Survival--A Novel

by Ben Bova

  They were all youngsters, almost all of them. Although youngster, in this age of cellular rejuvenation, was a relative term. Eighty-year-olds were as youthful as teenagers, Ignatiev knew.

  My two hundredth birthday is coming in a few years, he thought. Two hundred years of being awake. For nearly two thousand years Ignatiev had slept in suspended animation, frozen in cryogenic cold. The medics don’t count that time when they calculate one’s somatic age. Cryosleep is a time-out; your bodily functions are suspended while you snooze away. Too bad they can’t freeze the ALS permanently.

  But I’m actually very nearly two thousand years old! he marveled. I’ve existed for almost two thousand years. No wonder that I feel older than a mere two hundred. It’s not the ALS, not altogether, anyway.

  Older, he told himself, but no wiser.

  The crew had been selected by AI systems on Earth for their capabilities and drive. And for a willingness to leave family and friends behind while they went star-questing. Most of them were filled with missionary zeal to save intelligent species wherever they may be found. Others, like Ignatiev himself, had no family and few friends to tie them to Earth.

  How many of you are ambitious? Ignatiev asked them silently, as he walked along. How many of you would seize command of this mission, if the chance arose? Should I be as fearful as Brutus? Or as mistrustful as Cassius?

  Ignatiev was on his way to the astrogation center to look at the first detailed imagery of Oh-Four. While the starship was flying at nearly the speed of light, images of the planet had to be processed, reconstructed, to diminish the Doppler shift as much as possible. Otherwise the images of Oh-Four’s surface would be little more than blurs of colors.

  Now Intrepid’s speed was well below relativistic and the ship’s sensors should be able to get clear high-resolution images of the planet’s surface.

  Despite the standing order that the astrogation center should be occupied only by members of the ship’s astrogational team, Ignatiev saw that the compact little compartment was already jammed wall to wall with onlookers eager to see the first close-up views of the planet. Sweaty, sticky, restless young bodies that made the astrogation center hot and clammy. The air hummed with dozens of conversations, but as soon as Ignatiev pushed through the compartment’s entry hatch they all ceased as if a laser beam had cut off everyone’s tongue.

  He shouldered his way to the display screen at the front of the compartment and stood between it and the crowd. Looking over the expectant men and women, Ignatiev realized all over again how young they were.

  With a rueful shake of his head, Ignatiev raised his hands and said, “I’m afraid that all unauthorized personnel will have to leave the astrogation center.”

  A general sigh of unhappiness.

  “Only the astrogational crew may remain. We’ve got to let them do their job. Go to the auditorium. We’ll pipe the imagery there. You’ll see it just as well as you would here.”

  Unwillingly, muttering glumly, the crowd slowly squeezed through the hatch. Ignatiev noticed Patel standing uncertainly to one side of the exiting stream.

  “You too, Juga,” Ignatiev said, as gently as he could.

  The Punjabi blinked and tried to smile. Then, without a word, he turned and joined the exiting crowd. Ignatiev felt a slight pang of guilt. You could have let him stay, he berated himself. But he shook his head. No special privileges. Don’t let him think he’s above all the others.

  Once the command center was cleared out, Ignatiev stepped to one side of the command chair and told the crewman sitting in it, “Let’s see the planet.”

  He was a North American, Ignatiev’s implanted link to Aida reminded him: Ernie Macduff, a native of Manitoba who headed the ship’s astrogation crew. Young, clean-cut, lean, and muscular. If it bothered him that the AI system was in actual control of the ship and he was little more than a figurehead, he didn’t show it. Maybe he doesn’t even realize it. A pawn, Ignatiev thought. But there’s strength there; maybe he’ll grow into a knight or a bishop, in time.

  Macduff’s long fingers played across the studs on the arms of his chair. The central viewscreen flashed a kaleidoscope of colors briefly, then cleared to show the planet they were approaching.

  Ignatiev gasped. This is a planet that harbors intelligent life?

