Uranus

by Ben Bova

  Taking the black man’s hand in his own and smiling tightly, Waxman said, “It’s good to meet you face-to-face, Noel.” Gesturing to the two upholstered chairs in front of the desk, he said, “Why don’t you sit down? Lunch should be here shortly.”

  Dacco seated himself in the chair to his left. Is he left-handed? Waxman asked himself.

  Easing back into his own commodious chair, Waxman asked, “So how is everything going back on Earth?”

  “Very well,” said Dacco, still smiling. “Sales are steadily increasing. You might give some thought to raising your production goals.”

  “That good?”

  Nodding, Dacco said, “The habitats in Earth orbit are a strong market. So are the stations orbiting Jupiter.”

  “And the Rock Rats?”

  “A reliable market. It’s all in the reports I’ve sent you.”

  Waxman nodded. “Your latest report mentioned some problem at the power complex on Mercury.”

  “A little argument over paying for the Rust they’ve ordered. It’s being straightened out.”

  “No pay, no Rust,” said Waxman. “They pay up front.”

  “That’s our policy, I know. But we’ve found that letting the customer have a sample before he plunks down his money makes it much easier to get him to pony up the whole amount a little later.”

  Waxman shrugged. “A distribution problem.”

  “It’s being handled. No worries.”

  Waxman’s phone buzzed. He glared at the tiny console. “I said no interruptions!”

  His assistant’s voice replied timidly, “Your lunches are here, sir.”

  “Oh. Bring them right in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The office door slid open again, and Waxman’s assistant carried in a sizeable tray loaded with a pair of lunches and drinks.

  “On the conference table,” he told the woman.

  Dacco eyed her appreciatively. She was tall, willowy, with reddish-blond hair and a doe’s provocative eyes. Slim figure, but long legs—almost hidden by a floor-length black skirt that was slit from the hip.

  She set out the two lunches on the corner table and left the office without a word.

  “She’s a refugee from Earth?” Dacco asked, once the door slid shut behind her.

  “War casualty. Lost her right leg in the fighting in Tasmania.”

  “Pity.”

  “She does very well with her prosthetic leg.”

  “In bed?”

  Waxman smiled thinly. “Or on a trampoline.”

  Dacco’s look of surprise made Waxman want to laugh. But he suppressed the urge.

  * * *

  Nearly an hour later, as the two men sat at the circular conference table with the scattered crumbs of their lunches between them, Dacco said, “I had dinner last night with a woman who told me she used to be your assistant.”

  Waxman almost uttered Alicia’s name, but he held himself back at the last instant. No sense letting him know I can watch him without his knowledge of it.

  “My assistant?”

  “Alicia Polanyi.”

  “Oh, her.” Waxman forced a chuckle. “She’s opened a women’s clothing boutique. She and a former whore. They’ll go broke in a month or so.”

  “Really?”

  Waxman nodded as he reached for his cup of coffee.

  “She seems quite determined to make a success of her establishment,” Dacco said.

  With a careless shrug Waxman replied, “They’ll be out of business very soon.”

  “Pity.”

  “The iron laws of economics.”

  “The dismal science.”

  Waxman asked, “Did you find her attractive?”

  “A little too skeletal for me,” Dacco replied. “The other one was much sexier.”

  “Raven Marchesi. She ought to be sexier. She was a whore, back on Earth.”

  “Not here?”

  With a sly grin, Waxman answered, “Almost.”

  For several silent moments, Dacco seemed to mull Waxman’s reply in his mind. Then he said, “She seems attached to the astronomer.”

  “Gomez? Really?”

  “Looked that way to me.”

  “Raven and Tómas Gomez,” Waxman mused. “That’s interesting.”

  “So she’s not available?”

  Waxman studied Dacco’s face and saw desire burning in his dark eyes. He asked himself, Can I bind him to me with Raven? It’s worth a try.

  “She can be made available,” Waxman finally answered, with a knowing smile.

