“It’s all right, Mel—I’m becoming accustomed to Rayner’s mode of speech.” Conforden turned his eyes to Jerome. “It has also been reported to me that you work extra shifts in the tunnel.”
Jerome nodded. Same motivation.”
“And that quick action on your part saved a man’s life.”
“I don’t wany any medals puncturing my vacuum suit,” Jerome said. “What’s this all about?”
“The Thrabbren is being placed on the surface tomorrow. Only Guardians are permitted to go near it, of course, but I have decided to give you a place in the accompanying work party.” Conforden produced a wry smile. “The rest of us see this as a great honour, but you may look on it as a major step on the road back to Earth. Do you want the appointment?”
“Always willing to oblige,” Jerome said, concealing the lust that had suddenly been born inside him, the craving to raise his head and see beyond a horizon and into the beckoning depths of space. It might even be possible to pick out a glimmer of light from Earth itself—oceans, mountains, pastures, cities with parks and libraries and all-night grocery stores—all compressed into a single spark and fine-drawn into a bright thread of photons linking him with home. At that moment he could think of no greater reward for his labours.
“Pardon me, Director, but this isn’t according to the decisions we minuted at the last Precinct Council meeting,” Zednik said. “My understanding was that I would select the Terran representative for the Thabbren escort. In my opinion the honour should go to the worker with the longest service in the tunnel.”
Conforden nodded, but in disagreement. “We’re not talking about a ceremonial parade. Rayner may be useful in some small way, and that is the overriding consideration—although it is quite inconceivable that anything could go wrong with the Guardians’ plans at this stage.”
You should never say things like that, Jerome thought, watching the interplay of excitement and pride on Conforden’s young-old face. It was hubris that got me where I am today.
CHAPTER 10
For more than a day there had been nothing to do but wait, watch and think—and it was a time of utter strangeness.
After having adjusted to being on another world and to inhabiting a different body, Jerome had supposed himself immune to feelings of wonder—but this was a distillation of strangeness, a coming together and a culmination of every outré aspect of his new existence.
From where he sat on a portable chair he could see, to his left, the enigmatic, vacuum-suited figures of the six Guardians whose duty it had been to transport the Thabbren the full length of the tunnel and place it on the airless surface of the planet. Pirt Conforden was sitting among them, but in the half-light of the large terminal chamber it was impossible to pick him out from the others.
To Jerome’s right were the eight tunnel engineers, including Mallat Glevdane, who had been responsible for the tedious opening and closing of airlocks during the eight-kilometre journey from Cuthtranel. They were sitting near the cluster of small electric vehicles which had carried the party, and which also housed food supplies and toilet facilities.
There was a minimum of movement, and conversation was limited to brief whispered exchanges. All eyes were fixed on a large screen which was permanently attached to one wall of the chamber. The image it bore was of the Mercurian surface, so perfectly portrayed that at times Jerome felt he was looking through a picture window. It was a deep-focus view of a rocky plain, bound by jagged escarpments and illuminated by fierce horizontal rays from a sliver of unbearable brilliance on the horizon. Stars shone in a black sky, seemingly more numerous when farther from the Sun.
Jerome knew that the moon-like scene actually existed over his head, ten metres above the chamber, but he had yet to find out how it was being reproduced. Television and conventional photographic techniques were not involved, that much he knew, and he guessed that Dorrinian psychic engineers had simply arranged for the molecules of the screen to react in sympathy with others on the surface. The “camera’ may have been a normalseeming patch of rockface linked to the screen by a kind of inorganic telepathy. Totally impossible to detect, it was a perfect example of what the super-telepathic elite could do best.
Clearly visible in the middle distance were the gleaming metallic curvatures of the decoy—the huge sheet of alloy which had successfully lured a ship into crossing millions of kilometres of interplanetary space. It had been brought out of the tunnel in sections four years earlier and assembled by workers who had then used gas jets to obliterate all their footprints.
And in the centre of the foreground was the Thabbren—the most complex single artifact ever produced by human beings, the living jewel which had shaped the history of two worlds for more than three millennia.
Jerome, hoping for a direct glimpse of the Thabbren, had been disappointed to find it was encased in a protective covering which closely resembled a white pebble about the size of a golfball. Even if Marmorc were to be seen picking it up he would be able to pass it off as a mildly interesting rock specimen and await his chance to extract the fantastic kernel in seclusion. It was visible on the screen as a white fleck, carefully placed midway between two distinctive boulders which resembled human skulls. Marmorc probably had studied the small patch of ground before his translation to Earth, carrying every detail of it in his memory during his years of astronaut training, although as a supertelepath he could have been directed to the Thabbren by the Guardians watching from below.
Not having thought too much about the matter, Jerome had been surprised when, after the uneventful placing of the Thabbren by two Guardians, the entire group had remained in the terminal chamber to watch it—even though the Quicksilver had not been due to land for two days. From the little he knew about the Guardians it had seemed quite natural for them to segregate themselves in one part of the chamber, but he had been a little taken aback when the ordinary engineers, with whom he had worked closely, had isolated him from their company. Only when the vigil had been under way for some hours, giving him time to think and absorb its emotional qualities, had it dawned on him that the occasion was essentially religious in nature.
The bleakly alien environment, the dehumanizing vacuum suits, the low-pulsing engines and the rubbery smell of manufactured oxygen—all these had blinded him to the realization that for the Dorrinians, here was Bethlehem. And Mecca. And Teotihuacán. And Buddh Gaya. As he sat apart in the cavernous twilight, watching the watchers, it came to Jerome that no Earthly religion could have offered its devotees an experience of like intensity. Thirty-five centuries of effort and suffering had narrowed down and focused on this climactic event, an inconceivably massive inverted pyramid of time grinding down on a single point—and there was no guarantee that the load could be sustained. The classical Terran religions offered certitude, the commodity common to all, but there was a fearsome element of chance shot through this holiest moment in Dorrinian history.
Jerome was observing the ultimate gamble. The collective Dorrinian soul, encapsulated in a gem, was exposed on the meteor-scarred plain waiting to be transported to Heaven-on-Earth. But there would be no divine courier to ensure its safety. Instead, a complex and comparatively primitive spacecraft would grope its way down out of the void under the fallible control of men and their machines. The failure of any one of ten thousand components manufactured anywhere from Seattle to Milan to Nagasaki could terminate the ship’s mission at any time, thus slamming the doors of futurity on an entire race. Where a Christian placed his trust in the Cross, a Dorrinian was required to have faith that no microscopic circuit was developing a submicroscopic lesion, that no rivets in the Quicksilver’s flimsy structure had been given improper heat treatment.