Not that the butterflies, so-called, were butterflies. They were winged arthropods of a sort—but arthropods are not warm-blooded, and these things were. In spite of this they had not survived the millennia prior to Man's first landing on Mars—but neither had much of anything else, plant or animal. Perhaps the great meteor shower which formed the craters had wiped out practically all life on the Red Planet—or would wipe out all life.
"But what about the cities?" asked Grimes, when this theory was advanced. "You can't tell me that each meteor had the name of a city written on it. There must have been something left for Men to find."
"But there wasn't," said Williams.
"No. There wasn't—save for a couple or three dubious artifacts."
"I think . . ." began Mayhew hesitantly, "I think that we arrived just before some sort of mass migration . . . An old world, senescent, and its people moving on to greener, fresher pastures . . ."
Carnaby picked up the home-made butterfly net that he had been using, pretended to strum it as though it were a guitar.
"I've laid around and played around, this old town too long" he sang.
"Summer almost gone, winter comin' on . . .
"I've laid around and played around this old town too long,
"And I feel I gottagotta travel on . . ."
"Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Yes, there is that sort of feel in the air. But . . ." Then he, too, sang, in spite of Sonya's protests.
"There's a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin' through the town,
"A-comin' through the town, an' I'll be homeward bound,
"There's a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin' through the town . . .
"An' I feel I gotta travel on . . ."
"No one's stopping you," said his wife acidly.
"You don't get the point. When you board that lonesome train you don't take the town with you. You leave it behind. You leave town, in fact."
"What are you drivin' at, Skipper?" asked Williams.
"I . . . I don't quite know. When I was a kid, when I was a cadet at the Survey Service academy, we were supposed to read selected Twentieth Century science fiction. Wild stuff, most of it, and well off the beam most of the time. And yet, after years, some of it sticks in my memory. There was one story about an invention called, I think, the spindizzy. It was a sort of anti-gravitational device that lifted entire cities and sent them whiffling around the galaxy as enormous spaceships with closed economies . . .
"What if the Martians have something of the kind in mind? What if those antennae on the towers of their cities, like Carlotti antennae, aren't for communication but are something on the same general lines as our Mannschenn Drive? After all, both the Mannschenn Drive and the Carlotti Communication System do funny things to Space and Time . . . Mphm. It could be that they've taken our Carlotti set so they can modify it so it can be used as an interstellar drive for the boat . . ."
"And if they have, if they can," asked Sonya, "where do we go to? And, come to that, why?"
Carnaby started to sing again.
"Sheriff an' police a-comin' after me,
"Comin' after me, a-comin' after me . . .
"Sheriff an' police a-comin' after me, "An' I feel I gotta travel on . . ."
Nobody thought that it was very funny.
Chapter 27
The summons came an hour before sunrise.
Mayhew woke Grimes and Sonya, while Clarisse called the others.
Grimes asked, struggling into his clothes, "So this is it?"
"This is it, John."
"What is this it?" demanded Sonya grumpily.
"I . . . I don't know. They seem determined not to let me have a detailed picture. But you must be able to feel it . . . An atmosphere of tense expectancy . . . The bustle of embarkation . . ."
Sonya sniffed audibly, then said, "Fort Sumter has been fired upon. My regiment marches at dawn."
"I don't get it . . ." said Mayhew, after a puzzled pause.
"I do," Grimes told him. "But get into the boat, Ken. And we'll leave none of our own gear behind. Come to that, we may as well take these blankets. They might come in useful . . ."
Grimes and Sonya, muffled against the cold, emerged from the dome into the pre-dawn darkness. There was a thin, chill wind, and overhead the sky was clear, the stars bitterly bright. To the east the horizon was black against the first pale flush of day and a bright planet blazed with a greenish effulgence. Earth . . . And what were the mutineers doing, wondered the commodore. And what was happening, what would happen, to his ship, to the old Quest? Grimes looked away from the distant home world to the west, where tiny Phobos was slowly rising. Deimos, even tinier, was among the stars somewhere, undistinguishable from them. He had no time to waste determining its exact location. And to the north was the glare of the city lights.
Lights were coming on in the lifeboat. The loud grumbling of the inertial drive unit shattered the early morning calm. Williams must be already aboard, ensuring that all was in a state of readiness.
Grimes and Sonya hurried to the boat, clambered in through the open door. Yes, Williams was there, in the co-pilot's seat, and Clarisse, Mayhew, Carnaby, Brenda and Ruth were in their places.
"All right," said the commodore. "Let's go." He eased himself into his chair. "To the city, I suppose, Ken?"
"To the city. We are to land in the central plaza."
The hammering of the inertial drive became louder as Grimes lifted the boat. She lurched, steadied. Below her the canal was a ribbon of faintly gleaming silver in the starlight. Ahead the city was a star cluster on the black horizon, individual lights now visible through the dim-glowing haze.
