Fumbling in the darkness, Kemp found another stool, perched wearily on it. Perched and stared at Gardner, while he felt the nameless horror of an alien planet and an alien happening slowly circle over him, like dark wings beating in the starlight.
A small cone of brilliance hung above the workbench, lighting up the electronic microscope. And under the microscope, Kemp knew, was something that came close to being the raw material, the constituent element of life. Something that he and Johnny Gardner and Victor Findlay had sought—for how many years? To Kemp, sitting there in the darkness, it seemed eternity.
An eternity of research, of compiling notes, of seeming triumph, always followed by the blackest of defeat.
“And,” said Harrison Kemp, speaking to himself and the silent room and the madman at the port, “here we are again!”
It would be futile, Kemp knew, to try to pick up where Gardner had left off. For Gardner had worked swiftly, had been forced to work swiftly, in those last few minutes. Since there had been no time to jot it down, he had tucked away that final crucial data in his brain. Even under the near-zero conditions to which the protoplasmic molecules had been subjected, they still would be unstable. They would have changed now, would have been rendered useless for further observation—would either have become more complex life or no life at all, having lost that tiny spark that set them off from other molecules.
Kemp knew he and Findlay would have to start over again. Johnny’s notes would help them to a certain point—up to that point where he had ceased to write them down, had stored them in his brain. From that point onward they would have to go alone, have to feel their way along the path Johnny Gardner had taken, try to duplicate what he had done. For whatever was in Johnny’s brain was lost now—lost completely, gone like a whiff of rocket gas hurled into the maw of space.
A door creaked open and Kemp got to his feet, turning slowly to face the man silhouetted against the light from the room beyond.
“Why so quiet?” asked Findlay. “What are you fellows—”
His voice ran down and stopped. He stood rigidly, staring at the star-lighted face of Johnny Gardner.
“It just happened, Vic,” said Kemp. “He called me to show me something in the ’scope and while I looked it happened to him. When I looked up again and spoke to him, he was sitting there, just like he is now. He was all right before, just a few seconds before.”
“It hits them like that,” said Findlay. He stepped into the room, walked close to Kemp. “We should know,” he said. “We’ve seen it happen to enough of them, you and I. Sometimes I have a dream, with you and me the only sane men left in the entire System. Everybody cracking, leaving just the two of us.”
“I should have taken your advice,” Kemp declared bitterly. “I should have sent him back on the last ship. But he looked all right. He acted O.K. And we needed him. He hung out for a long time. I thought maybe he would last.”
“Don’t blame yourself, chief,” said Findlay. “There was no way for you to know.”
“But you knew, Vic! You warned me. You said he’d crack. How did you know? Tell me, how did—”
“Take it easy,” cautioned Findlay. “I didn’t know. Nothing definite, at least. Just a feeling I had. A hunch, I guess you’d call it.”
They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, as if by standing thus they might beat back the sense of doom, the air of utter human futility that seemed to well within themselves.
“It won’t always be like this,” said Kemp. “Some day we’ll be able to keep men’s minds from going haywire. We’ll find a way to help the mind keep pace with man’s ambitions, to fall in step with progress.”
Findlay nodded toward Gardner. “He was on the right track. He took the first long step. Before we even try to study the mind as it should be studied, scientifically, we must know what life is. Before, we’ve always started in the middle and stumbled back, trying to find the Lord knows what. We can’t afford to do that any longer. We have to have a basis, a basic understanding of life to understand ourselves.”
Kemp nodded. “You’re right, Vic. He took the first long step. And now … now, he goes to Sanctuary.”
They helped Johnny Gardner from the stool and across the room. He walked like a blind man, stumblingly, muscles uncertain. His eyes stared straight ahead, as if he were watching something no one else could see.
“Thank heaven,” said Findlay, “he went this way. Not like Smith.”
Kemp shuddered, remembering. Smith had been violent. He had mouthed obscenities, had screamed and shouted, wrecked the laboratory. They had tried to calm him, to reason with him. When he charged Findlay with a steel bar, Kemp had shot him.
Although even that hadn’t been any worse than Lempke. Lempke had committed suicide by walking out of the dome into the almost nonexistent atmosphere of frigid Pluto without benefit of space gear.
Dr. Daniel Monk laid the pencil aside, read once again the laborious lines of translation:
This is the story of … who visited the fifth planet from the central sun; not the first to go there, but the first to discover the life that lived thereon, a curious form of life that because of its … had not previously been recognized as life—
Outside the thin night wind of Mars had risen and was sweeping the city of Sandebar, whining and moaning among the cornices and columns of the museum. Drift sand pecked with tiny fingers against the windows and the brilliant Martian starlight painted frosty squares on the floor as it came tumbling through the casement.
This is the story of—
Dr. Monk frowned at that. The story of whom? Probably, he told himself, he would never know, for the vocabulary made available by the Rosetta scroll did not extend to personal names.
With a wry smile he picked up his pencil again, wrote “John Doe” in the blank. That was as good as any name.
This is the story of John Doe—
But that didn’t answer another question. It didn’t tell why the life of the fifth planet had not been recognized as life.
The fifth planet, without a doubt, was the planet which in another eon had traveled an orbit between Mars and Jupiter—the planet now represented by the Asteroid Belt, a maelstrom of planetary debris. It would have been the planet, it and the Earth, most accessible to Mars. It was natural the Martians should have gone there. And that they had known the planet before its disruption gave a breath-taking clue to the incredible antiquity of the scroll from which the passage had been translated.
Perhaps, Monk told himself, one of the other scrolls might tell of the actual breakup of the fifth planet, might give a clue or state a cause for its destruction. There were thousands of other scrolls, the loot of years from the ruins of Martian cities. But until this moment they had been voiceless, mute testimony the Martians had possessed a written language, but telling nothing of that language, revealing none of the vast store of information they held.
A curious form of life that because of its—
Because of its what? What form could life take, what trick could it devise to hide its being? Invisibility? Some variant of protective coloration? But one couldn’t write “invisibility” into the text as one had written “John Doe”.
Perhaps some day, Monk told himself, he might find the answer, might be able to write in that missing word. But not now. Not yet. The Rosetta scroll, for all its importance, still left much to be desired. It necessarily had to leave much to be desired, for it dealt in a language that sprang from a different source than Terrestrial language, developed along alien lines, represented thought processes that could have been—must have been—poles apart from the thoughts of Earth.