"Deepsix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Макдевитт Джек)

VII

Women were intended by their Maker to be cheerleaders. One has only to examine their anatomy and their disposition to recognize that melancholy fact. So long as they, and we, keep this rockbound truth firmly in mind, the sexes will perform their joint functions with admirable proficiency.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Night Thoughts," Notes from Babylon

Wendy was still two hours away from the object, but they were close enough to have good visuals, which were displayed in various aspects across a bank of screens in project control. The area was crowded with Beekman's people, clustered in front of the monitors and hunched over consoles.

The object had turned out to be an assembly of fifteen individual shafts, connected by bands set at regular intervals of about eighty kilometers. Eight shafts were on the perimeter, six in an inner ring, and one in the center. They were of identical dimensions, each with a diameter of about three-quarters of a meter, each long enough to stretch from New York to Seattle. There was considerable space between them, so Marcel could see through the assembly, could detect stars on the far side.

A rocky asteroid was attached to one end, webbed in by a net. The overall effect, Marcel thought, was of a lollipop with a stick that projected into the next county.

The end opposite the asteroid just stopped. A few lines trailed out of it, like dangling cables. Marcel noticed that the fifteen cylinders were cut off cleanly, suggesting the object had not broken away from some larger structure, but rather had been released.

"Impossible thing," said Beekman, who was delighted with the find. "Far too much mass for so narrow a body."

"Is it really that big a deal?" asked Marcel. "I mean, it's in space. It doesn't weigh anything."

"Doesn't matter. It still has mass. A lot of it along the length of the assembly."

Marcel was studying the configuration: The asteroid was up, the lower end of the assembly was pointed directly at Deepsix.

Beekman followed his eyes. "At least its position is about what we'd expect."

"Stable orbit?"

"Oh, yes. It could have been there for thousands of years. Except-"

"What?"

He delivered a puzzled grunt. "It just shouldn't hold together. I'll be interested in seeing what the thing's made of."

John Drummond, a young mathematician from Oxford, looked up from a screen."Impossibilium," he said.

Marcel, fascinated, watched the image. It was so long they couldn't put the entire thing on a single screen without shrinking the assembly to invisibility. One of the technicians put it up across a bank of five monitors, the lollipop head on the far left, and the long thin line of the supporting pole stretching all the way over to the far right-hand screen. "So it's not a ship of any kind, right?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Beekman. "It's certainly not a ship." He shook his head emphatically. "No way it could be a ship."

"So what is it? A dock?" asked Marcel. "Maybe a refueling station?" They homed in on one of the braces. It appeared to be a simple block of metal, two meters thick, supporting all fifteen shafts in their positions. "Where do you think it came from?"

Beekman shook his head. "Deepsix. Where else could it have come from?"

"But there's no indication they ever had technology remotely like this."

"We really haven't seen anything yet, Marcel. The technology may be under the ice. Kellie's tower might be very old. Thousands of years. We didn't look very advanced a few centuries ago either."

Marcel couldn't bring himself to believe that all evidence of a high-tech civilization could just disappear.

Beekman sighed. "The evidence is right outside, Marcel." He tried to rub away a headache. "We don't have any answers yet. Let's just be patient." He looked at the screens and then glanced at Drummond. An exchange of some sort took place between them.

"It's probably a counterweight," Drummond said. He was about average size and generally uncoordinated, a thin young man with prematurely receding hair. He seemed to have had trouble adjusting to low gravity. But he'd come to Wendy with a reputation for genius.

"Counterweight?" said Marcel. "Counterweight for what?"

"A skyhook." Beekman glanced at Drummond, who nodded agreement. "There's not much else it could have been."

"You mean an elevator from the ground to L.E.O.?"

"Not Earth orbit, obviously. But yes, I'd say that's exactly what it was."

Marcel saw several smiles. "I was under the impression there was no point putting up a skyhook. I mean, we've got spike technology. We can float vehicles into orbit. Why go to all the trouble-" He stopped. "Oh."

