"Hey, she may be just fine." Sandstrom was scowling but defensive. "We wouldn't have sent that emergency message at all, you know, except like I said, it has been over twenty-four hours. And we got no idea which way she went, or why her ground car isn't broadcasting an automatic positional signal. And we don't know how much experience she has—nothing about her in our records, no reply yet to our Ganymede inquiries. She could be dead already out there and we'd never know it. She shoulda' left a message where she was heading, but she didn't. And Dr. Brandt isn't on Europa, and we haven't been able to reach her."
Sandstrom was becoming increasingly tense, and so was Tristan. But Nell was finally relaxing. Hilda Brandt was far away, and the way things were going there was no danger that anyone on Europa was going to tell her and Tristan to leave. Quite the contrary. The staff of Mount Ararat was desperate for someone—anyone—to take over and tell them what to do. No problem at all.
Nell kept her video running, removed her helmet, scanned the group standing in front of her, and smiled pleasantly at Buzz Sandstrom.
"I'm Nell Cotter, and this is Tristan Morgan." She held out her hand. "Let's do introductions. But before that, let's go someplace where we can all sit down. I feel sure that we can help you—just as soon as you give us a few more facts."
* * *
Camille Hamilton was not dead. Not yet. But she was not sure how much longer she could remain alive. She was realizing, rather too late, that she was in over her head. Literally.
The first twenty kilometers toward Skagerrak Station had been easy. The sun was up, reflecting from Europa's grainy surface with a bright but oddly cold light. After a few minutes Camille came across a group of tracks. She realized that they must be those of previous travelers who had been making their way toward Blowhole. The path ought to be the safest and the easiest. She followed the same route, and for three-quarters of an hour had nothing to worry about except boredom. She itched to get a look at the data from DOS, tucked away inside her pocket, but there was no way that she could drive and operate the car's computer at the same time.
A kilometer from Blowhole, the boredom ended. Camille could see through the car's front window, all the way to the open circle of water. The chances of being spotted by someone working at Blowhole were too high to risk. She waited until the car came to a smooth, shallow valley in the surface, then cut away along it to the left, on a path that ought to skirt Blowhole at a comfortable distance.
And at that point she realized how spoiled she had been for the first hour of her journey. She had traveled almost a third of the way to Skagerrak Station in smooth and carefree comfort. But the next kilometer taught her what most of Europa was really like. She followed her chosen valley, only to find that it grew steeper-sided and at last pinched down to a width too narrow for her car. She had to go into reverse—which meant tricky and slow progress—until she reached a place where she could head up the valley side and over to seek a better route. Ten minutes later, that route too was narrowing. She cut her losses while there was still enough room to turn the car around and decided on a new strategy. If the valleys were not obliging, she would try the hills.
At first it seemed an excellent decision. She could spy out the lay of the land far ahead, look for breaks and crevasses, and make her moves accordingly. Soon she was running along a broad arcuate ridge that stretched like a dark-backed snake as far as she could see. Her inertial guidance system told her that she was heading in just the right direction for Skagerrak. She ran on smoothly for over five kilometers.
It was the sound of the car's engine that finally told her something was wrong. Its higher-pitched tone and the increased power draw insisted that the car was moving uphill. Except that the car's instrument panel insisted, just as firmly, that it was traveling dead level.
Camille knew within a matter of seconds what must be happening. Under its own weight, the car was sinking a few inches into the spongy, sputtered ice cover; in moving forward, it was compressing the ice just in front of itself. Thus it was always climbing, but also always traveling level.
Solving the problem, though, was another matter. She had no idea if the surface was more or less firm down in the valleys to her left and right. For the moment, it made more sense to live with slower progress and increased power drain and just keep going as she was.
Except that option was about to disappear. A couple of hundred meters ahead, the smooth ridge ended in a murderously steep escarpment. Camille edged the car forward until she could see the severity of the slope, and decided at once that there was no way she would take a ride down that.
Which left three choices: go down to the valley on her right; go down to the left; or turn and go back the way she had come.
Camille stopped the car, climbed out, and examined the treads. They were embedded to a depth of a few inches, but there was no danger that they would lock permanently in the bubble-grained ice. She set off on foot down the left-hand slope and found that it easily held her weight. Behind her, the impression of her suit's boots left only a faint indentation, maybe a centimeter deep. She continued almost all the way to the valley floor and found it easy going. On the other side of the long depression there was an equally gentle slope, leading up to another powdery dark ridge.
She started back. It would do. And if she had to, she could always ascend the slope once more and try the right-hand side.
She started the car again, but instead of heading directly down the slope as she had done on foot, she angled it so that she would be making some forward progress at the same time.
It went easily for twenty meters. Then the car began canting to the left, and the tilt steadily became more pronounced. The weight on that side was driving the treads deeper. The farther the car inclined, the greater the imbalance of left and right.
But Camille was not greatly worried. If she had to, she would simply halt her forward progress and go into steady reverse. And if, in the worst possible case, the car became totally jammed in the ice, Blowhole was within walking distance of anyone with the protection of a suit.
