The Mystery of Ireta (6 page)

“Why, why, it looks like the ones we have,” said Gaber in surprise that was almost outrage.

“No,” said Kai, turning the device thoughtfully in his hand, “the case is fatter, the crystal dimmer, and it feels old.”

“How can a core feel old? Why, the casing isn’t so much as scratched, or dull!”

“Heft it yourself. It feels old,” said Kai with a touch of impatience, and he was somewhat amused to see Gaber hesitantly examine the old core, and quickly hand it back.

“The Theks manufacture them, don’t they?” the cartographer said, giving Kai a sideways look.

“They have done so, but I think . . . Gaber, it won’t wash.”

“But don’t you see, Kai? The Theks know this planet has been surveyed. They’re back for some reason of their own. You know how they like to watchdog a likely colony . . .”

“Gaber!” Kai wanted to shake the older man, shake him out of his asinine and dangerous notion that the expedition had been planted. But, as he stared at the man’s eager, intense face, Kai realized how pathetic the cartographer was. Gaber must surely know this would be his last mission and was vainly hoping to extend it. “Gaber!” Kai gave the man a little shake, smiling kindly. “Now, I do appreciate your confiding your theory to me. You’ve done just as you should. And I appreciate the facts on which you base the notion, but please don’t go telling anyone else. I’d hate giving the heavy-worlders any excuse to ridicule one of my team.”

“Ridicule?” Gaber was startled and indignant.

“I’m afraid so, Gaber. The purpose of this expedition was too clearly set out in the original program. This is just an ordinary energy-resource expedition, with a bit of xenobiology thrown in as practice for Varian, and to keep the heavy-worlders fit and the youngsters occupied while the EV chases that cosmic storm. Just to reassure you, though, I’ll query EV about your theory in my next report. If, by some remote chance, you’re correct, they’d tell us. Now we’re down. In the meantime, I really do advise you to keep your theory between us, huh, Gaber? I value you as our cartographer too highly to want you mocked by the heavy-worlders.”

“Mocked?”

“They do like their little jokes on us light-gravs. I don’t want them to have one on you. We’ve a laugh for them, all right—on the Theks—with this!” Kai held up the core. “Our rocky friends are not so infallible after all. Not that I blame them for forgetting all about this planet, considering how it smells.”

“The heavy-worlders would make me a joke?” Gaber was having difficulty in accepting the possibility, but Kai was certain he’d found the proper deterrent to keep the man from spreading that insidious rumor.

“Under the present circumstances, yes, if you came out with that notion. As I mentioned, we have the youngsters with us. You don’t really think the third officer of EV is planting her son?”

“No, no, she wouldn’t do that.” Gaber’s expression changed from distressed to irritated. “You’re right. She’d’ve opposed it.” Gaber straightened his shoulders. “You’ve eased my mind, Kai. I hadn’t really
liked
the idea of being planted: I’ve left research unfinished and I only accepted this assignment to try and get a fresh perspective on it . . .”

“Good man.” Kai clapped the cartographer on the shoulder and turned him back toward the sled.

It occurred to Kai that he’d have all the arguments to press again once Gaber, and the others, learned that the EV had not picked up the secondary reports. He’d worry about that when the time came. Right now he had more to ponder in the ancient core in his hand. He didn’t think they had any apparatus in the shuttle for dating the device. He couldn’t remember if it had ever come up in discussions how long one of these cores could function. Portegin was the man to ask. And wouldn’t he be amazed at what his malfunctioning screen was recording?

In fact, Portegin was already puzzling over the print-out when Kai and Gaber strode into the chart dome.

“Kai, we’ve got some crazy echo on the seismic . . . what’s this?”

“One of those echoes.”

Portegin, his lean face settling into lines of dismay, weighed the device in his hand, peered at it, turning it round and round, end for end, before he looked with intense accusation at Kai.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Approximately here,” said Kai, pointing to the gap in the line of old echoes on the screen.

“We haven’t cored that area yet, boss.”

“I know.”

“But, boss, this is Thek manufacture. I’d swear it.”

Margit, who’d been filling in her report, came over to the two men. She took the core from Portegin’s unresisting hand.

