In the Ocean of Night (4 page)

There was precious little money for research, for new ideas, for dreams. But his parents did not sense that fact. His father shook his head a millimeter to each side, listening as Nigel talked, the older man probably not aware that he gave away his reaction. When Nigel was through describing the Icarus mission plan, his father had cast one of those unreadable looks at his mother and then very calmly advised Nigel to sign off the mission, to wait for something better. Surely something would come along. Surely, yes. From inside their perimeter they saw it very clearly. He had given them no daughter-in-law as yet, no grandchildren, had spent little time at home these past years. All this hovered unspoken behind his father’s millimeter swaying, and Nigel promised himself that when Icarus was over and done he would see more of them.

His father, obviously well read up on the matter, mentioned the unmanned backup missions. Robot probes, ready with a series of nuclear shoves. Why couldn’t Houston rely on them alone? A matter of probabilities, Nigel explained, glad to be on factual ground. But he knew, despite the committee reports, that the odds were cloudy. Perhaps a man was better, but who was sure? Even if only men could ferret out the core of Icarus, amid all that dust, why should it be Nigel? Easy answers: youth, reflexes; and, finally, because there weren’t all that many trained men left. Nigel mentioned not a word of this as he pumped the rocker, drank tea, murmured into the layered still air of the old house. He was going, one way or another. They knew it. And that last evening ended in silence.

On the airplane back to the anthill of Houston, he took up the one volume that he’d noticed in his old bedroom bookcase, and brought along on an impulse. The yellowed hardback was cracked, the pages stiff and stained by the accidents of adolescence. He remembered reading it shortly after applying for the US-European program, to get a feel for the Americans. He paged through remembered scenes and near the end came upon the one passage he had involuntarily memorized.

And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me…

Sitting in the contoured airplane seat, he felt more like Huck Finn than the calculating European others thought him to be.

Dave Fowles’s voice broke in.

“We have a recalculation of the impact damage, Nigel. Looks pretty bad.”

“Oh?”

“Two point six million people dead. Peripheral damage for four hundred kilometers around the impact site. No major Indian cities hit, but hundreds of villages—”

“How is that famine going?”

He sighed. “Worse than we expected. I guess as soon as word filtered down that Icarus might hit, all those dirt farmers left their crops and started preparing for the afterlife. That just aggravated the famine. The UN thinks there’ll be several million dead inside six months, even with our airlifts, and our sociometricians agree.”

“And that movement out of the impact area?”

“Bad. They just give up and won’t walk a step, Herb said. It must be their religion or something. I don’t understand it, I really don’t.”

Nigel thought, and something came to an edge in him. “Dave, I have an idea.”

“Sure, we just went off open channel, Nigel, the networks aren’t getting this. Shoot.”

“I’m going to plant the Egg after this rest period, aren’t I? This thing is solid metal ore, the magnetic field proves that. No point in waiting.”

“Correct. The Mission Commander just gave me confirmation on that. We have you scheduled to begin descent in about thirteen minutes.”

“Okay. This is it: I want to put the Egg in that vent I’ve found. It’s a long, irregular fissure. The Egg will give us a better momentum transfer if it goes off in a hole, and this one looks pretty deep.”

A whisper of static marked the line. Some tiny facet of Icarus gave him a quick white flash and vanished; he ached to seek it out, take a sample. He felt himself suspended beneath the white sun.

“How deep do you estimate?” Dave’s voice was guarded.

“I’ve been watching the shadows move as the vent rotates into the sun. I think its floor must be forty meters down, at least. That’ll give us a good kick from the Egg. I can take some interesting specimens out of there at the same time,” he finished lamely.

“Let you know in a minute.”

Len broke the wait that followed. “Think you can handle that? Securing that thing might get tricky if there’s not enough room.”

“If I can’t get it down to the bottom I’ll leave it hanging. The Egg won’t weigh even a kilo on the surface, I can simply hang it to the fissure wall like a painting.”

“Right. Hope they buy it.”

And then the carrier from Houston came in.

“We authorize touchdown near the edge. If the vent is wide enough—”

He was already readying his board.

TWO

It was a world of straight lines, no serene parabolas. He brought his module—cylindrical, thin radial spokes for stability, an insect profile ending in a globular pouch that was the Egg—in slowly, watching his radar screen. It was difficult to sense in this pebble of a world below him the potential to open a crater in the Earth forty kilometers across. It seemed sluggish, inert.

“Sure you don’t need any help?” Len called.

Nigel smiled and his tanned face crinkled. “You know Houston won’t let us get out of contact. The
Dragon
’s high gain antenna might not work in all this dust, and—”

“I know,” Len said, “and if we were both on the sunward side of Icarus, Earth would be in my radio shadow. Fine. Just let me know if—”

“Certainly.”

“Get’em, boy-o.”

The textured surface grew. He flew toward the dawn line and the small pocks and angles became clearer. Steering rockets murmured at his back. He concentrated on the distance and relative velocities, and upon speeding up the automatic cameras, until he was hovering directly above the vent. He rotated the module to gain a better view and inched closer.

“It’s deeper than I thought. I can see fifty meters in and the mouth is quite wide.”

“Sounds encouraging,” Dave said.

Without waiting for further word, he took the module down to the top of the vent. Blasted stone rose toward him, brown discolored into black where minute traces of gas had been baked away.

His headphones sputtered and crackled. “I’m losing your telemetry,” Len’s voice came.

Nigel brought the module to a dead stop. “Look, Len, I can’t go further in without the rock screening you out.”

