Timepiece

by Brian N Ball

  “We couldn't,” said the girl. “Del, could we?”

  Del felt an unfamiliar tenderness for the girl. She had softened since they had sighted the Planet; her obsessiveness with the paradox of time had gone, and it was clear too that the relationship between her and Garvin had changed. She was looking at Del with a submissive and urgent air.

  “We go on,” said Del. “Garv—how long before we orbit the Planet?”

  “Twenty-six hours and were there,” said Garvin, pointing out the path he had planned.

  “Come and rest,” said the girl. Garvin smiled at the invitation. He looked at them with a mixture of contempt and curiosity. The girl stared back. “Come to bed, Del.”

  "I can handle things,” he told Del.

  “I admire your resilience,” grumbled Henry Sokutu in a booming undertone. “The refuge of the inane!” he went on. “The urge to copulate at times of danger!”

  “Don’t go just yet,” said Garvin. “Something's coming in. Report from the probes. They're orbiting now with scanners.”

  “Report in,” said the computer. “Emergency! Life-forms sighted! Further signs to confirm previous civilization on planet Remains of artefacts.” The machine's voice paused. “Analysis? Evaluate?”

  “The facts first,” said Garvin. “Though,” he turned to Del, “it might be interesting to see what the computer thinks it's found?”

  “Briefly,” ordered Del. “The probability.”

  “A workshop,” said the computer. “The planet could be a testing-ground and a workshop.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Del found no time to pursue his need of the girl. There were talks, discussions, runs and re-runs of theories, and then brief sessions of sleep and more arguments. As they neared the Planet the four voyagers became tense: they thought more of the way that Smith's voyage had ended and less of their own optimistic forecasts of a successful investigation. The trouble was that, apart from the gravitational fields' constant state of flux, there was little that was unordinary about the Planet. There were odd contours here and there; but nothing that could not have belonged to any one of a hundred planets. The atmosphere would support most known life-forms. There was sufficient cloud cover and a dense enough atmosphere to keep out harmful radiation; and the gravitational complexities provided ample residual gravity to keep the envelope gases firmly attached to the Planet. The two hottish suns caused a curious day and night cycle, but one no stranger than a score of inhabited planets in the Galaxy had to contend with.

  It was an anti-climax to orbit the globe. Silver blue-green ice-caps and bright reds of desert; the panoply of the revolutions on the axis. The travel-poster beauty. The chains of lakes and the broad spread of seas. Orange girdles of mountains. It was difficult to reconcile this peaceful place with the weird speculations of the computer.

  The genetic effects of long-term exposure to gravitational change had fascinated Henry Sokutu:

  “We'd produce ovoid children! With disc feet! Or lozenge-shaped bipeds with arterial systems like a great bloody bellows! Or,” he said, his flabby cheeks wobbling gleefully, “or a dimensional solution! Reproduction inside Klein bottles, and astonishing arch-like humans.”

  “The plant-life has to adapt,” Garvin had said. “Osmosis is the big problem.” There was plant-life, and the computer had suggested some answers to the problem of osmotic pressures. “There's the usual cycle of carbon absorption and oxygen release; but the pressures of gravitational flux must be immense and complex. I liked the idea of some form of signal evolved to ignore pressure variations. An inbuilt cutoff.”

  'Why worry about the plant-life?” said Del. “It's the animal forms we have to worry about. No more in about them?”

  “Nothing,” said Garvin. “And I don't find the sighting reports convincing. They talk too much of possibilities on the basis of one observed movement.”

  “What will they do with the place?” said the girl.

  They had talked about this too. Gouge a great pit to investigate the odd cores? For six cores there were, six tiny powerful masses radiating colossal amounts of gravitational force. They had soon discovered that there were no satellites; that would have been too easy a solution. The computer's theory had rested in part upon slight shreds of evidence that had not been substantiated by further discoveries. So far, the theory of an advanced earlier civilization having built the Planet was unproven. Inevitably, the hopes of the party were receding. They were looking in practical terms at the oddities. The oddness of the Planet would bring in flocks of developers.

