A World Called Solitude

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

“It’s but a short flight, sir,” Arthur continued, unaware of Birk’s discomfiture. “We may still find survivors if we hurry.” And he started back toward the stairwell.

Birk stood rigid, frozen in time and space. Arthur’s words registered somewhere in his mind, like a mouse squeaking in a far corner of the next room. There was suddenly a hole in the bottom of his stomach, a queasy abyss through which all sensation was flowing, to be replaced by… what?

Arthur stopped when he realized Birk wasn’t following him. “You are coming, aren’t you, sir?” the robot asked politely. “I should think you’d want to supervise the rescue operations, There may be some decisions about whom to save and whom to leave, and you’re much more capable of making such choices than I am.”

Birk was suddenly aware that he was standing in the dark, with just a night robe draped loosely around his naked body. He was stricken with a fit of uncontrollable shivers and, even in his dazed state, that struck him as odd—the night wasn’t that cold. He tried to answer Arthur’s question, but his teeth were chattering so fiercely he couldn’t force the words out.

Seeing his master’s difficulty, Arthur returned to his side and wrapped one tentacular arm around Birk’s shoulders. “I’ve already summoned the medic team from the local area, and they’re on their way to the scene. If we hurry, we can meet them there.” He hesitated. “Unless, of course, you don’t want—”

“No,” Birk said. “I mean, yes, I do want… we must try.…” He was surprised how hoarse his own voice sounded.

“Good, sir, I thought that was what you’d say. But we must move quickly.” With the arm around behind him, Arthur was pushing Birk back toward the stairwell. Birk found his feet leaden, but Arthur’s gentle, inexorable pressure kept him moving forward. “Every second wasted could cost a life,” the robot continued.

Birk moved as though in a dream, or in a nightmare—a nightmare where he was pursuing something he wanted and could never quite catch up to it—or where something was chasing him and he could not move fast enough to escape. In this case, he couldn’t have said which simile was more correct.

He stood silently in the bedroom while Arthur scanned his wardrobe and made the appropriate selections. Birk, moving more like a robot than Arthur did, raised his arms to get the shirt on over his head, and lifted each leg mechanically as Arthur helped him put on his trousers. Arthur took his boots and led Birk up the stairs to the roof again, where the delta was waiting for them. “You can put your boots on while we’re flying,” the robot said. “I just received a report from the medic team. They’re nearing the site, and the crash looks like a bad one.”

Birk slid into his seat in the delta, and the triangular craft lifted off the roof even before the plastic bubble had fully closed over him. Arthur, at the controls, spun the craft around, and Birk was pressed back against his seat as the delta took off. He sat stiffly, holding his boots in his hand until Arthur reminded him to put them on.

The world around them was in blackness, the only light being the dim green glow from the instrument panel. There were no stars, there was no moon, and the cities of this world had not been lit at night for two thousand years, except on those few occasions when Birk had specifically requested it. Sky and ground merged into a uniform darkness, as though Birk had been shoved into a sensory-deprivation chamber. The delta had a searchlight on its underside that could have illuminated the ground below—but Arthur didn’t need it and Birk didn’t think to turn it on.

The delta flew with silent efficiency, with but a subliminal hum and a few half-felt quivers to let the occupants know it was moving. Once it reached maximum speed, Arthur kept it at a steady pace, and even the press of acceleration disappeared. With no scenery to watch gliding past, all sensation of motion vanished; the delta and its occupants could have been holding steady, suspended in a starless void for all eternity.

The darkness and the silence were restful, and Birk needed that right now. They covered him like a security blanket, cushioning his psyche from the shock of tonight’s event. For a few minutes, his mind could relax and flow with the solitude once more.

People. The thought was both entrancing and repellent. Other people, other voices, other ideas. It’s been so long. What could I say to them? What will they want from me? What are they doing here? What if they came to get me… ?

Be reasonable, the small, cold part of his mind told him. It’s been eleven years. They think you’re dead by now—that is, if they even think of you at all.

Arthur said it was a bad crash. Maybe everyone was killed. Then I wouldn’t have to worry. That thought warmed him somewhat. It wouldn’t be his fault if there weren’t any survivors. Just rotten luck, that was all. He could mourn them more deeply than anyone had ever been mourned before, regretting the lost companionship they could have provided him. He straightened up in his seat, already consigning their souls to the land of the dead and planning some memorial he’d have the robots erect in their name. He was starting to feel almost himself again.

There was a point of light below them now, near the horizon, and Arthur dipped their craft’s nose toward it. As the delta sped closer, Birk could see the point of light expand until it took on a definite shape—a lopsided ring of fire surrounding a darkened patch that glowed feebly, like an ember about to die. Then, even as he watched, the center of the ring grew brighter as the medic robot team set up its own floodlights to aid the rescue operation.

