Spring 2007 (17 page)

At the end of its mission, the NP-101 drops its final
film capsule and flies out into the middle of an uninhabited ocean, to ditch
its spent nuclear reactor safely far from home.

Cut to:

A bull’s-eye diagram. The centre is a black circle with
a star at its heart; around it is a circular platter, of roughly the same proportions
as a 45 rpm single.

Voice over:

A rough map of the disk. Here is the area we have
explored to date, using the NP-101 program.

(A dot little larger than a sand grain lights up on the
face of the single.)

That dot of light is a million kilometers in
radius–five times the distance that used to separate our old Earth from
its moon. (To cross the radius of the disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach
Three for almost ten years.) We aren’t even sure exactly where the centre of
that dot lies on the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block
two, can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before crashing
back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our surroundings, derived
from the continental-scale mapping cameras carried by Project Orion:

(A salmon pink area almost half an inch in diameter
lights up around the red sand grain on the face of the single.)

Of course, cameras at an altitude of a hundred thousand
miles can’t look down on new continents and discern signs of Communist
infiltration; at best they can listen for radio transmissions and perform
spectroscopic analyses of the atmospheric gasses above distant lands, looking
for gasses characteristic of industrial development such as chlorofluorocarbons
and nitrogen oxides.

This leaves us vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our
long term strategic analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on
the disk. In addition to the Communists, we must consider the possibility that
whoever build this monstrous structure–clearly one of the wonders of the
universe–might also live here. We must contemplate their motives for
bringing us to this place. And then there are the aboriginal cultures
discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both now placed under quarantine. If some
land masses bear aboriginal inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have
been transported to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some as-yet
unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine stone-age
dwellers–or that they are the survivors of advanced civilizations that
did not survive the transition to this environment. What is the possibility
that there exists on the disk one or more advanced alien civilizations that are
larger and more powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if
we saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our encountering
hostile Little Green Men–now that other worlds are in range of even a
well-equipped sailboat, much less the Savannah-class nuclear powered
exploration ships? Astronomers Carl Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the
probability as high–so high, in fact, that they believe there are several
such civilizations out there.

We are not alone. We can only speculate about why we
might have been brought here by the abductors, but we can be certain that it is
only a matter of time before we encounter an advanced alien civilization that
may well be hostile to us. This briefing film will now continue with an
overview of our strategic preparations for first contact, and the scenarios
within which we envisage this contingency arising, with specific reference to
the Soviet Union as an example of an unfriendly ideological superpower…

Chapter Eight:
Tenure
Track

After two weeks, Maddy is sure she’s going mad.

She and Bob have been assigned a small prefabricated
house (not much more than a shack, although it has electricity and running
water) on the edge of town. He’s been drafted into residential works, put to
work erecting more buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success
they’ve had, because after a carefully-controlled protest his status has been
corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee surveyor. A
promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently taking it as confirmation that
they’ve made the right move by coming here.

Maddy, meanwhile, has a harder time finding work. The
district hospital is fully staffed. They don’t need her, won’t need her until
the next shipload of settlers arrive, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go
tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a year’s time the
governor has decreed they’ll establish another town-scale settlement, inland
near the mining encampments on the edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they’ll need
medics to staff the new hospital: but for now, she’s a spare wheel. Because
Maddy is a city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a
job tramping around the outback if she can avoid it.

She spends the first week and then much of the second
mooching around town, trying to find out what she can do. She’s not the only
young woman in this predicament. While there’s officially no unemployment, and
the colony’s dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for idle hands,
there’s also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or indeed much of anything
else she can do. Career-wise it’s like a trip into the 1950’s. Young, female,
and ambitious? Lots of occupations simply don’t exist out here on the fringe,
and many others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees
mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers their guardians
pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids, although Maddy’s not
ready for that yet. But the alternatives on offer are limited.

Eventually Maddy takes to going through the “help
wanted” ads on the bulletin board outside city hall. Some of them are legit:
and at least a few are downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant
wanted for biological research. I wonder? she thinks, and goes in search of a
door to bang on.

When she finds the door–raw wood, just beginning
to bleach in the strong colonial sunlight–and bangs on it, John Martin
opens it and blinks quizzically into the light. “Hello?” he asks.

“You were advertising for a field assistant?” She stares
at him. He’s the entomologist, right? She remembers his hands on the telescope
on the deck of the ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false
patina of romance in her memories, compared to the dusty present it has
delivered her to.

“I was? Oh–yes, yes. Do come in.” He backs into
the house–another of these identikit shacks,
colonial, family, for the
use of
–and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room. It’s
almost completely filled by a work table and a desk and a tall wooden chest of
sample drawers. There’s an odd, musty smell, like old cobwebs and leaky
demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around his den, vaguely disordered by the
unexpected shock of company. There’s something touchingly cute about him, like
the subjects of his studies, Maddy thinks. “Sorry about the mess, I don’t get
many visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant experience?”

