Collected short fiction, p.766
Collected Short Fiction, page 766
Next day. “Dropped more ballast to clear a second line of cliffs. Ice below me now seamed with pressure ridges and crater-marked where I think ejecta fell. Dived again to study impact masses. Hard black stuff. High carbon content, but no crystals visible.”
“Diamonds!” That was four days later. “Here at last, too huge to believe! Too splendid to be true! An endless field of diamonds bigger than buildings, covering a slope that reaches as far as my lenses can see. The slope, I suppose, of the volcano that ejected them. Fracture planes glittering under the probes. Wait, Sis, and I’ll make you richer than anybody!”
Sealed inside the pressure cell, he couldn’t touch that treasure. Hoping to raise what he could with remote-controlled devices attached to flotation cells, he dropped anchors to hold him over a shimmering boulder that looked small enough to lift. Before his gear was attached, his long-silent radio crashed into life.
“Bursts of long-wave radiation,” he reported. “Nothing resembling the static I got coming through the storms. This is modulated into repetitious patterns. Signals? From what? I’d like to know, but lifting this rock will take everything I can muster. No time or power to waste on talk.”
He worked on. The signals grew stronger, until his radar picked up a moving image.
“A native getting curious?” Yang had seldom shown emotion, but Yin caught a tremor in his thinned, far-off voice. “Something sized to fit the planet. Now near, so near it ought to show a shape—but the radar reveals no shape. I’m trying the searchlight on it now.
“Something—” The tremor was stronger when he went on. “The near edge of it not a dozen kilometers away. And still no detail. When I narrowed the beam, it burned right through—through whatever it was. That stopped the signal. The radar still showed the same dim cloud. Ragged where the light had cut it. Fading fast till it vanished altogether. A funny thing! I’d like to know all about it, but no time to wonder now.”
He went back to work, but found himself stopping to stare at the glory of his chosen diamond blazing under the strobes. Nearly too large for his gear, it must weigh more, he thought, than all the gem diamonds men had ever mined. Absorbed in its burning splendor, he was slow to hear the beep of his radar alarm.
“Something coming. Something else I’ve no time for,” he reported from the monitor. “Smaller than that queer shadow-thing. Coming low up the slope behind me.” His wispy voice quickened. “I’ve got it in the searchlight now. Something dark and solid, that light doesn’t dissolve. Coming straight at me. Already too near—”
The object exploded against the descender. The rest of his reports were breathless fragments. A heavy concussion had dazed him. He found no other injury, but the instrument lights were dead. Groping in the dark, he started the emergency generator and discovered his bleak situation.
The descender had been powered by the flow of gas into five generator cells. Two had already been used up and jettisoned. Now two more were dead. The fifth, though still attached and working, had sprung a leak that filled it fast.
His first thought was to finish securing the lift cell to his prize, but all the external gear was dead. With no strobes flashing, not even to let him inspect the damage, all he had time for was to gasp a few final words into his computer log and launch it in the Mayday capsule.
“Sorry, Sis. This time, I really hoped to show you—”
Max Lind was sitting with Yin in the satellite lab as she played and replayed the recording. He had been her fellow student back at Kwan Tech. The son of a Company director, a golden Sunmark blazing on his cheek, he had thrown away the promise of a fine career in the Tycoon’s service to come with her to space. He tried hard now to dissuade her from following her brother into Neptune.
“A monstrous trap,” he told her. “Baited with a prize unreal as a dream. Those diamond boulders aren’t for us. Too far down beyond what that old Tycoon called the human limit.”
“Maybe so.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. I’ve got to go, because I should have been where my brother is. He tricked me and died for it. I mean to do better.”
The second descender was nearly ready, but she delayed the launch to install radio gear designed to retransmit those enigmatic signals her brother had chosen not to answer.
“Yang was always too impulsive,” she told him. “He wasn’t always wise. I think he should have tried to talk to those creatures—if that’s what they are. Ignoring them, he must have puzzled and alarmed them. Meaning no harm, he seems to have let his searchlight destroy one of them. I’ll try to make peace.”
