Part 4 (1/2)

'Yes.' If Bragen knew he was being mocked, it didn't show. 'I pick them for their physical fitness chiefly.'

'I knew it wasn't for their IQs,' Quinn answered drily.

'Give me a hand with the Examiner.'

Bragen showed a little emotion at last. He raised a single eyebrow. 'Examiner?'

Quinn picked up the wallet with the badge and card in it from beside the Dotor. He flashed it briefly at Bragen, then slipped it into the Doctor's closest pocket.

Bragen stared at the Doctor thoughtfully. He made no move to help Quinn, instead gesturing for the guard with Ben to come forward. Ben reeled a little as the guard abruptly removed his support, but he managed to stay on his feet.

'I wonder why the Earth's sent an Examiner to Vulcan?'

Bragen mused. 'Just now, I mean?' He looked at Quinn, who shrugged.

'I don't know.'

The security guard motioned Quinn back and scooped up the Doctor's still form as if it weighed nothing. Quinn moved over to see how Ben was doing.

Bragen pursed his lips thoughtfully. 'Mysterious, isn't it? We aren't due an Examiner for another two years.'

Concentrating on Ben, Quinn checked the youngster's eyes and pulse. Bit fast, obviously due to the stress he'd been through. His eyes didn't show any signs of concussion or delayed shock. Still, it would be best for the doctor back in the city to take a look at all three of them, just to be certain. Vulcan was still an alien world, with alien dangers. These three from Earth were typical no understanding of how dangerous it could be off the Earth.

'How do you feel?' he asked Ben.

Ben could make out the words, but he was having trouble still with his throat. It felt as if he'd swallowed a bowl of molten fire. Not wis.h.i.+ng to chance his voice, he shook his head.

'We saw your rocket overshoot the landing area. Most of the s.h.i.+ps from Earth do overshoot. It's a steep drop, so don't feel badly about messing it up.' Ben had no idea what the man was talking about, but he'd learned from experience to keep his mouth shut until he knew what was going on.

'I'm Quinn,' the man continued, 'the Deputy Governor.'

The other man moved forward, giving Ben a hawklike glance. 'Bragen,' he said softly, 'Head of Security.' Ben couldn't help wondering what the need for security was when meeting visitors.

'Let's get them all back, shall we?' Quinn said sharply.

Ben didn't have to be psychic to realize that Quinn didn't like Bragen very much. 'I'll take the girl.' He held out his hands. The guard who carried her looked to Bragen for confirmation. Ben saw that the security man paused a moment before giving a curt nod. The sailor then saw the look of annoyance and almost hatred that crossed Bragen's face as he stared at Quinn's back.

Things were definitely definitely brewing. But what? brewing. But what?

Then Bragen a.s.sumed his impa.s.sive face again. He glanced at Ben. 'I suppose you Earth people can't wait to see Lesterson's s.p.a.ce capsule,' he said coldly.

Ben had no idea what he was talking about, of course. It was obvious that he, Polly and well, call him the Doctor, at least for now had been mistaken for someone else. And the maybe-Doctor hadn't run off and left them here to die.

Maybe it hadn't been a trick. It looked as if the little man was out to the world.

As Ben studied the Doctor's face, one of the bright eyes opened and winked quickly at Ben before closing again.

Strewth, Ben thought to himself, he's faking unconsciousness! But why? And... how much else is he faking? Still in a deeply troubled state of mind, he followed Quinn's lead as the party started off.

Alone in his laboratory, Lesterson was carefully rubbing a small triangular piece of metal with a cloth. It was s.h.i.+ning up pretty well, all things considered. An angular, bird-like man, the colony's resident scientific genius perched on a stool, working away. He peered through his thick gla.s.ses at the metal, single-mindedly concentrating on the task before him. Lesterson considered his ability to focus on one item at a time to be one of his greatest a.s.sets. Others disagreed with him, of course, considering it his worst vice.

The laboratory was quite immense, given the scale of the rest of the city. At a time when most of the rooms were limited in size and decoration Vulcan was, after all, a fairly new colony world Lesterson's laboratory was over a hundred-feet long on both sides. It would have looked larger if it hadn't been so crammed.