“It feels heavier. And this crystal looks almost dead.” She regarded Kai for an explanation.

He shrugged. “Gaber saw the echoes on the recorder, thought you’d mucked it up, Portegin . . .” He grinned as the mechanic growled at the cartographer. “But I decided we’d better check. This was what we found.”

Margit made a guttural noise, deep in her throat, of disgust and irritation. “You mean, we’ve spent hours doing what has been
done
! You wit-heads could have saved us time and useless energy by rigging that screen right off.”

“According to our computer banks, this planet had never been surveyed,” Kai said in a soothing drawl.

“Well, obviously it has been.” Margit glowered at the screen. “And you know, we’ve paralleled their line almost perfectly. Not bad for a first working expedition, is it,” she added, talking herself into a better frame of mind. “Hey,” she said in a much louder, less happy tone of voice, “no wonder we couldn’t find anything worth the looking. It’d been got already. How far does the old survey coring go?”

“Stops at the edge of the shield, my dear girl,” said Portegin, “and now that we know from the old cores where the shield ends, we can start hitting some pay dirt for a change. I don’t think we’ve done too much duplication—except perhaps in the north and northeast.”

Kai thanked the compassionate computer that had put those two on this team with him—they might complain a bit, but they’d already talked themselves into a positive frame over the duplicated effort.

“I feel a lot better now, knowing there was a good reason we couldn’t find any pay dirt at all!” Margit studied the screen and then pointed at several areas. “There’s nothing here and here. Should be!”

“Signals are very faint,” Portegin said. “Some may have just given up the ghost. If everything else there is worked out, is there any point in setting new cores, Kai?”

“None.”

Aulia and Dimenon entered the cartography dome, closely followed by the other four geologists.

“Guess what Kai and Gaber found?” Margit asked. Expressions of surprise and displeasure greeted her question. “They found out why we couldn’t find anything . . . yet!”

So Kai and Gaber repeated the account of their afternoon’s activities, and the relief that spread throughout the room was reassuring to the team leader. Everyone had a turn at examining the old device, comparing it with those they were setting, joking about ghosts and echoes.

“We can set up secondary camps right on the edges of the shield,” Triv was saying excitedly. “Can we start tomorrow, Kai?”

“Surely, I’ll reassign everyone to more profitable areas hopefully. Let me work it out. And Bakkun, I’ll be out with you tomorrow.”

The meal gong sounded, reverberating under the force-screen, so he dismissed them all, staying behind briefly to reschedule flights for the next day. They would have to set up secondary camps, as Triv suggested, but Kai wasn’t all that keen to dissipate their complement. Varian hadn’t yet had a chance to catalogue the worst of the predators and, despite the personal force-screens, a team could be caught too far away for help to arrive in time. That predator he’d seen today wouldn’t be stopped by a puny personal force-screen. He also couldn’t hold the teams back from finding deposits; they got credit bonuses based on the assays of their individual discoveries. That was one reason why the lack of finds so far had had such a serious effect on their morale. He couldn’t risk a further check to their spirits and ambitions. He also couldn’t risk sending them out against predators like those he’d seen today. So he must have a chat with Varian.

He emerged into an insect-noisy night. The force-screen, arcing over the encampment, was aglow with blue spits of light as nocturnal creatures tried to reach the tantalizing floodlights which illuminated the compound.

Had that other survey party, millennia ago, camped here? Would another group, millennia hence, return when his cores emitted shallow ghost blips on another screen?

Had they really been planted?
The disturbing thought bobbed to the surface of his reflections, much as the aquatic monsters had been triggered by the shadow of the sled over the water. He tried to push down the notion. Had one of the others been tipped off secretly? Varian? No, as co-leader she was the least likely to have been informed. Tanegli? And was that why he was so willing to search out edible fruits? No, Tanegli was a sound man, but not the sort to be given private instructions while the team leaders were keyed out.

Not quite reassured within his own mind, Kai decided that congenial company would disrupt the uneasy tenor of his thoughts and he strode more purposefully toward the largest dome and his meal.

