“It’s tempting,” said Alex, not meaning it. The weight of centuries and the sense of decline pressed on the place. Furthermore, Meriwether felt remote. On Belle, we could be a couple hundred light-years from anybody else, but you didn’t notice it. In the outstation, though, you knew precisely where you were. The nearest person was one hell of a long way off, and you were conscious of every kilometer. Alex saw me grinning. “What?” he said.
“I could use a good party.”
Markop III was hardly worth a visit. But we went anyhow, because Alex insisted on being thorough.
It was an attractive world, lots of blue water, fleecy white clouds, herds of big shaggy creatures that made great targets if you were into hunting. The weather through the temperate zones was almost balmy.
If it was inviting, however, it was also potentially lethal. Unlike the vast majority of living worlds, its viruses and disease germs loved Homo sapiens. So you couldn’t drop a group of people onto the surface and expect to retrieve them unless you took a lot of precautions. That fact certainly ruled out tourist spots, and with them, hotels.
There was no talkative AI this time to tell us whether anything out of the ordinary had happened. Markop III had more land space than Rimway, 180 million square kilometers, much of it concealed by forest and jungle.
There had been a settlement at one time. That was ancient history, in the extreme. Four thousand years ago. The records are sketchy on details, but the Bendi Imperium established a colony there, and it lasted about a century before the plagues began to get ahead of the medical people. They eventually gave up.
We weren’t really equipped to do a major planetary scan. But we went into low orbit and took a long look. We spotted some ruins. A couple of long-dead cities, so thoroughly buried in jungle that no part of them was visible to the naked eye. In remote areas that might once have been farms, we saw walls and foundations.
We spent three days in orbit. There was nothing that looked like a viable shelter.
TWENTY-THREE
There’ll always be a Rimway.
- Heinz Boltmann (During an address to the Retired Officers’
Association, in the early days of the Confederacy, when survival seemed problematic.) Terranova, the new Earth, was well named. It orbited a nondescript orange star, it had a twenty-one-degree axial tilt, its gravity was a fraction of a percent below standard; it had an oversized airless moon, and there were a pair of continents that, seen from orbit, resembled Africa and the Americas.
The most remarkable aspect of the planet was that terrestrial life-forms integrated easily with the biosystem. Tomatoes grew nicely. Cats chased the local equivalent of squirrels, and the temperate zones proved to be healthful places for human beings.
But the critical piece of information for us was that the Mangles had a system of satellites in place, and it had been up and running over a century. Nobody came or went without their knowledge, and it didn’t take long to find out there had been no activity during the target time period. The Polaris had not gone there.
The only noteworthy event during our visit to Terranova occurred when a piece of rock got too close and had to be taken out by the Hazard Control System. The HCS consists of a black box mounted on the hull that detects and identifies incoming objects and coordinates the response, which is delivered by one or more of four particle-beam projectors.
The rock at Terranova was strictly a one-beam operation. It was only the second time in my career that we actually used the device.
Serendipity was the fourth world in the Gaspar system, and our last candidate. It was effectively a collage of desert broken by occasional patches of jungle near the poles.
A few small seas were scattered across the surface, isolated from each other. The equatorial belt was boiling hot and bone-dry, its vegetation consisting mostly of purple scrub. Even the local wildlife avoided the area.
Gaspar was a yellow-white class-F star. According to the data banks, the three inner worlds were all pretty thoroughly cooked. The sun was in an expansion cycle, getting hotter every year, and would soon burn off whatever life still clung to Gaspar IV. Serendipity. Soon seemed to be one of those cosmic terms, which really meant several hundred thousand years.
The life-forms were big, primitive, hungry. Not dinosaurs, exactly. Not lizards at all. They were mostly oversized, warm-blooded, slow-moving behemoths. Their considerable bulk was favored by the low gravity, which was about three-quarters of a gee.
The world was called Serendipity because everything had gone wrong on the discovery flight. The ship had been the Kismet, a private vessel operated by fortune hunters functioning several decades before the Confederacy established guidelines for exploration. Like requiring a license before external life-forms could be introduced into a biosystem.
A field team member was killed by one of the behemoths. Walked on, according to the most popular version of the story. Another had stepped in a hole and broken his leg. A marriage had disintegrated into a near-violent squabble. And the captain suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they arrived. In the midst of all that, the Kismet ’s Armstrong engines died, so they had to be rescued.
From orbit, we looked down at a surface that was dust brown and wrinkled, dried out, cracked, broken. Lots of places were emitting steam. Serendipity had the usual big moon that seems to be a requirement for large, land-based animals, and its skies were almost cloudless. It had a breathable atmosphere, and there were no pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. If you wanted to hide someone for a few weeks or months, this would be the perfect place. Except where would a hotel key fit in? “I was hoping we’d get lucky,” said Alex.
“Doesn’t look like it. This place is primitive. Does anybody live here at all?”
He grinned. “Would you?”
“Not really.”
“We’re here,” he said. “Might as well do the search. I’d guess we’re looking for a cluster of modules. Some sort of temporary shelter. Anything artificial.” He was visibly discouraged.
I told Belle to run a planetwide scan.
We passed over a miniscule sea and back over desert. The place was so desolate and forlorn that it had a kind of eerie beauty. When we crossed the terminator and slipped into the night, the ground occasionally glowed with ethereal fire.
But there was nothing, no place, certainly no hotel, where anyone could have stashed visitors.
After two days, Belle reported the scan complete. “Negative results,” she said. “I do not see anything artificial on the surface.”
Alex grunted and closed his eyes. “No surprise.”
“Time to go home,” I said.
He took the key out of his pocket and stared at it. Up. Down. Lock. Unlock.
Transfer funds. “Barber was willing to kill to keep its existence secret,” he said.
Why?
I looked down at the surface and thought how nothing would ever happen there.
The oversized critters would continue to chase one another down while the climate kept getting hotter. By the time survival became impossible even for these hardy lifeforms, the human race would probably be gone, evolved into something else. It got me thinking about time, how it seems to move faster as you get older, how it runs at different rates in gravity fields or under acceleration. How we assume that the kind of world we live in is the status quo, the end point of history. There’ll always be a Rimway.
“You know,” I said, “we may have made an assumption about the key.”
An eyebrow went up. “Which is what?”
“That it came from around 1365.”
“Of course it did,” he said. “It was lying in the back of the shuttle.”
“That doesn’t mean it belongs to that era.” I took the key from him and stared at it. “People have been barging around in the Veiled Lady for thousands of years.”
“We’ve ruled out planetary surfaces and outstations,” Alex said. “And we’ve ruled out a rendezvous with another ship. What’s left?”