As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

  After a minute’s thought, Lee said, “I guess I’d better meet the director, then. What’d you say his name was?”

  “Peary. Charles Peary.”

  That night, back in his own bedroom, while a phosphorescent waterfall cascaded down the viewscreen wall, Lee tried to reach Marlene again. The phone’s slightly sultry voice told him: “Miss Ettinger is occupied in experimental work topside at present and is not to be disturbed. If this is an emergency, however...”

  “No, it’s not an emergency.” Just life and death.

  His bed, Lee found, had a fluid mattress. In Titan’s low gravity, such comfort was absolutely decadent.

  The first thing he did on awakening was to call Marlene. The viewscreen stayed blank but she answered sleepily, “Who is it?”

  “Oh hell,” he said, “I woke you up.”

  “Sid? Hi. Yes, you did. We had some late runs with the computer last night...”

  He felt awkwardly foolish. “I’m sorry, Marlene. Go back to sleep.”

  “No, it’s all right.... I had to get up soon anyway. Excuse the blank screen, will you? I’m not decent.”

  “Sure. Look, can we get together for lunch? I want to talk with you.”

  “Lunch? Okay. What time?”

  “Noon... twelve thirty. You name it.”

  “Uh... better make it late. Thirteen hundred?”

  “Fine. Is the cafeteria still in the same place?”

  “Oh no,” her voice answered. “Everything’s been changed around since you were here. But it’s easy to find. Just follow the yellow markers in the corridors. Or ask anybody.”

  “Okay. See you at thirteen hundred.”

  “Fine.”

  “Throttled down to zero?” The director’s voice sounded wounded. “But that’s just not true, Dr. Lee. We’re accomplishing some very fine and important work here.”

  He was a sizable man who somehow gave the impression of smallness. His build was on the burly side, except that he seemed to be going soft, portly middle, flabby face largely hidden behind a shaggy mouse-gray beard. Hair thinning, eyes watery blue, voice soft with a slight drawling accent.

  “Why, we’ve made important strides in planetary physics over the past few years. Why, right now we’ve got a team of people doing fine work on atmospheric tides. And as soon as we can get our requisitions through the Earthside red-tape mill, we’ll get the computers we need for a first-class earthquake prediction center.”

  He leaned back in his desk chair and folded his hands over his middle with a what-do-you-think-of-that expression. Sitting across the desk from the director, Lee replied, “But the alien buildings, the machines... what’s being done about them?”

  Peary’s self-satisfied smile evaporated. He leaned forward and placed his chunky forearms on the desktop. “That’s a different matter. An entirely different matter. We’re in a caretaker stage there.”

  “A what?”

  “Caretaker stage. No further direct investigations of the machinery are possible without physical damage being done to the machines. Naturally, we can’t risk that, so...”

  “Can’t risk damaging the machines?”

  “Of course not.”

  Lee thought a moment. Then, “Mr. Peary...”

  “Please call me Charles.”

  “All right—Charles. Are you really certain that no useful work can be done on the machines without damaging them?”

  Peary’s shaggy face took on a look of regret. “You scientists have been poking around those machines for three generations and more. Nothing’s been discovered. Bennett admitted to me years ago that the only useful thing he could think of was to crack ‘em open and see what makes ‘em tick. Well now, regulations specifically state that nothing is to be done that might interfere with the continued operation of those machines. Those are the rules. I don’t make ‘em, I just carry them out.”

  “But...”

  “No sense arguing; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I was going to say,” Lee countered firmly, “that if I can show you a useful line of investigation that doesn’t require destroying any of the machinery, will you let us carry it out?”

  “Well now, I don’t think you can, frankly.”

  “But if I do.”

  “I’ll have to judge the idea on its own merits. I can’t commit myself to a judgment ahead of time.”

  Getting cagey. “Okay, fine. That’s all I ask.” Lee started to get out of his chair.

