The jeep slewed its way down the red mud jungle track. Nadir looked out of the window and through the rain. To the left was the mountainside. It loomed over them, with a heavy mist obscuring tongues of glacier on its heights. The jeep rounded an abrupt bend in the road. His monotonously-silent driver gave a grunt. Apparently this was his version of the triumphant announcement of their arrival.
After a hundred interminable kilometres of raw frontier, forest, and broken terrain, they were at the digs. Nadir could see men in rain gear and boots slipping and sliding about in the awful muck. Earth-movers, a long line of them, crossed the road while they waited. After a pause, the jeep was allowed in through a gap. He recognized a long-haired man hurrying to meet them. In spite of remote video conferences giving them that face-to-face contact so important in human relations, Nadir couldn’t stick a name to that face. He took Nadir to an opening in the cliff, covered by heavy tarpaulins.
The tall, bespectacled, blue-eyed Dr. Jeffrey Helmuth appeared from the dank and musty gloom of the interior. Inside the cavernous blackness, Nadir saw machinery and equipment, stuff reminiscent of boxcars upended, or heavy fabricating tools. It appeared to be an alien factory; at least that was the assessment so far. It was a complex maze of ‘something,’ built by a civilization as yet unknown.
“Gentlemen,” noted his guide.
Nadir felt a jab of naked shit, right in the guts.
The bald, sweating man on his left showed him further in, blue eyes gleaming behind the lenses. Two other men, one the guide, accompanied them.
“No one besides myself and a few others has seen this,” Dr. Helmuth said. “We’ve been holding off until your arrival.”
All around, the hulking constructions were covered in a thick, even coating of dust. Undisturbed for God knows how long. But then as the doctor pointed down at the floor, Nadir saw some strange and disturbing tracks.
It was true then.
Nadir’s heart begin to beat heavily, and he noted a sense of adrenalin-ridden shock.
He knelt down to examine the spoor. They were curiously elongated. The toe-pads were impossibly far from the balls of the foot. There were strange little scratch-marks, even farther out past the toes.
“It’s difficult to estimate the age,” he began. “Narrow, like a girl-child’s feet. It’s very odd. It’s as if they don’t clip their toenails…ever.”
He stood up to note the marks and prints on the ladder that went up the side of the device.
“Almost looks like they were playing,” he noted.
There was barely an echo. The words were eaten up and absorbed by the walls and floor. Outside, the sounds of men and machinery working could be faintly perceived; maybe forty metres distant. It was another world out there, a world of light, and wind, rain and movement, and moving, active things.
Outside was activity.
In here, time stood still.
“It’s very difficult to estimate the age, without further study of the rate of deposition, and the source of the, er; crud,” he concluded with a rueful grin at the other men.
“It could be days, or it could be years,” he added superfluously.
“And that’s not all,” said the Doctor in an odd tone. “Sorry to hold back on you, but…”
“Spit it out,” suggested Nadir.
His associates weren’t there, but had heard the tale.
“Doctor Helmuth heard a noise; or rather noises,” one of the men said in a serious tone.
“Or maybe voices,” the other guy put in.
Nadir searched their faces for signs of ridicule, but found none.
“Show me the other tracks. The ones you told me about,” he said.
“Right this way,” beckoned Dr. Helmuth, with a trace of apparent nervousness.
They picked up the bags and the walky-talkies. Then he led them deeper, with the help of their powerful hand-held lights, into the subterranean world.
The good doctor paused.
“This is where my own tracks end,” he said, and then pointed his torch, stabbing out into the dark. “I heard something; and that was it for me.”
There was a clear space of dry and undisturbed dust, black and hoary-looking in the ellipse of illumination thrown by the torch. Then Nadir saw it, a wavering, mottled pattern of shadows, and lumpy-looking marks in the dust.
“There! They go off to right and left.” Helmuth whispered hoarsely. “We made a point of it; not to make too many tracks of our own. The two sets of tracks must meet up somewhere.”
“Let’s go on,” said Nadir. “Can I call you Jeff?”
“Yes,” agreed Doctor Helmuth, yet making no effort to introduce the others.
Nadir put it down to sheer nervousness on the doctor’s part. He let it lie for the moment. There was another short pause, as they checked in by radio with a safety team outside in the unsecured area. With Nadir leading the way, they proceeded into the blackness. He stood momentarily, looking at the thin, yet distinct stretch of tracks running across a wide dust-blackened hall.
“Most of them seem to be pointed this way,” he observed.
No one spoke. He could hear every one of them breathing in the stillness. Good reason to get them moving again. He filled the silence with a few suggestions, such as tying up a bootlace, and he asked the tallest one to tie down the flaps on his pack. It was more to keep their minds occupied than from any real necessity. The team moved deliberately, and with some caution. He kept hoping they would address each other by name.
As they followed along, the tracks moved closer to a wall, and then the room opened up. It was so huge that all of their lights combined could not pierce the inky distance ahead. There was nothing but blackness. Yet the overhead loomed low, with piping, ductwork, cables, stapled or clipped or bolted to the underside. A shaft, lined with nameless infrastructure, went straight up above them. Thirty metres further on, it swelled to vastness again.
“They know what a straight line is,” muttered Jeffrey Helmuth. “It’s all very geometrical.”
“Huh,” the short, mustachioed man muttered. “The roof is slanted. The peak is up about eleven hundred metres!”
“Map it,” instructed Nadir as the fellow hastened to comply, tapping buttons and studying the layout so far.
“What the hell were they building in here?” the doctor queried. “And now it’s so completely empty.”
Their hearts had slowed down somewhat. The trail led far off into the center of the dark. It was dreadfully empty feeling, like everything in it had simply decomposed into nothingness. Everything was covered in a fine charcoal-grey powder; anywhere from four or five millimetres deep up to a metre in places; in something that resembled drifts of sand or snow.
Before setting off again, they examined cubicles along the wall: a door, a window, low-tiled ceilings.
“Foreman’s office?” someone, the tall guy, asked.
“Interview rooms?” Mr. Moustache suggested; this was the long-haired guy in blue coveralls.
