Collected short fiction, p.775
Collected Short Fiction, page 775
“That’s the star?”
“Probably not.” Glengarth shrugged again. “We’ve had no time for observation, but it looks too far off for its gravity to matter.
“A giant star?” Weakly. Hinch mopped at his sweat-bright face. Wouldn’t a giant be massive enough?”
“Of course, but I take that for a spectral type G2. A twin of our own sun.”
“So what?” Hinch shuffled away from the elevator, sharp black eyes stabbing at the screens, at Stecker, at him. His words were a shrill demand. “I want to know.”
Glengarth took a moment to control his temper. “Evidently we did enter the gravity well of something massive enough to get us out of quantum mode, but I don’t see it.”
“A black hole?” Stecker cringed from the stars. “Do you think . . .” His frightened whisper died.
“Possibly.” Glengarth nodded. If that’s the case, we’ll never see it. Our only clue would be its effect on our motion. Something that would be difficult or maybe impossible to measure, since we have no reference points.”
“Then get us out of danger!” Trembling. Stecker seized Glengarth’s arm. “Move!”
With more force than he intended. Glengarth twisted free. “Sir, how would you do that?”
“Idiot!” Hinch shrieked. “Shoot us out. The way you shot us here.”
“Get at it!” Stecker rasped. “Now!”
“No way, sir.”
“No way?” Hinch echoed. “Why the hell no way?”
“Surely, Mr. Glengarth.” Stecker’s tone was smoother. “You’re said to be a quantum engineer. Get us hack into quantum mode.”
“Sir, if you understood—”
“Incompetent jerk!” Hinch shook a scrawny fist. “Damn your excuses!”
“Cool it, Jake.” Stecker pulled him back. “Listen, Mr. Glengarth. I respect your spacemanship. and I know we can’t afford to quarrel. But the ship’s loaded with emergency survival equipment. You’ve got teams of expert technicians. Get us back into quantum wave propulsion, or tell me why not.”
“If you really don’t know, here’s why.” Bleakly, Glengarth grinned. “Remember the takeoff, how we sat waiting in the pit till the bunker crew fired us out. Very much like a bullet out of a gun. We didn’t bring the gun. and the laws of motion still apply.”
“Huh?” Stecker’s jaw sagged.
“Remember Newton’s laws. Action equals reaction. We need an external facility embedded in some object massive enough to absorb the launch reaction. A planet or at least a large asteroid. Something I don’t see.”
“If we can’t get out—” Stecker gulped What then?”
“Hard to say.” Glengarth bent to scan the green-winking consoles. “Impossible to plan anything until we can determine where we are.”
“When—” Stecker mopped his face and peered into the starlit darkness. When will that be?”
“We want action.” Jake Hinch growled. “Action now!”
“Listen, Mr. Hinch.”
Glengarth looked up for an instant, speaking bluntly. “We’re competent We know space navigation. We have trained astronomers aboard, and expert computer software. Give us time and we’ll do what we can.”
“If a black hole stopped us—” Shrill with panic. Hinch grabbed Stecker’s shoulder. “It will grab us. Suck us down. Drag us out of space.”
“But maybe,” Glengarth said, “it’s not a black hole.”
“What’s the difference? Teeth long and yellow. Hinch snarled through the ragged beard like a hungry wolf. “Anything else, and we’re left to drift in this hellish dark till the supplies are all eaten up and we re prowling the ship for human game.”
“Please!” Glengarth spread his hands. “Gentlemen, please!” Gentlemen, he thought, wasn’t quite the word.
“Jake, you’d better get out.” Stecker waved Hinch into the elevator. “You’re no pilot. I hope Mr. Glengarth can fly us out. Better let him try.”
5
“Fun!” Day sailed off her berth. “Real fun!”
She stopped herself against the ceiling and floated slowly back.
“Careful, dear.” Rima caught her ankle and pulled her down. “Till you’re more used to it.”
Kip felt enough weight come back so that he didn’t need the handholds. They sat watching the holoscreen. It stayed empty for a long time, but at last the speaker chimed. First Officer Glengarth was on the screen.
