The starchild compact, p.22
The Starchild Compact, page 22
"You run some of this," Ari pointed to the UDMC tank, "through this hose," he held up the nitrogen tetroxide hose, "things will get exciting really quickly. They're perfectly safe so long as they don't mix, except in a combustion chamber."
Then he showed Saeed how to attach each filling hose, and watched closely as Saeed pressed the male fittings into the female receptors on the tanks and the boots, and continued to watch carefully as he filled the boot tanks. The filling process automatically stopped when the boot tanks reached their capacity. Ari still monitored Saeed closely, even though Saeed had given no indication that he was still on his jihad mission. There was a slight risk with the fueling operation, since the hoses could be cut. This would instantly slam shut the valves at both ends, but the fuel in the hoses could still pour out and would definitely combust if brought together. The hoses were tough beyond belief, however. They were constructed from polyaramid, reinforced with strands of diamond crystal like the optic-fiber thread, but without its optic characteristics, and its surface was sleeved with the substance. No ordinary knife would even scratch the surface. Only a knife with a synthetic diamond crystalline edge could sever the hoses. Several were with the expedition, but Ari made sure that Saeed never even knew of their existence.
#
The arrival of the burst message from Iapetus containing Jon's discovery was viewed by only the watch section personnel. The watch captain immediately roused Rod Zakes, who showed up in Mission Control several minutes later, rubbing sleep from his eyes, thinning hair in disarray.
"Why do these things always seem to arrive just after midnight?" he grumbled, as he gratefully accepted a steaming cup of black coffee handed to him by one of the engineers. "Okay," he said following a couple of welcome sips of the hot brew, "what have we got this time that caused you to get me out of a perfectly comfortable bed?"
Instead of answering, CapCom simply pressed the play button. The enlarged holoimage shimmered into existence in the space before the consoles. Zakes watched in utter fascination as the scene unfolded. When the final hatch door opened, and Jon gazed into the pastoral landscape before stumbling and losing the image, Zakes shouted, "Hold it…play that back!"
"No need, Sir, it gets better in a moment."
"I'll be a goldamned sonofabitch," Zakes muttered as Jon explained the shifting gravity. "How the hell do they do that?"
CapCom left the holographic image hang in the air. "By now, Sir, they have moved Base Camp down inside the elevator at the bottom of the five kilometer shaft."
"I know where it is," Zakes said with an irritated voice, still waking up from his sound slumber. "Tell me something I don't know."
"They think the interior contains Earth-normal air, and, after testing, Sir, I think they plan to explore the interior without their suits."
"What! You gotta be kidding me! Without their suits?"
"Why not, Sir? If it's Earth normal gravity and Earth-normal air that's been working for God-knows-how-long…why not?"
"I guess you got a point." He rubbed his eyes again, and set down his empty coffee cup. "Prepare a press release, but let me see it before you send it out. I gotta pump bilges." He stood and left the control center.
The press release Zakes authorized was brief and uninformative: "The Iapetus exploratory team has discovered a chamber deep below the surface that contains Earth-normal air and some living plants. Once further details and holorecordings are received, we will make them available to the press."
#
Noel was the first person to drop down the shaft. He arrived at the elevator without incident stating that it was just a longer exercise like those he frequently did for fun back on Earth. With both Jon and Noel on the bottom, the crew lowered several nets containing test equipment, pressure tents complete with sanitary and sleeping facilities, food and water, and compact polyaramid construction components. Except for the scientific testing equipment, everything was sufficiently rugged that Jon and Noel had only to drop it through the lock, and then push it into the elevator interior. The effort was minimal, but still, the task lasted about two hours.
