Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  Sandstrom glared at Camille for a moment before turning and heading out. At the doorway, he turned again. "You know what I think? I think you should get the hell out of here, right now. Just bugger off."

  Camille collapsed into the chair. Welcome to Europa.

  She recalled David Lammerman's words: "What Mobarak's giving you is a vote of confidence . . . but don't think that means the solution will be easy."

  Fair enough. But what was she supposed to do when the solution became impossible?

  * * *

  For the next twenty-four hours, Camille wandered the interior of Mount Ararat and found that her reputation had preceded her. Buzz Sandstrom had done exactly as he had threatened. What he said was anybody's guess, but people recoiled from Camille as though she carried the Great War plague. They were willing to tell her where she could obtain food, and that was all. Their faces told her to head back to the ship and return to Ganymede.

  After hours of lonely effort, she managed to find the communications center and tried to contact Hilda Brandt. The research director was still away on Ganymede.

  Camille placed the call. What did she have to lose? She was ready to try anything, and the worst that Brandt could do was to order her to leave Europa. She waited in the com center for six hours, until she had read every note and number in the place. Her call was never returned. That was a message all by itself.

  She put on her suit and wandered back out to the deserted landing area. The ground cars sat in protected storage vaults. She examined a couple of them and found them in good working order, with plenty of fuel. Their controls were simple, too—nothing that she could not handle; but she had nowhere to go.

  At last she went on foot up the gentle slope of the crater to its smoothed lip, then over and down the slope of Mount Ararat until the bare rock gave way to crumpled ice. She walked a few hundred yards out, trying to gauge how difficult it would be for a car to traverse what she saw. There were plenty of hills and valleys, but none of the jagged rifts and crevasses that marked most of Europa's surface.

  Camille could feel the crunch of compressed materials beneath her boots. She bent low for a closer examination.

  It was water-ice, but the upper inch or two had a strangely granular and spongy appearance. Millennia of sputtering by protons and heavier sulfur ions had riddled the top layers, to leave a porous slab that crunched and gave under Camille's weight. It was Europa's version of a regolith, a crumbled outer layer pounded by endless impact. The ice was relatively firm, enough so that she should be able to move across it to the steep-sided ice ridges and valleys. But what was the point of aimless rambling? She was interested in what lay below the ice, not on top of it.

  It was hopeless. Camille was ready to give up.

  Except that she couldn't stand the idea of Mobarak's cool acceptance of failure, or—perhaps worse—David's understanding smile.

  She walked gloomily back to the inside of Mount Ararat and headed for the cafeteria, to eat a solitary meal there. The food tasted like ashes, although it was surely no worse than that served in DOS Center. She left her plate half-filled and set off again, wandering obsessively through the dimly lit interior corridors. The news of her movements somehow traveled ahead of her. There were two hundred in the research station, but she encountered only five of them in her travels.

  At last she went to the computer center for the fourth time and logged on with no trouble. The conventions were the same system-wide. As before, she soon found herself at a dead end. She could not get to any of the information that she needed. She had no password of her own, no local knowledge, and access only to the most general data files. There were tantalizing hints that what she needed about Europan geography was available—somewhere. But where?

  She began to skip around in the files, randomly browsing. Her breakthrough, when it came, looked like such a trifling advance that at first Camille did not know that she had something important.

  A couple of the locked files did not simply reject her request for entry. Instead, they sent a message in return: "General access prohibited. If you are with user sites E-1 through E-4, press the override key to initiate data transfer." Camille liked the idea of an override key into the data banks. It was just what she needed. But how did a user obtain that privilege? Who were those lucky people, Mister E-1 and Miss E-4, who were allowed into locked files?

  Camille had no idea. What she did have was a vague recollection of the same symbols being used somewhere in the communications center. She headed back there—another half-mile jaunt through the unfriendly corridors of Mount Ararat—and started to hunt.

