“It was made absolutely clear to me,” Clifford said, his eyes unfocusing dreamily, “that whatever reason we thought we had for being out among the stars, the real purpose of Westward was to bring us there, to that tower.”
Four pairs of eyes met Lamont’s briefly as the doors of the command deck slid open for him. They didn’t open all the way. Lamont waited for a moment, and then opted to turn sideways and slip through them, feeling relieved when they didn’t suddenly slam shut on him.
“We’re still working on that,” Ed Spratt grunted from where he stood at the situation table, leaning over a pile of diagrams. Captain Carter stood opposite him, leaning on the brass pommel of his cane. Beyond Ed, Abigail Bishop was seated at her station of the command console. She smiled in greeting and then turned back to the knobs and buttons of her control panel. Lazarus Long was at his station as well, but he wasn’t seated; his lanky frame was leaning casually against his stool, coffee cup in hand.
“You look like you got a good night’s sleep,” Lazarus observed.
“I did,” Lamont agreed. “Thank God.”
He wandered over to the refreshment dispenser on the starboard end of the deck. To his left, Santana’s office was unoccupied and unlit, the Mesoamerican decorations grimacing in the shadows. To his right, the panoramic transparent wall showed the underside of Westward, still partially immersed in a snowy crystalline cloud. His mind flashed back briefly to part of his dream the previous night, and he looked away from the window, trying to shake a sudden feeling of dread. It turned out to be an omen, however, when the acrid scent of instant coffee drifted to his nostrils from the black liquid that he dispensed into a cup.
Lazarus, watching Lamont’s familiar ritual from the center of the deck, lifted his own cup in a wry toast. “To the hydroponics bay,” he intoned. “May she rest in peace.”
Lamont glanced again at the white cloud that enveloped the front of the ship. “Bloody intolerable,” he muttered.
“It’s good that you got some rest,” Captain Carter said as the newspaperman approached the central console again. “I expect it will be another long day.”
Lamont grimaced as he sipped his lukewarm drink. “What’ve you got for me?”
“Communication is still an issue until we find some way to cut through the radio noise,” the captain reminded him. “I’d like you to continue to be our go-between in the meantime. I need to be kept apprised of how the colonists and crew we have over there are doing. That means at least one round trip a day for you, for the foreseeable future.”
“Suits me,” Lamont agreed, adjusting the strap of his ubiquitous recorder, which was slung diagonally over his suspenders. “I’d be glad of a chance to do some more snooping down there. Who knows? I might even find a decent cup of coffee.”
“Now that the immediate crisis is under control,” Spratt said, looking up from the plans he was studying, “A little snooping is a definite part of the plan. We know that the moon we’re orbiting is a good source of raw materials—oxygen, iron, that sort of thing—but raw materials are difficult to extract and refine. It might save us some trouble if we can find materials in the tower that are more ready to use.”
“Speaking of which,” Captain Carter said, looking at Lamont, “Chief Santana told me last night that you had an interesting idea.”
The newspaperman reflected on the conversation he’d had with Amila and Phobos in the observation deck after his return from the tower. “Right,” he replied. “I suggested that it might be worth looking at some of the vessels that are parked in the docking bay. They’re strange enough, and goodness knows if we can make heads or tails out of any of them. But if we could sort out how to use even one of them…”
“It would make a big difference in the repair effort,” Ed finished, pushing his thick glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “It’s got to be worth a try.”
“How many vessels did you see there?” Carter asked.
“Three or four,” Lamont answered, frowning as he gulped down the cold dregs of his instant coffee. “That’s assuming that all of the things in there are transportation devices. It’s not immediately obvious.”
Abigail looked up from her work, slipping a headphone off one ear. “And that may not be all of them,” she added. “Judging from the map in the elevator, we may not have seen every landing bay.”
“I don’t know,” Lazarus said, folding his arms. “Nothing in there looked like any kind of craft I’ve seen. Not a wing, jet or window among ‘em. I’m not sure we’ll have the first clue what we’re looking at.”
“We’ll need a team of engineers and scientists who can look beneath the surface appearance of things,” Spratt agreed. “Folks from diverse fields. Physics, mathematics, anthropology…”
“Archeology?” Lamont asked.
The others turned their eyes to him questioningly.
Carter took a deep breath. “An archeologist might be able to identify functions for things that are otherwise unrecognizable. It’s a useful skill set in this situation.”
“You realize what he’s getting at,” Ed pointed out. “Yes, we have one crew member who under normal circumstances would be perfect for this job—that’s why he was on the original expedition. But I guess that’s a tough break for us.”
Lamont rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You’re most likely right,” he agreed. “But I may as well pay a visit to the old boy and see if he’s found any of his marbles.”
Clifford Ashton was reclined on one of the slender examination beds of the medical bay, his back raised so that he could comfortably read from the screen of the boxy information retrieval unit on his lap. Scattered around his legs were a small library of multicolored memory tapes. The greenish glow from the unit’s illuminated viewing screen cast weird shadows on his pale skin. Lamont could see black text scrolling past in a patch of emerald reflected in Ashton’s glasses. The newspaperman had to quietly clear his throat before Clifford noticed him.
“Mr. Townsend!” The engineer exclaimed, fumbling to avoid scattering tapes on the floor as he hastily set the unit aside. “I’ve been hoping to see you.”
“Have you?” Lamont asked, trying to keep his tone casual.
“I—” Clifford stammered awkwardly. “I owe you an apology. The way I acted when you took me back from the tower… Well, it must have looked like I’d gone crazy.”
“It looked a little like that,” Lamont admitted carefully.
