When Hans hesitated, Ben Blesh said, "We'd better get a move on. The digger knows what it's talking about, and it won't start until we're at a safe distance."
A large working area sounded like a bad idea to Hans. "Is it proposing to use explosives? That could destroy exactly the things we are hoping to find."
"It has orders to operate in a non-destructive mode." For once, Ben apparently didn't have all the answers. The four of them climbed back onto the car and it retreated on a path at right angles to the saw-tooth line of the wall. Then it was watch and wait for a long while. To Hans Rebka's eyes nothing at all was happening. But at last Lara Quistner said, "It's really moving. I didn't realize it could go so fast."
Hans realized that a broad tunnel was appearing in the body of the drift. The digger was creeping forward into the cleared space. Hans saw what was perhaps a slight fog in the air above the digger's broad back, but otherwise there was no sign of cleared materials. After a few more seconds he exclaimed, "It's applying heat to the solid carbon oxide. Of course. Sublimation, straight to gas with no liquid phase. Does the digger have a fusion engine inside it?"
"A substantial one." Ben Blesh was measuring the rate of progress. "Don't worry, the digger will turn the heat off as soon as it is near a wall or a door or anything else that it recognizes. After that it will be up to us. If we want the door to remain intact, we can't rely on the digger. It knows fabricated objects when it sees them, but it doesn't know what to do with them."
The tunnel was deepening, at the same time as the drift above it was vanishing. After twenty more minutes, the digger halted. It extruded its limbs and retreated. The female voice said, "We have reached a boundary. Beyond this we cannot proceed without material damage."
Hans and the others approached the end of the newly created valley. They scraped at the white surface, gently at first and then more vigorously as their lamps revealed a brown facing. Ben scraped a path in several directions, to determine the outline of the flat surface. "It's some type of door all right. But it's tiny. They must have been very small. Do you think we will be able to squeeze through?"
"I hope so." Hans came close and directed his light onto the right-hand edge. "No kind of hinges. It would waste a lot of time if we tried to go over the wall. I don't think anyone will object if we do a little breaking-in."
The entry went easier than expected. If this had once indeed been a fortified gate, age and extreme temperature had rendered the construction materials weak and brittle. The facing caved in at one blow from Hans Rebka's gloved fist. Within half a minute, the whole door was gone and the way inside clear. Ben Blesh pushed forward eagerly, and Rebka allowed the other man to go first. He could not imagine finding anything pleasant, and at this point he did not expect danger.
The reality was more pathetic than threatening. The tunnel through the thick wall led not back into the open air, but to a large closed chamber. Within it, huddled in some kind of sacking intended to keep in warmth, they found five small bodies. The aliens resembled no species known to Rebka, and he had seen many on many worlds. But all had been in the Orion Arm. It should be no surprise that Sag Arm inhabitants had developed along different physical patterns.
Darya Lang cut open one of the sleeping bags. She worked carefully, afraid that the tiny frozen body would crumble to dust at her touch. The creature resembled a cross between insectoid and reptilian forms. Large compound eyes, clouded in death, stared up from a narrow muzzled face. Thin lips had shrunk back to show teeth like triangular knives. Four limbs, protected at their ends by a shiny chitinous covering, wrapped across the segmented body as though making a final effort to hold in warmth and life.
"How long do think they had?" Lara Quistner asked. "Many generations, or just one or two?"
"Unless someone returns for a thorough investigation, we don't know and we never will." Hans Rebka turned away. "You have to wish that it could have been quicker. I'll take the flash of a supernova any time over long, drawn-out cold."
Darya Lang stood up. She had been making a visual recording of the corpses and their surroundings. "I think it was fairly quick. I examined the images taken from orbit, too. I didn't notice these walled towns, but everything went too quickly for glaciation to creep down from the poles."
"Quick, but not quick enough. Does anyone want to see more?"