3

V
ARIAN
was diverted by Kai’s reception of the fruit when it was served as the evening meal. Divisti and Lungie had collaborated, and the table was spread with the fruit in its natural form, sliced into green juicy portions; fruit synthesized as a paste, reinforced with nutrients and vitamins; fruit added to the subsistence proteins; stewed fruit, dried fruit. Kai fastidiously tasted a minute piece of the fresh sliced fruit, smiled, made polite noises and finished his meal with the paste. Then he complained of a metallic aftertaste.

“That’s the additives. There’s no aftertaste with the fresh fruit,” Varian told him, suppressing a mixture of annoyance at his conservative tastes and amusement at his reaction. The ship-bred were wary of anything in its natural form.

“Why cultivate a taste for something I can’t indulge?” Kai asked when she tried to get him to eat more of the fresh fruit.

“Why not indulge yourself a little, while you have the chance? Besides,” she added, “once you have the taste, you can program it into any synthesizer and duplicate it on shipboard to your heart’s content.”

“A point.”

Varian had decided some time ago that it was just these little ship-evolved differences that fascinated her about Kai. He wasn’t physically that much different from the attractive young men she’d known on the various planets of her childhood and during early specialist’s training. If anything, Kai had kept himself more physically fit in the EV’s various humanoid sports facilities than his planet-based contemporaries. He had a lean, wiry frame, slightly taller than average, taller than herself, and she was not rated short on any normal Earth-type planet, being 1.75 meters tall. More important to her in Kai than mere handsomeness, which he had, was the strength in his face, the sparkle of humor in his brown eyes and the inner serenity that had commended him when they’d met in the EV’s humanoid dining area. She’d quickly recognized the aura of Discipline about him and had been overwhelmingly relieved that he was a Disciple and amused that his having passed the Training mattered to her on such short acquaintance. She’d accepted Discipline not that long ago herself, proud of her achievement and determined to suppress that pride, however much it meant that she could continue to advance in FSP service. A leader had to have Discipline since it was the only personal defense against other humanoids permitted by FSP and EEC, and of inestimable value in emergency situations.

Varian had been quite willing to develop a relationship with Kai and had privately done a good bit of crowing when she’d unexpectedly been tapped as a xenob on his geology expedition to Ireta.

“And what’s this I hear? This planet’s been raped before?”

“The shield land mass we’re on has certainly been stripped,” Kai replied, grinning a little at her blunt phrase. “Portegin only got the seismic screen rigged last night. Gaber thought it was malfunctioning because we got echoes where we’d cored, and faint impulses where we hadn’t. So I did a deccod and found an old, old core.”

Varian had already heard many of the details. “We were informed during our briefing on shipboard that the system had been in storage a long time.”

“Well, there certainly was no mention made of a previous geological survey.”

“True,” and Varian looked thoughtfully at a vague middle distance as she drawled out the affirmative. There had been sort of a last minute rush to assemble this Iretan expedition, though the Theks and Ryxi had been scheduled for their respective planets for some months. “My team was sure added in a hurry. After they got print-outs of life forms from the probe scan.”

“With all due respect, co-leader, the inclusion of your team doesn’t puzzle me as much as no mention of a previous coring.”

“I quite appreciate that. How old d’you think the cores are?”

“Too scorching old for my liking, Varian. The lines end with the stable shield area!”

Varian drew breath in a whistle. “Kai, that would mean millions of years. Could even a Thek-manufactured device last
that
long?”

“Who knows? C’mon, you can have a look at the device yourself. Then I’ve some tapes to play for you that I think you’ll like.”

“Those flying things Gaber was raving about?”

“Among others.”

“Sure you won’t have one more piece of fresh fruit?” She couldn’t resist teasing him.

Kai gave her a fleetingly irritated look, then grinned. He had an engaging smile, she thought, and not for the first time. They’d seen a good deal of each other in the planning stages but far too little now that they had to deal with their separate responsibilities.

“I’ve had a sufficiency to eat, thank you, Varian.”

“And I’m a glutton, huh?” But she snatched up one more slice from the platter. “What are these avians like? I don’t trust Gaber’s observations.”

“They’re golden-furred and I’d hazard that they’re intelligent. Curiosity occurs only with intelligence, doesn’t it?”