"Which brings us to the second problem. You flew the pinnace down to Pompadour, so you know it don't have that much space on it. In principle it has a three-person limit, though you can squeeze two in the back if you have to. Archimedes can't go—he'd be bulging out of the hatch with no room for anyone else."
"That gives you one definite stay-at-home on the Have-It-All."
"Yeah. Trouble is, Archimedes is stronger than greed but he ain't none too smart. If it came to a rescue mission, it'd be a toss-up whether you'd trust him or the autopilot to take the right action. You need a rescue crew that's smart and a good enough pilot to land the ship on top of Julian Graves's bald head and be out of there before he has time to feel the pain. And there's one other thing. You need a rescue crew that won't turn and run, no matter how dangerous it gets. You need a rescue crew that would die rather than leave you behind on the surface of Marglot."
"Kallik and J'merlia?"
"You got it. Put all that together, and it's easy. Atvar H'sial and I go down in the pinnace, and so does Claudius. Archimedes, Kallik and J'merlia stay behind. Kallik is really smart, and J'merlia flies this ship better than I ever could. Both of them are so devoted to At and me they'd come after us if we were marooned in hell. In fact, they're too damned devoted—if we don't stop 'em, they'll be down there every ten minutes to check on us. I'll tell 'em to come if they get my signal, or the pinnace beacon goes dead, an' not before. That leaves only one person still to decide."
"Me? You can't possibly mean me." Sinara stood in her most aggressive hands-on-hips stance. "Let me remind you of something, Louis. I am a survival team member. I am trained for trouble."
"You certainly know how to start it. All right, you're the fourth. It will be a squeeze in the pinnace, but we'll manage."
"We'll do more than manage. We'll have fun."
"I'm glad to hear you say that. Because I'll be the pilot, and the way space inside the pinnace is arranged, either Atvar H'sial or Claudius will have to sit next to you. I'll give you the choice." Louis looked up at her scowling face. "If you want to hear the rest of it, you might as well sit down again."
"The rest of it? You had this all worked out before I came in. You didn't want me to help, you just wanted me to listen."
"Not true. A second head can help. I think I know what I'm doin', but suppose I'm wrong? Here's the other part. We're going down to Marglot, but where do we land?"
"Are you asking me, or are you just going to tell me?" But Sinara sat down again.
"I'm going to explain the situation as I see it. Then I'm goin' to ask your opinion. What we know isn't much and it isn't complicated. We have six people in suits in one place on the surface, near the Hot Pole. Kallik has been monitoring suit signals, and one of the people is banged up pretty good."
"Who?"
"Ben Blesh."
"I bet he got hurt trying to be a hero. That was always his ambition."
"No information on that, an' you're bein' bitchy. The others are all right. But we got one, E.C. Tally, way off in the temperate zone between the hot and cold hemispheres. How he got there, what he's doin' there, your guess is as good as mine.
"Now we come to what we really don't know. Who else, or what else, is down there? The Marglotta were advanced enough to commission a Polypheme ship an' fly all the way to the Orion Arm to ask for help. They must have had some spaceflight of their own. You'd expect to see satellites buzzing all over the place around Marglot. We don't. Maybe in the combined gravity field of the sun, M-2, and Marglot, orbital paths are so weird that orbital decay times stop you puttin' up anything unmanned. But that's pure guesswork.
"Then there's the surface. Before you can have spaceflight, you need a pretty advanced civilization. It doesn't have to be out on the surface—Lo'tfian females run everything from their burrows, and only the males wander around above ground. But normally you expect spaceports an' stuff like that. Archimedes plotted out lots of structures that could be cities or industrial plants on the warm hemisphere, but he can't see anythin' moving near any of them. Also, we don't pick up a peep of radio signals from them. The strangest thing is that on the cold side, where Archimedes finds no trace of industrial structures, we pick up scads of radio noise all over the place. An' when I say noise, I mean it. The signals are junk, as though hundreds of people in suits were all jabbering at each other at once with nobody listening. One of those babble centers seems right about the place where we pick up the beacon of E.C. Tally's suit."