"What about the other sites, Captain Rebka?" Ben Blesh was commanding the digger to return to its position on the cargo rack. Having objected to visiting this world, he now seemed reluctant to leave. "Might we learn something there?"
"I don't think so. I didn't see much variation in the towns. It will be the same sad story, repeated a thousand or ten thousand times. Starvation, cold, death." As Hans Rebka led the way back to the car, he added to Darya Lang, "Even if it lasted only one lifetime, that was much too long. I'm inclined to agree with you, Darya, this isn't the handiwork of the Builders. Something more inhuman, something more indifferent to organic suffering, has been at work in this system. Let's get back to the Savior, file our report with Julian Graves—and take a look at Iceworld. It may prove more dangerous, but I can't imagine anything more depressing than what we found here."
CHAPTER TWELVE
To Iceworld.
The Savior leaving the dead world was not the ship that had arrived two days before. Within an hour of lift-off Darya could feel the change in every person on board. It was not hard to guess the reasons.
Before their arrival, Hans Rebka had been fidgety and preoccupied. He knew that he had his own agenda in going there, but he was reluctant to tell others until he could offer proof. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner had felt the nervousness of anyone about to undergo a first practical test. Now, Rebka's dark suspicions had been confirmed, while Ben and Lara had performed well—no, make that brilliantly. Darya could not imagine a more competent performance.
As for Darya herself, her full confidence in Hans Rebka was restored. She was ashamed for doubting him, when he had never in the past acted out of ego or the need to prove that he was in charge.
The result of all this was a great decrease in tension. The cramped quarters of the Savior no longer felt like an overcrowded box, too small for its crew. Rebka, Blesh, and Quistner were off by the communications console, and although she could not hear their conversation, an occasional laugh suggested that it was friendly and relaxed. If some of the laughter was a reaction to the sight of ugly death, that was no more than natural. The fact that they were talking together at all suggested a major adjustment. And it was no huge surprise when Lara Quistner wandered over to Darya and sat down by her side.
"Professor Lang, I've been thinking." She sounded tentative. "I want to bounce an idea off you. We've all heard a lot about the Builders, ever since we were kids, but it was always secondhand information. Everybody says that you are the ultimate authority on the Builders."
"If there is any such thing. And it's Darya, please, not Professor Lang. When you get right down to it there is no such thing as an authority on the Builders. What we know is simple. Something built and left behind a set of structures that we label as artifacts. All of them were very old—at least three million years—and most of them employed technology that we still do not understand. A few years ago, one new artifact appeared. Soon after that every one of them vanished. That's it. There you have our complete knowledge of the Builders. Everything else is speculation."
"But Professor Lang—Darya—surely there must be theories?"
"You've got it exactly right. Theories, not theory. You name it, someone had it. Maybe the Builders were entities whose consciousness extended over a finite dimension in time, so that they could literally see through time the way we can see through space. They could examine possible futures and direct the course of the spiral arm. That idea was mine, but I don't believe it anymore. Or the Builders are still alive, lying idle on the deep gravity slope that surrounds the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, where time slows so that an hour there is a century or a
millennium for us. That was Professor Carmina Gold's, at the Research Institute on Sentinel Gate, and she keeps looking for a way to travel to the center of the galaxy and back in a human lifetime. Maybe this expedition will help—we came to the Sag Arm in just a few days; there could be a chain of Bose nodes leading all the way to the galactic center. Or another theory: the Builders are actually human beings from our own future, coming back to direct the course of spiral arm development, including their own. That was Quintus Bloom's idea, and it made the embodied computer E.C. Tally go into a logical loop so bad we had to cold-start him."
"Quintus Bloom?"