  “I don’t think you can come up with anything that hasn’t been tried already,” Peary said. “No reflection on you, understand.”

  Lee looked down at him. “Sure. I understand.”

  He turned and walked to the door of the office.

  “Doubt you could damage the machines anyway,” he heard Peary mutter, “even if you try.”

  Lee found the cafeteria, after a half-hour search through the graffiti-covered corridors. One of the scrawled lines, just before the cafeteria itself, read:

  Food for thought, si.

  Food for stomach, no!

  The cafeteria was much bigger and more comfortable than the cramped collection of tables and chairs that he remembered from long ago. And it was quiet, despite the crowd eating, talking, moving through the spacious room. Acoustical dampers, Lee realized. One entire wall was a giant viewscreen which, at the moment, was showing skiers sleeking down an Earthly hillside, trailing plumes of sparkling powdery snow. No one even looked at it.

  Marlene was already at a table, Lee saw, with another man: young-looking, crew-cut, athletically trim, smiling and gesturing expressively for her. Lee punched buttons on the food selector wall as quickly as he could, waited an endless twenty seconds for his food tray to pop out of the slot at the end of the selector panel, then hurried to join them.

  “... and after you’ve exhausted yourself on the slopes all day, they give you this huge dinner and a ton of wine, and they still expect you to dance half the night and...”

  Marlene looked up as Lee put his tray on the table next to her.

  “Hello, Sid. Have you met Marty Richards?”

  “No. How are you?”

  Richards lifted his tail a few centimeters off his chair and took Lee’s hand in a strong grip. His smile was dazzling.

  “Hi. I’m with the physics group.”

  “Marty’s head of the physics section,” Marlene corrected as Lee sat down.

  “That’s pretty good for somebody your age. Or have you been on a star mission?”

  Richards grinned some more and shook his head. “No, but I’d sure like to do that sometime. Maybe I’ll put in for a star flight when the next round of them comes up. We’re sure not accomplishing much around here.”

  Lee peeled the foil off his tray and found that he had two containers of soup and no salad.

  “Marty was telling me about the skiing in Argentina,” Marlene said.

  Lee asked, “Why aren’t you accomplishing much here?”

  “We’re not allowed to,” Richards answered immediately. “I’ve got half a dozen projects that I’ve suggested to Bennett. They’re all sitting on his desk. Or Peary’s. None of them have been okayed.”

  “I talked with Peary this morning. He agreed to okay projects that don’t involve tampering with the machines.”

  Richards shrugged. “So what’s new? There’s not much we can do that doesn’t tamper with the machines in one way or another. I mean, they’ve been photographed and analyzed all through the electromagnetic spectrum down to gamma ray probes. We’ve done all the passive things you can think of. A hundred different ways and a thousand different times.”

  “Then think of something else.”

  Richards laughed.

  “Listen to me,” Lee snapped. “I want to see you people working, and working inside those buildings, not on planetary physics.”

  Richards stopped and stared at him. Then, “You want?”

  “That’s right. I’m taking Bennett’s place. He’s leaving
.”

  “Kim’s leaving? After all the years he’s put in... I guess we should have expected it.”

  Lee said nothing.

  “So you’re going to start taking things seriously again. You want us to get to work on the machines.”

  “Right. That’s what we’re here for.”

  “What about Peary?”

  “I’ll take care of him. He’s my responsibility.”

  Marlene said, “Sid, be careful of Peary. He’s insidious. He’ll smile at you and agree with you, and then when your back is turned he’ll renege on everything he’s told you.”

  “Okay. We’ll just have to keep watching him. And maybe we can learn how to operate when his back is turned.”

  Richards gaped at him. “You mean that?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  Richards’ grin started to take on the aspect of a canary-fed cat. “Okay... let me have a couple of sessions with my people. There are some damned good ideas moldering in the dust around here. Maybe we can resurrect them.”

  “Good. Do that.”

  They finished eating and Richards excused himself from the table.

