The Complete Short Stories Page 11

  Maxted had almost gone now, his fading identity a small featureless island nearly eroded by the waves beating across it.

  Sheringham knelt down and shouted into his ear.

  'Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you're drowning?'

  A succession of gigantic flaccid waves, each more lumbering and enveloping than the last, rode down upon them.

  'In a kiss!' Sheringham screamed. 'A kiss!'

  The island slipped and slid away into the molten shelf of the sea.

  1958

  The Waiting Grounds

  Whether Henry Talus, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can't say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me - a job which could easily have been done in three days were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven't yet faced up to.

  I remember that on the first evening after my arrival at Murak he asked me a question I've been puzzling over ever since.

  We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot steel bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us.

  'Tell me, Quaine,' Talus suddenly asked, 'where would you like to be when the world ends?'

  'I haven't really thought about it,' I admitted. 'Is there any urgency?'

  'Urgency?' Talus smiled at me thinly, his eyes amiable but assessing me shrewdly. 'Wait until you've been here a little longer.'

  He had almost finished his last tour at the observatory and I assumed he was referring to the desolation around us which he, after fifteen years, was leaving thanklessly to my entire care. Later, of course, I realized how wrong I was, just as I misjudged the whole of Talus's closed, complex personality.

  He was a lean, ascetic-looking man of about fifty, withheld and moody, as I discovered the moment I debarked from the freighter flying me in to Murak - instead of greeting me at the ramp he sat in the half-track a hundred yards away at the edge of the port, watching silently through dark glasses as I heaved my suitcases across the burning, lava-thick sunlight, legs weary after the massive deceleration, stumbling in the unfamiliar gravity.

  The gesture seemed characteristic. Talus's manner was aloof and sardonic; everything he said had the same deliberately ambiguous overtones, that air of private mystery recluses and extreme introjects assume as a defence. Not that Talus was in any way pathological - no one could spend fifteen years, even with six-monthly leaves, virtually alone on a remote planetary clinker like Murak without developing a few curious mannerisms. In fact, as I all too soon realized, what was really remarkable about Talus was the degree to which he had preserved his sanity, not surrendered it.

  He listened keenly to the latest news from Earth.

  'The first pilotless launchings- to Proxima Centauri are scheduled for 2250... the UN Assembly at Lake Success have just declared themselves a sovereign state... V-R Day celebrations are to be discontinued - you must have heard it all on the radiocasts.'

  'I haven't got a radio here,' Tallis said. 'Apart from the one up there, and that's tuned to the big spiral networks in Andromeda. On Murak we listen only to the important news.'

  I nearly retorted that by the time it reached Murak the news, however important, would be a million years old, but on that first evening I was preoccupied with adjusting myself to an unfamiliar planetary environment - notably a denser atmosphere, slightly higher (1.2 E) gravity, vicious temperature swings from - 30¡ to +160' - and programming new routines to fit myself into Murak's 18-hour day.

  Above all, there was the prospect of two years of near-absolute isolation.

  Ten miles from Murak Reef, the planet's only settlement, the observatory was sited among the first hills marking the northern edge of the inert volcano jungle which spread southward to Murak's equator. It consisted of the giant telescope and a straggling nexus of twenty or thirty asbestos domes which housed the automatic data processing and tracking units, generator and refrigerating plant, and a miscellany of replacement and vehicle stores, workshops and ancillary equipment.

  The observatory was self-sufficient as regards electric power and water. On the near-by slopes farms of solar batteries had been planted out in quarter-mile strips, the thousands of cells winking in the sunlight like a field of diamonds, sucking power from the sun to drive the generator dynamos. On another slope, its huge mouth permanently locked into the rock face, a mobile water synthesizer slowly bored its way through the desert crust, mining out oxygen and hydrogen combined into the surface minerals.

