The Paradox of the Sets. Brian Stableford

Mariel’s cabin, and I brought him up to date with a few terse and well-chosen sentences.

      He seemed less taken aback by the revelation than we had. He simply said: “The aliens.”

      “If that’s so,” I said, “they must have come on a hell of a way in a hundred and fifty years. From virtual animality to integration in a fast-developing civilization.”

      “It must be the aliens,” said Linda, suddenly. “The range of the hot spots and the cultivation is practically the same as their range. Wherever there were aliens the humans have migrated. It can hardly be a coincidence.”

      The computer began to generate paper in vast quantities at Karen’s behest, and I stepped over to help her pull it out of the way. The stack, of photographs multiplied with awesome speed and efficiency. There were an awful lot of them.

      The old question, which had been displaced from my mind by the new mysteries, suddenly returned.

      Why on Earth—or on Geb—did Helene Levasseur want aerial photographs of the Isis mountains?

      “None of this makes any sense,” I said, with a faint note of complaint in my voice. “It’s going to drive us all mad if we’re going to have to wait a week even to begin to find out what’s going on.”

      Karen stood up with the last armful of photographs. She had some difficulty in balancing them on the mound of paper already occupying the table.

      “That’s the lot,” she said. “The answer just might be in there. Start looking.”

      As I stared at the stack my heart sank a little. It looked as if it would take us a week to look at them all.

      “Oh well,” I said. “These things are sent to try us.”

      “And this time,” put in Nathan, “they may well succeed.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      I set the cup of coffee down at Karen’s elbow and congratulated her on her devotion to duty. She looked up from the photograph which she had been earnestly studying.

      “I’m on shift anyhow,” she reminded me. “It’s you that’s crazy.”

      “Curiosity kills cats,” I observed, “but it only drives men mad.”

      It was, according to the ship’s time we’d been keeping for the last twelve days, the early hours of the morning. Outside, though, the day had already dawned. The day here was a little long, but assuming that the locals still cut it into twenty-four bits they would probably have called it eight o’clock. On the other hand, if they had been sensible enough to forget transition and use metric time, they’d call it by some designation that would be just about meaningless to my poor habit-damned brain.

      Everyone else was in bed. One by one they’d realized what a mammoth task was involved in hunting through pictures of hundreds of thousands of square miles of mountain range without knowing what to look for and secure in the knowledge that it probably wasn’t there anyhow.

      What we had found out, from the shots taken higher up, was that the computer had not lied. The population of Geb, be it human or alien or both, really was scattered across two continents, bringing fairly impressive tracts of ground under cultivation in widely separated regions and mining for fuels and ores in locations strung out across half the world. There were only three or four things that looked like towns and they weren’t very big. Even allowing for the cloud cover it seemed dubious that we’d missed any conglomeration of any real size. The people of Geb didn’t seem to be very gregarious. In fact they seemed to be getting about as far away from one another as possible. There had been one major visual clue to the technological status of the colony, and that was an impressive one, though I wasn’t sure what interpretation to put on it. They were good road-builders. Their highways were very long and very straight. They had one road which went east-west practically all the way across Akhnaton, skirting the Isis Mountains to the north but otherwise having scant respect for geographic features. From this main artery other roads extended, crossing hundreds of miles—and several extended well over a thousand—to other “towns” or even to large homesteads. Each of these minor roads also had its proliferations. You don’t build roads like that for horses, and you don’t build them overnight either. The colonists obviously had progressed as far as the internal combustion engine, and that in itself was a minor miracle. But they also must have a workforce of very considerable size.

      “I think we’re wasting our time,” said Karen. “If Nathan can’t prise any more information out of the woman, then we’re completely at sea. I reckon that a little plain bargaining is in order.”

      “We’re not here to bargain,” I said, patiently—knowing that she knew well enough—“we’re here to offer our services. They’re entitled to be secretive, or rude, or hostile, or suspicious. We’re not supposed to react in kind, even though the temptation might at times be great.” I said it knowing that I, too, had succumbed to temptation on occasion and retaliated. But this was a new world and the resolutions were still fresh.

      “The computer pattern-scan turned up nothing,” muttered Karen. “It’s pointed out a dozen pretty craters and some nice rock formations, but nothing else. Even if there’s something in the mountains as a whole, do you realize what a thin slice of them we’ve got on these pics? We were pretty low before we ditched. You could draw the area we’ve got as a thick-leaded line on a standard map.”

      “I wonder why she chose that line,” I said. “It’s only inclined a few degrees to the line of latitude, but it’s considerably distant from the line of latitude which passes through the position she gave us as her own. She didn’t mind us landing a hundred miles away from her if it would allow us to scan this particular area. When Pete said the first area was too broad she shortened it both sides to hold the same central corridor. Can you sort out the line of pictures which shows the territory dead center of the area—the central five miles or so.”

      “She didn’t know the exact whereabouts of what she wanted to find,” Karen pointed out. “She said it might take years of searching on the ground.” Even while she was complaining she was checking the serial numbers on a stack of photographs, sorting out the ones I wanted. I took another set and began doing likewise.

      “True,” I admitted, “but she has some reference point somewhere—a place to start at and work out from. And it must be on this central line somewhere.”

      It took us ten minutes to extract the sequence of shots we wanted, and a further ten to arrange them in the correct order.

      “Incidentally,” I said, as I began spreading them around the floor in a long curve that spiraled around the table and then began to overlap itself, “as we’ll have passed directly overhead of all these points, I guess we’re on this line too.”

      “Sure,” she said, extending a foot to tap the last photograph in the sequence and then moving it on a few inches to the non-existent frame which would have been next. “We’re about here. If you look west out of the ship’s cameras you should be able to see this ridge and the peak way back here.”

      I tiptoed over the layout to the console and got an image of the outside on the display screen. I rotated the scanner. “There’s the ridge,” she said. “And the middle one of those three peaks is the one under my big toe.”

      I looked down at the floor. “And the other two?”

      “They’re on the parallel sets of pictures.”

      It gave me a place to start. I began with the bit of empty floor that was our own position and began crawling along the spiral. My gaze went over the ridge—actually quite a gentle bump that was presumably a saddle strung between two mountains and separating two valleys—and then down a long shallow slope. The pictures were mottled with expanses of bare rock, rough grass and occasional areas of shrub. The farther down I went the greater grew the proportion of shrub, but there was very little heavily wooded land. At the bottom of the valley I crossed a stream and admired the lushest vegetation around, and then started climbing again—another