Tachyon Web (8 page)

“They’re really here,” Jeanie whispered in awe.

Sammy took a quick inspection of the Kaulikan ship and began to turn
Excalibur
on her tail. The colossal wheel floated closer. Its white hull was virtually seamless, and Eric wondered if entry would be as easy as it had sounded from millions of miles away. He did spot, however, a small antenna dish – which in all possibility was bigger than their own ship – and watched as it drifted along a sweeping arc as the wheel spun. Then the antenna appeared to halt as Sammy synchronized their drift with that of the huge hub. They glided inwards toward a shadow cast by the curled rim of the bright metal walls.

“Think they know we’re here?” Strem breathed.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sammy replied. Then he abruptly leaned forward, repeatedly pressing a single button.

“What is it?” Eric asked.

“One second,” Sammy said.

The curve of the wheel’s rim opened into a dim hollow.
Excalibur
had been constructed in space and was not designed to land. Technically, this was a docking and not a landing, but as they were going under the influence of external gravity, it would have been nice to have shock pads. If they didn’t touch down gently, the bang would reverberate throughout the Kaulikan craft.

“We have a problem,” Sammy said finally. “Our dampers are fused in place.”

“Does that mean we can’t keep the drive on?” Strem asked.

“It means we can’t turn it off,” Sammy said. “Not and restart it. I can idle the graviton flux and hold us in place but we’ll just keep heating.”

“For how long?” Cleo asked.

“Until we blow up,” Sammy said.

“How much time do we have?” Eric asked.

“If we can keep a minimum idle,” Sammy said, “maybe six hours, maybe less. I was really hoping to turn most of our systems off.”

Eric hardly felt the touchdown on the inside rim of the rotating wheel. The hovering wigs and clothes settled to the floor. Looking straight up, through a gape cut by the shadowed rim and the reflecting hull, he saw a dozen nearby Kaulikan ships, much more widely spaced than he could have imagined from his earlier examination of the fleet.
Excalibur
was only a needle in a spread-out haystack, and it gave him reason to hope they had not been spotted.

They undid their belts, stood and stretched – even Sammy, who they had been beginning to believe had grown into his seat. Their relief at having survived the deceleration was cooled by the new deadline the fused damper had given them. Plus, there was the not so minor consideration, at least from Eric’s side, that within minutes they would be coming face-to-face with aliens. He was anxious to get going.

“I didn’t see any air locks when we were coming down,” Strem said, squeezing one of the drying white hairpieces over his head, ignoring Cleo’s and Jeanie’s snickers.

Sammy pointed out the window at the dark artificial valley in which
Excalibur
was nestled. “From sensor readings, there appear to be several placed along this rim. Walk in either direction long enough and you will come to one.”

“Should be interesting trying to open it,” Eric said. He pulled on his opant coat and glanced down at his gray slippers, realizing none of them had thought to note what type of shoes the Kaulikans wore. It was too late to worry about that now.

“We’ll bring lasers,” Strem said. “We can always cut it.”

“No.” Eric shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

“You could set off an alarm that way,” Sammy agreed. “There will be a remote eye on your pressure suits and opant belts. When you get to an air lock, I’ll be able to study it with you, and we’ll figure something out.”

“I’m bringing a laser, anyway,” Strem said. “I’m not going in there unarmed.”

Eric was annoyed. “And do what with it? If we get caught, we can’t fight our way back to
Excalibur
.”

“Why not?” Strem asked.

“You could just stun them,” Cleo said. “You wouldn’t have to kill anybody.”

“Listen to yourselves,” Eric said. “Here we’re about to make the most incredible contact and you’re talking about confrontations. Can’t you see, if we get caught we can’t give these people the impression we’re a hostile race?”

“Suit yourself,” Strem said. “I’m bringing a gun. I’ll hide it under my coat, and no one will know I have it. I won’t use it unless I’m forced to.”

“If we
do
get caught,” Eric said as patiently as he could, “the fact that you have a weapon will be bad enough. It won’t matter if you use it or not. Remember, we are the ones who are trespassing.”

