Answer Came There None
Galaxy, January 1974
(1974)
James White
Chapter One
Like a green and seemingly virginal carpet, the planetary surface unrolled five miles below the slowing ship. The grasses and small plants showed no signs of vegetable blight—the atmosphere was free of industrial pollutants and there were no cities or surface transport networks of any kind. But to the ship's sensors and the tired, experienced eyes of the crew the greenery was a beautiful lie, a cosmetic skin of apparent youth overlaying a world which for many thousands of years had been drained of all its natural resources, used up and emptied of all life above the insect level.
"We're wasting our time," said Jan, in a tone that indicated that she was looking for an argument.
Peter did not like arguing with her, especially during the last few minutes before touchdown, even though a searchship was fully capable of landing itself. He waited until the ship had recovered from a brief attack of the transonic shudders and their landing spot was centered in the forward viewscreen. Then he said, "Probably."
She gave a short sigh of irritation and tapped for a magnified picture of the landing area on her duplicate display. He could not see the particular section she had blown up for closer examination because her head was in the way.
Lit in profile by the screen, Jan looked almost young again. In silhouette the graying hair and the fine facial wrinkles did not show. But it took more than a trick of back lighting, he knew, to cancel out the weariness and lack of hope in her body and mind—as well as his own. Like the salt used to preserve meat in ancient times, every cell and thought was soaked in it. If an old-time cannibal had taken a bite out of one of them, hopelessness and frustration would have been the strongest taste.
Eighty years, he thought, was a long time to be doing the same job.
The screen darkened as the ship's nose went up, pulling forward-facing cameras off-picture, and they began falling tail-first into the increasingly resistant softness of their antigravity landing cushion. They touched down— the cushion flicked off and the ship rocked gently as the weight forced its landing legs deep into the soft ground. The all-around viewscreens lit up and the images steadied and sharpened as the ship came finally to rest.
"We are wasting our time," Jan persisted. I'm sure we have been here before."
"Unlikely," he replied, "but you could be forgiven for thinking so. One of these sites is very much like any other—the same green mounds, the same type and size of ruined buildings even, because they are probably examples of the most advanced and durable structures built by the same architect—"
He broke off because she was shaking her head. In a less conciliatory tone he went on, "Are you suggesting that I made a mistake and we've doubled back to a site already investigated? An understandable error, you are doubtless thinking, caused by my advancing years? But you are forgetting that our computer, which isn't subject to lapses caused by senile decay—"
"I could argue that point too," she broke in.
His first impulse was to tell her that the recent trouble they had had with the computer had been due to operator error and that she had been the operator, but he thought better of it. Instead he said, "Are you coming outside?"
"Yes," she replied. "I prefer talking to you to sitting here talking to myself."
"I'm glad," he said drily. "For a moment I wondered if the romance was going out of our relationship."
But they said very little while they were climbing into their protective suits, probably because he had touched on a subject to which they were both hypersensitive. He would willingly have bet that within the next hour there would be an argument about rejuvenation and that argument, he knew from bitter experience, nobody won.
Preceded by a general purpose robot which, in addition to the usual sensory and specimen gathering equipment was also programmed for medical and surgical emergencies, they moved down the ramp and onto the springy turf. The sun shone brightly out of a sky whose clouds could not have been more tastefully arranged by a landscape painter. The air was fresh and pure and eminently breathable, but their heavy protective suits were needed to protect them against the insects which crawled and flew and were incredibly vicious. Even though he knew that he would have no use for it, he wore a sidearm because the regulations required him to do so.
Jan did not wear one because, she was fond of saying, if a native life form more than two inches tall came at them she would be so pleased that she would want to hug the thing instead of shoot it.
The insects were everywhere.
Hundreds of the things died with each step the searchers took, while the robot's balloon tires wreaked even greater havoc. But the dark and oozing tracks that stained the grass in their wake were gone before they had traveled ten yards because the insects ate each other and not, for some odd ecological reasons, the short grass that sheltered them. Any insect left defenseless by death or injury disappeared quickly, right down to the last smear of juice or edible tissue.
There had been a time when Jan and he would have examined the insects' behavior for indications of developing intelligence—some sign, perhaps, that these last inheritors of this and so many other worlds would produce an insect gestalt with which the human race might eventually communicate. Now, however, they walked between and over the all too familiar grassy mounds and ignored the senseless ferocity under their feet.
Beneath the grass and the layer of warring insects the robot's sensors reported the usual mixture of indestructible plastic debris and metallic oxides. Toward the end this particular civilization had used a lot of plastic because no metal had been available. Nevertheless the. beings had built well and the plastic ruins still stood impressively tall in a few places, even though the builders had long since gone down before the insect enemy.
