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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Battle Station
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The next morning, when the men went out to fish and the women to gather greens, Ardra took Lee's arm and led him toward the back of the central cave. Ardraka and five other elders were waiting for them. They all looked very grim. Only then did Lee realize that Ardra was carrying a spear in his other hand.
They were sitting in a ragged semicircle, their backs to what looked like a tunnel entrance, their eyes hard on Lee. He sat at their focus, with Ardra squatting beside him.
“Lee,” Ardraka began without preliminaries, “why is it that Lee wishes to see the lower caves?”
The question caught him by surprise. “Because … Lee wishes to learn more about Ardraka's people. Lee comes from far away, and knows little of Ardraka's people.”
“Is it true,” one of the elders asked, “that Lee speaks at night with the Others?” His inflection made the word sound special, fearful, ominous.
“Lee speaks to the men and women of the place where Lee came from. It is like the way Ardraka speaks to Ardraka's grandfather … in a dream.”
“But Ardraka sleeps when doing this. Lee is awake.”
Ardra broke in, “Lee says Lee's people live beyond the sea. Beyond the sea is the sky. Do Lee's people live in the sky?”
Off the edge of the world, just like Columbus
. “Yes,” he admitted. “Lee's people live in the sky—”
“
See
!” Ardra shouted. “Lee is of the Others!”
The councilmen physically backed away from him. Even Ardraka seemed shaken.
“Lee is of the Others,” Ardra repeated. “Lee must be killed, before he kills Ardraka's people!”
“Kill?” Lee felt stunned. He had never heard any of them speak of violence before.
“Why should Lee kill the people here?”
They were all babbling at once. Ardraka raised his hand for silence.
“To kill a man is very serious,” he said painfully. “It is not certain that Lee is of the Others.”
“Lee says it with Lee's own mouth!” Ardra insisted. “Why else did Lee come here? Why does Lee want to see the lower caves?”
Ardraka glowered at his son, and the younger man stopped. “The council must be certain before it acts.”
Struggling to keep his voice calm, Ardra ticked off on his fingers, “Lee says Lee's people live in the sky … the Others live in the sky. Lee wishes to see the lower caves. Why? To see if more of Ardraka's people are living there, so that he can kill
all
the people!”
The council members murmured and glanced at him fearfully.
Starting to look like a lynch jury
.
“Wait,” Lee said. “There is more to the truth than what Ardra says. Lee's people live in the sky … that is true. But that does not mean that Lee's people are the Others. The sky is wide and larger … wider than the sea, by far. Many different peoples can live in the sky.”
Ardraka nodded, his brows knitted in concentration. “But, Lee, if both Lee's people and the Others live in the sky, why have not the Others destroyed Lee's people as they destroyed Ardraka's ancestors?”
Lee felt his stomach drop out of him.
So that's it
!
“Yes,” one of the councilmen said. “The Others live far from this land, yet the Others came here and destroyed Ardraka's forefathers and all the works of such men and women.”
“Tell Lee what happened,” he said, stalling for time to work out answers. “Lee knows nothing about the Others.”
Not from your side of the war, anyway.
Ardraka glanced around at the council members sitting on both sides of him. They looked uncertain, wary, still afraid. Ardra, beside Lee, had the fixed glare of a born prosecutor.
“Lee is not of Ardraka's people,” the younger man said, barely controlling the fury in his voice. “Lee must be of the Others. There are no people except Ardraka's people and the Others!”
“Perhaps that is not so,” Ardraka said. “True, Ardraka has always thought it to be this way, but Lee looks like an ordinary man, not like the Others.”
Ardra huffed. “No living man has seen the Others. How can Ardraka say …”
“Because Ardraka has seen pictures of the Others,” the chief said quietly.
“Pictures?” They were startled.
“Yes. In the deepest cave, where only the chief can go … and the chief's son. Ardraka has thought for a long time that soon Ardra should see the deepest cave. But no longer. Ardra must see the cave now.”
The old man got up, stiffly, to his feet. His son was visibly trembling with eagerness.
“May Lee also see the pictures?” Lee asked.
They all began to protest, but Ardraka said firmly, “Lee has been accused of being of the Others. Lee stands in peril of death. It is right that Lee should see the pictures.”
The council members muttered among themselves. Ardra glowered, then bent down and reached for the spear he had left at his feet. Lee smiled to himself.