The first inkling that there might be more to it than that came when the car began to descend into the ice, quite steadily and at a fixed angle. Camille realized that she had struck a patch of ultra-porous and weak surface, crumbling and soft enough for the whole car to sink into it as much as a meter.
Or two meters.
But still she did not realize the full extent of the trouble that she was in. Only when the view from the forward screen vanished, in favor of a dirty grey frost, did she wonder how far this could go.
She turned off the engine, and the only sounds in the car were those of the scrape and creak of ice, fracturing and failing beneath the car. That sound ended, but it was no relief. Camille was suddenly in free-fall for what felt like minutes; she later calculated that it was for just over three seconds.
The car landed with a final crunch, hard enough to jolt her but not to injure her. She was at last sitting level, and she heard and felt no sign of further settling.
Camille waited for a full minute to be completely sure. The car door slid open easily enough, but she was facing a wall of grey ice. In order to get out, she had to crawl to the rear and open the hatch that led through the roof.
She stared up at the rough-sided rectangular hole through which the car had entered. It was about six meters above her head, far out of reach. The pocket in the ice into which she had fallen was a good deal bigger than the entry hole, maybe eight meters long and four meters wide. It had been simple accident that the car had dropped in with its main door flush against one of the walls.
Camille lowered herself carefully over the rear of the car and tested the surface with one foot. It was quite solid, far more so than the friable upper crust. And although the floor of the pocket was nothing like level, she could move over its lumps and furrows and icy spikes with fair ease. Given Europa's low gravity, the top twenty or thirty meters of the moon's surface was probably honeycombed with caves lik
e this, of all sizes.
She worked her way steadily around the base and found no place where the ice underfoot was not solid enough to bear her weight.
Which meant that she was safe.
For the moment.
And after that?
Camille swore. At herself, and at her own stupidity. (She refused even to think the word "impulsiveness.") It had seemed to make such good sense to go to Skagerrak Station for easy access to the Europa data that she needed. But how much sense did it make that she had not sent a message of any kind, saying what she was trying to do and where she was going? The outgoing messages from Mount Ararat did not seem to be closely monitored. She could have sent word to David, using the same communications link through which she had tried to reach Hilda Brandt.
But she hadn't done that. Nor had she left any sign at Mount Ararat to show where she was heading. The most that anyone who came to look for her would learn was that she had left in a ground car. They couldn't track her, either, since she had followed the well-worn trail of other cars almost all the way to Blowhole.
Camille went across to the wall of the ice pocket, started to climb it, and found that it was too smooth near the top. She could scramble up to within a tantalizing few feet of the aperture, but then the wall curved over and inward. Even a fly would have had trouble traversing the final stretch.
She allowed herself to slide back down to the floor and stared up. Damn it, in gravity this weak she ought to be able to jump right up and out of the hole. Except that there was no place on the floor to provide firm footing, and there was too much danger of landing on some sharp-edged ice spike.
Camille became conscious of the chill in her gloved hands. Her suit was designed more for protection from particle flux than for thermal insulation. Once outside the warm car, her arms and legs were beginning to feel cold. Her idea of walking back to Blowhole if she had to would not have worked. She would have frozen long before she got there.
There was one other way that someone might find her. The ground car had its own transmitter for emergencies, and she could send a distress signal. The big problem was the geometry. The signal beam from the transmitter would not pass through a layer of ice, so it could be received only by a vehicle that lay within an upward-pointing cone, with the transmitter as apex and the rectangular hole in the ice above as its defining outer boundary. In practice, that implied a spaceborne or an airborne search. And it was not clear to Camille that there was such a capability on Europa.
She climbed back inside the car and began to inspect its status indicators; and learned that she was in much worse shape than she had thought.
Air, her first worry, was no problem. She had enough for a week or more. The killer was heat. Or lack of it.
She had checked the car's power supply before she left Mount Ararat and confirmed that it was ample, enough to allow the car to be driven for hundreds of kilometers. But it was not power that could readily be converted to warmth. And heat, not mobility, was what she would need as the car's internal temperature dropped.
Even in an emergency Camille thought like a scientist, and the irony of the situation struck her clearly. With the old, primitive engines of a century ago, the energy that allowed a car to move came from coal or oil or uranium. That energy was first produced as heat; then heat was in turn converted—inefficiently—to forward motion. But today's propulsion systems were far more sophisticated, and they disdained the redundant intermediate step. Raw energy powered the rotation of wheels or produced linear motion directly. The engines were far more efficient, and in every way superior—except in the one-in-a-million case where a car could not move and heat was exactly what the passenger needed.
So what about the power source designed to warm the passenger compartment?
That was pathetically inadequate. The ground cars were intended for trips of, at most, a couple of hundred kilometers, which in turn meant that no one expected them to be occupied for days at a time. The heaters, fully charged when she left Mount Ararat, would keep the cabin tolerable for another twenty hours or so. That was for a car out on Europa's frigid surface, and Camille would gain a little more time than that because the ambient temperature in her ice cave was higher. So she had, say, thirty hours at the outside, and then the cabin would slowly go into a deep freeze, where no human could possibly survive.