Strem looked puzzled. “Why is it that at times like this, you always start worrying about the implications of every blessed thing we’re going to do?”

“For the life of me,” Eric grumbled. “I can’t remember another time like this.”

“I agree with Strem,” Cleo said.

“I agree with Eric,” Jeanie said.

Sammy due to his uninvolved nature, didn’t vote either way. In the end, Strem took a gun from the weapon cabinet, but before he tucked it away, Eric made sure it was locked in the stun position.

Sammy fitted the implants in their ears, and they turned on a Kaulikan TV program to give themselves a trial run. They quickly discovered that when an alien was speaking, they had to subconsciously block out what was being said in order to catch the whispered mechanical voice in their ears. The translation, however, was the easy part. Though remaining on the bridge, Sammy would be able, by virtue of the implants, to hear everything that was said. They had previously decided that when he’d received a Kaulikan’s spoken words, and had them translated, he would give an appropriate response in
English
to the ship’s computer which would then relay it to them in Basic Kaulikan. It sounded good in theory but when they tried simulating an anticipated conversation, they decided they would be lucky if they were mistaken for stuttering morons.

The contacts were comfortable and hard to see through. Cleo defended herself by saying that she had had to use several layers of the green dye to get the proper shade.
Blind
stuttering morons.

There was no sense in waiting. Cleo blow-dried their wigs, and Jeanie touched up their face color. They climbed into their pressure suits and headed for
Excalibur
’s air lock. Eric very much enjoyed the girls’ good-bye kisses, especially Jeanie’s tearful ‘Come back soon.’ He was beginning to feel scared, but it was the kind of scared that made him feel extraordinarily alive. They slipped their inflatable containers through the collars of the opant coats and donned their helmets. Sammy took their gloved hands.

“Be careful,” he said.

Of course, it was too late for advice like that.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The first thing Eric did when he stepped outside was turn on his helmet lamp. The light came out green on a green metallic ground. With the contacts he was going to miss out on whatever colors the Kaulikan universe had to offer.

He moved straight out of the air lock toward the nearest wall and looked ‘up’ toward the end of the gray central shaft and black domes that encircled the shimmering ionic trail. What the alien technology lacked in sophistication, it made up for in magnitude. He stood, unable to stop staring, until he started to feel dizzy and had to put a hand out to steady himself. The rotation of the wheel was disorientating.

“Are you okay?” Strem asked, putting his hand on his shoulder, shinning his helmet lamp directly in his eyes.

“Yes.” Eric straightened.
Excalibur
blocked one side of the dark tunnel formed by the rim of the spinning wheel, a silent black cylinder whose outline could be seen only as a silhouette against the star field. But the other direction curved upwards without obstruction toward an inverted horizon that would bring them back to where they had started if they followed it long enough. Eric pointed to the Kaulikans’ glowing purple tail, which seemed to disappear into infinity. “Quite a view, huh?” he said.

“I’ve got to admit, it is,” Strem said. “I just can’t understand how they could work so long building these ships and not invent the graviton or hyper drives. They mustn’t be as intelligent as we are.”

“If I remember correctly, Dr. Pernel discovered the principles of the graviton flux entirely by accident, which led to the discovery of hyper relays. We were lucky; they weren’t.”

“Ah, maybe.”

They started away from
Excalibur
, plodding under the weight of the pressure suits, which had been designed for free fall. Eric estimated their gravity at eighty percent Earth’s. The side force or acceleration generated by the Kaulikan drive was barely noticeable. Then again, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that their drive had been on continuously for the last five years.

The first part of their slow walk was uneventful. The hull floor was flat, devoid of equipment. Eric repeatedly found his eyes drawn to the central shaft, soundlessly spinning its massive plates on what must have been the largest ball bearings in this quadrant of the galaxy. He suspected that was where engineering would be located, which was where they’d probably find their forty gallons of ethylene glycol.

Two hundred yards from
Excalibur
they came to a circular hatch on the ground with a light in the center and a handle at either end. There were no buttons to push, no knobs to spin. They stared at it for a while before Sammy came over the line.

