“Hurry up, for Chrissakes,” he said with a kind of nasal snarl. “It’s bloody boring sitting here.”
“Patience, patience,” Lorrest said, unperturbed, continuing to explore the surface of the door with one of his apparently ubiquitous white rectangles. “It’s just a matter of finding the right place for my calling card.”
A moment later he gave a low exclamation and stepped back as—with the loud report of a long-established seal being broken—the door retreated a short distance into the building. It stopped, then slid sideways to reveal a short corridor ending in another door which had a circular window. A pale amethyst light streamed through the glass. Has the light been on all the time, Hargate found himself wondering, his mind seizing on the irrelevancy, or is there a fridge door switch?
Holding the card aloft and slightly ahead of him, Lorrest walked slowly to the inner door. He pushed it open a little, satisfying himself that it was unlocked, and came back smiling. “It’s all right. I didn’t think Vekrynn would have gone in for automatic weapons, but associating with people like you has made me suspicious.”
“Yeah, you look suspicious.” His melancholia displaced by curiosity, Hargate urged his chair forward and through the outer doorway. Lorrest held the inner door open, allowing him to roll into a long chamber which occupied the entire volume of the building. The cold, delicately-tinted light had no obvious sources, coming equally from walls, floor and ceiling, making it difficult to judge dimensions and distances. Hargate, who had half-expected an Ali Baba’s cave of rare treasures, was slightly taken aback to find that the chamber was bare except for a single deeply-cushioned armchair which faced a row of seven metal boxes. The boxes were desk-sized, had numerous flush-mounted panels in varying shades of blue and were massively bolted to the floor, a detail which gave the whole assembly a curiously old-fashioned appearance. Hargate was reminded of twentieth century electrical power installations.
“What is it?” he said, not hiding his disappointment. “Some kind of relay station?”
“Hardly.” Lorrest went forward and stood for a moment by the chair, his face registering an excitement that was almost manic in its intensity. “If I’m not mistaken…Denny, I can’t believe this.”
“Believe what?” Hargate said irritably. “How about letting me in on…?”
Lorrest silenced him with an upraised hand and lowered himself into the deep chair. He touched no controls that Hargate could see, but a few seconds later a screen-like area of white luminescence sprang into existence in the air above the centre box. After a barely perceptible delay the screen blossomed with what Hargate had learned to recognise as Mollanian script.
“What we have here,” Lorrest said, speaking slowly, “is a copy of old man Vekrynn’s famous Notebook.”
“Is that all?”
Lorrest gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think you understand. Vekrynn is determined that his great opus, Analytical Notes on the Evolution of One Human Civilisation, will live forever, become part of the Mollanian heritage and all that stuff. He’s so afraid of the idea that it might be lost that he maintains, at his own expense, five up-dated copies of it on five different planets, and naturally he has made certain their whereabouts are known to everybody who could possibly be concerned.”
Hargate studied Lorrest’s face, trying to solve the puzzle it represented. “Is this a sixth copy that nobody knew about?”
“You’ve guessed it.”
“I still don’t see why you’re wetting yourself,” Hargate said. “From what you say, it would be in character for him to have a reserve copy.”
“Here? On a world far outside the human sector? On a world no other human knows about?” Lorrest shook his head as the writing on the screen began to change. “No, there has to be another reason. My guess is there’s something special about this one, and I’d like to know what it is.”
Hargate chuckled. “You’re becoming obsessed, man. Vekrynn isn’t worth the time or trouble.”
“It’s no trouble, and I’ve got a little time to kill.” Lorrest settled back in the chair and the characters blazoned on the insubstantial screen hovering above the middle cabinet began to change.
“Have fun,” Hargate said drily. Anxious to conserve what little power remained in his batteries, he rolled his chair away manually and began a circuit of the oblong chamber, hoping to find something of interest he had missed at first glance. The journey was disappointing—not even a scuff mark differentiated one blank wall from another. Losing interest in the interior of the building, he propelled himself back to the entrance, opened the door and went along the short corridor to the threshold of the alien world. The sun had not quite disappeared below the horizon, but there was little diffusion in the pure air and night was already advancing down the sky in merging bands of blue-green.
He shivered luxuriously, in spite of the ambient warmth, as he made yet another attempt to accommodate the knowledge that he, Denny Hargate, who as a child had not been able to drag himself more than a few city blocks without becoming exhausted, had travelled farther from Earth than any other member of his race. It was more than he could ever have expected. His private religion, his faith in that first miracle at Cotter’s Edge, had paid off in the form of something like a trip to heaven. If he had any cause for complaint it was that providence had not granted him the travelling companion he would have chosen—Gretana was the high priestess of Cotter’s Edge, and she should have been the one to accompany him. He could almost have reconciled himself to the prospect of dying in a couple of years or less on condition that he would be able to look at that incredible face every day, to replenish and fecundate himself and thus counteract the slow withering of his soul.
It was, however, most unlikely that he would ever see Gretana again. She was many light years distant and he had no way of even guessing the direction in the darkening vault of the sky, where the unfamiliar star groupings were again beginning to emerge. Could it be that loneliness was an unavoidable by-product of total mobility? From what he had learned of the Mollanians, theirs was a cool society in which individuals—freed from all the restraints of forced physical proximity—had forfeited the ability to form close personal relationships. Gretana saw her parents as remote and uninterested figures, which fitted his thesis, but another possible explanation lay in the Mollanians’ fantastic longevity. Lorrest had mentioned the difficulty of producing inert materials which could match a Mollanian lifespan; how then could a fragile thing like human passion hope to endure when the parties concerned went on for centuries, millennia, with no sign of change? Perhaps poignancy is all, Hargate mused. Perhaps…
The deep quavering sob which came from immediately behind him almost stopped Hargate’s heart.
He flailed himself around in his chair and saw Lorrest staring down at him. The Mollanian’s face was a near-luminous mask, flowing and distorting in an interplay of emotions Hargate was unable to identify. He shrank back into his chair, suddenly afraid, as Lorrest dropped to his knees, covered his face with his hands and began to sway, all the time emitting the inarticulate whimpers which can be wrested from humans by insupportable grief.