Her old father embraced her before she went aboard, sobbing forlornly. Max Lind kissed her and gave her a modest Terran diamond his mother had worn. Her descender dropped into the frigid surface winds, flickered down into darkening smog, vanished into Neptune.
She dropped it safely toward the diamond-slope where her brother had died. When her altimeters read two hundred kilometers, she blacked out her strobes and began retransmitting the signals he had recorded. They were answered from somewhere farther up the slope. She slowed her descent and echoed those answers, still showing no lights. Her radar caught no motion, but as she came lower it began to image something that amazed her.
“A wall?” She was recording a log. “Some sort of barrier ring? Nothing I can understand. Nothing solid, certainly—the radar penetrates it to image things beyond. It’s circular. Enclosing the spot where my brother died. Maybe a kilometer thick and twice that high, the area inside perhaps forty kilometers across. Intended for defense? Set up to contain the danger they felt in my brother’s descender? Probable enough, but I’m not going to test the notion.
“Yet I wonder. Wonder what it is. Wonder about the laws and the limits of matter and energy, down in this queer hell. About the energy cycles, and the evolutionary processes—if whatever got my brother is even akin to life and mind. Nice riddles for physics and biology, if I get home with them. But now, like my poor brother, I’m here for diamonds.”
She had brought five flotation cells. With no move to approach that shadow-barrier, she landed near the flat-crushed fragments of Yang’s descender and secured her first cell to the fire-bright boulder where his lifting slings were still in place.
Nothing attacked her. The cell secure, she dumped its ballast to let it rise. Driving herself against iron limits of time and power, she lifted four more enormous crystal masses. Lacking any special gear to gather or move her brother’s remains, she left them where he had died, those diamond crags to be his monuments.
She reached the surface safely, long months later, with no further contacts to report. Luther Chou picked up her signals, and Max Lind was aboard the first explorer craft to reach her with the kwanlon lines to tow her and her prizes to the low-level station.
“What are they, really? What are they like? What do they want?” Lind asked her that, while she was still in his arms.
“What are we to them?” Brooding over the enigma, she never found a better answer. “Sharing so very little, I doubt that we can ever know each other. They must fear us, as we fear them. I believe they have given us the space and the diamonds inside that barrier. A token, I think, of their desire for peace. I doubt they’ll ever let us land anywhere outside it.”
Time, confirming that intuition, has told us very little more about them. More descenders have been allowed to land inside the ring, lift diamonds, and rise again—but only one by one. Any second craft, diving before the last has completed its voyage, has been invariably lost. Though a good many adventurers have tried, no expedition toward any other section of the core has ever returned.
Neptune’s later history, and the later lives of Max and Yin, could fill another volume, though one with little to rival the drama of that first diamond strike. Though the Tycoons have tried, none of their own diamond seekers has ever got back from testing those implacable limits. They have granted the colonists at least a nominal autonomy, with Sunmarks to symbolize all the rights of citizenship, brands few have ever cared to wear.
On all the planets, the discovery has had vast impacts. Though long-established gemstone values were shattered overnight, rich new technologies have made up the loss many times. Diamond-based semiconductors have created a dazzling array of new solid-state devices.
Diamond chips make up the computer brains of the robots now on their way out to search for the dark tenth planet whose position they have recently computed, that remote and sinister planet whose wanderings through the comet clouds seem to have caused such hails of cosmic stuff as the one that killed off the dinosaurs.
1988
The Mental Man
“Dad? Is the world about to end?” Little Amy had slipped out of bed to hear the late news, and he found her sobbing behind them in the hall. “Can you make us safe?”
“Kitten, don’t you cry.” He picked her up, shivering in his arms. “The newspeople—they keep trying to scare us, but the world will be okay.”
He’d carried her back to her room and held her till he heard her sleeping. An hour later, Rhymer called him back to the project. Beth followed him out to the car.
