by John Rankine
When Helena was free, they stood for a minute out of programme. At any time the medical circus could be in again. It was obvious that they should move on and try to reach Eagle Nine. Grabbing up kilts, sandals and degaussing helmets, they looked at the hatch panel. They had seen it used twice as an exit and the release gear had to be somewhere on the panel of the oscilloscope spread. Sandra found it by a natural flair for identifying switchgear and, as she pushed over the lever, Helena rummaged along the counter for a hypo gun.
As the panel pivoted clear, a Copreon with a blaster on a shoulder strap, who had been standing with his back to it, spun round on his heel to see what was o’clock and Helena sent a full charge of a pinky grey serum into his bare chest. He was out like a light and they caught him as he fell, holding him upright, until Sandra had found the closing switch and the hatch was shut. They left him leaning on it, eyes wide open and a fixed smile on his ageless face.
In the clearing, close to Eagle Nine, Koenig was on his feet and telling himself that he was not fit to command a scout troop. Menos had outsmarted him all along the line. It was humiliating.
Paul Morrow joined him, then Carter. Victor Bergman was slower; but when he finally scrabbled to his feet, he was first with a theory. ‘That was a selective strike, John. No doubt about that. They had us monitored every step of the way. You saw Menos raise his hand? That was cool. He took a chance there. He finally realised you would do it.’
Carter said, ‘But why be that elaborate? They could have taken us at any time. When we were asleep, for instance, as they took Dr. Russell and Sandra.’
Koenig said, ‘We’ll use the Eagle and blast through the door. This time, they won’t have it so easy.’
First off the mark, he was first to come to a grinding halt as he butted into a free-standing, transparent barrier that blocked his way. Ten minutes later he was convinced. Eagle Nine was sealed in a protective screen that put her out of reach. The Copreons had done it again. Coming back to Carter’s question, he had to ask himself what all the gestural dance was about. It had to be that Menos had some purpose which he had not yet revealed. Maybe, in the short term, he was just a shrewd operator who was minimising casualties for his own side. In the long term, he had other plans.
Bergman was on the same frequency. As they met at the top of the slope, after a fruitless circle of the enclosed Eagle, he said, ‘Perhaps they want more Alphans down here. They must consider that the time is running out and our people will know that. Another party could be trapped. But why?’
Koenig was looking across the valley to the dark mouths of the old workings. He said, ‘The rotunda we were in was the admin centre for the mining projects in this area. The galleries over there could lead to offshoots of the complex. If we can get back inside, we could find some answers.’
Carter said, ‘What about the front door? They might not expect anybody to be so stupid as to try that.’
‘We’ll try that first.’
Heat was already moving up the scale as the sun jacked itself higher over the rocky rim of the valley. The trees gave shade, but also they gave cover. Each Alphan had an acute sense of being watched. To Koenig, it was no surprise when he was brought up short by a familiar force-field barrier set across the defile.
The Copreons had legislated even for fools, or they were monitoring every move and knew precisely where the Alphans were heading. Which it was, became clear as Koenig struck off left through the bush aiming for the valley side. After a hundred metres of rough travel through vegetation as dense as any rain forest, they hit another stop. The Copreons had dropped another shutter.
Koenig said, ‘How are they doing it, Victor?’
‘Body heat, brain currents, you name it. We can do pretty well ourselves with life-sign monitors for crews on mission.’
Morrow put his finger on a flaw. ‘Surely, we can, Professor; but all we know is whether the man is still alive. We can’t say to a metre where he is.’
‘It wouldn’t be too difficult, working a couple of coordinates.’
‘Not if he stayed still; but we’re moving.’
Bergman stuck doggedly to his theory. ‘It has to be something that we transmit like a homing beacon. Nothing visual would work in this country.’
Koenig thumped the heel of his hand on his forehead. It was no time for academic discussion. He could imagine Helena Russell inside the hill and the nudge of a sixth sense was telling him that she was in trouble.
His hand hit the stud of his degaussing helmet and, like Archimedes in his bath, he could say he had it in a flash. He whipped the helmet off and handed it to Bergman. ‘What about this, Victor?’
Victor Bergman looked at it and, for once, was slow off the mark. ‘I don’t follow you, John. There’s nothing in that circuit that would act as a transmitter.’
‘Not the way you fixed it, but these helmets were out of our sight for too long. Anybody could have planted a self-energising beacon. We probably show up on a scanner as four silver stars.’
Bergman checked Sandra’s neat wiring. Nothing had been added or modified. He pulled the rubber grummet from its groove and checked round the rim.
When he had it, he held it out in the palm of his hand, moving it slowly, so that the distant operator would not suspect that it was no longer being worn. Koenig picked it off carefully and set it head high on the bole of a massive tree. It was a thick, dime-size circle with an adhesive back. Every helmet was carrying one and they set them in line facing the invisible screen.
Carter said, ‘They might reckon we could stumble on that with good luck and a following wind. Would there be any more?’
They had one more each. Carried under the instep of the left shoe in every case. Carter said, ‘They’re a right lot of particular, farsighted bastards and that’s a fact.’
