“I don’t like taking chances,” he reminded them. “But that thing out there is a cornucopia of advanced technology that we can’t overlook.”
Clifford shook his head. “I got a picture of immensity, of ultimate importance,” he admitted. “But nothing clearer than that. What did you see?”
“I saw Mary,” Lamont replied, feeling slightly self-conscious. “A stained glass image of Mary in an old cathedral.”
“The Virgin Mother?” The engineer responded, his dusty eyebrows lifting. “Interesting.”
“Why?” Asked the newspaperman.
“Well, like I said before, I think the tower uses images and ideas that are already in our minds to help us understand things that would be otherwise too far outside our experience to take in. We both saw religious imagery. The fact that your Catholic background gives you a pre-existing conception of a Divine Feminine might have made you receptive to a different part of the message than I was.”
“Brilliant,” Lamont answered dryly, “Except that I ain’t Catholic. Never have been.”
Clifford made a face as if he were being introduced to a new piece of evidence that uncomfortably conflicted with a pet theory. “Really?” He asked. “Are you certain?”
“Shouldn’t I be?” Lamont countered.
“Well,” Clifford mumbled, “It seems unlikely that we would travel hundreds of light years from Earth and encounter something so recognizable. After all, what we’ve seen of the tower has been evidently alien in the extreme. It’s just that certain experiences within it have carried a feeling of…”
“Familiarity,” Lamont finished his sentence.
“Exactly,” Clifford nodded, becoming animated again. “In fact, once you set aside the external strangeness, the general function of the tower seems compellingly similar to…” He hesitated.
“To what?” Lamont urged.
Clifford licked his lips and picked up the cup again. “I don’t know if I should talk about it.”
Lamont looked at Ashton intently as the bookish engineer drew himself a second cup of water. “How long were you an engineer for United Space before being brought into the Westward project?” He asked.
“Nine years,” Clifford answered, wiping his mouth.
“And in that time, did you ever work on something like a radio or antenna that was pointed away from Earth? Out into deep space?” Lamont felt electrified with a nervous excitement. He realized that there was a connection that had been eating at him beneath the surface, something so far-fetched that he had never consciously entertained it.
The engineer looked conflicted, turning the cup around in his hand. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “I worked on components for something like that.”
“What’s the problem, mate?” Lamont asked, forcing his tone to become friendly and soothing. “The big secret United Space was keeping was this.” He slapped a palm dully on the padded surface of the examination bed behind him. “Westward. And we’re here. Surely any gag agreements you might have signed a decade ago are obsolete now.”
Clifford set the cup down and began to pace, his stocking feet soundless on the thin carpeting of the floor. He seemed to be attempting to resolve an inner struggle. Finally, his eyes flashed at Lamont, and the newspaperman recognized with satisfaction that novelty had won out. The bloke was a scientist, after all.
“They had me working on satellite infrastructures that could withstand extreme cold and pressure,” Clifford explained, stepping closer to Lamont so that he could lower his voice conspiratorially. “They didn’t tell me anything except the essential design challenges, but it seemed clear to me that the environment was consistent with, say, the upper atmosphere of Uranus. And that the general shape of the thing was meant to accommodate a very large dish.”
Lamont stood up straighter. He felt his eyes burning into those of the engineer, searching for some hint of a trick, a deception. His thoughts raced back to a conversation he’d had in what felt now like a different lifetime, deep in the bowels of Mars. The words of Madison, the space prospector, flashed verbatim through his mind.
After our departure, we happened to notice that a station of some kind was being constructed in orbit around Triton. There was a big supply ship for it in orbit; we could see the United Space markings on the side. But they never responded to our radio calls. It was a big radio array. But it was pointed outward—away from the sun, into interstellar space. Now, you’ve got to ask yourself: What’s the point of that?
“You must have been given some idea of what the purpose of the dish was, yeah?” Lamont urged. “A mission statement, a project plan.”
Clifford shook his head innocently. “Nothing like that. Just technical parameters.” He hesitated, glancing toward the door of the medical bay furtively. “But…”
Lamont raised his brows expectantly. “But what?”
Clifford lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “I was curious, so I did a little digging. I have an interest in history, you know.”
“I know,” Lamont encouraged him.
“One of the earliest big projects that Schultzcorp undertook, back in the ‘50s, had to do with building big radio dishes,” Clifford explained in a voice barely above a whisper. “At the time, the dust cloud that covered the Earth was a major technical barrier. After a few years, the project was apparently suspended and resources were diverted to clean up the sky and complete construction of Tomorrow. But it still begs the question: After the Epiphany event, why did Schultzcorp consider receiving signals from space to be a first priority?”
“And the infrastructures you were working on—” Lamont whispered, “—were part of the same project, nearly 50 years later?”
“I can’t be sure,” Clifford admitted. “I was never given a name for the project, and I couldn’t find any mentions of NOD after the mid 1950’s, and precious few of those at that.”
“What—what did you say?” Lamont nearly choked, startling the mousy engineer. “The acronym?”
“En-Oh-Dee,” Clifford stammered. “I never figured out what it stood for. And I didn’t dig too deeply because I didn’t want to endanger my job.”