With more boldness than might have been imagined, they kept on across the space.
It was very disorienting not to clearly see the floor. There were no walls to be seen, and the ceiling retreated to the great heights again. There was absolutely no noise except the puff-puff-puff of their feet and their own breath.
The light was sucked up by the fibrous black dust that coated everything.
“This is un-fucking-believable,” the long-haired construction guy said.
His name was on the tip of Nadir’s tongue.
“The trail branches left and right again,” said Nadir. “Look where it branches off.”
They consulted amongst themselves as to what to do.
“The left one there seems a little more defined,?
?? said the hulking big fellow at his elbow.
“Stan!” grinned Nadir in recollection.
He’d studied the files. The start had been little hurried this morning. Yet with all the preparations taken well in hand, there was no reason to delay.
“All right, we’ll take the left one,” and he placed a beacon by pressing the little tit and then rolling it underhand off into the emptiness.
“Hopefully, that will remain there,” he said, “But we have our mappers too.”
After a further half hour’s walk, they finally came to the other side.
Here they stopped and set out another beacon.
“Nothing beats a ball of string or a trail of bread crumbs,” joked the doctor.
‘We all seem to be feeling a little more at ease now,’ Nadir thought.
He considered his words.
“If you had to blaze a trail across something like that, you could almost go mad,” he told the others. “Imagine primitive peoples, equipped only with smoldering sticks, or maybe slightly more sophisticated fat-lamps.”
“If you brought fuel and wicks with you, you could go on forever,” pointed out the one guy whose name Nadir couldn’t recall.
“They could bring food and water, if they had containers,” he added.
That’s good. Nadir was thinking.
Put ourselves in the place of…them.
He shuddered involuntarily.
Then, almost in answer to his primitive, atavistic reaction, they heard it.
Was it a flute? A whistle? Voices? And then a drum? Distorted by distance, muffled by dust, changed and made more; well, spooky by multitudinous corners?
The tall guy, Stan, crossed himself, muttering, ‘Nom de Dieu,’ or something Nadir couldn’t quite catch.
But that, oddly enough, helped to allay his fears. Logic and reason, he told himself, logic and reason. Let that be your guide.
Still they hesitated. Stan was the tall guy. The long-haired guy was…but it still wouldn’t come. No time to fire up the computer and no good excuse, either.
Nadir forced himself to boldly lead off. To go back now would have been unthinkable.
His neck bristled and he could feel the goose bumps and the hairs rise on his arms.
Another faint sound came from afar.
“That could be water, or something,” whispered the long-haired fellow. “Couldn’t it?”
No one else offered an opinion.
Suddenly they were on a main thoroughfare. They shone their lights at literally hundreds of alien foot marks. The men nervously pointed the lights around, behind, ahead along the trail. These showed signs of various ages, suggested by the overlay of subsequent passers-by.
“Why don’t we stop, out to the side somewhere,” Nadir suggested.
One place looked as good as another. They put out a number of sensors. They used sonar-tripped cameras, with passive infrared capability. A seismograph, a sound recorder, and several other image-gathering systems.
They rolled out their sleeping bags and had a cold meal.
They found the floor by brushing aside the fine, powdery dust, which took a long time to settle.
It hung there all around them. They could taste it. It tasted like dirt.
Nadir carefully gave instructions in a low voice.
“Let’s have a pee, and then; pretend to sleep. Keep a rigorous silence,” he told them.
They put out all the lights. The breathing of the other men slowly diminished as they began to relax. It might be a long wait. When a person moved in their sleeping bag, causing a sudden and much-anticipated, ‘sssss-ip’ sound, it did cause a body to twitch reflexively.
Sweat trickled down his temples. He peered into the dark from his almost-fetal position, knowing full well, he couldn’t hope to see anything. Whenever one of his companions moved, he had a small jolt of adrenalin. How long to keep on? Wait three or four hours and then pretend to awaken?
Should have made that more clear with the men. Nadir hadn’t reckoned on the tension.
It came then.
Carefully Nadir reached out and touched Jeff Helmuth’s rigid figure. Helmuth’s body twitched.
A hand grasped his. Helmuth heard it too!
Nadir could discern the progress of the touch to the other two men.
Off in the dark, yet out of the range of the camera’s motion detector zone; they could hear someone; or some things moving across the dark chamber. There were no torches or lights. Could it be a large animal, or a herd of some type of cave-dwelling creature?
Not for the first time, his skin crawled, and hairs stood up. He kept strangely calm, but wondered if any of the others was fighting the urge to put on a light.
Vague noises. Too bad, but they couldn’t use night vision, not in pitch blackness, and not with flash units set to go off at any time. Not to see what was coming was frankly terrifying. He had never felt fear of this intensity for any extended period before. He realized with stark recognition, that he had lived a pretty sheltered life. Up until now.
There were noises…must have come upon our tracks, he realized.
The sounds were getting louder…no, closer!
That’s when they heard the cameras go off, three of them in quick succession.
They had a funny little beep to indicate a successful picture. The lighting units were deliberately set very low to avoid causing injury to cave-dwelling species. The men had only the briefest impression, of a few shadowy, yet vertically-elongated figures.
There were several seconds of padding, scuffling noises.
Then all was silence again.
Everyone let out their breath at once. Nadir fought back an insane urge to giggle…
Unzipping their sleeping bags, they all began whispering excitedly, but just as quickly got it under control.
“Let’s recover the cameras immediately,” said Nadir in a normal tone.
They all had their little lights going again. Thank God for that.
“They must be watching from afar,” the doctor said, yet there was no animal-eye reflection to be seen in a three-hundred-sixty degree sweep with one of the big lights.
“Let’s act like we own the place,” Nadir decided.
“Camera one,” said Stan, with the others crowding at his shoulder to watch.
He pushed the play button.
“Oh, my God,” the other guy murmured.
The rest remained silent, intent on the screen, avidly sucking it in.
They were viewing the first scientifically-documented alien contact in the history of the human race.
“Holy, bejeebers,” said Stan.
His partner just grunted.
“You got that right,” he muttered. “Next time you want to use yourself as bait, leave me home!”
