Cauldron

by Jack McDevitt

  “You guys go over,” said François, “cut your way in, take a quick look, and get back here.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Ben.

  “Look, Ben, so you know: There really isn’t time to do this, and I’m not going to put the ship at risk. When it gets close, I’m clearing out. Whether you two are back or not.”

  “Understood,” said Ben.

  “Goddam it.” Leah shook her head. “You worry too much, François.”

  He saw no advantage to the design of the object. The cubes seemed to be connected in a totally random fashion. Purely aesthetic, he thought. Somebody’s idea of art.

  He looked at the rear view. The black patch was growing, systematically blocking out stars.

  “Hatch locations,” said Bill, marking four sites on the display. François picked one that allowed easy access from the Jenkins and maneuvered alongside. It was located on one of the smaller cubes, on the outer rim of the cluster. It was less than average size, but it was larger than the Jenkins. He eased in as closely as he could, lined up the hatch with the ship’s air lock, and instructed Bill to hold the position. “Okay,” he told Ben.

  His navigation lights played off the surface of the object. It was battered. Corroded. It had been there a long time.

  Ben opened the outer hatch. “It’s pretty worn,” he said.

  “You’ve got seventeen minutes to be back here,” François said. “Okay? Seventeen minutes and we take off. Whether you’re on board or not.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Leah. “Just keep the door open.”

  Right.

  An imager picked them up as they left the ship. Followed them across the few meters of open space to the hatch. Whoever’d used it had been about the same size as humans. Which meant Ben would have a hard time squeezing through.

  “Incredible,” said Leah. She was examining the hull, which was pocked and scored. “Cosmic rays. It is ancient.”

  “How old do you think?” asked Ben.

  Bill sighed. “Use the scanner, Ben. Get me the hull’s composition, and I might be able to give you an answer.”

  Ben wasn’t sure which of the devices he carried with him was the scanner. He hadn’t used one before, but Leah knew. She activated hers and ran it across the damage.

  “Good,” said Bill. “Give me a minute.”

  Ben made an effort to open the hatch. There was a press panel, but it didn’t react. Leah put her scanner back in her belt and produced a laser. She activated it and started cutting. “This is a disaster,” she said. “What were the odds of finding something like this? And then to have it sitting right in front of that goddam avalanche back there?”

  Ben drew his own laser out of his harness, but François cautioned him not to use it. Two relatively inexperienced people cutting away was a sure formula for disaster. So he stayed back. Leah needed only minutes to cut through. She pushed a wedge of metal into space, put the instrument away, and stepped inside the ship.

  “Turn on the recorder,” François told her.

  Each wore an imager on the right breast pocket. The auxiliary monitor came to life, and François was looking down a dark corridor, illuminated by their headlamps. Shadows everywhere. The bulkhead looked rough and washed-out. Whatever materials had originally lined it had disintegrated. The overhead was so low that even Leah couldn’t stand up straight.

  Something was moving slowly down the bulkhead. Ben saw it, and the picture jumped.

  “What is it?” asked François.

  Dust. A hand, Leah’s, scooped some of it up, held the light against it.

  “Scan it,” said Bill. Leah complied. The AI’s electronics murmured softly. “Organics,” he said.

  “You’re saying this was one of the crew?”

  “Probably,” said François. “Or maybe they kept plants on board.”

  “I wonder what happened here?” said Ben.

  After a long silence, Bill said, “I’ve got the results on the cosmic ray damage. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve double-checked the numbers. The object appears to be 1.2 billion years old.”

  Ben made a noise as if he were in pain. “That can’t be right,” he said.

  “I’ve made no error.”

  “Son of a bitch. François, we’ve got to save this thing.”

  “If you can think of a way, I’ll be happy to make it happen.”

  Leah broke in: “There’s something on the wall here. Engraving of some kind. Feel this, Ben.”

  He put his fingertips against the bulkhead. Then he produced a knife and scraped away some dust.

  “Careful,” she said.

  François couldn’t make out anything.

  “There is something here. It’s filled in.”

  Leah moved to her right. “More here.” She ran her fingers down the bulkhead, top to bottom. “Not symbols,” she said. “More like a curving line.”

  “Nine minutes,” said François.

  “For God’s sake, François. Give us a break.”

  “What do you want me to do, Ben?” He was having trouble keeping the anger out of his voice. Did they think he wouldn’t have saved the thing if he could? Did they think he didn’t care?

  He listened while they tried to get a better look at the bulkhead. The object was tumbling slowly as it moved, and the dust had been crawling around inside it all this time. It would have long since wedded itself to any apertures, openings, lines, anything on the bulkheads. “It’s hopeless,” François said.

  It wasn’t going well. He heard mostly invective, aimed at the dust, occasionally at the omega. “Can’t be sure of anything,” Leah said. She looked around. A few pieces of metal were bolted into the connecting bulkhead.

  “Might have been cabinets,” said Ben, “or shelves, or an instrument panel of some sort.”

  “Better start back,” said François.

  “We can’t just give up.” Ben sounded desperate. He literally stabbed the bulkhead. “We may never find anything again as old as this is.”

  “Before the dinosaurs,” said François.

