic answers they had sought. Each answer only seemed to precipitate a new cascade of questions.

  “We’re bombarding the place with every frequency we have,” Adrian said, “and we’d do it with Peter’s energetic cosmic rays if we knew how to create and manipulate them. And we’re listening to every frequency we can think of.”

  “Nothing?” Jessica said.

  “Too much,” Adrian said. “There are enough radio waves out there to fry a bird, if there was anything like that around. But we can’t decipher any of it. The computer is chugging away like mad, but nothing happens.”

  “We could try to force our way in,” Frances said. “With lasers or thermite wands or high explosives.”

  “Others seemed to have tried that and failed,” Jessica said.

  “And it doesn’t seem like a rewarding strategy,” Adrian said. “Even if our summoners aren’t being good hosts and welcoming us to the party, breaking in isn’t likely to win us any friends. And this far from home, everybody needs friends.”

  “Like Blanche Dubois,” Frances said, “we must depend upon the kindness of strangers.”

  “I think we’re finished,” Jessica said. “We’re faced with puzzles we aren’t smart enough to solve. I think we should start back home.”

  “That’s the mother talking,” Frances said.

  “I’m going down there myself,” Adrian said. “I’ve let you two talk me into protecting myself and the ship, but I’m going to see that place with my own eyes.”

  Jessica protested and so did Frances, but not as vehemently when Adrian announced that Jessica would remain on the ship, in charge, while he and Frances descended toward the site of their first exploration.

  When they arrived, the entrance was open.

  Where a solid rock face had displayed only a few hairline cracks and the inscrutable incisions, a black hole had appeared, and Frances could see that the slab of rock that had blocked the entrance had slipped into a slender pit at the bottom. She laughed shakily. The sound reverberated inside her helmet. “Apparently you’re Aladdin,” she said to Adrian. “It was waiting for you.”

  “Unlikely,” Adrian said. “It makes more sense that it was waiting for the team to return.”

  “Don’t go in!” Jessica said over the static on their receivers. “It’s too dangerous!”

  Frances shrugged and then, realizing that Adrian couldn’t see the gesture, said, “Are we going to enter?”

  “I don’t know about you,” Adrian said, “but I didn’t come all this way to stand in the doorway first on one foot and then the other. Jessica, I know Frances and I are risking our lives and everything else in what may be folly, but that’s what this whole enterprise has been—risk and maybe folly, so one more foolish risk won’t make any difference this close to finding out what it’s all about. If we’re not back in three hours, don’t try to break in. This is not the time or the place for melodrama. And if we don’t get back, you’re in charge. If contact doesn’t occur in another month or so—you’ll have to be the judge of the proper time to wait and what constitutes contact—refuel and return with what we have.” And he turned toward the opening in the cliff before Jessica could reply.

  Frances shrugged again. “‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly,” she muttered and followed Adrian through the black doorway into what seemed, in the illumination from the lights built into their helmets, like a space carved out of rock and then faced with a dark metal or plastic.

  Behind them the door rose silently and terminally. “Maybe Peter’s worst fears are going to be realized,” Frances said. “No wonder he stayed home.”

  “Peter’s fears never did make sense,” Adrian said. But he didn’t sound convinced. “Let’s look around. With vacuum outside and an atmosphere inside, we presume, this must be an airlock.”

  The walls were smooth without protuberances and the corners were rounded, like a culvert. The far wall was flat, but no amount of feeling around for knobs or switches or levers by awkward gloved hands produced any reaction. “Maybe,” Frances said, “the opening of the outer door was an accident, and the inner door failed a long time ago. There’s nothing to say that the creatures that did all this are still alive. It could all be an automated process that is breaking down, bit by bit. That would explain a great deal. We don’t know how long those other spaceships have been in orbit…” She realized she was babbling and stopped abruptly. Too abruptly, she thought.

  Adrian turned his helmet toward hers, and she realized that the same thoughts had been running through his head. “About this time,” she went on, “the explorers would lift their helmets and sniff the air and say, ‘It’s breathable.’”

