With the assistance of three TD engineers Turpin managed to kneel down and crawl tremulously after Woodbine. Felt like a kid again, Turpin said, to himself, experiencing both fear and delight.
Haven't done anything like this in ninety years. The wall of the tube shimmered before him. 'You in there somewhere, Frank ?' he called as he gingerly made his way forward. The shimmer passed over him, and now he saw blue sky and a horizontal procession of great trees.
Taking hold of him by the shoulders, Woodbine lifted Turpin to his feet and set him upright on the grass-covered soil. The air smelled of weird things. Leon Turpin inhaled, perplexed; the scents were old and familiar, but he could not place them. I've experienced this before, in my childhood, sometime, he said to himself. Back in the twentieth century. Yes, this certainly is
Earth; nothing else could smell this way. This is no alien, foreign planet. But was that good or bad ? He did not know.
Bending, Woodbine picked a meager white flower. 'Have a morning glory,' he said to Turpin.
Ahead of them, TD space engineers sat at mobile high-frequency receiving equipment; they were no doubt accepting communications from the Queen Bee satellite somewhere overhead. The
'scope of the central van revolved slowly, a peculiar presence on this pastoral landscape.
'We're particularly interested in what it obtains from the dark side,' Don Stanley said. 'That's where it is, now.'
Glancing at him, Woodbine said, 'Lights, you mean.'
'Yes.' Stanley nodded.
'Lights of what ?' Turpin asked.
'If there are lights,' Stanley said patiently, 'anywhere, in any quantity, it means that this place is inhabited by a sentient race.' He added, 'It's found roads, already, on the sun side. Or at least what appear to be roads. The QB isn't by any means the best observation satellite; actually it was selected because it's the easiest and quickest to launch. We'd follow it up in a few days with more sophisticated equipment, of course,'
'If a developed society exists here,' Woodbine said, 'it'll be of enormous importance anthropologically. But it'll hurt Jim Briskin. His whole speech took as its premise the unestablished fact that this planet is vacant and available for colonization. I don't know which to hope for; I'd personally like to see the bibs revived and conveyed here, but...'
'Yes,' Turpin agreed. 'We put a fortune into those language translating machines, decades ago, and never got anything back. Woodbine, where do you think we are ?
'You figure it out, Turpin,' Woodbine said with a spasmodic grimace. 'After all, you people built the 'scuttler. In fact, you invented it. I don't work by a priori theory; I'm a data type. I have to gather a good deal of information before I can figure out what's going on.' He gestured. 'Like those people who followed us over here.' Behind them the media reporters had appeared, still hard at work at their job of scrutinizing everything in sight. They did not appear very awed by what they had found so far.
'I don't care about the bibs,' Turpin said candidly. He saw no need to obscure his personal convictions. 'And I certainly don't care about what happens to that politician,, whatever his name is. Briskett or Briskman - you know, the one who made the speech. That's not my problem; I've got other things to worry about. For instance ...' He broke off, because a communications systems engineer was coming toward them, temporarily leaving the gear which monitored the satellite.
'Maybe this man can tell us something,' Turpin said. 'But I'll say one thing more: when I look around here all I see is grass and trees, so if it's inhabited, its tenants certainly don't have full control of the environment. That might leave room for limited colonization.'
The com-sys engineer said respectfully, 'Mr. Turpin, you don't know me but I'm Bascolm
Howard; I work for you and have been for years. It's a great honor for me to give you the news that the QB satellite has picked up sequences and arrangements of lights on the dark side of this body. There's absolutely no doubt about it; they're assemblages of habitation. In other words, towns.'
'Well, that's that,' Stanley said.
'Not at all,' Woodbine said sharply. To Howard he said, 'Where are these conglomerations of lights ? Where they're supposed to be ?'
Frowning, Howard said, 'I don't quite...'
'At London ?' Woodbine said. 'Paris ? Berlin ? Warsaw ? Moscow ? All the big centers ?'
'Some are in the right places,' Howard said. 'But some aren't. For instance, we're picking up no lights from the British Isles, and there should be colossal numbers, there. And, oddly, the image transmitted from above Africa shows many lights. Many more than there ought to be. But overall there are distinctly fewer lights than we're accustomed to; we noticed it right away. Perhaps only one third or one fourth as many as anticipated.'
'As anticipated where ?' Woodbine said. 'Back home ? But we're not back home, are we ? Or don't you believe that ? What is your operating theory ? Just where do you imagine you are ?'
Flushing, Howard said, 'It's not my job to figure out where I am; I was told to come here and set up monitoring systems for a QB satellite, and that’s what I've done. We've had sufficient rotations already to assure us that we're on Terra; we've seen all the normal land-mass outlines, all the familiar continents and islands. Personally, I'm content simply to accept the obvious fact that this is our own world, although somehow altered; as, for example, the reformation of lightclusters.
And, in addition, we've not been able to pick up transmissions from any satellite except the QB launched earlier today. The air is dead.'
'On what frequencies ?' Woodbine said.
'On every frequency we've tried. Starting with the thirty-meter band and working on up.'
'Nothing ?' Woodbine persisted. 'Nothing at all ? That's impossible. Unless we're back before the days of radio.' He glanced at Stanley and Turpin. 'Back before 1900. But even so the U.K. should be lit up; it's one of the most densely populated areas in the world and was such back in the
1900s ... back for centuries. I don't understand.'
'Cloud layers ?' Stanley asked Howard. 'Masking the surface ?'
'Possibly,' Howard said. 'But that wouldn't explain the concentration of lights on the African
Continent. Nothing explains that.'
'We must have gone ahead into the future,' Stanley said.
"Then why no radio transmissions on any frequency ?' Woodbine said.
'Maybe they don't need to use the airwaves any more,' Stanley said. 'Maybe they communicate by direct mind-to-mind telepathy or something on that order which we know nothing about.'
'But the sky map,' Woodbine said. 'The stellar charts which your astrophysicists developed distinctly set the time as being identical with ours. We're coeval with this world, whether we like it - or can make up a theory about it - or not. Let's face this fact and not try to weasel around it.
But why waste time theorizing ? All we really have to do is make physical contact with one of these illuminated settlements and we'll know the answers.' He looked extremely impatient. 'Haul some sort of vehicle over here, a jet-hopper perhaps, and let’s get started.'
Stanley said, 'There is a 'hopper over here already. From the beginning, we intended to provide
Mr. Turpin with an aerial view. After all, this entire place, whatever it is, belongs to him.'
Snorting, Woodbine said, "The government may have something to say about that. Especially if
Briskin is elected, which I understand is certain now.'
'We'll fight it in the courts,' Turpin said. 'Typical socialism, bureaucratic governmental interference in the free enterprise system; we've had enough of that. Anyhow, TD and TD alone has the means of getting over here. Or does the fedgov plan to seize the 'scuttler ?'