Uranus

by Ben Bova

  “We don’t know yet whether it’s actually a relic, do we? That’s what we’re here to determine.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  “Good. Let’s get on with it.”

  Tómas led the little group through the automated inspection machines, noting that when Abbott smiled toothily at the facial identification screen there was a significant gap between his two upper front teeth.

  “Family distinction,” Abbott said cheerfully. “Some damned gene that keeps cropping up every generation or so. My father had a gap you could drive a lorry through.”

  Gomez made a weak smile.

  “You keep Greenwich time aboard this habitat, of course,” Abbott said as the others of his group made their way past the identification screens. “That’s good. We’ll settle into our quarters for a bit and meet you for dinner at nineteen hundred hours.”

  Seven o’clock, Gomez realized.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be at your door—”

  “No need for a native guide,” Abbott said, smiling broadly. “We’ll see you at the dining hall. Thank you.”

  Gomez realized he was being dismissed. “Well,” he managed to say, “welcome to Haven.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Gomez stood there and watched the team troop toward the escalator that led down to the living quarters.

  * * *

  When Gomez entered the dining hall, he saw that Abbott and his crew had already appropriated one of the long tables. And there was an empty chair waiting for him at Abbott’s immediate right.

  He sat down, selected his meal from the menu displayed on the tabletop screen, then turned to Abbott, who introduced each and every member of his team. Tómas forgot their names almost as soon as Abbott pronounced them, but he smiled and nodded at each of the astronomers in turn.

  As soon as he finished the introductions, Abbott fixed Gomez with a cocked eyebrow as he asked, “Whatever gave you the idea of coming out here to search the ocean of Uranus, my boy?”

  “The anomaly,” Gomez answered immediately. “The other three giant planets have thriving biospheres in their oceans. Uranus was apparently sterile. That didn’t seem to fit.”

  “H’mm,” Abbott murmured. “You were flying in the face of the common wisdom.”

  “New knowledge, new discoveries, often fly in the face of common wisdom,” Gomez replied. “Common wisdom often turns out to be wrong.”

  A hint of a smile played across Abbott’s face. “True enough,” he said. “True enough.”

  One of the astronomers across the table from Gomez, a long-faced, lank-haired young woman, challenged, “Do you really believe that this one little specimen you’ve turned up is evidence of an ancient civilization?”

  Gomez glanced at Abbott, who sat with his hands clasped beneath his chin, the food before him ignored, eager to hear his response.

  “Steel is not a natural metal. It is produced by intelligence.”

  “Or dropped by one of the submersibles that investigated this ocean decades ago,” the woman retorted. “What you’ve discovered is most likely the result of an accident.”

  “We’ve scanned the logs of all the submersibles that entered the ocean. No record of offloading a scrap of steel.”

  The woman’s lips curved into a slight smile. “Maybe the people operating the sub had an accident that they didn’t want to report.”

  Abbott broke in with, “That’s a possibility, don’t you think? Remote, perhaps, but a possibility.”

  Gomez suddenly realized that they were testing him. “The submersibles were controlled robotically. There were no humans aboard, nobody to attempt covering up evidence of an accident.”

  “Or incident,” said the young man sitting next to the woman.

  Gomez continued, “We’ve scanned the logs of every sub that was in the ocean. There is no record of offloading anything, not even a bubble of gas.”

  Abbott broke into a chuckle. “I’m afraid he’s already covered your hypothesis, Theresa.” Looking down at the dish in front of him, he said, “Come on now, let’s eat. The soup’s getting cold.”

  DOUBLE CHECKING

  Abbott took over effective command of Gomez’s investigation. His first step was to review every part of Tómas’s work.

  Raven suddenly had nothing to do. Abbott’s team of professionals was tracing her work, and they did not want her in their way or looking over their shoulders.

  “Good!” said Evan Waxman when she told him what was happening. “You can come back to work with me.”

  Raven—wearing nose plugs wormed into her nostrils—replied, “I’ll come back to work with you, but that’s all. No fun and games. No Rust or other junk.”

  Waxman leaned back in his desk chair and studied her face for a long, silent moment. Then, “You mean that, don’t you?”

  Standing in front of his desk, Raven felt like a schoolgirl who’d been sent to see the principal. But she clenched her fists and said, “Yes, Evan. I mean it.”

  “Alicia never sprinkled the Rust I gave her into your refrigerator, did she?”

  Raven made her eyes go wide. “Rust? In my refrigerator?”

  Waxman almost smiled. “Come on, Raven. I can see that you and Alicia have become friends. And become enemies of mine.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Evan,” Raven lied.

  “Oh, yes you do.” Waxman leaned forward and jabbed an index finger in her direction. “Never try to fool me, Raven. You’re beyond your depth, out of your league.”

  Raven stood there and said nothing.

  “You’re fired, Raven,” Waxman said, quite calmly. “I don’t want to see your face again. Just clear your office out. And don’t expect to get anything more than the minimum compensation from now on. You’re on your own.”

  “All right.”

  “I expect you’ll make out all right. Selling yourself, as usual.”

