In the Ocean of Night (34 page)
“Careful of that! I’m turning on the console now and I don’t want you hitting any of the switches.” She pressed something like a vertically mounted paper clip and two blue lights flickered on the board before them. In a moment the black screen above the board changed subtly to a shade of light green.
“Where does the power come from?” Sanges said. “We don’t know. The generators must be in one of the other modules but the engineers don’t want to go too deeply into there until we understand more. The power is AC, about 370 hertz—though that varies, for some reason. We took this panel off and tried to trace the circuitry but it’s extremely complicated. In another passageway the engineers found a huge vault of micro-sized electronic parts, apparently part of a memory bank. Most of the vault is thin films of magnetic materials on a substrate. The whole vault is at very low temperature, far colder than the surrounding ship.”
“Superconducting memory elements?”
“We think so. That’s not quite my line, so I haven’t had much to do with it. There are small-scale oscillations in magnetic fields among the circuitry, so probably the fields switch the superconducting elements on and off. Makes a great switching circuit, as long as it operates in vacuum. The trouble is, we don’t know where the cooling comes from. There is no circulating fluid; the walls are just
cold.
”
Sanges nodded and studied the array of hundreds of switches before him. “So this computer is alive, or at least its memory is. After all this time. With most of the ship knocked out. Remarkable.”
“That’s why we are taking so much care with it. It’s a direct link into whatever the aliens thought worth storing.” She tried a few of the switches experimentally. “It appears the power is on. More often than not this board is dead. The ship’s power is unstable. Okay, I am going to call Nigel Walmsley and start work. Watch what I do, but
don’t
touch the board. Most of the procedure for starting is written up; I’ll give you a copy at the end of this shift.”
She took a throat microphone and yoke and fitted it over her head. “Nikka here.”
“Walmsley, madam,” a voice came from the speaker mounted on the wall. “If world security were at stake, would you spend the night with a man whose name you didn’t even know?”
Nikka smiled. “But I know yours.”
“True, true. Still, I could have it changed.”
“Victor Sanges is here with me,” Nikka murmured officially, before Nigel could say anything more. “He’s the inside man for Team One.”
“Charmed, I’m sure. See you in the mess later, Mr. Sanges. Nikka, I’m picking up the screen quite well but I’m getting bored with that same green haze all the time.”
Sanges turned and looked at the television camera mounted over their heads. “Why don’t you simply pick the signal up from the circuits that feed the screen?” he asked Nikka.
“We don’t want to fool with the circuitry. Watch this, it’s the same opening sequence I always use just to see if the memory array is unchanged.”
Each switch had ten separate positions available; she altered several, glancing at the notebook at her elbow. A swirl of color formed and suddenly condensed into a pattern of symbols; curls, flashes, marks tantalizingly close to something like Persian script. In the middle of the display was a diagram involving triangles locked together in a confusing pattern.
“This was the first readout we ever got. Most sequences available don’t seem to give any image at all. Maybe they are vacant or the readout goes to some other console. This picture by itself is useless, because we don’t know what the writing means.”
“Is there much of it?”
“No, and I don’t think we could decipher very much even if we had a lot of printed symbols. The first Egyptologists couldn’t unravel a
human
language even though they had thousands of tablets, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. That’s why we’re concentrating on the pictures, not the script. Eventually maybe Team Three can make some sense out of the words, but for the moment we are stuck with looking at pictures and figuring out what they mean.”
Nikka touched some of the switches and another image formed on the screen. This was also familiar. It showed two circles overlapping and a line bisecting the chord of one. An apparent caption ran down the side. “Lewis has tentatively identified one of those captioned squiggles as the word
line.
He compared with six or seven other figures in this sequence and so far that’s the only guess he’s been able to make. It’s a painful process.”
She ran quickly through a number of other punching sequences and stopped to admire the last. It was a magnificent shot of Earth as seen from somewhere further out from the sun. A thin crescent moon peeked around it; whorls and streaks of cloud obscured most of the dark land.