  “Suddenly you’re giving orders,” Marlene said.

  Lee nodded. “I’d like to give you some orders too.”

  “I’m only an atmospheric physicist. I can’t do anything about the buildings.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind.”

  She rested her elbows on the table and leaned slightly toward him. “You’ve changed, Sid. You’re positively aggressive.”

  “I’ve learned,” he said. “I’ve found what I want; now I have to get it.”

  A smile flickered on her lips. A sad smile. “Sid... I had to work awfully hard to get over you. You really built a wall around yourself and shut me out.”

  “I know. I wish I could make that wall disappear. I want to. Maybe... maybe together we can break it down.”

  She said nothing.

  “You look awfully damned serious,” he said.

  “So do you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. When I saw you sitting here listening to that young twirp, batting those lovely eyes at him...”

  “I was not batting my eyes!”

  “Oh no?”

  She giggled. “No, I wasn’t... not consciously, at any rate.”

  “Consciously or unconsciously... when I saw you two together, that sure as hell put a dent in any walls I’ve got around me.”

  “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

  “Maybe there’s hope for us.”

  Her face completely serious again, her voice so low he could barely hear it, “You’re not the only one who’s been hurt, you know.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. Can we start over?”

  “We can try.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  “No promises, though. No commitments.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee spent the afternoon going through the underground center, poking into laboratories and workshops, meeting people. He knew Charnovsky was on Titan but couldn’t locate him. Pascual was in the infirmary, taking care of a wardful of children who were being tested for allergies and immunities.

  “In a closed-in environment like this, we must be extremely careful about infectious diseases,” the brown-skinned doctor said in his soft voice as he and Lee walked back toward Pascual’s office. The corridors in the infirmary area were hospital white and spotlessly clean of graffiti.

  “It’s a regular city now, isn’t it?” Lee asked rhetorically. “Schools, hospital, everything. How long do people stay here?”

  Pascual said, “The scientific staff comes and goes; you know, a scientist will be here for two or three years, on the average. I’ve been here a year and a half myself. In six months I’ll be leaving. But the others, the administrators like Bennett and Peary and the non-technical staff—most of them have been here for a long time. They’re permanently settled here, whether they realize it or not.”

  “How long has Peary been here?”

  Pascual shrugged. “I’m not sure. We could look it up. I think two of his children were born here, and the youngest is six.”

  “H’mm.”

  “You know that Charnovsky is here? He arrived a few months ago.”

  “Yes, I’ve been trying to find him. He’s probably up topside, trying to dig rocks up from underneath the ice. Anybody else from the Sirius crew?”

  “No... oh, yes, of course. Lehman. I haven’t seen him yet, maybe he’s not even arrived. But I saw his name on the list of new arrivals yesterday. Right under your name, as a matter of fact.”

  Naturally, Lee thought.

  So Lee invited the Sirius people to his place for dinner that night: Marlene, Pascual, and Charnovsky. It was a quiet gathering. Marlene insisted on taking care of the cooking, although Lee had nothing but pre-cooked meals for them. Charnovsky looked tired; he had been out topside for several days. They asked Lee about the Neanderthals and were appropriately sympathetic when he told them that Ardraka had died. They broke up early and Lee walked Marlene back to her quarters. He kissed her goodnight. She didn’t invite him in and he didn’t insist. He walked back to his place and finished a nearly dead bottle of cognac before trying to sleep.

  Two days later, Bennett called a meeting of all the scientific department heads. Charnovsky was there, and Richards, and four others whom Lee had briefly met during his tours through the underground settlement.

  They sat at an oval table in a small conference room. Bennett was the only old man among them. The others were all younger: either star-young, like Lee and Charnovsky, or truly youthful, like the rest of them.

  Bennett stood at the head of the table, with Lee sitting beside him.

  “I suppose you all know by now,” he said, “that I’ve decided to leave. Dr. Lee has accepted my request that he take over in my place.” He turned to Lee. “Sid, I suppose that’s all the ritual we need. The floor is yours.”