They all chuckled.
“That’s an unusual effect,” noted the doctor. “Still; we have two arms and two legs, a head. They’re kind of thin-looking.”
“We have still pictures as well,” added the other guy. “Let’s have a look.”
The initial impression was the same; tall, thin, ‘people,’ wearing long raggedy cloaks, and all of them were barefoot. Skinny shanks stuck out of the robes here and there.
“Did we have the gain turned up too much?” Nadir asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Stan. “I think the background temperature must be pretty low, because the dust acts as an insulator and it also gets all over everything, including them… and the cameras.”
“Very skeletal looking,” Nadir was fascinated by the look of them.
“What the heck would they find to eat in here?” rejoined Helmuth.
“We’ll leave some bea
ds, and tools, a few bags of candy. No weapons, not even a knife,” Nadir decided.
“There must be a waterhole,” he reasoned out loud for the benefit of the others.
The doctor moved off, in the lead suddenly, as he studied the marks and came back.
“They went back to the main trail, instead of running off into the darkness,” he reported.
“Is it possible they move about in here, completely in the dark?” the doctor wondered aloud.
“Let’s think about it. If they’re barefoot, and if they’re on the trail, they can probably feel other footprints below them. If they set foot too far off the trail, their feet would probably be sensitive enough to tell the difference,” suggested Nadir.
“Holy, Jesus,” muttered Stan.
They cleared up the site, and put all the stuff back in the bags.
It was a subdued group who stood looking at Nadir.
“When I got your original message, I sort of envisaged, I don’t know, some kind of primitive copper mine or something,” he acknowledged. “A few holes in the ground, or worse, a line of three or four stones in the dirt, more or less lined up in a row. I guess I was skeptical right up until I saw all those machines.”
“When can we expect someone from the Ministry?” asked Stan.
“Anytime in the next three years,” responded Nadir. “You know what they’re like.”
“What are we supposed to do?” asked the other.
“I’m sorry, I forgot your name,” Nadir told the man. “I can see everything in your file, but I just lost your name. I’m usually pretty good with names.”
“Mark,” came the response, white teeth gleaming behind the moustache.
“Damn! I’m sorry,” noted Nadir. “Look, guys, what would you be doing if we weren’t down here?”
“Building a road?” asked Stan.
“Periodic checks on the bordello girls,” Doctor Helmuth admitted.
“Paperwork,” grimaced Mark.
“Let’s go find that waterhole. What do you say?”
Without a whole lot of further discussion, they moved off one by one, along the main trail. The underground complex seemed to go on forever. They dropped a beacon as often as seemed necessary. These were low-powered radio beacons, and they only had so many to put down.
On and on they went, sometimes up multiple sets of stairs, or down long corridors with numberless cubicles; behind doors on each side. Occasionally; side corridors beckoned, but they followed the main concentration of foot prints.
They stopped to change batteries. They put the used ones back in the bags. There was still a little power in them and you never know.
“How far?” asked Nadir.
“We’ve come about six kilometres,” reported Mark. “Amazing.”
“Tell me about the road,” suggested Nadir as they got going again.
“Originally, we were going to build a floating road across eighty kilometres of the sloppiest, the worst, the shittiest kind of muskeg terrain imaginable,” said Stan. “The trouble is, you send ten trucks north, the road stretches. It buckles under them, and pressure waves go along, before and behind.”
“Oh, really,” Nadir said. “What does that do? Stretch the road?”
He felt another insane urge to giggle, and Stan’s grin showed white and clear in the light of his torch.
“That’s a good point, actually, but no. The real problem is that the up-and-down motion liquefies the muck underneath. Eventually, the inevitable truck break-down happens, and then, the road has time to settle.”
“Ah! I get it,” said Nadir.
“That’s why we’re following the lower slopes now,” said Stan. “It has its problems, but it’s firm ground, in fact solid igneous intrusions of billion-year old magma.”
“And that takes a lot of blasting,” Nadir suddenly comprehended.
“When the road is done, we can open up the mine,” said Mark. “We can’t lift our stuff in, it’s just too expensive.”
On a planet like this, either it came and went from the spaceport, went by water or was sent by road. The only modern communication was in fact electronic. You can’t send a bulldozer by wireless. Too heavy to go by helicopter, which were used in the exploration.
“That kind of heavy-lift capacity is years away,” the fellow concluded.
Nadir checked his watch. Soon it would be time for another rest.
They kept on for about another hour, then they came upon it. There were sounds of water dripping, and even the faintest suggestion of a pale grey light up ahead.
“Wow. That’s like a huge shaft going up inside the mountain,” said the doctor.
Tendrils of a woody, vine-like plant with fern-like appendages hung down in huge swooping fronds. Here the floor was almost clean, wiped so by countless feet over the years. A few mucky spots could be seen here and there.
At the edge of a clear pool of water a full seventy metres long; there was a beach, composed of a kind of black sand, along with lots of indistinct footprints.
“Look here,” called Mark.
It was a heavily-dented metal bucket, lying on its side, and with a thin trickle of water still moving down a smooth rock ledge towards the pond.
They all looked at him. Nadir shone his light into the pool, seeing the beam go way, way down into the depths.
“There’s a ramp going down over here,” called Mark. “I’ll bet there are lower levels, all flooded.”
“Let’s set up the cameras, one over there, one over there, and one at our spot,” and he reluctantly led them back away from the mysterious pool of crystalline water.
“Cold, but good,” said Stan after stopping and filling up his bottle.
They retreated a hundred metres back up the same long corridor they followed in.
They had a wall at their back, and some mouldy pieces of what looked like furniture to settle on.
“It’s like a bed of moss,” Jeff Helmuth murmured, as he lay back on it. “Very comfortable.”
Once again they shut off all the lights and waited.
It seemed like forever. The monotonous silence was their only friend. Nadir heard another man murmuring quietly in his sleep. Then he too, slept.
Upon awakening, he knew instantly that something was wrong, horribly wrong.
Reaching for the light, it wasn’t there. In rising panic, he groped and groped, but it just wasn’t there! He slapped at the figure nearest him, the doctor. An animal-like sound escaped as desperate fear stabbed at him.
