"It is true that humans have only two eyes," Yu'lhan said, "but it is still a mystery to me how you can see things 'narrowly.'"
"Say, Yu'lli, what are you—a Maahk disguised as a Blue? We should test your breath for traces of methane."
"I merely wished to point out that there is a lack of precision in some of the expressions you use," Yu'lhan replied in a voice that could hardly be any deeper. "Somewhat more rationality would not be bad for you."
Roderich gave the controls a quick glance although it was not actually necessary—the on-board Syntron guided the crawler more reliably than any pilot. That was especially so since they and Pearl Laneaux had upgraded the crawlers to be even more self-reliant and independent.
"Too much rationality is like too much salt in the soup of life," he lectured. "It spoils the taste. I assume that I was touched by your Creature of Humor while I was still in the cradle."
"There is no Creature of Humor," Yu'lhan said.
"But there is the Creature of Thoughtlessness and Stupidity," Tru'lhan added.
"I am neither thoughtless nor stupid," Roderich insisted defensively. "If your Creature came looking for me, he was barking up the wrong tree or whatever Creatures do." He pointed past the taller of the Blues to the aft area. "Is everything in order back there, Tru'lli?"
"This can hardly be a matter of analyzing mineral samples and such. And we are certainly not a hospital ship. This mission does not seem to me very reasonable."
"I know what you mean. If we find ark survivors in the asteroid belt, we can't very well give them medical help, that's true. But we will be quite capable of informing the PALENQUE and the Akonians on the LAS-TOOR as well."
"If we find survivors, Roder, you will no longer be laughing," Yu'lhan said, and this time Roderich shuddered because the voice really did sound as though it came from the grave. This was how he would have imagined the voice of Death to sound if it spoke to him. "Because the Creature of Chaos will be with them in all its many forms."
"Yu'lli?"
"My name is not ... "
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Please change the adjustment on your Translator. You could give someone the cold shivers the way you have it now."
"Four?" The voice of Crest Julian Catchpole spoke from the hypercom speaker. He had assumed leadership of the four-crawler mission team.
"Still here," Roderich said.
"We'll reach the asteroid belt in ten minutes. Fan out as planned."
"Roger, Grandpa. Number Four will proceed to its assigned search area."
"Four, I ought to talk to Sharita about you, Roderich. You seem to lack respect for your elders."
"Two against one. Is that fair?"
Catchpole's face appeared briefly on the screen: his head was bald, his skin browned and wrinkled. In his eyes was a gleam that revealed a man that was comfortable and at peace with the world. "Who ever said the universe was always fair, my boy? Keep a careful lookout, Four. There could be pieces of wreckage with survivors on board in front of us."
"Understood, Julian. We'll keep an eye out."
"And don't drive Yu'lhan and Tru'lhan crazy. Catch you later. Over and out."
The two Blues retreated to the rear section of the crawler and there readied the instruments that would normally serve to locate ores, minerals, and other raw materials from which valuable resources could be obtained. This time, they were to be used to find pieces of debris from a star ark and among them, perhaps human beings. Lemurians to be exact, the descendants of emigrants who, some 560 years of their subjective time before, had left Lemur—the Earth—on board spaceships that traveled at nearly the speed of light. A time-dilated journey into the future. For the Lemurians, six centuries had passed, but outside their ships it had been almost fifty-six millennia. Roderich was still astonished when he thought about it. Almost 56,000 years! Here, one could touch the past.
Yu'lhan and Tru'lhan worked in the aft laboratory and spoke to each other in Gatasian—to Roderich's ears, it sounded like loud chirping. He was alone for a few seconds, perhaps even for a few minutes, and a hidden observer would have noticed the change in his face. A mask seemed to loosen revealing another face beneath. Another Roder Roderich, much more serious and melancholy than the always laughing and joking young man that the PALENQUE'S other prospectors knew. This Roder Roderich seemed to be years older than the one he showed his friends and co-workers. The face was more hollow-cheeked, the eyes duller. At some point this Roderich had seen something that had terrified him. So much so that he hid himself behind a manner of behavior that could have been considered superficial. It was a shield he used to protect a wounded, vulnerable self.
Yu'lhan came back from the rearmost part of the crawler. "The instruments are ready," he said, and turned to the scanner's controls. His Translator-provided voice no longer sounded like it came from a tomb, but from a woman who wanted to seduce someone.
Roderich turned his head and smiled. "Much better!"
"Is it not an effort for you to always be turning your head when you wish to see to the side or behind you?" Yu'lhan asked. "You could have artificial eyes implanted in the back of your head."
"I don't want to have to look at you all the time, Yu'lli, thank you very much."
Roderich bent over the controls as an audio signal reminded him that a change in heading was necessary. "Here we go, boys." The stars in the bow window slid to the side as he changed the course. "We've reached the edge of our search sector. Tru'lli?"
"Scanning in progress."
