Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  He thought about demanding the questions in advance. But he wouldn’t want to have it get about that one of the world’s most spontaneous thinkers had to have everything up front. “Tell me, uh…” He hesitated, his mind blank. “What did you say your name was, again?”

  “Casey Hayes.”

  “Tell me, Casey, how do you happen to be on this flight? Did you have some sort of foreknowledge about this?”

  She tilted her head and gazed steadily back at him. He decided he liked her. She seemed intelligent for a woman journalist.

  “Why, no,” she said. “In fact, I’m not supposed to be working at all. The ticket was a birthday gift from my parents.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’re very lucky to have such parents.”

  “Thank you. I’ll confess I thought that the prospect of watching worlds crash into one another had considerable possibility for a story. If I could get the right angle.”

  “Let us see if you’ve done so, Casey. How did you plan to approach the matter?”

  “By finding one of the world’s most brilliant editors and presenting his reactions to the public.”

  The woman had no shame.

  She gazed steadily at him. He thought he saw the glitter of a promise, of a suggestion for a reward down the road, but ascribed it to the same male software that rooted him in place, that prevented his precipitate retreat to his quarters. “Maybe,” she continued, “we could talk over lunch tomorrow, if you’re free? The Topdeck is quite nice.”

  The Topdeck was the most posh eating spot on the vessel. Leather and silver. Candles. Bach on the piano. Very baroque. “Doesn’t seem quite right,” he said.

  “All right” She was all compliance. “Where would you suggest?”

  “I put it to you, as an alert journalist. If you were going to interview someone on the significance of the Titanic, or the Rancocas, where would you propose to hold the conversation?”

  She looked blank. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Since both have been recovered and, to a degree, reconstructed, surely nothing would serve as effectively as one of the forward staterooms.”

  “Oh,” she said. And again: “Oh! You mean go down to the surface.”

  Did he mean that? But yes, why not? History of a sort was about to be made. It wouldn’t hurt his reputation to be present at the nexus. He might be able to put the appropriate interpretation to events. The world’s uplifters, sentimentalists, and moralists would be in rare form during these next few days, drawing what lessons they could from the death of a sentient species. (How sentient, of course, would never become an issue.) There would be the usual references to the event as a warning from the Almighty. It occurred to him that if any of these unfortunate creatures were actually found, there would be a heart-wrenching outcry for some sort of desperate rescue effort, presumably from the decks of the Evening Star.

  Why not indeed?

  “Yes,” he said. “If we want to talk about Deepsix, then Deepsix is the place we should go.”

  She was hesitant. “I don’t see how we can arrange it,” she said. “Are they sending any tours down?”

  He laughed. “No. But I’m sure it can be managed. We have a couple of days yet. I’ll see what I can do.”

  When he got back to his stateroom, MacAllister locked the door and sank into a chair.

  The journalist reminded him of Sara.

  Not physically. The angles of Sara’s face were softer, Sara’s hair was several shades darker, Sara’s bearing not quite so imperial. They were both about the same size and weight, but once you got beyond that, it was hard to see a physical similarity.

  Yet it was there.

  The eyes, maybe. But Sara’s were green, Casey’s blue. Nonetheless, he recognized the steady gaze, and maybe something in her expression, in the way her smile played at the corners of her mouth or the way her voice softened when she thought she could work her will no other way.

  Or maybe his imagination had simply run wild, because he was on a flight that was going to become memorable, and he would have liked very much to share it with Sara.

  After spending twenty years relentlessly attacking marriage as an institution for the mentally deficient of both sexes, an evolutionary trap, he had met her one evening during a presentation to a group of young journalists. She’d invited him to dinner because she was working on an assignment and it required an interview with him. He was at the time perhaps America’s best-known misogynist. The grand passion always wears out, he’d maintained. He’d set its maximum limit at one year, three months, eleven days.

  With Sara, he never got a chance to test his figures. Eight months after he’d met her, three weeks after the wedding, she’d died in a freak boating accident. He hadn’t been there, had been in his office working on Premier when it happened.

  It was a long time ago now. Yet no day ever passed that he did not think of her.

  Sara had lived in many moods, somber and delighted, pensive and full of laughter. Her last name had been Dingle, and she used to tell people that the only reason she’d consented to marry him was to effect the name change. It had, she said, always been an embarrassment.

  He couldn’t have said why, but that was the Sara whose spirit occupied his stateroom at the moment.

  Stupid. He was getting old.

  He collected a strawberry clipper from the autobar and called up the library catalog. There was a new novel by Ramsey Taggart that he’d been wanting to look at. Taggart was one of his discoveries, but he’d begun coasting. MacAllister had spoken with him, shown him where he was going wrong. Nevertheless the last book, a dreary adultery-in-the-mountains melodrama, had shown no improvement. If the trend continued in this latest book, MacAllister would have no choice but to take him to task more formally. In public.