The story laid out before him was obvious. The ship had crashed into the hillside with devastating impact. The heat of its passage ignited the brush around it, and the fire began spreading out from the point of impact in all directions. The fire did not burn evenly because of a slight breeze that retarded its progress up the hill, leaving a lopsided, squashed-in appearance to the fiery circle. The robot rescue team arrived and immediately doused the fire near the ship so it wouldn’t hamper their operations. They didn’t care about the rest of the fire; what did it matter whether a thousand hectares burned, or even a million? The planet’s history could hardly be affected by such minor details anymore.

With the gentlest of bumps, Arthur landed the delta inside the fire circle. The plastic bubbles over the passenger compartments swung upward, and both man and robot slid off their seats to stand beside their craft. Arthur moved hastily, running up the charred hillside toward the twisted wreckage of the spaceship. Birk merely stood beside the delta, watching all the frantic activity in the rescue area before him.

The rescue floodlights shone with an intense yellow glow. They provided plenty of illumination, making this portion of the hillside look as bright as day; but the color made the scene seem washed out, faded like an overexposed photograph. The rapid movements of the robots as they went about their tasks seemed in direct contradiction to the lighting. There was a feverish quality about the place, a heat emanating from the rescue site having nothing to do with the fire raging around it.

The ship itself was a total wreck. Strangely, it seemed to have impacted on its side rather than either nose or tail first, as though the attitude controls had been misbehaving. The style of the ship was unfamiliar, but that wasn’t surprising—he could hardly have expected designs to remain as they’d been eleven years ago. The name Thundercloud could be read on the twisted metal of the hull. This was a human ship, all right—not that he’d had many doubts about it. Humanity had never encountered any evidence of other intelligent races in its short history of galactic exploration.

Except for the Makers, he reminded himself. And they don’t really count because I’m the only one who knows about them.

The ship had been a big one, nearly forty meters long, but whether it had been military or civilian he couldn’t hazard a guess. Depending on its mission, Birk estimated it could have housed as many as a hundred people and under no circumstances could it have been run by less than twenty. That gave Birk at least a feel for the magnitude of the problem he was facing.

The rescue robots had come prepared for heavy work. Their machines were already ripping the ship’s hull apart to allow medical teams to search for survivors. The din was almost deafening; the hissing of laser welding torches burning through the hull, the squealing of tortured metal being bent out of the way, the clanking of the big machines as they pulled the broken ship to pieces. Only one sound seemed to be missing, and it took Birk a few seconds to pinpoint what it was. In a human rescue operation, the rescuers would be yelling back and forth at one another, calling for assistance, coordinating their actions and giving advice or reassurance. These robots moved silently among the wreckage like gray metal ghosts. If they chatted among themselves at all—as they had to if they were to maintain any coordination—it was all in radio frequencies Birk could not hear.

The smoke from the fire tickled his nostrils, and he sneezed twice. The sneezes broke his reverie, and he started walking slowly up the hill toward the center of all the activity. Even as he walked, his mind was analyzing the situation.

No one could have survived a crash like that, he thought. The ship must have been traveling at better than three hundred kilometers an hour when it hit—and if the attitude controls were out, the people couldn’t even have been braced properly.

But apprehension was growing in another portion of his brain. There could have been a hundred people in there. Some of them may have been lucky. The ship hit on one side; people on the other side had a chance. What are the odds that some of them are still living?

He froze again as the thought triggered a memory—a memory of a thousand nightmares, but also a memory born of real life. He looked at the twisted pile of wreckage and thought of the twisted, broken bodies that must lie within it.

What are the odds, Birk? What are the odds?

***

“Offhand, I’d say they’re lousy. I’m open to better suggestions.”

Gonzales scowled at him. He looked as though he wanted to spit, had such an action not been so unthinkable aboard a spaceship. “So we’re stuck with that, eh?”

“It’s like the old joke that we’ve got two chances, slim and none. I’ll opt for slim any day.”

“We could go back.” Birk never knew the name of the black man who made that suggestion.

“No, we can’t,” he sighed patiently. “I told you that a week ago, when we crossed the point of no return. We haven’t the food, water, air, or fuel to make it back—and we all agreed then that we didn’t want to try.”

“But you’ve never landed a ship before,” Gonzales reiterated

“I’ll try to learn fast.”

But then he was at the control panel, and the ship, was coming down, and his hands were sweating, and nothing was going right. Piloting the ship through. a vacuum and charting a course through the convolutions of p-space were child’s play compared to maneuvering through the vagaries of a thick, resisting atmosphere.

The engines were a torch beneath them as the ship slammed downward toward the planet’s surface. He had confidence in the engines; he could have taken them apart blindfolded. But the engines were working perfectly; it was pilot performance at stake here, and he had no confidence at all in the pilot, himself.

The ship was shaking. It had been a slow, negligible rattle to start with—but as the whine of air rushing by became loud enough to hear even inside the hull, the vibrations grew in intensity. Now it was a bone-jarring shudder that rocked the whole ship as though the vessel itself were quaking with a premonition of doom. Birk was having trouble holding his hands steady at the controls—even assuming they were the right controls to begin with.