Lamont fumbled in his pocket. He had moved the radioactive souvenir from Epiphany Rex to a hidden compartment in his cigarette case so that he always knew where it was while the ship was under repair. Should he show it to Clifford? Was there another person onboard who could share the burden of this strange and inexplicable connection between half-century old documents and a world colonized by Mars in a long-distant epoch? He reeled with the momentary temptation to tell Clifford everything he knew, and then, as usual, thought the better of it. He didn’t know Ashton that well. Besides, mere hours ago, the man had been babbling inane platitudes after being affected somehow by the tower. No, better to keep it to himself until he better understood what he was dealing with.
“It’s an…extraordinary connection,” Lamont ventured carefully.
The engineer shrugged. “An interesting comparison, maybe, but I don’t see a connection. After all, the Schultzcorp project was designed to receive signals from deep space. The tower is the opposite—it’s designed to transmit them.”
“What’s your verdict?” Ed Spratt asked, examining the bowl of his unlit pipe. “Is Clifford still batty?”
Lamont toyed with his half-cup of instant coffee. He was seated with the members of the senior staff around the boomerang-shaped table of the conference room. The television monitor at the end of the room was flickering through a sequence of camera feeds, internal and external, that interspersed scenes of the repair efforts with brief glimpses of the mysterious cylindrical tower that half the ship’s complement was now calling home. “Obviously I’m not qualified to say,” he recused himself. “He seemed coherent enough, and talked as if he recognized that he’d been—compromised in some way by his contact with the tower.”
“Compromised!” Chief Santana repeated, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The way he was talking, he would have happily finished the job and blown up Westward if given the chance.”
“I was disoriented by my own contact with the tower,” Lamont reminded her. “Rosemary snapped me out of it after a few moments. For Clifford, the experience lasted for hours. He may have just needed more time for it to wear off.”
“And you think that it has worn off?” Captain Carter asked. “To the extent that he can resume normal duties? I’m just asking for your personal opinion, naturally.”
The newspaperman shrugged and gulped down the rest of his lukewarm coffee. “He seems to want to know the truth. I can respect that.”
Ed sighed, leaning back in his chair and tapping the stem of his pipe on the tabletop. “I don’t like taking chances,” he reminded them. “But that thing out there is a cornucopia of advanced technology that we can’t overlook. We need every available person with a qualified skill set to be over there learning about it, and Ashton fits that bill.”
“Wait,” Lamont interjected. “Are you planning to harvest pieces of technology from the tower?”
“If there’s something we can use to help get Westward up and running, sure,” Ed replied. “Wasn’t that your idea?”
“My idea was to borrow a vehicle of some kind, since it seems that they aren’t being used and probably haven’t been for a long time,” Lamont objected. “There’s a big difference between doing that and plundering any gadget that happens to catch your fancy.”
“I fail to see the distinction,” Chief Covington admitted in his Scottish brogue. He turned his eyes to the captain. “And for the record, I’m opposed to all of it.”
Francis straightened in his seat. “That thing lured us into its orbit and then unleashed a burst of energy that nearly destroyed my ship and nearly killed my crew,” he reminded the security chief. “Perhaps it was an accident, a misunderstanding. Perhaps it was intentional. We don’t know. But as far as I’m concerned, the tower is liable to provide any aid it can in our recovery.”
From the seat next to Carter’s, the reedy voice of Phobos interjected. “I would advise treading lightly,” he said.
“You would,” Ed mumbled. “God forbid that we should get our hands on advanced technology that you didn’t develop.”
“That’s not the point, Ed,” Amila objected. “The point is that there is an ethical component to this situation. If what happened was accidental, then yes, we do need to do what’s necessary to take care of our ship and our crew. But two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“And what if it wasn’t an accident?” Arthur asked, folding his thick arms. “What if this whole thing has been a trap?”
Phobos lifted a long finger instructively, as was his habit when making a point. “Then it is difficult for us to say at what point we have stopped playing into its hands.”
There was a long moment of uncomfortable silence around the table as the senior crew exchanged looks among each other.
Finally, Captain Carter steepled his fingers and leaned forward, drawing a deep breath of the still thin air. “We’re all tired,” he admitted. “But we all want the same thing: to bring our people home and resume our mission. To that end, we should use every reasonable tool at our disposal. Let’s content ourselves to focus on just the next expedition. Tomorrow has enough trouble of its own.”
“Wise words,” agreed Santana, nodding with grudging appreciation. “Lamont, you’ll check on the status of the camp, make a note of any developments that should be brought to our attention. There will also be some crew members switching places. Ed, you should have one team focused on solving the problem of communication, and one team examining the vehicles on the tower to see if any might be adapted for our use.” She looked at him pointedly. “Just fact-finding for now,” she emphasized.
Ed spread his hands, pipe stem lodged between his teeth, as if to say that he had never intended anything else.
“If there’s time,” Lamont suggested, “I’d like to take the lift down to a lower level and see what I find. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the tower, and anything we learn might be useful.”
“If you do,” Francis reminded him, “See to it that you don’t go alone. Unless we find some method of reliable communication…”
He trailed off, but Lamont finished it in his head. We would have no way of knowing what happened to you.