  “No, Evan. I’m not going back there.”

  “Sooner or later,” he said, with a smirk. “Sooner or later.”

  She made an about-face and strode angrily out of his office, past Alicia who sat rigidly at her desk, silent and unmoving.

  Once Raven reached her own cubbyhole of an office and started cleaning out her desk, a thread of memory played in her mind. Something about a guy in the Bible who was fired from his job, wondering what he was going to do next: “To dig I am unable, to beg I am too proud.”

  But what will I do? she asked herself. What will I do? One thing she was certain of, she was not going back to her old way of life.

  The habitat gives everybody a subsistence payment, she knew. It’s not much, but it’s better than starving.

  She remembered Alicia’s dream of running a store for women’s wear. Maybe I can work there.

  Maybe.

  Then she realized, I’m already working for Tómas! Maybe he can give me a salary. It doesn’t have to be much.

  But what would he expect in return? she asked herself.

  * * *

  With some trepidation, Raven phoned Gomez as soon as she carried the meager contents of her desk back to her apartment.

  Tómas’s broad-cheeked face appeared almost instantly on the wall screen in Raven’s living room. He seemed flustered, upset.

  “Hola!” Raven said, forcing a smile.

  Gomez looked startled for a moment, then he smiled back—a little tiredly, Raven thought—and answered, “Hello, Raven.”

  Behind him Raven could see a trio of astronomers intently scanning a viewscreen filled with alphanumeric symbols.

  Keeping her smile in place, she asked, “How’s it going, Tómas?”

  His lips twitched into a bitter grimace. “They’re tearing all my work apart. I feel like a criminal who’s being investigated by the police.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  Trying to stay cheerful, Raven said, “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

  He sighed. “I’m havi
ng dinner with Professor Abbott and his crew.”

  “Oh.”

  His face brightening, Gomez said, “You could join us, though. Why don’t you?”

  She suppressed the frown that threatened to break out and said instead, “Okay, sure. Where and what time?”

  “Seven o’clock at the main restaurant.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Gomez broke into a genuine grin. “Great!”

  DINNER FOR SEVENTEEN

  As usual, Professor Abbott sat at the head of the long table. Gomez was several seats below, but Raven saw that he had kept the chair next to him empty for her.

  She sat down and nodded greetings to the others. They nodded back and smiled at her.

  How much do they know about me? Raven wondered. About my background, my past life? Those records are supposed to be kept private, but …

  “And how are you, Ms. Marchesi?” Abbott asked from the head of the table.

  “Fine, thank you,” Raven lied.

  “I believe we’ve just about concluded the first phase of our study,” Abbott went on, smiling enough to show the gap between his front teeth.

  Raven saw Tómas stiffen in his chair. “And?” Gomez asked.

  Still smiling, Abbott said, “No news is good news, my boy. We haven’t found anything that invalidates your conclusion.”

  “The sample didn’t come from one of our own vessels?” asked one of the astronomers, sitting across the table.

  Abbott shook his head slowly. “Apparently not. At least, we haven’t been able to find any evidence that it did.”

  The astronomer—young, blond, husky—countered, “Absence of proof is not proof of absence, Professor.”

  “I quite agree, but we have run into a blank wall. That scrap of steel is real, and—as Dr. Gomez has told us many times—its composition does not match any of the types of steel used in our own submersibles.”

  Raven saw that Tómas was trembling. “Then it’s from here, from Uranus,” he said.

  Abbott fingered his moustache thoughtfully before answering, “That’s the best hypothesis we have at the moment. It might be wrong, mind you, but we haven’t found any evidence that proves it’s wrong.”

  The table went absolutely silent. Raven could hear threads of conversation from the other tables in the dining room: laughter, the clink of tableware, murmurs and mumbles from across the big room. But the astronomers’ table was absolutely silent.

  Yet she knew what was going through the minds of the young astronomers: the scrap of steel that Tómas found was manufactured here on Uranus, by intelligent Uranians. Yet the planet has been sterilized, wiped clean of their existence.

  Gomez broke their silence. “So what do we do now?”

  “We scan the seabed. We use your submarine to start scanning in the region where your scrap of steel was found. And I intend to ask the Astronomical Association to send digging equipment and a crew out here as soon as possible.”

  Tómas sank back onto his chair. His face looked halfway between stunned and unutterably satisfied.

  * * *

  The dinner turned into a celebration. Fourteen astronomers, plus Abbott, Tómas and Raven ate, laughed, made jokes, offered toasts until the dining room emptied out almost completely, except for their table. The robot servers waited with inhuman patience by the restaurant’s rear wall as the men and women reveled with unrestrained delight.

  Through all the merriment, Gomez marveled, They’re not against me. They didn’t come here to tear me down. They like me!

  He basked in the newfound warmth, even as Abbott warned, “What we’re facing now is a task that will be far from easy. We’re astronomers, not miners—”

  The husky blond fellow across the table suggested, “Maybe we could recruit some of the Rock Rats from the Asteroid Belt. They’re miners.”