Camille turned on the transmitter—its power draw was negligible—and began to send a distress signal. She turned her attention next to the food supply. It, too, was energy of a sort: chemical energy, whose slow release within her body would provide its own heat.
There was plenty of food, enough for several days. But long before it was exhausted, she would be a block of ice.
Water was also ample: twenty gallons of it. It could be heated. But that would draw from the same energy source that heated the cabin.
The car's spare suit? She could pull that on over the one she was wearing and improve the insulation. But that would not buy her more than another hour or two.
Camille was out of ideas. She leaned back in the seat and felt her mind drifting away from the problem. All she could do was to sit, and wait, and live for as long as she possibly could. Her salvation, if it came, depended on someone searching for her, locating the signal beacon, and finding the car in time.
She took out the storage unit for her DOS experimental data and inserted it into the car's computer. It was an act of deliberate folly, a recognition of the fact that she had given up hope of saving herself.
She watched the first data elements creep onto the screen in front of her and felt as though her mind were dividing into two parts. At one level, dark and primitive, she was desperately concerned with sheer survival. At another, higher level she had already retreated into the abstract, manageable world of astronomy and physics, where time and space were measured in billions of years and billions of light-years, where an individual was of no possible importance.
The data analysis continued, and Camille began to see patterns. At the same time, her hands and mouth were continuously at work. She was eating the food supplies, and without thinking about it, she kept on doing so long after her hunger was satisfied. And while she ate, she was drinking water, as hot as her mouth and throat could tolerate it.
Drinking, and drinking, and drinking. A gallon; a second whole gallon.
And then a third, as after many hours the cabin temperature began to fall . . . slowly, but steadily, dipping toward a level where the carbon dioxide and water vapor in Camille's exhaled breath would become no more than a puff of ice crystals. Except that long before that, there would be no breath.
* * *
Nell was changing her mind again about Tristan Morgan. Absurdly innocent and idealistic by video-show standards, yes; but put him in the right situation and he became a powerhouse.
He had said that he was no stranger to emergencies, and now he was proving it. Even before all of the facts were laid out for them, he had begun to take action.
"All right, let's look at what we know, as opposed to what we guess or wish were true." He cut off the babble that was starting up again around the long conference table deep inside Mount Ararat. "Camille Hamilton is in a ground car, and she's nowhere on Mount Ararat. Given the car's speed, by now she could be as far away as eight hundred kilometers. Every hour that goes by increases that upper limit by thirty."
"I don't believe that she could be anything like that far away," objected a redheaded woman engineer who possessed a lot of Tristan's own mannerisms, and for that reason seemed to disagree with him more than any of the others. "I bet I've spent more time in ground cars than anyone here, and I'm telling you, once you get off the standard routes it's tough. You often won't make a kilometer an hour."
"I'm sure you're right. But I'm setting limits on what we know, not on what we suspect or conjecture. And I think that's all we know." Tristan looked around the table. "Am I missing something?"
"We know that the car has a transmitter to send an emergen
cy signal," said Sandstrom. "And we know that it's not in use."
Tristan frowned. "Not quite. We know that the car has a transmitter, I'll give you that. And we know that we haven't picked up a signal. But it could be operating with lousy geometry for ground reception." Tristan glanced around the table again. "Which brings me to my point. Based on what we know, Camille Hamilton could in principle be hundreds of kilometers away. In a case like this, you don't rely on ground search. You conduct search-and-rescue from orbit. The ship we came in can get us started, but it's not enough. It wasn't designed for high-resolution orbital survey. We need reinforcements."
"But we called already," said the redhead. "And we got nothing. You came here, but not to answer our call."
"So maybe you've been calling the wrong people." Nell spoke for the first time since the review of Camille Hamilton's situation had begun. "You said you called Hilda Brandt's office. But you already agreed that Hamilton doesn't work for Brandt, and never has. And you admitted that when you first found out who Hamilton did work for, you didn't much care what happened to her. Don't you think Brandt's staff on Ganymede might feel the same way you did? You know—some bimbo of Mobarak's arrives on Europa, and she's trying to cause nothing but trouble with her high-power fusion programs. So she gets herself into trouble? Poetic justice. The hell with her—let her find her own way out."
"But we don't feel that way anymore," said Sandstrom. He did not sound quite convincing.
"Maybe not. Because she's here, and you met her, and you know she's a real, living person. But I bet that to the staff of Ganymede, she's just a statistic. You won't change their views with a call or two."
There was the unhappy silence of agreement.
"So what can we do?" asked Sandstrom at last.
"Two things. Tristan, with help from a couple of your people, can use his ship to begin a scan from orbit. Even if we don't think it's likely to work, we have to try. And the rest of us can call for help to the only person in the Jovian system sure to want to provide it—the only person who can provide it. The man who sent her here: Cyrus Mobarak."
Cold as Ice Page 21
