The Invincible (11 page)

“And what is it?”

“He’s unconscious. That is, not exactly. He can walk, move every part of his body; but it’s impossible to communicate with him. He’s also lost the power of speech. Did you hear his voice?”

“Yes, I did.”

“He seems to have calmed down somewhat—it was much worse before. He didn’t recognize any of us. This struck us as the most horrible thing at first. I tried calling out to him, ‘Kertelen, where are you?’ But he walked by me, as if he were completely deaf, went straight through our group and then up the canyon in such a manner that we all got gooseflesh. He was totally changed. He didn’t react to our calls, so we had to catch him—you can’t imagine what a job that was. Finally we were forced to tie him up; otherwise we would never have been able to transport him back to the base.”

“And what do the doctors say?”

“They spout Latin phrases, as usual, but they don’t know anything either. Nygren and Sax are in with the commander. You can find out more from them.”

Gaarb walked away heavily, his head bent to one side as usual. Rohan stepped into the elevator to get to the command center. The room was empty, but as he passed by the cartographical cabins, he could hear Sax’s voice coming through the door that was slightly ajar. He entered the room.

“Total amnesia. At least that’s what it looks like,” the neurophysiologist was saying. He had his back turned to Rohan and examined an X-ray picture he held in his hand. The astrogator sat at his desk, the open log book in front of him. His hand rested on one of the bookshelves packed tightly with rolled-up star maps. He remained silent as Sax slowly put the X-ray film back into a brown manila envelope.

“Amnesia, but this is a special case. Not only does he not remember who he is, but he has also lost the ability to read, write and speak. What we’re faced with here is complete disintegration, total destruction of personality. Nothing has been retained except for primitive reflexes. He is capable of walking, and he can eat, but only if someone puts the food into his mouth. He won’t reject it, but—”

“Can he see and hear?”

“Yes, he can. But he doesn’t understand what it is he sees. He cannot distinguish between people and objects.”

“And his reflexes?”

“Normal. Only his brain has been affected. Apparently all traces of his memory have been wiped out with one stroke,”

“Then the man from the
Condor
was also—”

“Yes. Now I am sure of it. It was the same thing.”

“I’ve seen one other case like this,” whispered the astrogator. He looked in the direction of Rohan but did not seem to notice him. “That was out in space.”

“Oh, yes, of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?” exclaimed the neurophysiologist in a high voice. “Amnesia due to a magnetic shock, wasn’t that it?”

“Yes.”

“I never saw a case of it. I’m only familiar with it through the literature. Didn’t that happen a long time ago when strong magnetic fields were used to fly at high speeds?”

“Yes. That is to say, only under specific conditions. The intensity of the field is far less important than the gradient and the intensity of the change. Nowadays, if large gradients occur in space—and occasionally we encounter some pretty stiff ones—then our gauges will register them at great distances. This could not be done in the old days.”

“True,” concurred the physician. “That’s quite right. Ammerhatten made similar experiments with dogs and cats. He exposed them to enormous magnetic fields until they lost their memory.”

“Yes, it had to do with the brain’s response to electrical stimuli.”

“But in this case we not only have Gaarb’s report. We’ve got confirmation from his men as well.” Sax was thinking out loud. “Powerful magnetic fields. Must have been hundreds of thousands of Gauss?”

“That wouldn’t be enough. You’d need millions for that,” the astrogator answered in a gruff voice. Only now did he become aware of Rohan’s presence.

“Come in and close the door behind you!”

“Millions? Wouldn’t our instruments here on board detect such a field?”

“Only under certain conditions,” replied Horpach. “If it were concentrated in a small area, if it were the size of this globe here, and if in addition it were screened off from the outside…”

“In short, if Kertelen had stuck his head between the poles of a gigantic electro-magnet—”

“Even that wouldn’t be sufficient. The field would have to oscillate in a certain frequency.”