“What is hap—?” She cut the question off because she knew he couldn’t tell her anything. He felt her cold tears when she caught his face to kiss him. “God help us!” she whispered. “If there is a God.”
That was three nights ago, or had it been four? A blur in his memory now, an ugly blur of strain and pain, but time didn’t matter. What did matter were the silent bombs and the red rain, and Project BenTech, and the silicon chips aching in his head.
“Ben? Dr. Gale?” Duvic had come to shake him awake. “More bad news while you were napping. Orders now to test the interfacer. They want you ready.”
He sat up on his cot in the dim-lit supply room and reached beneath the cot for his shoes. His shaven scalp itched under the bandages, and every move drove a cold steel needle into his skull. Teeth gritted against it, he wondered about Beth and the kids. Shut up here within these old brick walls that hid BenTech, groggy under Klebold’s analgesics, he hadn’t even been able to call.
Bad days and worse nights, no matter how many. Hours under Klebold’s microsurgery. Days and nights of pain from the microchips, though Klebold said the brain had no sensors for it. Endless work with Duvic to finish the software meant to link his mind to the big computer. Practice simulations that always malfunctioned and had to be practiced and practiced again.
“Huh?” His mouth was dry and bitter from sleep. “When?”
“Now. They’re waiting in the lab.”
Shoes untied, he followed Duvic. His oldest, closest friend, yet maybe half to blame for this, if the bombs and the killing rain had somehow come from his research at Los Alamos.
“I loved my weaponeering,” Duvic had once confessed. “Long ago, when I thought my country needed it. The thing I hit on terrified me. That’s what brought me here. The hope that BenTech could somehow counter—”
With a sad little shrug, he’d stopped with that.
Gale shuffled after him now into the lab. The glare hurt his eyes, and he had to squint at the machine. It crouched in the middle of the long room like a steel-plated dinosaur. Duvic called it the interfacer. To Gale, it had always been the beast. Tonight it would devour him.
Three men stood frowning at it. General Janssen, long-faced and sallowskinned, chewing the end of his cold cigar. Klebold, taller than the general, with a bald bullet head that made him look more soldier than surgeon. Rhymer, the project engineer, jittery now and nervously chewing the fringe of his yellow moustache. They all stirred to meet Gale.
“Ben?” Critically, the general scanned him. “Are you okay?”
“More or less.” His voice was a husky squeak. “Something new?”
“Nothing good.” The general scowled as if to blame him. “Hell blazing everywhere. We’re isolated now, but I did get orders before we got cut off We strike at once.”
“Strike?” He recoiled, and the silicon throbbed in his brain. “The wrong word, sir. BenTech is not a weapon. It can’t kill. The most we can hope for is a new intelligence source. I’ve always told you that, and tried to tell the Pentagon. It’s a research instrument, never yet tested.”
“Why not?”
“We were never ready.” Only half the reason. He hadn’t wanted to risk the microchips burning out his own brain if things went wrong. Nor the power they might give any other brain, if things went right. “We aren’t ready now—”
“Ready or not—” The general’s voice had the brittle snap of thin ice breaking. “If nobody’s told you, we’re fighting Armageddon.”
Amy’s whisper echoed through his splitting head. Dad? Is the world about to end?
He turned to stare at Duvic. A slight, uneasy man with a thin dark face and opaque dark eyes. The black, sharp-pointed beard gave him the look of an undersized Satan. Repentant now, maybe too late.
“Ben, don’t blame me!” Duvic caught his arm. “We don’t know who hit us or what they’ve hit us with. It does look like the lethal agent I helped develop back there at Los Alamos. The secret maybe leaked to God knows who. We just don’t know.” A sad little shrug. “Nobody knows much of anything.”
Gale’s dry throat worked, but no words came.
“Washington—” Emotion had hushed the general’s voice, and his hard face twisted. “Washington now. Knocked out this afternoon. We aren’t hitting back because we can’t identify a target. Dr. Duvic says you can.”
All four men looked expectantly at him.
