Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (19 page)

              He wanted to return to the mother ship that the frozen desert had turned into his safe haven. But before, even grinding his teeth, he would expel the insanity and accomplish the task that he had been given. He would contact the other group, bringing back hydrogen one way or the other—willingly or by force.

              The logistics ships were enormous, ten times the size of theirs. They were dark silver and had no opening to the outside, not even the smallest porthole. Had the other settlers come to these vessels? Or was there no one else? Their impact on the ground was visible, since it had ceded in such a way that the most distant ship was leaning like the Tower of Pizza and the slope of earth where it had landed was fractured. The landing must not have been very sweet. It had three repositioning rockets that extended almost to the ground, near the feet that held it steady and stretched almost halfway up the vessel. The Rover had taken an hour and a half to get there. After all, it was twelve kilometers away.

              A high slope arose just behind the ships as white as the plane’s surface. Five hundred meters to one side and they’d have all been destroyed. He knew he was near the limits of the dome, but it was so transparent that one could’t see it. He did not see any ship appearing to be manned.

              Arriving at the capsules, he filmed them not only with the camera on his helmet that transmitted everything he saw to the command center, but also with a spread spectrum that captured invisible radiation as well as light. He decided to circulate among them with the vehicle to record those images in three hundred sixty degrees.

              Three were very close and one, the Leaning Tower of Pizza, was farther out. No sign of the manned craft. Where could it be?

              The impeccably preserved access platforms were visible. They did not seem to have ever been opened by anyone.

              He exited the Rover, and disconnected the oxygen tubes and power supply cables. He walked to the first ship and activated the lifting access platform. He went up a little and then tested the opening system with the laser beam on the handle’s external face. The door opened. Inside, there was a pressurization chamber and a screen showing an internal temperature of five degrees below zero. He then heard the Vice President Andrew’s voice.

              “Okay, Lucas, mission accomplished. For your peace of mind, I am informing you that I do not believe the Rover had a preprogrammed failure and that the president’s wristwatch during his televised speech was compatible with a live transmission. Steven was mistaken. Test the other vessels’ openings.”

              He wanted to go in immediately, but his orders were clear. Strangely enough, Lucas thought, Andrew had said nothing about the volunteers’ vessel not being nearby.

              “Carrying on,” he said. “As you see, there is no sight of any vessel similar to ours,” Lucas decided to add.

              “No,” Andrew responded. “It looks like we’re on our own.”

              The second ship was a replica of the first, but the third was different since, instead of being a conical pyramid, it was cylindrical. He went up the platform and saw that the door had the symbol for radioactive risk—it was the heavy nuclear generator

              The fourth, farthest from the others, the one that was leaning, was also conical. From the height of the platform, he could see that the other ship was not just leaning. A type of hatch had opened and he could see internal equipment. The ground was visibly fractured on the last third of the distance between the two ships.

              “Okay, command center, are you seeing the defect on the ground? Come in.”

              “Okay, command center, come in. Do you copy?”

              Silence. He tested the signal and saw he had no connection. The nuclear ship was blocking his communications. He had to descend in order to confer the adorned vessel’s state. He took the spread spectrum camera and filmed the ship from a distance. He went down to the Rover and confirmed that he had no signal because he was aligned with the nuclear ship that was between him and the polar vessel. He observed the conical vessel with binoculars and saw that an elevated entrance with a picket of exoskeletons was partially opened: it had rotated seventy degrees. The ship had not split open but the opening system had been activated. Or someone had activated it. Perhaps the other settlers. He wasn’t sure he could close it. Maybe the cargo had been lost if it could not be exposed to extreme cold or if it were to fall, should the ship’s list worsen.

              He decided to approach with the all-terrain vehicle, with the prudence of affixing the traction cable to the nuclear ship beforehand. Since that rear cable was six hundred meters long, it was more than enough to reach the other vessel. He drove to within two hundred meters of it. The exoskeletons were of various types, with all of them showing a polished perfection. They would be the workhorses. Despite the fault in the ground that created a step, the area was flat and only began to slope near the ship. Lucas exited the Rover and hooked the vehicle’s front traction cable to his suit. It would allow him to go three hundred meters, more than enough. He was going to get closer and take a sample of the ice that had given way in order to see why and, then, try to understand what had happened to the logistics ship, if it were manned and, perhaps, close the elevated entrance, saving the cargo.

