Takeoff! (32 page)

She led him to a chair and made sure he was comfortable before she left to find her husband.

Queer
, thought Buth,
I’d never thought of Palver’s having
a
wife. Still. it’s been thirty years; maybe he married after—

“Ah! Dr. Buth! How good to see you again!”

Buth covered his slight start at hearing Palver’s voice by rising quickly to greet his host. A slight twinge in his back warned him against moving quite so rapidly.

Palver himself had changed, of course. His hair, which had been thick and black, was now thin and gray. His face was still full and round, although it tended to sag a bit. and his eyes seemed to have faded somewhat. Buth had the feeling that they weren’t quite the deep blue they had been three decades before.

But he showed that he still had the same brisk way about him as he extended his hand and said: “ Am I the first to welcome you to Mallow and Forest
Glade?”

Buth took his hand. “Except for a young chap named Faloban, yes. Thank you.”

“You liked cigars, I think?” Palver went to a panel in the wall, slid it aside, and took out a small cigar humidor. “I don’t use them myself,” he said, “but I like to keep them for friends.”

Buth accepted the cigar, lit it carefully. “I have to limit myself on these,” he told Palver. “I’m afraid I overdid it for too many years. My lungs aren’t what they used to be.”

“Well, well”—Palver pulled up a chair and sat down—”how have you been? I didn’t think you’d even remember me—a nobody. What did you ever find on Sol III? I haven’t been following your work, I’m afraid. They kicked me upstairs to rot a while back, you know; haven’t been able to keep up with anything, really.”

“There wasn’t much to keep up with,” Buth said. “Sol III was a dead end. I couldn’t prove a thing.”

Palver looked blank. “I don’t think I quite understand.”

Dr. Buth settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “There’s nothing to understand. I’m a failure, that’s all. No joke, no false modesty—no, nor bitterness, either. I spent thirty years of my life looking for something that wasn’t there to be found, trying to solve a problem that couldn’t be solved.”

Ducem Palver looked somewhat uncomfortable. Buth noticed it, and realized that it was perfectly possible that Palver didn’t have even the foggiest notion of what he was talking about. Thirty years is a long time to remember a conversation that only lasted an hour. Even Buth himself hadn’t remembered it until Faloban had mentioned Ducem Palver’s name.

“If you recall,” Buth said swiftly, “my group and I were digging on Sol III, searching beneath the D-layer for anything that might show us that Sol III was the original home of mankind. Above the Destruction Stratum, everything was post-spaceflight; it proved nothing. But we did have hopes for the artifacts below that layer.”

“I see,” said Palver. “It turned out that they, also, were post-spaceflight?”

There was a trace of bitterness in Buth’s short laugh. “Oh, no. We didn’t prove anything—not
anything
. We don’t know, even now, whether those artifacts we found were pre- or post-spaceflight. We don’t even know who made them or how or why.”

“What about those ceramic things?” Palver asked. “Were those all you found?”

Buth laughed again, bitterly, almost angrily. “It depends on how you mean that question, ‘Were those all you found?’ If you mean, did we find any more, the answer is an emphatic yes. If you mean, did we find anything else, the answer is almost no. We found plenty of them—to be exact, in thirty years we uncovered twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-five of them!”

He paused for breath while Palver blinked silently.

“After the first few thousand, we quit bothering with them. They got in the way. We had classified some two hundred different varieties under about nine group headings. We were beginning to treat them as animals or something, classifying them according to individual and group characteristics.” His voice became suddenly angry. “For thirty years, I worked, trying to find some clue to the mind of pre-spaceflight Man. It was my one drive, the one thing on my mind. I dedicated my life to it.

“And what did I find? Nothing but ceramic mysteries!”

He sat silently for a moment, his lips tight, his eyes focused on the hands in his lap.

Palver said smoothly: “You found nothing else at all?”

