The End of the Matter Page 21

  Water flowed below, rather than on top of the land. There was little in the way of large bodies of fresh water. The land showed the sameness as the cities. And each city was like the next, differing only in size. They were full of crumbling, disintegrating stonework and pitted metal structures, inhabited now only by insinuating winds and fading memories. The Teacher’s shuttle flew over each with the same hopes, departed with identical disappointment.

  “The Tar-Aiym built better cities but fewer, judging from what we saw of Booster.” Truzenzuzex was staring out at the desert sliding past beneath them. “That fits with what we know of the Hur’rikku’s rumored prolificacy and helps to explain the Tar-Aiym’s fright.”

  “You’re sure that Ab’s not one of them?” Flinx indicated the alien, who was strapped into a chair facing a wide viewport.

  Tse-Mallory shook his head. “The shape of the doors we have seen on low passes is enough to demonstrate that, whatever else Ab is, he is not a Hur’rikku. They were much smaller than Ab, smaller than ourselves. Closer to the Otoid of Alaspin, if you need a race for comparison. Whereas the Tar-Aiym, as near as we can tell from similar evidence on their world of Booster, were massive creatures, far larger even than your friend September. And yet,” he mused, staring out over the wastelands of metal and rock and sand, “the tiny Hur’rikku succeeded in terrifying the greater Tar-Aiym to the point where they lost control of their military science and created something which ultimately destroyed them all.”

  Truzenzuzex looked unhappy as he preened his antennae with a truhand. “We are wasting time, I fear. We cannot spend forever on this world. Another week, and I recommend returning to hire additional, nongovernment help.” At Flinx’s look of surprise he added: “It is in my nature to be impatient, friend Flinx.”

  As the shuttle banked sharply to leave the city they had just inspected, the philosoph slumped in his lounge-seat. “Ab still shows no indication of responding to anything on this world. I fear that he might not react to the weapon even if we passed directly over it. And since we have no idea what to look for, if it does not resemble a humanx weapon we could pass the thing by in equal ignorance. How many cities have we inspected, ship-brother?”

  “Fifty-five, counting the last.”

  Truzenzuzex made a sound indicative of mild disgust mixed with personal recrimination. “We could check out a thousand fifty-five, I’m afraid, without any hope of success.”

  His companion smiled back at him stolidly. “Possible, but we must examine those thousand and however many more. Three worlds await our—”

  Truzenzuzex waved resignedly. “Yes, I know, I know. But it seems so hopeless. If we could only pry some clue, some hint as to where the weapon was kept, out of Ab, we might find it. On Booster the location of the Krang was evident from its size, its position of isolation and importance, and the uniqueness of its construction. We have detected nothing similar on this world, nothing out of the ordinary in any city.”

  It was then that Flinx, keyed by Truzenzuzex’s words, had one of those rare moments of intuition which he could never predict. Yet that flash of intuition probably was not the result of his special talents at all. There was nothing extraordinary about the thought that occurred to him. It might simply have been that he, unlike the scientists, could think only of simple possibilities. He had already voiced half a hundred opinions on the possible location of the weapon prior to this one. None had been worthwhile. But this one definitely was.

  “If I,” he said casually, rubbing the back of Pip’s head, “had built a really powerful weapon, I’d want to make awful sure that if it went off accidentally no one would get hurt.”

  “In the ocean, perhaps?” mused Tse-Mallory uncertainly. “But there are signs that the oceans were heavily used, perhaps as a food source. We have seen no place of sufficient isolation to construct or locate such a weapon.”

  Truzenzuzex left his antennae alone. “Not on this planet, no. I would not put a device capable of destroying a collapsar on any inhabited world.”

  Tse-Mallory merely nodded slowly, comprehending. The philosoph went to the shuttle controls and reset its course for the camp set up in the northern hemisphere by September and Hasboga several weeks ago.

  “We have studied this world in hopes of finding something huge and different. The weapon could be small and ordinary-looking as well. But before we try combing every building, I think it behooves us to try your theory, Flinx.”