Ginger was the first woman to drop to the elevator following the equipment. Other than some minor twisting, she had no problem. She solved the twisting problem herself, and glided smoothly through the cofferdam into the elevator lock. Jon had her wait inside the elevator while he and Noel met the next arrival – Elke. She had no problem of any kind during the five-kilometer drop. Chen arrived next. He had to stop halfway down to untangle himself and his safety line. He had forgotten to control his spinning, and had allowed himself to put about fifteen twists into the rope pair. A minute later he had untangled himself, and continued to the bottom without further incident. Michele was more cautions, stopping several times during her descent to solve an incipient twisting problem. Carmen also descended without incident, although she controlled her descent speed so that it took her longer than the others. Demitri dropped down skillfully, second only to Ari in transit time. Saeed expressed some concern since he had never before rappelled, but said aloud that anything a woman could do, he could do with more skill, because he was a man. He made it to the bottom with only one twist that required no stop. Finally, Ari rappelled down without a belay. He set up a second free-running rappel line with a fixture that would bring him up short should his main rappel line go into runaway. He also kept his boot nozzles uncovered in the event of some kind of catastrophic failure. He arrived at the upper lock in record time, tied off his lines, locked the upper hatch, and dropped down and through the lower hatch.
Despite the real possibility that they would be able to exist on the inside without suits and pressure tents, Jon demanded that a proper Base Camp be set up in the elevator, "Just in case," he said. Not wanting to risk the expedition's only doctor on the first foray, he assigned himself and the expedition biologist, Michele, to take testing equipment through the last lock into the interior, where they would run atmospheric and toxin tests. They were way beyond any rulebook here, Jon knew. Instead, he was operating on instinct, making decisions that he believed would move this constantly shifting mission forward without seriously compromising crew safety.
Jon and Michele stepped into the lock and closed the hatch behind them. In his right leg pocket, Jon carried the atmospheric tester. Michele carried the small toxin tester in her left leg pocket.
"Watch yourself, now, Michele. It's not anything like the holoimage. Remember, as you step through the hatch, you will be hit with a gravity force nearly forty-three times greater than you are feeling right now. It nearly knocked me flat on my ass."
As he commenced operating the outer hatch, gas flowed into the lock, and then the outer hatch opened. Jon braced himself and stepped onto the surface. He staggered as the weight hit him, but this time he was prepared for it. He reached out to guide Michele, not a pro forma gesture as when he had helped her out of the Lander. As Michele stepped through the hatch, her legs crumbled beneath her, and Jon lowered her gently to her knees.
"Are you okay?" he asked, angry with himself for letting her fall.
"Oui, mon Capitaine! I am fine. I know you warned me, and held my hand, but it still completely surprised me. What an odd thing." She got carefully to her feet and spent a couple of minutes just gazing at the wonderfully strange landscape. Then she reached into her leg pocket. "Let's see what dangers lurk in this atmosphere."
Jon extracted the atmospheric monitor and set it for full analysis. Within seconds its reading indicated a nitrogen to oxygen mix of seventy-eight to twenty-one, with one percent of mostly carbon dioxide and several trace gases, at a nominal pressure of just under one bar.
Michele held up her analyzer for Jon to see. "It's as pure as mother's milk," she said with a giggle, and placed her hands on her helmet, twisted it to open, and lifted it off her collar.
"Michele, don't…" Jon warned, but too late.
"Okay, everybody," Jon said, "you all know what Michele just did. She's fine, so I guess it's okay, but…" He paused for significant effect. "…please don't ignore discipline. We really don't want to lose one of you because of a silly mistake."
Unable, herself, to hear Jon's announcement because her helmet lay in the grass beside her feet, Michele said, "Take off your helmet, mon Capitaine! It's lovely out here…in here…" She looked a bit confused.
Jon looked at her radiant face, able to hear her only dimly through the helmet. "What the hell," he said, "I'm removing my helmet, too."
Chapter 22
"Demitri, can you think of any reason not to bring the entire crew through?" Jon asked.
"We're already collapsing the pressure tents," Demitri answered. "You know," he added, "if we could figure how to operate the big door, and if we could get the elevator operating, we could bring one of the rovers down. It would greatly simplify our exploration."
"You're kidding…right?"
