“You are an exploration ship?”
“No, actually, we’re all salvagers. Just not this trip. Salvagers were the only ones crazy enough to take this job. And desperate enough.”
Cromwell thought about it. “I see. Well, first and foremost, you must not land here.”
“Is there a problem? Or aren’t we welcome?”
“You are as welcome as anyone, but if you come down you will not get back off. This is not a natural place. It looks like Heaven, but it is not. Cain went to the lands east of Eden and began human civilization. This is more or less west of Eden. All our basic needs are here, but there are no heavy metals nor other major components that would allow us industry. In other words, we’re pretty well stuck like this, and so is everybody else who lands. Limbo, we sometimes call it, or Eden with the snake already in charge. I have your communicator. Try and retrieve your probe. Go ahead, try it.”
An Li looked at the others, who pretty much shrugged, so she said, “Cap, bring the probe back.”
“Retrieving,” the captain responded. The probe lifted off rather normally, quickly reducing the people below to dots and then to nothing as it got high and encountered a cloud layer.
“That must be a hell of a cloud layer,” Cross commented.
But it wasn’t. “The probe ascent has slowed to almost stationary,” the captain told them. “I have it at full power and I appear to have full control, but it simply will not rise any more.”
She took a horizontal approach, but every time she tried to increase altitude above the six-thousand-meter mark, it stuck.
“Dump your samples, see if that will work,” Cross suggested.
“Did that already. Something is exerting a specific gravitational or magnetic or whatever kind of force on the probe. It kicks on at six thousand, it kicks off at any point below it. I believe we have experienced the man’s demonstration. I am returning the probe to its old position so we can see them again easily.”
An Li didn’t wait. “All right, we’re impressed.”
“So were we,” the gray man responded. “And so was everyone else who landed on this world. You can come here, you can live here, within its limits, you can do what you like, but nothing, once down, rises again. We tried to track it, assuming it was some sort of beam or directional ray, but our instruments showed nothing. Perhaps yours…?”
“Nothing here either,” the captain told them. “I have no idea how or from where it’s being applied.”
“I take it, then, we should attempt no landing here considering this situation?”
“I would not advise it, although there are advantages to living here. For example, I not only should be dead of old age here, I in fact was killed here when we first landed. And yet, here I am.”
“Are you saying that you’re immortal? That you rose from the dead?” Randi Queson was more of a believer than Jerry Nagel, but not to this degree.
“Oh, not really. You just don’t age at the same rate here as you do off this planet. I have no idea if it is a natural phenomenon or something connected to the same force or forces that prevent anything from leaving—if, indeed, they are artificial forces and not just some other natural phenomenon we haven’t any way to measure as yet. Your guess is as good as mine. At least it appears that we have no problems communicating outside the atmosphere, although we’ve been unable to communicate with any of the other moons.”
“You’ve tried?”
“Yes, we did everything you’d think of all those years ago when we finally wound up here. And, before us, several nonhuman groups as stuck as we are tried as well. We have only limited contact to this day with most of them—I don’t believe anyone ever really realizes what the term ‘alien’ really means until you face it—but one set, the Meskok, we’ve had excellent relations with from the beginning. I am by no means convinced that they are any less alien than the others, and physiologically they are bizarre, but they are also directional telepaths, meaning they don’t read minds in the mass but can convey thoughts and receive directed thoughts when speaking to specific people. They are very good at it. They seem, mentally, just like us, and they are quite sly and yet knowledgeable about us because they can get things from our minds. Whether they are simply adapted to being great interspecies communicators or are truly good poker players can’t be known, since we, obviously, can’t read their thoughts beyond what they use for conversation. They are also excellent at adapting to even the most alien biology. It was one of them who brought me back to life within minutes of my being shot and killed so long ago, not far from this spot. They’ve been essential to us as basic medical resources, since, like most people in our age, even our doctors don’t know how to fix a hangnail without a computer surgery.”
“And what do they get from you?”
“Diversions. A new group for study. They are fascinated by how different races of beings come to be, and how they come up both in invention and cultures. We were the first humans of sufficient numbers for their study. They know it probably won’t mean much, considering they’re trapped here as much as we, but it gives them something to do. I suspect your anthropologist could sympathize. This group is more or less in the same business.”
“Are any there?” Randi asked him. “I should like to speak to one.”
“Not possible. I could bring one over, but you’d need a translator, and it would be awkward considering how they communicate. There is no way for them to broadcast over any of our communicators, nor for you to receive and comprehend any of theirs.”
“What did you say your name was?” the anthropologist asked, disappointed but realizing the impracticality of using audio channels to speak to a telepath.
“Thomas Cromwell,” he responded crisply, some of the old military snap suddenly back in his voice and stance.
“Got him on the list of Woodward’s people from the archives,” the captain said to them, but not for broadcast. “That’s not his real name. Said to have been a spit-and-polish naval admiral with a totally ruthless outlook on orders and duty. He is said to have been responsible for the death of whole inhabited planets during that period. Then, something happened. Nobody knew what, but it was profound. He resigned, joined Woodward as security chief, and became dedicated to Woodward and Woodward’s view of the Christian godhead. A very mysterious character and still considered very dangerous when he served Woodward’s flying mission.”
“So what was his real name? Is it somebody so infamous we’d have heard of it?” Queson asked.
“Possibly. Probably. But we don’t know it. This material is gathered anecdotally and indirectly. I’m sure intelligence and military groups know it, but it’s as if he were wiped out of the public and general private records. A man powerful enough to get that kind of official cover is somebody who can unbury every secret body of everyone in power this side of the Silence. A man they’re so scared of they didn’t even dare kill him.”
“Maybe they were right,” Sark noted. “I mean, according to him, he was shot dead and even that didn’t stop him.”
Nagel turned and looked at the big man. “You really believe that story?”
“Cromwell’s got a dozen or so aliens within a couple of hundred meters of him right now,” An Li noted, pointing to the signatures. “We haven’t even picked them up on camera; he’s been living with them for decades. How many aliens have you ever met, Jerry? Spacefaring aliens. Technological aliens. Who knows what they can do? Hell, we could probably have brought him back if the shot was just so.”