'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 wishing to chance his voice, he shook his head.

'We saw your rocket overshoot the landing area. Most of the ships 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 shining 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 ship. 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 shift 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 polishing 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 fashioned 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 relationship 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.'

'An Examiner?' he echoed, puzzled. 'What's he here for?'

'I thought you'd know,' Janley replied.

Lesterson nodded. 'It's the capsule. It must be! They're not going to stop me working on the capsule! I'll promise you that.'

Janley showed a little emotion at that. Her eyes crinkled prettily as she laughed. 'Could anybody?' she asked, almost mockingly.

Not for the first time, Lesterson wondered if she were trying to give him a message that she'd like to distract his attention for a while. He gave her a quick, nervous look.

He'd never been too interested in the opposite s.e.x, but even he wasn't completely immune to her charms. There were only two things stopping him from following that line of research: a fear of being made a fool, since she'd never been explicit about any hypothetical interest; and the fact that he had more important things to do with his time.

'The Governor's always been difficult about it,' he said, answering her question as if it had been meant seriously.

'But surely they wouldn't come all the way from Earth just to '

Janley clearly wasn't interested in his ramblings. 'Look,'

she interrupted rudely, 'what about the meeting?'

'Meeting?' he asked, completely at a loss to understand her. As always. He never seemed to grasp anything that she said of importance.

'I've arranged everything,' she said, not directly answering him. His eyes showed that he understood what she meant now. 'Can we still use the old rocket room?'

When the colony had begun, the room had been used to store the atmospheric sounding rockets. Lesterson's staff had utilized them to map the wind flows and weather patterns of Vulcan. Once the planet had been terraformed, the colony would disrupt the old patterns. One of the tasks of Lesterson's group was to attempt to make the changes in the weather as gradual and predictable and safe! as they could ever be. That was one of the reasons for the Cray mainframe computer in the lab. The Governor would have a fit if he knew how few of the memory bubbles were actually occupied with the precious weather data. And what was in the remainder. It was one of Janley's holds over Lesterson.

'Yes, I suppose so.' Lesterson sighed. Putting down the metal triangle, he took off his gla.s.ses and polished them on the edge of his lab coat. 'I wish you wouldn't get mixed up in these pressure groups, Janley.'

Pressure groups, Janley thought. How little he knew!

She shook her head. They had gone through this argument dozens of times in the past. Lesterson refused to understand. Hardly the true scientific spirit. 'Somebody has to do something,' she finally said. 'The colony's running down and you know it.' She made it sound as if this deterioration could be directly traced back to him.

He put his gla.s.ses back on and picked up the silly piece of metal again 'I'm too busy,' he said.

Putting all of her powers of persuasion into her voice, Janley tried again. 'If we ran things, you'd have better facilities, more money.' But she'd already lost him. 'I wish you'd take an interest,' she snapped angrily. She was getting tired of his foolishness.

'I don't mind letting you use one of my rooms now and again,' he told her, 'but don't try and involve me. This is what I call important' He held up the metallic triangle.

'This little piece of metal came out of the capsule. Just fell out, Janley. Two hundred years in a mercury swamp, and look at it! Ten minutes polishing and it's as good as new.'

'Wonderful,' Janley commented without interest.

That touched a raw nerve, and he waved the artefact under her nose. 'Rain, damp, heat, mercury,' he told her.

'Nothing touches this metal. No rust, Janley, no corrosion.

Think what that alone could mean!'

Janley just wanted to hurt him. She regarded the metal without interest as she turned to leave. 'Well, I hope the Examiner lets you get on with your experiments,' she said.

At the door, she paused and fired her parting shot.

'Frankly, though, I doubt it. I think the Governor's brought the Examiner here to stop you opening the capsule.' She gave him a thin smile as she saw the shock and fear in his face. 'You should join our group, Lesterson,' she warned him. 'You might just need our help one day. And maybe sooner than you think.' She left the room.

Lesterson sat on his stool, the metal piece in his hand all but invisible to him. He wondered could she be right?

Is that why the Examiner is here? He glanced across at the capsule silent, still, enigmatic and filled with promise.

Humanity had reached the stars by exploiting Cyber technology. Who could even begin to guess what secrets this find might reveal? He couldn't let any stupid, obscurantist bureaucrat prevent him from exploiting his find. He couldn't!

Climbing to his feet, Lesterson set about what he knew he had to do to ensure that he was not stopped. This line of research was too important to allow any man whether it be the Governor or even an Earth Examiner to stop him now. He had to be ready for them when they came..

6.

Why Have You Come to Vulcan?

'How are you feeling now?' The colony's Chief Medical Officer, Thane a fortyish woman with short cropped blonde hair and a very efficient air smiled tightly down at Polly as she unstrapped her diagnostic pad from about the young girl's arm. She was dressed in the same fatigues as everyone in the place, but she managed to make hers look like a professional uniform. She had the slightly weary, rea.s.suring look that all of the best doctors seemed to possess. Only the tight lines about her eyes and mouth hinted at the pain and suffering she must have witnessed in her time.

'Fine,' Polly replied. 'What does all that ' she nodded at the pad Thane had been making notes on ' say I feel like?'

Thane's eyes twinkled. 'It says you feel fine. No aftereffects at all, I'm glad to say. Some of the first colonists weren't so lucky.'

The Doctor stopped tootling on his recorder for a moment. He was seated on the edge of another of the beds.

Ben was striding up and down, casting filthy looks at the Doctor. They had less effect on the little man than rain has on ducks.

'Lose many?' the Doctor asked sympathetically.

'Six,' Thane replied, sighing. She put the diagnostic pad away. 'Wasn't that in the reports?'

'Tell us a little about the colony,' the Doctor suggested, avoiding a direct reply.

'Didn't they brief you?' Thane looked puzzled.

'I never trust briefings,' he replied. 'Second-hand information given by third-rate bureaucrats. I prefer the horse's mouth.'

Thane laughed. 'I guess that makes me the horse, then.

Still, better than a donkey, I suppose.' She paused to gather her thoughts. 'Well, you're in the main section the city, we call it. Pretty small by Earth standards, I know, but we are still very new. It houses the main living quarters, the laboratories, administration and planning and the few amenities that we do possess.' She waved vaguely over her shoulder. 'The landing pad I positively refuse to call it the s.p.a.ce port is just north of here. It you imagine a wheel, we're the hub. On the rim at intervals are the mining and extraction sites that make this whole venture so worthwhile.'