Once, he recalled. Years ago. He had felt the same fright when as he had felt now, seeing this dark, pervasive substance scuttle into his world from the other side. I was eighteen, he said to himself. Just a kid. It was my first visit to the Golden Door satellite.
It had been when he had first seen George Walt.
Since it was impossible to close the rent, Don Stanley decided, they were going to have to make the attempt to subject the dimly-lit swamp world to some kind of ordered scrutiny. Taking full responsibility, he ordered a QB observation satellite brought to the lab with launching equipment. Before the barrier had been erected by TD's engineers he had sent the satellite across and had watched as it shot up into the murky, ominous sky.
Reports from the orbiting satellite began to arrive almost at once, and he seated himself with
Howard and started methodically to go over them. The time was five-thirty a.m. Much too early to awaken Leon Turpin, he realized. We'll just have to go on as we are, for at least another two hours.
The planet - and he felt no surprise in learning this - was Earth. But the stellar chart which the satellite recorded on the dark side contained data which was totally unexpected. For a long time he and Howard sat together conferring, to be certain there had been no error. There had not. By six-thirty in the morning, Stanley was sure of the situation, sure enough to have Leon Turpin woken up at his home on Long Island.
The QB satellite, this time, was orbiting an Earth in what was, for their world, a century in the future.
'You realize what this implies, don't you ?' he said to Howard.
'This could still be the same alter-Earth. The one we sent our colonists onto. Only we're seeing it a hundred years later.' Abruptly Howard shivered. 'Then what became of their colonizing efforts ? No trace at all ? After all, the satellite is picking up lights on the dark side in exactly the same locations as before.'
'I'll be glad when Turpin gets here,' Stanley said. The responsibility had become too much for him; he wanted out. Obviously, the colonization attempt had failed. But he simply refused to face it. It can't be the same Earth, he repeated again and again to himself. It's just got to be a totally different one.
Something terrible must have taken place between our colonists and the Pekes.
At seven fifteen a.m., Leon Turpin arrived, perfectly shaved, washed, dressed, and in absolute control of himself.
'Have you sent dredging equipment across ?' he asked Stanley as the two of them stood by the partly-completed concrete barrier, looking out across the swamp.
'What for ?' Stanley said.
Turpin's face twitched. 'To look for remains of our campsite. This is the same spot, isn't it ?
There's been no movement in space; this is where our colonists set up their base a century ago.
There ought to be all kinds of junk, if we dig down far enough, down to the hundred-year level.
Tell them to get started right away.'
It took only two hours for the dredges to locate and bring up an aluminum canteen and then a rusted, corroded, slime-drenched U.S. Army laser rifle. And, after that...
Skeletons. First one which they identified as a human male and then a smaller one, possibly that of a female.
Turpin signaled for the dredging to cease.
'Beyond any reasonable doubt, this was our campsite,' Turpin said, presently. 'We've proved that, to my satisfaction at least.' The others nodded; no one spoke, however, and they did not look directly at one another. 'Perhaps it's possible to view this as a tremendous break,' Turpin said.
'We know now not to send any more colonists across; we know what's going to happen to them.
They're going to perish right here at the campsite without having even...'
'They were slaughtered,' Stanley interrupted, 'because we didn't send any more across. The first group wasn't large enough to hold off the Pekes; it's obvious that the Pekes are responsible for this massacre. What else could have happened to them ?'
'Disease,' Howard said, after a pause. 'We never took time to make thorough studies of viruses and protozoa over there, as we should have. We were in such a goddam hurry to rush them across.'
'If we had kept sending them across,' Stanley persisted, 'in a steady flow, the Pekes wouldn't have been able to mow them down. My god, those colonists suddenly found themselves cut off from us, stranded there with no way to get back, abandoned by us ...' He broke off. 'We never should have tinkered with the power supply. That's where we made our mistake.'
Howard said, 'I wonder what we'll find when we get the original power supply hooked back up.'
He jerked his head toward the group of TD engineers laboring to disconnect the larger source. 'In a few more hours they'll have it back the way it was. Presumably we'll find ourselves facing the original rent, the original conditions; we'll be back in contact with our campsite, then, and if necessary we can march them all back here to this side again. Every last one of them.'
'But,' Stanley said almost inaudibly, 'you're leaving a factor out. The nexus to this swamp world hasn't gone away; it's either self-maintaining or some force on the other side is underwriting it... in any case it seems to be there for good. Things are never going to be as they were; we can't reestablish the original situation. We'll never see those colonists again. And we might as well get used to that idea. I say, go ahead and hook up the first, smaller power source again, but don't expect anything.' To Leon Turpin, he said,
'I've been here all night. Can I go home and go to bed for a few hours ? I can't keep my eyes open.'
Turpin said raspingly, 'Don't you want to be here when ...'
'You're just not facing it,' Stanley said. 'When I wake up, six or ten or fifteen hours from now, the situation's going to be exactly as it is right now. We'll be looking across at that swamp world, and it'll be staring right back at us. I'll tell you what we've got to do. Somebody - and I don't mean just another atavistic, simple-minded robot-type dredge - some brilliant human individual has got to go across there into that swamp world and locate the power source that's keeping this nexus alive. And then he's got to blow it to bits or, at the very least, dismantle it.' Stanley added,
'And then - and this may be almost impossible - someone's got to find out what established that power source in the first place. And how they knew we were coming.'
After a pause Leon Turpin said, 'Howard tells me that in the first few moments of operation with the augmented power source, something came through, some living creature. Is that true ?'
Don Stanley sighed wearily. 'I thought so at the time. Now I think I was out of my mind; I was simply just too scared by what I saw. I must have realized right away that we had lost those colonists forever.' He walked unsteadily toward the exit door of the lab. 'I'll see you a few hours from now. After I've had some sleep.'
'But I saw it, too,' Howard was saying, as Stanley shut the lab door after him.
I don't care what came through, Stanley said to himself. I don't care what you saw. I've done all I can. I haven't got anything left to give to this situation.
But you better have, Turpin, he realized. Because it's going to take a lot. What I've done disconnecting the augmented power source, getting the barrier erected, sending over the QB
satellite, starting up the robot dredge - all that's nothing. Just a way of finding out what confronts us.
He thought, I wish I could sleep forever. Never wake up again and have to face this.
But he knew he had to.
And he was not the only one. They would all have to wake up, one by one, to face this, President
Schwarz involved in his deft political maneuverings to outrun Jim Briskin, hitting him with his own idea ... Briskin, too, because no matter what Schwarz had done, no matter how hurriedly and recklessly he had acted, the idea behind the colonization had been Briskin's. The responsibility remained essentially his, and Schwarz, now, would be quick to hand it back to him.