“I never promised anything—” He tried to shake his head, and the silicon exploded in his skull. “The experiment was planned to find out if computer power can enhance the power of the mind. What that might mean, we can’t even guess.”
“Damned double-talk!” Rhymer stepped closer, to peer into his face with reddened, swollen eyes. Rhymer was allergic. The tawny moustache was wetly dark beneath his nose, and bright droplets shone along its uneven edge. Snakelike, his pink tongue brushed them. “We’re dying blind. We’ve got to know where to strike while we can. If you’ve been conning us—” Duvic caught Rhymer’s shoulder to pull him away.
“Margie—” The general’s tight face twitched. “My wife—she was caught in Washington. Already dead, for all I can learn. We’re all dead, Ben. Unless you can tell us what’s gone wrong.”
He shrugged, whispering, “May I call my family?”
“Impossible.” One stern word, but the general’s voice grew softer. “Sorry, Gale, but the phones—everything is dead.”
Amy’s breathless words echoed across his throbbing brain.
“Let’s get moving.” The general swung to Rhymer. “Project status now?”
“On the mark, sir. All-systems test running well. No bugs indicated. We should be up and ready in half an hour.”
“Talk enough.”
The general marched away.
Rhymer turned to the machine, testing switches and cable connections, squinting at oscilloscopes and gauges, checking items off a yellow sheet on his clipboard, his restless tongue darting and darting again against his damp moustache.
“Okay, Ben?” The surgeon leaned to frown into his eyes. “Let’s get your pulse.” Gale offered his wrist. “Good enough, considering, but I want you to relax while you can. Wash your face. Drink some coffee. Clear your head. You’ll need a clear head.”
Attentive as a nurse, Duvic went with Gale to the bathroom, stood by while he washed his face, pulled out a chair for him at the rickety table in the narrow alcove they called a lounge, swept back the clutter of used cups and half-eaten doughnuts and soiled newspapers to pour coffee for him. Gale’s stomach roiled at the coffee. He’d had far too much of it these last bleak days, and not much else, but he gulped it down.
“If there is a God—” Refilling the plastic cup, Duvic stopped to mutter at him. “He’s let us down.”
“Don’t blame God.” Gale pushed the cup away. “Or yourself. Things just happen. That’s my own philosophy—call it stochastic. I was never a believer, not in God or fate or even luck. Looking at the evidence, all I’ve ever seen is random chance.”
Moving jerkily, like some small overwound machine, Duvic had poured sugar and dry creamer into another cup and brought it back to the table with no coffee in it.
“Your chance now, to get the truth.” With a wry little shrug, Duvic peered into his dry cup and set it down. “I quit the weaponeering when I thought I’d found a link between nature and what we still call the supernatural. That’s what I call the Delta Psi Effect. The reason why I’m here. I want to know.”
“The Pentagon didn’t fund us to look for God.” Gale remembered not to shake his head. “The interfacer’s meant to be a military spy machine. No window into Heaven.”
Duvic grunted and rose to put coffee in his cup.
“In all the universe—” Gale raised his rusty voice. “In all the universe, all I see is accident. Look at the project itself—a long chain of random chance. A car accident knocked me out of medical school. In the hospital, I happened to meet a nurse whose father was a doctor who happened to be researching the analogs between computers and the brain. I happened to marry the nurse, and her father set me on the research track that led to Ben-Tech.
“All blind chance.”
Duvic had come back with his cup too full. It spilled over. He set it on an unfolded newspaper, and the headlines caught Gale’s eye. He leaned to read a block of bold black type.
DISASTEER GROWS:
WASHINGTON HIT:
Fragmentary bulletins from the nation’s capital confirm earlier rumors from military sources hinting that the city has been “taken out.” Interrupted calls described “silent bombs” exploding over Washington and adjacent metropolitan areas early yesterday afternoon, and spoke of “red rain” falling. Available officials have refused additional comment, but the total breakdown of all international and now interstate communications seems to corroborate previous reports of unprecedented world catastrophe.