  'You'll have plenty of spare time on your hands,' the Deputy Director of the Astrographic Institute on Ceres had warned me when I initialled the contract. 'There's a certain amount of routine maintenance, checking the power feeds to the reflector traverses and the processing units, but otherwise you won't need to touch the telescope. A big digital does the heavy thinking, tapes all the data down in 2000-hour schedules. You fly the cans out with you when you go on leave.'

  'So apart from shovelling the sand off the doorstep there's virtually nothing for me to do?' I'd commented.

  'That's what you're being paid for. Probably not as much as you deserve. Two years will seem a long time, even with three leave intervals. But don't worry about going crazy. You aren't alone on Murak. You'll just be bored. £2000 worth, to be exact. However, you say you have a thesis to write. And you never know, you may like it there. Tallis, the observer you're taking over from, went out in '03 for two years like yourself, and stayed fifteen. He'll show you the ropes. Pleasant fellow, by all accounts, a little whimsical, probably try to pull your leg.'

  Tallis drove me down to the settlement the first morning to collect my heavy vacuum baggage that had travelled spacehold.

  'Murak Reef,' he pointed out as the old '95 Chrysler half-track churned through the thick luminous ash silted over the metal road. We crossed a system of ancient lava lakes, flat grey disks half a mile wide, their hard crusts blistered and pocked by the countless meteor showers that had driven into Murak during the past million years. In the distance a group of long flat-roofed sheds and three high ore elevators separated themselves from the landscape.

  'I suppose they warned you. One supplies depot, a radio terminal and the minerals concession. Latest reliable estimates put the total population at seven.'

  I stared out at the surrounding desert floor, cracked and tiered by the heat swings into what looked like huge plates of rusted iron, and at the massed cones of the volcano jungle yellowing in the sand haze. It was 4 o'clock local time early morning - but the temperature was already over 80¡. We drove with windows shuttered, sun curtain down, refrigerating unit pumping noisily.

  'Must be fun on Saturday night,' I commented. 'Isn't there anything else?'

  'Just the thermal storms, and a mean noon temperature of 160¡.'

  'In the shade?'

  Tallis laughed. 'Shade? You must have a sense of humour. There isn't any shade on Murak. Don't ever forget it. Half an hour before noon the temperature starts to go up two degrees a minute. If you're caught out in it you'll be putting a match to your own pyre.'

  Murak Reef was a dust hole. In the sheds backing onto the depot the huge ore crushers and conveyors of the extraction plants clanked and slammed. Tallis introduced me to the agent, a morose old man called Pickford, and to two young engineers taking the wraps off a new grader. No one made any attempt at small talk. We nodded briefly, loaded my luggage onto the half-track and left.

  'A taciturn bunch,' I said. 'What are they mining?'

  'Tantalum, Columbium, the Rare Earths. A heartbreaking job, the concentrations are barely workable. They're tempted to Murak by fabulous commission rates, but they're lucky if they can even fill their norms.'

  'You can't be sorry you're leaving. What made you stay here fifteen
years?'

  'It would take me fifteen years to tell you,' Tallis rejoined. 'I like the empty hills and the dead lakes.'

  I murmured some comment, and aware that I wasn't satisfied he suddenly scooped a handful of grey sand off the seat, held it up and let it sift away through his fingers. 'Prime archezoic loam. Pure bedrock. Spit on it and anything might happen. Perhaps you'll understand me if I say I've been waiting for it to rain.'

  'Will it?'

  Tallis nodded. 'In about two million years, so someone who came here told me.'

  He said it with complete seriousness.

  During the next few days, as we checked the stores and equipment inventories and ran over the installation together, I began to wonder if Talus had lost his sense of time. Most men left to themselves for an indefinite period develop some occupational interest: chess or an insoluble dream-game or merely a compulsive wood-whittling. But Tallis, as far as I could see, did nothing. The cabin, a three-storey drum built round a central refrigerating column, was spartan and comfortless. Tallis's only recreation seemed to be staring out at the volcano jungle. This was an almost obsessive activity - all evening and most of the afternoon he would sit up on the lounge deck, gazing out at the hundreds of extinct cones visible from the observatory, their colours running the spectrum from red to violet as the day swung round into night.

