They reached the ancient buildings. The worker machines that scuttled about had kept them in good repair. Flandry stopped before the main structure. He tuned his radio to standard frequency. “At this range,” he said to that which was within, “you’ve got to have some receiver that’ll pick up my transmission.”
Code clicked and gibbered in his earplugs; and then, slowly, rustily, but gathering sureness as the words advanced, like the voice of one who has been heavily asleep: “Is…it…you? A man…returned at last?…No, two men, I detect—”
“More or less,” Flandry said.
Across the plain, beasts and chessmen came to a halt.
“Enter. The airlock…Remove your spacesuits inside. It is Earth-conditioned, with…furnished chambers. Inspection reveals a supply of undeteriorated food and drink…I hope you will find things in proper order. Some derangements are possible. The time was long and empty.”
Chapter X
Djana stumbled to bed and did not wake for thirty-odd hours. Flandry needed less rest. After breakfast he busied himself, languidly at first but with increasing energy. What he learned fascinated him so much that he regretted not daring to spend time exploring in depth the history of these past five centuries on Wayland.
He was in the main control room, holding technical discussions with the prime computer, when the speaker in its quaint-looking instrument bank said in its quaint-sounding Anglic: “As instructed, I have kept your companion under observation. Her eyelids are moving.”
Flandry got up. “Thanks,” he said automatically. It was hard to remember that no living mind flickered behind those meters and readout screens. An awareness did, yes, but not like that of any natural sophont, no matter how strange to man; this one was in some ways more and in some ways less than organic. “I’d better go to her. Uh, have a servitor bring hot soup and, uh, tea and buttered toast, soon’s it can.”
He strode down corridors silent except for the hum of machines, past apartments that held a few moldering possessions of men long dead, until he found hers.
“Nicky—” She blinked mistily and reached tremulous arms toward him. How thin and pale she’d grown! He could just hear her. Bending for a kiss, he felt her lips passive beneath his.
“Nicky…are we…all right?” The whisper-breath tickled his ear.
“Assuredly.” He stroked her cheek. “Everything’s on orbit.”
“Outside?”
“Safe as houses. Safer than numerous houses I could name.” Flandry straightened. “Relax. We’ll start putting meat back on those lovely bones in a few minutes. By departure date, you ought to be completely yourself again.”
She frowned, shook her head in a puzzled way, tried to sit up. “Hoy, not yet,” he said, laying hands on the bare slight shoulders. “I prescribe lots of bed rest. When you’re strong enough to find that boring, I’ll arrange for entertainment tapes to be projected. The computer says there’re a few left. Ought to be interesting, a show that old.”
Still she struggled feebly. The chemical-smelling air fluttered fast, in and out of her lungs. Alarm struck him. “What’s the trouble, Djana?”
“I…don’t know. Dizzy—”
“Oh, well. After what you’ve been through.”
Cold fingers clutched his arm. “Nicky. This moon. Is it…worth…anything?”
“Huh?”
“Money!” she shrieked like an insect. “Is it worth money?”
Why should that make that much difference, right now? flashed through him. Her past life’s made her fanatical on the subject, I suppose, and—“Sure.”
“You’re certain?” she gasped.
“My dear,” he said, “Leon Ammon will have to work hard at it if he does not want to become one of the richest men in the Empire.”
Her eyes rolled back till he saw only whiteness. She sagged in his embrace.
“Fainted,” he muttered, and eased her down. Rising, scratching his scalp: “Computer, what kind of medical knowledge do you keep in your data banks?”
Reviving after a while, Djana sobbed. She wouldn’t tell him why. Presently she was as near hysteria as her condition permitted. The computer found a sedative which Flandry administered.
Or her next awakening she was calm, at any rate on the surface, but somehow remote from him. She answered his remarks so curtly as to make it clear she didn’t want to talk. She did take nourishment, though. Afterward she lay frowning upward, fists clenched at her sides. He left her alone.
She was more cheerful by the following watch, and gradually reverted to her usual self.
But they saw scant of each other until they were again in space, bound back to the assigned round that was to end on Irumclaw where it began. She had spent most of the time previous in bed, waited on by robots while she recovered. He, vigor regained sooner, was preoccupied with setting matters on the moon to rights and supervising the repair of Jake. The latter job was complicated by the requirement that no clue remain to what had really taken place. He didn’t want his superiors disbelieving his entries in the log concerning a malfunction of the hyperdrive oscillator which it had taken him three weeks to fix by himself.
Stark Wayland fell aft, and mighty Regin, and lurid Mimir; and the boat moved alone amidst a glory of stars. Flandry sat with Djana in the conn, which was the single halfway comfortable area to sit. Rested, clean, depilated, fed, liquored, in crisp coverall, breathing ample air, feeling the tug of a steady Terran g and the faint throb of the power that drove him toward his destination, he inhaled of a cigarette, patted Djana’s hand, and grinned at her freshborn comeliness. “Mission accomplished,” he said. “I shall expect you to show your gratitude in the ways you know best.”
“Well-l-l,” she purred. After a moment: “How could you tell, Nicky?”
“Hm?”
“I don’t yet understand what went wrong. You tried to explain before, but I was too dazed, I guess.”
“Most simple,” he said, entirely willing to parade his cleverness anew. “Once I saw we were caught in a chess game, everything else made sense. For instance, I remembered those radio masts being erected in the wilds. An impossible job unless the construction robots were free from attack. Therefore the ferocity of the roving machines was limited to their own kind. Another game, you see, with more potentialities and less predictability than chess, even the chess-cum-combat that had been developed when the regular sort got boring. New types of killer were produced at intervals and sent forth to see how they’d do against the older models. Our boat, and later we ourselves, were naturally taken for such newcomers; the robots weren’t supplied with information about humans, and line-of-sight radio often had them out of touch with the big computer.”
“When we tried to call for help, though—”
“You mean from the peak of Mt. Maidens? Well, obviously none of the wild robots would recognize our signal, on the band they used. And that part of the computer’s attention which ‘listened in’ on its children simply filtered out my voice, the way you or I can fail to hear sounds when we’re busy with something else. With so much natural static around, that’s not surprising.
“Those masts were constructed strictly as relays for the robots—for the high frequencies which carried the digital transmissions—so that’s why they didn’t buck on my calls on any other band. The computer always did keep a small part of itself on the qui vive for a voice call on standard frequencies. But it assumed that, if and when humans came back, they would descend straight from the zenith and land near the buildings as they used to. Hence it didn’t make arrangements to detect people radio from any other direction.”