The observatory was self-sufficient as regards electric power and water. On the near-by slopes farms of solar batteries had been planted out in quarter-mile strips, the thousands of cells winking in the sunlight like a field of diamonds, sucking power from the sun to drive the generator dynamos. On another slope, its huge mouth permanently locked into the rock face, a mobile water synthesizer slowly bored its way through the desert crust, mining out oxygen and hydrogen combined into the surface minerals.
‘You’ll have plenty of spare time on your hands,’ the Deputy Director of the Astrographic Institute on Ceres had warned me when I initialled the contract. ‘There’s a certain amount of routine maintenance, checking the power feeds to the reflector traverses and the processing units, but otherwise you won’t need to touch the telescope. A big digital does the heavy thinking, tapes all the data down in 2000-hour schedules. You fly the cans out with you when you go on leave.’
‘So apart from shovelling the sand off the doorstep there’s virtually nothing for me to do?’ I’d commented.
‘That’s what you’re being paid for. Probably not as much as you deserve. Two years will seem a long time, even with three leave intervals. But don’t worry about going crazy. You aren’t alone on Murak. You’ll just be bored. £2000 worth, to be exact. However, you say you have a thesis to write. And you never know, you may like it there. Tallis, the observer you’re taking over from, went out in ‘03 for two years like yourself, and stayed fifteen. He’ll show you the ropes. Pleasant fellow, by all accounts, a little whimsical, probably try to pull your leg.’
Tallis drove me down to the settlement the first morning to collect my heavy vacuum baggage that had travelled spacehold.
‘Murak Reef,’ he pointed out as the old ‘95 Chrysler half-track churned through the thick luminous ash silted over the metal road. We crossed a system of ancient lava lakes, flat grey disks half a mile wide, their hard crusts blistered and pocked by the countless meteor showers that had driven into Murak during the past million years. In the distance a group of long flat-roofed sheds and three high ore elevators separated themselves from the landscape.
‘I suppose they warned you. One supplies depot, a radio terminal and the minerals concession. Latest reliable estimates put the total population at seven.’
I stared out at the surrounding desert floor, cracked and tiered by the heat swings into what looked like huge plates of rusted iron, and at the massed cones of the volcano jungle yellowing in the sand haze. It was 4 o’clock local time early morning — but the temperature was already over 80°. We drove with windows shuttered, sun curtain down, refrigerating unit pumping noisily.
‘Must be fun on Saturday night,’ I commented. ‘Isn’t there anything else?’
‘Just the thermal storms, and a mean noon temperature of 160°.’
‘In the shade?’
Tallis laughed. ‘Shade? You must have a sense of humour. There isn’t any shade on Murak. Don’t ever forget it. Half an hour before noon the temperature starts to go up two degrees a minute. If you’re caught out in it you’ll be putting a match to your own pyre.’
Murak Reef was a dust hole. In the sheds backing onto the depot the huge ore crushers and conveyors of the extraction plants clanked and slammed. Tallis introduced me to the agent, a morose old man called Pickford, and to two young engineers taking the wraps off a new grader. No one made any attempt at small talk. We nodded briefly, loaded my luggage onto the half-track and left.
‘A taciturn bunch,’ I said. ‘What are they mining?’
‘Tantalum, Columbium, the Rare Earths. A heartbreaking job, the concentrations are barely workable. They’re tempted to Murak by fabulous commission rates, but they’re lucky if they can even fill their norms.’
‘You can’t be sorry you’re leaving. What made you stay here fifteen years?’
‘It would take me fifteen years to tell you,’ Tallis rejoined. ‘I like the empty hills and the dead lakes.’
I murmured some comment, and aware that I wasn’t satisfied he suddenly scooped a handful of grey sand off the seat, held it up and let it sift away through his fingers. ‘Prime archezoic loam. Pure bedrock. Spit on it and anything might happen. Perhaps you’ll understand me if I say I’ve been waiting for it to rain.’
‘Will it?’
Tallis nodded. ‘In about two million years, so someone who came here told me.’
He said it with complete seriousness.
During the next few days, as we checked the stores and equipment inventories and ran over the installation together, I began to wonder if Talus had lost his sense of time. Most men left to themselves for an indefinite period develop some occupational interest: chess or an insoluble dream-game or merely a compulsive wood-whittling. But Tallis, as far as I could see, did nothing. The cabin, a three-storey drum built round a central refrigerating column, was spartan and comfortless. Tallis’s only recreation seemed to be staring out at the volcano jungle. This was an almost obsessive activity — all evening and most of the afternoon he would sit up on the lounge deck, gazing out at the hundreds of extinct cones visible from the observatory, their colours running the spectrum from red to violet as the day swung round into night.
The first indication of what Tallis was watching for came about a week before he was due to leave. He had crated up his few possessions and we were clearing out one of the small storage domes near the telescope. In the darkness at the back, draped across a pile of old fans, track links and beer coolers, were two pedal-powered refrigerator suits, enormous unwieldy sacks equipped with chest pylons and hand-operated cycle gears.
‘Do you ever have to use these?’ I asked Tallis, glumly visualizing what a generator failure could mean.
He shook his head. ‘They were left behind by a survey team which did some work out in the volcanoes. There’s an entire camp lying around in these sheds, in case you ever feel like a weekend on safari.’
Tallis was by the door. I moved my flashlight away and was about to switch it off when something flickered up at me from the floor. I stepped over the debris, searched about and found a small circular aluminium chest, about two feet across by a foot deep. Mounted on the back was a battery pack, thermostat and temperature selector. It was a typical relic of an expensively mounted expedition, probably a cocktail cabinet or hat box. Embossed in heavy gold lettering on the lid were the initials ‘C. F. N.’
Tallis came over from the door.
‘What’s this?’ he asked sharply, adding his flash to mine.
I would have left the case where it lay, but there was something in Tallis’s voice, a distinct inflection of annoyance, that made me pick it up and shoulder past into the sunlight.
I cleaned off the dust, Tallis at my shoulder. Keying open the vacuum seals I sprung back the lid. Inside was a small tape recorder, spool racks and a telescopic boom mike that cantilevered three feet up into the air, hovering a few inches from my mouth. It was a magnificent piece of equipment, a singleorder job hand-made by a specialist, worth at least £500 apart from the case.
‘Beautifully tooled,’ I remarked to Tallis. I tipped the platform and watched it spring gently. ‘The air bath is still intact.’
I ran my fingers over the range indicator and the selective six-channel reading head. It was even fitted with a sonic trip, a useful device which could be set to trigger at anything from a fly’s foot-fall to a walking crane’s.
The trip had been set; I wondered what might have strayed across it when I saw that someone had anticipated me. The tape between the spools had been ripped out, so roughly that one spool had been torn off its bearings. The rack was empty, and the two frayed tabs hooked to the spool axles were the only pieces of tape left.