Louis leaned back in his chair. He would never admit it to anybody, but it was nice to have an audience—especially an audience as attentive, fair-skinned and bright-eyed as Sinara Bellstock. A man could get into lots of trouble with an attractive young woman like that hanging on his words—if he wasn't in twenty-seven kinds of trouble already.
Sinara raised her eyebrows at him. "Do you really want my opinion?"
"I'm waitin' for it."
"Well, I would say the choices are rather clear-cut. There is exactly one place on Marglot where you have a member of our party, and also evidence of surface activity. We should take the pinnace down to E.C. Tally's location and find out what's going on there."
"You got it in one. Can you be ready in two hours?"
"Louis, I'm ready now. For anything."
She looked it. Her cheeks were glowing.
"One other thing, Sinara. We have no idea what we may find down on the surface. We all wear suits."
"I know that. I'm not a raw trainee, I'm a survival specialist. Assume I'm good at something."
Louis did, but he wouldn't say what. He watched her bounce out, happy as if he'd announced they all had the day off and were going for a picnic down on Marglot. She had come to the same decision as him about a choice of destination, but there was one detail of Louis's own thought processes that he had declined to mention: of all the creatures, human or non-human, that you might find down on the surface of the planet, E.C. Tally was the one entity whom Louis Nenda could persuade into believing almost anything.
Unfortunately, others already on Marglot might be able to persuade E.C. just as easily.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Fun and games on Marglot.
One more decision had to be made. Louis had not mentioned it to Sinara, because he was still turning it over in his mind. They had not come here to see the sights, so the safest approach would be to fly to your landing point as directly as possible. On the other hand, if there were spoils to be gained on Marglot—something which Louis increasingly doubted—then a survey from a few thousand meters above the ground, and even a landing at multiple locations, would be needed.
He never made a final decision. He didn't have to, because Atvar H'sial made it for him.
"Do you anticipate that we will be obliged to wear closed suits for most of the period while we are on the surface of Marglot?"
"Dunno. Seems like there's a pretty good chance of it, 'specially when we meet Tally an' whatever goes with him."
"Then let me remind you that on similar occasions in the past, you and I have suffered because of our inability to communicate. Sealed suits prevent any form of pheromonal communication, and you have difficulties when I seek to make statements employing human speech modes."
"You're gettin' better, At."
"Do not waste both our times. Your true opinion of my efforts shows clearly as a sub-text. No matter. What is important is that, since you and I will be unable to communicate efficiently once we are on the surface and our suits are closed, we must have an opportunity to decide upon a course of action before we arrive. We are able to fly in the pinnace with suits open. I therefore propose that we perform a preliminary reconnaissance of Marglot and formulate our plans, before we land and close our suits to meet with E.C. Tally and whatever surrounds him."
"Got it. I'll define a full low-altitude circuit of the planet before we touch down. Anything shoots at us, naturally we'll be out of there."
Louis thought about his partner again as he to
ok the final steps to separate the pinnace from the Have-It-All and begin the swoop toward Marglot. You took one look at a Cecropian and you wished you could wake up; but you were already awake, and when it came to business the pheromonal conversations between Louis and Atvar H'sial agreed point by point. Those conversations were also—Louis was very aware of Sinara, sitting right behind him and breathing down the back of his neck—unclouded by those other pheromonal exchanges which prevented clear-headed discussion with members of the opposite sex.
He stared ahead at their nearing destination. From this distance one whole hemisphere of Marglot was visible. It was almost all the cold side. Making a landing down there among the ice ridges of the oceans or the vertical walls of land glaciers would not be easy. With any luck they would never have to try it.