  Leah was breathing hard. “Before multicellular life.” The comment was punctuated by gasps. “Think about that for a minute. Before the first plant appeared on Earth, something was sitting here, in this room. We can’t just leave it.”

  François was getting a creepy feeling. The black patch behind the Jenkins kept growing.

  THEY GAVE UP. Ben had found a plate fixed to the bulkhead. He’d been trying to break it loose and he finally took a swipe at it with a wrench. It broke away and disappeared into the darkness. “Maybe the name of the place they came from,” he said.

  Leah touched the spot where the plate had been. “Or maybe the Men’s Room.”

  They went through an opening into a connecting tube. Toward a cube several times the size of the one they were leaving. “No,” said François. “Your time’s up. Come back.”

  “It’ll just take a minute, François,” said Leah. “We’re just going to take a quick look. Then we’ll come right back.”

  He wondered whether the tubes had originally been transparent. They looked different from the interior, a different shade of gray, and were smeared rather than flaking.

  He took a deep breath. “Bill, I don’t much like the way this is going.

  “Nor do I, François.”

  He counted off another minute. “Ben,” he said, finally, “that’s enough. Come back.”

  “We’re on our way.” They’d entered the new cube, which consisted of another chamber and several doorways.

  He wondered if, in some oddball way, they felt secure inside the object. Maybe if they were on the bridge, where they could see the omega closing in, they’d hustle a bit more. Behind him, Eagle and Tolya stood watching, saying nothing, hanging on to each other. François couldn’t resist: “Doesn’t look like such a hot idea now, guys, does it?”

  “Nyet,” said Tolya.

  He turned back to the AI: “Bill, put everything we have into a package and transmit t
o Union. Everything on the cloud, and on this damned thing. Whatever it is.”

  “It will take a minute or two.”

  “All right. Just do it.”

  The omega brightened. A series of lightning bolts.

  “Nothing here,” said Ben. He swept his light around the interior. Some objects were anchored to the deck. It was impossible to determine what they had been. Chairs, maybe. Or consoles. Or, for all they knew, altars. And boxes on either side of an exit. Cabinets, maybe. Leah cut one open, flashed her light inside. “Ben,” she said, “look at this.”

  She struggled to remove something. “Maybe a gauge of some sort?” She brushed it carefully, and held it up for inspection. François saw corroded metal. And symbols. And maybe a place that had supported wiring.

  “François,” said the AI, “the cloud is close. Our departure is becoming problematic.”

  “That’s it, guys. Time’s up. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “There’s something over here,” said Leah.

  François never found out what it was. Lightning flared behind him.

  Ben got the message. “On our way,” he said. They started to move. Finally. But Ben tripped over something, and bounced along the passageway. “Son of a bitch.”

  Bill responded with an electrical display, the sort of thing he did to show disapproval.

  “You okay?” said Leah.

  “Yeah.” He pushed her away. “Keep going.” And he was up and running, pushing her before him.

  It’s hard to run in grip shoes and zero gravity. Especially when you’re not used to either. They hurried back down the connecting tube. François urged them on. Maybe it was his voice, maybe it was inevitable, but, whatever the cause, Ben and Leah had become suddenly fearful. Panicky.

  “The data package has been dispatched, François.”

  “Good,” he said. “Bill, be ready to go as soon as they’re on board.”

  “We can proceed on your direction.”

  “Ben, when you guys get into the lock, shut the outer hatch and grab hold of something. We’re not going to wait around.”

  “Okay, François. It’ll only be a minute.”

  Bill rattled his electronics again. He was not happy. “Electrical activity in the cloud is increasing. It might be prudent to leave now.”

  François considered it. The idiots had put him and the ship in danger.

  Moments later they left the object and clambered into the air lock.

  “Go, Bill,” he said. “Get us the hell out of here.”

  ARCHIVE

  A team of astronomers announced today that the omegas appear to have originated in the Mordecai Zone, a series of dust clouds approximately 280 billion kilometers long, located near the galactic core. They are unable to explain how the process works, or why it should be happening. “In all probability, we will not know until we can send a mission to investigate,” Edward Harper, a spokesman for the team, said during a press conference. When asked when that might be, he admitted he had no idea, that it is well beyond the capabilities of present technology, and may remain so for a long time.

  —Science Journal, March, 2229

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  1115 hours, GMT. Jenkins reports loss of main engines. Damage apparently incurred during hurried acceleration. Details not clear at this time. Rescue mission scheduled to leave tomorrow morning.

  —Union Operations log entry, Saturday, February 3

  chapter 2

  MATT DARWIN FILED the last of the documents, accepted the congratulations of his senior partner, Emma Stern, sat back in his chair, and considered how good he was. A natural talent for moving real estate. Who would have thought? That morning, he’d completed the sale of the Hofstatter property, a professional office building in Alexandria. Its owners had come to him after months of trying to move the place, and he’d done it in a week, even gotten two prospective buyers bidding against each other.

  His commission, on that single sale, almost matched his annual take-home pay back in his Academy days. “Must make you wonder why you didn’t get started earlier,” Emma said.