Roderich touched control fields and a holographic field formed in front of the bow window that gave the impression someone had turned on hidden spotlights here and there out in space. Pockmarked rocks emerged from vague shadows, many asteroids not even as large as the crawler, others with a diameter of several hundred kilometers. The crawler's force field was in operation and protected it from the smaller rocks. The Syntron avoided the larger ones with timely course deviations that were immediately integrated into the search pattern. Roderich listened for a while to the routine reports that the hypercom transmitted and added some of his own. His glance alternating between readouts and the bow window. Columns of data streamed through the edge of the holo field, reporting on the composition and structure of various asteroids.
"A mining operation here would be quite worthwhile," Tru'lhan's voice said from the rear. "In particular, a station of inexpensive prefabricated components, the usual infrastructure of antigrav modules, compensators, and maintenance units, as well as automatic processing systems. A small group could produce a great deal. There is certainly no lack of raw materials."
"I doubt if we'll be here long enough even to begin construction of such a station," Roderich said, looking out into space. "Ever since Perry Rhodan came on board, Sharita Coho seems to have forgotten that the PALENQUE is supposed to make money. If things go on like this, the GEMC brass won't exactly give us a round of applause."
"Perhaps she wants to sell the historical information that we obtained from the star arks' data storage units," Yu'lhan suggested. "Our shares ... "
"Energy signatures," Tru'lhan interrupted his brother.
They immediately appeared in the holo field in front of the forward window: colored bars whose colors and lengths showed the type and quantity of the energy emissions that had been registered.
"Plasma fires on two wreck sections," said Tru'lhan, who was doing the analysis. "Additional fluctuations indicate chemical reactions of varying intensity."
The zoom enlarged the view of the debris, and Roderich saw shattered components that had once been part of the star ark LEMCHA OVIR. They looked as though a titan's fist had grabbed them, shaken them, and then hurled them away. Cable strands streamed like torn sinews in space, and burst windows stared like dead eyes in the cold darkness. A silent dance was taking place out there, choreographed by a catastrophe; a collision that had released enormous kinetic energy and torn the ark apart. Asteroids and wreck sections spun on the stage of this bizarre b
allet, each object endowed with its own momentum that took it away from the others or brought it closer to them. As Roderich watched, a piece of debris struck one of the smaller asteroids and burst apart like a seed pod that had been waiting to release its contents. The impact had caused an explosive decompression. At least a part of the fragment had still had atmosphere, and lost it explosively in the vacuum of space, taking everything along with it, small debris and ...
"Roder ... " Tru'lhan chirped.
"Yes, I saw them." Two humanoid figures that the zoom had shown with the same pitiless indifference as everything else. Two Lemurians, descendants of those who had set out 50,000 years before in objective time. Dead.
"They are both here," Yu'lhan said, and the female voice of the Translator was a strange contrast to the words. "The many-shaped Creature of Chaos and the black Creature of Death."
Roderich's fingers darted across the controls as he called up the current scanning data and correlated it. "Are there wreck sections with functioning life-support systems?"
Most of the colored bars disappeared from the holo field. Two remained, and after a few seconds only one was left.
"Another energy signature," Tru'lhan said. "And it's approaching the wreck section with the still functioning life-support systems."
A sphere appeared in the holo field and Roderich saw maneuvering jets firing to make course corrections. "Survivors!"
"Everything indicates that," Yu'lhan confirmed.
Roderich activated the hypercom unit. "Number Four has found something, Julian. We haven't found just wreck sections but survivors as well. My intention is to ... "
"Attention," the synthetic voice of the on-board Syntron suddenly said, and Roderich saw the green glow of the High-Energy Overload field flare up around the crawler. "Invasive energy interference."
"Yu'lli? Tru'lli?"
"Scan running." This time, Yu'lhan did not complain about the nickname. "Strong emissions near one of the asteroids. It does not originate from the wreck sections of the Lemurian star ark."
"Menttia?"
By that, Roderich meant the energy beings that came from the fifth planet of the Ichest system. Until just a few days before they had behaved as though they were hostile to humans.
"Negative."
The HO screen flickered, and Crawler IV began to tremble like a frightened animal.
"We have problems, Julian," Roderich said loudly. "Somebody or something is trying to take control of us."
"The hyper-communication connection no longer exists," the Syntron's voice informed him.
Once more the holographic field's depiction changed and a large asteroid appeared, almost thirteen hundred kilometers long and more than eight hundred wide. Numerous craters showed on the gray-black surface.
"The invasive interference is coming from there?"
"Yes," Yu'lhan confirmed tersely.
"But there's ... nothing there."
"Not on it, but in it." Yu'lhan stepped next to the pilot's seat, reached out a hand that had four main fingers and three thumbs, and operated several control fields. A configuration diagram appeared with the same external structure as the asteroid. In its interior Roderich saw several areas that resembled buildings.
"A ... base inside the asteroid?"
"No doubt."
"It's getting much too hot for me here," Roderich said and activated the main engines. That is, he wanted to activate them, but the expected rumbling was not forthcoming. A dull ache started in his neck, spreading from there through his back and head, apparently with the intention of scraping every single nerve. The HO screen flickered once more, then vanished like a blown-out candle flame. The crawler shook more violently and its outer hull creaked.