If those pictures give you the slightest excuse, you're going to ram that thing through me. You'd make a good sheriff, kill first, then ask questions
.
 
 
Far from having forgotten his way to the deeper caves, Ardraka threaded through a honeycomb of tunnels and chambers, always picking the path that slanted downward. Lee sensed that they were spiraling deeper and deeper into the solid rock of the cliffs, far below the sea level. The walls were crusted, and a thick mat of dust clung to the ground. But everything shone with the same faint luminosity as the upper caves, and beneath the dust the footing felt more like pitted metal than rock.
Finally Ardraka stopped. They were standing in the entryway to a fairly small chamber. The lighting was very dim. Lee stood behind Ardraka and felt Ardra's breath on his back.
“This is the place,” Ardraka said solemnly. His voice echoed slightly.
They slowly entered the chamber. Ardraka walked to the farthest wall and wordlessly pointed to a jumble of lines scrawled at about eye level. The cave was dark, but the lines of the drawing glowed slightly brighter than the wall itself.
Gradually, Lee pieced the picture together. It was crude, so crude that it was hard to understand. But there were stick figures of men that seemed to be running, and rough outlines of what might be buildings, with curls of smoke rising up from them. Above them all were circular things, ships, with dots for ports. Harsh jagged lines were streaking out of them and toward the stick figures.
“Men and women,” Ardraka said, in a reverent whisper as he pointed to the stick drawings. “The men and women of the time of Ardraka's farthest ancestors. And
here
”—his hand flashed to the circles —“are the Others.”
Even in the dim light, Lee could see Ardra's face gaping at the picture. “The Others,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“Look at Lee,” Ardraka commanded his son. “Does Lee look like the Others, or like a man?”
Ardra seemed about to crumble. He said shakily, “Lee … Ardra has misjudged Lee … Ardra is ashamed.”
“There is no shame,” Lee said. “Ardra has done no harm. Ardra was trying to protect Ardraka's people.”
And besides, you were right.
Turning to Ardraka, Lee asked, “Is this all that you know of the Others?”
“Ardraka knows that the Others killed the people of Ardraka's forefathers. Before the Others came, Ardraka's ancestors lived in splendor; their living places covered the land everywhere; they swam the seas without fear of any creature of the deep; they leaped through the sky and laughed at the winds and storms; every day was bright and good and there was no night. Then the Others came and destroyed everything. The Others turned the sky to fire and brought night. Only the people in the deepest cave survived. This was the deepest cave. Only the people of Ardraka escaped the Others.”
We destroyed this world,
Lee told himself.
An interstellar war, eons ago. We destroyed each other, old man. Only you've been destroyed for good, and we climbed back
.
“One more thing remains,” Ardraka said. He walked into the shadows on the other end of the room and pushed open a door.
A door
! It was metal, Lee could feel as he went past it. There was another chamber, larger.
A storeroom! Shelves lined the walls. Most of them empty, but here and there were boxes, containers, machinery with strange writing on it.
“These belonged to Ardraka's oldest ancestors,” the chief said. “No man today knows why these things were saved here in the deepest cave. They have no
purpose. They are dead. As dead as the people who put them here.”
It was Lee who was trembling as they made their way up to the dwelling caves.
It was a week before he dared stroll the beach at night again, a week of torment, even though Ardra never gave him the slightest reason to think that he was still under suspicion.
They were just as stunned as he was when he told them about it.
“We killed them,” he whispered savagely at them, back in the comfort of the ship. “We destroyed them. Maybe we even made the Pup explode, to wipe them out completely.”
“That's … farfetched,” Rassmussen answered. But his voice sounded lame.
“What do we do now?”
“I want to see those artifacts.”
“Yes, but how?”
Lee said, “I can take you down to the cave, if we can put the whole clan to sleep for a few hours. Maybe gas …”
“That could work,” Rassmussen agreed.
“A soporific gas?” Pascual's soft tenor rang incredulously in Lee's ears. “But we haven't the faintest idea of how it might affect them.”
“It's the only way,” Lee said. “You can't dig your way into the cave … even if you could, they would hear it, and you'd be discovered.”
“But gas … it could kill them all.”
“They're all dead right now,” Lee snapped. “Those artifacts are the only possible clue to their early history.”