  The first indication of what Tallis was watching for came about a week before he was due to leave. He had crated up his few possessions and we were clearing out one of the small storage domes near the telescope. In the darkness at the back, draped across a pile of old fans, track links and beer coolers, were two pedal-powered refrigerator suits, enormous unwieldy sacks equipped with chest pylons and hand-operated cycle gears.

  'Do you ever have to use these?' I asked Tallis, glumly visualizing what a generator failure could mean.

  He shook his head. 'They were left behind by a survey team which did some work out in the volcanoes. There's an entire camp lying around in these sheds, in case you ever feel like a weekend on safari.'

  Tallis was by the door. I moved my flashlight away and was about to switch it off when something flickered up at me from the floor. I stepped over the debris, searched about and found a small circular aluminium chest, about two feet across by a foot deep. Mounted on the back was a battery pack, thermostat and temperature selector. It was a typical relic of an expensively mounted expedition, probably a cocktail cabinet or hat box. Embossed in heavy gold lettering on the lid were the initials 'C. F. N.'

  Tallis came over from the door.

  'What's this?' he asked sharply, adding his flash to mine.

  I would have left the case where it lay, but there was something in Tallis's voice, a distinct inflection of annoyance, that made me pick it up and shoulder past into the sunlight.

  I cleaned off the dust, Tallis at my shoulder. Keying open the vacuum seals I sprung back the lid. Inside was a small tape recorder, spool racks and a telescopic boom mike that cantilevered three feet up into the air, hovering a few inches from my mouth. It was a magnificent piece of equipment, a singleorder job hand-made by a specialist, worth at least £500 apart from the case.

  'Beautifully tooled,' I remarked to Tallis. I tipped the platform and watched it spring gently. 'The air bath is still intact.'

  I ran my fingers over the range indicator and the selective six-channel reading head. It was even fitted with a sonic trip, a useful device which could be set to trigger at anything from a fly's foot-fall to a walking crane's.

  The trip had been set; I wondered what might have strayed across it when I saw that someone had anticipated me. The tape between the spools had been ripped out, so roughly that one spool had been torn off its bearings. The rack was empty, and the two frayed tabs hooked to the spool axles were the only pieces of tape left.

  'Somebody was in a hurry,' I said aloud. I depressed the lid and polished the initials with my fingertips. 'This must have belonged to one of the members of the survey. C. F. N. Do you want to send it on to him?'

  Tallis watched me pensively. 'No. I'm afraid the two members of the team died here. Just over a year ago.'

  He told me about the incident. Two Cambridge geologists had negotiated through the Institute for Tallis's help in establishing a camp ten miles out in the volcano jungle, where they intended to work for a year, analysing the planet's core materials. The cost of bringing a vehicle to Murak was prohibitive, so Tallis had transported all the equipment to the camp site and set it up for them.

  'I arranged to visit them once a month with power packs, water and supplies. The first time everything seemed all right. They were both over sixty, but standing up well to the heat. The camp and laboratory were running smoothly, and they had a small transmitter they could have used in an emergency.

  'I saw them three times altogether. On my fourth visit they had vanished. I estimated that they'd been missing for about a week. Nothing was wrong. The transmitter was working, and there was plenty of water and power. I assumed they'd gone out collecting samples, lost themselves and died quickly in the first noon high.'

  'You never found the bodies?'

  'No. I searched for them, but in the volcano jungle the contours of the valley floors shift from hour to hour. I notified the Institute and two months later an inspector flew in from Ceres and drove out to the site with me. He certified the deaths, told me to dismantle the camp and store it here. There were a few personal things, but I've heard nothing from any friends or relatives.'

  'Tragic,' I commented. I closed the tape recorder and carried it into the shed. We walked back to the cabin. It was an hour to noon, and the parabolic sun bumper over the roof was a bowl of liquid fire.

