CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“Fridays, when it was clam chowder,” Keene said to Charlie. “And a good seafood salad bar. I was never that much into lobster, though. Too much like groceries. You know—one bag of them always made three bags of trash. But maybe some scrod or flounder, or a nice piece of whitefish… What?—”

For a moment it was like the loss of steering when a car slides on ice. They were crossing above slopes of rock outcrops and mud slides overlooking tracts of reedy marshland, and trading visions of their best-remembered restaurants in Los Angeles and Boston, when Keene felt a lightness in touch on the wheel. And then the whole cab seemed to rise from the ground, and he was seized by a sudden vertigo, as if he had been transported back into space and become weightless. Charlie was clinging to the bar on the door pillar and flailing with his other hand to find purchase, but some relentless force seemed to be lifting him from the seat and sending him sideways against Keene. Keene became conscious of a juddering, roaring noise, seemingly all around, and an octave below it, a groaning from deep in the ground that he felt in his stomach more than heard. Then came the punctuation of a series of immense, violent shocks that stung in his ears like the reports of nearby artillery. The runabout seemed to bounce and leap upward again, the scene outside turning. He registered in a detached kind of way that the tilt of the piece of ground they were on was changing. The runabout was thrown up and bounced several times more, becoming part of a jumble of loose boulders all tumbling and bounding downward in a melee as if they had taken on life. The force reversed and carried Charlie away, pinning him against the far side of the cab, and Keene found himself in turn hugging the steering column and trying to brace with his leg to avoid being flung on top of him. And then the whole section of hillside beneath them detached and slid away, sweeping them down toward the fringe of the marshes. The windshield shattered into a shower of pieces, and Keene found himself first bracing across the gap to prevent himself from jackknifing out over his seat harness, then slammed back against the rear wall as the runabout rolled and turned over. His head struck something hard, and his vision kaleidoscoped; but he remained conscious of them thudding to a halt in an upended position, straps cutting into his body.

Still, the shaking and thundering continued, with more rocks tumbling and crashing into them from above. The rear wall of the cab was torn and bulging inward, wedging Keene awkwardly toward the driver’s-side door, with Charlie hanging above him beneath the slanting seatback. Hot, caustic gases seared Keene’s nostrils and his throat. There was fresh blood on his sleeve. He felt his arm and shoulder, but apart from probable bruising they didn’t seemed to be injured. It wasn’t from inside his coat. Finally, he traced it to his shoulder and found wetness down the side of his face and neck. There could be no thought of getting out until the turmoil outside eased.

His mind had gone into a state of numbness; he lost track of how long it lasted. It could have been ten minutes or an hour. Gradually, the heavier lurches gave way to a slowing clatter of pebbles striking the runabout or the rocks outside. Then Keene felt water inside the cab seeping into his boots. “Charlie, we have to get out.” He waited for a second or two, then jabbed upward around the bulge in the cab’s rear wall at Charlie’s shoulder. “Charlie, are you okay?”

A pang of worry hit him, and then Charlie’s head turned sluggishly. “I think so… . Just a bit shaken up.” His voice was wheezy. “Man, look at you!”

“What?”

“One side of your head’s got blood all over it. You sure you’re okay?”

“Just a scalp thing by the feel of it. But we need to move. We’ve got water coming in. I can feel it.”

There was no question of opening the driver’s door. It was partly on the underside, its window disintegrated, embedded in mud and by the look of it, buckled firmly in place anyway. Charlie felt for the door latch on his side, released it, and heaved with his arm and shoulder, but the door wouldn’t budge. “It’s no good,” he announced, breathless. Keene released his seat harness and leaned past Charlie to add his strength as well, but it didn’t help.

“Then it’ll have to be the front,” Keene said. He searched around and checked the dash compartment. The only object he could find of any weight was a metal-cased flashlamp. He used it to clear the remaining windshield shards from around the edge of the frame; then, with Charlie assisting, lifted his legs up along the dash panel and hauled himself over the wheel to squirm downward and out through the opening. It would have been easier if the runabout possessed more of a hood, which would have left a bigger space between the windshield and the ground. As it was, Keene had to worm his way feetfirst toward the passenger side, where the gap was higher, before he could turn and straighten up. Charlie followed, managing more easily since his reversed position brought him out the right way around. The squeeze had left both of them smeared with mud and soaked along their bodies.

The runabout had come to the end of its trail. It was nose-down in a mud slide that had surged into the marshes, its back end lifted by a rock lodged firmly underneath, and the rest of it looking as if it had been used as a practice target for field artillery. The generator had torn loose and was partly immersed in ooze maybe thirty feet away. Looking up to take in more of the general surroundings, Keene was dumbstruck.