“Ship status.” His voice was hoarse, and Kip thought he looked unhappy. “We have emerged from wave propulsion with no reported damage. We are now in rocket mode, moving at point zero four G while we survey our new surroundings. Further information will follow when possible. That is all.”
His image flickered out.
“That’s all?” Kip looked at his mother. “What about the star that stopped us? And the new planet where we can land?”
“Try not to fret,” she urged him. “Mr. Glengarth will tell us more when he can.” She sighed and spoke again, more softly. “They were old friends, Rais Glengarth and Captain Alt. Friends of my father, too. The three of them loved to be together. I’m sure Mr. Glengarth will keep us safe.”
He wondered how sure she really was.
They waited. Nothing happened. Day asked when they could go back for Me Me. Kip wanted his Game Gate. Finally the woman with the white cap called them down for breakfast in the dining room. It was slabs of something that the man at the counter called starchow on novakelp toast, with synkafe or soya milk.
Day pushed her tray back and begged again for Me Me.
“It’s not bad.” Kip ate his toast and milk. “Not really bad.”
“Good for us,” Rima insisted. “Everything we need.
But it had to be concentrated, so we could bring enough to last till we can plant our own crops.”
When, Kip wondered, would that be?
Carlos was in the line of people waiting when they left the room. Now he wore yellow coveralls. The hurt hand was bandaged. A security man stood close behind him. Yet he smiled at Kip and then at Rima, and called, “¿Qué tal, amigo?”
“Who’s that?” Rima asked when they had gone on.
How could he know you?”
“Carlos,” Kip told her. A stowaway.” He told her how he had found Carlos in the gym.
“You never reported him?”
He wasn’t hurting anybody. All he wanted was to come on the ship. He’d cut his hand on some glass, and he was afraid. I felt sorry for him. And he has nice eyes.”
“Nice eyes!” Her voice sharpened. “He could have hurt you. He could have been a Fairshare agent, aboard to sabotage the ship. You should have told the officers and told me.”
“I promised not to tell.”
“Kip!” she scolded. “You must learn to be careful with strangers.”
He said nothing else, yet he felt glad Carlos was with them on the ship.
* * *
Back in the cabin, they waited again for that further information. It never came. Missing his friends beyond the Gate, Kip thought perhaps ship security would return the game now. Rima let him go down to ask for it. Gone two hours, he finally brought it back.
“I had a good visit with Carlos,” he told her. “I like him.”
“That stowaway?” She frowned.
“He’s okay,” he said, trying to persuade her. “Still a prisoner, but not locked up. In spite of his hurt hand, he’s working in the supply room. My Game Gate was dead when the security officer found it for me. He fixed it.”
“Fixed it? How?”
“He knows about computers. He said the wave conversion had caused a static surge that garbled the access command. Now it works fine. And he asked about you.”
“Me?”
“He was standing with those Fairshare people we saw outside the site. He saw you in the cab. When I told him you were my mother, he said I was very lucky.”
“Kip, please!” She looked annoyed. “He’s a criminal!”
“Not really, Mom. Security’s just holding him till Captain Stecker can decide about him. Really, he’s okay. I think you’d like him.”
A Mexican stowaway? What makes you think that?”
Kip was glad when the speaker chimed.
Glengarth came on the screen, smiling bleakly.
“Status update.” The stubble on his face had grown darker, and he forgot to hold his smile. “Thanks to the astro team, we’ve discovered the object that terminated our wave flight.”
His image vanished, and a field of stars filled the screen. Against them was a shadow, slowly swelling. A circular blot, it looked utterly black at first, but dull red pockmarks appeared as it grew larger, and finally a ragged. narrow crack the color of fire.
“The object.” Glengarth’s rusty voice went on, “is a black dwarf star. If you wonder what a black dwarf is, a star is born when gravity collapses a cloud of gas and dust. If it’s big enough, the heat produced by the collapse sets off the nuclear reaction—the fusion of hydrogen into helium—that makes stars shine.
“A dwarf like this was too small to start that reaction.