The Alphans retraced their steps for fifty metres, turned left, pushed on parallel to the entry ramp to the rotunda and then veered left again. There was no check. This time they were free to move on, until Koenig had one last screen of fronds between himself and open country. He raised a hand to halt the column.
The nearest opening in the rock face was set on a broad ledge that had once carried a mineral track and ran below the roadway they had walked down. It was twenty metres above the valley floor and, except for the top five metres which were sheer, it was an easy scramble.
Sooner or later, the monitoring team in the rotunda was certain to look at the stationary blips on the scanner and put two and two together. The less time taken now in hanging about, the better.
Koenig said, ‘One at a time. Once you’re in the open, move it along. Up you go, Alan.’
Carter crossed the narrow strip at a run. They watched him make the scramble look easy; then he had to traverse to find a viable route. Once he had it, he was away again. Koenig had been timing the operation. As Carter heaved himself onto the ledge, he said, ‘Two minutes on the nose. It’s still a long time if there’s anybody looking for a target. See what you can do, Paul.’
Morrow had the advantage of seeing it done and knocked five seconds off.
Koenig said, ‘Victor. No records to break, but as fast as you like.’
Although he seemed to be slow and deliberate, Victor Bergman was only fractionally over average time for the course. Koenig spent the time trying to make sense of the random scatter of old workings. Each one had its individual track. They had a long-abandoned look as though they had been used by early miners using simple techniques. But any community able to run space shuttles across a solar system would have been equipped from the start with highly sophisticated gear. Maybe there had been people on Pelorus even before the Copreons had made the trip?
It was a thought to share with the amateur archaeologist. Helena Russell appeared in his mind’s eye and he told himself bitterly that his own lack of foresight had put her in Menos’s hands. They should have jacked it in and turned for Alpha as soon as Eagle Nine was ready for flight. He saw Bergman reach journey’s end and was
off himself, in a controlled burst of effort which got him into the cave before the scientist had dusted himself off.
The shaft sloped gently down and two square section ruts a metre apart suggested that ore tubs had been run on some kind of wheeled system. But all gear had been stripped out. There was no rusting pick head or lamp sconce to show how the old miners had gone to work.
The other three had already made adjustments to their commlocks to get a pencil beam of visible light instead of the operating beam. Koenig said, ‘We don’t know how long we shall have to search. One commlock at a time to conserve power. Let’s go.’
For three hundred metres it was straight and all down hill. Paul Morrow voiced the doubt that was in every head. ‘There’s no saying that these old workings were ever brought into the system. God knows where this leads, but it’s going the wrong way.’
Carter said, ‘We could spend months checking out every shaft. For that matter, if they were all connected, there’d be no need to make new approach roads. They could have pulled all the ore out of one or two main routes.’
Thin veins of infrangom showed up as Koenig’s searching beam probed ahead. He reckoned they both had a point. But he also remembered the closed hatches he had seen on the Copreon scanner. There was a watch kept on entry from other tunnels. They had to come from somewhere and, by any reasoning, were likely to go through the hills and meet up with the androids’ sector.
He set himself another ten minutes. After that, they would work back and pick another hole.
There was a half minute still to run and he was going on only because he had fixed a limit and any system was better than no system, when the beam hit a stop and splayed out in an asterisk of light. The tunnel was blind. It was a long folly going nowhere.
Seen close, it was clear that a section of roof had come down. The parallel ruts ran on to the face and were blocked by rubble. Alan Carter, out of simple frustration heaved away at a long slab and Koenig grabbed for his waist and shoved him bodily aside.
There was a sliding rumble as the filling settled to a new level and the spot where Carter had stood was thigh deep in broken rock. Dust had risen in a cloud and was wafted back up the tunnel by a draught of warm air.
Carter picked himself up. ‘Thanks, Commander. Sorry about that. I guess it could have brought the roof in.’
‘Don’t apologise. You did well. Look at that.’
The loose rock had rolled away from the right-hand wall and for the first time they were seeing evidence of a branch gallery. Up close to the roof, there was a metre-wide hole that a careful man might crawl through.
Taking it real slow, as if he were walking on eggs, Koenig went up the pile of scree and shoved head and shoulders through the gap. His voice filtered back. ‘This could be it. Watch how you go.’
Journey’s end, when they were all gathered at floor level, was an interchange point in the system. It was a hemisphere on a twenty-metre diagonal, with a turntable set in the rock, operated by a lever and a pawl-and-ratchet device. Ore cars could be switched and shunted off through a number of connecting tunnels. Only a set of mine drawings could make sense of the layout, but there was one tunnel that led back the way they had come. It was still sloping down hill.
Bergman said, ‘There’s no doubt about it, John. We’re well below the level of any outlet on the hillside. This is going below the valley floor. It’s the right direction.’
This time there were choices to be made. Fifty metres on there was an intersection and another turntable. Koenig stopped. He reckoned that they might have to come back in darkness. The turntable operating lever was a loose fit in its socket and he heaved it out, laying it in the centre of the roadway they had come down. Two minutes later, they were facing a three-way junction.
There was nothing to choose. Koenig tried to imagine how they were placed with relation to the ground above. ‘What do you think, Victor?’