“Wake up, damn you!” he grunted out with some force, face all stiff with anger and something else.
Just fear.
It won’t kill you, he told himself. It’s just fear.
The others woke, and they were all talking. It was a moment near madness. Nadir remembered and then found his pocket flash. He turned it on, and saw the cameras hadn’t been fired. Then; on impulse more than anything else, he pointed the light up. A narrow catwalk went directly over them. Five metres up. How stupid could they have been?
As the other men silenced, he put it down again.
“Anyone else have another light?” he asked.
It turns out they all did, and now they were feeling a little better about things.
They all had a grip on themselves, he noted with relief.
“Did you see ‘em?” asked Stan in a hoarse whisper.
“Nah,” said Nadir, sounding regretful. “Glad I didn’t, actually. You guys were all sawing logs, though.”
He felt a sudden burst of pride. They should be able to walk out of here, if they conserved the batteries.
“I guess they didn’t want to cause us harm, or they could easily have done it,” he pointed out.
br />
“They must perceive us as some kind of a threat,” muttered the doctor thoughtfully.
“It will be tough going, four guys following one small light,” grunted Mark.
As they sat whispering, intent on using their ears for all their might, Nadir noted again that it wasn’t completely dark. In the hours spent wandering the halls, the eyes had adjusted somewhat, and the dimmest glow emanated from the direction of the water hole.
Of course, going back the way they came in would require good lights.
That’s when he saw them. He straightened up with a start. The others saw them now; too. They all went rigid, not moving a muscle.
He tried to remember to breathe.
Just try to breathe normally.
A group of beings…people…were shuffling towards them, forming a big semi-circle around them. They within about ten metres distance.
Nadir was conscious of his pistol, slung on his belt. Stan made a protesting noise, and upon rising, Nadir patted his shoulder.
Nadir stood clear of the heap. He remained silent.
“The translator?” he asked Mark.
“I have eighty nationalities under my management,” he spoke in a low, calm tone.
“The Basques and the Finns caused some problems.”
None of the others made a sound.
Neither did any of the group who stood regarding them in something akin to awe.
It was hard to ascribe emotions to facial expressions in a totally alien race.
Nadir studied the robes just as they seemed to study him. Tattered and covered with grime. A baby peered out from behind its, or her; mother’s legs.
Hopefully, bringing the kids along was a peaceful sign?
A pair of small boys pushed at each other, eyes wide and looking at him.
“Doc! Doc! Are you seeing all this?” Nadir whispered.
The doctor had nothing to say.
A tall, wiry-looking figure stepped out front and centre, as the group parted before him. The being had burning, glowing eyes. No, it was a reflection from a small lamp he held. It appeared to be filled with living light. Some kind of insects? This being approached, but Nadir stood his ground. He even kind of relaxed. These people just looked…poverty stricken.
Faint noises issued from its mouth, obscured by an overgrown mustache and beard.
“Oh, great and mighty Star Gods, we give thanks for the blessings.”
Flattery will get you everywhere, Nadir thought inconsequentially.
“You have spoken well,” he said, then caught his breath.
A moment passed. He thought he was going to be sick to his stomach. Nadir didn’t want to be rude, but he gawked for a moment. A movement had opened up the shawl-like garment worn by the old man.
This person had no skin pigmentation, none whatsoever. Nadir could see internal organs, or at least things which corresponded to his imagined picture of them.
He thought he could see heart, lungs, stomach, and veins, all glowing from below the skin’s surface.
In the background there was a sudden intake of breath as the others caught on as well, one by one.
“Drink from our fountain, eat of our table,” the being told him in a singsong, nasal chant, accompanied by somebody on a flute.
“Thank you. We come in peace,” Nadir announced.
Still conscious of the gun in his waist holster, and feeling somehow sullied by the possession of it, he saw the being study his every inch.
The eyes possessed intelligence and something else. Was it fear?
“Please come with us to our home,” it beckoned them.
“I’ll have to write a thank-you note to the makers of that fucking translation device,” noted Mark; as he stuck right there at Nadir’s elbow.
* * *
They sat around in a big circle near one end of the pool.
Nadir and the others tried to get to know a little about the people. Apparently they farmed some kind of crop up on the terraces of the great shaft above them. The people with the highest fields could grow the best crops. That made sense, but only the strongest and fittest could work them.
Water fell from the sky. A few stalagmites and stalactites could be seen. The light was growing stronger, roughly corresponding to about midday on the surface.
The water would eventually build up calcareous deposits. Everything else looked to be made by someone’s hand. Did the original builders take advantage of existing tunnels in the extinct volcano? It would seem that they must have. Yet he knew nothing. Nothing with a capital ‘N.’
Nadir and the others agreed that the water issued from one of the glaciers that dotted the Seven Sisters volcanic chain. Perhaps the ground was riddled with lava tubes turned into rivers.
However, this did not satisfactorily account for the light. Was it possible that even now; alien emergency lighting a thousand years old was coming down from above? But why not in the other passages? The light was not necessarily, ‘natural,’ though. And it didn’t seem to be luminescing from the rocks or the very walls or anything like that. It clearly fell from above, just like the fine, ever-present mist in the main chamber.
The sky was a splotchy glare of indeterminate distance. By studying the sides of what was a huge stony bowl, they decided that it had to be a couple of thousand metres up there.
“I’m not sure if that’s an artificial sky, or what,” he admitted to Doctor Helmuth and the others. “It’s damned convincing, if it is.”
“We’re in some kind of alien mall,” joked Stan, who had been pretty quiet for some time.
They watched the kids playing by the water’s edge. The chief sat with them, and several others. The kids simply accepted them at face value and went back to play.
It took some getting used to, but people are people, Nadir reasoned.
“Do you think sunlight is directed into the shaft by huge mirrors or something?”
asked Mark.
The shaft was so high there was only that faint glow.
The people returned the expedition’s equipment, tactfully, and had asked not to be ‘over-warmed,’ by the light of the ‘baby-stars,’ that the ‘sky-gods,’ carried with them.
