“That is materialistic,” sighed Walter, “not faith. Olga gives love for love. She rewards faith. But she can’t cure all the ills in the world. She isn’t omnipotent.”
“A deity with a small d,” said Val. “In that case you might as well pay homage to the hive—earn calories and quarters.”
Walter turned back to his console—quietly mumbling a prayer for Val’s soul.
The artifacts from 50:00 were sorted. Sharps Committees indexed the Iron-Age weapons. Buckeye beads were studied by hive astronomers using heliocentric zodiac charts. Biotecks confirmed Val’s suspicions about the bones—calcium/collagen ratings were 0.10 on the Grube-Hill scale—citizen bones. Tektites were checked for solar gases and cosmogenic radionuclides. The results did not compute. Flimsy printouts accumulated. More tecks were assigned to the lab and the tests were repeated.
Three more growing seasons passed without a single buckeye sighting. Val checked with hunter units all over the globe. The gardens were safe. HC budgets were cut back. Val found himself working in the Suicide Prevention Center. Walter was retired for reasons of health.
Val was supervising a Sweeper at shaft base. A jumper had managed to land on one of the dispensers. There was quite a mess—transport fluids and all manner of dispenser items mixed in with the usual jumper gore. His communicator buzzed.
“Don at HC labs, sir. I’ve finished the meteor analysis.”
Val’s face was blank. Over six months had passed.
“The 50:00 tektites, sir?”
“Oh, yes. But I thought all the HC departments were closed. What are you doing there?”
“It was taper budget. We were allowed to finish our assignments. Can you drop in and go over these reports? They are rather interesting.”
At shift-change Val ran down to level eighteen. He walked past the huge vats at Biosynthe. A sulfur odor told him the enzymologists were pushing the methionine reaction. Hunter Control was dark. Crates blocked the hallways. Dust was everywhere. He was saddened by the sight of dead Huntercraft—whose brains and converters were in use elsewhere in the hive.
The lab was still lit and clean. Two tecks worked in a small corner. The one called Don rose to greet him.
“These are the reports, sir,” he said. “You’ll notice that we studied them in three stages. Stage one showed that they were indeed carbonaceous chondrites. That means they come from moon or Earth and are composed of peculiar granules—the chondrules. They can occur in showers. None were of the deep-space, nickel-iron type. When we examined them for solar gases we collected the gas at different temperatures. The 800 to 1,000-degree fraction had a solar-type ratio of krypton/neon. Over four. Those gases have a lower ratio in our atmosphere. We also collected solar-type ratios of helium, argon and xenon.”
Val studied the printouts.
“So they were real meteors.”
The teck shook his head.
“Maybe not. The preatmospheric exposure age and the minimum radius can be calculated by the heavy isotopes—the cosmogenic radionuclides. We used gamma-ray spectrometric techniques to find the ratio of cobalt-60/cobalt-59.”
Val nodded: “The longer it is in space the more neutrons it captures—the more heavy isotope. Right?”
“Right,” said Don. “Only the ratio was the same as on Earth. We checked sodium, aluminum and manganese too. No increase over the ratios on Earth.”
“Must have been in space a very short time,” concluded Val. “A very young meteor.”
Don raised his voice.
“Sir, do you know the size of an astrobleme it would take to produce this size meteor shower? There were craters like these on all the major continents. The astrobleme would be as big as Hudson Bay. Most of the old chondrite specimens are millions of years old. These 50:00 tektites are young—a few hundred years at the most. Historical time. Do you think history could forget an impact the size of Hudson Bay?”
“No—” said Val slowly. “Not on Earth anyway. It could have impacted on the other side of the moon. The hive hasn’t looked at the sky for over a thousand years—not in earnest, anyway.”
The teck grinned and produced a globe of the Earth.
“These yellow outlines are buckeye camps the night of the planetary conjunction. The red dots are meteor impacts. Note the clustering around the headwaters of each continent’s principle river bed—Mississippi, Nile, Amazon, Ob, Parana, Murray, Volga, etc. Those meteors had a very good guidance system.”
“The clustering is impossible,” said Val.
“So are the radionuclides,” said Don.
“Do you suspect something other than natural forces at work?” asked Val.
“I was about to ask you the same thing, sir,” said Don. “If an intelligence is behind this, it must be a very benevolent one. Look at the depth. Of the more-than-11,000 craters which I’ve seen optic records on—none did significant damage to a shaft city. All craters measure between ten and fifty feet in diameter.”
Val frowned: “But New Lake was a major disaster.”
“I’m not sure that it was a meteor crater,” said Don.
“Oh?”
“No tektites. No nickel-iron. Nothing. Could have been some sort of explosion in the high megaclosson range,” suggested Don.
“Megaclosson? There’s nothing on Earth that—” began Val. He sat down thinking—intelligence, benevolent—it added up to something he didn’t like to admit. Thanking Don, he took the reports and went to visit old, fat Walter.
Bitter admitted him to the sick room. Retirement had taken away Walter’s flavors—now beri-beri and pellagra added to the cyanosis of heart failure. Swollen and stuporous, he sat propped in his cot. Val showed him the reports. He took them with weak, trembling hands—squinting with tired, rheumy eyes.
“I see the hand of Olga in this,” old Walter gasped.
Val smiled and patted his old friend on the arm.
“I knew you would. Keep the reports. They’re yours. Get some rest now.”
Walter pressed the reports in his ESbook and dozed off.
9
GITAR
Kaia, the last five-toed hominid on the continent, awaited death stoically. Battle scars and the heavy burden of age had prevented him from making the trek to The River. Now he was alone. Weedy vines climbed the towers and fouled the optics of Big ES. Skies were free from Huntercraft. Now he could hobble about openly—nibbling kumquat, citron and cran. Agromecks waved, commenting on his white beard. He napped in the sun. Time was short.
Val scratched his head. The reports on the suicide flower reaction puzzled. A dozen flowers were found clustered around a shaft cap in SE Orange. Their brains were negative for both IA and MR. He ran a statistical cross-check on the phototropic catalepsy deaths—flowers—and found a pattern. When map-projected it showed a geographic linearity that could not be random. Citizens had been leaving their shaft cities in groups and dying on the Outside—usually so soon that their bodies formed clusters—peeling and baking in the solar actinics. Samplers had investigated and Neuro could find nothing wrong with their serotonin buttons. Temporal analysis indicated another was due. If the linear sequence continued, fat Walter’s shaft city was a good possibility for the next cluster.