He had his suit open, and he was offering a running commentary on what he saw to the Cecropian at his side. Atvar H'sial was in the observer's seat—a wild misnomer in this case, since her echolocation permitted her to see only what was in the cabin of the pinnace. Louis wondered how she could stand it. She couldn't "see" anything at all unless it gave off or reflected sound waves. For Atvar H'sial there were no stars, no moons, no galaxies—not even the planet below, until they were close to the ground. And, once her suit was sealed, there was also no speech. The urge to open up as soon as they landed would be enormous. But she never complained.
Not like the sniveling wretch in the seat behind her. Claudius had a special suit, one adapted to his strange helical physiology. Insisting that he was dying, he had refused to wind himself into it on the Have-It-All, until Nenda brought Archimedes into the picture.
The Zardalu had raised himself to his full height and glared down on Claudius with open maw, while Nenda said to Claudius, "I've told him he can eat whatever of you he can still see one minute from now."
That had taken care of the suit problem, but it hadn't ended the moaning and groaning.
"Such discomfort! Such pain! Such anguish! That a distinguished being of noble lineage should be subjected to treatment like this . . . Never should I have agreed to suffer such degradation. Never should I have left the haven of Pleasureworld!"
With his suit open Nenda was trying to talk pheromonally to Atvar H'sial, but doing it while Claudius made such a racket in the back seat made Louis's head ache. Claudius was loud, and he was shrill.
Finally Nenda set the controls to automatic and turned in his seat to face the Polypheme. He said pleasantly, "We are cruisin' at seventeen thousand meters. The temperature is a hundred and eleven below. There's hardly any air outside, and nothin' but solid ice beneath us. The seat you are in, Claudius, has an ejector mechanism, and it's controlled from the pilot's seat. If you don't stop jabbering, I'm goin' to use it."
Sinara, sitting next to Claudius, said, "Louis, do it! Do it!"
"I may. My finger's on the button. One more squeak and that's it."
Claudius subsided. At last Louis was able to concentrate on the scene below and could again send pheromonal messages about it to Atvar H'sial.
"We might as well go the distance and make a full circuit of the planet, but I'm not optimistic. The cold hemisphere is as bleak and bare as Archimedes said. The sun provides a fair amount of light, but only a dribble of heat."
"High civilizations have thrived on worlds colder than this."
"They have. I suspect they did here. But the Marglotta were right to be scared enough to call out for help. Something came along, and it zapped them. Question is, is it on the surface now, still doin' its thing?"
"I would suggest that whatever malevolent influence was present, it is, for the time being at least, somewhat inactive. I assume that the suit signals from the surface continue to indicate living occupants?"
"They do, though Ben Blesh ain't in good shape. Hold on a minute, At. We're approaching one of the major boundaries. We are still on the daylight side, but we're near the edge of the cold hemisphere. I think I see open water below us—an' greenery. Maybe I ought to take us down as soon as we get where the surface is a bit warmer. If we're going to do that we should act pretty quick, because in another hour of flight we'll be at the day/night divider."
"Take us lower, Louis, but land only if you observe one of the structures noted by Archimedes as possibly indicative of a city or an industrial site."
"I don't need to look for one. We took every location that Archimedes spotted and stuck 'em in the pinnace navigation system. There's a place about two hundred kilometers ahead and almost on our flight path."
"Then we should indeed take a look. And if you are able to descend to the surface so that we may exit this craft, I personally will, in truth, actually be able to look with my own sensory apparatus."
"An open suit?"
"Unless you note clear evidence of danger, that is a risk which I am willing to undertake."
The comment confirmed it in Louis's mind. Atvar H'sial was as averse to unnecessary risks as he was, but she was going stir crazy. They had been cooped up in a confined environment for far too long—ever since the arrival of the summons to Miranda when they were working on Xerarchos. That felt like a million years ago.
"Hold it in a bit longer, At. I'll have us on the ground in twenty minutes."
Having said that, Nenda was still not ready to take risks. He reduced their height and speed in the final ten kilometers, and when their target was in sight he flew a slow circle all around it.