"Sure," said Beekman. "Whoever built this thing doesn't have the spike. They've got some other stuff, though, that we don't. We could never make one of these. Not one that would hold together."

"Okay," said Marcel. "What you're telling me, if I understand this correctly, is that this is the part of the skyhook that sticks out into space and balances the section that reaches to the ground, right?"

"Yes."

"That brings up a question."

"Yes, it does," said Beekman. "Where's the rest of the skyhook?" He shrugged. "Remove the counterweight, and everything else falls down."

"Wouldn't we have seen it if that had happened?"

"I'd think so."

"Maybe they cut it loose near the bottom of the elevator. If that happened-"

"Most of it would get yanked out into space and drift off."

"So there could be another piece of this thing out here somewhere."

"Could be. Yes."

"But what we're saying is that it was put up and then taken down?"

"Or fell down."

They retired into the project director's office, and Beekman waved him to a chair. A large globe of Deepsix stood in one corner.

"It's crazy," said Marcel. "You can't hide a skyhook. Up or down."

"Maybe the pieces that collapsed are under the glaciers," Beekman said. "We really can't see much of the surface." He zeroed in on the equator and began to turn the globe. "Although it would have to be along here somewhere. Along the equator where we can see the ground."

They called up pictures of Maleiva HI and began looking. For the most part, the equator crossed open ocean. It touched a few islands in the Coraggio east of Transitoria, rounded the globe without any land in sight, passed through Northern Tempus, leaped the Misty Sea, and returned to Transitoria a couple hundred kilometers south of Burbage Point. The tower.

"Here," said Beekman, indicating the archipelago, "or here." The Transitorian west coast.

"Why?" asked Marcel.

"Big mountains in both places. You want the highest base you can get. So you put it on top of a mountain."

"But a structure like that would be big."

"Oh, yes."

"So where is it?" Marcel looked at both sites, the archipelago, where several enormous mountains stood atop islands that appeared to be volcanic. And the coastal range, which featured a chain of giants with cloud-covered peaks.

"I don't know." Beekman held out his hands.

"Tell me," said Marcel. "If you had a skyhook, and something happened to it, so it collapsed, which way would it fall?"

The project director smiled. "Down."

"No. I'm serious. Would it fall toward the west?"

"There'd be a tendency in that direction. But the kind of structure we're talking about, thousands of kilometers of elevator shaft and God knows what else. Mostly it would just come down." Someone was knocking. Beekman kept talking while he opened the door and invited Drummond inside. "If it were here, in Transitoria, the base could be hidden on one of these peaks under the clouds. But that still doesn't explain where the wreckage got to. It should be scattered across the landscape."

Marcel looked at Drummond. "Maybe not," Drummond said.

"Suppose you wanted to take it down. With minimum damage to the terrain below. What do you do?"

"I have no idea, John," Beekman said. "But I'd think we would want to separate the shaft at a point where the longest possible section would get hauled up by the counterweight. What's left-"

"Falls west-"

"— into the ocean." Beekman drummed his fingers on the table-top. "It's possible. If you've got a hell of a good engineer. But why would someone deliberately take it down? I mean, that thing's got to be an architectural nightmare to put up in the first place."

"Maybe they developed the spike and didn't need it anymore. Maybe it was becoming a hazard. I'd think one of those things would need a lot of maintenance."

"Well." Beekman shrugged. "There are a number of mountains in that range. We'll have an orbiter in the area in a bit. Why don't we run some scans and see what we can see."

MEMO FOR THE CAPTAIN

11726 1427 hours From Bill

The cruise ship Evening Star transited from hyperspace four minutes ago. It has set course for Maleiva III and will arrive in orbit in approximately two hours.

People boarding cruise liners usually did so via standard GTOs, Ground-to-Orbit vehicles that employed the spike for lift and standard chemical thrusters for velocity. The Star's onboard lander was a luxury vehicle, seldom used, maintained primarily to accommodate VIPs who had commercial or political reasons for shunning the more public modes of transportation.