  “Bite the Planet into bits,” said Henry Sokutu. “Hip its secrets out. Turn it into a fun place.”

  “There must be a mystery,” said the girl. “Smith— he encountered something outside our Universe!”

  “It may have gone,” said Del.

  He was admitting what they now feared: that the mystery would have vanished, that their voyage of discovery would result in the finding of the everyday. That whatever had been responsible for collecting the glowing white dwarf material, stripping its atoms of their electrons, and leaving the rest like so much rubbish, had worked out its purpose and slipped away forever.

  “They'll turn it into a side-show,” said Garvin. “It mustn't happen!”

  The girl had told Del, in a quiet and reflective moment, that the disappointment sickened her. The mysterious Planet of Time had turned out to be a curiosity, but no more than that “I'd rather we went plunging down just as the Commander went!” she had told Del. ‘It can't end like this!”

  They found they felt the same on this: that rather would they be whirled away by the same grotesque forces that had tom Smith and his vessel into a whirlpool of time, than the voyage to end with the discovery of a planet that was no more than a box of tricks.

  The search had been minutely undertaken. All day they had checked over the Planet They were used now to the strange tricks that the Planet produced; they were prepared for the random changes that sent the field recorders spinning and the green-bronze robots hurrying about the ship to check the efficacy of the ship's own fields. All four of them concentrated on the Planet's surface. They looked for clues to the Planet's history. Disturbances of rock strata; malformations that might indicate a search for basic metals; signs of a re-distribution of seas and mountain chains; the movement of continents; hints of weather changes over the millennia that might indicate interference with natural patterns; crystallographic analysis for radiation level change; and the immediate environs of the Planet for the debris that all civilizations leave in orbit.

  “How do you circumnavigate a cube?” said Henry Sokutu after another sweep. “How does one land on a disc?” Their conversations wove fantasy into every prosaic detail. “Suppose you landed on a gravitational comer,” said Sokutu. “Or on the edge—the edge of a world? Poor Ellison! How he would have relished this problem.”

  Ellison. They remembered him from time to time. They had asked all the questions about Ellison too: was he assimilated into the fabric of the ship? Was he alive and floating at some sub-molecular level in the drive? And, a ghastly thought, could he hear their speculations about the Planet, about its life-forms, and about Ellison himself?

  Del found himself regarding Ellison as a token of bad luck: the albatross of the voyage, the thin ghost that could wreck the machine. Sokutu was becoming spiteful, the girl more and more dependent upon Del, and Garvin was gradually assuming control. They needed something definite to work on—a sign that the expedition was worthwhile. Del listened to the others without actually hearing them.

  From Henry Sokutu, a note of complaint. “In earlier days, my dear Del, the discoverer was rewarded with a territorial title based on his findings—but how can you be so honoured? Duke of Cube? Doge of a Dodecahedron? Prince of a Pyramid? There’s no dignity there, Del!”

  From the girl, for the first time, an open plea for help. “I came, Del, you don’t know why, I can’t explain yet—but Del, you have to believe/’ she said softly, “
it was you.”

  And from Garvin, the flow of logical development, the easy analysis of the factors, the constant attempt to relate. “What kind of life could adapt to this? I can’t reconcile what we have here with any previously recorded phenomenon! Unless ...”

  And the inchoate speculativeness that Henry Sokutu used as a trade-mark. “Not in the whole of recorded exploration, Garvin. How right you always are. But do forms have to adapt? Couldn’t it be the other way round? Couldn’t the computer be right after all, and this simply be the testing-bed for some evolutionary process? Or could it be that this whirligig of a Planet is a toy? Now there was something like that,” he went on. “A toy! A plaything? A land of celestial baby’s rattle! It might just be.” He dived off into a hundred parallels.

  “There!” Garvin said.

  Time hung still as his shout rang through the cabin.

  They knew that this was the moment.

  ‘Too many damned theories!” Garvin said savagely. “It was there and we missed it on all the runs! Why couldn’t we look for it, instead of relying on the machines?”

