“One of the dangers of our existence,” he said. “Though nothing compared to what you’ve faced to come to us. I’ll send my assistant Keefe to make certain the alarm is functioning, and perhaps we can enjoy a short rest after the day’s turmoil.”
Yanderman spoke only with an effort. He said, “We faced dangers, as you put it, for a matter of days to get to you. If you’ve had to endure this kind of thing for four and a half centuries, all I can say is that my friend and I had the better bargain!”
XX
Hoping that nobody was paying attention to him, and sure at least that Nestamay wasn’t, because her grandfather had sent her to fetch another jug of the curious fruit-flavoured concoction these people had instead of beer, Conrad leaned back in the corner of the Maxall hovel. It wasn’t much of a building compared with the solid stone-and-timber work of Lagwich, but it had one thing in its favour, which it had taken him a long time to track down. The air was cleaner than in a Lagwich house. Partly it was due to the absence of cooking smells, but mostly, he thought, it was because the people had fresh clothing two or three times a week.
He’d been given a suit of the same kind, and found it very comfortable. But he didn’t pretend to follow the explanation he’d been given about the source of the garments, any more than he was pretending now to follow the conversation between Yanderman, Maxall, Keefe and Egrin.
It seemed the local people would never run out of questions—how big is the barrenland, how long did it take you to get across, where is Lagwich and how big, where is Esberg and how big, are there any other barrenlands, how many people are there in the world …? It was about there that Conrad had decided to lean back and shut his eyes. He drowsed.
“More to drink, Conrad?”
He snapped back to awareness. Nestamay was offering him the jug, and in bending forward also a remarkable view of her young bosom. Remembering he was an explorer, Conrad viewed. A few seconds later, however, the sound of his name spoken by Yanderman made him turn guiltily and say, “Ah—yes?”
But Yanderman wasn’t addressing him. He was explaining the way they had compiled the map to spare themselves the need to carry water, and Grandfather Maxall was shaking his head apparently at the fact that his son had overlooked this possibility.
Did that imply that somebody here had the same gift as himself? Conrad leaned forward and paid attention. The answer was no, but there were salvaged scraps of drawings and diagrams from which at least some information about water could have been extracted, although in every other respect they had been rendered obsolete by the creation of the barrenland.
“You had access to similar maps?” Maxall suggested.
Yanderman shook his head and explained about Conrad’s gift, and there were wondering comments all round. Keefe was the most eager to learn more on this subject, and asked Yanderman directly for a demonstration of trance.
“I think my friend is rather tired,” Yanderman countered, and earned Conrad’s lasting gratitude for his understanding.
“I’m so sorry!” Grandfather Maxall said. “Why, here we’ve been plying you with endless questions, and you’re exhausted! We can show you to beds for the night at once if you wish.”
Conrad felt a stir of hope. But Yanderman wasn’t satisfied. He said, “I’d rather ask you a few questions first, if you don’t mind. You realise, much of what we’ve learned from visions experienced by Conrad here, and by Granny Jassy and others at Esberg, was completely irrelevant, and since we had no idea what might be significant we’ve never made much sense out of it. To start with: what is the barrenland?”
“A quarantine area,” Maxall answered promptly. “The term is traditional, though we often call it the bare ground.”
“What was it for?”
“It was meant to isolate the Station from the rest of the world.”
“How was it—? No, that’s irrelevant at the moment.” Yanderman rubbed his chin; he had sprouted a fair beard since he last saw a razor, and it was irritating him. “All right: what’s this place—the Station, as you call it?”
“A …” Grandfather Maxall hesitated. “Again, I have to use a traditional name. You see, a lot of things we know, we don’t understand. We have the same problem as you—sorting out the useful from the useless information, and I imagine a lot of information which was once useful has been forgotten because the situation altered. So I think I can best define the Station by reading a passage of the traditional lore to you. Nestamay, give me the locked case!”
The girl hurried to fetch it. Sorting through the various charts and drawings in it, Grandfather Maxall came eventually to a piece of paper yellowed and fragile with age. He peered shortsightedly at it.
“If I stumble in my reading, it’s because I haven’t studied this passage for a long time,” he excused himself. “I meant to go over it with Nestamay, but somehow … Well, here it is. It begins with a broken sentence, by the way. See if you can make sense of it with your extra data.”
He cleared his throat. “‘… result of many years of research and development on many different planets.’ That’s the broken sentence. It goes on.
‘“Its capacity is being continually expanded. Indeed, it will continue to expand to match the growing volume of interstellar traffic for the foreseeable future. No other information-processing system would be capable of coping. Only the organochemic cortex has saved interstellar traffic from being overwhelmed by its own complexity. It is predicted that in a century’s time organochemic cortexes will be handling fifty times the present traffic safely and without error.
‘“The organochemic cortex combines the reliability of inorganic cortexes with the flexibility and self-programming ability of the human brain. Terminal Station ‘A’ is the first, but it will not for long be the only, interstellar transit station to be completely supervised by an organochemic cortex.’ ”
He put the paper aside, looking hopefully at Yanderman. “Have you learned anything from these memories of the past which will help you to clarify that?”
