The Paradox of the Sets. Brian Stableford

Nathan scrambled through the hatchway to the main communications console, where he quickly re-established contact with Helene Levasseur and began explaining what had happened. Pete said nothing, and took no notice of him though they were mere inches apart. He was engrossed in itemizing the damage to the ship’s systems.

      “Nothing drastic,” Karen assured me. “We can fly home on stand-by. As long as no one wants us to take pictures of the Andes while we head for a landing in the Amazon basin.”

      I stared with fascination at the displays on the main screen as the computer ran its thorough check of the ship’s instrumentation and controls. I could hardly understand any of it, but there was a kind of hypnotic compulsion in the shifting red figures.

      “It makes you go blind,” commented Karen, though she was staring too. For her, it was okay. She knew what it all meant.

      Nathan shut the door of the control room to avoid distraction. Linda had picked up the thin paper map that had been on the table—it was a print-out sheet showing most of the southeast corner of Akhnaton.

      “Where are we?” she asked.

      Karen considered it for a moment, then stabbed a finger at a spot which looked to me to be well within the mountain range.

      “Give or take a thumbnail,” she said. “We were supposed to come down here.” Her finger indicated a spot which must have been several hundred miles farther east and several thousand feet farther down. I looked for the scale indicated at the side of the print-out to check my estimate. It was near enough.

      “Where’s this town that our lovely siren claims to inhabit?” I asked.

      Karen’s finger moved a little way south, and then described a rough circle. “Somewhere around here,” she said.

      “If the only way to get up here is by donkey,” I said, “she’s going to be a long time getting up here to meet us.”

      “Those are only the foothills,” said Linda, “compared to what we just missed. We must have shaved the tops off the mountains.”

      “Good job they’re volcanic,” I joked, weakly. “If they’d had proper peaks instead of craters....”

      Nathan stuck his head round the door. “She says she’s sorry,” he said.

      “Did you thank her?” asked Karen.

      “She wants to know if we got her pictures. I said we had some, but the unscheduled stop interfered somewhat. We have plenty of time to look them over, though. She says that she can make the first seventy or eighty miles by lorry, but that she’s not sure how much farther she can get before she has to start walking—or riding, at any rate. It’s going to take several days before she can get to us. It’s a long way—up as well as along.”

      “We know,” I told him.

      “Before the crash,” said Karen, in a thoughtful tone, “I had some print-out...not the shots of the mountains...the standard spy-eye stuff from a long way up. The computer analysis seemed crazy, but I hadn’t time to check it out because of getting ready for the special shots. I’ll take a look now.”

      She moved to the computer console and called up the images that the computer had put together from the high-altitude pictures. By image-intensification and augmentation the computer was supposed to be able to map out cultivated land and such industrial activity as oil refining and iron smelting—in fact, anything causing significant hot-spots where no hot-spots ought to be. She had an image displayed on the screen which showed the whole land surface on Mercator projection, and then cut it down rapidly to show Akhnaton and the greater part of Imhotep, ignoring the two minor land masses.

      “It can’t be right,” she said, immediately.

      I could see what she meant. The computer was telling us that by its calculations ninety percent of Akhnaton was under cultivation and most of Imhotep too. The hot spots were widely spaced but were distributed across both continents. Taken literally, that implied that Geb had a population in the hundreds of millions. That didn’t make sense. Unless....

      “Remember Attica,” I said.

      On Attica, one of the colonists had discovered a vocation which involved helping the aliens to build an empire and a civilization. In a few short generations be had worked wonders. But he had done nothing on this scale. The colonists of Geb had had longer, but this was balanced out by the fact that the natives of Geb hadn’t been nearly as advanced to start with as the primitive Ak’lehrian Empire. In their natural state they had no technology at all—not even fire.

      “If that’s real,” said Linda, “then this is success on a scale we couldn’t have dreamed possible.”

      Nathan came out to take a look. He didn’t say anything, but he stared long and hard. Finally, he said: “It’s impossible. There must be a malfunction.”

      “This is integrated from information the cameras took in while we were a long way up,” said Karen. “The computers were in perfect order. It may be a bug. There was a lot of cloud cover in the west and across Imhotep. It could be wrong—but it’s difficult to see how it could manufacture all those extra hot spots. You’d better check it with your charming friend on the ground.”

      “Three thousand people given six generations...,” began Linda, as Nathan disappeared again.

      “Forget it,” advised Karen. “Rabbits could do it. Not people. If they worked at breeding full time they’d just about make it. But a colony can’t just use its women as breeding machines. They’re half the labor force too.” She pursed her mouth as she noticed the unconscious pun, but no one had the bad taste to comment upon it.

      “They would need something like ten children each,” admitted Linda. “Every woman, every generation, and starting as young as possible. It doesn’t seem very likely.”

      “I make it more than that,” I said, struggling desperately with the mental arithmetic. “More like seventeen or eighteen children each.”

      “I think this is rather futile,” opined Karen. She was probably right.

      “If it’s true,” I said, “it has to be humans plus aliens. And even so it’s a miracle.”

      “The analysis checks out,” said Karen, blanking the screen. “If it’s a bug it’s a consistent bug.”

      “So get the prints,” I said. “All of them—high-altitude stuff, the ones you took over the mountains, the lot. We can see with our own eyes.”

      “It’s an awful lot of paper,” said Karen, dubiously.

      “We can recycle it,” I pointed out, impatiently.

      “Yes sir,” she said. I wasn’t about to be impressed by the sarcasm.

      Nathan reappeared to tell us that according to Mme. Levasseur the population of the world was considerably less than a million. Asked about the Set population she had confessed ignorance. She had not said anything to indicate that the Sets participated in human civilization, but she had not said anything specifically to the contrary. She appeared to have embarked upon a policy of being evasive.

      “Ask her why they have two whole continents under cultivation to feed a few hundred thousand people,” I suggested.

      “That’s not strictly true,” observed Karen. “What the display showed was the distribution of cultivated land rather than the gross amount. It may be that they’ve just spread themselves out thinly. There weren’t a vast number of hot spots—they were just much more widely scattered than we expected. Maybe they carved up the continents with the aid of a map and a ruler and gave the original colonists a small nation apiece.”

      “Some of them must have had a long walk,” I commented acidly.

      “She says that she’ll try to get to us as soon as possible,” said Nathan, ignoring the idle banter. “Within a week, she hopes.”

      “Great,”