Nadir apologized profusely, and the chief seemed to bear no ill will towards the team. He seemed to accept the apology at face value. He didn’t seem to know anything at all about the world outside the volcano, nor did he know who made the tunnels.
They were expected!
Literally for months and years now. The thuds and clunks of the road-building told of their coming. Nadir tried to see it. To visualize this bit of data, from the point of view of the aliens, living underground.
‘Yes; they would have heard us coming,’ he realized.
He made the men open up their packs again and share a meal, making sure all the villagers got a taste of the ‘Sky-Gods’ food.
It was the least they could do.
He felt pretty guilty about flash-burns to several younger members of the tribe.
“We are not gods, we are people, just like you.”
How could you explain it?
To tell these folks, living underground all their lives, about the sky?
The chief kept calling them, ‘people of the sky,’ and such. How could one explain about road building, and blasting, and blowing off the corner of a mountain? And finding a hole? Revealing a cave? With strange, rectangular objects inside it, obviously not natural formations?
How could you explain an e-mail to head office, and how everyone else wanted the weekend off…?
How he was the new guy?
Upon arrival, he was thrill
ed to be on a planet with a total population of eighteen thousand. Yet this hadn’t corresponded to his fantasy, painstakingly built up in a small woodlot outside of his home town, with rabbits, foxes; and the occasional turkey vulture.
Lots of little creatures, that scampered about like Bambi.
None of them was psychologically equipped for this, and especially not the villagers.
“When worlds collide,” he quipped to the doctor, and then suddenly regretted it; for the translator worked both ways.
The aliens could hear everything he said, he realized with a sudden guilty feeling.
“I know what you mean. I’m finding this hard going myself,” admitted Dr. Helmuth.
So far no one had the fortitude to try any of the fungoid-looking food offered by the people.
The ‘old man’ spoke as Nadir and the others listened. He had a sound recorder set up and hoped to catch every word. It suddenly occurred to Nadir that this discovery could totally ‘make’ him with the company.
“The people have lived here for many thousand years,” the old man intoned, searching his memory for the long-held word pictures which seemed to be a complex language.
“Long ago, the Gods burned the land with lightning and thunder,” he sang. “Only those who hid in the Womb of the World survived.”
The old man hummed a few notes, and then continued.
“When the air became fire to breathe, and the water became like poison to drink,” and more nasal sing-song notes hummed down in the deepness of his stringy throat. “A man and a woman came to this place and became our ancestors.”
The song went on for quite a bit, a haunting melody, unstructured but still music.
“But surely now, it is safe to return,” suggested the Doctor.
“We have adapted,” said the chief simply.
“Well put,” noted Mark dryly. “How do they know about the sky? Stars? Thunder and lightning?”
This was truly fascinating stuff, and how lucky! Like a fantasy come true. Nadir just shrugged at Mark, Stan and the doctor. They watched as the women roasted a huge, lizard-like creature, all white and morphous-looking, with its tiny, pale, yet bulging eyes closed over in death.
It began to sizzle, with grease spattering and flaring on contact with the coals.
* * *
Later, with the chief’s daughter as his guide, he explored some of the galleries. Going up stairway after stairway, traversing the wide alcoves and balconies, the light grew progressively stronger.
Here were epiphytic plants, growing in vast profusion, cheek by jowl and one on top of the other. Nadir remarked upon a small flying critter much like a hummingbird, flitting from bulb to bulb. Somewhere he discovered the analogy ran thin. This was, after all; a very unusual alien ecology. Not exactly his forte.
Nadir was a gussied-up security guard, and, ‘trouble-shooter,’ nothing more. A dick, a gumshoe, a flatfoot, ‘a good old rent-a-cop.’ A job is a job and you take what you can get, yet there was no luckier man in the galaxy!
“Holy cow,” he joshed, and then couldn’t explain it for the life of him. At first the scents confused him, but apart from her unique scent, there were a thousand others.
He saw weird and wonderful blossoms, some tiny as a pinhead and others shrub-size. More flying critters. They seemed to be winged reptilians; and not all of them vegetarian. There were flowers in profusion, some with fragrance sweet, piercing and piquant; some sour, or even putrescent.
There must be more carnivores, he reluctantly decided. How big could they get? But the girl didn’t seem overly concerned by the flyers.
A blue blossom beside his head smelled sour. It was not unpleasant. It was just different. Water continually fell from the overhead shaft, metres away from the edge of the place where they stood. This was an odd amphitheatre-like nook in the wall of the crater or tube, or whatever formed this place.
The water hung before them like a veil.
“One of my grandfather’s fields,” she explained.
Ah! It must be…lying fallow? And with the waterfall adjacent, a prime location, he realized.
They stopped for a while, taking a seat on the terrace. They talked in quiet voices, for he took the translator device along while the other men did other things, like sleep and cook. When the pair of them left, the doctor was examining some of the children. He was taking extensive notes; and being quite thorough. Nadir humourously noted the patience of the children; a good trait.
All just a game to them, probably. He became aware of her warmth as she huddled innocently at his side.
He asked her age, her name, her family, her friends. How was she taught? Did she know what a school is? Even the most mundane questions took on huge significance when talking to an alien. Oddly; proper names meant nothing to the translator.
Interesting.
These people offered no threat to the Company’s project. That meant he could relax some. But it was clearly essential to get on good terms with them, like good neighbours should.
The Ministry would show up sooner or later. Hand them a big public relations scoop on a silver platter, and the Company would have the Ministry eating out of its hand. At least for a while.
She seemed to be about twenty, yet she herself had no idea. No seasons, no stars visible to create a chronology. It got dimmer, it got brighter, but with the sun and the moon lighting the outside world, it was never, ‘daylight.’
Down here, time stood still. The darkness lasted an eternity.
The falling water glittered as only falling water can. He sighed in appreciation of the beauty he saw before him. With just a little more light on the subject, the lava-tube would have been a magnificent scene. The widest part had to be five hundred metres, perhaps longer in one axis.
Her skin shone with a luster peculiar to the people.
