Authors: Ben Bova

Battle Station (28 page)

BOOK: Battle Station

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They split the team into three groups. Chien and Charnovsky stayed with the car; Marlene and Doris would go with Lee and Grote to look at the flora and fauna (if any) on the shore side of the hills. Lee and the engineer carried a pair of TV camera packs with them, to set up close to the shoreline.

“Beware of the natives,” Charnovsky's voice grated in Lee's earphones as they walked away from the
skimmer. “They might swoop down on you with bows and arrows!” His laughter showed what he thought of Lee's worries.

Climbing the hills wasn't as bad as Lee had thought it would be. The powersuit did most of the work, and the glassy rock was not smooth enough to cause real troubles with footing. It was hot, though, even with the suit's cooling equipment turned up full bore. Sirius blazed overhead, and the rocks beat glare and heat back into their faces as they climbed.

It took most of the day to get over the crest of the hills. But finally, with Sirius edging toward the horizon behind them, Lee saw the water.

The sea spread to the farther horizon, cool and blue, with long gentle swells that steepened into surf as they ran up toward the land. And the land was green here: shrubs and mossy-looking plants were patchily sprinkled around.

“Look! Right here!” Doris's voice.

Lee swiveled his head and saw her clumsily sinking to her knees, like an armor-plated elephant getting down ponderously from a circus trick. She knelt beside a fernlike plant. They all walked over and helped her to photograph it, snip a leaf from it, probe its root system.

“Might as well sleep here tonight,” Grote said. “I'll take the first watch.”

“Can't we set the scanners to give an alarm if anything approaches?” Marlene asked. “There's nothing here dangerous enough toâ”

“I want one of us awake at all times,” Grote said firmly. “And nobody outside of his suit.”

“There's no place like home,” Doris muttered. “But after a while even your own smell gets to you.”

The women lay down, locking the suits into roughly reclining positions. To Lee they looked like oversized beetles that had gotten stuck on their backs. It didn't look possible for them to ever get up again. Then
another thought struck him, and he chuckled to himself.
Super chastity belts
.

He sat down, cranked the suit's torso section back to a comfortable reclining angle, and tried to doze off. He was dreaming of the towers on Titan again when Grote's voice in his earphones woke him.

“Is it my turn?” he asked groggily.

“Not yet. But turn off your transmitter. You were groaning in your sleep. Don't want to wake up the girls, do you?”

Lee took the second watch and simply stayed awake until daybreak without bothering any of the others. They began marching toward the sea.

The hills descended only slightly into a rolling plateau that went on until they reached the bluffs that overlooked the sea. A few hundred feet down was a narrow strip of beach, with the breakers surging in.

“This is as far as we go,” Grote said.

The women spent the morning collecting plant samples. Marlene found a few insects and grew more excited over them than Doris had been about the shrubbery. Lee and Grote walked along the edge of the cliffs looking for a good place to set up their cameras.

“You're sure this is the area where they were seen?” Lee asked.

The engineer, walking alongside him, turned his head inside the plastic helmet. Lee could see he was edgy, too.

“I know how to read a map.”

“Sorry, I'm just anxiousâ”

“So am I.”

They walked until Sirius was almost directly overhead, without seeing anything except the tireless sea, the beach, and the spongy-looking plants that huddled close to the ground.

“Not even a damned tree,” Grote grumbled.

They turned back and headed for the spot where they had left the women. Far up the beach, Lee saw a tiny dark spot.

“What's that?”

Grote stared for a few moments. “Probably a rock.” But he touched a button on the chest of his suit.

Lee did the same, and an electro-optical viewpiece slid down in front of his eyes. Turning a dial on the suit's control panel, he tried to focus on the spot. It wavered in the heat currents of the early afternoon, blurred and uncertain. Then it seemed to jump out of view.

Lee punched the button, and the lens slid away from his eyes. “It's moving!” he shouted, and started to run.

He heard Grote's heavy breathing as the engineer followed him, and they both nearly flew in their powersuits along the edge of the cliffs.

It was a man! No, not one, Lee saw, but two of them walking along the beach, their feet in the foaming water.

“Get down, you bloody fool,” he heard Grote shrilling at him.

He dove headlong, bounced, cracked the back of his head against the helmet's plastic, then banged his chin on the soft inner lining of the collar.

“Don't want them to see us, do you?” Grote was whispering now.

“They can't hear us, for God's sake,” Lee said into his suit radiophone.

They wormed their way to the cliff's edge again and watched. The two men seemed to be dressed in black.
Or are they black-skinned and naked
? Lee wondered.

After a hurried council, they unslung one of the video cameras and its power unit, set it up right there, turned it on, and then backed away from the edge of the cliff. Then they ran as hard as they could, staying
out of sight of the beach, with the remaining camera. They passed the startled women and breathlessly shouted out their find. The women dropped their work and started running after them.

About a kilometer or so farther on they dropped to all fours again and painfully crawled to the edge once more. Grote hissed the women into silence as they hunched up beside him.

The beach was empty now.

“Do you think they saw us?” Lee asked.

“Don't know.”

Lee used the electro-optics again and scanned the beach. “No sign of them.”

“Their footprints,” Grote snapped. “Look there.”

The trails of two very human-looking sets of footprints marched straight into the water. All four of them searched the sea for hours, but saw nothing. Finally, they decided to set up the other camera. It was turning dark by the time they finished.

“We've got to get back to the car,” Grote said wearily, when they finished. “There's not enough food in the suits for another day.”

“I'll stay here,” Lee replied. “You can bring me more supplies tomorrow.”