Yanderman shook his head. “All I gathered was that, first, this place was a transit station, right? In other words, you could really walk to other worlds from here, something which I’d dismissed as absurd. And second, the organochemic cortex—whatever that might be—was very important.”
“It’s not absurd, this walking to other worlds story,” Keefe put in. “After all, that mechanism is one of the ones still functioning.”
Both Conrad and Yanderman looked at him in bewilderment.
“So you finally decided to agree with me!” Grandfather Maxall roared, slapping his knee. Keefe looked uncomfortable, and explained to the puzzled newcomers.
“We say, out of habit, that the things ‘hatch’ in the Station. Maxall has always said that wasn’t right—they must come from somewhere else, where they have others of their own kind to breed with. That much figures. And things like the ovens, the power accumulators, the clothing-dispensers—they certainly have gone on working all this time without much help from us.”
“What’s more, though we don’t know what the organochemic cortex is, exactly,” Maxall put in, “we know where it is. You saw that dense mass of dangerous vegetation which fills up a great deal of the dome? Of course you did. And you probably wondered why we don’t just go in with heatbeams and burn it out. Well, the reason is that according to tradition the cortex is located somewhere under the plants, and without it we’d freeze, starve and go naked because it too is still working and maintaining the services which support us.”
He gulped down his drink and held out his mug for more. Nestamay hesitated before pouring for him. She said, “Grandfather—doesn’t this mean that we can change that?”
“How so?” Maxall blinked at her.
“Why, if it’s been proved possible to cross the barrenland, can’t we stop worrying about the risk of putting the Station out of action? Can’t we make plans to evacuate to the outside world and then try and burn our way into the dome and—?”
r />
She let the last words trail away.
“That’s not what we’re here for!” the old man snapped. “We are here to maintain and repair the Station! In other words, it’s not up to us to wreck it just to prevent a few more lousy things breaking through and terrorising us! And now we’re in contact with the outside again, we have grounds for hope.”
Cheeks crimson, Nestamay muttered something about fetching more drink, and slipped out of the hovel again. Conrad stared after her musingly.
“Hmmm …” Yanderman said at length. “Now you said the barrenland was a quarantine area. What against?”
“I’ll have to refer to something else I don’t properly understand,” Maxall said. He sorted through his case of documents again. “This is apparently an official decree. It’s headed ‘Bureau of Traffic’ and ‘Bureau of Public Health’, and it says: ‘As of the receipt of this notice Terminal Station A and routes serviced therefrom are to cease operation. Immediate Class One-Plus quarantine restrictions are placed on all stations subject to recent traffic from areas known to be foci of encephalosis dureri.’ Legend says this was a kind of contagious madness, by the way,” he added. On Yanderman’s curt nod—yes, I know—he resumed.
‘“Terminal Station A is declared subject to absolute quarantine exclusive only of repair and maintenance technicians, who must sign a voluntary release before entering the banned zone.’”
“That clears up a lot of problems I had after listening to you, Conrad,” Yanderman said, turning. Then: “Conrad!”
With a start, Conrad looked round. “I’m sorry! I was trying to work out … Yanderman, please explain this. If my visions come from the distant past, how is it that I could have seen Nestamay in them? So clearly that when I tried carving a girl’s head out of soap the day you came to Lagwich, I made it look like her instead of like Idris, as I intended?”
“A family resemblance,” Yanderman said curtly, and went back to his discussion with Maxall.
XXI
Hours later, when he and Yanderman had been left to rest in the hovel—its usual occupants having insisted on moving to another—the superficial glibness of that explanation was still irritating Conrad. It refused stubbornly to let him yield to the sleep his exhaustion craved.
Giving up at last, he rolled on his side and looked in Yanderman’s direction. It was far too dark to see him even in outline. A soughing breeze turned momentarily to a stiff wind and rattled a few grains of sand on the hovel wall.
“Conrad?” Yanderman said. On receiving a grunted response, he went on, “How do you feel after our epic trip?”
“Not very different,” Conrad admitted. “It turned out so much easier than I expected it all feels unreal. And the people here, too—so ordinary in so many ways. You’d expect them to make much more fuss after over four hundred years in isolation.”
“I know.” Sounds suggested that Yanderman was rolling on his back to look upwards at the low ceiling. “I think there are two reasons why our arrival passed off so calmly. For one thing, there are no precedents. Your people at Lagwich, mine in Esberg—we’ve developed a set of habits for meeting strangers. A marrying expedition comes, and you put on your best clothes and bake celebration bread and clean house and so on; well, all that has just gone with the wind here. And the second reason, it seems to me, is that the pattern of life here is such a tightly-knit one there’s no slack. Some of the demands of the existence you and I know are taken off their shoulders by the ancient machines: they’d have no opening for a soapmaker, for instance, because they have a device which takes in soiled clothing and delivers fresh. And some of the food is automatically produced—I want to investigate that tomorrow. But even so, nine-tenths of their waking time is taken up in meeting the demands of their predicament. Every single day a twenty-man working party is occupied in keeping the vegetation under control, Maxall says. Yesterday the discovery of an alien plant seeded from the hoof of a recently arrived thing meant that those people who should have had a day to rest up had to go out and scour the barrenland for any other specimens. That’s how the plants we saw on the way got where they are, obviously. I’m amazed they haven’t caved in under this pressure long ago, especially as they have no proper weapons!”
