The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

       THE WAITING GROUNDS

      Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can’t say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me – a job which could easily have been done in three days – were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven’t yet faced up to.

      I remember that on the first evening after my arrival at Murak he asked me a question I’ve been puzzling over ever since.

      We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot steel bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us.

      ‘Tell me, Quaine,’ Tallis suddenly asked, ‘where would you like to be when the world ends?’

      ‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ I admitted. ‘Is there any urgency?’

      ‘Urgency?’ Tallis smiled at me thinly, his eyes amiable but assessing me shrewdly. ‘Wait until you’ve been here a little longer.’

      He had almost finished his last tour at the observatory and I assumed he was referring to the desolation around us which he, after fifteen years, was leaving thanklessly to my entire care. Later, of course, I realized how wrong I was, just as I misjudged the whole of Tallis’s closed, complex personality.

      He was a lean, ascetic-looking man of about fifty, withheld and moody, as I discovered the moment I debarked from the freighter flying me in to Murak – instead of greeting me at the ramp he sat in the half-track a hundred yards away at the edge of the port, watching silently through dark glasses as I heaved my suitcases across the burning, lava-thick sunlight, legs weary after the massive deceleration, stumbling in the unfamiliar gravity.

      The gesture seemed characteristic. Tallis’s manner was aloof and sardonic; everything he said had the same deliberately ambiguous overtones, that air of private mystery recluses and extreme introjects assume as a defence. Not that Tallis was in any way pathological – no one could spend fifteen years, even with six-monthly leaves, virtually alone on a remote planetary clinker like Murak without developing a few curious mannerisms. In fact, as I all too soon realized, what was really remarkable about Tallis was the degree to which he had preserved his sanity, not surrendered it.

      He listened keenly to the latest news from Earth.

      ‘The first pilotless launchings to Proxima Centauri are scheduled for 2250 … the UN Assembly at Lake Success have just declared themselves a sovereign state … V-R Day celebrations are to be discontinued – you must have heard it all on the radiocasts.’

      ‘I haven’t got a radio here,’ Tallis said. ‘Apart from the one up there, and that’s tuned to the big spiral networks in Andromeda. On Murak we listen only to the important news.’

      I nearly retorted that by the time it reached Murak the news, however important, would be a million years old, but on that first evening I was preoccupied with adjusting myself to an unfamiliar planetary environment – notably a denser atmosphere, slightly higher (1.2 E) gravity, vicious temperature swings from −30° to +160° – and programming new routines to fit myself into Murak’s 18-hour day.

      Above all, there was the prospect of two years of near-absolute isolation.

      Ten miles from Murak Reef, the planet’s only settlement, the observatory was sited among the first hills marking the northern edge of the inert volcano jungle which spread southward to Murak’s equator. It consisted of the giant telescope and a straggling nexus of twenty or thirty asbestos domes which housed the automatic data processing and tracking units, generator and refrigerating plant, and a miscellany of replacement and vehicle stores, workshops and ancillary equipment.

      The observatory was self-sufficient as regards electric power and water. On the near-by slopes farms of solar batteries had been planted out in quarter-mile strips, the thousands of cells winking in the sunlight like a field of diamonds, sucking power from the sun to drive the generator dynamos. On another slope, its huge mouth permanently locked into the rock face, a mobile water synthesizer slowly bored its way through the desert crust, mining out oxygen and hydrogen combined into the surface minerals.

      ‘You’ll have plenty of spare time on your hands,’ the Deputy Director of the Astrographic Institute on Ceres had warned me when I initialled the contract. ‘There’s a certain amount of routine maintenance, checking the power feeds to the reflector traverses and the processing units, but otherwise you won’t need to touch the telescope. A big digital does the heavy thinking, tapes all the data down in 2000-hour schedules. You fly the cans out with you when you go on leave.’

      ‘So apart from shovelling the sand off the doorstep there’s virtually nothing for me to do?’ I’d commented.

      ‘That’s what you’re being paid for. Probably not as much as you deserve. Two years will seem a long time, even with three leave intervals. But don’t worry about going crazy. You aren’t alone on Murak. You’ll just be bored. £2000 worth, to be exact. However, you say you have a thesis to write. And you never know, you may like it there. Tallis, the observer you’re taking over from, went out in ’03 for two years like yourself, and stayed fifteen. He’ll show you the ropes. Pleasant fellow, by all accounts, a little whimsical, probably try to pull your leg.’

      Tallis drove me down to the settlement the first morning to collect my heavy vacuum baggage that had travelled spacehold.

      ‘Murak Reef,’ he pointed out as the old ’95 Chrysler half-track churned through the thick luminous ash silted over the metal road. We crossed a system of ancient lava lakes, flat grey disks half a mile wide, their hard crusts blistered and pocked by the countless meteor showers that had driven into Murak during the past million years. In the distance a group of long flat-roofed sheds and three high ore elevators separated themselves from the landscape.

      ‘I suppose they warned you. One supplies depot, a radio terminal and the minerals concession. Latest reliable estimates put the total population at seven.’

      I stared out at the surrounding desert floor, cracked and tiered by the heat swings into what looked like huge plates of rusted iron, and at the massed cones of the volcano jungle yellowing in the sand haze. It was 4 o’clock local time – early morning – but the temperature was already over 80°. We drove with windows shuttered, sun curtain down, refrigerating unit pumping noisily.

      ‘Must be fun on Saturday night,’ I commented. ‘Isn’t there anything else?’

      ‘Just the thermal storms, and a mean noon temperature of 160°.’

      ‘In the shade?’

      Tallis laughed. ‘Shade? You must have a sense of humour. There isn’t any shade on Murak. Don’t ever forget it. Half an hour before noon the temperature starts to go up two degrees a minute. If you’re caught out in it you’ll be putting a match to your own pyre.’

      Murak Reef was a dust hole. In the sheds backing onto the depot the huge ore crushers and conveyors of the extraction plants clanked and slammed. Tallis introduced me to the agent, a morose old man called Pickford, and to two young engineers taking the wraps off a new grader. No one made any attempt at small talk. We nodded briefly, loaded my luggage onto the half-track and left.

      ‘A taciturn bunch,’ I said. ‘What are they mining?’

      ‘Tantalum, Columbium, the Rare Earths. A heartbreaking job, the concentrations are barely workable. They’re tempted to Murak by fabulous commission rates, but they’re lucky if they can even fill their norms.’