              He had gone no more than thirty meters beyond the fault in the terrace when he decided to take his first deep sample of the ice. He placed the self-rotating hollow rod on the ground and programmed it to perforate twenty meters, but had not yet reached even seven when the ground shook.

              The location was not safe. He fell back. It would be better to forget the rod and leave to go to the cargo ship. The principal thing was the hydrogen for the polar ship’s batteries. He ran to get to the Rover and proceeded quickly, distancing himself from the danger. But before he reached the car, the ground gave way abruptly and he fell some thirty meters into a void, hanging from the traction cable that hooked him to the jeep.

              He was swinging in the air above a huge underground cave, looking like Cliff Burton Richard’s book in the old collier’s galley.

Chapter 16

Mystery

His helmet’s visor was cracked in a star shape. He had hit his head on the Rover’s lateral pedal and somewhere on the batteries. He looked up: pieces of ice were falling to the ground at great speed, as if they were attracted by a strange magnetic force, and the two front of the jeep’s six wheels were suspended in the air, the spotlights pointing down. His heart was racing at one hundred twenty per hour. He was afraid that the crack in the visor would let the suit depressurize or that the vibration would loosen platinum in his organism. In truth, the planet that he inhabited was not Ganymede but the inside of his spacesuit. Only there did he have pressure, oxygen, and temperatures of human proportions. On Earth, those things were a given, they had no value, but there, they were an oasis and he was living in that oasis. The vehicle continued immobile, seeming to be stable in spite of everything and the batteries’ charge continued to hold. He had to climb up, since the ground could cede and the Rover fall. He looked down to register the image, but he had lost the frontal camera. It was a gigantic grotto. In the past, Ganymede must have had liquid water, perhaps due to volcanic activity, and it was possible that, millions of years ago, underground veins of water had carved the grotto. He just couldn’t fathom what force had drawn the frozen white clumps into an accelerated fall.

              He pressed the button to be pulled up, but it was stuck. He remembered that everything was redundant in those systems and activated the button with the laser beam. Crap, he’d turned on the rapid descent button and had fallen another thirty meters. More pieces of ice broke loose and dove straight down into the abyss in which he as suspended, but the Rover did not move a millimeter.
Phew! It’s tied to the nuclear ship, good.
He felt stupid because he’d made a mistake, like Caroline, but the idea of mooring the Rover to the nuclear ship had been a good one. This is what he’d explained to Andrew--the right people for the right missions.
Very good,
he was going to go up. He looked down one last time and saw nothing special except for the soldier guarding the grotto.

              “The soldier?!”

              He observed more closely. There was a set of shadows so perfect that it seemed real.
What bad luck not having the camera. It really is deceiving.
Happily, he had exceptional vision and did not let himself be deceived by the first illusion in the dark. He activated the ascent button to the car. Arriving up top, he needed uncommon strength in order to climb. He went up to the Rover and crossed it until descending at the back. He was exhausted, sweating. He lowered the suit’s temperature to fifteen degrees. Above zero. He moved fifty meters away from the vehicle and unhooked the cable from his suit before unlocking the rear traction cable that moored the jeep to one of the ship’s feet. He slowly activated it and the Rover was progressively pulled. He jumped into the vehicle and thought that any other crew member in his place would not have escaped. Perhaps Andrew or Sofia, who were more athletic, would have been able to climb to the hood of the jeep. Probably not even them.

              The image of the shadow, with the illusion of the soldier, rifle at his shoulder, guarding the entrance of the grotto on Ganymede, on Jupiter’s periphery, returned to his spirit. He wouldn’t return there as the logistics vessel with the exoskeletons had sunk another three meters when the ground collapsed. It was lost.

