A World Out of Time Page 8

  “Your records call you an agnostic.”

  “Yeah. I’m whistling in the dark. I keep thinking I’ll just barely get killed landing.”

  He was taking a long rest period in celebration. He had finally finished cleaning debris out of the probe warhead. With a meal in his hand—a layered sandwich baked like a cake—he watched the landscape roll below him. A dull red highlight gleamed on the nightside ocean, below Jupiter.

  “Where do I want to land? Is there any sign of civilization down there?”

  “There is evidence of the generation and use of power in three places.” On the huge blue face of the planet a green arrow suddenly pointed at a green grid pattern. “Here, and on the other side of the world, and in Antarctica. My orbit does not cover Antarctica, but I can land you there.”

  “No, thanks. Isn’t that just about California?” Thinking: Wait a minute, the west coast ought to bulge. And where’s Baja California? From what seemed to be central Mexico the coast was a convex sweep all the way up to what must be Alaska.

  “Most of what you called California and Baja California will be an island near the North Pole. I can land you there too.”

  “No. Wherever someone is generating power, that’s where I want to land. There, where you put the grid pattern…which looks a little like a city, doesn’t it? Right angles…”

  “There are many clustered buildings, yes, but no strong evidence of preplanning. Your era would have called it a city. I advise against your landing there.”

  “If they’re the ones who sent the messages, they probably won’t kill me. I served their ancestral State.” It might be Nevada, he thought; or Arizona. It was on the seacoast now.

  “The differences between…” Peerssa stopped.

  Corbell got angry. “That’s Earth. Earth!” The screwed-up solar system bothered him too, when he let it. “Peerssa, that was Earth’s plate tectonics you were describing! Did you find the island that used to be California?”

  “I found two islands that might have been California, three million years ago.”

  “Well, then! Did that happen by coincidence?”

  “No,” Peerssa lied.

  “Call that area where you put the grid One City. Call the Antarctic area Three City. Now, what about Two City? Where is that?”

  “Bordering the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia.”

  “Land me in One City, then.” More calmly, Corbell added, “I must be nuts, looking for civilization. Why do I want to spend my last days fighting a foreign language? But maybe I’ll have time to find out what happened here.”

  Corbell filled the probe nose cone with medicines, food, a tank of fresh water, tanks of oxygen. The plastic foam would hold them. He moored more solidly the ultrasonic whistle, controlled by signal from Peerssa, that would melt the foam.

  He had put on muscle weight. The heart attack he feared, and thought he was prepared for, had never come. Don Juan’s twenty-second-century medicines had given him that. But he lived with hot wires in his shoulders: Tendonitis.

  At the last—braced in the middle of the ravaged nose compartment, with one hand on the spigot of the foam tank—he hesitated. “Peerssa? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do after I’m down?”

  “I will wait until I am sure you are dead. Then I will search other systems for the State.”

  “You’re no crazier than I am.” He wondered how long Peerssa expected him to last—and didn’t ask. He opened the spigot. Foam surrounded him and congealed.

  Thrust built up under his back, held for a time, then eased to almost nothing. Presently there was turbulence. It was a powered landing, not a meteoric re-entry. The thrust built up again, held, died. The probe rotated…and there was a jar that drove him two inches into the foam.

  Peerssa spoke in his suit radio. “May I consider myself free of your commands?”

  Corbell suffered a quick, vividly detailed nightmare. “Melt the foam first!” he cried. But Peerssa was no longer bound by his orders. Peerssa would take vengeance on one whom the State considered a criminal and arch-ingrate. The foam would not melt. Corbell would die here, embedded like a fly in amber, his freedom mere yards away!

  He felt a lurch. Then another. The nightmare ended. He sank through melting foam, blind, to a solid bulkhead. The foam ran from his faceplate, and he saw that the inspection hatch was wide open.

  Corbell stepped into the opening and looked out and down.

  Peerssa had landed the big cylinder on its side, on attitude jets. The sun, high overhead, was nonetheless a sunset sun, red and inflated. The land ran flat to a range of sharp-edged granite hills. It was all dead: browns and grays, dead rock and dust. Heat made the air shimmer like water.

  The State had not provided exit ladders for a package probe. Peerssa had been clever again. The foam had run out the hatch and congealed into a foam plastic slope. Corbell walked down it, and his boots crunched, as on snow partly thawed and refrozen. He stepped out onto the soil of Earth.

  The soil had died.

  Three million years. Wars? Erosion? Loss of water when Earth fled inexplicably from an inexplicably expanding sun? At this moment he didn’t care. He raised his hands to his faceplate—

  “Do not try to take off your suit. Corbell, have you left the probe?”

  —ready for his first breath of fresh air in a long time. “Why not?”

  “Have you left the probe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. For purposes of discussion I have spoken of this world as Earth. Now I may speak of the differences. You have landed on a world marginally habitable at best, in a region uninhabitably hot.”

  “What?” Corbell looked down. The outside temperature register was set at chin level below the edge of his faceplate. It didn’t look bad, not bad at—centigrade! The State used centigrade!

