The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

‘In the back.’

      I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and TV-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become.

      ‘There it is,’ Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferreted about for a wrench. ‘Thought you might like to buy some.’

      ‘How long has it been here?’

      ‘About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.’

      Doubtful, I thought: more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he prised off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes.

      I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light.

      It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others.

      ‘You’re right,’ I said. Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me.

      I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorized Version. The marbling inside the endboards was unmarked. A publisher’s ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library.

      The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate.

      ‘How many crates did they have altogether?’ I asked Pickford.

      ‘Bibles? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.’ He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. ‘Good condition, eh?’

      It was a Koran.

      I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there were ninety in all: thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorized Versions and eleven Vulgates), fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads.

      I took one of each and gave Pickford a £10 note.

      ‘Any time you want some more,’ he called after me. ‘Maybe I can arrange a discount.’ He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen.

      

      When Mayer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk.

      ‘Pickford’s samples,’ I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. ‘According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.’

      ‘He’s senile.’

      ‘No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.’

      ‘Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.’

      ‘Whatever they were they certainly weren’t geologists. Why did Tallis say they were? Anyway, why didn’t he ever mention that they had ordered all these Bibles?’

      ‘Perhaps he’d forgotten.’

      ‘Fifteen crates? Fifteen crates of Bibles? Heavens above, what did they do with them?’

      Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. ‘Do you want me to radio Ceres?’

      ‘Not yet. It still doesn’t add up to anything.’

      ‘There might be a reward. Probably a big one. God, I could go home!’

      ‘Relax. First we’ve got to find out what these so-called geologists were doing here, why they ordered this fantastic supply of Bibles. One thing: whatever it was, I swear Tallis knew about it. Originally I thought they might have discovered a geldspar mine and been double-crossed by Tallis – that sonic trip was suspicious. Or else that they’d deliberately faked their own deaths so that they could spend a couple of years working the mine, using Tallis as their supply source. But all these Bibles mean we must start thinking in completely different categories.’

      Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler’s driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gulley that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me.

      Mayer deputized at the observatory, driving over every afternoon. He helped me recondition an old diesel generator in one of the storage domes and we lashed it on to the back of the half-track to power the cabin heater needed for the −30° nights and the three big spotlights fixed on the roof, providing a 360° traverse. I made two trips with a full cargo of fuel out to the camp site, dumped them there and made it my base.

      Across the thick glue-like sand of the volcano jungle, we calculated, a man of sixty could walk at a maximum of one mile an hour, and spend at most two hours in 70° or above sunlight. That meant that whatever there was to find would be within twelve square miles of the camp site, three square miles if we included a return journey.

      I searched the volcanoes as exactingly as I could, marking each cone and the adjacent valleys on the charts as I covered them, at a steady five miles an hour, the great engine of the Chrysler roaring ceaselessly, from noon, when the valleys filled with fire and seemed to run with lava again, round to midnight, when the huge cones became enormous mountains of bone, sombre graveyards presided over by the fantastic colonnades and hanging galleries of the sand reefs, suspended from the lake rims like inverted cathedrals.

      I forced the Chrysler on, swinging the bumpers to uproot any suspicious crag or boulder that might hide a mine shaft, ramming through huge drifts of fine white sand that rose in soft clouds around the half-track like the dust of powdered silk.

      I found nothing. The reefs and valleys were deserted, the volcano slopes untracked, craters empty, their shallow floors littered with meteor debris, rock sulphur and cosmic dust.

      

      I decided to give up just before dawn on the fourth morning, after waking from a couple of hours of cramped and restless sleep.

      ‘I’m coming in now,’ I reported to Mayer over the transmitter. ‘There’s nothing out here. I’ll collect what fuel there is left from the site and see you for breakfast.’

      Dawn had just come up as I reached the site. I loaded the fuel cans back onto the half-track, switched off the spotlights and took what I knew would be my last look round. I sat down at the field desk and watched the sun arching upward through the cones across the lake. Scooping a handful of ash off the desk, I scrutinized it sadly for geldspar.

      ‘Prime archezoic loam,’ I said, repeating Tallis’s words aloud to the dead lake. I was about to spit on it, more in anger than in hope, when some of the tumblers in my mind started to click.

      About five miles from the far edge of the lake, silhouetted against the sunrise over the volcanoes, was a long 100-foot-high escarpment of hard slate-blue rock that lifted out of the desert bed and ran for about two miles in a low clean sweep across the horizon, disappearing among the cones in the south-west. Its outlines were sharp and well defined, suggesting that its materials pre-dated the planet’s volcanic period. The escarpment sat squarely across the desert, gaunt and rigid, and looked as if it had been there since Murak’s beginning, while the soft ashy cones and grey hillocks around it had known only the planet’s end.

      It was no more than an uninformed guess, but suddenly I would have bet my entire two years’ salary that the rocks of the escarpment were archezoic. It was about three miles outside the area I had been combing, just visible from the observatory.

      The vision of a geldspar mine returned sharply!

      

      The lake took me nearly halfway there. I raced the Chrysler across it at forty, wasted thirty