“But there wasn’t anyone here to harvest them,” Viktor said
“So they’re no good anymore?” the boy asked.
“Not at all! I’m glad to see they’re really there. They could be pretty valuable, if we had any way to use them. Pure metals, already refined, all sorts of raw materials . . .” He grinned wryly. “If we had factories we could do a lot of manufacturing. If we had food to feed the people to run the factories. If we had the people to grow the food to feed the people. If—”
He broke off as he realized Balit was holding the camera on him. “Come on, Balit, what are you going to do with all these pictures? Why don’t you turn that thing off?”
“No, it’s really interesting, Viktor,” the boy protested. “What do you mean, if you had people?”
Viktor resigned himself. “All right, let’s start from the beginning. The whole planet’s bare, right? Which means there’s no ground cover to hold the soil in place. So it’s been washing down into the sea for a couple of centuries now, which means that if it isn’t stopped fairly soon Newmanhome will stay dead.” He paused for a moment, trying to remember the bright, promising early days of the first colony on Newmanhome. “So what has to be done, as soon as possible, is get some kind of vegetation going, all over the world. That means planting seeds—a whole planet’s worth of seeds, Balit; millions of tons of them. I suppose they’d have to be sown from airplanes—if we had airplanes. If we had the seeds to sow. Then—are you sure you want to hear all this?”
“Please, Viktor!” the boy begged.
Viktor shrugged. “But we need people to do the work. Not only to sow the seeds planetwide, but to grow food to feed everybody doing it. And to build the planes, maybe; and before that to build the factories to build the planes. Balit,” he said earnestly, “I’ve been through this before, and it’s hard. When the first Earth ships landed here they had a few thousand people, and all kinds of machinery designed for every purpose you can imagine—and still everybody was working night and day for years. How many people are on Newmanhome now?”
“Sixteen,” the boy said promptly. “I mean, sixteen from the habitats, plus forty-two like you, and all the gillies.”
“Sixteen,” Viktor said, nodding. “Plus forty-two like me. Of course there are a few thousand more—like me—in the freezers, but we can’t do much about it. Manett says they tried to revive some on their own, but most of them died. Freezer burn, over all that time, the only chance is to take them back to the habitats where somebody like Nrina has all the equipment and can do the job right. No,” he said, staring emptily at the brown hills, “I don’t see how it’s possible. We just don’t have the resources to stay alive here, much less try to figure out—”
He stopped himself, then grinned at the boy. “I was all set to go on about Nebo and what happened to the universe again, wasn’t I? And you’ve already heard enough about that.”
“Never enough, Viktor,” Balit said seriously, but he turned off his camera. Then he said, “There are plenty of people on the habitats, you know.”
“Sure there are. They stay there, too. They don’t come to crude places like this.”
“I’m here, Viktor.”
Apologetic, Viktor reached out to stroke the boy’s shoulder. “I know you are, Balit. I appreciate it. But—let’s be serious, Balit. How many people are willing to leave the habitats and come here? And the ones who do come, how long can they stay? You can’t tell me you’re comfortable here.”
“It’s not so bad, Viktor,” the boy said, trying to sound as though he meant it. They were silent for a moment, then Viktor pointed down through the water.
“See those lumps down there? Not the Von Neumanns, the square-edged ones? I think those were the docks of Homeport. Of course, they’re buried in mud now, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they were.”
“Wouldn’t the docks be at the water’s edge, Viktor?”
“They were. But that was before the ice pushed the land down; that happens, sometimes.” Viktor looked around. “I’d bet,” he said, “that we’re floating right now just about over where Homeport was!”
He stopped paddling and gazed at the water, trying to reconstruct the plan of the old town. It could have been so. This could have been the waterfront—that patch back there where his home had been—up higher, near where the present shoreline lay, perhaps the old site of the schoolhouse where he had first met brash, red-headed, teen-aged Theresa McGann . . .
“Is something the matter, Viktor?” Balit asked anxiously.
Viktor blinked. After a moment he managed a grin. “It’s all right,” he said. “I was just remembering.”
Balit nodded, studying Viktor’s face. Then he said hesitantly, “Viktor? Has—ah—has Nrina called you?”
Viktor looked at the boy. “It wasn’t Nrina I was thinking about,” he said.
“I know,” the boy said. “I just wondered.” And then he said, “When we give Markety’s boat back to him, do you think we should ask him to show us the Nebo things?”
“Oh, my God,” Viktor said, shaking his head in astonishment. Because, incredible as it was, with all the other things that had been going on since he arrived back on Newmanhome, he had almost forgotten “the Nebo things.”
The things weren’t in a museum, or anything like one. They were in a shed on the outskirts of the little colony, and most of the space was full of junk that no one wanted but no one was willing to throw away. Since that exactly described the artifacts from Nebo, they were there—half-concealed behind a litter of broken dune-buggy wheels, stacks of cracked crockery dug out of the ice-age warrens, and other unnameable debris,
When, with Markety’s help, Viktor and Balit got to the Nebo things they were not much better. The largest of them Viktor had already seen, on Nrina’s desk machine, a lavender metal object as big as a man, more or less cubical in shape. Viktor poked it cautiously. It was very solid. “Why weren’t these things taken to the habitats?” he asked.
Markety looked astonished. “They might be dangerous, Viktor. You know what happened on Nebo when people tried to poke into that sort of thing. They’re better here, so that in case anyone does anything risky there would be less damage—I mean, to anything important,” he explained.
“You mean if anybody tries to see what’s inside them,” Viktor said, nodding. “Maybe you’re right, but it has to be done.”
Markety’s astonishment turned to worry. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Viktor.”
“It doesn’t have to be done here. Maybe they could be taken to some other part of Newmanhome—maybe we could work out some kind of remote-controlled machinery to try to open them up—I don’t know, maybe the best place to do it is on Nebo itself. But in the long run we have to take the chance, because we do have to know!” As the words came out of his mouth Viktor heard, surprisingly, that he sounded as though he were actually growing excited again.
“Pelly says maybe it could be done in space,” Balit offered eagerly.
“Just so it’s done, I don’t care how,” Viktor said. “Those Nebo machines did things human beings couldn’t even imagine—ever—even when they could travel from star to star.”
Markety coughed. “We know they were pretty good at killing people, anyway,” he conceded.
“I don’t think those deaths were on purpose,” Viktor argued. “Not all of them, anyway. At least we know that they actually helped some people—the ones I saw land on Nebo; we have the tapes to prove it. Yes, they died after a while, but they weren’t simply murdered . . . God knows why,” he finished. Then he went on. “I haven’t said all of this even to you, Balit, but I have a kind of an idea. I think there’s another civilization around—not human. At least, I think there was, and that they sent somebody to Nebo long ago—very long ago, even before the first New Ark landed here from Earth.”
“Nobody’s ever said anything like that, Viktor,” Balit said worriedly. “Where would those people come from?”
“I don’t know. The star Gold has planets, according to Pelly. Maybe the people who landed on Nebo came from one of those planets. Anyway, I think that for some reason—I can’t even guess what it might have been—they constructed those machines on Nebo to tap the energies of our sun, and use them to accelerate this whole little group of stars.”
“Why would they do that?” Markety asked good-naturedly.
“I have no idea. I said so. But we’ll never have any hope of knowing ‘why’ unless we can figure out ‘how’—and that means taking some of those machines apart to see what made them run!”