‘Not left, but nothing in it for centre or right. They must both go roughly for where we want to be.’
‘Centre then.’
There was no loose stone about and he used his laser sparingly to mark the floor with a thin smear of instant lava. The slope was levelling off. They were meeting intersections every few minutes. Koenig checked his time disc. They had more than made up the time in the first tunnel; they must be under the valley floor.
Alan Carter whose hearing was uncanny, put a hand on Koenig’s arm. ‘Commander!’
‘What is it?’
‘Do you hear anything?’
Paul Morrow said, ‘Like what, Alan?’
‘A faint hum. Machinery of some kind.’
Fifty paces on, it was clear to all hands. Bergman knelt down and put his ear to the roadway. ‘There’s no doubt, John. It’s machinery. There’s a powerhouse somewhere. They must use a lot in that rotunda.’
‘But a mine shaft wouldn’t open out from a powerhouse.’
‘I don’t think these workings have anything to do with the Copreon organisation. They predate the present generation of Copreons. As I see it, they used this site because it was ready-made to build their working colony on; but their recent mining was highly mechanised with android labour and could be well away from here.’
It was all interesting speculation, but Koenig was not in the mood. Streaked with sweat and dust and sick to his stomach with all things Copreon, he wanted out and if he could get out by walking on Menos, it would be all gain. He came as near as he had ever come to snapping at his old friend. ‘I’m sure you have the right of it, Victor. Put it in the log.’
The vibration of the unseen generators reached a maximum and began to fade. Koenig turned on his heel and strode back along the tunnel to the intersection closest to the point of maximum noise. He said, ‘Paul and Victor, go along that way. Not far. I don’t want us losing each other in this maze. Two minutes, then back here. Check out whether you get nearer.’
With Carter, he took the opposite limb and it was clear in the first half minute, they had backed a loser. When they joined forces again, Paul Morrow was looking more cheerful than at any time since. ‘Progress, Commander. We’re home and dry.’
In a manner of speaking, he was right, but on any sober count there was a lot more mileage to go before they could do any congratulating.
Morrow’s tunnel ran out into an enclosed quarry feature which was big enough to lose the beams of the commlocks in its lofty roof. It was on a similar scale to the Copreons’ living rotunda and gave force to Bergman’s theory that the Copreons had taken over existing works and adapted them to their own use. It even had a gallery hewn out of the rock, halfway up the dome. Instead of elaborate flying stairways, there were vertical ladders in pairs at intervals.
Unrepentant, Bergman was at it again. ‘What do you think about that, John? It’s the most amazingly economical system I’ve seen. You see each ladder is free to move up and down one step. There’s an eccentric cam. One lifts, one stays still. Anybody going up, gets on one ladder and it lifts him one rung. Then he swings over to the stationary ladder and the first one falls back. The second ladder lifts and he swings back to the first. That way he’s lifted to the top and neither ladder moves more than one step.’
Koenig said, ‘I believe you. There should be one in every home. But since it isn’t working, we’ll just have to climb.’
As his weight came onto the bottom rung of the nearest pair, he found that circumstance was out to prove him wrong. There was a rattle of long-unused gear going into spasm and the ancient mechanism jolted into life.
Bergman was vindicated on all counts. It made climbing easy. Once he had the rhythm, it was a simple matter of swinging left and right and making progress. On the gallery, he was facing a closed metal hatch, which had been a late addition to the building works. From behind it, the characteristic noise of generators came strength nine.
A journey of a thousand miles ends in one step and he was one step from the heartland of the Copreon complex.
More to the
point, he was one step from where he could find Menos and squeeze out some hard facts about Helena.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gregor, all there was of power in the android faction, had no emotions to cloud his judgement. Logical thought, finding an outlet in effective action, was his meat. Ever since the Alphans had upset his calculations, by voting with their feet and getting themselves out of the net, he had been running probabilities through his computer and finally called a meeting of his council to share in problem solution.
There was a lot of satisfaction in seeing them sitting around the table. They were the true heirs of all the millennia of biological progress. Memory banks loaded with all the data that had ever been gathered in the Copreon archives, there was no collection of humans anywhere that could pack such a wealth of knowledge and expertise in one room. With the unlimited power that could be concentrated in the ducts of the metal mountain, by its spin through the magnetic fields of Pelorus, they were truly immortal. When the last Copreon colonist had died off, they would still be there with undisputed dominion.
He had plans for expansion. There was no hurry. But eventually, he would set up a whole manufacturing enterprise to build androids and robots in numbers that would populate the empty quarters. It would be the first android nation in the galaxy, as far as could be known. It would be stable and without the internal pressures that drove human civilisations to rise and fall. Every unit would be engineered for a particular place. It would be beautiful and balanced as a mathematical equation and those special units, like himself, created for abstract thought, would produce works would make Pelorus the wonder of the universe.
There was no court jester to tell him that he was suffering from vaulting ambition that might well overreach itself and fall flat on its microgrooved face. The council members plugged themselves in to the communications net which linked each cortex to an interchange and waited for the feeling of the meeting to be expressed as a printout from the master computer.