A large mainframe computer took up a good deal of s.p.a.ce by the main entrance. The centre of the room was filled with three long benches, on which Lesterson's electronic testing gear was arranged. The far wall held chemicals and the esoteric tubes, retorts and beakers to combine and a.n.a.lyse them. By Earth scales, it was a small, functional laboratory. By Vulcan standards it would almost have been an incredible waste of s.p.a.ce and manpower.

But only almost.

Dominating the room was the bulk of the s.p.a.ce capsule.

It was about sixty-feet long and vaguely cylindrical. The front of it was blunt, the back straight. It looked like an immense bullet. The corrugated surface was broken at about ten-feet intervals by what were apparently bulkheads protruding from the s.h.i.+p. There were three large fins, evenly s.p.a.ced about the capsule's far end. There was no sign of any way to get into the craft.

The laboratory had only two smallish windows. One looked out on to the rocky surface of Vulcan. Lesterson hadn't bothered to use it since the lab had been built.

There was nothing of interest to him out there. The other window opened on to the hydroponics section next door.

There the bulk of Lesterson's staff worked on acclimatizing a vast number of Earth trees, plants and crops to the fertile but odd soil of Vulcan. Once Lesterson gave his approval, the colonists would s.h.i.+ft the thriving growths outside in an attempt to make the planet a new Garden of Eden. Lesterson might have given that approval a while ago, had he not turned all of his energy and interests to the capsule.

A stranger might have done a double take on seeing the structure. Filling a good third of the available s.p.a.ce, there was clearly no way it could have been brought inside the laboratory. The reason for that was quite simple, really: it had not been brought to this spot. The colonists had been dredging out this section of what had been a mora.s.s to build part of the city on when a bulldozer had shattered a blade on the sunken capsule.

The plans for the city had been abruptly changed by the discovery. Lesterson had insisted that his laboratory be built around the capsule they had unearthed (unvulcaned?) so that he could examine it.

This had been done, even though they were still uncertain of the exact size of the thing. They had dug down to the rock to try and free the capsule, but it had become apparent that some of the rock had formed around part of the capsule.

How long must this thing have been buried on Vulcan before the humans had stumbled across it?

Lesterson had almost finished polis.h.i.+ng the metal triangle to his satisfaction. Like the capsule itself, the piece showed no signs of wear. It could be a decade old, or a million years, for all that he or any of the others on his staff could tell. The only chance of finding any answers to this mystery lay in opening the capsule. Only one thing was certain: the artefact had not been fas.h.i.+oned by human hands. Lesterson wasn't the only one who was dying to open the capsule up.

The door opened and Janley walked in. She was Lesterson's chief a.s.sistant, though only in her late twenties. A ferociously bright and concentrated worker, she sometimes scared Lesterson with her intensity. She seemed to be unable to perform even the simplest of tasks without committing herself a hundred per cent to it. She could even turn the simple act of making a pot of tea into an act of almost religiously epic proportions. And, to top it all off, she was an amazingly attractive woman. Her open, flawless face was framed by a cascade of chestnut hair.

Even the simple fatigues that all of the science staff wore failed to hide her perfect form.

Lesterson was amazed that she didn't have an ongoing relations.h.i.+p with anyone in the colony. He knew that most of his male staff married and unmarried spent almost as much time trying to chat her up as they did working. To the best of his knowledge, Janley had turned everyone down flat. He himself was married to his work, but he couldn't stop himself from sometimes staring at her beautiful features. Janley, if she noticed such glances, ignored him. Well, he could hardly blame her he was no catch. He hadn't been even in his youth, some forty years earlier. Now he was a thin, tired man, in dire need of the thick gla.s.ses perched on his beak-like nose. His hair was still brown and fairly full, but it never behaved. Wisps constantly fell into his eyes as he worked. He had always been destined for great things and had somehow never quite managed to achieve his destiny. When he was honest with himself, Lesterson knew he'd risen to his level of mediocrity as the chief scientist of this fledgling Earth colony. Janley could never see anything in him. It didn't stop his body and imagination from seeing an awful lot in her, though.

'Lesterson,' she began in her aggressive tone, but he interrupted her.

'Look at this,' he said, showing her the triangular piece of metal. She gave it a brief glance that seemed to categorize it instantly: metal, polished, no obvious junction. metal, polished, no obvious junction.

Uninteresting.

'They've just brought in an Examiner from Earth,' she told him bluntly. 'And he's got a couple of a.s.sistants with him.'