  Peerssa said, “It’s too hot, Corbell. Temperatures in the equatorial zone range from fifty-five degrees centigrade upward. The oceans are above fifty degrees. I find little chlorophyll absorption in the oceans, and none on land, barring certain mountain valleys. You would have done better to land near one or the other pole.”

  Somehow Corbell was not even shocked. Had he half expected this? My death is the end of the world—a very human attitude. And three million years, after all…“So that’s what happened to the oceans.”

  “The atmosphere holds thousands of megatons of water vapor, enough to support the hypothesis that Earth’s continental shelves have become dry land. What remains of the oceans should be very salty. Corbell, we still don’t know.”

  “What about those mountain valleys?”

  “In a mountain range corresponding to Earth’s Himalayas, there are valleys between one and two kilometers high. Some life has survived there.”

  Corbell sighed. “All right. Which way is civilization?”

  “Define civilization.”

  “One City. No, just point me at the closest place where someone is using power.”

  “Four point nine kilometers distant there is minor usage of power. I doubt you will find people, or even living beings. The power level has not varied since we made orbit. I think you will find nothing but machines running automatically.”

  “I’ll try anyway. Which way?”

  “West. I can locate you. I will guide you.”

  III

  Corbell had not gone hiking in a long time.

  The suit was not uncomfortable. Most of his equipment’s weight rested on his shoulders. The boots were not hiking boots, but they fit. He set out in a rhythmic stride, breathing the canned air, letting his attention rove the scenery—and bad to stop very soon. He’d chosen too quick a pace.

  He rested, then set out in a more leisurely stroll. It was level land: not ankle-breaking country, though he had to watch his footing. It was packed earth with rocks inset, and there were gentle wind-carved risings and fallings-off.

  Peerssa led him to the range of hills and apparently expected him t
o walk straight across them. Corbell turned left until he could find an easier slope. He found he was grumbling subvocally.

  He had had to grumble subvocally for lo, these eight years’ waking time in which he had grown one hundred and eighty years old while three million years passed on Earth. Grumble aloud and you couldn’t know what Peerssa might pick up and take as an order. Goddamn literal computers, he grumbled. Sleep tanks and super-medicines that don’t keep you young. Air and cooling equipment getting heavier with each step. Why couldn’t they have put a belly band in this suit? A belly band was the greatest invention since the wheel. It let a hiker carry the weight on his hips instead of his back. If the State had had its head screwed on right—

  Which was silly. The suit was designed for free-fall and use aboard ship. Not hiking. And if Peerssa took orders, it was a damn good thing. And he was lucky to be on Earth at all. And, Corbell thought as he topped the crest, he was damn glad to be here. Puffing, bent over so he could pant better, half listening for the heart attack he’d been expecting for so long, it came to him that he was happy.

  Yeah! In three million years, probably no human being had ever done what he had done. Be nice if there were someone to brag to.

  He saw the house.

  It was on a higher crest of hills beyond this one. Otherwise he might not have noticed it. It was just the color of the hills: gray and dust-brown; but he saw its regular shape against the blue of sky. It was set against the rock slope.

  It took him another two hours to reach it. He was being careful with himself. Even so, he knew how his legs would hurt tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. He was two-thirds of the way up that second range of hills when he found the remains of a broken road. Then it was easier.

  The house was extravagantly designed. The roof was a convex triangle, almost horizontal, with the base against the hill itself. Below the roof were two walls of glass, or of something stronger. The house’s single room was exposed to this single voyeur, who perched precariously on the slope and clutched at a boulder with thick gloves. It was, he thought, a hell of a place to build a house.

  He pressed his faceplate against the (presumed) glass.

  The floor was not level. Either the hill itself had settled, or architectural styles had changed more than Corbell was willing to believe.

  He was looking into a living-room-sized area with what had to be a bed in the middle. But the bed was two or three times bigger than king size, and it had the asymmetrical shape of a ’50s-style Hollywood pool. The curved headboard was a control panel fitted with screens and toggles and tall grills like hi-fi soundboxes, and a couple of slots big enough to deliver drinks or sandwiches. In the darkness above the bed hovered a big wire sculpture or mobile or possibly some kind of antenna, he couldn’t tell which.

  Two pinpricks of yellow light lived in the control panel.

  “This is your power source, all right,” Corbell reported. “I’m going to find the door.”

  Twenty minutes later he reported, “There’s no door.”

  “A house must have an opening. Look for an opening that doesn’t look like a door. From your description, there must be more to the house than you can see: a toilet at least, perhaps an office, or a food dispensary.”

  “They’d have to be under the hill. Mmm…all right, I’ll keep looking.”

  He found no trace of a trapdoor in the roof. Could the whole roof lift up in one piece, on signal? Corbell couldn’t guess whether the architect would have been that wasteful of power.