             
Stupid, stupid,
he repeated to himself while he attached the front cable on the jeep to his spacesuit and went back toward the precipice that opened up on the cavern, but he couldn´t avoid going to see. He had to be absolutely sure it was an illusion. Not that he thought it was possible—with an external pressure incompatible with everything, at two hundred degrees below zero—for there to be a sentinel guarding a cave hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth. He had been taken as a fool by the police in two countries, but a soldier, a green recruit, guarding an underground vein in a frozen desert on Ganymede? Only if the gods had gotten together on Olympus just to make fun of the clown. Yes, it was a false image, with 99.9 percent probability but he needed one hundred percent certainty. Otherwise, the cancer of doubt would eat away at him forever.
Sorry Sofia, sorry Andrew, sorry everyone, I promise not to tell you the truth to protect you from me,
he swore, while looking at the blacked out radio signal, blocked by the nuclear ship.

              He walked carefully to the edge of the grotto’s upper entrance, lay down on the frozen ground and peaked down over the opening’s edge. He pointed down the projectors, but nothing was clear. He got up slowly, and checked his batteries and oxygen. He was going to go down. Lucas still stopped halfway down. One hundred fifty degrees below zero. It was a little over one hundred meters to the rocky ground where, after landing, the temperature was minus one hundred thirty degrees. He looked for the soldier who had been at the entrance of north vein and did not see him.
He went away,
Lucas said to himself. He was living from the shadows and reflections of his lantern and had disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.
Very well, I needed to be certain, folks.
He looked up.

              “I’m going back,” he said.

              But he didn’t go. He even started his ascent, being pulled by the cable, but the vortex of hypotheses in his head did not stop. What if the Ganymedian soldier had fled from him? What if he was one of the missing settlers and what if he’d been frightened? He’d had a rifle at his shoulder and no spacesuit. What if he’d fled from the cold? Lucas joked to himself. He stopped. He was swinging seventy meters from the grotto floor.
Why is it two hundred degrees below zero up on top, halfway down, it’s one hundred fifty and on the rocky ground, one hundred thirty? Where is the heat coming from?

              He descended again. He had to be certain that there was no one under ground, settlers or not, in grottos, in the neighborhood of Jupiter. He released the cable and guaranteed that it was firmly on the ground. It was his return passport. Water had circulated here in the past, he thought again, looking at a smooth pebble while moving toward the grotto’s extreme north side. He might not be able to go through the entrance to the seam, it looked so narrow. He wasn’t going to risk ripping the suit and dying of decompression.

* * *

When he got there, he saw that he’d been lucky because the door was open.
The door?
His heart was beating two hundred times a minute.
There’s a door here. A door! I’m going back to tell them,
he quickly stepped back ten paces.
What am I going to tell them?
He stopped.
That on the way there, I discovered that the Earth is Paradise, Space is Hell, a soldier ran away and the door to the cave on Ganymede was open?

              He returned to the door. Now, his lantern’s light projected a shadow identical to a soldier on the wall. It was the same image that he’d seen from the other angle. The soldier did not exist, but there was a door, without a doubt. An artifact made by someone intelligent. It was palpable, real. He was not hallucinating. He passed through it and continued into a gallery with stalactites and stalagmites, but without any sign of water in any state. The temperature sensor now registered one hundred ten degrees.
Where’s that heat from?
he repeated. He continued almost another one hundred fifty meters, being careful not to rip his suit. Finally, he found a new door. He pushed it, but it didn’t budge. He took the titanium pick that he carried on his spacesuit to collect samples and used it to pull up the door as if it were a crowbar. It wasn’t easy. Some rust fell off. He pushed it again, it opened and he gained access to a vast space.

             
What’s this?

              Inside a hangar of titanic dimensions, maybe five hundred meters long, eighty high and ninety wide, dozens of enormous blocks of transparent ice had soldiers frozen in them in tight formation. The blocks, poorly stacked, were something unfathomable: it was an entire army. He looked at the frozen men’s faces. They were not statues, they were not robots, they were people. With the exception of the officers and sergeants, their ages ranged from eighteen to twenty, if you went by their skin, but they would be much older if you took into account their set faces. The hangar was a natural formation that someone had transformed. On the ceiling, in a corner, the roof had partially yielded—it was the cargo ship sinking. He turned on the exterior sound exits and shouted, “Hey, hey.”
He only heard a light echo, almost nothing. “I’m a settler from the polar ship, from Earth. Is anyone here?” Ganymede’s low atmospheric pressure guaranteed silence. The temperature sensor was marking ninety degrees below zero. An oven.
Who turned it on? Could it already be the external nuclear reactor?