He studied her some more, up close and personal, as she regarded him with the most elfin, ingenuous look on her face. Not all of them glowed, but she did. Once a person got used to it, it seemed very natural and beautiful. Nadir gazed at the beating of her heart, the glowing mammary glands, the hard muscles of her tummy thankfully obscuring her breakfast.
For some reason he felt very protective of her all of a sudden.
How it all happened, he could not afterwards say. It just happened. For no reason at all, he leaned over, almost not of his own volition. He kissed her, and her arms came up around his neck as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
They made love in a soft, mossy glade which was but feet from the edge of the abyss. Water fell from above, a fine mist, which oddly did not cool them. It was a fine, warm mist as they writhed and moaned in sweet madness. He knew it was wrong, but he was unable to stop.
Her eyes, her hair; all of her was his and he loved her. He wondered how he could ever leave after smelling the hair, the hair of a woman of the people up close. It was enchanting; to feel that soft, smooth, satiny skin against your loins.
Something happened. He saw himself through her eyes for one brief moment of time.
It was a shared moment, a kind of telepathy that he forgot about as soon as he recognized it.
Nadir had barely heard of pheromones on a science program years before, yet he was conscious of the effect her aroma had on him.
In the back of his mind, he recognized what must be happening.
He was unable to resist.
Nadir was uncaring for the moment. What mattered was that two became one…
They lay together in a silence that only lovers can know.
Time briefly stood still for them.
* *
*
When they finally returned to the village; Nadir’s dazed reverie was brutally shattered. The hypnotic effect was broken by shock at the news. There were three new men, waiting with Dr. Helmuth and the others.
“What happened?” he asked.
The senior new guy made a report.
“After about twenty hours, we decided to come in after you. We got in maybe a kilometre. Maybe a klick and a quarter. We heard a rumble, and we felt the ground shake. A big quake. We were unable to contact safety two at the entry point,” he said.
“We made our way back. After about four hundred and fifty metres, the way was blocked by a fall. Rather than try to explore other routes; there’s only one outlet we know about after all, we chose to continue the search for you.”
“Shit! Well, you did the right thing, I suppose,” muttered Nadir.
“You know, we did hear or feel, I guess, a small tremor a few hours ago. I thought I was imagining things, but the people were adamant about something,” noted Doctor Helmuth.
“It’s very rare,” added Mark.
“I was way up the shaft,” said Nadir, unconscious of the irony. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
“Might not have felt it, if a person was standing on the spongy stuff,” said Stan.
“Couldn’t be that big a fall,” speculated one of the new guys. “Thank God we work for the mining company!”
“I hate to break this to you, but it could be some time before they can get to us,” said Nadir soberly.
Mark, more in tune with the logistics and available equipment, nodded agreement.
“If they started immediately, it will still take days to get tunnel-diggers onsite,” he explained. “They may have to bore through a half a klick or a klick of solid fucking basalt.”
Considering their position; Nadir took control, as a senior officer of the company.
In his security role, he was clearly the most logical person to be in charge. They brewed up coffee and soup with the newcomers, who brought along a welcome three-day ration of survival foods a la special services or snipers.
Real iron-ration shit, he noted, but gratefully.
Nadir asked them to conserve the lights, which they agreed to do.
The People began to draw near; having remained at a respectful distance from the new men.
“Holy cow!” gasped one of the new guys, then the others gaped as well.
“Calm down! Doctor Helmuth, would you please explain things to these fellows? I have to talk to the chief,” said Nadir firmly.
A time for firm and effective leadership, he realized.
The chief confirmed his worst fears. Some travelers were missing. A search to the east, where Nadir and his group came from; revealed that some of the tunnels known to the village had collapsed. The young men of the village brought the news.
“How can my people and I get out?” asked Nadir in some dismay.
“There is a journey of many sleeps to the west. No one alive in the village now to guide you. The only man who has ever been there is one of the missing travelers.”
“Will they be able to make their way back here?” asked Nadir.
“We hope that they live. We hope that they can find a way to come home,” the chief told him. “But no one can tell the future.”
“We might not be able to go far enough west with our lights,” Nadir explained. “We can’t travel in the pitch dark.”
“It will take much time to gather the light-creatures, for your lamps,” said the chief.
“Or you must climb.”
“What?” gasped Nadir in renewed hope. “You mean there is a way out?”
The chief told him of an old legend. A legend from the beginnings of time itself, as far as The People were concerned.
“In the beginning, a man and a woman climbed down into the center of the world from their home in the sky,” the old man intoned in the sing-song notes, the ritual words of the ancient song. “It is to the sky, that you must seek your fate. So it is for us, and so, perhaps, it will be for you.”
Nadir went back to camp with the chief, aware that he would have to convince the others. The key to that was to convince himself. That turned out to be easier than expected. The men were beaten. Despondent and demoralized; they lacked the will to do anything about their situation. He soon had them up and moving. The chief gave them his daughter as a guide to help them find the way. She knew it as well as anyone in the village, they were assured.
They climbed, they climbed, they climbed ever higher. As the group went up stair and ramp after endless stair and ramp; the light imperceptibly brightened.
The mood changed and a note of boldness crept into the comments of one the new guys. He became surly, truculent and argumentative. Nadir might have big trouble on his hands. They had been on their way less than three hours.
Then signs of altitude sickness set in. Possibly the air got more polluted as opposed to thinner? Hard to say without proper instruments. Suddenly the surly one slipped and fell as he reached for a set of ladder-bars set into a vertical wall. One quick glimpse of his terrified eyes, the rictus of terror turning his mouth into something hideous. Then the strands of vegetation broke away.
A funny little yelp, an animal gasp, and then a shrieking, sobbing, burbling yell that ended shockingly. After a brief echo, the cavern went silent. Just as quickly as it started, the echoing scream stopped.
The girl shuddered in his arms.
Nadir heard voices from the level above.
“Jesus!” someone said.
All was shocked silence.
“All right, men; pay attention to what you’re doing,” barked Nadir.
Jesus isn’t the right word for it, he thought.
They were stunned by the death. Although none could blame Nadir, it cast a horrible pall over the group. He felt a heavy load of guilt, even though the man was careless and stupid.