  Flinx shook his head. “But if it’s in this system and not on this planet, how do we find it?”

  “Your same thought holds, Flinx.” Truzenzuzex leaned away from the controls. “Any race cautious enough to place such a dangerous device off its world would take care not to lose track of it. They would want to know where it was at all times. As yet we have not monitored persistent surface sources of radiation for any energy traveling out into space. Such energy should be produced by the most sophisticated, reliable machinery the Hur’rikku could construct. They would be designed to be long-lasting and self-repairing, in case of peripheral damage.”

  September was sick of the desert and rejoined them willingly and gladly. Hasboga reacted to the word that they might be leaving the planet permanently somewhat less enthusiastically. She was on the verge, she assured them, of uncovering secrets of the Hur’rikku which would keep Commonwealth researchers busy for decades. September half convinced, half coerced her onto the shuttle.

  “We may have to return tomorrow, if this idea reveals nothing,” Tse-Mallory said in an effort to placate her. “We may not discover any energy being beamed offplanet. A few circumpolar and equatorial orbits should be enough to tell.”

  Hasboga fumed and argued and cried and having no choice, gave in.

  Sensors on board the Teacher had previously recorded over a hundred sources of radiation from still-functioning Hur’rikku machinery. Many seemed to be homing beacons. These were located on the outskirts of vast urban areas, near spacious plains that might once have been shuttleports or some other kind of staging area.

  Three such beams were still broadcasting with enough power to reach deeply into space, well beyond where an incoming craft would need to pick them up. One beam emerged from the ground near the largest city on the south polar continent and dissipated itself in the general direction of Sagittarius. Flinx was more tempted than he could say to try to follow that immensely powerful radiant arrow to its ultimate destination.

  But they desperately needed to locate something somewhat closer to home. So Flinx had the computer plot the beam’s course for future reference. Someday, perhaps . . .

  A second beam led the Teacher and its anxious occupants to the fourth moon of the peripheral gas giant. They traced it to some small ruins, better preserved than any they had seen on the inhabited world itself. There was some erosion, however, since the moon possessed an atmosphere of its own. They had difficulty convincing Hasboga they couldn’t afford to linger near the wonderfully intact Hur’rikku structures.

  The third beam directed them to a fourth planet, one the ship’s instruments had not detected during their initial rapid approach to the Cannachanna system. That was not surprising, however: The fourth planet was less a world than a drifting moon, about a third the size of Earth’s. It orbited Cannachanna twice as far out as the gas giant did. It was a bleak, meteor-scoured globe, relentlessly uninviting, coated with a thin crust of frozen methane and ammonia. It had no free atmosphere. One side always faced sunward; the other perpetually gazed at the abyss of interstellar space.

  They found a tiny receiver on Cannachanna IV. The beam from the Hur’rikku world ended there. A quick search of the receiving installation revealed only receiving equipment. There was nothing remotely like a free-standing device or weapon. Everything was tied in to the receiving station.

  The team commenced a slow, low-orbit probe of the moon-world’s surface. Detectors showed nothing below them but reflective frozen gas and dead rock.

  Truzenzuzex was watching the monitor�
�s monotonous reports flow dutifully to readouts in the piloting chamber. “This is the end, I suppose,” he said dolefully. “We might as well attempt to follow the first transmission to Sagittarius.” He shook his shining, jewel-eyed head. “I fear I am almost too old to make such a journey.”

  Tse-Mallory’s expression was equally disconsolate, even as he tried to sound optimistic. “There is still a chance. We have not finished the survey yet. And we can always return to the second planet and begin again. The supposition we’re pursuing may have been in error.”

  “True,” agreed the philosoph.

  “Gentlesirs.” Flinx glanced back from his position by the monitors. “There’s an artifact ahead of us.”

  That announcement precipitated a rush by the two scientists toward the smaller screens located in the main console. Sure enough, according to the instruments they were approaching a comparatively small solid object of indeterminate composition. It remained stable above the small planet and lay in a straight line with the transmission ending on the rocky globe’s opposite side.