Rassmussen decided. “We'll do it.”
Lee slept less than ever the next few nights, and when he did he dreamed, but no longer about the buildings on Titan. Now he dreamed of the ships of an ancient Earth, huge round ships that spat fire on the cities and people of Makta. He dreamed of the Pup exploding and showering the planet with fire, blowing off the atmosphere, boiling the oceans, turning mountains into glass slag, killing every living thing on the surface of the world, leaving the planet bathed in a steam cloud, its ground ruptured with angry new volcanoes.
 
It was a rainy dark night when you could hardly see ten meters beyond the cave's mouth that they came. Lee heard their voices in his head as they drove the skimmer up onto the beach and clambered down from it and headed for the caves. Inside the caves, the people were asleep, sprawled innocently on the damp musty ground.
Out of the rain a huge, bulky metal shape materialized, walking with exaggerated caution.
“Hello, Sid,” Jerry Grote's voice said in his head, and the white metal shape raised a hand in greeting.
The Others
, Lee thought as he watched four more powersuited figures appear in the dark rain.
He stepped out of the cave, the rain a cold shock to his body. “Bring the stuff?”
Grote hitched a gauntleted thumb at one of the others. “Pascual's got it. He's insisting on administering the gas himself.”
“Okay, but let's get it done quickly, before somebody wakes up and spots you. Who else is with you?”
“Chien, Tanaka, and Stek. Tanaka can help Carlos with the anesthetic. Chien and Stek can look over the artifacts.”
Lee nodded agreement.
Pascual and Tanaka spent more than an hour seeping the mildest soporific they knew of through the sleeping cave. Lee fidgeted outside on the beach, in the rain, waiting for them to finish. When Tanaka finally told them it was safe to go through, he hurried past the sprawled bodies, scarcely seeing Pascual —still inside his cumbersome suit—patiently recording medical analyses of each individual.
Even with the suit lamps to light the corridors, it was hard to retrace his steps down to the lowest level of the ancient shelter. But when he got to the storeroom, Lee heard Stek break into a long string of Polish exultation at the sight of the artifacts.
The three suited figures holographed, X-rayed, took radiation counts, measured, weighed, every piece on the ancient shelves. They touched nothing directly, but lifted each piece with loving tenderness in a portable magnetic grapple.
“This one,” Stek told Lee, holding a hand-sized, oddly angular instrument in midair with the grapple, “we must take with us.”
“Why?”
“Look at it,” the physicist said. “If it's not an astronautical sextant or something close to it, I'll eat Charnovsky's rocks for a month.”
The instrument didn't look impressive to Lee. It had a lens at one end, a few dials at the other. Most of it was just an angular metal box, with strange printing on it.
“You want to know where these people originally came from?” Stek asked. “If they came from somewhere other than this planet, the information could be inside this instrument.”
Lee snapped his gaze from the instrument to Stek's helmeted face.
“If it is a sextant, it must have a reference frame built into it. A tape, perhaps, that lists the stars that
these people wanted to go to.”
“Okay,” Lee said. “Take it.”
By the time they got back up to the main sleeping cave and out to the beach again, it was full daylight.
“We'll have to keep them sleeping until almost dawn tomorrow,” Lee told Pascual. “Otherwise they might suspect that something unusual's happened.”
The doctor's face looked concerned but not worried. “We can do that without harming them, I think. But Sid, they'll be very hungry when they awake.”
Lee turned to Grote. “How about taking the skimmer out and stunning a couple of big fish and towing them back here to the shallows?”
Grinning, Grote replied, “Hardly fair sport with the equipment I've got.” He turned and headed for the car.
“Wait,” Stek called to him. “Give me a chance to get this safely packed in a magnetic casing.” And the physicist took the instrument off toward the skimmer.
“Sid,” Pascual said gently, “I want you to come back with us. You need a thorough medical check.”
“Medical?” Lee flashed. “Or are you fronting for Lehman?”
Pascual's eyes widened with surprise. “If you had a mirror, you would see why I want to check you. You're breaking out in skin cancers.”
Instinctively, Lee looked at his hands and forearms. There were a few tiny blisters on them. And more on his belly and legs.
“It's from overexposure to the ultraviolet. Hatfield's skin-darkening didn't fully protect you.”
“Is it serious?”
“I can't tell without a full examination.”