They kept going, more slowly now. The group carefully made their way up terraces, and ledges, some just barren stone, perched over a vertical fall, some overhung by huge slabs.
There was always another ladder, another stairwell, another ramp, and another vertical slot that could be managed by fit people with some small physical skills. All the while, the air got worse, and they got more tired, and the odds got longer.
Occasionally it would be a vertical climb on some ancient metal rungs. Wet; and moss covered, it was far from easy or safe going. He could see that better now. It was time for a rest and maybe some better planning. They rigged up all their climbing gear. They roped themselves together as best they could, although their capability was limited. They stood on a terraced ledge, about fifteen metres wide and a hundred metres long. Nadir went to the back wall. Putting his back against it, he slid down into a seated position.
Breathing deeply, there was moist sweat in the armpits and in the chest area.
“What’s our altitude?” he asked.
“Got to be up close to three thousand metres by now,” affirmed Helmuth.
“Let’s keep the food, ropes, helmets, and cache the rest here,” Nadir suggested.
No one else spoke. If there is an opening, can we make it? What if it’s simply too high?
Columbia had a thinner atmosphere than his own world, but it had higher CO2, in addition to richer oxygen content. The CO2 helped keep the atmosphere stable.
The team had small bottles of oxygen, meant for emergency first-aid use. They sat and heated more soup, and hot coffee. It would be wise to rest a while. No one felt like sleep.
They sat wrapped up in their sleeping bags. Getting damned cold, Nadir noted. The food supply couldn’t hold out for an extended time. If they couldn’t get out this way, someone would have to try the un
known path to the west. That was a very bleak thought. He knew who would have to lead it. But to sit and wait was a form of suicide.
Even if the exact location of any exit was unknown, someone would have to try.
There were too many unknowns. The other option was to try to stay with the people, and eat their food, and hope for rescue. Natural revulsion aside; the likelihood of an allergic reaction or simple poisoning was too high.
Who wants to be first?
After two or three weeks, attempts to rescue them would be called off.
On that note, Nadir and the girl led the way. The way became progressively more challenging. They had to routinely cast around for the correct way to go. Up until now, it was easy or obvious. But each successive path closed off other options. The band of refugee climbers had reached the point where there was only one correct path at any given time, and the price of error was wasted time, energy and vitality.
They were losing time. The growth was becoming a jungle, with creepers, woody plants, and succulent plants that didn’t support your weight. Some had thorns, prickles, or a sap that stung and itched.
“Don’t wipe your eyes,” he advised.
“Let the doctor look at that,” he added to Mark, who now had angry red welts, big slash marks on his exposed forearms.
They rested again.
“If you get that stuff in your eyes, you’ll be fucked,” he barked again to the whole group.
They had plenty of water to wash it off with, at least that was good.
Suddenly the girl would go no farther.
“It burns,” she told them, referring to the increasing daylight.
She was a creature of the darkness, no doubt about it.
The Doctor and the other men doggedly moved on while Nadir and the girl said a painful goodbye.
“I love you,” she told him in utmost simplicity.
“I’ll be back,” said Nadir and tears filled his eyes.
“I will remember you always,” she said.
Something stabbed into his heart. Reality? Truth? The pain of them both knowing?
Slowly she turned away and began to climb down into the misty cloud that now lay below their level.
He watched her, but only for a while.
Soon he turned his eyes to the sky again.
Suddenly two shots rang out. Several more shots. What the hell was going on up there? With a pounding in his chest and ringing in his ears, he hoisted himself off the ladder onto a tiny landing.
More ladders!
A body dropped past his position, then another, silently falling. The colourful, tumbling, rag-doll clothing told him the doctor was not among them.
But who?
He climbed again with renewed effort, yet he must go slowly. At an overhanging ledge, he caught up to Mark and Stan. They looked to be deep in oxygen starvation. Their eyes loomed in desperation as they gasped with the pain of breathing.
Their hands didn’t seem to be working properly. Their oxygen bottles were empty, or almost so.
“He took our bottles!” gasped Stan. “He killed them! He killed them!”
Nadir just nodded in numbed grief and a hazy kind of understanding.
His own hands were getting stiff. Nadir had a dizzy, nauseous feeling; even a kind of drunk. He struggled to keep his composure and to remain calm. There was still some oxygen in his bottle.
These men were near finished; and there was little he could do for them.
“Your best chance is to rest. Stay roped together. That last set of ladders is a real doozie. You guys better head down very slowly. It’s your only chance,” he advised.
He had this sinking feeling that one man couldn’t possibly lower them on a rope; not hundreds of feet.
Stan had the strength to try, but Mark…Mark slowly began to reach for a branch close to their little safety nest. The other guy was clinging to the rock face, crying.
Stan was willing to give it a go. Nadir nodded encouragement, and patted them all on the shoulder, willing them to live.
Of the doctor, there was no sign.
Nadir stayed out of the way. Then he began to climb to get above them, out of danger from his own friends. He wondered if the doctor would try to ambush him. Still, he had to go on.
Somebody had to get out. Might as well be me, he thought with a burst of fury that was surprising in its intensity, despite the surroundings and circumstances.
Yes, he might live yet. Something, some things, deep in his guts were driving him.
The end of the journey was near, and the other man must have gotten out. The sky! It was very near now, a dome, not flat, where ice had melted away due to the heat of the mountain. The stronger light showed details that he hadn’t seen in what seemed like a lifetime.
He recognized the hair on the backs of his hands.
Fingernails turning blue…his hand didn’t look right. Kind of swollen.
“Fuck you!” he said to his hands.
Then he had it.
There was a final kind of overhanging ledge. Where the icy lip hung over was the outlet of a small waterfall, so far the highest one of the numerous streams that issued from rocky ledges all over the interior wall of the crater or shaft.
As soon as the water came over the lip it turned into the fine vapour that fell below.
The sky was ice. It was a plug of ice, covering the hole where the dim light came from. Nadir studied the way ahead. Now, due to the intense cold, the woody vines were extinguished, the only handholds mossy wet cracks in the rock. He could see the only place.
The doctor could have climbed across and under; then up the other side.
“Jesus!” Nadir prayed silently but fervently.