  BOOK FIVE

  THE ENGINEER

  THE HOSPITAL

  Vincente Zworkyn lay on the hospital bed glaring down at his left leg. It was covered by a plastic bandage from just above the knee down to the ankle. It didn’t hurt much, but it itched maddeningly.

  Damned fool, he told himself. Damned stupid, overeager, moronic idiot. Jetbike racing. At your age. Trying to show the youngsters that you’re just as good as they are. Reckless irresponsible asshole.

  His hospital billet was screened off for privacy, but his team had squeezed in to visit him and offer their apologies for the accident. The four young men and one woman crowded around his bed, all looking as sheepish as children who had been caught raiding the cookie jar.

  “Wasn’t your fault,” Zworkyn told them, trying to smile despite his foul mood. “I should have known better.”

  It had seemed like a good idea, a bit of fun to break the monotony of their dedicated work. A race around the circular passageway of the Haven II habitat on jetbikes borrowed from the recreation center on the older wheel. Zworkyn had sped into the lead as they zoomed along the kilometers-long passageway, past teams of robots working on the construction details. Fun to feel the wind in your face and know you were ahead of the kids.

  But it only took one discarded hammer lying on the passageway’s flooring to flip Zworkyn’s bike into the air and send him flying ass over teakettle into a newly installed section of paneling, badly bruising his back and breaking his kneecap and the slender fibula below it.

  The hospital’s medical staff had welcomed him with barely hidden glee: they seldom got to deal with such interesting fractures.

  Now he lay on the hospital bed, waiting for the stem cell injections to repair his bones. He felt little pain: even his injured back was quickly healing, thanks to modern electrotherapy.

  But his leg itched. Zworkyn imagined he could feel the microscopic stem cells knitting his broken bones together. No, the chief of surgery explained to him, gently, patiently. The itching was psychosomatic. Had to be.

  His team mumbled apologies and good wishes and shuffled out of his narrow space. Alone now, he glared at the bandaged leg, wishing that he could reach down and scratch the damned itch.

  His bedside phone buzzed.

  “Yes?”

  “Professor Abbott wishes to visit with you,” the phone replied.

  “He’s here?”

  “He’s in the waiting room.”

  “Send him in!” Maybe, Zworkyn thought, Abbott could get his mind off the insidious itch.

  Zworkyn raised the bed to a sitting position as Abbott pushed through the curtains that surrounded his narrow berth.

  “Well, well,” said Abbott, extending his hand. “How are you doing, Vince?”

  Zworkyn made a grin. “Not too bad. They tell me I ought to be out of here tomorrow.”

  Pulling up the enclosure’s only chair to the edge of the hospital bed, Abbott said, as he sat down, “Really? That’s remarkable.”

  “Stem cells.”

  “Ah.”

  “How’s everything in the uninjured world?”

  Abbott tilted his head slightly. “Your people and my people are working together rather nicely. They’ve been scanning images we’ve gotten from the sub, trying to reconstruct the city down there.”

  “So? Have they come up with anything?”

  “It’s a hard slog, I’m afraid,” Abbott said, unconsciously tugg
ing at one end of his moustache. “The city’s been thoroughly flattened. It’s almost as though some angry god smashed it all with a superhuman hammer.”

  Zworkyn nodded.

  “And the dating is all out of whack,” Abbott went on. “Uranus was smashed by a sizeable planetoidal object back during the time of the Late Bombardment, some four billion years ago. Yet all the radioactive dating we’re getting from the city’s remains are much younger. Much younger. Something’s badly out of whack.”

  Almost smiling, Zworkyn muttered, “That’s what makes science interesting, don’t you think? The unanswered questions.”

  Fingering his moustache again, Abbott replied, “I wish it wasn’t so damned interesting! I want to find out what happened down there.”

  With a heartfelt sigh, Zworkyn agreed, “So do I, Gordon. So do I.”

  * * *

  Raven tried to suppress a frown as she looked at Noel Dacco’s grinning face on the viewscreen of the boutique’s computer.

