“I don’t think so.” Targett put another forkful of steak into his mouth. “The syndicates are bound to use computers to calculate the odds. That gives them an unfair advantage.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Bubble was the unofficial name given to the expanding volume of space in which every planet and asteroid had been surveyed by men. Some of the worlds examined, the best, were earmarked for colonization or other kinds of development, but only in cases where there was no indigenous civilization. The Cartographical Service’s charter empowered it to deal solely with uninhabited planets—all inter-culture contacts being the prerogative of diplomatic or military missions, according to individual circumstances.
As a result of this policy, David Surgenor—although a long-term veteran of the Cartographical Service—had never in the course of his official duties encountered members of an extraterrestrial civilization, and had no expectations of doing so…
Surgenor stood by without speaking while part of the survey equipment was pulled out of Module Five to make room for two extra seats. As soon as the work had been completed he climbed into the heavy vehicle and drove it down the Sarafand’s ramp with unnecessary speed. Only a short distance separated the survey ship from the squat bulk of the military vessel Admiral Carpenter, but Surgenor selected ground-effect suspension and made the journey amid spectacular plumes of powdery sand. His course was marked by a blood-red gash in the white desert, which slowly healed itself as the phototropic sand returned to its surface.
One of the guards at the foot of the Admiral Carpenter’s ramp pointed to where he wanted Surgenor to park and said something into a wrist communicator. Surgenor slid Module Five into the indicated slot and killed the lift, allowing the beetle-shaped vehicle to settle on its under surface. He opened the door and the hot, dry air of the planet Saladin gusted into the cabin.
“Major Giyani’s party will be with you in two minutes,” the guard called.
Surgenor gave a muted parody of a military salute and slouched further down in his seat. He knew he was behaving childishly, but the Sarafand had been grounded on this world for almost a month now—and Surgenor had not been at rest that long in all his years in the Cartographical Service. Waiting in one place, wasting the meagre ration of time granted to humans, had the effect of making him pessimistic and morose. Travel no longer had the same compulsion for him that it used to have, yet he was unable to remain in one place.
He stared resentfully at the sun-blazing white desert which stretched to the horizon and wondered why it had seemed beautiful the first morning he saw it. There had been a wind that day, of course, and its swift-moving patterns had been traced as intricate shadings of crimson-through-white, sweeping across the dunes as buried layers were exposed to the sun and then made their phototropic response to its light.
The Sarafand had landed, as always, with the intention of carrying out a routine survey operation. There were obvious difficulties in the terrain, which meant that modules could travel at top speed, and the survey would have been completed in three days had the totally unexpected not occurred.
Three of the module crews had reported seeing apparitions.
The visions had taken two different forms—people and buildings—which shimmered transparently and vanished in a way which would have prompted observers to write them off as mirages—but for the fact that a mirage had to have a physical counterpart somewhere. And an earlier orbital survey of Saladin had established that it was a dead world, containing no intelligent life or traces of its former presence…
“Waken up, driver,” Major Giyani said crisply. “We’re ready to go.”
Surgenor raised his head with deliberate slowness and eyed the swarthy, black-moustached officer who was standing in the module’s entrance and somehow managing to look dapper in regulation battle kit. Behind him was a smooth-faced lieutenant with apologetic blue eyes, and a heavily built sergeant who was carrying a rifle.
“We can’t move off until everybody gets in,” Surgenor pointed out reasonably, but in a way which was meant to express his distaste for being treated as a chauffeur. He waited stolidly until the lieutenant and sergeant were in the supernumerary seats in the rear, and the major had sat down in the vacant front seat. The sergeant, whose name Surgenor vaguely remembered as McErlain, did not set his rifle down but cradled it in his lap.
“This is our destination,” Giyani said, handing Surgenor a sheet of paper on which was written a set of grid co-ordinates. “The straight-line distance from here is about…’
“Five-hundred-and-fifty kilometres,” Surgenor put in, having performed a rapid mental calculation.
Giyani raised his black eyebrows and looked closely at Surgenor. “Your name is…Dave Surgenor, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, Dave.” Giyani gave a prolonged smile which said, See how I humour touchy civilians?—then he pointed at the grid reference. “Can you get us there by eight-hundred hours, ship time?”
Surgenor decided, too late, that he preferred Giyani when he was being officious. He started the module rolling, switched to ground-effect suspension, and set a course that took them almost due south. There was little conversation during the two-hour journey, but Surgenor noted that Giyani addressed Sergeant McErlain with undisguised dislike, while the lieutenant—whose name was Kelvin—avoided speaking to the barrel-chested man at all. The sergeant answered Giyani in flat monosyllables in a way that remained on the safe side of insolence, but only just. Aware of the charged atmosphere in the module, Surgenor tried to remember the wisps of mess table gossip he had picked up about McErlain, but most of his thoughts were taken up with the objective of the present expedition.
When the first reports of apparitions had been radioed in to Aesop a check was made of the geodesic map of Saladin which was being built up in the computer decks. It revealed evidence of bedrock reshaping having been carried out three thousand years earlier, in locations which corresponded closely with those of the sightings.
At that stage Aesop had withdrawn the survey modules, in keeping with the limitations of the Cartographical Service’s charter, and a tachyonic transmission had been sent to the regional headquarters. As a result the cruiser Admiral Carpenter, which had been traversing that volume of space, arrived two days later and assumed control.
One of the first orders issued by Colonel Nietzel, commander of the ground forces, was that Aesop was to treat all information about Saladin as classified and to withhold it from civilian personnel. This should have meant that the Sarafand’s crewmen were completely in the dark about subsequent events, but there was some social contact between the two ships’ complements, and Surgenor had heard the rumours.
Scanner satellites thrown into orbit by the Admiral Carpenter were reputed to have recorded thousands of partial materializations of buildings, strange vehicles, animals and heavily-robed figures right across the face of Saladin. It was also said that some of the buildings and figures had materialized into full solidity, but had vanished before any of the military vessel’s fliers could reach them. It was as if another civilization existed on Saladin—one which had withdrawn beyond an incomprehensible barrier at the approach of strangers, and was determined to remain aloof.