The pain centred up in the whole of his reality. Everything else faded away. The pain alone was real.
Mind focused as best he could, strength and courage all but gone, gasping for breath and steeling his fingers with the power of his will, he made it across without looking down; without thinking about it too much. When he got to the other side of the falls, he had strong nausea, deep in the guts. He swallowed, over and over again, and controlled it.
Straight up now…careful, careful…still got some oxygen left.
He climbed to a point just below the slippery creek ledge. Surveying all the other three-hundred-sixty degrees of the shaft; he saw that he was alone. Either the doctor made it out or he died trying. Perhaps falling silently past, when his own attention was directed elsewhere?
But that seemed unlikely.
Helmuth would have screamed.
He would have screamed, right?
Nadir was aware that his knees were knocking and his heart was racing.
He prayed that the murdering bastard Doctor Helmuth had gotten out. He studied the stone, saw a dislodged bit of what appeared to be alien lichens, or some other simple plant-like forms.
He breathed from his little oxygen bottle, holding on with one arm locked around his perch. It was a ledge with an outcropping and big cracks going up the back. From here on, it was a real Hail-fucking-Mary kind of climb.
It was there. It looked impossible. How Helmuth did it was a bit of a mystery. The doctor hadn’t impressed him as an athletic type. Mind you; doctors are health nuts…the thoughts raced, as he hung there, undecided!
But that’s just stupid.
What am I doing, clinging on to my last few moments?
Or wasting one last opportunity?
He reached out.
It was no good. His arm was too short! But Helmuth was no taller than he. How the hell did he do it? Nadir studied the situation, knowing time was not on his side. Soon enough, his knees would start to shake again.
The
position of his feet was wrong. He pulled back, took slow, deep breaths, no panic.
He went down a few feet, rested, and cleared his mind of the fear.
“This is it, now or never,” he told himself. “Start off on the right fucking foot…you stupid bastard.”
Climbing back up, he notched his left foot, propelled himself up another foot and a half. Lock in the right foot, hand on, hand off…hand into the inch-wide crack. As deep and as firmly as he could get it.
Nadir tried to keep his body as close to the wall as he could, and slowly straightened up. His clutching hand found what it was looking for. One last moment of intense fear and courage, and then he stood on the ledge. He crouched carefully, and saw how slippery it was. Tempted to fall on his knees, to kiss the stone; but he moved well back from the edge before he felt comfortable.
Lungs tight…he needed to keep moving. Hacking and gasping for breath. It took a long time to recover his equilibrium. His guts ached with the need to puke. The water was only three metres wide, perhaps three or four centimeters deep. Yet this, along with other streams was sufficient to keep life going down below. It was the slimy, mouldy stuff growing beside it which made staying here dangerous. He had a mental picture of himself tripping, sliding, slithering to the brink…a man, falling at a hundred kilometres per hour, reaching out desperately, trying to clutch at branches centimetres beyond his fingertips.
He smiled in spite of himself.
The doctor left a few signs. A track. The doctor has slipped here. Stones, newly-disturbed from their position. Wet on one side, dirty on the other. Nadir bent to touch the water.
Warmer than expected.
Carefully he made his way up the tunnel running under the ice cap. In places the ice seemed quite rotten and fairly thin, to judge by the light shining through and dazzling his eyes. Maybe he could break out, and make the trek successfully down the mountain, if he was lucky.
If cold, hunger, oxygen starvation or exposure, animals, didn’t get him first. If the doctor didn’t get him first. This was a one-way trip. There was no way in hell he could make it back down from the waterfall.
He considered himself lucky to stand upright. The underside of the glacier was honey-combed with riverine passages, but many were too small to explore. Hopefully the roof would have collapsed somewhere, or he would have to literally climb up through an ice tunnel. He listened to the water, gurgling as he followed along, but heard no other noises. Occasional pops and cracks seemed to come from the glacier itself. The sooner he could get out the better. The air seems better here, he noted with relief. The way trended downhill. Thank God.
Suddenly he came to it. Sunlight flooded his eyes, and he had to feel his way forward, blinking back the warm tears that gushed from his eyes. The light, the unfamiliar cold wind blasting his face…he wept for joy. He tripped over something soft and yielding.
Nadir realized in shock, that he was crouching beside a dead man. The doctor perhaps was blinded as well? He examined the body as best he could, barely able to see. This job, unpleasant though it was, could be done by feel. His eyes watered uncontrollably, but he didn’t think he was crying. It was just the brightness…
Dr. Jeffrey Helmuth had broken a femur, and shot himself in despair.
Half an hour, an hour passed and he worried about snow blindness. Finally he could see well enough to travel. The doctor tried to climb up and out, and hadn’t made it.
Too much of a hurry, perhaps. There was a small pack, and several near-empty oxygen bottles. He shrugged the strap over his shoulder and measured the climb ahead of him.
Nadir made it.
He looked at the gun. He tossed it back in the hole. He had his own.
Leave the evidence for others to examine.
What he needed now was to find his way down safely from the glacier, and get to a lower altitude as soon as possible. He knew that many crevasses, many hidden under soft snow, lay ahead of him.
He knew that the most important thing, the most important tool right now, was his own head. He had food for a couple of meals, and water was not a problem. The thing to do was to stay dry and warm.
Six days later the helicopter found him, as he slid down out of the jungle and onto the paved helipad beside the office trailers. It was parked there disconsolately, as the last of the searchers had only this morning arrived. The general consensus of opinion was that the tunnel diggers would find the bodies sooner or later. Hopefully.
“Hey! Isn’t that Mr. Nadir?” someone yelled in disbelief; and he had to laugh, for he knew that already.
Then he slipped into unconsciousness. It was finally over, as strong hands gripped him now, falling…falling.
End
Louis Bertrand Shalako lives in Canada. Louis enjoys cycling and swimming, and is a lover of good books. He lives with his elderly father, in a small war-time bungalow filled with books, cats, and model airplanes. Louis retired early, and now he writes full-time. So far Louis has been published in the Dutch, English, Estonian, Greek, and Spanish languages, with several translations pending.
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