  With all instruments operating and alert for any sign of a reaction from the device, the Teacher nudged cautiously closer.

  A fourth voice added itself to the general discussion: “See flivver run and diver, hopscotch moplatch, puddin’n thatch a house and teach a mouse.” Ab lectured them in that vein for half an hour, then turned away and resumed his solitary singing.

  Truzenzuzex ran the entire recorded dialogue through the vocabulary they had laboriously constructed for Ab. It produced one recognizable Terranglo word: “Bang.”

  The philosoph could hardly contain his excitement. “Gentlesirs, I think we’ve found our weapon.”

  But the actual sight of the artifact, when they had drawn near enough to inspect it visually, was disappointing. Certainly it displayed none of the visual awesomeness of the quiescent Tar-Aiym weapon, The Krang—or, for that matter, the impressiveness of many humanx weapons Flinx had seen or heard of.

  September was urged forward, to venture his opinion. It was not complimentary. “A single SCCAM shell would make basic particles of that thing. That’s the most pitiful excuse for an ultimate weapon anyone ever dreamed up.”

  “A germ,” Tse-Mallory pointed out, “does not look particularly impressive either, but a certain variety once wiped out every creature in the Blight, including both the Tar-Aiym and the Hur’rikku.”

  Flinx edged the ship in until they were floating only fifty meters from the artifact. It was about a hundred meters in length, a roughly cylindrical shape with four curving sides which met at two pointed ends. Things that looked like long antennae protruded another few meters from each of the two ends. It resembled a four-sided banana, only it was straight instead of curved.

  The artifact was a rusty-brown color, but it didn’t look quite like metal. Starlight and the observation lights of the Teacher gleamed off its sides. It had a candy-slick luster reminiscent of plastic. But it wasn’t a plastic, either, Flinx mused as he studied the readouts.

  Where two curved sides met, the material assumed a translucence completely out of keeping with its otherwise solid appearance. Turning a work beam on the surface through one port, they discovered that the entire substance was translucent, although no matter how powerful the light shined on it, one could only see about a meter into the thirty-meter depth of the artifact.

  The light also revealed that all four sides were engraved with a tiny, surprisingly florid script. Small protrusions and indentations broke the smoothness of the sides with a decidedly random regularity.

  They could find nothing that looked like an entrance port, muzzle, trigger, exhaust, generator—in short, nothing that would lead an onlooker to believe he was examining a weapon. It was a hundred-meter length of metal-glass-plastic something that was determinedly innocuous in appearance and inert in state.

  At the scientist’s urgings, Flinx guided the ship in a slow circle under, around, and back over the top of the long alien form. Then the Teacher slipped between the small planet and the device. If this maneuver interrupted any vital transmission or broadcast, it didn’t show in the continued inactivity of the device.

  Tse-Mallory looked anxious. “That’s the weapon, all right. Ab confirmed it. It’s got to be the weapon.” Flinx had never seen him so nervous.

  Alongside him, compound eyes regarded the motionless artifact unblinkingly. Then the philosoph moved to activate specific sensors on the control console.

  Hasboga appeared, looking sleepy. Her lethargy vanished when she saw the artifact. September quieted her, tried to explain what they had found and what they were doing. She listened, but her real attention was reserved for the inscriptions cut into the device’s flanks.

  “A diffusion scan won’t penetrate the material.” Truzenzuzex’s gaze moved from one readout to the next. “Still no evidence of any movement relative to the planet below or to our ship. Nor is the artifact emitting any radiation—at least, not any variety this vessel is equipped to detect. And there is no connection of any sort to the surface below.” He turned from the controls and regarded them thoughtfully. One truhand rubbed idly at his lower mandibles.