"He was a big name at the Institute a few years ago. He stayed on Labyrinth when it disappeared, and no one to this day knows what happened to him. Then there was the theory that nothing cataclysmic happened to the Builders. They were just like any other species, they grew old, and since they didn't change they slowly died out. That idea was a kind of orphan, no one knows who had it first. Most people attribute it to Captain Alonzo Sloane, an old space wanderer who went off looking for the Lost Worlds, Jesteen and Skyfall and Petra and Primrose and Paladin and Midas and Rainbow Reef. He never came back, though we did find his ship near Labyrinth."
"People with ideas about the Builders seem to disappear rather often."
"Oh, most of them don't—we just remember the ones who did. I've had a dozen ideas of my own to explain who the Builders were and what happened to them, and I'm still here. And I must have read a hundred or a thousand papers by other people. Only one of them could be right, and chances are, all of them are wrong. If you have thoughts of your own, don't be ashamed of them. Maybe they are new, and maybe they are better than anyone else's."
"If you don't mind listening?"
"As I said, I've listened a thousand times, but I'm ready to listen ten thousand more. Hans Rebka tells me that the Builders are an obsession with me. I won't go quite that far, but I will admit they have been my life's consuming interest. Go ahead."
"Well." Lara glanced across at the two men, making sure that they were still deep in conversation. "I knew that the Builders were around for a very long time, and a few million years ago they disappeared. That never seemed to make much sense to me. If they died out, wouldn't you expect to see evidence of where and how they died? When I heard about this expedition, and found out where we were going, it occurred to me that perhaps the Builders didn't die out at all. Perhaps they just moved. Perhaps they decided to make a home in the Sag Arm, instead of in the Orion Arm. I know that they have some way of moving across great distances, because one of the artifacts is supposed to be far out of the galactic plane."
"Thirty thousand lightyears out of it. Lara, I was there. We called it—or the beings that inhabited it, who claimed to be servants of the Builders, called it—Serenity. Our party included Julian Graves. We were not sure what carried us out there, or what carried us back. We called them transportation vortices, but that was just a name. How a vortex worked was a total mystery. They seemed to appear anywhere, and carry you hundreds or thousands of lightyears instantly without involving Bose nodes at all."
"Then if they wanted to, they could easily have moved here."
"Without a doubt. The Builders have—or had—enormous powers, able to do things that still look like magic to us. We're millennia behind them in our most advanced technology, if not millions of years. But I'm convinced of one thing, Lara. I can't prove this, but I feel it in my bones: whoever and whatever killed this star system and all the life within it was not the Builders. For that to be true, they would have had to change much more than their location. They would have had to change their whole attitude toward other living creatures. It's not generally accepted, but I believe that the Builders guided the development of our own local arm. It's thanks to them that we have a stable civilization involving many species and three major clades. If Captain Rebka were listening, I would say four major clades in deference to his feelings. Even though everyone outside the Phemus Circle regards it as a backward place of no great importance."
"I've heard something about that." Lara Quistner glanced across to Hans Rebka and lowered her voice. "They say that all the planets of the Phemus Circle are poor and primitive, and all the men are totally sex-mad. Is it true?"
If you're asking about my recent experience, forget it. Hans and I haven't looked each other in the eye for weeks. And if you have ideas about him, get in line. "The worlds I've seen in the Phemus Circle were certainly poverty-stricken compared with some rich planet like Miranda." It was a good, neutral answer. Darya wondered what rumors Lara Quistner might have heard. "As for the men, you'd have to find out for yourself. Someday, maybe you will. In my experience, they are sex-mad—and so are the women of the Phemus Circle. On some of the planets they have to reproduce whenever and however they can, in order to maintain a population at all. But at the same time the men can be prudish. Sometimes the slightest detail will turn off their interest in sex."
Which was quite as far as Darya intended to go on that particular subject, regardless of her personal data base. She had been keeping an eye on the two men, and saw that they had wrapped up their conversation and were over by the autochef. They were poking at the controls. Darya winced. Maybe Ben Blesh knew what he was doing, but Hans Rebka's attempts at food programming were disastrous. Being raised on Teufel a man couldn't afford to be picky. She went on, "I think that the big planet, Iceworld, proves that the Builders were once here in the Sag Arm. It has all the earmarks of a Builder artifact—too light for its size, far too cold to be natural. What you are proposing, that the Builders might still be here and still be active, is another matter. This star system suggests to me that some other group—the ones I called the Voiders—came along after the Builders and did their own dirty work."