“We can’t break contact.”

“Well—”

“Maybe I should move in.”

“No, stay outside the dust. Move sunward and behind me—there’ll still be a cone of good reception.”

“Okay, I’m off.”

“Listen, you guys,” Dave said, “if you’re having trouble with this maybe we should just for—” Nigel switched him off. Minutes were being eaten away.

He rotated the module to get a full set of photographs.

Icarus was a bumpy, round hill that sloped away wherever he looked. Burnished mounds and clefts made a miniature geography, seeming larger than they were as the eye tried to fit them into a familiar perspective. He glanced at the clock. It had been long enough; he flipped a switch and the burr of static returned.

“How’s it going, Len?” he said.

“Hey, having transmission trouble? I lost you there for a minute.”

“Had some thinking to do.”

“Oh. Dave says they’re having second thoughts back there.”

“I guessed as much. But then, they’re not here, are they?”

Len chuckled. “I guess not.”

“How far around are you? Ready for me to go in?” “Almost. Take a few more minutes. What’s it like down there?”

“Pretty bleak. I wonder why Icarus is so close to spherical? I expected something jagged.”

“Can’t be gravitational forces.”

“No, there’s not enough to hold down even gravel— everything is bald, there’s no debris around at all.”

“Maybe solar erosion has rounded the whole asteroid off.”

“I’m going in,” Nigel said abruptly.

“Okay, I guess I can track you from here.”

The rotation of Icarus had brought the left wall closer. He nudged the craft back to center, remembering the first time he had learned in some forgotten science text that the Earth rotated. For weeks he had been convinced that whenever he fell down, it was because the Earth had moved beneath him without his noticing. He had thought it a wonderful fact, that everyone was able to stand up when the Earth was obviously trying to knock them down.

He smiled and took the craft in.

Jaws of stone yawned around him. Random fragments of something like mica glinted from the seared rocks. Nigel stopped about halfway down and tilted his spotlights up to see the underhang of a shelf; it was rough, brownish. He glided toward the vent wall and extended a waldoe claw. Its teeth bit neatly with a dull snap and brought back a few pounds of desiccated rubble. Len called; Nigel answered with monosyllables. He nudged the module downward again, moving carefully in the shadowed silence. He used a carrier pouch on the craft’s skin to store the sample, and added more clawfuls of rock to other pouches.

He was nearly to the bottom before he noticed it.

The pitted floor was a jumble of rocks that rose from pools of ink. Nigel could not make out detail; he turned his spotlights downward.

A deep crack ran down the center of the rough floor. It was perhaps five meters wide and utterly black.

At irregular intervals things protruded from the crack, angular things that were charred and blunted. Some gave sparkling reflections, as though partially fused and melted.

Nigel glided closer.

One of the objects was a long convoluted band of a coppery metal that described an intricate, folded weave of spirals.

He sat in the stillness and looked at it. Time passed. Ten meters away a crumpled form that had been square was jammed in the crack, as though it had been partly forced out by a great wind. There were others; he photographed them.

Len had been calling for some time.

When he was through Nigel pressed a button to transmit and said, “We’re going to have to recalculate, Len. Icarus isn’t a lump of ice or a rock or anything else. I think”—he paused, still not quite believing it—“it has to be a ship.”

THREE

It took Houston an hour to agree that he had to leave the module. Both he and Len had to argue with a Project Director who thought they had wasted too much time already; the man obviously didn’t believe anything they reported, thinking it a cock-and-bull story designed to give Nigel more time for sample collecting. Len could only barely be restrained from coming into the cloud himself and only the necessity for reevaluating the mission stopped him.

Even after agreeing, Houston demanded a price. The Egg had to be secured to the vent floor first. This could be done without Nigel’s leaving the module and, rather than argue, he moved quickly and efficiently to make short work of it.

The Egg was a dull gray sphere with securing bolts sunk into its skin. Nigel maneuvered it near the dark fissure wall and fired the bolts that freed it. The sphere coasted free.

Before it could glide very far he shot the aft securing bolts and they arced across the space to the wall and buried themselves in the stone. Steel cables reeled in and pulled the Egg to the rock face. Nothing could move it now and only Len or Nigel could detonate its fifty megatons.

Nigel ate before he left the module. Houston was divided about contingency plans; Dave gave him a summary to which he half listened. He and Len had another twenty-two hours’ margin of air, and some changes could be made in their braking orbit back to Earth.

The two unmanned backup missions were being stepped up, but they looked less promising now. The radar sensing modules had to close on Icarus at high velocity, and the dust and pebbles inside the cloud, impacting at those speeds, could disable the warheads before they searched out Icarus itself.

“Popping the cover,” Nigel called, and switched over to suit radio. The hatch came free with a hollow bang. He inched gingerly out, went hand over hand down the module’s securing line, and stood at last on Icarus.

“The surface crunches a little under my feet,” he said, knowing Len would pester him with questions if he didn’t keep up a steady stream of commentary. They had both ridden in a small, sweaty cabin for five weeks to intercept Icarus, and now Len was missing a payoff larger than anything they had dreamed. “It must be something like cinder. Dried out. That’s the way it looks, anyway.”

A pause.

“I’m at the edge of the crack. It’s about two meters across here, and the sides are pretty smooth. I’m hanging over it now, looking in. The walls go on for about four meters and then there’s nothing but black. My lights can’t pick up anything beyond that.”

“Maybe there’s a hole in there,” Len said. “Could be.”