  “This exceptionally unexceptional ghost from the Hur’rikku past must be the weapon. We have Ab’s one significant, if colloquial, reference to it. We have the fact that it is here, in the safest place to store a powerful weapon in this system. Yet it persists in maintaining a pose of innocence. What we have observed on the Hur’rikku world does not prepare me to accept this as a deception. I confess I do not know how to proceed to prove it is otherwise.”

  “How is it supposed to work?” Hasboga edged closer to the curving main viewport, beyond which the device drifted. “Not that I care how big an explosion it makes, you understand.”

  Tse-Mallory did not smile. “We don’t know that it explodes.”

  “Well, does whatever it’s supposed to do. But I’d like to have a closer look at those inscriptions on it.”

  “You may have your chance,” said Truzenzuzex. “We may have to decipher them in order to learn how the device operates. Certainly the mechanism has not manifested itself to us.”

  “The inscriptions might not be instructions,” Flinx pointed out prosaically. “They might simply say ‘This ultimate weapon manufactured by H’pel’s Ultimate Weapons, Inc.’, or something like that.”

  A valentine-shaped head swiveled to face him. “We’d best hope otherwise, Flinx.”

  Tse-Mallory indicated agreement. “I feel like a Neanderthal cornered by a Smilodon. Someone has just handed me Mr. September’s Mark Twenty and I have ten seconds to figure out how to use it. Probably I’d end up employing it as a club.” He gestured at the floating enigma. Lights from the Teacher’s ports shone eerily on the dull-colored surface. “If we aren’t careful, we’re liable to end up like that Neanderthal, looking dumbly down the barrel of a Hur’rikku weapon while we pound on its trigger. We’d better be careful which of those protrusions and indentations on its surface we stick our manipulative digits into. I’d much rather learn how to activate the device from a distance. However,” he added, without evident concern for his personal safety, “if someone has to jump up and down on it to make it go off, that is what we’ll do.

  “But we won’t do it here, where it will do no good. First we must convey the device to the present location of the rogue.” He turned his gaze on Flinx. “There’s a planetless binary system in the path of the rogue. We should reach that spatial vicinity at the same time as or slightly after the rogue if we depart from here now and drive at maximum velocity for rendezvous. We will have the rare opportunity to observe the influence of a massive collapsar on another stellar object. We will also see,” he said, directing his words subtly to Isili Hasboga, “what will happen to the suns of Carmague-Collangatta and Twosky Bright if our research turns out to have been incorrect.”

  “Suppose that’s the case.” Hasboga looked subdued. “What will you do then?”

  Tse-Mallory smiled
very slightly. “Then Tru and I will go hunting down the next best legend.” He glanced back to Flinx. “I think there is ample room. The cargo hold is standard?”

  Flinx nodded. “The Teacher was modeled on a small freighter. I haven’t had any occasion to handle freight”—another small lie—“but there’s no reason why the hold shouldn’t be functional.” He indicated the Hur’rikku artifact filling the port. “The ship’s hold should be able to contain several objects that size.”

  The Teacher’s attitude was altered so that the great cargo doors in its tail were facing the object. Flinx operated the hatches and watched telltales indicate that the huge metal panels were performing properly.

  The hold was little more than a vast open sphere within which all kinds of cargo could be stored at null g. At present the cavernous space was empty. There would be plenty of room for the Hur’rikku device.

  Gradually Flinx activated the posigravity tractor beams, used for manipulating large cargo. Every muscle in his body was a touch tenser than usual. No one knew if the powerful tractors would have an adverse effect on the artifact. Only instruments indicated when the tractors locked on, however. The artifact remained as quiescent as before.

  “Slide it into the ship, Flinx,” said Tse-Mallory, watching different sensors. “Slowly.”

  Through the use of rear-facing tridees they were able to see the artifact. Tse-Mallory looked up, smiled, and nodded with a touch of impatience. Several minutes had passed.

  “It’s all right, Flinx. You can bring it in now.”

  Flinx glanced up from the controls, confusion and uncertainty mixing in his expression. “Bran, that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The tractors are set on maximum pull—but the thing’s not budging.”