The Diamond Moon (21 page)

 

“If I had to guess, I’d say we were inside a hangar,” Blake said. “They must have had smaller ships that could take them down to the planets.

 

“I wonder if we’ll ever find one of those,” Forster said. “Or did they return here a billion years ago?”

 

“If this is a hangar, it’s empty except for us,” said Sparta.

 

“Yes. Too bad.”

 

“Why too bad, sir?” Blake asked.

“Their wonderful machinery performed on cue. Their myriad animals woke from frozen sleep and did what in their genes they’d been programmed to do. But apparently a few too many million years have passed. On the outside, everything is alive and working. Here in the interior, all is dark and empty.”

Sparta and Blake said nothing, and Forster fell silent, not caring to say more. The Manta glided lazily through the dark water, its blue-white beams picking out structural el-ements as delicate as fronds of kelp or branches of coral. On every side dark passageways beckoned them to enter labyrinthine corridors; there were too many entrances to make any choice obvious or easy.

“We should start back before we worry the others,” Sparta said.

 

Forster nodded, still brooding.

 

She was moved to comfort him. “Just think what you’ll find.”

 

“Yes, but really, it’s almost
too
big,” he said wearily. “Not to mention filled with water.”

 

“Don’t worry, we’ll put everyone to work,” she said.

 

“How?” He stirred. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“We’ll use them as divers—put them in space suits and ferry them down here, two at a time. The Manta can be flooded, and once we get them here inside the core, the pressure is low enough. A rigid suit can easily stand up to it.” She smiled. “It’s still the greatest archaeological find in history, Professor. Even though it is full of water.”

XX

“I don’t want to take up space here with yet another de-scription of all the wonders of Amalthea. There have already been enough docu-chips and photograms and maps and learned disquisitions upon the subject—my own bookchip, by the way, will soon be published by Sidgwick, Routledge & Unwin—but what I would like to give you instead is some impression of what it was like to be one of the first humans ever to enter that strange watery world. . . .”

Bill Hawkins turned in his sleep, making himself more comfortable in his loose sleep restraint, and resumed his murmurous dream soliloquy. “Yet I’m sorry to say—I know this sounds hard to believe— that I simply can’t remember what I was feeling when the Europan submarine ejected me into blackness. I suppose I could say that I was so excited and so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all that I’ve forgotten everything else. . . .”

In his dreams, Hawkins was a marvelous speechifier, throughout it all remaining fluent, suave—but humble, of course—although his audience constantly shifted, from packed lecture hall to intimate video studio to a circle of evening-jacketed, bearded men in a map-lined drawing room of a vaguely imagined Explorers Club. . . .

“Certainly I do recall the impression of sheer size, something which mere holos can never give. The builders of this world, coming from a world of waters, were giants, at least four times the size of humans —or so we guessed from the dimensions of their entranceways and corridors, which were easily big enough to admit the submarine. We were tadpoles wriggling among their works.

“We never got below the outer levels, so we met with few of the scientific marvels which later expeditions dis-covered. That was just as well; we had enough to keep us busy. We assumed we were exploring residential areas and control rooms and the like, but the architecture was so strange and haunting we were never perfectly sure what we were looking at—we might have been swimming in an oc-topus’s garden. Oh, there were inscriptions aplenty, millions of characters of them, and I spent most of my time trying to decipher just enough to get their gist. Most were uni-maginably dull, mere lists of supplies, or labeled diagrams for incomprehensible devices.

“But there were no representations of the creatures who had written them, no sign of the creatures who lived in these intricate halls. We knew from the Martian plaque that they were not without vanity, but nowhere did they keep pictures of themselves, or even surfaces smooth and flat enough to serve—as the Martian plaque and the Venus tablets might have served, had they not been covered with symbols—as mirrors. . . .”

Hawkins muttered and grumbled. In his dream he was looking into a mirror inscribed with a thousand alien characters, and behind them a face stared back at him, not his own. . . .

 

The face resembled that of the woman psychiatrist he’d been required to interview before he was accepted for the expedition.

