‘Salesmen, they were,’ he told me, blowing into his pipe. ‘Tallis did the heavy work for them. Should never have come here, trying to sell all those books.’
‘Books?’
‘Cases full. Bibles, if I recall.’
‘Textbooks,’ I suggested. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Sure I did,’ he said, puttering to himself. ‘Guinea moroccos.’ He jerked his head sharply. ‘You won’t sell them here, I told them.’
It sounded exactly like a dry piece of academic humour. I could see Tallis and the two scientists pulling Pickford’s leg, passing off their reference library as a set of commercial samples.
I suppose the whole episode would eventually have faded, but Tallis’s charts kept my interest going. There were about twenty of them, half million aerials of the volcano jungle within a fifteen-mile radius of the observatory. One of them was marked with what I assumed to be the camp site of the geologists and alternative routes to and from the observatory. The camp was just over ten miles away, across terrain that was rough but not over-difficult for a tracked car.
I still suspected I was getting myself wound up over nothing. A meaningless approach arrow on the charts, the faintest suggestion of a cryptic ‘X’, and I should have been off like a rocket after a geldspar mine or two mysterious graves. I was almost sure that Tallis had not been responsible, either by negligence or design, for the deaths of the two men, but that still left a number of unanswered questions.
The next clear day I checked over the half-track, strapped a flare pistol into my knee holste’r and set off, warning Pickford to listen out for a mayday call on the Chrysler’s transmitter.
It was just after dawn when I gunned the half-track out of the observatory compound and headed up the slope between two battery farms, following the route mapped out on the charts. Behind me the telescope swung slowly on its bogies, tirelessly sweeping its great steel ear through the Cepheid talk. The temperature was in the low seventies, comfortably cool for Murak, the sky a fresh cerise, broken by lanes of indigo that threw vivid violet lights on the drifts of grey ash on the higher slopes of the volcano jungle.
The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesizer, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first valley. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanoes jostled together like a herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the flat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier.
I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanoes ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky.
I walked round the site, looking for some trace of the two geologists. A battered tin field-desk lay on its side, green paint blistered and scratched. I turned it over and pulled out its drawers, finding nothing except a charred notebook and a telephone, the receiver melted solidly into its cradle.
Tallis had done his job too well.
The temperature was over 1000 by the time I climbed back into the half-track and a couple of miles ahead I had to stop as the cooling unit was draining power from the spark plugs and stalling the engine. The outside temperature was 130°, the sky a roaring shield, reflected in the slopes around me so that they seemed to stream with molten wax. I sealed all the shutters and changed into neutral, even then having to race the ancient engine to provide enough current for the cooler. I sat there for over an hour in the dim gloom of the dashboard, ears deadened by the engine roar, right foot cramping, cursing Talus and the two geologists.
That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis.
One afternoon, two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked: ‘I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.’
‘TV tapes?’
‘Bibles, I thought he said.’
I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed.
He puffed smoke at me. ‘Those salesmen,’ he explained. ‘You were inquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.’
I nodded. ‘Well?’
‘I kept some.’
I put out my cigarette. ‘Can I see them?’
He gestured me round the counter with his pipe. ‘In the back.’
I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and TV-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become.
‘There it is,’ Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferreted about for a wrench. ‘Thought you might like to buy some.’
‘How long has it been here?’
‘About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.’
Doubtful, I thought: more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he prised off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes.
I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light.
It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others.
‘You’re right,’ I said. Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me.
I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorized Version. The marbling inside the endboards was unmarked. A publisher’s ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library.
The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate.
‘How many crates did they have altogether?’ I asked Pickford.
‘Bibles? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.’ He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. ‘Good condition, eh?’
It was a Koran.
I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there were ninety in all: thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorized Versions and eleven Vulgates), fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads.
I took one of each and gave Pickford a ?10 note.
‘Any time you want some more,’ he called after me. ‘Maybe I can arrange a discount.’ He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen.
When Mayer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk.
‘Pickford’s samples,’ I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. ‘According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.’
‘He’s senile.’
‘No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.’
‘Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.’
‘Whatever they were they certainly weren’t geologists. Why did Tallis say they were? Anyway, why didn’t he ever mention that they had ordered all these Bibles?’
‘Perhaps he’d forgotten.’
‘Fifteen crates? Fifteen crates of Bibles? Heavens above, what did they do with them?’
Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. ‘Do you want me to radio Ceres?’
