"Okay." Marcel grinned. He'd have enjoyed being there to watch the reaction of top management when this news came in. I say, we seem to have had a bit of an oversight on Deepsix. "When you're ready to transmit your report, Gunny, let me know."
Beekman went below and, within twenty minutes, was on the circuit. "We went back over the recordings, Marcel," he said. "Take a look at this"
A snowfield clicked onto his display. Taken by the satellites, it seemed ordinary enough, a landscape of rolling hills and occasional patches of forest. On the desolate side, but the whole world was desolate. "What am I looking for?"
"There," said one of the researchers, a blond young man whose name was Arvin, or Ervin, or something like that.
A shadow.
A building. No doubt this time.
"Where is this?" he asked.
"Northern Transitoria. A few hundred kilometers south of the coast."
It was a spire. A tower.
They magnified it for him. It appeared to be made from stone blocks. He saw a scattering of windows. "How high is it?"
"About three stories. Probably another three below the snow line."
He stared at it. The tower and the snow. It looked like a cold, solitary, forbidding place.
"It doesn't look lived in," said Arvin.
Marcel agreed with the assessment. It looked old, and the surrounding snow was undisturbed.
"I don't think there's any glass in the windows," said someone else.
A map appeared with the location marked. It was south of the ocean they'd called Coraggio. Not far from Bad News Bay.
Well named, he thought. "What's under the snow?"
Beekman nodded to someone off-screen. A network of lines appeared. Houses. Streets. Central parks, maybe. An avenue or possibly a onetime watercourse curving through the middle of the pattern. Watercourse probably, because it was possible to make out a couple of straight lines that looked like bridges. "It's big," he said.
Beekman nodded. "It would have supported a population of probably twenty thousand. But it's small in the sense that the roads and buildings are scaled down. We figure the streets are only a couple of meters wide. That's narrow by anybody's standards. And here's something else." He used a marker to indicate a thick line that seemed to circle the network. "This looks like a wall."
"Fortifications," said Marcel.
"I'd think so. And that kind of fortification means pretechnologi-cal." He looked uncomfortable. "I wish we had an expert here."
The tower appeared to be connected to the wall. "Nothing else visible above the snow?"
"No. Everything else is buried."
He'd suspected the wall they'd found yesterday to be a freak of nature, an illusion perhaps. But this- "It makes five of us now," said Marcel. Five places where sentience had appeared. "Any structures anywhere else on the planet, Gunther?"
"Nothing other than the wall, so far. We've started looking. I'm sure there will be." He tugged distractedly at his beard. "Marcel, we'll have to send a team down. Find out who they are. Or were."
"Can't," said Marcel.
The project director met his eyes. Beekman lowered his voice so that there would not appear to be a disagreement. "This is a special circumstance. I'll sign a release from any instructions or policies that preclude you from acting. But we have to go down and take a closer look."
"I'd love to help, Gunny," said Marcel, "but I meant can't. We don't have a lander."
Beekman's jaw literally dropped. "That can't be right," he said. "You have three of them down in the shuttle bay."
"Those are shuttles. Ship to ship. But they can't operate in an atmosphere."
"You're sure?" He was visibly dismayed. "We've got to be able to do something."
"I don't know what," said Marcel. "Report it. Let Gomez worry about it."
"How could we not have a lander?"
"We don't carry dead mass. Landers are heavy. This operation, we weren't supposed to have any use for one."
Beekman snorted. "Who decided that? Well, never mind. I guess we've all learned something about preparedness."
"You don't have anyone qualified to conduct an investigation anyhow," said Marcel.
"Qualified?" Beekman looked like a man facing a world of idiots. "You're talking about poking around in an old building. Look for writing on the wall and take some pictures. Maybe find a couple of pots. What kind of qualifications do you need?"
Marcel grinned. "You'd break all the pots."
"Okay, let the Academy know. Tell them to send out another ship, if they want. But they'll have to hurry."
"They will that" said Marcel. He knew there wouldn't be time for a second mission to reach them from Earth. They'd have to divert somebody.
III
It surprises me that courage and valor have not been bred out of the human race. These are qualities that traditionally had to an early demise. They are therefore not conducive to passing one's genes along. Rather it is the people who faint under pressure who tend to father the next generation. -gregory MACALLISTER, "Straight and Narrow," Reminiscences
Hutch was not looking forward to spending the next few weeks locked up inside Wildside with Randall Nightingale. He took his meals with the other passengers, and occasionally wandered into the common room. But he had little to say, and he inevitably looked ill at ease. He was small in stature, thin, gray, only a couple of centimeters taller than the diminutive Hutch.
It was an unfortunate circumstance for a reclusive man. The run between Quraqua and Earth usually carried upward of twenty passengers. Had that been the present situation, he could have retreated easily into his cabin and no one would have noticed. But they only had four. Five, counting the pilot And so he'd felt pressure and was doing his best to participate.
But his best served only to create an atmosphere that was both tentative and cautious. Laughter flowed out of the room when he appeared and everyone struggled to find things to talk about.
The biosystem on Pinnacle was, after six billion years, far and away the oldest one known. Nightingale had been there for the better part of a decade, reconstructing its history. Most of the theoretical work was said to be done, and therefore she understood why Nightingale
would be going home. But nevertheless it seemed coincidental that he should choose just this moment.
In an effort to satisfy her curiosity, she'd looked for an opportunity to speak with him alone. When it arose, she casually wondered whether someone in his family had taken ill.
"No," he'd said. "Everyone's doing fine." But he volunteered nothing more. Didn't even ask why she'd inquired.
Hutch smiled and suggested she'd been concerned because his name had appeared unexpectedly on the passenger manifest. She hadn't realized he was coming until just a few hours before departure.
He replied with a shrug. "It was a last-minute decision."
"Well, I'm glad everybody's okay."
— After the conversation, if one could call it that, she'd gone to the bridge and pulled up the files on the Nightingale mission.
The Maleiva system had been initially surveyed by the James P. Taliaferro twenty-one years ago. Its results had excited the scientific community for two reasons: Maleiva III was a living world, and it was going to collide with a rogue gas giant. The expedition under Nightingale had been assembled and dispatched with fanfare and some controversy.
Others, seemingly better qualified, had competed for the opportunity to lead the mission. Nightingale was chosen because he was energetic, the Academy said. A man of exquisite judgment. If he had no experience in exploring a biosystem whose outlines were only vaguely understood, neither had any of the other candidates. And if he was younger than some that the establishment would have preferred to see nominated, he was also, as it happened, married to the commissioner's daughter.