Buth looked up, and a wry smile came over his face. “Oh, yes, there were a few other things, of course, but they didn’t make much sense, either. The trouble was, you see, that nothing but stones and ceramics survived. Metals corroded, plastics rotted. We did find a few bits of polyethylene tetrafluoride, but they had been pressed out of shape.

“We couldn’t even date the stuff. It was at least twenty thousand years old, and possibly as much as a hundred and fifty thousand. But we had no standards—nothing to go by.

“We found bones, of course. They had thirty-two teeth in the skulls instead of twenty-eight, but that proved nothing. We found rubble that might have been buildings, but after all those thousands of years, we couldn’t be sure. In one place, we found several tons of gold bricks; it was probably a warehouse of some kind. We deduced from that evidence that they must have had ordinary transmutation, because gold is pretty rare, and it has so few uses that it isn’t worth mining.

“Obviously, then, they must have had atomic power, which implies spaceflight. But, again, we couldn’t be sure.

“But, in the long run, the thing that really puzzled us was those ceramic domes. There were so many of them! What could they have been used for? Why were so many needed?” Buth rubbed the back of his neck with a broad palm and laughed a little to himself...We never knew. Maybe we never will.”

“But see here,” said Palver, genuinely interested, “I though you told me that one of your men—I forget his name—had decided they were used for high-temperature synthesis.”

“Possibly,” agreed Dr. Buth. “But synthesis of what? Besides there were samples which weren’t badly damaged, and they didn’t show any signs of prolonged exposure to high temperatures. They’d been fused over with a mixture of silicates, but the inside and the outside were the same.”

“What else would you have to uncover to find out what they were?” Palver asked.

Buth puffed at his cigar a moment, considering his answer.

“The connections,” he said at last.

“Eh?”

“They were obviously a part of some kind of apparatus,” Buth explained. “There were orifices in them that led from some sort of metallic connection—we don’t know what, because the metal had long ago dissolved into its compounds, gone beyond even the most careful electrolytic reconstruction. And there are holes in flanges at the top and bottom which—” He stopped for a moment and reached into his pocket. “Here...I’ve got a stereo of our prize specimen; I’ll show you what I mean.”

The small cube of transparency that he took from his pocket held a miniature reproduction of one of the enigmatic objects. He handed it to Ducem Palver. “Now that’s the—No, turn it over; you’ve got it upside down.”

“How do you know?” Palver asked, looking at the cube.

“What?”

“I said, how do you know it’s upside down?” Palver repeated. “How can you tell?”

“Oh. Well, we can’t, of course, but it stands to reason that the biggest part would be at the bottom. It would be unstable if you tried to set it on the small end, with the big opening up. Although” —he shrugged—”again, we can’t be sure.”

Palver looked the little duplicate over, turning it this way and that in his hands. It remained as puzzling as ever. “Maybe it’s a decoration or something,” he said at last.

“Could be. Ober Sutt, my assistant for twenty years, thought they might have been used for heating homes. That would account for their prevalence. But they don’t show any signs of heat corrosion, and why should they have used such crude methods if they had atomic power?” Again he laughed his short, sharp laugh. “So, after thirty years, we wound up where we started. With nothing.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t find traces of their writing,” said Palver, handing the stereo crystal back to his visitor.

“We did, for all the good it did us. As a matter of fact, we found engraving on little tiles that we found near some of the domes. Several of the domes, you see, were surrounded by little square ceramic plates about so big.” He held up his hands to indicate a square about eight centimeters on a side. “We thought they might have been used to line the chamber that the domes were ill, to protect the rest of the building from the heat-at least, we thought that at first, but there weren’t any signs of heat erosion on them, either.

“They must have been cemented together somehow, because we found engravings of several sets that matched. Here, I’ll show you.”

He took out his scriber and notebook and carefully drew lines on it. Then he handed it to Ducem Palver.

“Those lines were shallow scorings. We don’t know whether that is printing—writing of some kind—or simply channels for some other purpose. But we’re inclined to think that it’s writing because of the way it’s set down and because we did find other stones with the same sort of thing on them.”