It resembled a large penguin. It had a black-and-white hull with retractable white wings. The nose was blunt, almost boxy, with Evening Star emblazoned in black script below the TransGalactic Starswirl. The interior was leather and brass. It had a small autobar and a pullout worktable so that riders could shuffle papers or relax as they wished.

After making arrangements to send the shuttle down, Nicholson had become concerned that some of his other passengers would learn about the flight and demand places on board. He had consequently impressed on MacAllister that he was to say nothing to anyone. The news that he wished to take another journalist along had been unsettling, but Nicholson had been caught by then, committed, and wanted to do nothing to upset his illustrious guest.

This was not the first time the old editor had discovered the advantage of his reputation for volcanic outbursts against those who, for whatever reason, had incurred his wrath. Consequently he and Casey remained, aside from the pilot, the only persons aboard.

The pilot's name was Cole Wetheral. He was a taciturn man who would have made a successful funeral director. He had morose eyes and a long nose and long pale fingers that fluttered across the controls as if they were an organ keyboard. He gave preflight instructions and information in a stentorian tone: "Please be seated." "You will wish to check the status board above your seat before attempting to move around the cabin." "We want you to enjoy your excursion; please feel free to ask if there is anything you need." He informed them also that it would be early morning local time when they arrived.

Casey looked dazzled, and MacAllister wondered whether it was a condition brought on by the chance to visit a world a few days before it was to end, or by his own presence. He waited until she was inside, then climbed in and sat down beside her.

"Have you ever been down on another world before, Mr. MacAllister?" she asked.

He hadn't. Had never seen a point to it. He perceived himself as the end product of three billion years of evolution, specifically designed for the Earth, and that was where he was inclined to stay. "I expect," he told her, "that this will be the only visit I ever make to alien soil."

She had, as it turned out. She'd been to Pinnacle and Quraqua, and to Quraqua's airless moon, with its enigmatic city on the plain. Doing features, she explained.

The pilot closed the hatches. Interior lights came on. He spent about a minute hunched over his control board, then reached up and threw a couple of switches on an overhead panel. "We are depressur-izing the bay," he said. "We'll be ready to depart in just a couple of minutes."

The vehicle rose slightly.

"I appreciate your doing this," Casey told him.

He smiled benevolently. MacAllister liked doing things for people. And there was nothing quite so gratifying as the appreciation of a young person to whom he was lending the luster of his name. "To be honest, Casey," he said, "I'm glad you asked. Without your initiative, I'd have spent most of the next week in The Navigator."

The lander's motors whined and began to pulse steadily.

She smiled. MacAllister had made a career of attacking women in print, as he had attacked college professors, preachers, farmers, left-wing editorial writers, and assorted other do-gooders and champions of the downtrodden. Women, he'd argued, were possessed of an impossible anatomy, top-heavy and off-balance. They could not walk without jiggling and rolling, and consequently it was quite impossible for men of sense to take even the brightest of them seriously.

Many women perceived him as that most dangerous kind of character: an articulate and persuasive demagogue. He knew that, but accepted it as the price he had to pay for saying the things that everyone else knew to be true, but which they denied, even to themselves. To a degree, his literary reputation protected him from the rage that surely would have fallen on the head of a lesser man. It demonstrated to him the intellectual bankruptcy of both sexes. Here, after all, was this sweet young thing, beaming and smiling at him, hoping to improve her career through his auspices, and quite willing to overlook a substantial series of ill-tempered remarks on his side, should he choose to make them, simply because they would provide excellent copy. "There is a perfectly good reason, my dear, why the downtrodden are trodden down. If they deserved better, they would have better."

The bay doors opened.

"We'll lose all sense of gravity after we launch," said the pilot.