  Its surface was a blackened wasteland, barren and lifeless. Bare rock, pitted with meteor craters. Not a tree or a blade of grass. Dead. Empty.

  Ignatiev tasted bile in his throat. The place looks as if the death wave has already scoured it clean. We’ve come all this way for nothing. A fool’s errand.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ignatiev heard himself ask, “Is that the best resolution you can get?”

  Macduff’s youthful face looked stricken, as if someone had told him he was infected with a loathsome disease.

  “Yessir,” he answered, in a half whisper. But his fingers still manipulated the control studs on his chair’s armrests. The picture on the display screen did not change.

  One of the women at an auxiliary console stared at the screen and whimpered, “To come all this way … for nothing.”

  “The Predecessors said this planet harbored intelligent life,” one of the other crew members said, almost accusingly.

  “If it did when they studied it,” Ignatiev said, “it doesn’t any longer.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Looks like the death wave scoured it clean.”

  “But the death wave is still two hundred light-years away.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Maybe the Predecessors’ findings were off.”

  “Maybe everything they’ve told us is wrong.”

  Ignatiev sensed a tide of confusion, almost panic, rising among the astrogation team. God knows what the rest of the crew is thinking, out in the auditorium, he told himself.

  Trying to understand what they were seeing, Ignatiev said, “The imagery the Predecessors gave our scientists back on Earth showed that this planet had cities, buildings, structures. Where are they?”

  “Demolished,” said Macduff.

  “The death wave doesn’t demolish structures. It kills living organisms but it doesn’t level whole cities.”

  “Well look at it!” Macduff snapped, waving a long arm at the main screen. “Something has blasted the whole planet down to bedrock!”

  “War?” someone asked. “They wiped themselves out in a war?”

  “What should we do?” demanded the woman at the auxiliary console. “There’s no sense establishing an orbit around the planet. It’s dead.”

  Ignatiev wanted to agree with her. But something within him refused to allow him to do so.

  “We establish orbit around Oh-Four,” he said firmly. “We check the mission protocol to see what we’re expected to do. If the protocol permits, we’ll go down to Oh-Four’s surface for a closer examination and try to determine what happened here.”

  To himself, he added, A leader leads. If the AI system picked me to head this gaggle of youths, then I’m going to give them a reason for being here, a purpose for their existence. I’m not going to let them slink back home with their tails between their legs.

  “Down to the surface?” asked Macduff, his voice trembling slightly. “That could be dangerous.”

  “We’ve come too far to turn back now. We’ve got to determine what happened to the inhabitants of this world.”

  “Whatever destroyed this planet might destroy us.”

  Ignatiev also felt the same fear, fear of the unknown. “We’re scientists,” he insisted. “We don’t run away from mysteries. We try to solve them.”

  Someone muttered almost too low for Ignatiev to hear him, “Like the Scott expedition to the Antarctic.”

  Ignatiev smiled. “As a sergeant told his men when they wavered at going into battle, ‘Come on, you bastards, do you want to live forever?’”

  That silenced them, although Ignatiev thought that the sergeant’s men must have answered with a fervent,
“Hell yes!”

  * * *

  Just about the entire complement of scientists and engineers had crowded into the ship’s auditorium. Ignatiev had called the meeting for four o’clock, ship’s time, figuring that the proximity to the dinner hour would keep the palavering down to a minimum.

  He was wrong.

  Everyone had a question, a suggestion, an opinion. Ignatiev stood at the lectern set up on the auditorium’s stage until his legs began to throb, listening to them babble.

  “Why should we stay here if the planet’s dead? Let’s go back home.”

  “But what happened to it? A whole world blasted into rubble? What happened?”

  “Whatever happened, we’re too late to do anything about it.”

  “We should map the surface with the finest resolution we can, and then head back to Earth,” said Thornton, the captain of the ship’s crew.

  Standing alone on the stage, leaning on the lectern, Ignatiev wished he had a magic wand that would silence them all.