It was hot at first, from the collapse and the fission of unstable elements. But the surface has cooled. You can see scattered eruptions glowing through the crust, but it radiates so little heat that we found it difficult to detect. It may have planets. We re searching now, but they’ll be even harder to find.
The black star vanished, but his image came back to say that further updates would follow.
“Suppose they find a planet.” Kip looked at his mother. “That dead star can’t warm it. What good will it be?”
“Wait.” She shrugged, looking as tired as Glengarth. “Let’s wait and see.”
They waited.
She wanted to hear no more about Carlos Mondragon, but Kip asked for him at the security office when she let him go down to join a low-G training class.
“The Mex stowaway?” The black woman shrugged. “Gone.”
He asked where.
“The computer lab,” she said. “He knows computers. That power surge at takeoff played tricks on computers all over the ship. It left a bug in ours, here in supply. He knew what to do. When the astro team heard about that, they took him away.”
His mother would surely like Carlos, Kip thought, if she ever got to know him.
* * *
Day was asleep when he got back from the class. When she woke still wanting Me Me, Rima took her down to the rec room. Kip went back through the Gate to rejoin the Legion of the Lost in a daring raid to rescue a captured comrade from the evil queen of the diamond planet.
Rima and Day came back, and they watched the screen again. It was still blank when the dining room manager called them down for another meal of the concentrates he had to say he liked. Two men joined them at the table and lifted their cups of synkafe to greet his mother.
She introduced them. Andy Andersen, a bald, pinkskinned giant, was head of the landing team. Tony Cruzet, the Mission astronomer, was a tiny, owlish man with thick-lensed glasses. Their eyes were haggard, and they sat in moody silence till Kip and Day went to stand in line for soyasweet snowfoam.
“Bitch of a thing,” Cruzet muttered to Rima then. “Stecker’s drunk or in a total funk or likely both. Locked up in his cabin with empty bottles and dirty dishes scattered everywhere. Hinch finally looked out when I knocked. Asked if I knew a willing woman.”
He made a dismal shrug.
“A tough time for Rais Glengarth.” Andersen scowled, shaking vitasweet into his synkafe. “Sixty hours in the dome with no sleep except what he’s got dozing in his seat. Doing what he can to keep a lid on panic while he looks for anywhere to go.”
“A landing site?” Rima asked. “A planet?”
“We’ve all been on the search team, but I don’t know—”
Stirring his synkafe, Andersen splashed it on the table and mopped at the spill and forgot to go on.
“So?” she prompted him. “The outlook?
“Not good,” he muttered. “If you want the truth, it’s a no-win game. Planets would be invisible, if the star has planets. None for sure in radar or lidar range. Rotation might have been a clue to the orbital plane where they ought to be, but the dwarf doesn’t rotate. Not fast enough to tell us anything.”
He shook his head and mopped again at the brown splash on the table.
“And what if we find ’em?” Cruzet blinked at her with a look of groggy defiance. “You lead the bio team? Here to terraform some strange planet into a better Earth? If we do stumble onto some dirty snowball, close to absolute zero, what do you plan for that?”
Day and Kip came back with their snowfoam before she had to answer.
The message gong woke her late that night.
“Dr. Virili?” Andy Andersen called from the control dome. “A new situation. Mr. Glengarth wants all team leaders here in twenty minutes.”
6
The call had wakened Kip. He agreed to stay in the cabin with Day. Rima took the elevator to the control deck and came out into blinding midnight.
“Rima!” Glengarth called warmly out of the darkness. “You know Dr. Cruzet and Dr. Andersen. This is Carlos Mondragon.”
In a moment she was able to make out the little group standing in silhouette against the stars that filled the arching screens.
“Señora Virili!” She recognized the stowaway’s accent. “I know your fine son. I am happy to find you here.”
Kip’s friendships had always baffled her, but she murmured, “Hello.”
“I called all the team leaders.” Glengarth turned soberly from the dimly glowing instruments. “Lt. Mason won’t leave the security desk. Mr. Senn’s still on his radar search. Mr. Hinch says Captain Stecker is sleeping. Not to be disturbed.”