  Adrian laughed. It echoed tinnily in Frances’ helmet. “That never made any sense either. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave our helmets on until we’re back aboard ship, and hope our air supply holds out.”

  Light spilling over them told Frances that the inner door had opened. Behind it was a long, featureless tunnel, apparently burned out of the rock so that it fused into a smooth, shiny gray surface as it cooled, and perhaps with some luminescent material added so that it glowed. Frances felt as if she were in an artery of some gigantic beast.

  “Apparently,” Adrian said, “it took some time for the atmospheric pressure to equalize.” He stepped forward into the tunnel, Frances close behind. Adrian knelt to get a better view of the floor. “No grooves, no apparent wear. But whoever built this must have moved a hell of a lot of people—well, creatures—and equipment this way.”

  Frances looked as far as she could down the featureless tunnel. It seemed to curve gently downward until, in the distance, the top seemed to meet the floor. “We’ve got—what?—a bit less than four hours’ air supply? We can explore for a little less than two hours and then get back with a small margin of safety, and hope that the doors operate in the other direction.”

  Adrian looked at the doorway through which they had entered. It, too, had no apparent controls. “It would seem to register motion or maybe heat.”

  “If that’s the case,” Frances said, “it should be opening now.”

  “Good engineering would require some built-in delays to prevent cycling,” Adrian said absently. “But the others know we’re here. We should allow an hour-and-a-half for exploration in case we have any delays getting back.”

  He started off down the unrevealing tunnel and Frances trudged after him. It looked as if it would be another long day. “Shouldn’t we leave a trail, or unwind a ball of twine or something,” she asked, “in case this corridor branches?”

  “We have something even better,” Adrian said, “a built-in mapper.”

  “Gee,” Frances said, “the Cretans should have had one of those.”

  They walked through the gray luminescent tunnel, steadily trending downward, with occasional branches right and left. They stayed with the main tunnel.

  “Nothing,” Frances muttered. “Nothing.”

  “Were you expecting something?” Adrian responded, but he, too, sounded disappointed.

  “Did I ever tell you that in addition to space sickness,” Frances said, “I have a touch of claustrophobia?”

  “Now is hardly the time,” Adrian said, but he stopped. “We’re getting nowhere. We need a vehicle of some kind and a longer air supply and maybe a bigger exploring party. I think we’ve done everything we
can.”

  And he turned around and led the way back through the enigmatic tunnel to the entrance that now, Frances hoped, had become an exit. Miraculously, it seemed, the wall slid down in front of them and up in back of them when they entered, and, after a suitable pause, the other doorway opened and they walked, free and unenlightened, back onto the planet’s surface.

  Four days later, the engineers had put together a small vehicle like a golf cart with a battery drive, a seat for two, and a space behind the seat for two canisters of oxygen. The outer entrance now was oddly responsive, admitting anyone who moved in front of it, including the cart when it was occupied but not when it was empty.

  “Clever,” Adrian said. “It can discriminate between living creatures and objects that merely move. That avoids random openings and closings—for falling rocks, say.”

  “Or it knows who we are,” Frances said. “That would explain why it didn’t open the first time Jessie and I were here. It took time to identify us.”

  “I prefer a simpler explanation,” Adrian said, but refused to offer one.

  The two of them explored the tunnels as far as the cart would carry them, sometimes exploring side tunnels. In the side tunnels, which were slightly smaller than the main one, something like doorways opened into something like rooms carved out of the rock by a process similar to that which had formed the tunnels. Sometimes the rooms were interconnected like apartments or sets of offices. But all were empty and unmarked even by dust or litter or scratches.

  “They’ve got a great cleaning service,” Frances said.

  “I think they did it in stages,” Adrian said. “When the climate began to change, through a change in orbit or a decline in solar output, and the air began to thin, they moved inside, first into the outer layers, then gradually deeper and deeper, abandoning the first habitations as they went.”

  “Or maybe,” Frances said, “these were living quarters for the workers.”