  Instead, he raised his voice to a lion’s roar and shouted, “We are not going to leave! Not yet.”

  That quieted the crowd, except for a few mutters here and there.

  “We are going to send a team of volunteers to the surface and examine it firsthand.”

  “But that could be dangerous,” a woman’s voice called out.

  Ignatiev said, “We should learn as much as we can about what happened here before we decide to leave.”

  “What does the Executive Commission on Earth have to say about this?” a man’s voice asked.

  “We have sent a preliminary report to Earth via the QUE communications link. It should reach the commission in another few hours. In the meantime, we prepare for a mission to the planet’s surface.”

  “But not before we hear back from the commission!”

  Nodding, Ignatiev agreed, “That’s right, not until we hear from the commission.”

  Although no object with mass could exceed Einstein’s limit of the speed of light, the Predecessors had shown the scientists of Earth that information could be sent across the parsecs between the stars at superluminal velocities, using the arcane (to nonphysicists) phenomenon of quantum unlimited entanglement.

  Jugannath Patel, sitting in the front row of the auditorium, raised his hand and—without waiting for Ignatiev to acknowledge him—said, “So we wait for the commission’s reply.”

  Ignatiev nodded. “And while we wait, we prepare for a mission to the surface.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ignatiev returned to his quarters, feeling too tired to be hungry.

  A whole planet blasted into rubble, he said to himself. Why? Why?

  According to the Predecessors’ survey of the planet, nearly a thousand years earlier, it was a world inhabited by intelligent machines. The Predecessors had found this unremarkable. Organic intelligence was short-lived, they knew from their own history. Hardly any intelligent organic species survived for as much as a few million years. But some of them left their descendants: intelligent machines. Carbon-based intelligence faded quickly, often destroying itself; but digital intelligence was practically immortal.

  Yet the digital intelligence on Oh-Four was gone, wiped out. It couldn’t have been a war, Ignatiev told himself. Machines are too smart for such nonsense. Wars happen among the emotional, the irrational, the hormone-drenched minds of organic creatures.

  Sitting tiredly on his plushly yielding couch, Ignatiev surveyed his comfortable room. The holographic fireplace crackled cheerfully. The “windows” showed some of his favorite artworks. There was even a three-dimensional display of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, from the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, sitting on an end table next to the couch.

  “Alexander Alexandrovich,” Aida called, in a softly calming tone.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like to play a game of chess? It would help to relax—”

  “No!” he snapped. “No chess.”

  Aida’s three-dimensional image winked out.

  Once, a lifetime ago, he whiled away empty hours playing chess. He could beat almost everyone he knew, except for AI systems. Playing against an opponent that never forgot any move and could see twenty moves ahead was a foolish mistake, he finally realized. Instead of relaxing him, chess games with an AI system were studies in frustration.

  Instead, Ignatiev commanded the windows to show views of the planet they were approaching. Dead. Lifeless. Blackened and seared by the hand of—what?

  “Aida,” he called out.

  The artificial intelligence’s avatar immediately reappeared in the display above the fireplace.

  “You are troubled, Alexander Alexandrovich.”

  “You would be too, if you had any emotions,” he growled.

  “That capability was not included in my makeup.”

  “Aida, do you have any record of a machine intelligence destroying itself?”

  The avatar hesitated for several heartbeats: an eternity for a machine intelligence.

  “None in my memory banks,” the avatar replied. “That doesn’t mean that such disasters have not happened in regions we have not explored as yet.”

  Ignatiev knew that the AI’s use of the word we referred to the Predecessors. Human exploration of the stars was pitifully small compared to the Predecessors’. They’ve been at it for millennia, Ignatiev knew. We’ve barely started to creep beyond our own solar system.

  Feeling more and more exasperated, Ignatiev asked, “What do you think we should do?”

  With a soothing smile, Aida replied, “None of the sensor scans of the planet show anything especially harmful. The planet is airless, but our standard excursion suits can protect against that. Radiation levels are nominal. There are no predators or intelligent species that might be harmful. The planet appears to be quite dead.”