“These are the engravings you found near the mysterious domes?” Palver asked.

“That’s right.”

“They make no sense whatever.”

“They don’t. They probably never will, unless we can find some way of connecting them with our own language and our own methods of writing.”

Palver was silent for several minutes, as was Dr. Buth, who sat staring at the glowing end of his cigar. Finally, Buth dropped the cigar into a nearby disposer, where it disappeared with a bright flash of molecular disintegration.

“Thirty years,” said Buth. “And nothing to show for it. Oh, I enjoyed it—don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself. But it’s funny how a man can enjoy himself doing profitless work. There was a time when I thought I might work on my mathematical theories—you remember?—and look how unprofitable that might have been.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Palver said uncomfortably. He handed the notebook back to Dr. Buth.

“But still,” Buth said, taking the notebook, “a man hates to think of wasting thirty years. And that’s what it was.”

He looked at the lines he had drawn. Meaningless lines that made a meaningless pattern:

EMPLOYEES MUST WASH

HANDS BEFORE LEAVING

“Waste,” he said softly, “all waste.”

ON THE MARTIAN PROBLEM

By Randall Garrett

I took in Edgar Rice Burroughs early in my life, washing him down with great draughts of mother’s milk.

Mother, needless to say, did not approve when she found out what sort of “trash” I was reading. For some reason I could never understand, The Wizard of Oz was good fare for children, but A Princess of Mars was not. (After I was grown up and had become a selling writer, I asked my beloved mother why she had differentiated between the two. “I was younger then,” she said, as though that explained it. Maybe it did.)

There are those who like the Tarzan series—certainly the most famous; there are those who like the Pellucidar series; and so on. Me, I love John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

Of late—like the past thirty years—there have been those who have said that the John Carter stories are not “true science fiction” because they lack scientific verisimilitude and because the latest scientific investigations have proven Burroughs wrong.

I have done my best to correct that erroneous attitude.

I am not at liberty to reveal whence I obtained the Xerox copy of this letter, nor why it was specifically sent to me rather than, say, Mr. Philip José Farmer, who would be far more qualified than I for the honor of putting it before the public. My duty, however, was clear, and with the kind co-operation of Dr. Isaac Asimov and Mr. George Scithers, it is herewith submitted for your perusal.

The letter itself is written in a bold, highly legible, masculine hand. The heading shows that it was written in Richmond, Virginia, and it is addressed to a numbered postal box in Nairobi.

The bracketed notes after certain of the writer’s expressions were added by myself, and I have appended a conversion table of
e
quivalent units in three measuring systems.

—Randall Garrett

My dear Ed,

Since your secret retirement to Africa, we have had much less communication than I would like, but, alas, my duties at home have kept me busy these many years. It is, however, a comfort to know that, thanks to the Duke’s special serum, you will, barring accident or assassination, be around as long as I.

I am sorry not to have answered your last letter sooner, but, truth to tell, it caused me a great deal of consternation. I fear I had not been keeping up with the affairs of Earth as much as I perhaps should have, and I had no idea that the Mariner and Viking spacecraft had sent back such peculiar data.

One sentence in your last letter made me very proud: “I would rather believe that every man connected with NASA and JPL is a liar and a hoaxer than to believe you would ever tell me a deliberate lie.” But, as you say, those photographs are most convincing.

Naturally, I took the photoreproductions you sent to a group of the wisest savants of Helium, and bade them do their best to solve the problem. They strove mightily, knowing my honor was at stake. Long they pondered over the data, and, with a science that is older and more advanced than that of Earth, they came up with the answer.

The tome they produced is far longer and far heavier than any book you have ever published, and is filled with page after page of abstruse mathematics, all using Martian symbolism. I could not translate it for you if I wished.

In fact, I had to get old Menz Klausa to explain it to me. He is not only learned in Martian mathematics, but has the knack of making things understandable to one who is not as learned as he. I shall endeavor to make the whole thing as clear to you as he made it to me.