Harnesses swung down and locked them in. The interior lights blinked and went out. Then they sank back into their seats and began to move through the night. MacAllister twisted around and looked back at the great bulk of the Evening Star. Lights blazed fore and aft. An antenna mounted just beyond the launch pod rotated slowly.

The power and majesty of the great liner was somehow lost when it was in dock. He'd not been all that impressed when he'd boarded her back at the Wheel. But out here the Star was in her element, afloat among strange constellations beneath a sun that wasn't quite the right color, above a world whose icy continents bore unfamiliar shapes. This view alone, he decided, was worth the side trip.

"Did I tell you," said Casey, "I'm checked out to pilot these things?" She looked pleased with herself.

That fact caught MacAllister's respect. Deep space seemed to be her journalistic specialty. Acquiring a pilot's skills told him she was serious. "Excellent," he said. He turned away from the view, glanced at her, then looked out again at the shimmering atmosphere below. "So how did you manage that?"

"My father owns a yacht."

"Ah." He recognized the family name. "Your father's Desmond Hayes."

"Yes." She clamped her teeth together as if she'd been caught in a faux pas. And he understood: rich man's daughter trying to make it on her own.

Desmond Hayes was the founder of Lifelong Enterprises, which had funded numerous biotech advances, and was one of the major forces behind recent life-extending breakthroughs. He was notoriously wealthy, had a taste for power, and talked often of running for political office. He was seldom seen without a beautiful young woman on his arm. A ridiculous figure, on the whole.

"Well," MacAllister said, "it's always a good idea to have a backup pilot."

They were over clumps of cumulus now, bright in the starlight. MacAllister heard and felt the beginnings of atmospheric resistance. He brought up the autobar menu. They were well stocked. "How about a drink, Casey?"

"That sounds like a good idea," she said. "A mint driver would be nice, if they have one."

He punched it in, handed it over to her, and made a hot rum for himself. "Wetheral," he said, "let's take a look at the countryside before we set down."

It proved to be a singularly uninviting landscape, mostly just snow and ice. The narrow equatorial belt provided dense forest along its southern edge, open country to the northeast, and low rolling hills and occasional patches of trees near the tower.

At dawn, they cruised over a shoreline dominated by enormous peaks. "This is the northern coast," Wetheral explained. Several strips of beach presented themselves. In all, it was a magnificent seascape.

They continued their exploration while the sun rose higher, until finally MacAllister informed Wetheral they'd seen enough. "Let's go talk to the people at the tower," he said.

The pilot brought them back toward the south, and thirty minutes later they descended toward Burbage Point. A few trees rose out of the snow.

"Dismal place," she said.

But MacAllister liked it. There was something majestic in the desolation.

Despite the short night, they were up early and back in the tower immediately after sunrise. Hutch, Nightingale, and Kellie returned to the tunnel to recommence digging, while Chiang took over guard duty at the entrance and Toni went up to the roof.

This second sunrise on the new world was bright and enticing. The snow glittered in the hard cold light. The trees from which the cat had appeared glowed green and purple, and a sprinkling of white clouds drifted through the sky.

They'd been working only ten minutes when Kellie found a few half-legible symbols on one of the walls.

She recorded them with the microscan, and they decided to try to salvage the images themselves. But when they used the lasers to remove the segment of wall, it crumbled. "There's a technique for this," Hutch grumbled, "but I don't know what it is."

Marcel broke in on the private channel. "Hutch?"

"I'm here. What've you got?"

"We think it's a skyhook."

"You're kidding."

"You think I could make this up?"

"Hold on. I'm going to put you on the allcom, and I want you to tell everybody." She switched him over.

He repeated the news, and Nightingale announced himself stunned.

"What does Gunther think?" asked Kellie.

"It's Gunther's conclusion. Hell, what do I know about this stuff? But I'll give him this: I can't imagine what else it could be."

"That means," said Hutch, "this place isn't representative at all. We've wandered into a remote site that didn't keep up with the rest of the world."