Just like a doctor
. “I can't leave now,” Lee said. “I've got to be here when they wake up and make sure that they don't suspect they've been visited by the … by us.”
“And if they do suspect?”
Lee shrugged. “That's something we ought to know, even if we can't do anything about it.”
“Won't it be dangerous for you?”
“Maybe.”
Pascual shook his head. “You mustn't stay out in the open any longer. I won't be responsible for it.”
“Fine. Do you want me to sign a release form?”
 
Grote brought the skimmer back around sundown, with two good-sized fish aboard. The others got aboard around midnight, and with a few final radioed words of parting, they drove off the beach and out to sea.
At dawn the people woke up. They looked and acted completely normal, as far as Lee could tell. It was one of the children who noticed the still-sluggish fish that Grote had left in a shallow pool just outside the line of breakers. Every man in the clan splashed out, spear in hand, to get them. They feasted happily that day.
 
The dream was confusing. Somehow the towers on Titan and the exploding star got mixed together. Lee saw himself driving a bone spear into the sleeping form of one of the natives. The man turned on the ground, with the spear run through his body, and smiled bloodily at him. It was Ardraka.
“Sid!”
He snapped awake. It was dark, and the people were sleeping, full-bellied. He was slouched near one of the entryways to the main sleeping cave, at the mouth of a tunnel leading to the openings in the cliff wall.
“Sid, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he whispered so low that he could only feel the vibration in his throat.
“I'm up the beach about three kilometers from the relay unit. You've got to come back to the ship. Stek
thinks he's figured out the instrument.”
Wordlessly, silently, Lee got up and padded through the tunnel and out onto the beach. The night was clear and bright. Dawn would be coming in another hour, he judged. The sea was calm, the wind a gentle crooning as it swept down from the cliffs.
“Sid, did you hear what I said? Stek thinks he knows what the instrument is for. It's part of a pointing system for a communications setup.”
“I'm on my way.” He still whispered and turned to see if anyone was following him.
Grote was in a biosuit, and no one else was aboard the skimmer. The engineer jabbered about Stek's work on the instrument all the way back to the ship.
Just before they arrived, Grote suggested, “Uh, Sid, you do want to put on some coveralls, don't you?”
 
 
Two biosuited men were setting up some electronics equipment at the base of the ship's largest telescope, dangling in a hoist sling overhead, the fierce glow of Sirius glinting off its metal barrel.
“Stek's setting up an experiment,” Grote explained.
Lee was bundled into a biosuit and ushered into the physicist's workroom as soon as he set foot inside the ship. Stek was a large, round, florid man with thinning red hair. Lee had hardly spoken to him at all, except for the few hours at the cave, when the physicist had been encased in a powersuit.
“It's a tracker, built to find a star in the sky and lock onto it as long as it's above the horizon,” Stek said, gesturing to the instrument hovering in a magnetic grapple a few inches above his work table.
“You're sure of that?” Lee asked.
The physicist glanced at him as though he had been insulted. “There's no doubt about it. It's a tracker, and it probably was used to aim a communications antenna at their home star.”
“And where is that?”
“I don't know yet. That's why I'm setting up the experiment with the telescope.”
Lee walked over to the work table and stared at the instrument. “How can you be certain that it's what you say it is?”
Stek flushed, then controlled himself. With obvious patience, he explained, “X-ray probes showed that the instrument contained a magnetic memory tape. The tape was in binary code, and it was fairly simple to transliterate the code, electronically, into the ship's main computers. We didn't even have to touch the instrument physically … except with photons.”
Lee made an expression that showed he was duly impressed.
Looking happier, Stek went on, “The computer cross-checked the instrument's coding and came up with correlations: altitude references were on the instrument's tape, and astronomical ephemerides, timing data, and so forth. Exactly what we'd put into a communications tracker.”
“But this was made by a different race of people—”
“It makes no difference,” Stek said sharply. “The physics are the same. The universe is the same. The instrument can only do the job it was designed to do, and that job was to track a single star.”
“Only one star?”
“Yes, that's why I'm certain it was for communicating with their home star.”
“So we can find their home star after all.” Lee felt the old dread returning, but with it something new, something deeper.
Those people in the caves were our enemy. And maybe their brothers, the ones who built the machines on Titan, are still out there somewhere looking for them—and for us.

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