“But there was nothing but rubble up there. There were no machines and no magnets, nothing but eroded ravines, gravel and sand.”

“And caves,” Horpach added meaningfully.

“And caves. Do you believe somebody pulled him into one of those caves and that there was a magnet in it? No, that’s—”

“How else can you account for it?” asked the commander, as if he had grown tired of this discussion.

The physician remained silent.

At 3:40 A.M. the shrill ringing of the alarm signals sounded throughout the
Invincible.
The men awoke with a start, dressed and hurried to their stations, swearing as they went. Five minutes after the alarm signal began, Rohan entered the command center. The astrogator had not yet arrived. Rohan quickly walked up to the videoscreen. The dark night was lit up brightly in the east by countless white flashes of lightning. It seemed as though a meteorite shower emanated from a radiant point and was attacking the rocket.

Rohan checked the dials of the field control instruments. He had programed the computers himself and knew they would not react to rain or sandstorms.

Something—it was too dark to make out what it was—came rushing from the direction of the desert and scattered in a rain of fire. The discharges occurred at the surface of the energy dome. The mysterious missiles bounced off the shield and flew back, rapidly fading flames along a parabolic curve. Still other flames slid down the curvature of the vaulted field. The ridges of the dunes became momentarily visible, then sank back again into the darkness.

The hands on the dials flicked sluggishly. The system of the Diracs needed only a relatively small effort to ward off this mysterious bombardment. Rohan heard the approaching steps of the commander as he looked across to the spectrometer installation,

“Nickel, iron, manganese, beryllium, titanium,” the astrogator read the results off the brightly illuminated scale. He stood next to Rohan. “What I wouldn’t give to be able to see with my own eyes what’s going on there.”

“It’s raining metallic particles,” said Rohan slowly. “They must be quite small to judge by their discharges.”

“I’d like to get a close look at them,” said the astrogator. “How about it? Shall we risk it?”

“You mean switch off the energy field?”

“Yes. For a fraction of a second. We’ll catch a few particles inside the protected zone, the rest will be repelled when we switch our energy field back on.”

Rohan did not answer for a long time.

“Well, it’s conceivable…” he finally said.

But before the commander had time to step over to the instrument panel, the flickering flames died down just as rapidly as they had flared up. Stark darkness reigned again, the kind that is known only on moonless planets that circle far from the star clusters of the galaxy.

“No luck this time,” muttered Horpach. His hand rested on the main switch. He remained standing for another minute, then nodded briefly in Rohan’s direction and left the room. The all-clear signal sounded throughout all levels of the spaceship.

Rohan sighed, glanced once again at the videoscreens: there was nothing on the image but pitch black darkness. Then he went back to bed.

They were getting used to the planet, its never-changing desert face, the slight shadows cast by its unnaturally light clouds as they drifted apart. Even by daylight one could see them through the light of the bright stars. They came to accept the ever-present sand that crunched under wheel and foot. They even grew accustomed to the dull red sun, whose rays were incomparably softer than those of its terrestrial counterpart. Instead of warmth, one felt its silent presence whenever the back was turned.

Every morning the work troops set out, each one in a different direction. The energo-robots disappeared among the dunes, rocking like giant boats. Once the dust cloud settled those who remained at the
Invincible
would try to guess what the day would offer. The men discussed what one of the radar observers had said to one of the communications technicians, or tried to recall the name of the pilot who had lost a leg on the navigational satellite Terra 5 six years ago. They passed the time chatting about little things, perched on empty canisters below the rocket, whose shadow circled like the hand on a gigantic sundial until it grew long enough to touch the ring formed by the energo-robots. Then the men rose and began to look out for their friends, who would return exhausted and hungry.