"Looks like it. But there's no evidence of technological civilization anywhere on the surface."

"They had an ice age," said Hutch. "It got covered."

"We don't think even an ice age would completely erase all signs of an advanced culture. There'd be towers. Real towers, not that debacle you have. Maybe they'd get knocked over, but we'd still be able to see they'd been there. There'd be dams, harbor construction, all sorts of things. Concrete doesn't go away."

"What's going to happen to it?" asked Kellie. "The skyhook?"

"In about a week it'll go down with Deepsix."

"So where does that leave us?" asked Hutch. "Are we wasting our time here?"

She heard Marcel sigh. "I don't know anything about archeology," he said. "We've forwarded everything we have to the Academy, and to the archeologists at Nok. They're considerably closer, and maybe we'll get some suggestions back from them."

"There's something else here," said Kellie. She'd uncovered a metal bar.

"Hold on, Marcel." Hutch moved into position to give Wendy a good look.

Kellie tried to brush the dirt away. "Careful," Hutch said. "It looks sharp."

Nightingale dug a dart out of the frozen clay. Feather stalks remained at its base.

The bar was attached to a crosspiece. And the crosspiece became a rack. The rack was stocked with tubes.

They were narrow and about two-thirds of a meter long. Hutch picked one up and examined it by torchlight. It was hollow, made of light wood. Brittle now, of course. One end was narrowed and had a fitting that might have been a mouthpiece.

"You thinking what I am?" asked Kellie.

"Yep. It's a blowgun."

They found a second dart.

And a couple of javelins.

"Stone heads," Hutch said.

And small. A half meter long.

They also found some shields. These were made of iron and had been covered with animal skins, which fell apart when they touched them.

"Blowguns and skyhooks," said Marcel. "An interesting world."

"About the skyhook-" said Nightingale.

"Yes?"

"If they actually had one at one time, part of it would still be here somewhere, right? I mean, that would have to be a big structure. And it has to be on the equator, so it's not under the ice somewhere."

"We're way ahead of you, Randy. We think the base might have been in a mountain chain along the coast a few hundred kilometers southwest of where you are. We're waiting for satellites to get into position to do a scan."

"The west coast," she said.

"Right. Some of the peaks in that area seem to have permanent clouds over them. If we find something, you'll want to take a run over there yourself. We might be looking at the ultimate dig site."

They carried the blowguns, the javelins, and several darts up to ground level. Outside, the wind had blown up again, and snow had begun to fall. They had no bags of sufficient size for the rack, so they cut the plastic in strips and wrapped it as best they could. But when they tried to move it to the lander, the wind caught the plastic and almost ripped it out of their hands. "Bendo and Klopp," said Nightingale, referring to a currently popular comedy team that specialized in pratfalls.

Hutch nodded. "I guess. Let's leave it here until things calm down."

They took a break. Kellie and Nightingale went back to the lander for a few minutes, and Hutch hoisted herself onto the table to rest. Spending all day bent over in tunnels, endlessly scraping, sweeping, and digging, was not her game.

Toni broke in on the allcom: "Hutch, we've got company."

"Company?" She signaled to Chiang, who was standing in the doorway, and drew her cutter. It was, she assumed, the cat.

"Lander coming in," said Toni.

Hutch opened her channel to Marcel. "Who else is out here?"

"A cruise ship," he said. "Just arrived this morning."

"Well, it looks as if they're sending down tourists."

"What?"

"You got it. They must be crazy."

"Don't know anything about it. I'll contact their captain."

She was getting another signal. "I'll get back to you, Marcel." She punched in the new caller. "Go ahead."

"Ground party, this is the pilot of the Evening Star lander. We would like to set down in the area."

"Not a good idea," said Hutch. "It's dangerous here. There are wild animals."

There was no response for almost half a minute. Then: "We accept responsibility for everyone who is on board."

"What's going on?" she asked. "Why are you here?"