The slopes that they had been traversing above had been broken and rugged before, but they had been continuous. Now they were split by two enormous, vertical fissures that had opened up all the way to the summit line, from which palls of black smoke or dust were spilling out over the lower slopes. Rivulets of rubble could be seen cascading down into the nearer fissure in places. But even more than that, the whole line of the slopes was tilted drunkenly forward, as if it had been torn from the greater massif behind by the opening up of a fault running lengthwise but invisible from where they were standing. Charlie was standing, staring up as if mesmerized. “Awesome!” was all he could find to murmur.

Moving mechanically for want of any better inspiration just at the moment, Keene clambered up to the truck bed, and leaving Charlie to his rapture, began hauling out what was left of their gear and supplies to take stock. Most of what had been stowed in the open bed of the truck was gone, which had included the drums of diesel oil—now neither here nor there anyway—but more importantly the main fresh water container. However, there were several bottles clipped in a rack. They still had the food, medical kit, spare clothes, and carrying packs, which had been in the closed compartment behind the cab. Then a fit of nausea and dizziness came over him. He stumbled across to some nearby rocks and sat down.

Charlie came over with one of the water bottles, a tin cup, and the medical kit. He gave Keene a drink, and when Keene had recovered somewhat, began cleaning the gash in his head and began closing it with suture clips. At least, Keene had been right in guessing it was mostly a scalp wound. The amount of bleeding had made it look worse than it was. “We should move from here as soon as we can,” Charlie said. “Those rocks up there look precarious. There could be more falls at any time.”

Joburg lay ahead to the south, where the ridge they had been descending from eventually broke up into a region of rounded hills. Obviously, the information from probe flights and the Scout’s journey stored in the runabout’s on-board system would no longer be of any use to them. They had compads, but using them to access copies from Serengeti would be an invitation for the transmissions to be traced. “I estimate about thirty miles,” Keene said. “The settlement shouldn’t be too difficult to find when we get in the general area. There’s a conspicuous peak to the east that should give us our bearings. At the rate we’re likely to manage in this kind of country, say, three days. Maybe four? . . . Ouch!”

“Sorry, Lan. But it looks a lot cleaner now. I’ll put some of this on and cover it up.”

“So what do you think?”

“You still believe there will be any point in trying to warn the Aztec, after all that time?”

Keene realized that it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder about it. But there was no way to change any of that. “What else can we do?” he answered simply.

“After all this time away from Earth? Do you really think either of us is up to it?”

“There’s only one way we’ll ever know, isn’t there?”

A few seconds of silence followed. “We do have two choices,” Charlie said.

“What’s the other one?”

Charlie shrugged as if reluctant to state the obvious. “Accept reality, Lan. Admit that it was a good try, but it’s over. Call Serengeti to have them pick us up… .” Keene raised his head. Charlie saw the look on his face. “You’re right. There’s only one.”

They laid out what they had and sorted it into piles. The food, fresh water, cooking gear, personal hygiene items, medical kit, foam-quilted bed covers that they’d brought to substitute for sleeping bags, and a minimum of the spare clothing they had brought were obvious selections. Keene added some of the lighter-weight tools and a few oddments like electrical tape, twine, repair aids. Would there be a need for some kind of weapons, just in case? Charlie wondered. Keene didn’t know. The best improvisations he could find were a two-foot pry bar and an alloy survey stake used for ground marking. Finally, he ducked down through the passenger-side window of the cab to retrieve whatever he could find that was useful from there. The on-board processor was still working, and twisting uncomfortably, he transferred a copy of the Scout’s map from its store into his wrist compad. That should get them to within sight of the landmark peaks, he told himself.

When he straightened back up, he found Charlie staring thoughtfully out at the marshes. He followed Charlie’s gaze but could see nothing especially significant. “It isn’t duck season, Charlie,” he said.

“The Bolivians used to make boats out of reeds like that,” Charlie answered distantly. “I got to ride in one once up on Lake Titicaca. So did the Egyptians long ago, too.” There were clumps of tall reeds lining the water in places.

Keene’s head hurt, he’d ricked something in his back, now it seemed the rest of his body was stiffening up too, and given the choice he would have preferred just to lie down. “You know, Charlie, I was just wondering about that,” he said.

“Maybe there is another option.”

“What?”

“Going directly south from here, inland of the ridge, we know the going’s rough. But if my memory is correct, the upper part of one of the rivers parallels it on the other side before it turns west farther down, toward the sea.”

