The City of the Sun (16 page)

It was a procedure that had worked on other colony worlds, applied either by ourselves or by Kilner’s team. It wasn’t quite foolproof; cellular processes are usually very well confined and the leakage of molecules across the cell wall—both in and out—is often so slow that there is usually a “honeymoon period” before the defending viruses and the invading cells actually go to war. This meant that on one or two occasions when I’d used the technique against protozoan invaders the rate of destruction of the invader cells wasn’t adequate to keep pace with the rate of proliferation and reinfection. Against a communal parasite, however, where the invader cells had to stick together to be fully effective, it ought to work well enough.

There remained, however, one big doubt in my mind relative to this specific case, and that was the versatility of the parasite cells. There was no way we could estimate the extent to which that versatility applied to the actual metabolic processes of the parasite. Theory said that mimicry is always a superficial phenomenon, never extending to the level of molecular processes...but I was haunted by the fear that this might be the exception that proved the rule.

Only time would tell. Maybe more time than we had. Linda could obtain a list of target molecules in a matter of days, but you can’t build a virus in days. We would need several weeks, even if we all worked eighteen hours a day every day, to come up with a series of attack viruses. And then we would still have to test them in the tissue cultures. That would only take days, but the results couldn’t be taken as conclusive until we had tested over a much longer period of time—and ideally, until we had tested in the real circumstances, to see if a living person could be protected indefinitely from infection.

Even after that, there was the mutation rate of the parasite still looming large as a threat to long-term success. It wouldn’t take long for a new strain of parasite to emerge which could confound our viruses. And then a new series of attack viruses would have to be devised. And then a new strain...and then a new series...and so ad infinitum. That’s the way it is with various classes of virus on Earth, and why—even in the twenty-third century—we still have no cure for the common cold.

I could see all the difficulties looming large, but there was no point in lying down and letting them crush me. When asked to do the impossible the only sensible procedure is to start at the beginning and keep going, in the hope that somewhere en route the impossible will become possible. You can’t afford to be disheartened by the thought of deadlines. If it was anyone’s job to get the deadlines extended it was Nathan’s—he was the diplomat.

I threw myself into the lab work and tried to set aside the horrors of the general situation. For the time being, there was nothing I could do about them.

And maybe nothing anyone could do.

“Very devious,” I commented. “And suppose they don’t come to us cap in hand and say they’re sorry?”

“Then we wait. And keep waiting. You have all you need in the lab. Ultimately you’ll come up with something we can use. Oh, I know it’ll take weeks and months and God only knows how long...and of course you can’t and won’t guarantee your results. But we’ve all the time in the world. We don’t ever have to go out again until we have all the cards we need in our hand. And even if they do reopen negotiations...we’re taking no chances, Alex. None at all.”

“I might have to go out,” I said, blandly.

“Why?”

“Any of a dozen reasons. To get another specimen. To pick up a few mice for experiments on whole organisms. To gather some vegetation as raw material in extracting local proteins. We can’t just wave a magic wand in there, you know. We have to have material to work on. It isn’t easy conducting the kind of operation we’re trying to mount with hardly two grams of specimen...and the fact that it has to be kept isolated at all times from the air of the lab doesn’t help. We’re working all the time through plastic membranes.”

“All right,” he said, soothingly. “What you need, we’ll get. When it’s necessary. All I’m saying is that we have to be careful. We don’t know what might happen if we step out through the lock now. The agreement died.”

“If they’d wanted to play it rough,” I said, “they had plenty of opportunity. They saved my life.... They let me come back here to tell you all what I’d seen. Does that sound like all-out war to you? They still think that they can talk—persuade us to recognize their point of view.”

“In that case,” said Nathan, “they’ll be along to reopen negotiations, in their own good time.”

I shook my head, and went back to work. It was the safest and sanest course.

There was nothing new to do, and nothing to be discovered at this stage. It was just a matter of going on and on...checking, tabulating, looking at results. As the parasite grew on the cultures which permitted it to grow we tested our range of means of killing it. It wasn’t easy to kill.... We found nothing that would neatly excise it from human tissue without wreaking havoc among the human cells as well. That was only to be expected.

Linda began to produce a list of the simpler molecules characteristic of the parasite’s metabolic pathways. The unfortunate thing was that even at this level there were discrepancies between specimens grown in different tissues. The cells were metabolically versatile. There were still a lot of molecules that were present in every instance, but as we went further up the scale of complexity that list would probably get whittled down dramatically. By the time we got to molecules of such size and delicacy they could easily be singled out for attack there might be very few indeed that were inevitably involved in the creature’s metabolic processes no matter what circumstances it was growing in.

The hours slid by with remarkable rapidity. Linda went off-shift and Conrad came back on. I let him take over the experiments he’d initiated and I took over from Linda. We ate on the job.

We didn’t talk. We didn’t get in one another’s way. We’d established something like a perfect working relationship—inside the lab, at least. Outside we speculated, argued, compared ideas. Inside, we worked. When we did talk, it was to pass on information with the maximum efficiency and the minimum fuss. We just didn’t notice the hands of the clock rolling round. I got tired, but I didn’t pay it much attention. Once you settle your body and mind into a rhythm, then all you need is something to keep both your mind and your hands occupied. You can go on almost forever, falling into a kind of mesmeric trance.