Without the novelty which had originally inspired them when they were working in the metallic debris of the “city,” their energy soon dissipated. Hardly a week had gone by when even the
Condor
work detail failed to bring any more exciting news (like the fact that another corpse had been identified). And the findings that at first had been symbols of sheer horror—the remains of their dead comrades—were now carefully packed inside hermetically sealed containers and stowed down below in the storage rooms of the
Invincible.
The men whose job it was to continue to search the sand around the
Condor,
or to rummage through the ship’s interior, experienced boredom rather than a sense of relief. They seemed to have grown oblivious to the fate of the former crew. Their efforts now concentrated on collecting bits of memorabilia, meaningless knick-knacks that had survived their anonymous owners—an old, workworn harmonica or a Chinese puzzle. These objects quickly lost all traces of their origin, and were soon circulated and used as communal property among the
Invincible’s
crew.

Rohan would never have believed it possible, but in less than a week he was behaving no differently than the rest of the crew. Only on rare occasions, when he was completely alone would he begin to wonder what he was doing there. All this work, their ant-like activity, the complicated details of their research: the transilluminations, the search for specimens, the rock drillings (which were made even more difficult by the third step routine), the opening and closing of the energy fields, the laser weapons with their exactly prescribed firing range, the unending visual control, the constant calculations—all this, he realized, was nothing but self-deceit. Basically, they were dong nothing more than wait for some new event, another catastrophe. They were simply pretending that they did not know the real reason for all this busywork.

At first the men would crowd around the ship’s infirmary every morning to wait for news about Kertelen. He seemed to them not so much the victim of a mysterious attack as some creature who no longer resembled a human being, a monster who had nothing in common with them. It was as if they believed they were in some fantastic fairytale, in which an unknown force from a hostile planet had changed one of them into a monster. In reality, of course, the man was nothing but a cripple. Moreover, it soon became apparent that his brain was simply empty, like that of a newborn baby. His mind was able to absorb all the knowledge the doctors would teach it. Gradually, like an infant, he began to talk. Those who passed the hospital no longer heard the strange whining sounds, unlike any produced by human voices, or that senseless baby’s crying that had been so terrible because it came from the mouth of a grown man. One week later, Kertelen formed his first syllables and began to recognize the physicians, although he could not yet pronounce their names.

By the second week, the men had lost interest in him, especially after the doctors announced that he would never be able to say anything about the circumstances surrounding his accident, not even after he had completed his unusual re-education process and had “returned to his normal self.”

In the meantime the work continued. The crews continued to map the city and to collect details about the construction of the shrub-like pyramids, although no one could figure out their function. Finally, the astrogator decided that further investigations of the
Condor
would be useless, and therefore were to be discontinued. The spaceship itself would have to be abandoned. Repairing the outer hull was more than they could manage here, especially since the engineers had much more urgent work to do. Only a large number of energo-robots, transporters, jeeps and all kinds of instruments were transferred to the
Invincible.
The spaceship itself was reduced to a wreck after this salvaging operation. The
Condor
was made tight. The crew comforted itself with the thought that either they or the next expedition would eventually bring the cruiser back to its home base. At the conclusion of these operations, Horpach directed the
Condor
troop to continue its work in the north of the desert. They joined Gallagher’s group, now under the command of Regnar. Rohan advanced to main coordinator of all research activities. He would leave the immediate vicinity of the
Invincible
for no more than brief periods, and not even every day.

In an area criss-crossed by many ravines with subterranean springs, the two groups made some peculiar finds. They encountered clay deposits with layers of a reddish-black substance which seemed to be of neither geological nor planetary origin. The specialists were at a loss. It looked as if millions of years earlier vast quantities of metal particles had settled on the surface of the old basalt mantle of the planet’s solid shell. These splinters consisted either of metal or some metalloid matter—perhaps a huge iron-nickel meteor had exploded in the planet’s atmosphere and then melted into the ancient rock during fiery cataclysms. These metallic fragments might have oxidized gradually, followed by chemical reactions with their matrix and other elements present. Finally they would have changed into these black-brown layers with occasional spots of crimson.