'I know you will try.' Morris's throat trembled. It was unlike him to stand up to anyone who was in a position to damage him. 'Nevertheless,' he said righteously, 'three people are dead.'
'I understand that.'
'I'm captain here. I expect to be associated with this disaster for the rest of my career. There'll be no escaping it.'
It's a terrible thing to listen to a grown man whine. 'I rather think,' she said, 'that the unofficial culpability, if any, will attach to Dr. Carson.'
Morris was glad to hear that. But he was too smart to show his satisfaction. Instead, he sat for some moments peering sadly off into a corner, as if he were considering the varieties of disaster which can befall even the most capable men.
Truscott suspected that when she was gone, he would call up a coffee and a cinnamon roll. Emotional encounters, she knew, always left him hungry.
'You'll need some reconstructive surgery when you get home. Meantime, stay off it as much as you can.' The ship's physician, a grandmotherly type with an easygoing, upbeat bedside manner, irritated Carson. He had never much liked cheerful people. 'Neither of you will be able to walk for about twelve hours,' she told him and Janet. 'Afterward, I want you both to stay off your feet for several days. I'll let you know when.'
Janet was sitting up, examining her anesthetized left leg. 'When do we get out?' she asked.
'There's no indication of an infection or complication, but we don't have much experience with this sort of thing. The brachyids injected you with a protein compound that seems to have no purpose. It might make you a little sick, but that will be the extent of it.'
'Venom?' asked Carson.
'Probably. But you're not a local life form. So you got off lucky. Anyway, I want to keep an eye on you until morning. If nothing develops by then, you can go back to your quarters.' She checked her lightpad. 'You have a visitor. May we show him in?'
'Who is it?' asked Carson.
'Me.' Harvey Sill appeared in the doorway. 'I've got some information for you.'
The doctor excused herself, while Sill asked how they were doing. 'Pretty good,' Carson said. Truth was, he hadn't slept since they'd brought him aboard. 'What've you got?'
'A reading on the syzygy.'
'On the whatl'
'The lunar alignment. Remember? You wanted to know how long it had been since the four moons lined up?'
A lot had happened since then, and Carson had forgotten. 'Oh, yes,' he said. It seemed trivial now.
'It's been a while. We make it 4743 B.C., terrestrial.'
He tried to make the numbers fit, and had no luck. 'That can't be the one we're looking for.'
'Why not?'
'It's too recent. We know they had interstellar travel as early as the twenty-first millenium B.C. The space station is primitive, so it should predate that. Do we have an event that happened more than twenty-three thousand years ago?'
Sill consulted his pad. 'One of the moons has an orbit at a steep angle to the others. Which means that they hardly ever line up. Prior to the one in 4743, you have to go back over a hundred thousand years.'
'That can't be right.'
Sill shrugged. 'Let me know if we can do anything else for you.' He smiled at Janet, and left the room.
'It was worth a try, I guess,' said Carson. 'The orbiter may have been up there a long time, but not a hundred thousand years.'
'Maybe the photos are simulated.'
'Must be.' His eyes slid shut. The room was getting sunlight just then. It was warm and sleep-inducing. Something connected with the station had been bothering him when the business with the crabs started. He needed to think about it, to reach back and find it. 'Janet,' he said, 'think about the ruins for a minute.'
'Okay.'
'We didn't really get to see much of the harbor city. But did it look to you like the kind of city that a high-tech race of star-travelers would have built?'
'You mean the steel and concrete?'
'Yes. And the evidence we had of extensive water travel. I thought the collapsed bridge looked like something we might have built.'
'We're star-travelers.'
'We're just starting. These people had been at it for thousands of years. Does it make sense they'd still be using brick walls, for God's sake?'
'Maybe,' she said. 'What are you trying to say?'
'I don't know.' The air was thick. It was hard to think. 'Is it possible the interstellar civilization came first! Before the cities and the space station?'
Janet nodded. 'The evidence points that way. We tend to assume continual progress. But maybe they slid into a dark age. Or just went downhill.' She punched a pillow and finished with a rush of emotion: 'That's what it is, Frank. It'll be interesting to see what the excavations show.'
'Yes,' said Carson. But somebody else will get to do that. I'm sure as hell not going back down there.
His legs were anesthetized, and he felt only a pleasant warmth in them.
While Janet slept, Carson withdrew into the back of his mind. The sense of general well-being that should have accompanied the tranks never arrived. He was left only with a sense of disconnectedness. Of watching from a distance.
He went over his decisions again and again. He'd failed to take seriously the possibilities of attack. Failed to consider any danger other than a single, dangerous predator. Failed to provide adequate security.
The room grew dark. He watched the moons appear one by one in his view panel. They were cold and white and alive. Maybe everything in this system was alive: the sun, the worlds, the things in solar orbit. Even the continents. The moons aligned themselves, formed up like a military unit, like brachyids.
Syzygy.
He was awake. Drenched with sweat.
Beside him, Janet slept peacefully.
Syzygy.
It had last happened in 4743 B.C. And the era of the Monuments had ended, as far as they knew, around 21,000 B.C.
He picked up a lightpad, and began writing it all down. Assume that the people who had lived in the harbor city had put up the space station. Assume also that the station had ended its useful life shortly thereafter, because it was primitive, and would quickly have become obsolete. But there were no other stations, more advanced ones, so the harbor city and the planetary civilization had ceased activity. Had they perhaps not outlived their orbiter?
The time span between the last syzygy and the (supposed) end of the Age of Monuments was approximately sixteen thousand years.
DISCONTINUITIES
Beta Pac III Quraqua Nok 21.0OOBC 9000 16,OOO BC 4743 BC 1000 400 AD
Again, there were increments of eight thousand years.
He stared at the numbers a long time.
And he thought about the space station. Why had its occupants tied themselves into their chairs and opened the hatches?
Carson remembered the old twentieth-century story of the cosmonaut who was stranded in orbit when the Soviet Union dissolved. He was circling the Earth, and one day the country that put him up just wasn't there anymore. Maybe these people got stranded too. Something happened on the ground. Something that cut off all hope of return. And out of grief, or desperation, they had let in the night.
Maybe the discontinuities weren't gradual events. Maybe they were sudden, overnight disasters. Okay, that seemed ridiculous. But where did it lead? What other evidence did he have? How could it connect with Oz?