              He scrutinized that phantasmagoric cathedral’s overwhelming central nave with his eyes until he found, on the other extremity, a huge vault type door. He covered the five hundred meters that separated him from that steel dam and tried to open it, but it was completely impossible.

              The battery charge sensors on his helmet began blinking, indicating that it had dropped into the reserve level. Shit, the damned batteries were malfunctioning from the blow. Lucas had to return or he’d freeze to death. He lowered the temperature in the suit to three degrees and made the return trip as quickly as possible. When he reached the place he’d left the cable, he found it in the exact same spot. He hooked the cable to his suite and began his ascent, while the cable simultaneously began replacing the charge in his suit; but halfway up, it stopped.
Power loss,
the sensor blinked.
What power loss? The power in the cable comes from the Rover and it’s got enough for days.
He attached the suit battery to the cable to continue supplying power from his own battery and turned off the suit’s heat. The cable, using external power, slowly rose nearly forty meters and the temperature dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero at the same time. It then stopped again. He could not discard the oxygen tanks like Caroline had because he would die without oxygen before reaching the jeep. His muscles began having difficulty following the orders his brain was giving them. He opened the jeep’s traction software and saw that the safely transport human function had been activated. The system had probably detected the high friction between the cable and the rock, on the cave’s upper opening, and had cut the energy to protect the astronaut from the risk of ripping his suit in the opening. He turned it off and manually reactivated the non-sensitive cargo ascent from the jeep. In the meantime, his heavy suit’s internal temperature had gone down to thirty-two degrees below zero, but the cable was recharging the batteries. He redefined the temperature to fifteen degrees above zero. The Rover’s rotor quickly brought him up and in the transition from the grotto’s access well to the ground he managed to prevent hurting himself while protecting his right forearm with the titanium pick’s handle. He prayed for the suit to not rip while he was being dragged on the ice to the jeep. The temperature had now reached five degrees above but then the battery died. The friction must have cut the wires bringing the electricity from the Rover to his suit. When he banged into the front of the Rover, the ball of ice that had accumulated in front of him broke apart but the temperature in the suit was at fifty-three below and his visor was even more scratched. He fell in front of the hood and his muscles would not obey him. He could barely see out of the helmet. Images of Quiroga cut open in the refrigerated autopsy room appeared in his mind and Lucas shouted,
No, no, not today.
In a last burst of explosive energy, he stood up and threw himself into the Ganymedian car. He hit the right side and fell on the ground. He saw the power supply cable hanging. Sixty-one degrees below zero. He couldn’t speak and was paralyzed. His eyes were stuck, encrusted in frozen tears. Before going to sleep, he fixed his spleen-like eyes on the cable and ballistically yanked the policeman who was sleeping at the steering wheel through the window of the car in Lisbon once more. He passed out.                           

              He came to an hour later to the sound of the depleted oxygen alarm for his first bottle going off. The temperature in his suit was fifteen degrees above zero. The power supply was on despite not being plugged in perfectly. He felt cold, but now his members were obeying him, even if torpidly. He dragged himself to the jeep. He sat down and connected all of the cables and tubes. He raised the temperature to twenty-two degrees and went back to sleep.

              “Lucas, come in. If you can hear, come in,” Andrew was calling incessantly. The command center had redefined the communications frequency and he could now hear them where he was.

              Sofia’s voice then appeared. “Lucas, wake up. Move about. Answer.”

              “Hello, Sofia,” Lucas responded, hearing shouts of joy from the other end.

              “What’s going on? Where are you?  We can’t detect you.”

              “I’m in the area of the logistics ships, partially blocked by the ship with the nuclear reactor, twelve kilometers from you. What I found is unbelievable. We were not the first to arrive on Ganymede, Andrew. The planet is inhabited and not just recently.”