Hunted Head - Страница 4

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This involved a journey to another room, at first sight identical to the one they had just quitted, where once again Sandy sat and watched Marius fiddling with controls. This time, however, what he wanted finally appeared in the middle of the room. It was a three-dimensional projection of some sort, far more solid-looking than any hologram Sandy had ever seen; although the great door was dimly visible at the top of it, behind the sky. The lower part consisted of wet black rocks under assault by an angry sea. Pools lay in the hollows, and the air was full of spray. Sandy ducked automatically, then realised that the waves were frozen in mid-surge and the spray hung unmoving in the air.

Marius did something else and the brightness of the ceiling receded to a thin line around the edge. The projection filled the room without competition. There was nothing to indicate its scale, except the apparent height of the waves in comparison with their evident force; on this basis, it was probably about half life-size.

“Do you see the meter?” Marius inquired.

It stood on the rocks at the front of the projection; if it had been as solid as it looked Sandy could have leaned forward and touched it. A squat pillar, with an oblong display in its upper part that read:

...

N79%

CO 20%

O trace.

Marius let her look for thirty seconds. Then the projection darkened. The shape of the rocks did not alter, but the white edge of \the waves was farther away. Above, the sky was full of stars, in unfamiliar patterns. There were also two small crescents, one only a curving line, the other fatter and brighter, on opposite sides of the sky.

Marius heard her gasp.

“Good,” he said. “You have seen them.” He returned to the controls.

Presently it was daylight. The tide was out. The outline of the rocks had changed somewhat and the pools were placed differently. One, towards the edge was covered with a thick green scum.

The meter was still there. This time it read:

...

N79%

CO19%

O1.4%

Sandy drew a deep breath and tried to keep her voice steady.

“That’s another planet,” she said. “Not Earth. Not in the Solar System. You’re terraforming it.”

“Exactly right,” said Marius gravely.

“How long did it take? I mean, how long between the first picture and the second one?”

“About—” Marius glanced at the control board “—fifteen thousand years… But progress is exponential; after another thousand years the oxygen content is up to 4 percent, and there are lichens on rocks inland. Do you want to see?”

“Doesn’t sound very dramatic. How about the stage after that?”

“Ah. Well. The next stage was to try to establish the growth of mosses. Unfortunately it was not a success. At present the botanists are collecting fresh stocks with which to try again.”

Sandy scratched her neck thoughtfully. “Yes, but can’t they take a look and see which species are going to take hold?”

“No!”

It was almost a shout. Sandy looked up, startled.

“I beg your pardon.” That was hardly more than a mutter. “It is the strictest rule: we never, under any circumstances, try to examine the results of a step before the work is complete.”

“I would have thought—”

“No. What you see on the other side of the interface is not probability or possibility, but fact. Suppose, before the moss was put in place, we had turned the viewer on to the areas in which it was to be planted, a thousand years after that was to be done. Suppose, then, we saw that the rocks everywhere were still bare. Would we go ahead and plant it? Where would be the point?

“But then, how could there be moss growing, if it had never been planted? Knowledge, absolute and definite knowledge of the future as it affects yourself, is never any use. Whether it is bad or good, you cannot do anything that will change it. It simply takes away your power to decide… The moss was planted, and a thousand years later it had not spread, but vanished. Therefore, next time, the thing must be done differently—other species of moss, other areas for the trial, the ground prepared in different ways. And we will check it sooner.

“Of course, when it was being planted, it was checked often—at the beginning, every day. Some of the patches appeared to take well, and to spread. After five years it was judged time to jump ahead and see whether things were ripe for the next phase. Now, naturally, there are people trying to pinpoint the time when the moss disappeared, and when they find it they will be able to investigate the reasons—cautiously, in case they should kill it all off by some mistake of their own.”

“Wow,” said Sandy. “Complicated.”

“It is the power to go from one time to another without traversing all the times between that makes terra-forming a feasible project; but it has its own dangers, and our rules are designed to avoid them.”

“Yes, but—Look, how long is it since you’ve known that the moss failed?”

“It was discovered four days ago.”

“Oh. I see.”

“On that world we have unlimited time, but in Donander there is none to waste. In ten days at the most we should know what went wrong, and can think about replanting.”

“Yea, but you said this place had been going a hundred and forty-seven years. How come the terraforming’s only got to stage three, or is it four?”

“It took the best part of a hundred years to locate planets fit for terra-forming, and to establish interfaces. That is not easy outside the Solar System. The planet you were viewing orbits a star a hundred and thirteen light-years from Sol—when contact was established, that is. The shortest distance we had to reach was thirty-four light-years—”

“There’s more than one planet being terraformed, then?”

“At present there are five of them. That one was the most advanced. Three had a very deep corrosive atmosphere, like Venus, and time had to be spent on blowing part of it away. The other was found quite recently. None of them has got beyond the second stage.”

Sandy sat back on the bench, aware suddenly of delayed shock. Reaching out over light-years, blowing away the atmosphere of planets, jumping forwards a thousand years to see how an experiment was getting on… A chill ran up her backbone. The bench she was sitting on, the floor underfoot seemed solid enough, but—She took a fold of skin on the back of her left hand between her fingernails and bore down. It hurt.

Looking up, she caught Marius watching her with a faint smile. It vanished at once.

“It is all quite real, Miss Jennings. Difficult to believe, I know. Everybody finds that.”

“Yea, but what sort of people do this kind of thing? Are they…” Sandy waved her hands in desperation. Were they gods? Ridiculous. Immortals? Disembodied intelligences, like the whatsisnames in that book she read once?

“They are scientists, like you. Very human. Argumentative. Touchy. In a hurry. All the time tearing their hair over the things that have gone wrong. Or the other kind, the patient ones, who do not talk about their problems, and sometimes spend all their lives looking for a way through a cul-de-sac, and sometimes stand up one day and talk quietly of what they have done, and set off a great new wave of understanding—”

“Yes, but where are they? I haven’t seen a soul except you.”

This time Marius did not tell her to come and see. He simply bustled her into her seat and caused the spider-car to swivel round and barrel back along the way that they had come. Sandy wondered whether she had insulted him somehow. Very soon, however, the car was going at such a speed that she was afraid to distract him by asking questions. For the first time it was making a noise—a faint whine, like a distant mosquito—and, looking down, she had the disquieting impression that the spinning wheels were not actually touching the ground… They shot into the crossroads from which the journey had started, and she wondered whether she had failed some test or other and was about to be returned ignominiously to her own Universe. However the car twiddled through a right-angle, in a way that would surely have made any ordinary vehicle turn over, shot past a couple of bays, and halted in one with no passages opening from it, only a single door.

It was a door high enough for giants, and wide enough for ten very fat men to walk abreast. There were two main valves, each divided into a series of hinged panels, and as Marius led her towards it the two. innermost panels slid away, leaving room for the two of them to go through it side by side.

Sandy hadn’t expected it; but maybe she should have done. Once again Marius had preferred demonstration to answering. This was where the scientists were… about five hundred of them, anyway, at a quick guess; in pairs and larger groups, sitting around small tables in an enormous room and drinking coffee together. Or, judging by the variety of different cups in sight, and the various urns and other containers on the serving tables, any other beverage they chose. She could smell peppermint, and something vegetative that might be mate, but the overriding aroma was that of coffee. Good coffee.

“Sit there.” Marius indicated a table for two, unoccupied. “I will fetch coffee.”

He set off towards the far end of the room. There were filter cups and an urn on a counter. Oh. How did you drink through the mask of an isolation suit?