"But that doesn't mean the Builders must be gone completely. Maybe they are still around in other parts of this arm."
"They might be. I'm quite willing to admit the possibility of two races of super-beings. But you know how Julian Graves reacted. He talked about the 'undesirability of concatenating implausibilities.' As if we were not sure of the existence of the Builders themselves, when we have seen evidence of their existence all over our own spiral arm. I'm hoping that what we find on Iceworld will persuade Julian Graves to change his mind."
"My idea wasn't new, was it? You had the same thought yourself, long ago."
"Possibly something very like it. But keep thinking. It could be that the Builders became extinct when they stopped thinking."
"You don't really believe that, do you?"
"No, I don't. On the other hand, I've been wrong about the Builders so many times in the past, you shouldn't accept my views—or anyone else's—as gospel." Darya saw that Rebka and Blesh were examining something in the autochef, and Ben Blesh was laughing. She concluded, "If you have more ideas when we reach Iceworld, I'd like to discuss them."
It was intended to be an easy way to end the talk and hurry over to protect her own stomach, but it produced a surprising response. Lara lowered her voice and said, "There is something else I'd like to talk you about. But not right now. I want to speak privately."
It didn't sound as though Lara wanted another conversation about the Builders. That was a pity. Darya herself would be more than ready for that, especially after they'd had a chance to examine Iceworld.
Maybe Hans was right after all. Maybe "obsession" was the best word for it.
* * *
They had traveled to an alien arm of the galaxy where humans had never been before. They were within an alien star system, and only a day ago they had left a dead and alien world. But alien was relative. There were degrees of alienation. The planet they had come from, with its air and oceans and mountains and what had once been a thriving civilization of intelligent beings, felt like home compared with Iceworld.
Darya sat by Hans Rebka's side and alternated her attention between the displays of the ship's sensors and the planet around which the Savior now orbited.
She had to think of it as alternating attention, because they could not see the world in any conventional sense. To human eyes, Iceworld was no more than darkness visible, a black disk revealed by the absence of the stars that it occulted.
Every other imaging sensor, at every frequency from hard X-rays to long-wavelength radio, told the same story. They detected no emitted signal. The planet was simply not there. Only one seldom-used instrument, a low-resolution imaging device normally used to measure cosmic background radiation, admitted a presence. It reported a unique world where the maximum temperature was little more than one kelvin, and that only in isolated places. In many places the temperature was too small to register—which meant that it had to be less than one hundredth of a degree absolute.
Nothing in the universe was so cold, nothing in the universe could be so cold. Radiation falling onto a planet's surface must warm it, raising it at the very least to the 2.7 kelvins of the cosmic microwave background.
"So it doesn't exist," Rebka said. "But there it is."
"Will we be going down?" Ben Blesh was crowding Darya, pushing her aside in his eagerness to see everything.
"Eventually." Rebka was in the command pilot's seat. "Before that happens I'd like to learn as much as we can from orbit. It may take a day or two, but I want to fly over every square kilometer and tickle the ground with something a bit more active."
The Savior was moving along a spiraling orbit that would in time cover Iceworld's whole surface like wool being wound evenly onto a great ball. The ship was less than two hundred kilometers above the surface. Such a close orbit would normally decay rapidly because of air drag, but Iceworld lacked the faintest trace of an atmosphere. The planet also seemed perfectly spherical. The gravity field supported the idea of an equally symmetrical interior, and nothing perturbed the Savior's flight. Only Rebka's natural caution prevented them from flying lower yet, fifty kilometers or five kilometers up.
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