  If there was an entrance in the road itself, then hard dirt covered it. Corbell was getting annoyed. The house couldn’t have been used in a hundred years; possibly a thousand; conceivably ten thousand. Likewise the door, wherever it might be. Maybe the house had a second, lower story, now buried in the hill, door and all.

  “I’ll have to break in,” he said.

  “Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I’m not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies.”

  “What if it does have a burglar alarm? I’m wearing a helmet. It’ll block most of the sound.”

  “There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser.”

  “Will it—?” Will it reach? Stupid, it was designed to reach across tens of light-years. “Go ahead.”

  “I have the house in view. Firing.”

  Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell’s arm pierced the clouds.

  “Peerssa, you’re being attacked. Can you handle it?”

  “It can’t hurt me. It could hurt you. I’d better destroy it.”

  The metal object began to glow. It didn’t like that. It fled away in a jerky randomized path, while the red beam remained fixed on one point in the sky. Its upper body glowed bright red verging on orange. It was screaming; its frantic warbling voice sang through Corbell’s helmet. Suddenly it tilted and arced away down the hill. It struck the plain hard, turned over and over, and lay quiet.

  There was a hole in the roof now. Corbell said, “You think there are more of those?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  Corbell climbed down to the roof and looked through. Molten concrete, or whatever, had set the bed afire. Corbell jumped down onto the flaming bedclothes, prepared to get off fast. Wrong again: It was a water bed, and his feet went right through it. He waded out, then pushed the burning bedclothes into the puddle in the middle with his clumsy gloved hands. The fire went out, but the room filled with steam.

  “I’m in the house,” he reported. Peerssa didn’t bother to answer.

  Corbell the architect looked about him.

  This room, the visible part of the house, was a triangle. The bed in the center had the pleasing asymmetry of a puddle of water—and it was pleasing. An arc of sofa occupied one corner, facing the bed. In front of the sofa was a slab of black slate or a good imitation, arced like the sofa, but broken in the middle. Corbell bent and lifted one end of the slab. Something on the underside: solid circuitry. At a guess, this had been a floating coffee table until whatever was holding it up burned out.

  From inside the room he still couldn’t see any doors.

  There was only one opaque wall to inspect. He moved along it, rapping. It sounded hollow.

  Door controls on the headboard? Nuts. You’d have to walk clear around to the other side—wait, there was something on the back side. Three thumb-sized circular depressions of chrome yellow against black headboard. Corbell pushed them.

  The back wall slid up in three unequal sections.

  The biggest one was a closet. Corbell found half a dozen garments in it, all one-piece long-sleeved garments with lots of pockets. Some had hoods. A layer of dust at the bottom of the closet was two to three inches thick.

  The second section was smaller, no bigger than a telephone booth, with a free-form chair in it. Corbell stepped in. He found another chrome-yellow depression on the wall, and touched it. The door shot up behind him.

  A chair. Funny. Now he saw the great hole in the seat of the chair. A toilet? But there was no water in the bowl, and no toilet paper…nothing but a glitteringly clean metal sponge attached to the chair by a wire.

  He left the cubicle. By any terms, it was pretty basic for a house with this complexity of design. The owner should have been able to afford something better.

  He turned to the clothing still hanging on shaped hangers. Funny, he couldn’t tell if they were made for a man or a woman. He tugged at the fabric. It was amazingly resilient—and very dusty. He tugged harder, then tried in earnest to tear the cloth. It
stood his full strength.

  This clothing seemed new.

  But the dust?

  Say there were temporary clothes, meant to be thrown out when styles changed, and clothes meant to last longer. How long? If that layer of dust was the temporary clothes.

  He still hadn’t found a door.

  The third cubicle looked promising. There was nothing in it at all except for one unmarked switch like the yellow circle in the bathroom, and a panel of four white-glowing touch points.

  “I think I’ve found an elevator,” he said. “I’m going to try it.” He used the yellow touch point. The door came up; he turned on his helmet lamp.

  Peerssa said, “Dangerous. What if the elevator takes you down and then breaks down?”

  “Then you beam me another manhole to climb out of.” Corbell pushed the top button. Nothing happened.

  He’d expected that. He must be at the top. He pushed number two.

  Peerssa’s voice came unnecessarily loud. “Corbell. Answer if you can.”

  “Yeah?” There had been no sense of motion, yet something had changed. There were eight more white-glowing touch points: two additional vertical rows beside the first, set closer together, and each of these was marked with a black squiggle.

  Corbell jabbed at the door button.

  Peerssa said, “You have changed position by four point one miles southwest and two hundred feet loss of altitude. I place you in One City.”

  “Yeah.” Corbell looked out into a different room. He was beginning to feel like a wandering ghost. Everything was spooky, unreal.

  He stepped out, round what once must have been a floating desk but was now only knee-high. Screens and pushbutton panels set into the desk made it look like the control board in the Womb Room; but they were ruined. It must have rained here for hundreds of years.

  There was a rug like half-melted cotton candy, deep as his ankles. It squished beneath his boots, and tore, and stuck to his suit fabric. He stepped to the edge of an empty picture window frame and looked out and down.