"That one looks interesting," Peter said, pointing toward a squat, five-story building that seemed to be structurally complete except for its missing roof. Many of the plastic windows were still in place, but rendered virtually opaque by weathering and the mosslike growth that also covered the walls. The ground-level entrance was large and clear of rubble. He added: "Do you still think that we've been here before?"
"The familiar can look strange," she said stubbornly, "if you approach it from a different angle."
"And the wrong angle of view," he replied, "can make the strange look familiar. But let's stop arguing and start looking inside. We are supposed to examine at least one building on every site and more if we should turn up something interesting ..."
His voice trailed into silence. He was thinking that one indication of approaching senility was the habit of explaining things to someone who already knew the explanation.
A few minutes later the robot placed sensors against a wall and emitted high-pitched squeaks as it sonically analyzed the building for structural defects. Satisfied that the place was safe for human searchers, it preceded them inside.
With the robot's main beam trained at full intensity on the ceiling there was more than enough light for them to see around the big entrance hall. The remains of what might have been desks and possibly some clear-walled display cases were spaced at intervals about the floor, while the walls were covered with largo pictures. A heavy dusting of living and long-dead insects over everything made it difficult to pick out details.
The contents of the display cases, if they once had been display cases, were no longer recognizable. Most of the pictures, for some reason, were less obscured by insects and showed machinery with natives busy around it—Peter deduced a large factory complex and what looked like a supersonic atmospheric flyer of conventional design. A bank of elevators was framed against the wall facing the entrance, the doors collapsed outward under the pressure of the rubble that had collected in the elevator shafts.
A broad ramp curved upward to the level above. The searchers began to climb.
From their studies of sites visited earlier they had formed a vague idea of what the natives of this world had looked like and of the way they moved when they were not riding in cars or flyers. Physically they had resembled short, wide-based cones with a number of specialized appendages—manipulators, visual equipment and possibly eating and breathing orifices—sprouting from the top. Presumably their brains were housed somewhere inside the stubby, legless bodies, which had moved snaillike—but not necessarily slowly—on a wide apron of muscle. Stairs or ladders inside the dwellings had been conspicuous by their absence.
As ho mounted the ramp Peter's eyes were fixed on the robot, which was capable of climbing anything, when Jan gripped his arm tightly and pointed ahead.
"Look at those sculptures," she said excitedly. "And undraped, too. This will answer a lot of the physiological questions."
Two enormous figures, five or six times larger than life, dominated the floor space at the top of the ramp. They had been cut from hard rock and the insects had left them alone—Peter saw that every muscle and joint and wrinkle was rendered in perfect detail. No wonder Jan was pleased.
"I suppose," he said, "the smaller of the two is the female of the species?"
"It's easy to tell who is the medic in this family," Jan said, shaking her head. "No. I'd say that the small one with its eye glaring aggressively at us is their equivalent of Neanderthal Man, while the tall one with the more specialized appendages, whose eyestalk is pointed skyward, represents the builders of this once-mighty civilization."
... Which rose to its greatest heights, he added silently, and signaled its presence to the rest of the galaxy and then died, two thousand years ago ...
"We're lucky," Jan went on. "We've found a cultural center designed for posterity—maybe even us. Look around you. Some of those display cases are still complete and their contents are undamaged—which isn't surprising since most of them contain oddly shaped pieces of rock—"
She broke off and turned away from him. The robot was busily photographing the alien tableau and concentrating its main beam on the subject it had chosen. Jan switched on her suit light and picked her way along a cluttered aisle to the next ascending ramp. She went up it at a near run. Peter followed more slowly. By the time he and the robot found her crouched over a collapsed display case, she was still trying to catch her breath.
"You shouldn't run like that," he said. "Overexertion is dangerous at our age."
She waved his words aside and went on excitedly, "I was pretty sure below, but now there is no doubt in my mind. We've found a museum. The ground floor level is devoted to the race's prehistory—crude stone implements, knives, early attempts at working clay or mud. On this level they have progressed to agriculture and weaving. Most of the specimens were of perishable vegetable matter, so time and the insects have done for them. But the wall pictures are well preserved and clearly show the level of culture of that period. Succeeding levels should bring us to the time when this civilization began to fall apart. We may even find the reasons for its collapse."
"We know the reason why it, and all the others, collapsed," he said tiredly. "They had too many, smug, self-satisfied, selfish beings eating up too few natural resources. We've pieced together that particular picture too many times—what's begun to impress me is that nearly every culture we've found has left us a lesson of its past; not one a lesson for survival."
"I know," she replied, some of the enthusiasm fading from her tone. "But finding this building was a piece of rare good luck and there might be another piece just waiting for us. We're due some good luck and I have a feeling—"
"You always have a feeling," he broke in. "It's called wishful thinking."