“The colors are wrong,” Sanges said. “It’s too red.” “It wasn’t made for human eyes,” Nikka said. “Nigel, I’m trying a new sequence. Alter 707B to 707C.”
She said casually to Sanges, “If this setting is in some way fatal, if it fries me to this chair, at least somebody will know which sequence to avoid next time.”
Sanges looked at her in surprise. She punched the sequence and got a few lines of symbols. “No help. Log, Nigel.” The next was an array of dots. Then came a slightly altered array. As they watched, the groupings changed smoothly, rotating clockwise.
“Nigel, measure this. How fast is the rotation?” There was a pause. “I make it a little over seven hours.”
Nikka nodded. “Half the 14.3 hours that the lights in the Bowl Room take to cycle. Put that on special log.”
Sanges made notes. Nikka showed him a color-coded array of dots which one of the astrophysicists had identified as a chart of the stars within thirty-three light years of the sun. The apparent size seemed to be related to their absolute magnitude. If the correspondence was exact, it meant a slight alteration in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and gave some support to one of the newer theories of stellar evolution. Sanges nodded without saying anything.
She tried some new sequences. More dots, then some lines of squiggles. A drawing of two intersecting spheres, no captions. Dots. Then what appeared to be a photograph of a machined tool, with captions. “Log, Nigel. What does it look like to you?”
“Abstract sculpture? A particularly sophisticated screwdriver?
I
don’t know.”
The next sequence showed the same tool from a different angle. Next, more dots, then—Nikka jerked back.
Feral dark eyes glared out at them. Something like a large rat with scales stood in the foreground, erect on hind legs. Pink sand stretched to the horizon. Its forepaws held something, perhaps food, in long nails.
“My,” Nigel said. “Doesn’t look at all friendly.”
“No caption,” Nikka said. “But it’s the first life form we’ve ever gotten. Better put this through to Kardensky.”
“It is an
evil
-looking thing,” Sanges said intensely. “I do not know why God would make such a creature.”
“Value judgment, tsk tsk,” Nigel said. “Perhaps God wasn’t consulted, Mr. Sanges.”
Nikka thumbed another sequence.
Mr. Ichino stood at the small sink and slowly washed the dishes after supper. The taste of the canned chili lingered in his mouth. It was the real thing, no soybeans, and the only luxury he allowed himself these days. He had never quite got accustomed to handing someone a dollar bill when buying a newspaper and not getting any change in return. Even so, he would pay almost any amount to have an occasional meal with real meat in it. It wasn’t as though he had any true objection to vegetarianism, though he had never understood why it was better to kill plants than animals. It was just that he liked the taste of meat.
The day’s long twilight had begun to settle. He could no longer make out the ridgeline several miles away. Dense white clouds drifted in from oceanward; it would probably snow tonight.
A flicker of motion caught his eye. The window over the sink was partly fogged and he reached up to rub a clear spot. A man came staggering out of the forest a hundred meters away. He took a few agonized steps and collapsed into a drift of snow.
Mr. Ichino wiped his hands and rushed to the door. He slipped on his heavy lumber jacket as he went out the door and blinked as the sudden cold reached his unprotected face. The man was barely visible in the snow. Mr. Ichino cleared the distance in a loping stride, puffing only slightly. The work he had done around the cabin had cut away pounds and sharpened his muscle tone. When Mr. Ichino reached the man it was clear why he had fallen. There was a burn in his side. It passed through layers of parka, a shirt and extra insulation. An area a foot wide was matted and blood-soaked. The man’s ruddy face was clenched and tight. When Mr. Ichino touched near the wound the man groaned weakly and flinched.