As they flew on, the rosy pallor in the east spread slowly over the entire sky and the ocherous desert reflected the growing luminosity. Abruptly, a point of dazzling light appeared over the low hills, expanded rapidly. The sun was up, and the towers of the city stood stark and black in the pearly morning mist, but only for an instant; the clarity of their first appearance dimmed to a quivering insubstantiality. Grimes remembered again that story which he had read so long ago; what was its title? Cities in Flight? Something like that. He laughed briefly. Just a trick of the light, he told himself.
They flew on—and, quite suddenly, were rattling over the pinnacles of the outermost towers. On each of them gleamed the elliptical Mobius strip, but the antennae were motionless. Over broad avenues they flew, slowly now, over the graceful bridges that spanned the wide streets, that connected tower to tower in a complex mesh. There was traffic abroad—beetle-like vehicles, small knots of pedestrians, most of whom paused briefly to look upwards at the noisy flying boat.
They came to the central plaza, which was circular in plan, paved with lustrous pink stone, and ornamented by a central fountain and a profusion of flowering shrubs. To the north of the fountain a space had been cleared for them—shrubs removed, their beds flattened. So that there could be no mistake, a little red-flashing beacon indicated their landing site.
"I suppose this is where they want us," said Grimes.
"It is," Mayhew told him.
"Mphm. I think I can wriggle us in without knocking anything over," said Grimes.
Cautiously he brought the boat down. There was just room for her between the beds of shrubs and the stone benches. When her landing gear crunched on the paving he cut the drive. He said, unnecessarily, "Well, we're here."
Sonya muttered something about a blinding glimpse of the obvious but she, with the others, was staring out through the viewports. From ground level the towers were even more impressive than they had appeared from the air. They soared like fountains, flash-frozen to immobility. They, and the connecting bridges, were an arching spray of intricately interlacing stone and metal. Over all, glittering gold in the sunlight, were those enigmatic antennae.
"Company," announced Williams prosaically.
Grimes pulled his regard away from the fantastic architecture, looked to where the commander was pointing. Walking slowly towa
rds the boat came a small procession, six Martians, all of them tall, attenuated, all with those almost featureless elongated heads, all of them looking more like insects than men. Two of them carried between them the Carlotti transceiver. It looked just as it had when it had been dismantled, but it was impossible to see what changes had been made to the components concealed by the casing.
"Dwynnaith is with them," said Mayhew. His lips went on moving, silently, as he put his thoughts into words. Then, "We are to accompany him to the assembly hall. The others will fit the . . . the apparatus back into the boat."
"Very well," said Grimes at last. He did not like the idea of letting strangers, aliens, loose in the lifeboat without himself or one of his people there to see what was being done, but realized that he had no option. "Very well."
Mayhew and Clarisse were first out of the boat. They went through the head-touching ceremony with Dwynnaith. The other Martians looked at the humans with an apparent lack of curiosity, conversed among themselves in eerie, chittering voices. Grimes was last on the ground. He waited until the telepaths seemed to have completed their silent conversation, then said, "We're all ready, Ken."
"Good. The Council is waiting for us."
* * *
The Council was waiting for them in a great hall on the ground floor of one of the towers. It was a huge room, with a vast expanse of polished floor, a high, vaulted ceiling, a platform against one wall. There was neither ornamentation nor furniture, save for the eight inflatable chairs for the humans, incongruous in the vastness. Six of these chairs were on the floor before the platform, the other two were on the platform itself.
On the dais stood the members of the Council—ten of them, all tall, all attenuated, each one indistiguishable, to human eyes, from any of the others. Dwynnaith joined them on the platform, accompanied by Mayhew and Clarisse. He stood behind their chairs as they seated themselves.
"Is it all right for us to sit?" asked Grimes.
"That is what the chairs are for, John," replied Mayhew.
The humans seated themselves. They looked up at the grave Martians, the Martians looked down at them. The silence was becoming oppressive. Grimes wished that he had his pipe with him—and that he had something with which to fill it.
Mayhew spoke again—but it was not, somehow, his voice. Just as he had controlled the girl Elena, Grimes realized, somebody or something was now controlling him. His face was the face of a humanoid robot, mobile yet not really alive.
He said, "I, Gwayllian, Moderator of the Council, have studied and learned your language. It is not possible for my vocal cords to form the necessary sounds, therefore I speak through the mouth of Mayhew. You will forgive me if my vocabulary is in any way deficient."
"You're doin' fine," remarked the irrepressible Williams.
"I thank you. But you will please not interrupt. The time fast approaches when we, when we all, must . . . go. But before our departure you should know what is about to happen.
