He stopped just outside the portal, moving slightly to allow it to close behind him. His expression was grim. “Lucked out,” he said aloud, looking around the unfamiliar chamber.
There was no one to hear, or to see the bitter and despondent look on his face. The chamber was deserted. The probe was in free fall, and Pertin floated slowly away from the transport; but nothing else was floating in the room. There was no litter, no sign that any other being of any sort was within thousands of light-years and, as he listened, not even any sound.
He swore softly to himself and twisted his body around to face the crated personal effects that were nudging their way out of the box. There wasn’t a great deal to come: some tapes; some changes of clothing, personal items. All his belongings were in a couple of crates, and at the end of the string of transmissions came his companion on the mission, Doc Chimp.
Doc Chimp thrust out a long arm and caught the handle of the door as he went by. He hung there for a moment, staring at his environment with an expression that was a parody of Pertin’s own. “Oh, wow, Ben Charles,” he said sadly. “What a place.”
“It’ll be "Ben James", I think,” said Pertin.
“Sure,” said Doc Chimp dismally. “Me, I’m not going to bother. If you want to call me something different, call me stupid.”
Doc Chimp was Earthborn, but he was not human. He was five feet three inches tall, weighed more than two hundred pounds and, in high-G environments, habitually walked on feet and knuckles. His parents had been chimpanzees. But Doc Chimp was something different.
For one thing, he had a sense of humour. He reflected it in the clothes he wore. Over his hairy barrel chest he wore a little red vest, open, with the coarse black fur sprouting through. He didn’t need it for comfort or for modesty; he wore it to please his own sense of the comic, and for pockets to hold his automatic translator, the key to his private suitcase and a supply of macadamia nuts, of which he was very fond. For modesty he wore shiny brown lederhosen. On his head he sported a kepi with a sand veil around sides and back, and over its visor a bright green plume.
Even the plume was sagging dejectedly as he said, “I think I’m going to hate this place, Ben James.”
“We didn’t come here to have fun. Where the hell is everybody?”
“Don’t know, Ben James. Can’t say.”
“Stow our stuff then. This thing won’t stay in free fall long; we’d better find somebody before it starts firing again.”
“Certainly, Ben James. But there’s somebody coming now." Pertin said, startled: “I don’t hear anything.”
“Neither do I. But I smell it. It’s a T’Worlie, coming fast.”
The probe ship was T’Worlie property, but fortunately for the other races of the Galaxy the T’Worlies didn’t have a very strong territorial imperative.
They had been civilized for a long, long time. They were an inquisitive race, in their unhurried way, and no doubt that was why they had been sending their probes out for hundreds of generations. Little T’Worlie rockets had radiated in all directions from their mother star, some of them aimed at other stars, some at nothing closer than the Great Nebula in Andromeda, ten million years” travel time away.
Only a race like that, deploying probes as lavishly and patiently as it had, could have discovered the curious astronomical object called Lambda. No other race would have been in a position to do it. Sirians, with their limited time-binding capacities that reached no more than a week into the future, wouldn’t have bothered. Nothing that promised a remote payoff interested the Sirians at all - which made them unattractive partners, but inoffensive foes. Humans of course had no chance; their technology wasn’t up to the job, and the farthest terrestrial probe was still climbing towards the turnover point on its now senseless journey towards 40 Eridani A.
But the T’Worlies thought long, slow thoughts, and they were gently but persistently curious about everything. If their race lived long enough it would learn everything there was to know.
None of them seemed to mind that no T’Worlie now alive would be present to learn it.
Lambda had been discovered first by an unmanned T’Worlie scout ship and reported in a routine synoptic survey. It attracted no attention at all. When first observed its great distance and low luminosity put it at the very threshold of detectability, and the traits which made it unique had not been noted.
Subsequent observations attracted more attention. Its weak spectral lines seemed to shift towards the violet, rather than the red - which is to say, it was moving towards the Galaxy instead of away from it. Curious. But the lines were so very weak, the point so very distant, and the orderly T’Worlies had many other things on their agenda to investigate.
Then, by accident, another scout turned up the same object in a survey.
It might not have been recognized if the computers of the T’Worlies had not been so patient and painstaking. The second scout had been launched five thousand years earlier, its vector several degrees away. From its point of view, Object Lambda was in a wholly different part of the sky, and its rate of approach, indicated by the spectral shift, quite different.
But the computers had sensed a possible match and had clucked over the figures until they confirmed it. There existed a specific, if hypothetical, orbit and velocity which, seen from those two scouts at those recorded times, would have given exactly those readings.
From the estimated elements the computers made a prediction. They requested a special observation from still a third unmanned scout. Lo! It turned out as they had predicted.
Object Lambda was not more than twenty thousand light-years from the edge of the Galaxy, and was approaching it at about one sixth of light-speed.
At this point the T’Worlies announced their discovery to the Galactic civilization at large, and began a study of their existing drones in that general part of space.
The T’Worlie drones were as small as interstellar probes can be made: a scoop, a hydrogen ram, some instruments and a tachyon installation. The T’Worlies had been launching them, thousands at a time, for tens of thousands of years. As they had never invented war, they were able to accumulate large quantities of surplus capital, and so the probes were not at first a particularly expensive project for them. Like most early-industrial races, they had energy to burn. They burned it. Their planet was largely water covered; though they looked like bats, they were somewhat more analogous to flying fish. The water was rich in D²O, and they spent its fusion energies profligately.
The T’Worlie drone model was standardized early. A programme was set up under which each drone, upon reaching a point suitably distant from all others, flashed a tachyonic signal to the T’Worlie planet, whereupon the tachyon transmitters scanned, encoded and transmitted whole new drones to the mother drone’s unit. As each new drone flashed into being, it signalled in to the T’Worlie planet, was given a course and programme of its own and went onward. The effect was that of an enormous globe of drones, at the end thousands of millions of them, expanding outward like the shell of a dead super-nova.
The programme was fully automatic and economical of everything but the energy eaten up by the tachyon transmitters, and for ten thousand years there seemed to be an endless supply of that.
In the end even the T’Worlies began to realize that their energy resources, though huge, were not infinite. The drone programme was cut to a trickle. But it was never stopped, and the great swelling bubble of drone ships expanded out, into globular clusters, out towards the neighbouring galaxies, along the spiral arms, in towards the core of the Milky Way itself. It was a T’Worlie drone that had buried itself on Pluto and been found by the exploration from Earth. In fact, T’Worlie drones had brought into the Galactic society at least a hundred races at one time or another, almost half of the total so far located.