"I'm carrying two journalists who would like to visit the tower."

"I don't believe this," she said. "The tower is dangerous, too. It could fall down at any time."

There was a new voice, a baritone with perfect diction: "We've been warned. It's on record. So you need not concern yourself further."

"May I ask who's speaking?"

"Gregory MacAllister," he said. "I'm a passenger on the Evening Star." He implied a merely at the beginning of the sentence, which in turn suggested modesty by someone who was in fact a great deal more than merely a passenger.

Hutch wondered if this would turn out to be the Gregory MacAllister. "I don't think you understand," she said. "We are formally designated an archeological site. You're in violation of the law if you land."

"What section of the code would that be, ma'am?"

Damned if she knew. There was such a law. But she had no idea where to find it.

"Then I think we'll have to continue as is."

She switched to another channel. "Bill, tie me in to the Evening Star. Get me a command channel if you have one."

Bill replied with an electronic murmur and then told her none was available. "There's only one main link,"he said.

"Put me through."

She listened to a series of clicks and a chime. Then: "The Evening Star welcomes you to first-class accommodations on voyages throughout the known universe." The voice was female. "We feature luxurious cabins, a wide range of international cuisines, leading entertainers, three casinos, and special accommodations for parties. How may we serve you?"

"My name's Hutchins," she said. "I'm with the landing party at the dig. I'd like to speak with someone in command, please."

"I'm fully authorized to respond to all requests and complaints. Ms. Hutchins. I'd be pleased to help you."

"I want to talk to the captain."

"Perhaps if you explained your purpose in making this request-"

"Your captain has put some of his passengers in danger. Would you please put me through to him?"

There was a pause, then barely audible voices. Finally: "This is the duty officer. Who are you again?" A human being this time. A male.

"I'm Priscilla Hutchins. The archeological project director on Deepsix. We have a team on the ground. You people have sent down some tourists. And I wanted you to know that there are hazards."

"We have tourists on the surface?"

"Yes, you do."

"I see." A pause. "What kind of hazards?"

"They could be eaten."

Still another delay. Then: "Do you have some sort of authority I should be aware of?"

"Look. Your passengers are approaching a protected archeological site. Moreover, it's an earthquake zone, and somebody could get killed. Please recall them. Or send them somewhere else."

"Just a minute, please."

He clicked off the circuit.

The lander pilot came back: "Ms. Hutchins, we are going to set down near the tower. Since it seems to be snowing, and I assume visibility isn't any better on the ground, please clear your people away for the moment."

"They're directly overhead," said Kellie.

Hutch called everyone into the tower. "Stay inside until they're on the ground," she said. Then she switched back to the lander. "Are you still there, pilot?"

"I'm still here."

"Our people are out of the way. You're clear to come in. If you must."

"Thank you."

Marcel came back on: "Hutch."

"Yeah, what'd they tell you?"

"You know who's on board?"

"Gregory MacAllister."

"Do you know who he is?"

Now she did. This was Gregory the Great. Self-appointed champion of common sense who'd made a fortune attacking the pompous and the arrogant, or, depending on whom you listened to, simply those less gifted than he. Years before she'd been in a graduate seminar with a historian whose chief claim to fame was that he'd once been publicly chastised by MacAllister. He'd even put an account of the assault up on the screen and stood beside it grinning as if he'd touched greatness. "Yes," she said. "The only person on the planet who could bring church and science together. They both hope he dies."

"That's him. And I hope he's not listening."

"What am I supposed to do with him?"

"Hutch, management would not want you to offend him. My guess is that it'll be your job if you do."

"How about if I just feed him to the big cat?"

"Pardon?"

"Let it go."

"I think it would be a good idea to treat him well. Let him look at whatever he wants to. It won't hurt anything. And don't let him fall on his head."

The snow had grown heavier and become so thick MacAllister didn't see anything until moments before they touched down. He got a glimpse of the other lander, and of the tower beyond, and then they were on the ground, so softly he barely felt the impact. Wetheral had the personality of a pinecone, but there was no question he was a competent pilot.