“No weapons?” Conrad echoed in astonishment. “But how about the things they used to burn Jaspers body—the heatbeams? Those looked like weapons to me!”
“Maxall says they weren’t intended for such use. They were converted, a long time ago, from devices meant for welding or smelting metal. They’ve been indispensable, but they consume immense quantities of power which can only be replaced through solar batteries—collecting sunlight and storing it—and they burn out rapidly. Besides, they’re cumbersome. You saw how awkward they are to handle.”
“There’s something else,” Conrad said after a pause. “I mean another reason why they didn’t go crazy with joy on seeing us. They’re frightened.”
There was a further pause, considerably longer. At last Yanderman said, “You’re no fool, Conrad. Have you any idea why?”
Encouraged, Conrad said musingly, “When I first realised I thought it must be the shock of what happened to Jasper. Nestamay explained why he had to be killed at once, and it sounded horrible. But then I thought maybe it was going on before that. As I understand it, they have this alarm which signals the arrival of a thing, and Jasper turned it off. If you’ve been used all your life to being warned of danger it must be pretty upsetting to know one time there was no warning.”
“Ye-es,” Yanderman agreed. “But I think it’s even deeper than that. They had no warning about us, did they? There was no alarm to signal our arrival.”
Conrad started. “Do they think we’re dangerous?”
“Try and put yourself in their position. All your life, and during the lifetime of your ancestors, existence at this place they call the Station has had a rigid form, an embracing discipline. You’ve never seen a stranger apart from a newborn infant. Though your traditional lore talks matter-of-factly about transport to other worlds, you’ve never been out of sight of this monstrous dome here. There is only one random factor in your existence: things appear every now and then. Maxall says the incidence is about once in two to three days. It used to be higher, and smaller creatures as well as large ones came through, some of them in swarms which took a month or more to dispose of completely. According to him, one of his own ancestors put a stop to this, but at the cost of losing a great deal of the area under the dome to the creeping plants. It was the lesser of two evils. Several irreplaceable specialists, including men who really understood the traditional lore, had been killed within a single year. You were dozing when we discussed this, I believe.”
Shamefacedly Conrad admitted that was possible. He said, “You mean they’re frightened of us not because we threaten them but simply because our arrival upsets the—uh—the situation they’ve adjusted to?”
“Precisely. Add one more thing, too. Here they’ve been isolated for centuries, charged with a specific task. As a result of losing those irreplaceable men I mentioned, and for various other reasons, they’ve been driven to the verge of admitting failure. They just don’t know what they’re doing any more! All their energy goes in keeping the problem under control. They never advance towards a solution of it. And now our intrusion shows them that all this time the world has been going on outside; things have changed incredibly. Maybe, by this time, their dedication isn’t relevant any more. Maybe it will turn out that everything they’ve sweated and slaved for is useless.”
“I thought they were being very polite to us,” Conrad muttered. “It seemed like an effort.”
Yanderman gave a dry, rustling laugh.
“But—” Conrad fumbled for the words. “But haven’t they had anyone here who could do what I can do? I mean, have these visions of the past?”
“Apparently not. Maxall was explaining to me that the community is now reduced to a mere handful of heavily-inbred genetic lines. This boy who e
ndangered everyone by turning off the alarm had only been spared punishment previously because he represented the sole survivor of a particular line and the only possible mate for Maxall’s granddaughter. Recessive imbecility has already appeared in the Maxall family; the old man was terrified that if Nestamay had children by anyone else this recessive would crop up in them. And a community like this can’t afford to feed unproductive people.”
“What’s this got to do with—?”
“With your gift? Simply that it’s a rarity, and probably due to some factor of inheritance. In this community, the genes endowing people with it aren’t present in anybody’s makeup.”
“I see.” Conrad hesitated. An idea had just struck him which seemed almost presumptuous, but he had to voice it anyway. “Yanderman, is it going to be possible to put my gift to use here? I mean—I mean …” His voice trailed away.
“I don’t know,” Yanderman said. “That’s what I’ve been banking on, naturally, ever since I heard those extracts from the ancient lore which Maxall read to us. There are clues in there which may lead us through the tangled maze of your visualised images to an eventual solution. It would help tremendously if you could gain full waking access to your visions, but I doubt if you’ll ever achieve it. I know Granny Jassy had been trying for nearly fifty years without succeeding.”
“Why not?” That was indeed what Conrad had been thinking of; Yanderman’s offhand dismissal of the chance was a blow.
“Hmmm … You’re asking a difficult question for this time of the night, boy! I’m not sure I understand it fully myself, but I’ll do my best. You’ve got at your visions during most of your life by sitting and relaxing and then letting your attention settle on nothing in particular, right? A patch of sunlight on the ground, maybe, or a white pebble, or the tip of your forefinger—anything like that.”