The Mote in God's Eye (22 page)

Buckman let go of Staley’s arm. “Too damned many.’ His eyes seemed lost; his soul was lost in that enormous veil of red-lit darkness. “We may not need it, though. The Moties must have been observing the Coal Sack for at their history; hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Especially if they’ve developed some such pseudoscience as astrology. If we can talk to them...” He trailed off.

Staley said, “We wondered why you were so eager to come along.”

“What? Do you mean jaunting off with you to see that rock? Staley, I don’t care what the Motie was using it for, I want to know why the Trojan points are so crowded.”

“You think there’ll be clues?”

“Maybe, in the composition of the rock. We can hope so.”

“I may be able to help you there,” Staley said slowly. “Sauron—my home—has an asteroid belt and mining industries. I learned something about rock mining from my uncles. Thought I might be a miner myself, once.” He stopped abruptly, expecting Buckman to bring up an unpleasant subject.

Buckman said, “I wonder what the Captain expects to find there?”

“He told me that. We know just one thing about that rock,” said Staley. “A Motie was interested in it. When we know why, we’ll know something about Moties.”

“Not very much,” Buckman growled.

Staley relaxed. Either Buckman didn’t know why Sauron was infamous, or . . . no. Tactful? Buckman? Not hardly.

The Motie pup was born five hours after
MacArthur
’s cutter left for the asteroid. The birth was remarkably doglike, considering the mother’s distant relationship to dogs; and there was only the one pup, about the size of a rat.

The lounge was very popular that day, as crew and officers and scientists and even the Chaplain found an excuse to drop by.

“Look how much smaller the lower left arm is,” said Sally. “We were right, Jonathan. The little ones are derived from the big Moties.”

Someone thought of leading the large Motie down to the lounge. She did not seem the least interested in the new miniature Motie; but she did make sounds at the others. One of them dug Horace Bury’s watch out from under a pillow and gave it to her.

Rod watched the activities around the Motie pup when. he could. It seemed very highly developed for a newborn; within hours of its birth it was nibbling at cabbages, and it seemed able to walk, although the mother usually carried it with one set of arms. She moved rapidly and was hardly hampered by it at all.

Meanwhile, the Motie ship drew nearer; and if there was any change in its acceleration, it was too small for
MacArthur
to detect.

“They’ll be here in seventy hours,” Rod told Cargill via laser message. “I want you back in sixty. Don’t let Buckman start anything he can’t finish within the time limit. If you contact aliens, tell me fast—and don’t try to talk them unless there’s no way out.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

“Not my orders, Jack. Kutuzov’s. He’s not happy about this excursion. Just look that rock over and get back.”

The rock was thirty million kilometers distant from
MacArthur
, about a twenty-five-hour trip each way at one gee. Four gravities would cut that in half. Not enough, Staley thought, to make it worthwhile putting up with four gees.

“But we could go at 1.5 gee, sir,” he suggested to Cargill. “Not only would the trip be faster, but we’d get there faster. We wouldn’t move around so much. The cutter wouldn’t seem so crowded.”

“That’s brilliant,” Cargill said warmly. “A brilliant suggestion, Mr. Staley.”

“Then we’ll do it?”

“We will not.”

“But—why not, sir?”

“Because I don’t like plus gees. Because it uses fuel and if we use too much
MacArthur
may have to dive into the gas giant to get us home. Never waste fuel, Mr. Staley. You may want it someday. And besides, it’s nitwit idea.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.” Cargill smiled at Staley’s puzzled look. “Let me tell you about the one
I
got in the Book...”

For a midshipman it was always school time. Staley would hold higher ranks than this one, if he had the ability, and if he lived.

Cargill finished his story and looked at the time. “Get some sleep, Staley. You’ll have the con after turnover.”

From a distance the asteroid looked dark, rough, and porous. It rotated once in thirty-one hours; oddly slow, according to Buckman. There was no sign of activity: no motion, no radiation, no anomalous neutrino flux. Horst Staley searched for temperature variations but there were none.