The man himself turned around in his seat and studied them momentarily with those sad eyes. "How long," he asked, "did you folks plan on being here?"

"Not long," said MacAllister. "An hour or so."

The snow was already piling up on the windscreen.

"Okay. I have a few things to take care of. Make sure you activate your e-suit before you go out, and we want you to keep it on the entire time you're here. You can breathe the local air if necessary, but the mix isn't quite right.

"The captain also directed me to ask you both to be careful. There've been wild animal sightings."

"We know that," said MacAllister.

"Good. There's a great deal of paperwork involved if we lose either of you." He said it without a trace of irony.

"Thank you," said Casey.

They went through the airlock and climbed down out of the spacecraft into the storm. "To do the interview correctly," MacAllister said, "we're going to want to wait until it subsides." Ordinarily, heavy weather provided great atmosphere for interviews. But in this case the tower was the star of the show, and people needed to be able to see it. "Wetheral, how long before this blizzard lets up?"

The pilot appeared in the hatch. "I don't know, sir. We don't have a weather report."

"Seems as if it might be a good idea to get one."

"Won't be one for this area," he said seriously.'He looked around, shook his head, and came down the ladder.

The archeologists' lander was dead ahead. It was smaller than the Star's vehicle, and sleeker. More businesslike.

A woman materialized out of the driving snow. She wore a blue-and-white jumpsuit and he knew from the way she walked it was Hutchins. She was trim, built like a boy, and came up almost to his shoulders. Her black hair was cut short, and she looked unfriendly. But he shrugged it away in his usual forgiving manner, recognizing anger as a natural trait exhibited by females who didn't get their way.

"You're the mission commander, I take it?" he asked, extending his hand.

She shook it perfunctorily. "I'm Hutchins," she said.

He introduced Casey and Wetheral.

"Why don't we talk inside?" Hutchins turned on her heel and marched off.

Delightful.

They clumped through the snow. MacAllister studied the tower while he tried to get used to the e-suit. He should have been cold, but wasn't. His feet, clad in leisure shoes, sank into the drifts. But they stayed warm.

The tower loomed up through the storm. At home, it would have been no more than a pile of rock. Here, amidst all this desolation, it was magnificent. But the Philistines had punched a hole in the wall. "Pity you chose to do that," he told Hutchins.

"It made egress considerably easier."

"I quite understand." He did, of course. And yet this tower had obviously stood a long time. It should have been possible to show it a bit more respect. "I don't suppose we have any idea how old it is?"

"Not yet," she said. "We don't have an onboard facility for dating. It'll take a while."

The storm caused him to speak more loudly than necessary. He was having a hard time getting used to the radio. Hutchins asked him to lower his voice. He did and focused on trying to keep it down. "And there's nothing else?" he asked. "No other ruins?"

"There are some scattered around the planet. And there's a city buried down there." She pointed at the ground.

"Really?" He tried to imagine it, a town with houses and parks and probably a jail under the ice. "Incredible," he said.

"Watch your head." She led him through the entrance they had made. He ducked and followed her into a low-roofed chamber with a table on which were piled some cups and darts. He had to stay bent over.

"Tight fit," he said. The small-gauge stairways caught his eye. "The inhabitants were, what, — elves?"

"Apparently about that size."

"What have you learned about them so far?" He wandered over to the table and reached for one of the cups, but she asked him, if he would, to avoid handling them. "Forgive me," he said. "So what can you tell me about them?"

"We know they favored blowguns."

He smiled back at her. "Primitives."

Hutchins's people drifted in to meet him. They struck him as by and large a forgettable lot. The other two women were reasonably attractive. There was one young male with a trace of Asian ancestry. And he recognized the second male but couldn't immediately place him. He was an elderly, bookish-looking individual, with a weak chin and a fussy mustache. And he was in fact staring at MacAllister with some irritation.