  I said to Tallis: 'What on earth were they hoping to catch in the volcano jungle? The sonic trip was set.'

  'Was it?' Tallis shrugged. 'What are you suggesting?'

  'Nothing. It's just curious. I'm surprised there wasn't more of an investigation.'

  'Why? To start with, the fare from Ceres is £800, over £3000 from Earth. They were working privately. Why should anyone waste time and money doubting the obvious?'

  I wanted to press Tallis for detail, but his last remark seemed to close the episode. We ate a silent lunch, then went out on a tour of the solar farms, replacing burnt-out thermo-couples. I was left with a vanished tape, two deaths, and a silent teasing suspicion that linked them neatly together.

  Over the next days I began to watch Tallis more closely, waiting for another clue to the enigma growing around him.

  I did learn one thing that astonished me.

  I had asked him about his plans for the future; these were indefinite - he said something vague about a holiday, nothing he anticipated with any eagerness, and sounded as if he had given no thought whatever to his retirement. Over the last few days, as his departure time drew closer, the entire focus of his mind became fixed upon the volcano jungle; from dawn until late into the night he sat quietly in his chair, staring out at the ghostless panorama of disintegrating cones, adrift in some private time sea.

  'When are you coming back?' I asked with an attempt at playfulness, curious why he was leaving Murak at all.

  He took the question seriously. 'I'm afraid I won't be. Fifteen years is long enough, just about the limit of time one can spend continuously in a single place. After that one gets institutionalized - '

  'Continuously?' I broke in. 'You've had your leaves?'

  'No, I didn't bother. I was busy here.'

  'Fifteen years!' I shouted. 'Good God, why? In this of all places! And what do you mean, "busy"? You're just sitting here, waiting for nothing. What are you supposed to be watching for, anyway?'

  Tallis smiled evasively, started to say something and then thought better of it.

  The question pressed round him. What was he waiting for? Were the geologists still alive? Was he expecting them to return, or make some signal? As I watched him pace about the cabin on his last morning I was convinced there was something he couldn't
quite bring himself to tell me. Almost melodramatically he watched out over the desert, delaying his departure until the thirty-minute take-off siren hooted from the port. As we climbed into the half-track I fully expected the glowing spectres of the two geologists to come looming out of the volcano jungle, uttering cries of murder and revenge.

  He shook my hand carefully before he went aboard. 'You've got my address all right? You're quite sure?' For some reason, which confused my cruder suspicions, he had made a special point of ensuring that both I and the Institute would be able to contact him.

  'Don't worry,' I said. 'I'll let you know if it rains.'

  He looked at me sombrely. 'Don't wait too long.' His eyes strayed past my head towards the southern horizon, through the sand-haze to the endless sea of cones. He added: 'Two million years is a long time.'

  I took his arm as we walked to the ramp. 'Tallis,' I asked quietly, 'what are you watching for? There's something, isn't there?'

  He pulled away from me, collected himself. 'What?' he said shortly, looking at his wristwatch.

  'You've been trying to tell me all week,' I insisted. 'Come on, man.'

  He shook his head abruptly, muttered something about the heat and stepped quickly through the lock.

  I started to shout after him: 'Those two geologists are out there... but the five-minute siren shattered the air and by the time it stopped Tallis had disappeared down the companionway and crewmen were shackling on the launching gantry and sealing the cargo and passenger locks.

  I stood at the edge of the port as the ship cleared its take-off check, annoyed with myself for waiting until the last impossible moment to press Tallis for an explanation. Half an hour later he was gone.

  Over the next few days Tallis began to slide slowly into the back of my mind. I gradually settled into the observatory, picked out new routines to keep time continuously on the move. Mayer, the metallurgist down at the mine, came over to the cabin most evenings to play chess and forget his pitifully low extraction rates. He was a big, muscular fellow of thirty-five who loathed Murak's climate, geology and bad company, a little crude but the sort of tonic I needed after an overdose of Tallis.