  A little surprised, Lee got up from his chair and looked them over. They shifted uneasily in their seats, feet scraped the plastic flooring. Somebody coughed nervously.

  “I’ve only been here a few days,” Lee began, “and had no idea that Kim wanted to sandbag me into taking his job while he strolled off for the South Sea Isles....”

  A few polite chuckles.

  “But in the short time I’ve been here, it’s become abundantly clear to me that the scientific staff is being hamstrung by regulations and restrictions on what we can do. I hope to put an end to that.”

  They stirred in their chairs, but now there was an edge of tenseness in it, expectancy.

  “Now, I don’t mean that we’re going to charge into the buildings up there and tear them apart. I agree that we shouldn’t tinker with them until we have some idea of what we’re doing. But neither do I believe that there’s nothing we can do. I want you to tell me what we can do inside those buildings that hasn’t been done before. I want ideas, new approaches that I can push past Peary’s objections. Above all, I want to find out what those machines are doing!”

  One of the scientists muttered something to the man next to him. Lee ignored it.

  “Let me remind you of what we’ve got to accomplish here. Sometimes when you’re face-to-face with a problem every day, you lose perspective on it.”

  “Those machines were put here by an alien race. An enemy of mankind. The ruins on Mars were made by men and destroyed by aliens. The Martian script refers to a battle of some sort. Most anthropologists think the script is reciting folklore. I think it was a history book, or maybe a newscast.”

  Charnovsky huffed loudly.

  “The Neanderthals on Sirius were colonists. The aliens—the Others, they call them—blew up Sirius B, turned the star into a nova, to wipe out all the life on that colony. There’s evidence that an intelligent settlement—either ours or theirs, the evidence is very scanty—existed on Van Maanen’s Star. It too was destroyed by a nova explosion.

  �
��For the past year, I’ve been cajoling the Earth’s archaeologists and anthropologists to reexamine the fossil records of human prehistory. Even if the earlier human civilization that founded the Mars and Sirius colonies was completely destroyed by the Others, there ought to be some archaeological evidence somewhere. Most of my colleagues have battled these ideas with every ounce of their strength. A few have gone out and started digging. They’ve found, already, that some of our previous conceptions of the datings of various human fossils are badly in error. Naturally, they’re placing most of their emphasis on the Neanderthal fossils, and fortunately there’s plenty of fossil record available on the Neanderthals.

  “It seems perfectly clear to me that there was an earlier civilization on Earth, at least fifty thousand years ago, maybe much earlier. Perhaps it was a Neanderthal civilization, perhaps Sapiens. In either event, it met an alien race, the Others, who built those machines topside. We fought a war, and we lost. Our settlements on Sirius, on Van Maanen’s Star, on Mars and the Moon were totally wiped out. The only known survivors are the Neanderthals on Sirius. The Others must have done an especially thorough job on Earth itself, to make certain that the planet would never foster an intelligent civilization again. But we survived. The Neanderthals didn’t make it, but we did. Now we’re able to reach the stars again. And the Others are probably out there somewhere, waiting for us.”

  Lee paused. No one moved.

  Then Richards said, “That’s a lot to swallow in one sitting.”

  “I know. And the details may be wrong. But I think the general picture is correct. Those machines up topside were built by the Others. Their purpose is hostile. They may still be out among the stars somewhere. If we expect to survive, we must understand what those machines are doing, and why. It’s that simple.”

  Dr. Kulaki, a wiry electronics engineer, bobbed his head up and down. “Maybe the whole story’s completely wrong, but who could take the chance of ignoring the possibility that it’s right?”

  “Exactly,” Lee agreed. “That’s why we’re going to tackle those machines with every ounce of intelligence and strength in us. Neither Peary nor anyone else will stop us, that I guarantee you. Now I want your proposals for action by the end of the week.”