“No. If there's anything to see, the cameras will pick it up. Chien is monitoring them back at the car, and the whole crew of the ship must be watching the view.”

Lee saw there was no sense arguing. Besides, he was bone-tired. But he knew he'd be back again as soon as he could get there.

“Well, it settles a three-hundred-year-old argument,” Aaron Hatfield said as he watched the viewscreen.

The biochemist and Lee were sitting in the main workroom of the ship's Sirius globe, watching the humanoids as televised by the cameras on the cliffs. Charnovsky was on the other side of the room, at a workbench, flashing rock chips with a laser so that a spectrometer could analyze their chemical composition. The other “outsiders” were traveling in the skimmer again, collecting more floral and insect specimens.

“What argument?” Lee asked.

Hatfield shifted in his chair, making the webbing creak. “About the human form â¦ whether it's an accident or a result of evolutionary selection. From
them
,” he nodded toward the screen, “I'd say it's no accident.”

One camera was on wide-field focus and showed a group of three of the men. They were wading hip-deep in the surf, carrying slender rods high above their heads to keep them free of the surging waves. The other camera was fixed on a close-up view of three women standing on the beach, watching their men. Like the men, they were completely naked and black-skinned. They looked human in every detail.

Every morning they appeared on the beach, often carrying the rods, but sometimes not. Lee concluded that they must live in caves cut into the cliffs. The rods looked like simple bone spears but even under the closest focus of the cameras he couldn't be sure.

“They're not Negroid,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone listening.

“It's hard to tell, isn't it?” Hatfield asked.

Nodding, Lee said, “They just don't look like terrestrial Negroes â¦ except for their skin coloring. And that's an adaptation to Sirius's brightness. Plenty of ultraviolet, too.”

Charnovsky came over and pulled up a chair. “So. Have they caught any fish this morning?”

“Not yet,” Lee answered.

Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, “Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don't make much of an enemy, Lee.”

“They could have been our enemy,” Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky's needling, but not reconciled to it.

The geologist shook his head sadly. “Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Lee. The chances against this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances â¦”

“What're the chances that two intelligent races will both evolve along the same physical lines?” Lee snapped.

Charnovsky shrugged. “We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent.”

Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield, “Aaron, the biochemistry is very similar to Earth's, isn't it?”

“Very close.”

“I mean â¦ I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn't be poisoned or anything like that?”

“Well,” Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, “as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs is concerned â¦ yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is
basically the same as ours, as nearly as I've been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, and they make me deathly ill. You see, there're all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses â¦”

“We've been living with the local bugs for months now,” Lee said. “We're adapted to them, aren't we?”

“You know what they say about visiting strange places: don't drink the water.”

One of the natives struck into the water with his spear, and instantly the water began to boil with the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home, and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot-long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera's autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy.

“Damn,” Lee said softly. “They're as human as we are.”

“And obviously representative of a high technical civilization,” Charnovsky said.

“Survivors of one, maybe,” Lee answered. “Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup's explosion â¦ or by war.”

“Ah, now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours
and
theirs.”

“All right, go ahead and laugh,” Lee said. “I won't be able to prove anything until I get to live with them.”

“Until what?” Hatfield said.

“Until I go out there and meet them face-to-face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.”

“Live with them?” Rassmussen looked startled; the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain's monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.

They were sitting around a circular table in the
conference room of the Sirius globe: the six “outsiders,” Grote, Chien, Captain Rassmussen, Pascual, and Lehman.

“Aren't you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?” Grote asked, grinning.

“I don't think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,” Lee countered.

The laugh turned on Grote.

Lee went on quietly, “I've checked it out with Aaron, here. There's no biochemical reason why I couldn't survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we've seen the humanoids carrying, and I'll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.”

Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, “About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitiveâ”

“I won't be representing an advanced culture to them,” Lee said. “I intend to be just as naked and toolless as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black.”

“That would be necessary in any event if you don't want to be sunburned to death,” Pascual said.

Hatfield added, “You'll also need contact lenses that'll screen out the UV and protect your eyes.”

They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rassmussen.
The idea's slipping out from under his control.
The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl. Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rassmussen spoke up: “One more question. Are you willing to give up an eye for this mission of yours?”

“What do you mean?”

The captain's hands seemed to wander loosely without a mug of beer to tie them down. “Well â¦ you seem to be willing to run a good deal of personal risk to live with these â¦ eh, people. From the expedition's viewpoint, you will also be risking our only anthropologist, you know. I think the wise thing to do, in that case, would be to have a running record of everything you see and hear.”

Lee nodded.

“So we can swap one of your eyes for a TV camera and plant a transmitter somewhere in your skull. I'm sure there's enough empty space in your head to accommodate it.” The captain chuckled toothily at his joke.

“We can't do an eye procedure here,” Pascual argued. “It's too risky.”

“I understand that Dr. Tanaka is quite expert in that field,” the captain said. “And naturally we would preserve the eye to restore it afterward. Unless, of course, Professor Leeâ” He let the suggestion dangle.

Lee looked at them sitting around the big table; Rassmussen, trying to look noncommittal; Pascual, upset and nearly angry; Lehman, staring intently right back into Lee's eyes.

You're just trying to force me to back down
, Lee thought of Rassmussen. Then, of Lehman,
And if I don't back down, you'll be convinced that I'm crazy
.

For a long moment there was no sound in the crowded conference room except the faint whir of the air blower.

“All right,” Lee said. “If Tanaka is willing to tackle the surgery, so am I.”

BOOK: Battle Station

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