  “A date?” she asked. “You want to take me to dinner?”

  “I find you very attractive,” Dacco replied.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Noel. I’m practically engaged to Tómas Gomez.”

  Dacco’s smile didn’t diminish by as much as a millimeter. “Practically?” he asked.

  “He loves me.”

  “And you love him?”

  Raven’s breath caught in her throat. Then she answered, “Yes, I do.”

  Waggling a finger at her, Dacco said, “You had to think about it.”

  “I love him,” Raven said, more firmly.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a fling with me? It doesn’t have to mean anything. Just fun. One last fling before you tie the knot with Tómas.”

  Raven shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

  Dacco’s smile evaporated. He said, “From what Waxman tells me, you weren’t so reserved before you came here. And you’ve slept with him often enough.”

  “That’s over!” Raven snapped.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  With a careless shrug, Dacco said, “Okay. You can’t blame a man for trying. You’re a very delectable dish. But you already know that.”

  With a hand that trembled slightly, Raven tapped the screen’s OFF button. That’s not the end of it, she told herself. Waxman’s pointing him at me, like a hunter unleashing his dog to chase down a rabbit.

  Well, I’m no rabbit, she thought. And wished it were true.

  THE LATE BOMBARDMENT

  Vincente Zworkyn lay back on his bed in his darkened compartment, his eyes closed as he tried to will himself to sleep.

  But in his mind he saw the Late Bombardment.

  Some four billion years ago, back in the early days of the solar system’s existence, countless chunks of rock and ice hurtled through the newly formed planets, blasting out continent-sized craters whenever they smashed into a fledgling world.

  Zworkyn saw the turmoil, the havoc, the mayhem as thousands, millions of worldlets zoomed through the young solar system.

  Four billion years ago, he said to himself. The craters that those cataclysmic collisions gouged out of the young Earth’s red-hot crust were erased in time, smoothed away by four billion years of weathering: wind and rain and continental drift. But the young Moon, airless and waterless, kept the evidence across its cratered surface. When human explorers reached the Moon, they dated the craters that blanketed its bleak surface.

  Four billion years ago, Zworkyn repeated to himself. While the Earth and Moon were being pummeled, Uranus was hit by a truly massive planetoid, smashed so hard that the planet was knocked over sidewise, its poles pointing to the Sun, unlike any other world in the solar system.

  That cataclysm scrubbed Uranus clean of all life. All life. Down to amoebas and even microscopic chains of DNA. Not just the city we’re exploring. All life. Destroyed.

  Zworkyn stared at the darkened ceiling above him, clean and white. He listened to the monitors clicking and chugging away behind him at the head of his bed.

  All life. Wiped out. Four billion years ago.

  But why does the evidence we’ve pulled up from that destroyed city date it at only a couple of million years old? Two million years ago. That’s about when the last ice age began on Earth. It’s practically yesterday afternoon, in the history of the solar system.

  Zworkyn closed his eyes and tried to let go of the puzzlement that bedeviled him. But instead of drifting to sleep he kept thinking about Uranus, lifeless, scoured clean of every living organism that once inhabited it. From the creatures who built that city down to the molecules that formed the basis of life. All gone. Destroyed. Wiped out.

  His eyes flashed open. What if the cataclysm that knocked over Uranus’s spin didn’t happen during the Late Bombardment? What if it happened only two million years ago?

  Then it would all fit! The planet was knocked over sideways. The city down there was flattened. All life on Uranus—all life, down to the molecular level—was eradicated.

  What could have caused that? he asked himself. Then he shivered as a wave of cold swept over his healing body.

  Not what could cause that, Zworkyn realized. Who could cause that? Who destroyed all life on Uranus?

  * * *

  Gordon Abbott frowned down at Zworkyn’s body on his hospital bed as the two doctors finished their examination of the patient.

  The male doctor straightened up and smiled at Zworkyn. “You’re fine. Kneecap and fibula are both completely repaired. You’re free to go.”