"The first time that you came to this world, which you call Mars, we wanted nothing of you. Your landing, in your ship, would have interfered with our preparations for the . . . voyage. You were, with all the resources of your own technology at your disposal, quite capable of . . . looking after yourselves. The second time that you came, as fugitives, our preparations were almost complete. You were in no way a menace to our plans. Our engineers, our mathematicians, our scientists could spare the time to consider your problem. The solution of it was an amusing mental exercise.
"But, as a beginning, I must tell you who and what we are.
"We are not of this world. Many millennia ago our people lived on another planet, many light years from here. The name of the sun, the star, around which it revolved would be meaningless to you; besides, that star is no more. We—our ancestors—escaped before our sun became a nova. Our ships dispersed. One ship found this planet which, as it was then, was almost a twin to the one which we had abandoned. Slowly, over the centuries, we rebuilt our civilization. But slowly, over the long centuries, this world was dying. Rejuvenation of the planet was considered; this would have been a far from impossible feat. But our astronomers warned of an inevitable, coming catastrophe. An extrapolation of the orbits of Mars, as you call this world, and of sundry planetoids made it obvious that a disastrous meteoric bombardment could not be avoided.
"Yet we did not wish to leave this planet, even though we still possessed the technology for faster-than-light travel between the stars. It had become home. We did not wish to leave our cities, which had grown up with us. But there was a way. There was a way to avoid the inevitable wreck, to save our cities as well as ourselves. And we took it."
He's getting his tenses mixed, thought Grimes. He said—some comment seemed to be expected—"So you will convert your cities into FTL spaceships . . ."
"Not will," replied Mayhew in that voice which was not his own. "Not will, but did. And not space ships, but time ships. We went back in Time to a period just prior to the landing of our ancestors, so that they found the civilization which they, themselves, had founded already well established and flourishing. We have repeated the cycle now a thousand times, on each occasion with only minor variations.
"You will be such a variation—and a very minor one."
Somewhere a great bell was tolling, slow, measured strokes.
A countdown, thought Grimes, a temporal countdown . . . He said desperately, "Suppose that we don't want to come with you?"
"You and your people may stay if you wish. You may hope to survive the meteoric storm which will wreck this world, or you may return to Earth. But do not forget that we offer you hope."
"Give it a go, Skipper," urged Williams. "Give it a go. What have we to lose?"
"Nothing," said the Moderator of the Council through Mayhew. "Nothing, but there may be-there just may be—much to gain. And now you will return to your boat."
Chapter 28
They hurried back to the boat.
It lay there, in the center of the plaza, glistening in the fine spray that was blowing over it from the fountain. The Martian technicians had finished their work and were gone. The Carlotti transceiver was back in its old place. It was Sonya who noticed that the blankets they had brought from the encampment had gone. It seemed a matter of no great importance—but, thought Grimes, it looked as though it had been decided that they were to take no local artifacts with them to wherever—or whenever—they were being sent.
"Button up, Skipper?" asked Williams.
"Yes, we'd better," Grimes told him.
The doors slid shut, sealing the hull.
What was going to happen now? That great bell was still tolling with slow, solemn deliberation, measuring off the remaining minutes of time. The plaza was deserted, as were the streets and the bridges. There was a brooding atmosphere of tense expectancy.
Grimes said, more to himself than to anybody else, "I wonder if we're supposed to switch on the Carlotti . . ." He walked slowly to the instrument, put out his finger to the On-Off button. But it was no longer there. The panel was featureless. "Ruth!" he called. "Come here! What do you make of this?"
Then the bell stopped, and the silence was like a heavy blow. "Look!" shouted Carnaby. "Look!"
They looked. Atop the towers surrounding the plaza the antennae were starting to rotate, slowly at first, about their long axes, the sunlight flashing from the polished, twisted surfaces. And—"Look!" cried Ruth Macoboy. The miniature antenna of the Carlotti transceiver was rotating too, in synchronization. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the sun was setting, falling back towards the eastern horizon. Abruptly there was deep shadow as it was obscured by the towers. Then there was twilight, but morning not evening twilight, come again. There was twilight, and night, and day, with the sun rising in the west and setting in the east.
Night followed day and day followed night, faster and faster, a flicker of alternating light and darkness that became too fast to register on the retina, that was seen as a
grey dusk. Overhead the sun was a wavering band of yellow light in the sky, with Phobos as a narrower, dimmer band. The stars were streaks of silver.
Yet the buildings surrounding the plaza were still substantial, were glowing with a hard luminosity. The whirling antennae at their pinnacles flared like torches in the dimness.
For hours this went on.
It was fascinating to watch, at first, but the fascination wore off. One can get used to anything in time. Brenda Coles left the port beside which she was seated, went into the little galley. She returned with mugs of instant coffee, which all of them sipped gratefully. It was not very good coffee, but the very ordinariness of what they were doing was psychologically beneficial. They talked a little, in disjointed sentences. They wondered what was going to happen next, more for the sake of idle speculation than in the hope that any questions would be answered thereby.
The Way Back Page 13