“That’s right,” Keene agreed. “I just copied the map.”

“If we got to the other side, we could make a raft and use the waterway. I’m almost certain it would have to flow into the long lake below Joburg. It would halve the time. And we wouldn’t have to go back and over. Not much farther south from here, there are ways through to the west.”

“Assuming there are reeds over there,” Keene pointed out.

“There’s bound to be some kind of suitable material around a river.” Charlie turned his gaze back finally and looked at him. “Which would you rather risk, Lan? A thirty-mile trek over this? Or trusting we’ll find something, in return for riding the current downstream and taking half the time?”

Put that way, it didn’t need a lot of thinking about. “You’re right. The river, it is,” Keene agreed simply.

They checked over the pile of discarded items for anything vital they might have overlooked. It contained two packs of inflatable plastic air beds that some Kronian back in mission planning had thought to provide for overland expeditions. Keene and Charlie had been about to leave them to save weight, but then Keene realized they would be ideal aids for raftmaking. He retrieved them, passing one to Charlie. “Pontoons,” he said.

Charlie took it and added it to his pack. “What have we got to cut reeds with?” he asked. The planners evidently hadn’t seen much use in the runabout’s tool kit for things like sickles or machetes. After some rummaging, Keene produced a general-purpose handsaw with exchangeable blades, and a pair of hand shears. He put them in his own pack with a shrug that said that was it. Then, wincing from the bruises they had collected, they heaved the packs onto their backs and began picking their way, slipping and sliding, across the foot of the slopes.

The ground became firmer as they moved off the mounds of fresh debris, with pools of intruding water already forming among them, and they were able to increase their pace somewhat. But Keene’s legs were soon beginning to feel leaden. Being away from Earth had affected him more than he’d realized. After maybe a mile, they stopped to catch their breath. A low rumbling sound came from behind them. They looked back. One of the towers above where the runabout lay was collapsing, burying the area in an avalanche of dust and rock. They glanced ominously at each other but said nothing. Hitching their packs higher on their shoulders, they turned away and resumed a slow but steady pace toward the south.

To President Xen Urzin of the Kronian Congress, it was so obvious that the universe and everything in it were fashioned by some creative force with a purpose that he was hard put to understand how rational minds could ever have thought otherwise; even more, why they should have been so insistent on contriving ways of clinging to their view after repeated demonstrations that all the numbers and probabilities showed it to be simply untenable. He suspected it was a hangover from the period of Terran development when notions of conquest and exploitation being the right of the strong, and survival the natural reward for excellence, served as a convenient justification for the political and economic ideology of the times.

It seemed as self-evident as anything could be that the cosmos functioned as an immense materials-processing factory for producing planetary systems and the suns to nurture them; planetary systems provided assembly stations for constructing living organisms, the purpose of life was to support consciousness; and consciousness existed in order to undergo experience. Beyond that, things got more conjectural.

Many believed that the entities experiencing consciousness were products of some higher, more spiritually directed form of intelligence pursuing objectives of its own. Urzin liked to think so too, but he admitted that this was largely for reasons of emotional appeal and internal conviction—although why this should be seen as an admission, indicating some kind of weakness, he wasn’t quite sure. However, he did believe that the ancestral humans who had inhabited the Earth when it orbited Saturn had been more directly attuned to such realities, and in something comparable to a collective amnesia that had befallen the race as a consequence of the cataclysms that had occurred since, that awareness had been lost. He believed it was part of his role to help the race rediscover whatever future had been destined in those far-off times, and that they would find it out among the stars. Interestingly, it had been the very ordeal brought on by the fall from that earlier idyll that had spurred the technological advancement that now made such a migration possible. Without the hardships and insecurities that it had endured, and the restlessness and ambitions which those things had engendered, humanity might have existed indefinitely in a state of blissful but stagnant ease. Maybe the religious believers from Earth who stated that their Lord, Buddha, Allah, or whatever worked in strange ways had a point.

He stood in his suite in the Hexagon at Foundation on Titan, contemplating a panorama of waterfalls in a rain forest beneath a sunny sky of blue and shining white clouds. Jon Foy, higher up in his tower, liked looking out at a dead surface in the gloom, but Urzin preferred internal graphics creations that he could choose to suit his mood. The latest theory he had been invited to consider was from the school that sought a naturalist explanation for things, and posed the many-universe version of quantum mechanics as being potentially capable of originating the complexity of living systems that confounded conventional attempts at explanation. Essentially, the suggestion was that if in a sufficiently vast totality, everything that could happen would happen somewhere, and if some mechanism existed for communicating information between the all-but-infinite number of universes making up the totality, then life having emerged in one part, however unlikely, could propagate itself to the rest.