When Linda appeared in the doorway of the lab again I simply assumed that the time had flown and that it was my turn to sleep. I was almost through the door when I noticed that she wasn’t dressed for work, and that she was calling out to Conrad, too.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. I looked up at the clock and saw that it was just before midnight, ship’s time. The shift had three more hours to run.

“Karen dragged me out of bed. There’s someone outside the ship. And he isn’t from the city.”

It took a moment to sink in. I still had to change gear, mentally, and the automatic transmission just wasn’t working.

“Not from the city,” I repeated, trying to make the words divest themselves of their meaning.

Then I got the point.

Everyone else was in the main room except for Pete, who was in the control room. There was an image on the screen being relayed by the external camera with the help of light intensification. It showed a man who was exploring, the area around the airlock with his fingertips, as if looking for a door handle or a crevice into which he could insert his fingers. His eyes had the glassy quality of the unseeing.

I moved round to let Conrad and Linda get into position, and found myself jostling Karen’s elbow.

“He tripped an alarm with his body heat,” she murmured. “I got a red light, roused Pete. Then everyone else, as soon as we got an image and saw....”

She didn’t have to go on. It was obvious enough what she’d seen.

The man had hair...a lot of hair. He was naked to the waist, and the only thing growing on his body, so far as we could see, was thick, curly hair. On his chest and on his back. He wasn’t very big, but he was wiry. His muscles were thick, with no fat on them. The hair on his head grew long, and was tied behind with a ragged piece of cloth. His beard had been hacked short.

He turned away from the ship’s smooth outer wall as he seemed to hear a sound somewhere nearby, and we saw the whole expanse of his back. There was not the slightest sign of a black spider web.

He found the rim of the airlock with his fingertips, and tried to get his fingernails into the crack—a stupid, futile gesture, but one which served to communicate to us something of his urgency.

“It looks,” said Conrad, calmly, “as if the parasite didn’t get them all after all.”

“You said you saw no sign,” whispered Nathan, to me.

“I didn’t,” I assured him. “But what does that prove? You can’t draw conclusions from an absence of evidence.”

He knew that as well as I did. I looked across at him, and saw his brow furrowed in concentration. He was worried. This was something he had not anticipated. The city people had told him that there were no men outside the city. I had found nothing to suggest that there might be. The suspicion that was niggling away at his mind was quite straightforward.

Was this a trick?

“That hair didn’t grow overnight,” I said. “And I don’t believe that the city people can just take off their dendrites as if they were shedding a vest.”

“Let him into the airlock,” said Karen. “We don’t need to let him any farther. We can talk over the intercom. But let him in.... He’s scared. They may be watching the ship.”

“And those archers are good,” I said. “I wouldn’t reckon on the dark to stop them.”

“Did you ever hear of the Trojan Horse?” objected Nathan.

“He doesn’t look Greek to me,” said Karen.

“All right,” said Nathan, swiftly. “Tell Pete to let him in.”

With a little effort I could have resented his automatic assumption of command in this situation, but I let it go. He was making the only decision possible.

We watched the surprise on the hairy man’s face as the outer lock slid back into its bed. He jumped back, and it seemed that he almost turned and ran. But he overcame his reflexes with no more than a moment’s thought, and practically leapt through the opening into the chamber.

Karen called to Pete, and the outer door slid shut again. The image on the screen changed. It went dead for a second, then showed nothing but blackness. Then Pete switched on the light in the lock, and we saw the visitor cover his eyes with his hands against the brilliance. He slipped into a kind of defensive crouch. As soon as he could bear the glare of the light he peeped out through his fingers, furtively.

Nathan plugged a microphone into the panel beneath the screen and punched the combination to link it to the speaker in the wall of the decontamination chamber.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

The answer was obviously affirmative. The man in the airlock jumped like a startled hare at the sound. He looked up, and his eyes fixed almost immediately on the speaker. The camera was just above it, and so he seemed to be staring straight at us from the screen. His hair was dark brown, almost black. His skin was tanned and leathery. The trousers which were his only garment apart from moccasins on his feet were made from the hide of one of the creatures we called oxen.

Before he answered he took another look around—at the shower heads, the controls on the decontamination unit, at the lockers where various pieces of equipment and the suits were stored. But he didn’t touch anything.

“I hear you,” he said.

“We can see you by means of a camera,” said Nathan. “I’m afraid there’s no provision for you to see us. But there’s a microphone near the speaker. We can hear you clearly. I can’t let you come any farther. Don’t try to operate the controls on the inner door—they’re frozen from the control room. You have to stay there. We don’t dare let you in because of the danger of...infection.”

“I’m not from the city,” he said. “I’m from the north.”

Nathan glanced at me. I shrugged.

“You came to find us?” asked Nathan.

“My name’s Antolin Sorokin,” said the other. “One of our men saw the city people at the ship two days ago. He saw the man in the plastic suit that was with them. We decided that it must mean visitors...from Earth. There was a big meteor some time ago.”