  She found them eventually, in an unlikely place. They were pinned to the wall, as part of a list of dedicated signal frequencies. Which meant that E-1 and the other three were not individual data-user identifications; they had to be places, to which signals were sent and from which signals were received using those assigned frequencies.

  Which left only the question, where? Not anywhere on Mount Ararat, that was for sure. Yet not at some distant location in the Jovian system, either, since off-Europan communications were handled by the same nonlocal communication net that she had used to send her unsuccessful message to Hilda Brandt.

  Camille made up a message that said nothing, and gave E-1 as its destination. It produced an unexpected result. A Level-Two female Fax popped into view on Camille's screen.

  "The geometry is unfavorable for transmission," it said politely. "Do you wish to send anyway, or wait and retransmit later?"

  "I may have the wrong destination. Can you confirm the location?"

  "In what form?"

  A great question, since Camille had no idea of what the options were. "Place?"

  "Place name, or coordinates?"

  "Both."

  "Your given message destination is named Sub-Jove. Its coordinates are one degree north, two degrees east. Do you wish to transmit?"

  "I'll wait." Camille cut the connection. She now knew exactly where E-1 was located: on the other side of Europa, facing squarely at Jupiter. Messages would have to go through a couple of relay satellites, and apparently they were not at the moment in favorable orbit positions. And E-1 must be the Sub-Jove camp's access point to the computer systems, a node located outside the Mount Ararat base. It was Camille's first hint that off-base facilities even existed.

  But it made sense. If scientists were in the habit of staying out on the ice for periods of weeks, even months, they would still need access to base data. And if the internal pointers were to be believed, users away from base could read all data, even if they couldn't write to any but their own files.

  But reading data, and recording what she read, was all that Camille needed.

  She sent the same message in rapid succession to the three other destinations. One good thing about a low-level Fax, it would never notice a repeating pattern of behavior and start to ask questions about it. E-2 was like E-2, over on the other side of Europa and far out of reach. Camille could fly there in her ship, but she would have no way of landing. E-3 was nearby, but it was right at Blowhole, where Camille's presence would be sure to arouse unwanted attention and interference. The fourth one, E-4, was out beyond Blowhole, nearly sixty kilometers from Mount Ararat. It would be hard to reach, even by ground car; but it was her only hope of progress. And—a big plus—according to the Fax, Skagerrak Station was currently unoccupied. If Camille could get there, she would be able to work without interruptions.

  She had a toehold on her problem. But this time she was determined not to be impulsive. Too much was at stake. She signed off the communications system, returned to her hermit's cell, and went to bed. If the idea of taking a trip to an off-base facility still seemed worth a try in ten hours' time, she would make the attempt.

  And if it did not?

  She might go anyway.

  Camille slept for five hours, woke up with her mind furiously active, tossed in her cot for another thirty minutes, and finally gave up.

  Bette
r admit it, she was committed.

  On the walk to the ground vehicles she did not meet a soul. She was inclined to think of that as a good omen. She climbed aboard, checked power and supplies again—ample—and started the motor. The ground car purred its way up and over the lip of the crater, down the hillside, and out onto the ice on its combination of runners and wheels.

  Sixty kilometers was not a long way for a normal surface trip, no more than an hour's jaunt; but she wanted to avoid Blowhole, and quite apart from that she had little hope of being able to follow a direct route. Europa's exterior was just too broken and jagged. Within the first ten minutes she found one crack too wide to cross and another too deep to see the bottom. Camille drove slowly and carefully, making detours around anything that looked steep enough to be dangerous.

  She estimated that she would reach Skagerrak Station in maybe seven or eight hours. She felt really good: cool, calculating, and cautious; certainly not—banish the thought—impulsive.

  It never occurred to Camille that impulsiveness is only one of many ways of being stupid.

  15

  Needle in an Icestack

  The loss of the first baby tooth. The moment when you looked into a mirror and realized that was you in there.

  The first serious date. First love, and first loss. That single, intrusive grey hair. There was a first time for everything.