"Are you trying to be nasty or can't you help it?" she said angrily, then went on: "Right here we may be able to piece together a complete picture, instead of searching all over the planet for pieces of the jigsaw—and probably missing most of them. I'm glad you made that mistake and doubled back here because—"
Chapter Two
"Damn it," he said furiously. "You keep insisting that we landed here before, but we can't have done so. The computer isn't your specialty, so I can't completely convince you that when I program the ship for a search it cannot possibly make that kind of error."
"It couldn't—but maybe you could," she snapped back. Then, more quietly, she went on, "You are sure that you didn't make a mistake and I am sure you did. So we are having this stupid argument and letting it blunt our powers of observation and reasoning. We've found something I think we missed before and you don't. That doesn't alter the fact that we could be on the point of learning the workings of an extraterrestrial culture that—in all respects save one—might make ours look medieval by comparison.
"This is all wrong," she went on seriously. "We're losing our sense of proportion. I think we've let ourselves grow too old. We seem to do nothing these days but argue and snap at each other and we could be missing important data simply because we are squabbling instead of looking."
"I know we're growing old," he said. "But the last time this subject came up we agreed that there would be no more rejuvenation programs unless we found—"
"You agreed. I had reservations."
He took a deep breath and tried to hide his anger at having to say something he had already said too many times before.
"We've already undergone three rejuvenations. There is no problem about getting another. Even though the treatments are restricted because there are too many people, our work insures our being made young again with no quibbling. At the same time—if we go through the process once again we'll be morally obliged to continue our work as searchers. And I, for one, do not think that I could stand another twenty years doing— this. Even as a youthful, vigorous, clear-eyed grave-robber instead of an elderly specimen with hardening of the intellect. We've already known lifetimes of disappointment. To extend it by another twenty years is more than I could take. I'm sorry. But if you want to apply—"
He could see her head shaking inside her helmet.
She said, "No. I do as you do."
"But—" he said drily.
"But," she said softly, "I miss the fringe benefits."
For a few seconds they stared silently at each other. Then he grinned and suddenly they both laughed. The problems were still there—nothing had changed so far as their personal difficulties were concerned but, for a short time at least, the senseless arguing was over.
"Is there anything special I should look for?" he asked when the therapeutic laughter had ceased. "Something to indicate species survival?"
"I don't know," she replied. "Look for something different, some new idea or facet in the culture that would make it unlike any of the others we've investigated. It could be a scheme for population control or feeding— maybe an idea that came too late to do these creatures any good, but one we might use on Earth before we go the same way. But I would especially like to find some indication that—before their culture fell apart—some of them were able to get away and plant a colony. In the two thousand years since this world stopped signaling a flourishing colony could have come into being in another system. A colonization project like that is important enough to have a place in a museum," she added, "and its position in space would almost certainly be included in the exhibit."
In short, he thought wearily as they moved toward another ascending ramp, we are still looking for our own image ...
They had been looking for "people" on the first search mission, Peter remembered, but on that occasion it had not seemed to matter too much when they had not found them. The prospects had been too new, strange and exciting—setting out in one of the first searchships with everyone wishing them well. In many respects it had been like a honeymoon—for Jan and himself it had been their honeymoon—and those tend to be perfect in every way, especially in retrospect.
Using the newly developed stardrive, they had jumped ten light-years into interstellar space, deployed their vast antennae and listened. More accurately, the ship's sensors had listened while the personnel carried out explorations of a more personal nature. The weeks of waiting had passed pleasantly enough while the antennae scooped up mush from stellar objects that radiated on the bands above and below the visible spectrum. Then, suddenly, a signal had come that could only have had an intelligent source.
It was simple, repetitious and as individually unique as a signature. As expected, it faded out within a few minutes and returned, again for only a few minutes, just over a day later.
During their training on Pluto Station they had listened to recordings of many such signals. The theory had been that the "messages" emanated from antennae on worlds that could well lie halfway across the galaxy and that the periods of silence corresponded to the rotational period of the transmitting planet. It was also thought that the transmitting antennae were steerable, so that they painted virtually all of the surrounding space in measured, vertical sweeps. This theory proved true in the majority of cases, the searchers discovered later, but there had been a few worlds where the signals had been sent from a transmitter in orbit.
Peter had taken a fix on that first signal and he and his bride had jumped one hundred light-years closer. Then they had taken another fix and jumped again. There was no need to make sense of the signal, although they had often tried—it was simply an alien voice saying over and over again that it was there.
Then, abruptly, it was no longer there.
They had back-tracked until the signal was coming in again, then made a long jump at right angles to fix the system's position by triangulation. Within a few weeks they had found it—and arrived on a world wiped clean of intelligent life.
...
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