The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell
evasively, started to say something and then thought better of it.
The question pressed round him. What was he waiting for? Were the geologists still alive? Was he expecting them to return, or make some signal? As I watched him pace about the cabin on his last morning I was convinced there was something he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell me. Almost melodramatically he watched out over the desert, delaying his departure until the thirty-minute take-off siren hooted from the port. As we climbed into the half-track I fully expected the glowing spectres of the two geologists to come looming out of the volcano jungle, uttering cries of murder and revenge.
He shook my hand carefully before he went aboard. ‘You’ve got my address all right? You’re quite sure?’ For some reason, which confused my cruder suspicions, he had made a special point of ensuring that both I and the Institute would be able to contact him.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you know if it rains.’
He looked at me sombrely. ‘Don’t wait too long.’ His eyes strayed past my head towards the southern horizon, through the sand-haze to the endless sea of cones. He added: ‘Two million years is a long time.’
I took his arm as we walked to the ramp. ‘Tallis,’ I asked quietly, ‘what are you watching for? There’s something, isn’t there?’
He pulled away from me, collected himself. ‘What?’ he said shortly, looking at his wristwatch.
‘You’ve been trying to tell me all week,’ I insisted. ‘Come on, man.’
He shook his head abruptly, muttered something about the heat and stepped quickly through the lock.
I started to shout after him: ‘Those two geologists are out there …!’ but the five-minute siren shattered the air and by the time it stopped Tallis had disappeared down the companionway and crewmen were shackling on the launching gantry and sealing the cargo and passenger locks.
I stood at the edge of the port as the ship cleared its take-off check, annoyed with myself for waiting until the last impossible moment to press Tallis for an explanation. Half an hour later he was gone.
Over the next few days Tallis began to slide slowly into the back of my mind. I gradually settled into the observatory, picked out new routines to keep time continuously on the move. Mayer, the metallurgist down at the mine, came over to the cabin most evenings to play chess and forget his pitifully low extraction rates. He was a big, muscular fellow of thirty-five who loathed Murak’s climate, geology and bad company, a little crude but the sort of tonic I needed after an overdose of Tallis.
Mayer had met Tallis only once, and had never heard about the deaths of the two geologists.
‘Damned fools, what were they looking for? Nothing to do with geology, Murak hasn’t got one.’
Pickford, the old agent down at the depot, was the only person on Murak who remembered the two men, but time had garbled his memories.
‘Salesmen, they were,’ he told me, blowing into his pipe. ‘Tallis did the heavy work for them. Should never have come here, trying to sell all those books.’
‘Books?’
‘Cases full. Bibles, if I recall.’
‘Textbooks,’ I suggested. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Sure I did,’ he said, puttering to himself. ‘Guinea moroccos.’ He jerked his head sharply. ‘You won’t sell them here, I told them.’
It sounded exactly like a dry piece of academic humour. I could see Tallis and the two scientists pulling Pickford’s leg, passing off their reference library as a set of commercial samples.
I suppose the whole episode would eventually have faded, but Tallis’s charts kept my interest going. There were about twenty of them, half million aerials of the volcano jungle within a fifteen-mile radius of the observatory. One of them was marked with what I assumed to be the camp site of the geologists and alternative routes to and from the observatory. The camp was just over ten miles away, across terrain that was rough but not over-difficult for a tracked car.
I still suspected I was getting myself wound up over nothing. A meaningless approach arrow on the charts, the faintest suggestion of a cryptic ‘X’, and I should have been off like a rocket after a geldspar mine or two mysterious graves. I was almost sure that Tallis had not been responsible, either by negligence or design, for the deaths of the two men, but that still left a number of unanswered questions.
The next clear day I checked over the half-track, strapped a flare pistol into my knee holster and set off, warning Pickford to listen out for a mayday call on the Chrysler’s transmitter.
It was just after dawn when I gunned the half-track out of the observatory compound and headed up the slope between two battery farms, following the route mapped out on the charts. Behind me the telescope swung slowly on its bogies, tirelessly sweeping its great steel ear through the Cepheid talk. The temperature was in the low seventies, comfortably cool for Murak, the sky a fresh cerise, broken by lanes of indigo that threw vivid violet lights on the drifts of grey ash on the higher slopes of the volcano jungle.
The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesizer, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first valley. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanoes jostled together like a herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the flat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier.
I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanoes ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky.
I walked round the site, looking for some trace of the two geologists. A battered tin field-desk lay on its side, green paint blistered and scratched. I turned it over and pulled out its drawers, finding nothing except a charred notebook and a telephone, the receiver melted solidly into its cradle.
Tallis had done his job too well.
The temperature was over 100° by the time I climbed back into the half-track and a couple of miles ahead I had to stop as the cooling unit was draining power from the spark plugs and stalling the engine. The outside temperature was 130°, the sky a roaring shield, reflected in the slopes around me so that they seemed to stream with molten wax. I sealed all the shutters and changed into neutral, even then having to race the ancient engine to provide enough current for the cooler. I sat there for over an hour in the dim gloom of the dashboard, ears deadened by the engine roar, right foot cramping, cursing Tallis and the two geologists.
That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis.
One afternoon, two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked: ‘I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.’
‘TV tapes?’
‘Bibles, I thought he said.’
I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed.
He puffed smoke at me. ‘Those salesmen,’ he explained. ‘You were inquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.’
I nodded. ‘Well?’
‘I kept some.’
I