I said to the man from the Space Agency.
“They blew it,” he said. “They all died. Every last one, within the space of a single night. They never got a chance to find out what it was that hit them. They couldn’t provide the shipboard personnel with a single clue. They started dying, and they had no way to fight.”
“Cross-systemic infection,” I said. “Instant epidemic. That’s what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” replied Harmall. “That’s up to you, if you want the job.”
“Nobody else went down from the ship?”
Harmall shook his head. “By this time, the crew had the HSB in orbit and ready to burn. Captain d’Orsay considered that a state of emergency had arisen. The captains of the other crews were revived, and d’Orsay handed over command to Captain Juhasz. Rather than send a second technical crew to follow the first, he decided to wait for a time for a response to the beacon. He considered—correctly—that three hundred and fifty years of technical progress and expanding knowledge might allow him to call upon greater resources than he already had on the Ariadne. All further investigation of the surface was carried out by robot probes—which were not, of course, permitted to return.”
“We three, then, are being invited to play detective?” This time the question came from Zeno.
“That’s right,” said Harmall. “As I’ve said, there are manifest dangers. On the other hand, you start with one advantage: the bodies are there for examination. An autopsy might reveal the cause of death. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“How long will they have been dead by the time we get there?” I wanted to know.
“Nearly two months,” he told me.
Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a nice job. On the other hand, I was only a humble geneticist. Angelina Hesse was a physiologist. In my book, that made her number-one scalpel-wielder. Zeno and I were the hit men—we had to sort out the cure once the disease was identified.
“Why no pathologist?” I inquired.
“There is one,” said Harmall. “He’s coming in from a station in the belt.”
“A Soviet?”
“That’s right. Vesenkov—know him?”
I shook my head. Theoretically, the principle of freedom of information applies to research findings in pure science. For a while, I’d actually bothered to keep up with the bulletins published in English by the Soviets, but I’d eventually realized that they were never going to tell me anything non-trivial that I didn’t already know. Whether acknowledged or not, the principle of sovereignty extended to knowledge as well as to territory. We probably had agents who knew everything that appeared in the Soviets’ own bulletins, just as they had agents who read ours in the original, but information like that doesn’t filter back to the poor sods who do all the work.
“This is a matter for the concern of the entire race,” said Harmall smoothly. “We’re obliged to permit a soviet observer to participate in our investigations. We asked them to supply a competent professional, and they of course agreed. He’ll be here in two days. The Earth Spirit should be just about ready to set out by then, assuming that you can have your equipment stowed quickly enough. You can discuss weight and size restrictions with the quartermaster. Are you still with us?”
I was still with him. It had never crossed my mind to consider the possibility of backing out. Obviously, the Ariadne’s team had made a mistake. I thought of myself as the kind of man who never made mistakes. Ergo, I figured, there was nothing to be scared of.
I broached what seemed to me, at the time, to be a much more important question. “On the basis of what you’ve shown us,” I said, “Naxos isn’t as...well-developed...as Earth. In an evolutionary sense, that is. All the vertebrates in those pictures are what we’d call primitive. Amphibious. The implication is that the cleidoic egg hasn’t yet appeared, nor internal temperature regulation as in Earthly mammals. I take it from what you said earlier that such a state of affairs wouldn’t be too surprising—climatic stability and an abundance of water seem to be the rule there. Am I right?”
“There is no evidence of creatures resembling mammals,” he replied. “Our information is very limited, though. We would hesitate to make statements about the whole world on the basis of what was discovered in one locality in a matter of twenty days.”
“You have supplementary evidence from the robots.”
“Very little,” he said.
He was playing coy. It wasn’t just scientific caution. For some reason, he didn’t want to jump to the oh-so-attractive conclusion that Naxos was a virgin world, ready for exploitation if only it could be demonstrated that humans could live there. Maybe, I thought, it was an official line, chosen so as to provide an excuse for holding the Soviets back from a more intimate involvement. If Naxos was what it seemed, then it surely was a matter to interest the whole human race; but while we could treat it as nothing more than another biological puzzle, with no real practical implications, it would be much easier for Space Agency to keep control.
I didn’t bother to follow up the line of thought. It didn’t really interest me that much.
“Have we finished for the time being?” asked Schumann.
Harmall signaled that we had, though he looked around once more to see if there was any sign of anyone wanting to back out.
“In that case,” said the director, “you’d better take Dr. Hesse to your lab, Lee. No equipment came up from Marsbase, and I doubt if Vesenkov will bring any from the Belt. You’d better start deciding what you need, before the Earth Spirit’s quartermaster begins telling you what you can’t have.”
I was the last to leave the room, and as I looked back at Schumann, he said, “Good luck.” I realized then that he had meant the remark about being expendable.
“You don’t really think there’s something there that we can’t handle, do you?” I asked him.
“Why do you think Zeno is included?” he countered. His voice was low. Zeno was out in the corridor, moving away.
“He and I are a good team?” I suggested.
“A bug which knocks out humans just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “might take a little longer to dispose of a Calicoi. Or maybe it will work the other way around. Either way, someone could be on hand to watch it happen, and get the story back. That’s how dangerous Harmall thinks it is.”
“You worry too much,” I told him.
Directors are paid to be cautious to the point of paranoia. I preferred to think that Zeno was in for much the same reason that Vesenkov was in—because the Calicoi had every right to take an interest in the Ariadne’s discovery.
“Well,” he said, “good luck anyway.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll tell you the whole story, next time I pass this way.”
I figured that I was in a position to be generous with my promises.
CHAPTER FIVE
When