"Only partly. It really does make sense."
Jon had to admit that it really did make sense. If this artificial world covered the entire moon, then there were about six and a half million square clicks of surface down here. That was a lot of area to cover.
Under Demitri's able supervision, the crew moved all their equipment that they had lowered down the shaft into the interior. No matter how well prepared each person was for the gravity shift through the inner lock, the transition to Earth-normal gravity was a shock. All the women except Elke ended on the ground the first time, as did Chen and Saeed. They all had been operating in low gravity for sufficiently long that they had to adjust to the higher gravity with conscious effort. The blue sky filled with fleecy clouds, the green grass and other growing things made the adjustment a pleasure.
Without being told, everyone removed pressure suits. The men ended up in their shipboard jumpsuits, with lightweight foot wear more suited to a low gravity environment. The women managed to look fresher than the guys, more spruced up and colorful, and Michele had somehow smuggled a short skirt and scooped white silk blouse into her pressure suit, and was dancing barefoot and child-like in the grass.
Chen and Noel set to work taking physical measurements. Using both radar and sonar they determined that the roof was two kilometers above them, not nearly high enough to generate the clouds.
"It's a neat trick," Chen told the others.
"For more than one reason," Noel added. "How do they do it? Simple, straightforward question, how – the hell – do they do it? And second, how in hell is it still working – and everything else, for that matter? What kind of engineering does it take to build something like this?"
Michele joined Carmen to test various plants, comparing their molecular structure with similar Earth plants. They prepared several cuttings for polymerase chain reaction DNA analysis by soaking the samples in a special solution, heating them for several minutes, and conducting the PCR analysis.
With no specific scientific tasks, Ginger and Elke busied themselves with straightening out the still messy Base Camp, with Demitri joining in, grumbling good naturedly about having to do woman's work.
"Captain," Carmen said after a few minutes, "this isn't similar to Earth grass, it is Earth grass…and leaves, and bark, and berries. Here," she said with a twinkle in her eye, "try this blueberry. They're delicious."
"It makes no sense, mon Capitaine," Michele added. "How could this be?"
She's right, of course, Jon thought as he thoughtfully chewed the berry. How the hell can all this be?
"Double check your measurements and findings, Doc. Ginger, put together a communiqué for Houston. Don't speculate. Just give them the facts." He shook his head in wonder as he accepted a ripe marionberry from Carmen. It was delicious. "When you have completed your measurements and the message is in the pipeline, meet me please under that tree." He pointed to a sprawling oak about a hundred meters distant. "Ari, please join me now." He struck off for the tree, and Ari hurried after him.
Jon sat on the ground leaning against the broad trunk. Ari sat back against a protruding root. "Your thoughts, please. What are we dealing with here?" Jon asked.
"Occam's razor, my friend, Occam's razor."
"And…?" Jon didn't want to put anything into Ari's mind. He wanted Ari's independent thoughts.
"Let's grant the technology," Ari said thoughtfully, scratching behind his right ear. "I don't have a clue how they do the gravity or any of the other manifestations, but…" His pause was long and apparently thoughtful. Jon just sat, waiting for him to continue. "Setting aside those questions, what do we have?" He started ticking the points off his fingers. "One, we got a sky that looks like ours, but the tint is a bit off. Two, we got Earth-normal gravity, not something close, but exactly Earth-normal. Three, we got Earth plants – not something close. They are Earth plants. Doc says the DNA is an exact match. Four, we have machines with ergonomics that fit us." He paused again, looking thoughtfully at his four fingers. Jon patiently waited for him to continue, even though he could see where he was going. "I think somebody wanted this place to mimic Earth as closely as possible. They painted the dome, but over time it must have faded a bit." He paused again, and rested his head in his hands with his fingers against his forehead and his thumbs against his jaw. "They can't be from Earth," he continued, "cause topside is a hundred-thousand or more years old, and this kind of technology didn't exist on Earth that long ago. Hell, it doesn't exist there now…" His voice trailed off. "You see where I'm going?"
