“But you do support some people who do things my way,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” he admitted, “we do. If we didn’t, we’d have to compete on the open market for everything that buccaneers of your kind bring in. We make such bargains reluctantly, and we make them in the hope of maintaining a measure of control over the activities of freelance explorers—but we can’t afford to make deals with anyone and everyone. We have to be selective, and we can’t make our selection on the basis of species loyalty or personal friendship.”
“You could” I said—but that was unfair. He was only one man in an organization full of not-quite-men. The Tetrax called the shots.
“You’re a one-man operation, Michael,” Sovorov reminded me, although it was hardly news. “You may think you’re a serious player, but that’s because you spend so much time out in the cold, without the benefit of regular reality checks. Policy favours teams—teams which can be persuaded to adopt our code of practice, our fundamental philosophy.”
“The Tetrax found Asgard,” I observed. “They could have kept it to themselves, if they’d really wanted to. Policy, as far as I can see, favours diversity and compromise. Policy is not to put too many eggs into any one basket, especially if it’s the one you’re carrying yourself. Policy is to encourage petty rivalries, so that everyone is wary of everyone else, and the Tetrax can be friends with everyone. Divide and conquer is out of date; nowadays it’s divide and exploit.”
“That’s rather cynical,” Sovorov said. He had a habit of stating the obvious.
“We’re all parasites, Alex, scuttling around the nooks and crannies of Asgard’s rind,” I told him. “You might take pride in being the only human member of a multiracial consortium that pretends to represent the entire galaxy rather than a handful of colony worlds, but you’re no holier than I am. You’re careful and you’re methodical—hooray for you. You’re also slow and repetitive. I’m willing to bet that you—or your masters, at any rate—have learned far more from stuff brought in by so-called scavengers than from the material your own teams have bagged as they work their way outwards from your home base at a pace that would disgust a snail. Asgard’s big, Alex—really, really big. Even the surface is big, let alone level one and level two… and when we find a way down to levels five and six, not to mention fifty and sixty, we’ll find out exactly how big it might be, and how many different things it might contain. I know your people have been expecting to figure out how to get down to the lower levels for a long time. Ever since I arrived here it’s been tomorrow, or the next day… just a little more data, a tiny stroke of luck in decoding the signs. Maybe you’ll do it—maybe your way is the way that will give us the key to the elevator—but I think my way is just as likely to deliver the big break. While you put a magnifying glass to the map, I’m covering the territory. If I were you, I’d back me, just to make sure you’re covering all the angles.”
He dropped the pen at last, and sat back in his chair with a theatrical sigh. “We’re gradually putting the jigsaw together,” he said. “Little by little, we’re building a coherent picture of the humanoids who lived on Asgard before what you insist on calling ‘the big freeze.’ We’re putting together a foundation that will allow us to make sense of everything— it’s not just a matter of playing with fancy gadgets in the hope that one of them will turn out to do something miraculous. If we can understand the language and the culture of the people who built and maintained Asgard, we can find out what we need to know about the lower levels before we actually go down into them… assuming, as everyone seems to, that there are more levels than the ones we’ve so far penetrated. That would be the sensible way to proceed, the most productive way to proceed. If someone like you were to find a way to open up the entire artefact before we’ve found out why it was built and what’s likely to be down there, it would be a tragedy.”
“I don’t agree,” I said. I felt, at the time, that my self-restraint was veritably heroic.
“I know you don’t,” he said—and tried to smile.
“They laughed at Christopher Columbus,” I reminded him.
“They also laughed at a lot of cranks,” he pointed out. “Look, Michael, I’ve done what I can. Your application is under consideration. It’s out of my hands. Perhaps you’ll get your money.”
“And perhaps I won’t.”
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said. “You have skills and plenty of experience. Lots of people would be glad to hire you.”
“I’m not a team player,” I told him. “If I were employee material, I’d never have left Earth. Do you have any news of the war, by the way?—I didn’t really get a chance to chat to the new arrival last night. Too tired by half.”
“So was I,” he admitted, “but the word around the Establishment is that it’s over.”
“Really? Who won?”
He was the wrong person to ask. He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and said, “In a war, Michael, nobody wins. It’s just destruction and devastation all round. If we can’t learn to understand that, there’s no future for us in this galaxy.”
I sighed. “How long before I get a decision on my proposal?” I asked.
“Fifteen or twenty units,” he told me. He meant Tetron metric units, which are something in the region of a quarter of an Earthly hour. “I’ll call you as soon as I know. Will you be at home?”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I assured him. “I have other irons in the fire.”
3
I did have a few other irons in the fire. I spent the rest of the morning trying them out to see if any of them had warmed up, but none of them had. I had a few more conversations like the one I’d had with Aleksandr Sovorov before I accepted the fact that everyone else in Asgard was even less likely than the C.R.E. to give me any money on the terms I was offering, but in the end I went home. Six hours had passed but Sovorov hadn’t called.
When no one is prepared to give you what you need there’s really only one thing you can do, and that’s recalculate your needs. There were two ways I could do that. One was to give up operating independently and join a team. There were at least a dozen outfits who would hire me who kept their fieldworkers supplied with adequate life-support systems and moderately generous pay, but the pay would be all I’d get. If the team I was with made a significant find, its members would get a bonus, but we’d have to hand it over the moment we found it and say goodbye to it forever. The chance of following anything through would be gone.
I hated to give up on the dream of turning up something big—specifically, a way down into one or more unexplored levels. The chance of finding valuable technics was only part of it; what really mattered was the chance to discover a whole new world. I’d been born way too late to get in on the first race into interstellar space, when everyone thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that the galaxy might be full of virgin worlds awaiting discovery and gaiaformation, but that dream had been animating human history for centuries and I’d inherited it in spite of its obsolescence. The discovery that there was a place where the race was still on—not because the Tetrax hadn’t got there first but because they were stuck outside a locked door with no obvious way in—had been an irresistible lure, once it had been explained to me properly by my namesake, Michael Finn.