  She was tall and graceful, with two personalities, cordial, funny, and lighthearted for the customers, skeptical and strictly business for her employees. She could be vindictive, but she approved of Matt, recognized his talent, and was somewhat taken by his charm. He’d told her once she’d have made a good Academy pilot, had meant it, and had won her heart forever.

  “How about we close down early and celebrate?” he said. “Dinner’s on me.”

  She wasn’t young, but she could still light up the place. “Love to, Matt. But we have tickets for Born Again tonight.” She let him see she regretted declining the invitation. “How about we do it tomorrow, okay? And I’ll buy.”

  Kirby, the AI, announced that Prendergast had arrived for his appointment with her. They were trying to decide on a place to locate his pharmaceutical distribution operation. He was being forced to relocate because of rising waters. Can’t go on building dikes forever, he’d been saying. Find me a new place. Preferably on top of a hill.

  So she turned a radiant isn’t-life-grand smile on him and left. Matt had nothing pressing and decided he’d take the rest of the day off.

  Stern & Hopkins Realty Company (Hopkins had moved on before Matt joined the firm) was located on the third floor of the Estevan Building, across the park from the Potomac Senior Center. A few years ago, he’d received an award over there for shepherding a damaged ship and its passengers back home. It had been the Academy of Science and Technology then.

  He watched as the front door of the old administration building opened. That was where they’d given him his big night, called him onstage in the auditorium, and presented him with the plaque that now hung in his den at home. An attendant came out onto the walkway, pushing someone in a wheelchair. Despite all the medical advances, the vastly increased longevity, the general good health of the population, knees still eventually gave way. And bodies still went through the long process of breaking down.

  He got his jacket out of the closet and pulled it around his shoulders. “Kirby?”

  “Yes, Matt?” The AI spoke with a Southern accent. Emma was from South Carolina.

  “I’m going to head out for the day.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  When he got home, he’d call Reyna. Maybe she’d like to do dinner this evening.

  THERE HAD BEEN a time when the land now bordering the Potomac Senior Center was a golf course. The golf course was long gone, converted into a park, but the area was still called the Fairway. Matt lived in a modest duplex on the edge of the Fairway. It was about a mile and a half from the office, a pleasant stroll on a nice day. He passed young mothers with their toddlers and infants, older people spread out among the benches, a couple of five-year-olds trying to get a kite into the air. Sailboats drifted down the Potomac, and a steady stream of traffic passed overhead.

  A sudden gust lifted a woman’s hat and sent it flying. The woman hesitated between pursuit and a child. Matt would have given chase, but the wind was taking it toward the horizon, and within seconds the hat had vanished into a cluster of trees fifty yards away.

  He passed a chess game between two elderly men. That’s how I’m going to end up, he thought, splayed across a bench looking for ways to spend my time. Thinking how I’d never made my life count for anything.

  In Emma’s presence, he always pretended he couldn’t be more satisfied with his job. He was, she said with mock significance, one of the great salesmen of their time. She meant it, more or less, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of life he’d envisioned. She’d been concerned about his background when he’d first shown up at Stern & Hopkins. Isn’t this going to seem dull after piloting starships? You really going to be satisfied hanging around here when you might have been spending your time at Alva Koratti? (She always made up the name of a star, and pretended she couldn’t quite get it right. So she had him cruising through Alpha Carlassa, and Beta Chesko, and F
ar Nineveh.) We don’t want to take you, Matt, she’d said, then lose you and have to train someone else.

  He’d assured her he was there to stay. He pretended he loved representing people who were buying and selling real estate. He made jokes about how much better the money was (that, at least, was true), and how he liked working regular hours. “I must have been crazy in the old days,” he’d told her. “I’d never go back.”

  She’d smiled at him. A skeptic’s smile. Emma was no dummy, and she saw right through his routine. But she liked him enough to hire him anyhow.

  He’d left his chosen profession because there was no longer a market for star pilots. The Interstellar Age was over. He’d stayed with the Academy until they shut down, then he’d gone to work for Kosmik, hauling freight and passengers to the outstations. A year later, Kosmik began cutting back, and he’d caught a job piloting tours for Orion.

  When things turned dark for Orion, he was the junior guy and consequently first to go. He’d gotten a job managing a databank operation, mining, sorting, and analysis done here. He’d hated it, moved on, sold insurance, managed a desk in a medical office, even done a stint as a security guard in an entertainment mall. Eventually, he’d taken a girlfriend’s advice and tried real estate.

  So here he was, on a fast track to nowhere, piling up more money than he’d ever dreamed of.

  The last hundred yards was uphill. His neighbor, Hobbie Cordero, was just getting home. Hobbie was a medical researcher of some sort, always going on about genetic this and splenetic that. He was passionate about what he did. Matt envied him.

  They talked for a few minutes. Hobbie was short and dumpy, a guy who ate too much and never exercised and just didn’t worry about it. He was involved in a project that would help fend off strokes, and he was capable of telling Matt about it while wolfing down hot dogs.

  Sometimes, the conversation with Hobbie was the highlight of his day.

  So Matt drifted through the afternoons of his life, rooting for the Washington Sentinels, and getting excited about selling estates along the Potomac and villas in DC.