“I
could
say that I was excited and overwhelmed by the wonder of it all . . . but that would be inaccurate.” His dream statements became fussy, his words precise. The dream psy-chiatrist regarded him skeptically. “Actually, the first time Inspector Troy heaved me out of the tight little Manta into the warm fluid interior of Amalthea’s core—pushed me out rather roughly, in fact, with surprising strength for a woman of her size—my mind was so filled with thoughts of Mar-ianne that I wasn’t paying attention to the job I’d traveled so many hundreds of thousands of . . .”

A new face confronted him in his dreams. He moaned aloud. His eyes sprang open in the darkness.

His heart was thudding in great slow beats and his forehead was beaded with sweat. He groped in the pouch on the wall beside him and found a tissue, which he used to wipe the sweat carefully away. Hawkins would never be able to eradicate the memory of Marianne’s horribly blackened and bloody face as she lay blind and barely conscious inside the wreck of the Moon Cruiser.

But less than twenty-four hours later—he’d kept watch until the professor had ordered him to go to sleep —all the burst cells and infused blood of her ruined face had been carried away and digested, and her skin was again as fresh and new as a ten-year-old’s. Her beauty hurt his heart.

Hawkins shared the tiny sleeping compartment with the professor—he’d moved into the professor’s cabin when Sparta moved in with Blake—but the work of exploring the great world-ship had required the crew of the
Ventris
to work in shifts, and for the moment Hawkins had the place to himself. He knew he would not be going back to sleep soon. His dream had been too vivid.

He had not given any thought—consciously, anyway—to what he would make of his experiences once he got back to civilization. There were the various confidentiality agree-ments and contracts he’d signed before coming aboard, but these merely limited him to clearing public statements with the professor until the scientific results of the expedition had been published. Forster had promised that he had no intention of delaying publication and no inclination to muz-zle his crew.

It occurred to Hawkins that there was going to be a big demand for the memoirs of those who were actually on the scene, including his own. Certainly having Randolph Mays close to hand did nothing to discourage fantasies of fame.

Maybe his dream was trying to tell him something. As long as he wasn’t going to sleep anyway, it wouldn’t hurt to start making some private notes. He reached for his chip recorder, switched it on, and in the creaking darkness of the sleeping compartment, began to whisper into it. He started where his dream left off.

“Barely more than another hour had passed before both of them, Marianne and that odious Mays, were awake and talking—Mays doing almost all of it. As there was no room in the clinic, I watched all this on the monitor—a good thing, as I doubt I could have kept my hands from Mays’s throat. His television persona is pretty well known, but it’s mis-leading. In the flesh he is a tall, rather cadaverous man with thinning hair and an attitude of bonhomie which one knows to be only skin-deep, the protective coloration of someone who has to be friendly with too many people. Underneath he is a
carnivore
, as I had already learned.

“ ‘I
expect
this is as big a surprise to
you
as it is to
me
,’ he said to us with a wholly inappropriate attempt at heartiness, as if he’d just shown up for a dinner invitation a day early. ‘I see you’ve already made the acquaintance of my . . .’

“There was just the slightest pause before Mays’s next word, but it was more than long enough to make me see red—
‘assistant,’
he said, ‘Marianne Mitchell.’

“ ‘Indeed, we have been pleased to make her acquain-tance,’ the professor said to him with a straight face, throw-ing his insincerity back in his face. ‘And what brought you here? A spot of trouble, obviously. Why don’t you tell us about it?’

“Mays went on to tell us a tale of innocence and modest heroics—about his Herculean efforts to improvise a program for the capsule’s malfunctioning maneuvering system, in hopes of bringing them down softly on Amalthea. We al-ready knew it to be a pack of lies. And no doubt Mays
knew
we knew he was lying, but there was nothing he could do about that, for he also well understood that the ship’s recorders were picking up his every word and that anything he said could be held against him at the inevitable Space Board inquiry into the crash.

“The professor blandly let him hang himself. When Mays finally ran out of steam I waited for Forster to confront him with his lies; instead the professor said, ‘You’ll be up and about within a few hours, I’m glad to say. Unfortunately we won’t be returning to Ganymede for a while, and Amalthea is still under Space Board quarantine. So I’m afraid you are stuck here with us.’