The pain grew so intense that Roderich screamed loudly. Darkness enveloped him, as black as space, and as he fell through that blackness, he heard the shrill chirping of the two Blues as though from a distant world that had expelled him and left him to face the Creature of Chaos.
3
Perry Rhodan
To Perry Rhodan, the technical section of the PALENQUE was a labyrinth in which things hummed, chirped, and clicked everywhere. Most of the machinery seemed to be permanent installations, but there were also devices that appeared improvised: new arrangements of positronic components that resembled exotic spider webs; holo fields that had been connected to modified hypersensors and in which tiny discharges flickered repeatedly; projectors between which multi-colored force fields surged like curtains blowing in the wind. Rhodan saw all that as he went by, accompanied by Sharita Coho, the PALENQUE's commander. She was once more wearing a dark, military-like uniform, in its belt-holster was a hand-beamer from which she never seemed to be parted. But his attention was on something else: a strange whispering that seemed audible only to him.
"Still not hearing anything?" he asked Sharita.
She arched a dark brow. "It's pretty loud in here."
"You know what I mean."
"Kurd?" Sharita called.
"We're over here," came a voice from somewhere in the maze. It seemed more than a little chaotic to Rhodan, but Sharita apparently saw order and structure within it since she knew exactly where she had to turn to find the source of the voice. Rhodan followed her through several narrow aisles and finally reached an open area where two men were working on a highly complex installation: Kurd Brodbeck, Chief Engineer of the PALENQUE, and Huang Lee, one of his co-workers. They glanced up just briefly, then went back to their work.
"To whom or what do I owe the honor?" Brodbeck asked.
"Our guest on board, no less." Sharita smiled fleetingly. "No, Perry, I'm still not hearing anything. Are you sure you didn't just imagine it?"
"Very sure. Meanwhile, the whispering has turned into a low whistling. It's getting louder. And it's coming from here."
"Kurd?"
"Are you certain it's not a phantom noise?" the Chief Engineer asked as he checked over the shining bands of some hyperenergetic connections with a hand-held sensor unit. "Sometimes there's a ringing in your ear even though you're not really hearing anything."
Rhodan listened within himself. For nearly three hours, he had perceived the sound, which was not actually a sound at all. Often it whispered like the voice of the wind in distant treetops, and at other times it sounded like an angry insect that now flew past his right ear, then his left. At the moment it sounded like an alarm siren howling at a distance of several kilometers.
Something drew his attention to several dark objects in the web of hyperenergetic strands that were connected to a mobile Syntron. The overlaid projection field showed columns of data flowing here and there along with complicated patterns that were repeatedly removed and replaced with new ones. Huang Lee raised his hand and touched a holographic control field. Another hyperstrand in the network lit up and probed across the objects like a thin finger of light.
"What are those?" Rhodan asked, pointing to the dark objects: small disks with diameters of a few centimeters.
Brodbeck straightened up. The Chief Engineer was middle-aged, thin and sinewy, and had water-blue eyes and a burn scar on his right cheek. "Those are submodules from the LEMCHA OVIR's data storage unit. We've been trying for several hours to access the information contained inside them."
"It's amazing how different this technology is from that which the Lemurians used in the NETHACK ACHTON," the stocky Huang Lee said. "The two star arks don't just come from two different time periods. During the five hundred years of subjective time that passed on board, their technology also continued to evolve in different directions."
Brodbeck nodded. "This memory module is made of a different material, and the type of data storage is different, too. To say nothing of the formatting." He gestured to the arrangement of hyperenergy strands and the mobile Syntron. "This is a special scanner. We're scanning the data structure on a quantum-mechanical level, but without looking inside the box that has Schrödinger's Cat in it." Rhodan understood what the Chief Technician
meant. The scanning procedure did not have any effect on the structure of the data. Schrödinger's cat stayed both dead and alive. Or to put it another way: the information in the memory modules remained intact.
Rhodan's eyebrows raised slightly. "When did you begin your examination?"
"A few hours ago."
"When, precisely?"
Brodbeck glanced at a chronometer. "Just three hours ago."
Rhodan looked at Sharita Coho. "And it was just three hours ago I heard the whispering for the first time." A sudden weakness surged up within him and he swayed on his feet.
"Is everything all right?" Sharita asked, concerned.
"I ... think so," Rhodan replied. Strange: some of the weakness remained within him despite the Cell Activator that continuously renewed his physical strength. He took a deep breath. "There must be a connection."
"Or it might be nothing more than a coincidence," Sharita said, looking intently at Rhodan.
He pointed to the LEMCHA OVIR's data storage unit. "Whatever I'm feeling is coming from there."
He was very certain, although he did not have a rational explanation for it. Emotional certainty connected the "sound" with the data storage modules taken from the star ark that had crashed on the planet Mentack Nutai.
Lee again touched some holographic control fields and the network of hyperstrands rotated. An audible signal sounded, a slight ping, and the shrinking and swelling geometrical patterns in the three-dimensional projection field grew into a unified, stable form.
"I think we're ready," Lee said. "We should now be able to read the first data."
Brodbeck looked questioningly first at Sharita Coho and then at Rhodan as well.
Exodus to the Stars Page 2