  They looked at the surface of the globe beneath them. Garvin held the optical scanners locked onto what he had found: a shallow, huge depression, ten miles across. A regular saucer-shaped hollow. In it, the broken-backed ancient vessel.

  “Smith’s,” said the girl.

  “Look at the coordinates,” said Garvin. A robot hastened to set up the patterns of force-lines. “Each gravitational change is plotted here. Now see how the sexagesimal pattern links with this depression.”

  “But why didn’t the computer find this out?” said Del angrily. “Surely the thing’s programmed to look at every possible combination of circumstances?”

  “It didn't believe Smith landed," said Henry Sokutu. “It didn't think it was looking for Smith's ship.''

  “But why not?" said Suzanne. She looked from Sokutu to Del, and then to Garvin.

  Garvin grinned. “Smith wasn't supposed to land. His drive was inhibited. No-one told the computer that drives can be released."

  “But it should have found the depression," said Del. “It's too regular for a chance physical feature."

  Garvin shrugged. “Ask it"

  The machine sounded hurt “Too early for detailed report," it informed them. “Depression apparently linked with gravitational phenomena, but other factors operating. Suggest early departure, leaving probes in orbit to relay information."

  “And what's your theory?" asked Del.

  Garvin told them. The Commander of the survey vessel had also seen the strange gravitational behaviour of the Planet. But he had been too eager. He had missed the significance of the hollow, its relationship with the distribution of the cores. “Or maybe the cores had briefly coalesced," said Garvin. “Maybe there were only minor field aberrations—insufficient to cause alarm, enough to arouse curiosity. And then whatever is controlling the fields of the Planet suddenly ached out." He clenched his fist. ‘"Like that."

  “You're presupposing a controlling intelligence!" said Henry Sokutu. “Malignant, something evil!"

  “No." Garvin opened his hand. “No more evil than a boy reaching out for a strange and new butterfly."

  “And that hollow is the net," said the girl.

  “There may be more hollows," said Garvin. “And I don't think the net analogy is useful. No, I think they're more likely to be the remnants of some kind of structure." He looked thoughtfully at the intricate assembly of probability graphs he had built up. “Some kind of dimensional engine," he said.

  “Or a meteor splash!" said Henry Sokutu. “Del, don't let him overstate the case! He’s building up too much on too little evidence.”

  Del was still looking at the meticulous flow of Garvin’s geomorphological surveys. “It looks too regular for a chance occurence,” he said. “Too big for a meteor indentation.”

  “It’s been there a long time,” said Henry Sokutu calmly. ‘It could have been the focus of a freak mantle fault.”

  “It has been there a long time,” said Garvin. “It’s been there and it’s remained symmetrical in shape and constant in depth for twenty million years. In spite of erosion and stratafolding the hollow has remained exactly like that. So our instruments say.”

  The immense antiquity of the thing overwhelmed the listeners.

  “That old?” said Del. -

  “Yes. And there’s a power source keeping it like that. Something massive in scale and on the kind of time-scale that makes our civilization look like a mayfly.”

  “And you’re building a theory on that?” said Henry Sokutu.

  “And why not?” asked the girl. “You yourself were suggesting the same thing. You said the Planet was extra-Universal.”

  “Agreed, my dear,” said Henry Sokutu, in his most sickeningly patronizing manner. “So we should beware of making inferences based on a knowledge of our own standards of observation.” He smiled at Garvin: “At the risk of sounding overcautious,” he said, “keep in mind the old countryman’s adage, adapted, I’ll admit.”

  “Which is?” said Garvin.

  Two hollows don’t make a Sumer.”

  The girl looked puzzled, but Garvin laughed.

  “Sumer?” asked Suzanne.

  “A lost civilization on Sol,” explained Del. “Entombed for thousands of years. It astonished its discoverers.”

  “By its strangeness,” added Henry Sokutu.

  ‘There’s morel” exploded Garvin. “Half-a-dozen places where the configuration isn’t natural.”