“I think that confirms it,” he reported. “The place must be empty. A life form that evolved on Mote Prime would need heat, wouldn’t it, sir?”

“Yes.”

The cutter moved in. Stippling which had made the rock look porous at a distance became pocks, then gaping holes of random size. Meteors, obviously. But so many?

“I told you the Trojan points were crowded,” Buckman said happily. “Probably the asteroid passes through the thick of the Trojan cluster regularly . . . only, give me a close-up of that big pock there, Cargill.”

Two powers higher, and the screen was half filled by a black pit. Smaller pits showed around it.

“No sign of a crater rim,” Cargill said.

“Noticed that, did you? Damn thing’s hollow.
That’s
why the density is so low. Well, it’s not inhabited now, but it must have been once. They even went to the trouble of giving it a comfortable rotation.” Buckman turned. “Cargill, we’ll want to search through that thing.”

“Yes, but not you. A Navy crew will board the rock.”

“This is my field of competence, damn it!”

“Your safety’s mine, Doctor. Lafferty, take us around the rock.”

The back of the asteroid was one enormous cup-shaped crater.

“Pocked with little craters . . . but they are craters. Not holes,” said Cargill. “Doctor, what do you make of that?”

“I can’t imagine. Not if it’s a natural formation—”

“It was moved!” Staley exclaimed.

“Oddly enough, just what I was thinking,” Cargill said. “The asteroid was moved using thermonuclear devices, exploding the bombs progressively in the same crater to channel the blast. It’s been done before. Get me a radiation reading, Midshipman.”

“Aye aye, sir.” He left, and returned in a minute. “Nothing, sir. It’s cold.”

“Really?” Cargill went to check that for himself. When he finished he looked at his instruments and frowned. “Cold as a pirate’s heart. If they used bombs, they must have been goddamn clean. That shouldn’t surprise me.”

The cutter circled farther around the flying mountain.

“That could be an air lock. There.” Staley pointed at a raised cap of stone surrounded by an archery target in faded orange paint.

“Right, but I doubt if we’d get it open. We’ll go in through one of the meteor holes. Still . . . we’ll look it over. Lafferty, take us in.”

In their reports they called it Beehive Asteroid. The rock was all many-sided chambers without floors linked by channels too small for men, all choked with dried asymmetrical mummies. Whatever miracles the builders had made, artificial gravity was not one of them. The corridors went in all directions; the larger chambers and storage rooms were studded everywhere with knobs for hand holds, anchor points for lines, storage niches.

The mummies floated everywhere, thin and dried, with gaping mouths. They varied from a meter to a meter and a half in height. Staley chose several and sent them back to the cutter.

There was machinery too, all incomprehensible to Staley and his men, all frozen fast by vacuum cementing. Staley had one of the smaller machines torn from the wall. He chose it for strangeness, not potential use; none of the machines was complete. “No metal,” Staley reported. “Stone flywheels and things that look like they might be integrated circuits—ceramics with impurities, that kind of thing. But very little metal, sir.”

They moved on at random. Eventually they reached a central chamber. It was gigantic, and so was the machine that dominated it. Cables that might have been power superconductors led from the wreck, convincing Staley that this was the asteroid’s power source; but it showed no trace of radiation.

They worked through narrow passages between incomprehensible blocks of stone, and found a large metallic box.

“Cut into that,” Staley ordered.

Lafferty used his cutting laser. They stool around watching the narrow green beam do nothing to the silvery casing. Staley wondered: where was the energy going? Could they be pumping power into it, somehow? Warmth on his face hinted at the answer.

He took a thermometer reading. The casing was just less than red-hot, all over. When Lafferty turned off the laser the casing cooled rapidly; but it maintained the same temperature at every point.

A superconductor of heat.
Staley whistled into his suit mike and wondered if he could find a smaller sample. Then he tried using pliers on the casing—and it bent like tin. A strip came away in the pliers. They tore sheets off with their gauntleted hands.