  “But how did it die?” Ignatiev demanded. “What happened to it?”

  “That is beyond my knowledge, Alexander Alexandrovich. That is something that you must investigate.”

  “You agree, then, that we must send a team to the surface?”

  “I see no other way of possibly answering your questions.”

  Ignatiev nodded, satisfied. And he suddenly realized that he was in fact quite hungry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ignatiev got up, left his quarters, and headed toward the main dining room. As he strode along the passageway he noticed that most of the people walking by wore the expedition’s standard-issue coveralls, a sky blue, one-piece jumpsuit. It was like walking through a maze of animated blue-colored automatons.

  He himself was dressed in a white turtleneck shirt and dark gray slacks. Comfortable. Sensible. I’d look like a fat old fool in those coveralls, he told himself.

  Then he caught an image of himself reflected in one of the display screens that lined the bulkhead: a chunky, bullheaded old man, thick white hair and beard, hands balled into fists as he strode along, his face set in a menacing scowl. At least I’m well dressed, he told himself.

  “Professor Ignatiev!”

  Turning from the screen, Ignatiev saw Patel hurrying toward him. My new shadow, Ignatiev thought. Wherever I go, he’ll be following me.

  “Juga,” he said by way of greeting.

  “I have taken the liberty of checking out the team that is preparing for the surface mission,” the dark-skinned technician said, in his lilting inflection. “They are progressing quite well.”

  “That’s good,” said Ignatiev as he resumed his walk to the main dining room. “Fine.”

  Scurrying to keep up, Patel asked, “Has the commission responded to our report?”

  Our report? Ignatiev asked himself. Yes, ours, he concluded. The report bears my signature but it is the work of our entire staff, really.

  “Only to say that they have received it, will study it, and reply as soon as possible.”

  Patel nodded. “Yes, it must have taken them by surprise.”

  “Indeed.” Gesturing t
oward the open doors of the dining area, Ignatiev asked, “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Oh yes, more than an hour ago.”

  “Ah. Well. I haven’t, and I’m quite hungry.”

  “Oh yes. Of course.” Patel stood there uncertainly for a moment, then said, “Enjoy your dinner, sir.”

  * * *

  The main dining room was quite elegant, with crystal chandeliers hanging from its high ceiling, twinkling candles on every table, gleaming silverware and sparkling glasses.

  More of the psychotechs’ contribution, Ignatiev said to himself. My tax assessments at work. Ah well, when surrounded by splendor, you might as well enjoy it.

  The robot that served as a maître d’ began to head toward an unoccupied table for two, off in a quiet corner of the ornate room, but Ignatiev stopped it.

  Pointing to a table set for eight that had only six places occupied, he said to the robot, “Let’s see if they will allow me to join them.”

  Before the robot could respond, Ignatiev stepped up to the table and asked, “I hate to eat alone. May I join you?”

  One of the young men looked up and grinned lopsidedly. “Why? Are we falling apart?”

  Ignatiev blinked, puzzled.

  The woman next to the young man said sourly, “Don’t mind Corcoran, Professor Ignatiev. He thinks he’s a comedian.”

  A lanky black man rose to his feet and gestured to the empty chair across the table from him. “It would be an honor, sir.”

  The link with Aida implanted in Ignatiev’s brain whispered, “Raj Jackson, African-American, geochemist.”

  Jackson towered over Ignatiev. He was lean and gangly, with a gleaming smile on his dark face. A knight, Ignatiev thought. Definitely a high-spirited steed.

  “Thank you, Dr. Jackson,” Ignatiev said as he took the proffered chair.

  It turned out that the whole group were geochemists, except for the round-faced woman with flame-red hair who was sitting next to Jackson. Like all the others, she was wearing a simple one-piece jumpsuit, sky blue. It was skin-tight, though, and outlined her generous figure nicely.

  “Katherine Mulvany,” whispered Aida. “Irish. Geophysicist.”