She doesn’t hesitate: “None whatsoever, but I’d like to
learn.” She leans forward. “I qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college
I was studying biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I
was thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that’s not going
to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no vacancies, so I need to find
something else to do. What exactly does a field assistant get up to?”

“Get sore feet.” He grins lopsidedly. “Did you do any
lab time? Field work?” Maddy nods hesitantly so he drags her meager college
experiences out of her before he continues. “I’ve got a whole continent to
explore and only one set of hands: we’re spread thin out here. Luckily NSF
budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant’s job is to be my Man Friday;
to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help with basic lab
work–very basic–and so on. Oh, and if they’re interested in
entomology, botany, or anything else remotely relevant that’s a plus. There
aren’t many unemployed life sciences people around here, funnily enough: have
you had any chemistry?”

“Some,” Maddy says cautiously; “I’m no biochemist.” She
glances round the crowded office curiously. “What are you meant to be doing?”

He sighs. “A primary survey of an entire continent.
Nobody, but nobody, even bothered looking into the local insect ecology here.
There’re virtually no vertebrates, birds, lizards, what have you–but back
home there are more species of beetle than everything else put together, and
this place is no different. Did you know nobody has even sampled the outback
fifty miles inland of here? We’re doing nothing but throw up shacks along the
coastline and open-cast quarries a few miles inland. There could be anything in
the interior, absolutely anything.” When he gets excited he starts
gesticulating, Maddy notices, waving his hands around enthusiastically. She
nods and smiles, trying to encourage him.

“A lot of what I’m doing is the sort of thing they were
doing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Take samples, draw them, log
their habitat and dietary habits, see if I can figure out their life cycle, try
and work out who’s kissing-cousins with what. Build a family tree. Oh, I also
need to do the same with the vegetation, you know? And they want me to keep
close watch on the other disks around Lucifer. ‘Keep an eye out for signs of
sapience,’ whatever that means: I figure there’s a bunch of leftovers in the
astronomical community who feel downright insulted that whoever built this disk
and brought us here didn’t land on the White House lawn and introduce
themselves. I’d better tell you right now, there’s enough work here to occupy an
army of zoologists and botanists for a century; you can get started on a PhD
right here and now if you want. I’m only here for five years, but my successor
should be okay about taking on an experienced RA … the hard bit is going to be
maintaining focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the
governor-general’s discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him, but it
won’t be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be enough?”

Maddy thinks for a moment. Truman dollars–the
local scrip–aren’t worth a whole lot, but there’s not much to spend them
on. And Rob’s earning for both of them anyway. And a PhD …
that could be my
ticket back to civilization, couldn’t it?
“I guess so,” she says, feeling a
sense of vast relief: so there’s something she’s useful for besides raising the
next generation, after all. She tries to set aside the visions of herself,
distinguished and not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor’s chair
at an ivy league university. “When do I start?”

Chapter Nine:
On the Beach

Misha’s first impressions of the disturbingly familiar
alien continent are of an oppressively humid heat, and the stench of decaying
jellyfish.

The Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river
estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins stick out
near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings: gigantic Kuznetsov
atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either side of its high-ridged back,
either side of the launch/recovery catapults for its parasite MiG
fighter-bombers, aft of the broad curve of the ekranoplan’s bridge. Near the
waterline, a boat bay is open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy loading their kit
into the landing craft that will ferry them to the small camp on the beach.
Misha, who stands just above the waterline, turns away from the giant ground
effect ship and watches his commander, who is staring inland with a faint
expression of worry. “Those trees–awfully close, aren’t they?” Gagarin
says, with the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first dangerous
years after his patron Khrushchev’s fall.

“That is indeed what captain Kirov is taking care of,”
replies Gorodin, playing his role of foil to the colonel-general’s sardonic
humor. And indeed shadowy figures in olive-green battle dress are stalking in
and out of the trees, carefully laying tripwires and screamers in an arc around
the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of sailors with assault
rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle. “I wouldn’t worry unduly sir.”

“I’ll still be happier when the outer perimeter is
secure. And when I’ve got a sane explanation of this for the comrade General
Secretary.” Gagarin’s humor evaporates: he turns and walks along the beach,
towards the large tent that’s already gone up to provide shelter from the heat
of noon. The bar of solid sunlight–what passes for sunlight here–is
already at maximum length, glaring like a rod of white-hot steel that impales
the disk. (Some of the more superstitious call it the axle of heaven. Part of
Gorodin’s job is to discourage such non-materialist backsliding.)

The tent awning is pegged back: inside it, Gagarin and
Misha find Major Suvurov and Academician Borisovitch leaning over a map.
Already the scientific film crew–a bunch of dubious civilians from the
TASS agency–are busy in a corner, preparing cans for shooting. “Ah, Oleg,
Mikhail.” Gagarin summons up a professionally photogenic smile. “Getting
anywhere?”

Borisovitch, a slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks
more like a janitor than a world-famous scientist, shrugs. “We were just
talking about going along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you’d
like to come, too?”