  The woman doctor nodded. “All indices in positive territory. You can get up and leave whenever you’re ready.”

  Abbott thought, Physically, Vincente is healed. But mentally…? I wonder.

  As the two medics left his narrow stall, Zworkyn sat up on his bed. “Gordon, that’s got to be the answer. Uranus was battered over sideways a scant two million years ago, not during the Late Bombardment!”

  Abbott shook his head. Softly, almost pityingly, he said, “That’s absurd, Vince. You can’t believe—”

  “Where’s the evidence that Uranus was knocked sideways during the Late Bombardment? It’s all conjecture! Why couldn’t it have happened two million years ago instead of four billion?”

  “Where’s the evidence for that?” Abbott snapped.

  “Down at the bottom of the ocean! That smashed city. The radioactive dating tells us it was smashed two million years ago. That’s real, hard evidence, not conjecture.”

  “The Late Bombardment isn’t conjecture.”

  “Yes, I know. But there is no actual evidence that Uranus was whacked sideways at that time. That idea is conjecture! Truly!”

  Abbott was frowning. “Two million years ago there weren’t big protoplanets whizzing through the solar system. How do you explain Uranus being smacked sideways? What caused that?”

  “Not what,” Zworkyn replied. “Who.”

  “Who?”

  “What happened on Uranus wasn’t natural, Gordon. Not a cataclysm that erases all life on an entire planet, down to the molecular level. It was a deliberate act of destruction.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “So was Wegener’s idea of continental drift,” Zworkyn countered. “But it turned out he was right.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. Damned serious.”

  Abbott’s face was turning red. “You can’t seriously believe that some interstellar invader wiped Uranus clean of life. That’s the stuff of fantasy!”

  “So were airplanes and rockets and colonies on Mars, not so long ago.”

  The look on Abbott’s face was more of sorrow than anger. He shook his head slowly. “Vincente, my friend, you’re going off the deep end. Maybe you need a bit more rest here in the hospital.”

  “No,” Zworkyn barked. “We need to excavate the ruins down there at the bottom of the sea and find out what they have to tell us.”

  Abbott started to reply, caught
himself, then began over. “Well, that’s something I can agree with. When in doubt, study the evidence.”

  “Right,” said Zworkyn.

  “But if I were you, Vincente old friend, I wouldn’t spout your E.T. invasion idea to anybody. Not until you have some real evidence to back it up.”

  Zworkyn nodded. “I suppose that’s right.”

  “You bet it is.”

  SEARCHING

  “Can you keep a secret?” Tómas asked.

  He was sitting beside Raven on the sofa in her living room, watching the Zworkyn team’s report on the latest samples they had dredged up from the ruined city at the bottom of the sea.

  Raven nodded easily. “Keep a secret? Sure.”

  “No,” Tómas said, turning to face her. “I mean really keep a secret. Not tell anybody else. Deep and dark.”

  She saw that he was totally serious. “If you want me to.”

  “It’s something Zworkyn told me. In total confidence. But it’s so crazy, I’ve got to tell somebody about it or burst.”

  “I’ll keep your secret, Tómas. I promise.”

  “Well…” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Zworkyn thinks that the city they’ve found was wiped out by aliens.”

  Her eyes widening, Raven asked, “Aliens? Like extraterrestrials?”

  Tómas nodded solemnly.

  “Wow!”

  “I don’t know if he’s gone off the deep end,” Tómas said, almost wistfully. “Maybe that jetbike accident has rattled his brain.”

  “Does he seem okay? I mean, has he done anything weird?”

  “No, but this afternoon he told me what he thinks about the city down on the seabed. It sounds crazy to me.”

  “Did he give you any reason for what he believes?”

  Tómas quickly ran through Zworkyn’s reasoning. Raven followed it, just barely.

  Touching Tómas’s arm, she asked, “Does any of it make sense to you?”

  “I learned about the Late Bombardment in undergraduate school. Everybody thinks that’s when Uranus got knocked over sidewise.”