  “We have to go on and see it all!” said the girl. They were all looking at Henry Sokutu. “Where's your sense of wonder” she said. “Yo« were the one that wanted to investigate the last mystery. We can’t let the records gather dust in the files of Trust for another thousand years!”

  “My sense of wonder?” said Henry Sokutu. “Gone, I’m afraid. Gone with poor Ellison.” Gone were the rolling phrases and the grand gestures. Here was a tired old man who had looked at the majesty of molecular dissolution and turned away, appalled.

  Del reviewed the arguments, and as he recalled them Henry Sokutu spoke again:

  “Why not leave it to a properly equipped party? Del, I know I’m conditioned by my age, by my training as an academic; I know I’ve never myself experienced much of decisive affairs at first hand; I know all this, and I still feel you’re all hurrying into calamity.”

  “You think another ship would be sent out?” asked the girl quietly.

  “No.” Henry Sokutu looked at the three in wonder.

  “No.” It was Garvin who spoke. “And we’ve talked enough.”

  “The Charlies have finished the modifications to the ion-drive,” said the girl. “They want to send Charlie Five along with us in the surface craft”

  “We have the capacity?” asked Del.

  “Plenty,” said Garvin. “I planned for space to bring some souvenirs back.”

  “No trouble with the governor?” asked Del.

  "I came away neatly enough” said Garvin. He flicked a switch and the green-bronze shape came within seconds. It held out a bundle of gleaming components. “There's the guts of it.”

  “Will you be able to put it back?” asked the girl.

  For answer, Garvin dropped the handful of parts and ground them with his heel. “Committed,” he said.

  “And you’re all going down,” said Henry Sokutu heavily.

  “Now,” agreed Garvin.

  There was a flash of the old Henry Sokutu, the grotesque humour mounting him: “You can’t take me into that molecular mess! You're possessed, all of you! I can't risk my precious brains in that gravitational nightmare! Damn it, it's in my contract!”

  “You stay,” Del said.

  “Alone!” He stared around the cabin, at the great console, at the ready racks of robots, at the empty couches and the silent playthings. “Why?”

  “We have one small engine,” said Del ‘If it fails for some reason, you're our only hope. We
can't strip the main drive from the ship, and to build a drive would take too long.”

  “What can I do?” said the big man.

  “Start a crash course in Field Theory,” said Del. “Charlie One has a programme for you.”

  They shrugged into the heavy deep-space suits. Each one took some item or other as a talisman, Del without realizing why he had slipped a copy of Garvin's survey charts in a spare pocket, the girl consciously sliding a glittering quite impractical net of gold over her hair, and Garvin briskly packing a spare player into his overalls pocket: Del recognized it. Garvin was in the habit of playing over and over again the recordings that the Commander had sent back from the Planet.

  “You're a strange girl,” said Henry Sokutu. “You're an unlikely team,” he said, including the men. “Take care ” he said.

  The last the three saw of him was an irritated shooting away of eager green-bronze figures, a waving of hands at the busy machines.

  For a while the old man watched the progress of the small, ramshackle craft that had been hastily assembled out of an odd assortment of inessential equipment and spares. The scanners shifted from the ship to the Planet, mixing scenes of bright red desert with black, jutting cliffs and roaring seas. A mountain range poked up jaggedly. The ship drifted down into a lower orbital path.

  “A pattern,” he said to himself. “The variation of sap pressures! Surely the molecular architecture of plant cell walls will be revised.” He paused. “Though Garvin will have worked that out. Details.” He looked around the cabin, dissatisfied.

  For the third time, a green-bronze shape came forward to assist, to help, to explain, but Henry Sokutu waved it away.

  “It’s the pattern—the overall pattern we have to find!”

  There was so much to do. The ecology, for instance. It had to be fitted into the pattern. His great and powerful intellect began to range over all that had been said in the past weeks: somewhere, there was something he had missed. “Ellison?” he wondered. “Did he know something? I have his last words on record....”