  With slow horror, Nell Cotter realized that she was going through another first.

  "I knew it, you see, the moment I set eyes on her," Tristan Morgan was saying, his face as miserable as his chipmunk cheeks would permit. "I said to myself, that's the woman for me, the only one I'll ever want if I live to be ten thousand. I suppose in some ways it must have happened even before we met, because when I heard Wilsa's music, I felt that it spoke to me alone. And then I finally did meet her, and she seemed to like me, too. So to lose her, just like that, in a split second . . ."

  He was pouring out his heart. But not, Nell realized, as he would have done to someone his own age.

  No. He was opening up to Old Mother Cotter, a lady who was experienced and understanding, and ancient beyond belief. Peter Pan was consulting some wrinkled, antique crone who felt, for the first time in her life, "ever so much older than twenty."

  She wanted to shake him and say, "Hey, Weepy Willie, wait a minute. What about me? I'm not quite past it, you know. Suppose I happen to feel the same way about Jon Perry?"

  Instead, she nodded and said, "Don't give up. We've been jumping to conclusions, but we may be misunderstanding things. Wait until we see them again and hear their side of the story." Which meant, depressingly, that she was even older and more case-hardened than Tristan seemed to think. Because she didn't believe for one moment that there had been a misunderstanding. What they had witnessed was a classical lightning flash of mutual attraction, followed by a severing of former ties and an instant dumping of old ballast in the form of Nell and Tristan.

  And when you admitted that fact, you had to face another one: If you needed a hot story about Cyrus Mobarak and the Europan fusion project, you wouldn't be able to piggyback on Jon Perry anymore to get it. You'd have to find your own way.

  A new thought? Not at all. It had been banging around inside Nell's head long before Tristan Morgan started hustling around the Jovian system, trying to soothe his upset feelings by frantic action. She had traveled with him, because something was going to happen in the world of the Jupiter satellites, something big, something that would make a hell of a story. She was sure of it. The feeling had come to her before, half a dozen times, of forces converging to an unseen focus, and she had always been right. Maybe that was what Glyn Sefaris meant when he told Nell that she had a way of "being there."

  She felt it now, the lines were drawing closer. But her sense of impending action could not tell her what would lie at the focal point. So far, she had found nothing worth reporting. There were small points of interest, such as the way that Von Neumanns were used throughout the Jovian system in situations where Earth workers would automatically do a genome boost to a natural form. But that would make at best a three-minute "Them and Us" comparison clip.

  An Outward Bound robot mission to a nearby star had an even lower rating potential, but she had attached herself to Tristan because he was her only local contact. She had endured a couple more of the awful meetings of the Immaturity-of-the-Year awards ceremony that called itself Outward Bound, then leaped at the chance of a trip to the deuterium-separation facility on Ganymede. They had moved from there to the main plant, on a big ice fragment beyond Callisto, and then to an observers' visit to Hebe Station. During the Hebe landing, the price for Nell's ticket had at last been made clear: She was to serve Tristan as Mother Confessor.

  Before that thought could emerge in full flower, it was pushed aside by another one.

  "Tristan, we've flown to three different locations. But you've never once called through for permission to go anywhere, or permission to land."

  "I know. It's because this ship and I are part of a Starseed troubleshooting group, and we have to go all sorts of places in a hurry. So we have a special deal where we act first, then fill out the paperwork afterward. Otherwise we'd never get anywhere in time to be useful."

  It took a minute for his words to sink in; she must be getting as old as Tristan seemed to think she was. "Are you telling me that you have an automatic permit to go anywhere in the Jovian system?"

  "Pretty much anywhere. I don't know what would happen if I tried to land someplace exclusive, like the General Assembly's private recsat."

  The first rule of the business: Go take a look.

  "Tristan, instead of standing around worrying about how Wilsa feels about you, why don't you ask her?"

  "I'd love to. But she's on Europa."

  "That's no more than three or four hours away. So why aren't we on Europa? You just told me that you can go there if you want to. Can you?"

