“Very interesting,” Ryu said politely.
This showed, Fokin stated, that all the buildings had one and the same function. “All we have to do is establish what,” he added as an afterthought.
When the helicopter returned the second time, Komov saw that Tanya and Fokin had set up a high pole and had raised over the city the unofficial flag of the Pathfinders-a white field with a stylized depiction of a heptagonal nut. A long time ago, almost a century back, one prominent spaceman and fervent opponent of the study of the evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space had once said heatedly that the only evidence that he was ready to consider irrefutable would be a wheel on an axle, a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem carved onto a cliffside, or a heptagonal nut. The Pathfinders had accepted the challenge and had emblazoned their flag with a depiction of a heptagonal nut.
Komov saluted the flag gladly. Much fuel had been burned and many parsecs had been traveled since the flag had been created. It had first flown over the circular streets of the empty city on Mars. At that time the fantastic hypothesis that both the city and the Martian satellites could have a natural origin had still had currency. At that time even the most daring Pathfinders merely considered the city and the satellites to be the sole remains of a mysterious vanished Martian civilization. And many parsecs had to be traveled, and much ground had to be dug, before only one hypothesis remained unrefuted: the empty cities and the abandoned satellites had been built by visitors from an unknown distant planetary system. But this city on Leonida…
Komov got the last pack out of the helicopter cabin, jumped into the grass, and slammed the door shut. Ryu went up to him, and said while rolling down his sleeves, “And now I must leave you, Gennady. I have a sounding in twenty minutes.”
“Of course,” said Komov. “Thank you, Ryu. Come have supper with us.”
Ryu looked at his watch and said, “Thank you, but I can’t guarantee it.”
Mboga, leaning his carbine against the wall of the nearest building, inflated a tent right in the middle of the street. He watched Ryu leave and then smiled at Komov, parting the gray lips on his small wrinkled face. “This is verily a planet with all the conveniences, Gennady,” he said. “Here we walk around weaponless, pitch tents right on the grass. And this…” He nodded in the direction of Fokin and Tanya. The Pathfinder archaeologist and the archaeological engineer, having trampled down the grass around them, were fussing over the autolab in the shade of a building. The archaeological engineer wore shorts and a silk sleeveless blouse. Her heavy shoes adorned the roof of the building, and her coverall lay next to the packs. Fokin, wearing gym shorts, was tearing off his sweat-drenched jacket.
“Good grief,” Tanya was saying, “How did you connect the batteries?”
“In a minute, in a minute, Tanya,” Fokin answered vaguely.
“No,” said Komov. “This isn’t Pandora.” He dragged a second tent out of the pack and set about fitting the rotary pump to it. No, this isn’t Pandora, he thought. On Pandora they had forced their way through murky jungles wearing heavy-duty spacesuits, carrying cumbersome disintegrators with the safety catches off. It squished underfoot, and with every step multilegged vermin ran every which way, while overhead two blood-red suns shone dimly through the tangle of sticky branches. And it was not only Pandora! On every planet with an atmosphere the Pathfinders and the Assaultmen moved with the greatest caution, driving before them columns of robot scouts, self-propelled biolabs, toxicanalyzers, condensed clouds of universal virophages. Immediately after landing, a ship’s captain was required to burn out a safety zone with thermite. It was considered an enormous crime to return to a ship without a preliminary, very careful disinfection and disinfestation. Invisible monsters more terrible than the plague or leprosy lay in wait for the unwary. It had happened only thirty years back.
It could happen even now on Leonida, the planet with all the conveniences. There were microfauna here too, and very abundant they were. But thirty years ago, small Doctor Mboga had found the “battery of life” on fierce Pandora, and Professor Karpenko on Earth had discovered bioblockading. One injection a day. You could even get by with one a week. Komov wiped his damp face and started undoing his jacket.
When the sun had sunk toward the west and the sky in the east had turned from a whitish color to dark violet, they sat down to supper. The camp was ready. Three tents crossed the street, and the packs and boxes of equipment were neatly stacked along the wall of one of the buildings. Fokin, sighing, had cooked supper. Everyone was hungry, and consequently they did not wait for Ryu. From the camp they could see that Ryu was sitting on the roof of his laboratory, doing something with the antennas.
“Never mind—we’ll leave some for him,” Tanya promised.
“Go ahead,” said Fokin, starting to eat his boiled veal. “He’ll get hungry and he’ll come.”
“You picked the wrong place to put the helicopter, Gennady,” said Tanya. “It blocks off the whole view of the river.”
Everyone looked at the helicopter. It really did destroy the view.
“You get a fine river view from the roof,” Komov said calmly.
“No, really,” said Fokin, who was sitting with his back to the river. “There’s nothing tasteful around here to look at.”
“What do you mean nothing?” Komov said as calmly as before. “What about the veal?” He lay down on his back and started looking at the sky.
“Here’s what I’m thinking about,” Fokin retorted, wiping his mustache with a napkin. “How will we dig into these graves?” He tapped his finger against the nearest building. “Shall we go under, or cut into the wall?”
“That’s not quite the problem,” Komov said lazily. “How did the owners get in?—that’s the problem. Did they cut into the walls too?”
Fokin looked thoughtfully at Komov and asked, “And what in fact do you know about the owners? Maybe they didn’t need to get in there.”
“Uh-huh,” said Tanya. “A new architectural principle. Somebody sat down on the grass, put walls and a ceiling around himself, and… and…”
“And went away,” Mboga finished.
“Well, suppose they really are tombs?” Fokin insisted.
Everyone discussed this proposal for some time.
“Tatyana, what do the analyses say?” asked Komov.
“Limestone,” said Tanya. “Calcium carbonate. Plus many impurities, of course. You know what it’s like? Coral reefs. And the more so, since the building is made out of a single piece.”
“A monolith of natural origin.”
“Here we go again with that natural business!” cried Fokin. “It’s a scientific law: you have only to find new evidence of aliens, and immediately people appear to declare that it’s a natural formation.”
“It’s a natural proposition,” said Komov.
“Tomorrow we’ll put together the intravisor and have a look,” Tanya promised. “The main thing is that this limestone has nothing in common with the stuff that the city on Mars is built from. Or the amberine of the city on Vladislava.”
“So someone else is wandering among the planets,” said Komov. “It would be nice if this time they left us something a little more substantial.”
“If we could just find a library,” moaned Fokin. “Or some sort of machinery!”
They fell silent. Mboga got out a short pipe, and started filling it. He squatted, looking pensively over the tents into the bright sky. Under the white kerchief, his small face had a look of complete peace and satisfaction.