“Just as well,” Andersen murmured.
“The search?” she asked. “Is there anywhere to land?”
“We were groping in the dark.” Andersen’s even voice was resonant and deep. She thought he would sing bass. “But we did find a planet. Tony’ll tell you how.”
“We deployed a reference satellite.” Cruzet’s precise, dry voice held no emotion she could hear. “Tracking it, we were able to detect and measure the planet’s gravitation effect, the way Adams and Leverrier detected Neptune’s. Thanks to Mr. Mondragon at the computer.”
He turned to point at a dull red disk against the field of stars.
“A radar image. The color’s false, of course. We’re looking at a great ice cap. Probably white, if we had light to see it. We’re moving toward it—and the dwarf beyond it—at nearly seven kilometers a second.”
“Can we land?”
“Perhaps.” Hesitant, Glengarth looked at Cruzet and Andersen. “That’s what I called you to consider.”
“It’s far too cold to colonize.” Andersen hunched himself and made a mock shiver. “Near absolute zero.”
“Certainly no promising site for settlement.” Cruzet nodded. “Though large enough. Slightly more massive than Earth. The orbit’s nearly circular, only nine million kilometers out from the dwarf. It rotates in tidal lock. Same face always away from the star. The face we see.”
He gestured at the disk. “I think it once had seas and atmosphere. All frozen now into the ice that covers most of this hemisphere.”
“The other hemisphere—would it be warmer?”
“Once, I suppose. Not today.”
“We must look—”
“By whose authority?” Hinch’s raucous squawk startled Rima. He had come out of the elevator and stopped close behind her, a gaunt gray ghost blinking blindly into the dimness. “Captain Stecker must be consulted.”
“You said he was sleeping.” Glengarth shrugged and turned back to the others. “We have to act now, because we came out of quantum mode with such a high velocity. Braking it will take a lot of fuel. I believe we can get down safe, though with too little fuel left for takeoff if we don’t like the place. I wanted you to realize we’d have to stay—”
“Not so fast!” Hinch snarled. “Hold everything till the captain wakes up.”
Seeming not to hear him, Glengarth gestured at Cruzet. “Before we decide, there’s something else.”
“Nothing I expected.” Cruzet’s thin dry voice reflected none of the tension that had seized the group. “The planet was certainly warmer once, from the heat of fission and gravitation. Perhaps life did exist. In any case, the dwarf stopped shining billions of years ago. Naturally, we’d assumed that the planet was dead.
“Till Andy got this.”
Andersen touched the console behind him. Rima watched that dim red globe swell to fill its window in the simulated sky. A faint green dot appeared on the center of it and grew to become a wide green rectangle with neat green hexagons spaced to form an arc half around it.
“He’d been with Mark Senn on the search telescope. He can tell you—”
“What the blazing hell?” Standing close behind Rima, Hinch yelped in alarm. “What’s that?”
“You tell us.” Andersen shrugged and turned again to the others. “What you see is our digital record of an anomaly the radar sweep picked up. False color again, now to show elevation differences. Whatever these objects are. they stand two of three kilometers above the level of the ice. They’re massive as mountains, but you see the geometric shapes. Senn thinks they have to be artificial.”
Rima’s breath had stopped. She heard a fan whirring faintly, and Hindi’s stifled obscenity.
“A city?” Andersen paused to stare at the green-glowing enigma, and she felt his awe. “If you can imagine a city there on the ice, maybe built of ice, its buildings larger than any building could be.”
“Strange.” She tried to push off her dread. “But couldn’t it be a natural formation? Glaciers form hummocks and crevasses—”
“You haven’t heard the evidence.” Glengarth was craning his heck toward those shapes in the sky. “Evidence of what, I don’t know. Listen to Andy.”
“I was on the light telescope while Senn ran the radar scan.” Andersen spoke with a quiet deliberation, careful of facts. “Not that I could actually see the planet, but I’d got its outline from the stars it occluded. Sweeping the ice at high power, I wasn’t really expecting anything at all. Not till I saw lights flashing.”