Hutchins did the introductions. And the mystery went away. "Randall Nightingale," she said.

Ah. Nightingale. The man who fainted. The man carried relatively uninjured out of battle by a woman. MacAllister frowned and pretended to study his features. "Do I know you from somewhere?" he asked with benign dignity.

"Yes," said Nightingale. "Indeed you do."

"You're…"

"I was the director of the original project, Mr. MacAllister. Twenty years or so ago."

"So you were." MacAllister was not without compassion, and he let Nightingale see that he felt a degree of sympathy. "I am sorry how that turned out. It must have been hard on you."

Hutchins must have sensed the gathering storm. She moved in close.

MacAllister turned to his companion. "Casey, you know Randall Nightingale. A legendary figure."

Nightingale took an aggressive step forward, but Hutchins put an arm around his shoulder. Little woman, he thought. And a little man. But Nightingale wisely allowed himself to be restrained. "I haven't forgotten you, MacAllister," he said.

MacAllister smiled politely. "There, sir, as you can see, you had the advantage of me."

Hutchins drew him away and turned him over to the Asian. Something passed between them, and he coaxed Nightingale out of the chamber and down the child's staircase.

"What was that about?" asked Casey.

"Man didn't like to read about himself." MacAllister turned back to Hutchins. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "I didn't expect to find him here."

"It's okay. Let's just try to keep it peaceful."

"Madam," he said, "you need to tell that to your own people. But I'll certainly try to stay out of everyone's way. Now, can I persuade you to show us around the site a bit?"

"All right," she said. "I guess it can't do any harm. But there's really not much to see."

"How long have you been on the ground, if you don't mind my asking?"

"This is our second day."

"Do we know anything at all about the natives, the creatures, who built it? Other than the blowguns?"

Hutchins told him what they had learned: The natives were of course preindustrial, fought organized wars, and had a form of writing. She offered to take him to the top of the tower. "Tell me what's up there, and I'll decide," he said.

She described the chamber and the levered ceiling which apparently had opened up. And she added their idea that the natives might have owned a telescope.

"Optics?" he said. "That doesn't seem to fit with blowguns."

"That's our feeling. I hope we'll get some answers during the course of the day."

MacAllister saw no point making the climb. Instead they descended into the lower chambers, and Hutchins showed him a fireplace and some chair fragments.

Near the bottom of the tower they looked into a tunnel. "This is where we're working now," she said.

The tunnel was too small to accommodate him. Even had it not been, he would have stayed out of it. "So what's back there?" he asked.

"It's where we found the blowguns. It looks as if there was an armory. But what we're really interested in is finding writing samples and maybe some engraved pictures. Or possibly sculpture. Something that'll tell us what they looked like. We'd like to answer your question, Mr. MacAllister."

"Of course." MacAllister looked around at the blank walls. "We must have some idea of their appearance. For example, surely the staircase is designed for a bipedal creature?"

"Surely," she said. "We're pretty sure they had four limbs. Walked upright. That's about the extent of what we know."

"When do you expect to be able to determine the age of this place?"

"After we get some of the pieces back to a lab. Until then everything is guesswork."

Wetheral was still standing by the chair fragments, trying to catch Hutchins's attention. "Yes?" she said.

"May I ask whether you're finished with these?"

"Yes," she said. "We've already stowed a complete armchair in the lander."

"Good." He looked pleased. "Thank you." And while she watched, clearly surprised, he gathered the fragments, a beam, and a piece of material that might once have been drapery. And he carried everything up the staircase.

"The ship hopes to salvage a few pieces," MacAllister explained. His back was beginning to hurt from all the bending. "Anything that might interest the more historically minded passengers."

She showed no reaction. "I can't see that it'll do any harm." "Thank you," said MacAllister. "And if there's nothing we missed"-he turned to Casey-"this might be a good time to go outside and, if the weather will allow, do our interview."