In effect, it was an attempt to put traditional evolution on a more solid foundation. Urzin didn’t really think it mattered that much. Whether or not living things had arrived at their present form through some process of change from simpler beginnings, or appeared abruptly as expressions of complex genetic programs whose origins could at present hardly even be guessed at, wasn’t the issue. The real question was, had the programs written themselves through the accumulating effects of unguided natural processes, or had something that knew what it was doing written them? Urzin liked his own theory better. And he was quite happy to concede that emotional appeal was probably the real reason why most people ended up supporting any theory, whatever other reasons they might profess. He was still cogitating over the issue, when the house manager informed him that Mylor Vorse was at the door. Right on time as always. Urzin acknowledged by voice and had him enter. Vorse appeared from the outer room of the suite moments later. He was carrying two dark bottles with maroon labels embellished in gold lettering.

“Mylor. I haven’t seen you for a while. You must be busy. My! What have we here?”

“A dry merlot from Mimas. Superb, Xen! The manager there sent me a crate on behalf of the work force. I thought you’d like a couple of bottles to add to your reserve.”

“My thanks, indeed.” Urzin raised one of the bottles to inspect it. “And what did you do to earn such esteem from the winemakers on Mimas?”

“Oh… I think it was in appreciation of the shipping we’ve provided for their crop produce generally. Personally, I think we’ve all got more to be thankful to them for. But it was a nice bonus, anyway.”

Urzin took the bottles over to a cabinet by the wall and found a place for them in the mildly chilled section. “But that wasn’t what you wanted to see me about,” he said, straightening back up and turning.

As was his way, Vorse spent little time on preliminaries. “We’re still getting intermittent messages claiming electrical disturbances blanketing communications with Earth. What’s come through has been from Zeigler or his staff. Nothing from Gallian for four days now. With the sudden blackouts from Trojan and Eskimo too, I’m suspicious. It’s all too much to be a coincidence.”

It wasn’t the first time Urzin had heard such thoughts. A number of people in the higher levels of Congress and the Directorates were talking about a Pragmatist coup with a lot of Security Arm involvement. More than one had criticized him for allowing the SA too much power and freedom at a time when their real reason for existing had passed. He had seen it as a needed safety valve for unsettled youth and the more adventurously disposed, but on reflection conceded that he might have been too trusting. The Security Arm had presented an opportunity that Terran political interests couldn’t pass by, and Terran politics simply wasn’t something that Urzin pretended any instinct for anymore than did most Kronians. Leo Cavan had probably discerned the risk sooner than anyone. But few had listened to him back then.

“Yes, I’m aware of the concerns, Mylor,” he said. “In fact, I was intending to call a meeting of the Triad and inner policy heads, including yourself, to go over it. The problem right now, to be quite frank, is knowing where anyone’s true sympathies might lie. I have a feeling it’s a lot more complicated than we might have thought.”

“I appreciate that,” Vorse said. “But in the meantime, there’s the question of the Aztec. If there has been some kind of a takeover on Earth, Aztec will be bringing them just the things they need to consolidate and build a solid foothold there. I’d like your approval to call it back for now, pending developments.”

“Are we still in normal communication with Aztec?” Urzin checked.

“Yes. A routine update came in from Commander Reese a couple of hours ago. There’s no reason I can see to suspect anything amiss there.”

Urzin thought for a moment. It suggested that whatever might be happening with the other ships, at least they could trust Reese. “Isn’t recall a bit drastic?” he said. “Why not let them continue until they reach the vicinity of Earth, but with orders to stand off until further instructions before initiating any contact?”

Vorse pursed his lips. “Just that if there is a hostile situation there, they’d be a long way from home and isolated from any help before they found out.”

“But then look at it the other way around,” Urzin suggested. “If there is something going on out there, they could represent the only help capable of making a difference right now. Why think of them as just a passive resource to be acquired? Why not a potential active asset?”

“They’re a supply ship,” Vorse replied. “What could they do if weapons like the ones that disappeared from Rhea have found their way there? And I don’t have to tell you what would be involved if Trojan shows up.”

“I’m not sure what they could do, exactly,” Urzin said. “But I have infinite trust in human resourcefulness. One thing I do know is that they can’t do anything if they’re nowhere near. And precisely because they are such a valuable asset, I don’t think the danger to them would be all that great. I’d prefer we do it the way I said.”

Vorse drew a deep breath, obviously still far from happy, but nodded shortly. “Very well, Xen. I’ll beam Reese accordingly.”