What he could see was unimpressive. Seven broad gray strips—roads, or rail lines—converged. Where they met, and for about half a kilometer around that point, a narrower grid of intersecting strips formed a ruled pattern on the surface. All the gray strips were dotted with dark, rectangular objects, scores of them. They looked to Louis to be about the right size to be ground cars, but he didn't want to tilt Atvar H'sial's opinion before she'd had a chance to make her own assessment. Louis could see no sign of buildings or of people. The only thing that moved in the whole silent scene was some kind of flag or banner, fluttering in the breeze at the top of a tall metallic spindle marking the meeting of the seven roads.
"See anything to worry about?" Louis said over his shoulder to Sinara and Claudius; and, at her silence and the Polypheme's disdainful grunt, "Right, then. I'm taking us in."
He dropped the pinnace onto one of the wide gray roads, about fifty meters from the central flagpole. When after a few minutes of silent observation neither the pinnace's instruments nor its occupants saw or heard anything, Louis opened the hatch and stepped outside.
The final descent had been made with all suits closed, but his suit's monitors showed an acceptable atmosphere and no ambient toxins. He waved to Atvar H'sial and said over his suit radio, "All right. Anybody who wants out for a while should do it now."
Sinara was by his side in a moment, the faceplate of her suit already open. Atvar H'sial followed more slowly, setting in motion the complex set of servo-mechanisms that rolled back the head part of her suit. The two-meter fronded antennas slowly unfolded, while the twin yellow trumpetlike horns below them turned to take in the scene ahead. The pheromones that wafted across to Louis were wordless, but they expressed pure bliss.
Louis set out toward the nearest of the blocky objects that stood on the road. Sinara danced on ahead of him. By the time he reached her she had already opened a door at its front.
"It's a vehicle, Louis." For once her voice was not bubbling over with enthusiasm. "Marglottas inside it—dead. Just like the ones in the ship on Miranda. But it's the same as there, not a sign of what killed them. They look as if they should be perfectly fine."
Atvar H'sial had moved more slowly along the road, making her own careful observations. She said as she came to their side, "The resemblance between these deaths and the deaths on the ship that came to Miranda go beyond the superficial. When first we had an opportunity to examine those bodies, we all remarked on their exceptionally well-preserved condition. They were dead, but in a sense, like these creatures, they were more tha
n dead."
"At, I don't know about Cecropians, but with humans being dead is sorta like being pregnant. Either you are or you aren't. There's no in-between."
"I will define my terms more closely. When a creature dies, be it human, Cecropian, or any other form known to me, the life of the organism, considered as a single unit, ends. However, this does not at once imply the death of the multitude of microorganisms that reside within it or upon it. Their activity continues for a period, largely unaffected by the fate of their host. Were you, Louis, to expire at this very moment, the bacteria of your intestinal tract, to name but one example, would persist in their activity. When you die your body will begin to rot, to putrefy, to bloat, and to transform itself into a mass of reeking and putrescent flesh."
"Thanks, At. It's real nice to have somethin' to look forward to."
"The same would be just as true of me, Louis, or of your female here."
Louis had been summarizing Atvar H'sial's thoughts in words for Sinara's benefit. He edited the final phrase—she had enough ideas on that already.
The Cecropian continued, "Yet this process of internal decay had not happened to the Marglotta who arrived at Miranda, nor to the Chism Polypheme who flew that ship. Nor is it true for these beings." Atvar H'sial waved a paw. "In order for the mummification which we observe here to occur, all life processes, external and internal, at the total organism level and at the bacterial level, must cease together. All die."
"How could that happen?"
"I do not know. But I am able to confirm that it is true. My ultrasonics permit me to look inside these bodies. No form of life, even at the microbial level, is present within them. But at the same time, plant life here flourishes." The Cecropian pointed to the low greenery that separated the gray roads, and to the ugly gray cactus growths that popped up here and there among it.
"D'you think it's like this all over Marglot?"
"That remains to be confirmed. First, however, we should determine if what we find for the Marglotta in this car is equally true for those in the city."
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