"Yep," Jon answered, "they didn't come from Earth, they came to Earth. God knows why…"
"And their shit's still working," Ari said with a hint of awe. "We should probably think twice before pissing these guys off." Ari grinned at Jon, and pointed over Jon's shoulders at the rest of the team making its way to the oak.
"Okay," Jon said to his assembled crew, lolling on the grass in a ragged circle around him, "our best guess is that whoever the creators of this world were, they came here from somewhere else, but they exactly mimicked Earth as closely as possible. Ari thinks," he added with a smile, "that they painted the roof, and the paint faded."
Everyone chuckled, but Jon thought he could detect nervousness behind the superficial gaiety. "We're afoot for the time being," he continued. "I want to explore as much of this terrain as we can during the next few days. I will split us up into two-person teams, and we'll spread out maintaining coms until we lose a link. Then we'll figure out what to do at that point."
Demitri spoke up. "I've found something interesting about the geometrics of this place. Look in the sky in that direction." He pointed.
"It looks like a vertical line," Ginger said.
"Now that direction…"
"Another line," Noel said.
"Now there…"
"Another," said Chen.
"And there, and there…"
"Two more lines," from Ari.
"I think those are supporting columns," Demitri said. "I've done some calculations. The roof is two clicks up. The horizon is one-point-six-nine clicks out…that puts the base of that column about seven-point-seven-six clicks away. I did a pattern analysis – we're back to hexagons.
Jon divided the crew up, trying to maintain the most efficient and compatible teams he could. "Ari, you've got Saeed. Dr. Bhuta, Chen is with you. Noel, you and Elke team up. Demitri and Ginger, and Michele is with me. Each team will head directly toward a column. Demitri says they're a bit less than eight clicks away. Take your time and observe as you progress. Pack some food and water, a light blanket, share a sanitary kit and a portable analyzer. Each of you carries a holocam and coms, and each team will lay a fiber-optic thread. Stay in sight of each other at all times, and check in with the party to your left and right every few minutes." His instructions sounded a bit formal to him as he gave them. "Look, guys, this is totally unexpected. We are as completely unprepared for this as we can be. But we have to try. This is the single most important event in human history, and each of you is right in the middle of it. Let's make the best of it, and try to find out what we can, while keeping as safe as we can. It's been a long day. Let's get some rest, and get started in the morning."
As Jon spoke, the sky commenced a noticeable dimming. Over the next two hours, the sky turned dark, and was filled with stars – the stars of Earth as seen from slightly north of the equator. To Jon's mind, this was further confirmation that this interior was supposed to mimic as closely as possible conditions on Earth. He chalked up the incident sunset to coincidence. He was completely unprepared to consider any million-year-old mechanism that was capable of inferring sunset from his conversation.
#
The news of the Iapetus explorers' discovery flashed around Earth as rapidly as human engineers could interrupt routine holocast programming with the flash report. The world watched in awe as crew members passed through the inner lock and struggled to maintain equilibrium in the suddenly increased gravity. Pundits explained in hundreds of languages with thousands of hastily drawn diagrams and clumsy animations how the gravity of Iapetus differed from that of Earth – and many dropped in the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and even some of Jupiter's moons and other moons of Saturn. Anything to fill out the rather meager report from the interior of Iapetus. Throughout the Judeo-Christian world, people of faith gathered spontaneously at churches, cathedrals, and synagogues. Priests, scholars, and learned religious men turned to their ancient texts to discover where this might have been foretold in scripture.
Crowds of people streamed into Area 51 in the American southwest, and spontaneous demonstrations took place in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles, of people dressed in futuristic-looking costumes, many waving dog-eared copies of George Adamski's writings from the 1950s.
The peoples of the world celebrated the startling fact that we were not alone in the universe, and the nearly universally accepted theory that in a place so vast as the interior of Iapetus, the explorers were bound to find something or even someone with an explanation that made sense.