  He rubbed at a rounded cheek. "Well, I suppose so. Go talk to Wilsa directly, you mean? That's a pretty attractive idea. I guess I ought to put in a call to Hilda Brandt—we get on real well—just to make sure it's all right."

  He was already reaching for the communication panel when Nell grabbed his hand. Damn it, she was experienced and understanding and ancient beyond belief—compared with some people she could mention.

  "Tristan, don't you dare. She might say no. And then where would you be? Let's just up and go. It's a whole lot easier to get absolution than permission."

  He was nodding, slowly. "Do you really think it's all been some sort of misunderstanding?"

  I wouldn't take odds on it. "I can't say. But what I can say is that we'll know for sure—as soon as we arrive on Europa and talk to Wilsa and Jon."

  * * *

  To Nell, everything about Europa was no more strange than any totally new experience had to be. What made less sense to her was Tristan's obvious sense of uneasiness when the ship landed at Mount Ararat spaceport and a little robot car growled them along through a warren of underground tunnels.

  "You said this is just a small outpost research station." Nell wondered when it would be safe to remove her suit; they ought to be far enough under the surface by now to be shielded, and there was already air around them. "And you told me not to expect a welcoming committee. So why does it worry you if we don't have one?"

  "You've got it backwards." Tristan kept his gaze on the tunnel ahead. "I'm worried because there will be a bunch of people to meet us, as soon as we get off this car. You didn't see the answer to my last message. When I gave our ID and expected time of arrival, they fired back a reply saying they'd be here waiting. That never happened to me before. Makes me wonder if they checked and found out we're not approved to come here."

  For once, Nell was forced to agree with Tristan. Attention from the Mount Ararat staff was the last thing she needed.

  But they didn't have a choice. When the car finally halted, eight people came to surround it. By Europan standards, that
was a crowd scene. A crowd, however, that did not include either Wilsa Sheer or Jon Perry. Nell climbed down and was suddenly glad that she and Tristan still wore their suits. If there were guilt on his face, it wouldn't be seen for another few minutes.

  Except that quite enough guilt was already visible in the waiting group. Nell knew how to read body language. Without even thinking about it, she turned on her midget video camera.

  "Welcome to Mount Ararat." The man standing at the middle of the group didn't sound welcoming at all. "I'm Buzz Sandstrom. I must say I didn't expect you'd be here so quickly. Now I'm wondering if we've dragged you all the way from Ganymede for nothing."

  Tristan was silent. Shocked to silence? Nell nodded, encouraging the man to continue.

  "We can't be sure," Sandstrom went on, "but we suspect that something bad must have happened to her. If anyone should get the blame for what happened," he added grudgingly, "I suppose that I'm the one."

  Nell nodded again, still not speaking. Sandstrom was swallowing, obviously uncomfortable. Confession time was not yet over for the day.

  "But I mean . . ."He gazed at Nell for absolution. "I didn't mean no harm. When she came here, out of the blue like that . . . well, I just got mad. Who wouldn't have? She didn't come here to help Europa, see? She came to ruin all our work. Or to try to. So I got mad, and I guess I got everyone else feeling the same way. And then—"

  "What do you mean, something bad happened to her?" Tristan had seized and fixed on that one phrase, and he couldn't bear to wait any longer. "Is Wilsa in trouble?"

  It was Sandstrom's turn for confusion. "Huh? Wilsa?"

  "Wilsa Sheer. You said something bad happened—"

  "Not Wilsa Sheer. She's fine, or I guess she is. She went down under the ice with Dr. Perry, and they're still there. I'm talking about Camille Hamilton."

  The name registered with Nell, because she was still receiving briefings and updates on Mobarak's Jovian system activities. But she was willing to bet that it meant not a thing to Tristan Morgan. He had removed his suit helmet, and now he was gaping at Buzz Sandstrom, who seemed to mistake his popping eyes for strong disapproval.