Clifford swung his gangly legs over the side of the bed and put his hands in his lap, his features contorting in a conflicted expression. “I suppose I did, in a way. That tower was trying to communicate with me, but the experience was so weird and overwhelming that I just didn’t know how to process it.” He made a vague gesture with his fingers before clasping them together again on his lap. “It all came out in disconnected pictures and phrases from things I’d…”
He paused, looking up at Lamont thoughtfully. “I think that it was using things from my memory to try to tell me something. Things I’d recognize so that it didn’t seem so strange.”
“It,” Lamont repeated, leaning against the next bed over. “Not her?”
The mousy engineer gave an embarrassed chuckle and wrung his hands. “Well, I don’t know. The tower itself is obviously a mechanical construction, like a giant radio tower, except so much more. The question is whether it’s just sending signals, or if it’s also receiving them.”
“So what happened?” Lamont asked. “Where did you go after we first arrived at the garden?”
“Nowhere in particular,” Ashton shrugged. “I just wandered a little way from the central column and came upon a sort of canopy or covered area…”
“Like a grove?” The newspaperman suggested.
Clifford nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, something like an artificial grove! There was an object of some kind in the center, like a sculpture or a statue. I went to take a closer look, and suddenly I was having all kinds of wild visions, like I’d taken a drug or something. Have you been there too?”
Lamont nodded. “The statue of the woman,” he said. “I fell into a kind of trance too.”
Clifford snapped his fingers. “A woman! When I remember the shape of the sculpture, it’s effectively abstract, at least by human standards. But I thought the same thing. I interpreted it as a woman.”
“What happened next?” Lamont prodded.
“That’s the funny part,” Clifford said, shaking his head. “The experience was intense, but it didn’t feel very long. I left the grove feeling a little strange and went to look for the rest of you, to tell you about it, but you were gone. The place was deserted.”
“We combed the garden looking for you, and you were gone,” Lamont explained.
“It’s peculiar,” Clifford agreed. “The space isn’t that large. You should have seen me there, even if I was still under the canopy. As it turned out, more time had passed than I thought—a lot more time.”
“For us too,” Lamont said. “We were in the garden for about six hours, though to me it only felt like perhaps one hour. How long was it between when you left the grove and when I arrived with the first group of colonists?”
The mousy engineer shrugged. “It didn’t occur to me to check the time,” he admitted. “I was overwhelmed by what I had experienced and in something of a daze.”
“Did you feel afraid?” Lamont asked, recalling the sense of dread that accompanied his own dream or vision. “That we wouldn’t return for you? That you’d be alone there?”
“Not at all,” Clifford answered confidently. “I wasn’t precisely sure what I had experienced, but it convinced me of two things: That I wasn’t alone at all, and that the crew of Westward would return to the tower, if they had left at all.”
“Why?” Lamont urged him.
“It was made absolutely clear to me,” Clifford said, his eyes unfocusing dreamily, “that whatever reason we thought we had for being out among the stars, the real purpose of Westward was to bring us there, to that tower. Now that we’ve arrived, it has no other purpose. Just like the other ships we saw.”
“And the—the people—in those ships. What of them?” The newspaperman asked.
“They stayed,” Clifford answered, his eyes shifting to lock clearly on those of Lamont. “They joined the Chorus.”
“So they’re still there?” Lamont pressed, stepping away from his perch so that there was less than an arm’s length between them. “Somewhere in that tower?”
“I suppose they must be,” Clifford agreed.
“Alive?” Lamont asked.
Clifford made a vague gesture that, to Lamont, indicated that he didn’t understand the relevance of the question.
“You seem awfully unconcerned with the fate of the tower’s earlier visitors,” Lamont murmured, a note of menace in his voice.
“I don’t mean to be,” Clifford insisted earnestly. “It’s just that I came away from my experience with a sense of absolute well-being. Not just for me, for all of us. The tower seems to have been designed to transcend common limitations. Mass and gravity. Time and space.” He paused significantly. “Life and death.”
Lamont felt a sting of pain. He had inadvertently bit his lip. “Designed by whom? When?”
“I would very much like to know that myself,” The engineer admitted. He lowered himself to the floor, standing mere inches away from Lamont now. His lanky frame was somewhat taller than Lamont’s, even in stocking feet. “One thing seems clear: The tower is a communication device. Somehow it communicated with me, and I think with you too. I have to believe that if we give it time, let it speak, then any questions we have will be answered.”
“And the fact that it has us as a literal captive audience,” Lamont asked flatly, “don’t concern you at all?”
“It does!” Clifford insisted, sidestepping the newspaperman and heading toward the counter of the medical bay. “At least, I know it should. But perhaps we’ve been brought into something beyond our present sensibilities. A higher purpose.”
Lamont watched the engineer cagily. “And what purpose is that, mate? A giant radio tower, pointed into empty space, using the mass of a moon to block interference. Who’s it for? Us?”
Clifford strolled with careful casualness to the counter, which held a water basin and a variety of medical apparatus. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “It brought us here so that we could help. Add our voices to the Chorus.”
His back was now between Lamont and the sink, so that the newspaperman couldn’t see what he was doing with his hands. Lamont tensed, balling his fists. Who’s idea was it to leave Clifford unsupervised? “And the Chorus is meant to—what was it? Rouse the Sleeper.”
Clifford turned around, holding an object in his hand. It was a small cup. He raised it to his lips and drank with evident relief, then set it on the counter and folded his arms. “That’s what I was told,” he agreed.
Lamont exhaled, forcing himself to relax. “And who is that?” He asked.