“Mays did his unconvincing best to appear crushed by this news. The professor went on, ‘But when and if you feel up to it, we will welcome any help you and Ms. Mitchell care to give us’—you can imagine my consternation, hearing this!—’ for you see, Sir Randolph, we have recently made a most extraordinary discovery. And by an even greater co-incidence, here you are to share it with us. . . .’

“I glanced at Marianne, who floated in her life-support harness almost as naked as the day she was born —a fact I would not mention were it not for my acute awareness that the horrid and ancient Mays hovered in that same state beside her. Something atavistic in me was stirred. I wanted to cover her, a throwback to the attitudes of the last century. I was reminded of my humiliation, and I resolved not to let matters stand where they stood when we left Ganymede.”

Hawkins paused long enough to rub his sweating face. “But that’s off the track. In any other circumstances, given what we’d stumbled upon, we would have been glad of the extra help, but Sir Randolph Mays was a snake, and the professor knew it. Granted, Mays wasn’t going anywhere without the
Ventris,
but there was some question as to whether we could legally deny him access to communications.

“The professor grasped that nettle firmly. As soon as he was back in the wardroom, out of earshot of the people in the clinic, he took us aside and said, ‘I hope we can all get along together. As far as I’m concerned they can go where they like and record what they like, as long as they
don’t take anything
— and as long as they don’t transmit anything before we get back to Ganymede.’

“ ‘I don’t see how we can stop them,’ McNeil said, in that deceptively languid way he has, so that you know he’s scheming something. ‘What if he tries to fix his capsule’s radio? Especially since it’s not really broken.’

“ ‘
Out
of the question,’ Forster said with relish. ‘For one thing, that would be tampering with evidence.’

 

“I’d been woolgathering, still stewing over Marianne, but at about that point I rejoined the conversation. ‘Aren’t we even going to let Ganymede know what happened to them?’

“Foster allowed me a hint of a smile. ‘No, Bill, I suspect we too are going to suffer a communications breakdown—of the same kind that Sir Randolph’s capsule did. Unfortu-nately the news will get out, within a day or so, that we are no longer under Space Board protection here. But meanwhile, if we can delay interference from the outside worlds, we’ll have an opportunity to get to know our guests better.’

“Ever since the whole incident began, I’d been playing the moralist—for Marianne’s sake, or so I’d told myself. Until this point. For suddenly I found myself confronted with new possibilities. Marianne and me, incommunicado . . .

“But Forster wasn’t through; he had another trick up his sleeve. ‘Before we lose communication with the rest of the solar system, however, I’m going to register a claim to Amalthea. It will be back to Ganymede and on to Manhattan and Strasbourg and the Hague before Mays and his, hm, assistant get themselves free of their medical accoutre-ments.’

“ ‘How can you do that, sir?’ Me again. Leave it to me to state the obvious. ’Space law prohibits private parties from claiming astronomical bodies.’

“Forster gave me that patented crooked grin of his, one bushy brow up and one down. ‘I’m not annexing an astro-nomical body, Mr. Hawkins. The core of Amalthea is a der-elict spaceship. In the name of the Cultural Commission, I’ve put in a claim for
salvage
. If Mays tries to take any sou-venirs, he’ll be stealing from the Council of Worlds. I’ll explain the situation to him before he gets any bright ideas.’

“And that was that. For the last three days the professor has been working all of us so hard I’ve hardly exchanged a private word with Marianne.”
Through the hull of the
Ventris
Hawkins heard hatches banging and the hiss of gasses. Shift change already. It was time for him to drag himself into his spacesuit. He made a final remark into his recorder: “But I haven’t had time even to think as much about her as I expected I would. The levels of the worldship we’ve seen so far will require a lifetime’s exploration. And this afternoon we found the Ambassador. . . .”

XXI

Diving through the now shallow water to the core was like diving through bouillabaisse, thick with life. The core’s great heating towers simmered and stirred the soup steadily, as if they had been working in the kitchen since eternity. Fewer than a dozen revolutions of Jupiter remained before the mir-rored surface of the core lay sterile in space, all the life it had spawned having boiled away and perished in vacuum.