(“Pull on it. Turn it. Play with it. Open it.”)

They tried to turn it clockwise and counterclockwise, but it didn’t budge. Yanking on the handles didn’t help matters. Eric thought it would be fitting to travel hundred of light years, survive a nova and a mad deceleration, and then not be able to get past the door. Finally, frustrated, Strem kicked the light, and lo and behold, that worked. The hatch eased up a couple of inches and they were able to turn it a half revolution clockwise until it stopped and swung open. They peered inside. It was awfully dark.

“Who wants to go first?” Strem said.

“Who was the first man to step on the moon?” Eric asked.

“Armstrong.”

“You see, you remember, I’m going first.” Eric knelt by the hole, found a ladder in his light, turned around and gingerly stuck his right foot inside, letting his heel come to rest on a firm flat rung. That wasn’t so bad. He put his left foot on the next rung, counting ten steps as he carefully descended. From the spacing of the rungs and the height of the closed door at one end of the cramped air lock, he estimated that the Kaulikans must be about as tall as themselves; another one of a dozen particulars he had been worried about.

Eric waved for Strem to come down and peered through a circular window in the door, glimpsing a lit corridor at the end of a brief dark hallway. He watched for a couple of minutes; no one walked by.

“Want me to kick them?” Strem asked a moment later as the two bent over the row of three differently shaded green lights adjacent to the door. Checking to be sure Strem had closed the hatch behind him, Eric put his hand over the top light. Nothing happened. He tried the second one and got the same result. With the third time, though, the walls began to glow as atmosphere rushed into the cubicle. They turned off their head lamps, and Strem went to remove his helmet. Eric stopped him.

“Organism check,” Eric said, reaching into his suit pouch and removing a white spongy cube sealed in clear plastic. He tore off the wrapper. If the sponge turned black within a minute, there was probably something fatal in the air.

“I hope we don’t catch anything from them,” Strem said, watching.

“I hope we don’t give them anything.”

“There you go again. We’ve had the Union Shot Series. We can’t infect anybody on any planet.”

“We can’t infect anybody that’s human. We may not be doing these people a favor by dropping in this way.”

The cube remained white. Eric put it back in his pouch and they pulled off their helmets.

The air was warm, slightly humid, and smelled like honey. Eric had half expected stale recycled odors. He took a long deep breath, tasting a high oxygen content.

A light now shone in the center of the door. They pressed it and the door opened. The short hallway outside the air lock was a locker room, and they were able to stow their pressure suits in two empty cabinets. Eric scowled as Strem removed his gun from a clasp on his oxygen tank and hid it inside his opant jacket. Strem just shook his head, muttering under his breath about moralistic obsessions.

“Sammy, how’s your reception?” Eric asked. He was scarcely aware of the implant inside his ear. The remote eye was a pinpoint dot at the centre of their belts.

(“Audio and video are both excellent. Now get away from the air lock as quickly as you can.”)

The corridor outside the second door was empty, stretching beyond its upside-down horizon to the left, but dead-ending in what appeared to be an elevator on the right. The featureless ceiling was low, another foot and it would have touched Strem’s fluffy white head, and the floor was an undistinguished carpet. The walls, on the other hand, were decorated with abstract mosaics – at least they looked abstract to Eric – made up of countless tiny rock tiles. He was sorely tempted to slip out his contacts and see if the artwork didn’t take on definition with the help of a color besides green. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of his vision, the designs appealed to him. They seemed somehow optimistic.

They entered the elevator at the end of the corridor. The single door closed behind them. This time there were six lights to choose from, each underlined with an imprinted symbol.

“Sammy, what are these markings?” Eric asked.

(“The numerals one through six, counting from the top.”)

“There has to be more floors in this wheel than six,” Eric said thoughtfully. “We’ll probably have to find another elevator. Sammy, I’m heading for the axis. How does that sound?”

(“I was thinking the same thing. That’s where their power supply will be. I can track you in case you start going in circles.”)

Eric looked at Strem, who was fidgeting noticeably. “What’s wrong?” he asked.