Astrogator Pam Stokes, who had been lost in study of her ancestral slide rule, wondering if it had been damaged in the landing, looked up and said, “Thursday, I think. Back on Earth, that is.”
In the baffled silence this created, Captain Standforth mused, “It’s that tricky business of not turning the engines off until you actually touch down; that’s the part I have the trouble with.”
“If we’ve landed on the damn planet,” Ensign Kybee Benson said, struggling out of the pod that had absorbed the brunt — though not all — of the impact, “let’s take a look at it.” A social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, Ensign Benson was responsible for studying each lost colony when it was found and describing its 500 years of unsung history. Being the only one aboard the Hopeful likelier to be interested in the planet than in the landing, he was the first to cross the command deck to the view-screens, switch them on and look out at a rolling and nearly treeless savanna that looked much like the Rift Valley in Kenya in August, before the rains. Each screen showed the landscape from a different direction, all the views very similar, each with low tan hills far in the background. “Hmmmm,” said Ensign Benson.
The five other travelers in the Hopeful crowded around: Captain Standforth, tall and craggy; Pam, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion; Hester, the human fireplug; Billy, the idealist; and Councilman Morton Luthguster, portly as a plum pudding, representative of the Galactic Council, who harrumphed and said, “Fine farmland, I should think.”
“Oh, should you?” Ensign Benson snarled. He despised his shipmates, each and every. They were here because they were misfits, home base delighted to be rid of them on this endless journey; but why was he here? Furious by nature, he said savagely, “We aren’t here for real estate, Councilman. Where’s the colony? Pam? You steered us here.”
“This is definitely the nexus,” Pam told him, the slide rule flashing in her slender fingers. “We are on the planet Matrix, fourth from the star Mohonk, gravity and air compatible with Earth—”
“It’s a big planet,” commented Ensign Benson.
“One point one nine three times the size of Earth,” Pam agreed. “Earth density to one point—”
“It’s a small colony,” the ensign interrupted.
“Oh, it’s here,” Pam assured him, getting the idea. “This is the place. The coefficients are—”
Billy, peering at one of the view-screens, said, “I see something out there. Little boxes or something.”
Everyone peered at the same screen. Thirty yards away on the tundra were low, slender structures of some kind.
“Then let’s take a look,” Ensign Benson said.
They watched the new creatures emerge from the giant silver ship. One, two, three, four, five, six. They watched, and absorbed, and studied.
Then, for the moment, they slid deeper into their holes, drawing the earth closed above them.
The slender structures were gravestones, made of metal. “Oh, dear,” said Pam.
Ensign Benson looked around at the bare land. A slight breeze blew. “There were forty colonists,” he said. “There are thirty-seven graves.”
Captain Standforth, who had been scanning the sky — bird taxidermy was his one passion — said, “What’s that? You mean the colony never survived at all?”
“Look at the dates,” Ensign Benson told him, gesturing at the letters and numbers etched into the metal. “Not one person was born here, and none of the original colonists lasted more than four years after arrival.”
Hester said, “But they didn’t all die at once, so it wasn’t poisoned water or an attack from hostile creatures.”
Billy said, “Forty colonists and only thirty-seven graves? How come, do you suppose?”
“Well,” Ensign Benson said, being uncharacteristically patient with Billy, his natural animosity softened by the presence of all those headstones, “I suppose there wasn’t anybody around to bury the last one, and the other two could have died away from the colony. After five hundred years, you know, Billy, they’d all be gone by now, anyway.”
“I guess so,” Billy said, nodding but glancing surreptitiously toward the horizon.
Councilman Luthguster pointed at something beyond the cemetery, farther from the ship. “Is that some sort of ruin?”
It was. They approached it and found that it was at the crest of a low fold in the land, with more ruins on the slope down from them. Crumbled remnants of poured quasi-parquet flooring, stubby bits of pseudostone wall, the entire area scattered with artifacts of domesticity: pots, coat hangers, plastic picture frames. During 500 years of neglect, accumulated rust, wind and dirt had gnawed at the husk of the fledgling colony, working tirelessly to make it unexist, coming closer to that goal with every passing year.
At the bottom of the fold in the terrain, among coatless buttons and doorless handles, the crew found a sturdy metal footlocker half-buried in the earth; buried deeper on one side, indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. The locker’s catches were closed, but it wasn’t padlocked. Inside were sheets of paper that had all but rotted away, photos faded to a nearly uniform beige and what looked like a video tape, but not of a sort Ensign Benson had ever seen. Picking it up, removing the cassette from its metal box, he showed it to Hester, saying, “Any idea what this is?”
“If that’s a tape,” Hester commented, “it’s goddam old.”
“Hester,” the ensign said, “if it’s anything in this forsaken place, it’s goddam old.”
“Well, that’s true,” Hester admitted. She took the cassette from the ensign’s hands and studied it. “Tape seems all right,” she said, “but we don’t have anything to play this on.”
“Then it doesn’t matter if it’s all right or not,” the ensign pointed out.
“Well, I’m wondering,” she said, turning the cassette in her hands, “if I could adapt it. If you read this tape the same way our machine does, with a laser, with the same kind of laser, maybe I could rewind it or something, fix the machine to take it.” She turned. “Captain?”
Captain Standforth guiltily looked down from the skies. “Yes, Hester?”
“Want me to see if I can play this tape?”
“Excellent idea,” the captain told her.
Down in the holes, they wove, they spun, they altered, they waited.
For two days, while the rest of the crew roamed and searched the surrounding area, collecting basketfuls of detritus and trash, examining remnants and ruins, learning nothing, Hester struggled with the ancient tape.
“It’s impossible,” she would announce at every meal, smudges of machine oil on cheeks and knuckles, the banked fires of frustration in her eyes. Sometimes it was impossible because the tape was not scanned in the way the machine knew how to scan; sometimes it was because the speed of the tape was unknown and d unknowable; sometimes it was because of incompatibilities at the magnetic or the electronic or simply the physical level. And always, having announced the impossibility, Hester would grumble and sigh and shake her head and wade back in to try some more.
Everyone else rooted for her, of course, partly wanting Hester to succeed simply because she was their shipmate and they wanted their shipmate to succeed, but also because they wanted to know what had happened to the Matrix colony and assumed the tape would tell them. That is, everybody but Ensign Benson assumed that. As the struggle to read the tape grew more and more prolonged, he came to believe it would turn out — if they ever did crack it — to be no damn use at all. Instead of the Rosetta tape, instead of the answer to the mystery of the colony’s failure, it would prove to be, in Ensign Benson’s private, unstated opinion, nothing more than some silly piece of entertainment, songs and dances perhaps, some piece of forgettable 500-year-old fluff brought along by the colonists to distract themselves during the long nights of their settlement’s youth. In a brand-new colony, after all, there is no downtown.