It was impossible to map the Beehive with its tight, curving corridors. It was hard to tell where they were; but they marked their paths as they went, and used proton beam instruments to measure distances through walls.

The corridor walls were eggshell thin throughout the interior. They were not much thicker outside. Beehive Asteroid could not have been a safe place to live.

But the wall beneath the crater was many meters thick. Radiation, Staley thought. There must have been residual radiation. Otherwise they would have carved this wall out the way they did all the others, to make room for themselves.

There must have been a wild population explosion here.

And then something killed them all off.

And now there was no radiation at all. How long ago did it all happen? The place was covered with small meteor holes; scores of holes in the walls. How long?

Staley looked speculatively at the small, heavy Motie artifact Lafferty and Sohl were manhandling through the corridor. Vacuum cementing—and the wandering of elementary particles across an interface. That might tell
MacArthur
’s civilian scientists just how long Beehive Asteroid had been abandoned; but already he knew one thing. It was
old
.

Chaplain David Hardy watched the miniatures only through the intercom because that way he wasn’t involved in the endless speculations on what Moties were. It was a question of scientific interest to Horvath and his people; but to Chaplain Hardy there was more than intellectual curiosity at stake. It was his job to determine if Moties were human. Horvath’s scientists only wondered if they were intelligent.

The one question preceded the other, of course. It was unlikely that God had created beings with souls and no intelligence; but it was quite possible that He had created intelligent beings with no souls, or beings whose salvation was brought about by ways entirely different from those of mankind. They might even be a form of angel, although an unlikelier-looking set of angels would be hard to imagine. Hardy grinned at the thought and went back to his study of the miniatures. The big Motie was asleep.

The miniatures weren’t doing anything interesting at the moment either. It wasn’t necessary for Hardy to watch them continuously. Everything was holographed anyway, and as
MacArthur
’s linguist, Hardy would be informed if anything happened. He was already certain the miniatures were neither intelligent nor human.

He sighed deeply. What is man that Thou art mindful of him, O Lord? And why is it my problem to know what place Moties have in Thy plan? Well, that at least was straightforward. Second-guessing God is an old, old game. On paper he was the best man for the job, certainly the best man in Trans-Coalsack Sector.

Hardy had been fifteen years a priest and twelve years a Navy chaplain, but he was only beginning to think of it as his profession. At age thirty-five he had been a full professor at the Imperial University on Sparta, an expert in ancient and modern human languages and the esoteric art called linguistic archeology. Dr. David Hardy had been happy enough tracing the origins of recently discovered colonies lost for centuries. By studying their languages and their words for common objects he could tell what part of space the original colonists had come from. Usually he could pinpoint the planet and even the city.

He liked everything about the university except the students. He had not been particularly religious until his wife was killed in a landing boat crash; then, and he was not sure even yet how it happened, the Bishop had come to see him, and Hardy had looked long and searchingly at his life—and entered a seminary. His first assignment after ordination had been a disastrous tour as chaplain to students. It hadn’t worked, and he could see that he was not cut out for a parish priest. The Navy needed chaplains, and could always use linguists...

Now, at age fifty-two, he sat in front of an intercom screen watching four-armed monsters playing with cabbages. A Latin crossword puzzle lay on the desk at his left hand, and Hardy played idly with it.
Domine, non sum...

“
Dignis
, of course.” Hardy chuckled to himself. Precisely what he had said when the Cardinal gave him the assignment of accompanying the Mote expedition. “Lord, I am not worthy...”

“None of us is, Hardy,” the Cardinal had said. “But then we’re not worthy of the priesthood either, and that’s more presumption than going out to look at aliens.”

“Yes, my lord.” He looked at the crossword puzzle again. It was more interesting than the aliens at the moment.

Rod Blaine would not have agreed, but then the Captain didn’t get as many chances to watch the playful little creatures as the Chaplain did. There was work to do but for now it could be neglected. His cabin intercom buzzed insistently, and the miniatures vanished to be replaced by the smooth round face of his clerk. “Dr. Horvath insists on speaking with you.”