It was obvious that nothing could be done until the man was inside. Mr. Ichino was surprised at how heavy he seemed, but got the arms over his own shoulder in a carry position and managed to stagger the distance back to the cabin without stumbling or pitching the body into the snow. He laid the man out on the floor and began to undress him. Stripping away the clothes was difficult because the harness of a backpack had knotted itself around the wound. Mr. Ichino used a knife to cut away the shirt and undershirt.
Cleaning, treating and bandaging the wound took more than an hour. Dirt and pine needles were caught among the blackened, flaky skin and as the heat of the cabin reached it the capillaries opened and began to bleed.
He lifted the man again and got him into the cabin’s second bed. The man had never awakened. Mr. Ichino stood regarding the face, now relaxed, for long moments. He could not understand how anyone had sustained such an injury out here in the middle of unoccupied forest. What was more, why would anyone be here in the first place? Mr. Ichino’s first thought was to try for the emergency call station fifteen kilometers away. The nearest fire road was only four kilometers and the Rangers might have it clear of snow by now. Mr. Ichino kept a small jeep there.
He began to dress for the walk. The going was mostly uphill and it would probably take several hours. As he made himself a thermos of coffee he glanced out the window and noticed that snow was falling again, this time in a hard swift wind that bowed the tops of the pines. A gust howled at the corners of the cabin.
At his age such a march was too great a risk. He hesitated for a moment and then decided to stay. Instead of making coffee he prepared beef broth for his patient and got the man to sip a few spoonfuls. Then he waited. He mused over the strange nature of the wound, almost like a cut in its clean outline. But it was a burn, undeniably, and a bad one. Perhaps a burning timber had fallen on him.
It was only after some time that he noticed the pack lying where he had cast it aside. It was a large one, with aluminum tubing, many pockets and insulation; quite expensive. The upper flap was unbuttoned. Sticking out the top, as though it had been jammed in hurriedly, was a gray metal tube.
Mr. Ichino fished it out. The tube thickened at its base and small metal arches like finger grips ran down the side. It was a meter long and had several extrusions like toggle switches.
He had never seen anything like it before. The lines of the thing seemed awkward. There was no telling what it was. Gingerly he put it back.
He checked his patient, who had apparently fallen into a deep sleep. Pulse was normal; the eyes betrayed nothing unusual. Mr. Ichino wished he had more medical supplies. He found a name stenciled on the pack,
Peter Graves.
There didn’t seem to be anything to do but wait. He made himself some coffee. Outside the storm grew worse.
Sanges had another bad moment crawling out the tube at the end of the shift. Nikka had to push him through one of the narrow segments of the passage and the man glowered at her when they reached the lock. They suited up in silence and cycled out onto the flat, dusty floor of the moon. Two hundred meters away—not far from the spot where Nikka had crashed—a surface pressure lock of Site Seven was sunk into the lunar rock. More excavations were partially completed in the distance. Gradually a network of tubes was being punched by lasers, ten meters beneath the shielding rock and dust. Set that deep, the quarters suffered little variation in temperature between lunar day and night and even the incessant rain of particles from the solar wind made radiation levels only slightly higher than those on Earth.
Nigel Walmsley met them after they cycled through to the suiting bay. Sanges acknowledged Nigel’s greeting but fell silent, his mind apparently still on the tunnels of the ship.
“Are you free for dinner in Paris tomorrow?” Nigel asked Nikka.
“Um.”
“Well, perhaps some elegant preheated rations and processed water, then?”
Nikka looked at him speculatively and agreed. She went to shower while Nigel by unspoken convention wrote the debriefing report for the shift’s findings. Aside from the large ratlike creature and the 7.15 hour rotation period, there was little remarkable to report. Progress was slow.
When Nikka emerged, followed by Sanges, all three made their way into the communicating corridor. It was a swirl of yellows and greens, spiraling around and splashing out onto the deck, making the corridor seem deceptively long. At the tucked-in cafeteria Nigel made a show of opening the door for Nikka with a certain self-satirizing grace. On a world where people were selected to minimize demands on the life-support system, he seemed tall and heavy.
