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Twelve
Nevile Fawkes (botanist; a man who appreciated his own handsomeness by modeling his hair style after that shown on the traditional busts of Alexander the Great, but from whose appearance the presence of a nose far more aquiline than Alexander ever possessed noticeably detracted) was gone for two days, by Junior chronology, in one of the Triple G.’s atmospheric coasters. He could navigate one like a dream and was, in fact, the only man outside the crew who could navigate one at all, so he was the natural choice for the task. Fawkes did not seem noticeably overjoyed about that.
He returned, completely unharmed and unable to hide a grin of relief. He submitted to irradiation for the sake of sterilizing the exterior of his flexible air suit (designed to protect men from the deleterious effect of the outer environment, where no pressure differential existed; the strength and jointedness of a true space suit being obviously u
Fawkes flaunted color photographs in great number. The central valley of the continent was fertile almost beyond Earthly dreams. The rivers were mighty, the mountains rugged and snow-covered (with the usual pyrotechnic solar effects). Under Lagrange II alone, the vegetation looked vaguely repellent, seeming rather dark, like dried blood. Under Lagrange I, however, or under the suns together, the brilliant, flourishing green and the glisten of the numerous lakes (particularly north and south along the dead rims of the departing glaciers) brought an ache of homesickness to the hearts of many.
Fawkes said, “Look at these.”
He had skimmed low to take a photochrome of a field of huge flowers dripping with scarlet. In the high ultra-violet radiation of Lagrange I, exposure times were of necessity extremely short, and despite the motion of the coaster, each blossom stood out as a sharp blotch of strident color.
“I swear,” said Fawkes, “each one of those was six feet across.”
They admired the flowers unrestrainedly.
Fawkes then said, “No intelligent life whatever, of course.”
Sheffield looked up from the photographs with instant sharpness. Life and intelligence, after all, were by way of being his province. “How do you know?”
“Look for yourself,” said the botanist. “There are the photos. No highways, no cities, no artificial waterways, no signs of anything man-made.”
“No machine civilization,” said Sheffield. “That’s all.”
“Even ape men would build shelters and use fire,” said Fawkes, offended.
“The continent is ten times as large as Africa and you’ve been over it for two days. There’s a lot you could miss.”
“Not as much as you’d think,” was the warm response. “I followed every sizable river up and down and looked over both seacoasts. Any settlements are bound to be there.”
“In allowing seventy-two hours for two eight thousand-mile seacoasts ten thousand miles apart, plus how many thousand miles of river, that had to be a pretty quick lookover.”
Cimon interrupted, “What’s this all about? Homo sapiens is the only intelligence ever discovered in the Galaxy through a hundred thousand and more explored planets. The chances of Troas possessing intelligence is virtually nil.”
“Yes?” said Sheffield. “You could use the same argument to prove there’s no intelligence on Earth.”
“Makoyama,” said Cimon, “in his report mentioned no intelligent life.”
“And how much time did he have? It was a case of another quick feel through the haystack with one finger and a report of no needle.”
“What the eternal Universe,” said Rodriguez waspishly. “We argue like madmen. Call the hypothesis of indigenous intelligence unproven and let it go. We are not through investigating yet, I hope.”
Thirteen
Copies of those first pictures of Junior’s surface were added to what might be termed the open files. After a second trip, Fawkes returned in more somber mood and the meeting was correspondingly more subdued.
New photographs went from hand to hand and were then placed by Cimon himself in the special safe that nothing could open short of Cimon’s own hands or an all-destroying nuclear blast.
Fawkes said, ”The two largest rivers have a generally north-south course along the eastern edges of the western mountain range. The larger river comes down from the northern icecap, the smaller up from the southern one. Tributaries come in westward from the eastern range, interlacing the entire central plain. Apparently the central plain is tipped, the eastern edge being higher. It’s what ought to be expected maybe. The eastern mountain range is the taller, broader, and more continuous of the two. I wasn’t able to make actual measurements, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they beat the Himalayas. In fact, they’re a lot like the Wu Ch’ao range on Hesperus. You have to hit the stratosphere to get over them, and rugged-Wow!
“Anyway”-he brought himself back to the immediate subject on hand with an effort-” the two main rivers join about a hundred miles south of the equator and pour through a gap in the western range. They make it to the ocean after that in just short of eighty miles.
“Where it hits the ocean is a natural spot for the planetary metropolis. The trade routes into the interior of the continent have to converge there so it would be the inevitable emporium for space trade. Even as far as surface trade is concerned, the continental east coast has to move goods across the ocean. Jumping the eastern range isn’t worth the effort. Then, too, there are the islands we saw when we were landing.
“So right there is where I would have looked for the settlement even if we didn’t have a record of the latitude and longitude. And those settlers had an eye for the future. It’s where they set up shop.”
Novee said in a low voice, “They thought they had an eye for the future, anyway. There isn’t much left of them, is there?”
Fawkes tried to be philosophic about it. ”It’s been over a century. What do you expect? There’s a lot more left of them than I honestly thought there would be. Their buildings were mostly prefab. They’ve tumbled and vegetation has forced its way over and through them. The fact that the climate of Junior if glacial is what’s preserved it. The trees-or the objects that rather look like trees-are small and obviously very slow growing.
“Even so, the clearing is gone. From the air, the only way you could tell there had once been a settlement in that spot was that the new growth had a slightly different color and- and, well, texture-than the surrounding forests.”
He pointed at a particular photograph. “This is just a slag heap. Maybe it was machinery once. I think those are burial mounds.”
Novee said, “Any actual remains? Bones?”
Fawkes shook his head.
Novee said, “The last survivors didn’t bury themselves, did they?”
Fawkes said, “Animals, I suppose.” He walked away, his back to the group. ”It was raining when I poked my way through. It went splat, splat on the flat leaves above me and the ground was soggy and spongy underneath. It was dark, gloomy. There was a cold wind. The pictures I took don’t get it across. I felt as though there were a thousand ghosts, waiting-”
The mood was contagious.
Cimon said savagely, “Stop that!”
In the background, Mark A
Sheffield touched Mark’s thin shoulder lightly. “Only a way of speaking, Mark. But don’t feel badly that he doesn’t mean it literally. You’re watching the birth of a superstition, and that’s something, isn’t it?”