  But Abbott shook his head. “Not the type we need, not at all. It’s one thing to tear up an asteroid and extract the minerals that have a high market price, it’s quite another to search for scraps of what might be relics buried in a seabed full of worthless rocks and sand.”

  The blond young astronomer nodded his reluctant agreement.

  “No,” Abbott went on, “we have before us a task of the most grueling kind. We’re going to need patience, skill, and a fairly sizeable amount of luck.”

  That’s a cheerful note, Raven thought. She saw that Tómas looked sober, thoughtful, as if from an old story of the American Wild West about a gunslinger facing a challenger.

  * * *

  The dinner broke up at last and the group headed for the restaurant’s doors. Raven noticed that several of the astronomers paired off; romance was in the air.

  Abbott seemed to pay no attention to the apparent couplings. Then Raven realized that Gomez was walking beside her, silent. But his eyes were focused on her face.

  While the rest of the group headed down to the quarters that had been assigned to them, Raven walked with Tómas past her own apartment. And his.

  “Where are we going, Tómas?” she asked.

  “To the observation blister down at the end of this passageway,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged his husky shoulders. “I want to say goodnight to the universe.”

  She saw that he was smiling shyly. And she wondered what else he had in mind.

  He opened the observation blister’s hatch and gestured Raven inside. It was noticeably cooler inside, even though the blister’s glass bubble was opaqued.

  Before Raven could say anything, Gomez touched the control button next to the hatch and the bubble immediately became perfectly transparent. Raven felt as if she were suddenly standing among the stars, vast clouds of swirling dots of light looking down at her, with blue-gray Uranus hanging to one side, huge and silent.

  Raven shuddered at the beauty of the universe.

  “You’re cold?” Gomez asked, stepping closer to her.

  She shook her head. “It’s just so … so…”

  “Magnificent,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Magnificent.”

  He slid his arm around her shoulders and for several moments they stood together, silent, awestruck.

  “I come here often,” Gomez said softly. “I need to remind myself of what I’m dealing with.”

  Raven forced herself back to reality. It wasn’t easy, with the heavens gazing down at her, but she made an effort of will.

  “Tómas, Mr. Waxman fired me. I don’t have a job anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “He called and told me. He said you’d come crawling to me now.”

  Sudden anger surged through Raven’s veins.

  Before she could say a word, though, Gomez told her, “I can hire you as my assistant. You’ve been doing the work, why shouldn’t I pay you for it?”

  “Tómas, I can’t—”

  “Of course you can’t,” he said, in a near whisper. “I don’t want you to. I don’t want to buy your love, Raven. I want you to love me, really love me.”

  In the light of the stars, she saw that his eyes were gleaming.

  “I don’t know if I can, Tómas. I don’t know if I know how to!”

  “Time will tell, Raven. Time heals all wounds, so they say.”

  “So they say,” she echoed.

  He let his arm fall away from her shoulders. Turning toward the blister’s hatch, Gomez said, “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”

  Raven walked alongside him toward the hatch, thinking, I don’t deserve him. I don’t deserve him.

  But as they stepped back into the long, curving passageway that led back to the habitat’s living quarters, she saw that Gomez was smiling happily.

  MANEUVERING

  It took more than four weeks for the Astronomical Association to put together a digging team and send it, with its equipment, to Haven.

  Abbott’s team of astronomers had little to do but wait. Several of them left the
habitat and returned to Earth. Abbott himself jaunted back to Earth for more than a week, then returned on the same vessel that brought the digging team.

  During the weeks of waiting, Raven and Alicia worked on the idea of opening a women’s clothing shop.

  “Evan is absolutely against it,” Alicia told Raven over dinner in her quarters. “He doesn’t want us to become independent.”

  Sitting across her narrow kitchen table from Alicia, Raven said, “Then we’ll have to go over his head.”

  Alicia blinked. “Reverend Umber?”

  “Reverend Umber,” Raven confirmed.

  “You’re serious!”

  “He’s the only one who can trump Evan.”

  “But what makes you think he’ll agree with us? What makes you think he’ll go against Evan?”

  “He’s worried about Evan,” Raven answered. “Besides, who else can we turn to?”

  Alicia had no answer.

  * * *

  “It’s good of you to see me, Reverend,” said Raven.

  She had seated herself in front of Umber’s handsome desk, wearing the standard gray uniform of the habitat, feeling like a nun or a novice come to beg a favor from the head of a medieval holy order.

  Umber made a small gesture with his right hand. “Not at all, Raven. Your well-being is important to me, as is the well-being of all our people.”

  Trying to look penitent, Raven said, “What I’ve come to ask you is out of the ordinary, I know.”

  Umber’s brows rose noticeably. “Really?”

  “You know Alicia Polanyi?”

  “She’s Evan’s assistant, isn’t she?”

  “Part of Evan’s harem.”

  She saw Umber’s head snap back as though she had slapped him. For an endless moment, the reverend said nothing. Then, tiredly, “I’ve tried to show Evan the error of his ways, but he just nods and goes right ahead doing what he wants.”

  “Alicia and I want to break free of him.”

  “Evan told me he fired you.”

  “Yes, he did.”