  He thought through the conversation with Casey, because it seemed to him he was missing something. He was not one to put himself to trouble on behalf of others, and yet he’d volunteered to do an on-site interview that would seriously inconvenience him. Why had he done that?

  Gradually, it occurred to him that he wanted to go down to the surface of Maleiva III. To walk among its ruins and let its great age surround him. To soak the sense of oncoming disaster into his blood, What would it be like to stand on the surface of that doomed world and watch the giant rushing down?

  To manage things, he would have to win over the assistance of Erik Nicholson.

  Nicholson was the captain of the Evening Star, a small man, both in physical stature and in spirit. He was, for example, quite proud of his position, and strutted about like a turkey. He spoke in a manner that was simultaneously distant and weak, as if he were delivering divine instructions from the mountaintop and hoping you’d believe

  MacAllister was scheduled to join the captain for dinner next evening. That would serve as an opportunity to draw him into a private conversation and get the ball rolling. The trick would be to find a reason strong enough to persuade him it would be in his interest to send the ship’s lander to the surface. With MacAllister in it.

  The book came up and he started on it. Once or twice, though, he glanced around the room to reassure himself he was really alone.

  V

  All the important things that ever happened to me occurred while I was going someplace else.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Notes from Babylon

  Wendy’s shuttle delivered two passengers, the additions to the ground survey team, to Wildside. Hutch met them in the bay, where they traded introductions.

  Kellie Collier was a head taller than Hutch and wore a standard blue-trimmed white Wendy Jay jumpsuit She shook Hutch’s hand warmly and said how pleased she was to be included.

  Chiang Harmon’s Asian ancestors revealed themselves in the shape of his eyes but nowhere else that she could see. His hair was brown, he was big-boned and broad-shouldered, and he seemed a trifle clumsy. Hutch decided on the spot she liked him. She also recognized that he had more than a professional i
nterest in Kellie.

  “Either of you ever been down on a frontier world before?” she asked.

  Kellie had. Although she confessed she’d never traveled anywhere beyond the bases and outposts. “No place where there might have been trouble,” she admitted.

  On the other hand, she knew how to use a stinger.

  “We don’t have any stingers on board,” said Hutch.

  Her eyebrows rose. “You’re going down onto a potentially lethal world without weapons?”

  Hutch showed her a cutter.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Hutch turned it on. A blade of white light appeared. “Laser,” she said. “Cut through anything.”

  “I don’t think I’d want to let the local gators get that close.”

  “Sorry,” said Hutch. “They’re all we have. We have to make do.”

  They had half a dozen on board. They were probably a notch or two more efficient than the cutter Biney Coldfield had used to fight off the cardinals. They were a basic tool for archeologists, but in the right hands they also made an effective weapon. But Hutch was unsure whether her volunteers were people to whom she was willing to entrust the weapons. If they weren’t, she decided, she shouldn’t take them along.

  She’d given long consideration to the wildlife hazards on Deepsix. There’d be no repetition of the earlier mistakes. She’d put together a set of operational requirements that everyone would adhere to without exception. She gave each of them a copy, and insisted they read and sign it before the discussion went any farther. Any deviation, she explained, would result in the offender’s being shipped back into orbit. Posthaste.

  Did everyone understand?

  Everyone did.

  She showed them around Wildside. They found Scolari and Embry in the common room, where Chiang asked whether they were going down to the surface, too. When they replied that they weren’t, both looking uncomfortable and a shade indignant, Kellie glanced at Hutch, and it was impossible to miss the judgment she’d just made.

  “Why not?” Kellie asked innocently. “It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  “I’m not an archeologist,” said Scolari defensively. “And to be honest, I think it’s a damn-fool thing to do. That place down there is full of wild animals, and it’s going to start breaking up at any time. I don’t plan to be there when it happens. Not for the sake of a few pots.”

  Embry smiled coolly and let it go.

  Hutch would have preferred more young males in the group, because she hoped they would be cutting engraved stones out of walls and hauling them back to the lander. Gravity on Deepsix was .92 Earth normal, and .89 Pinnacle, which was the level to which Toni was accustomed. It would help somewhat, but they might still have use for some muscle.

  Nightingale joined them, and they did another round of introductions, and then took time for a training session. Hutch explained the importance of getting pictures of whatever they might find, and of taking measurements and mapping where everything was. “We do all that,” she said, “before we touch anything.”

  She described the hazards, not only from predators, but simply from moving around in an ancient building. “Be careful. Floors will give way; overheads will cave in. Sharp objects won’t penetrate your suit, but they can still punch holes in you.” She invited Nightingale to speak about his experience. He was understandably reticent, but he advised them not to underestimate anything. “The predators on Deepsix have had an extra couple of billion years to evolve. They have very sharp teeth and some of them look innocuous. Trust nothing.”

  She handed out the cutters and talked about how they would be used and where things could go wrong. She watched while they practiced, and required each to demonstrate proficiency. “Be careful in close quarters, if it comes to it. The cutter is almost certainly more dangerous than anything we’re going to meet.”

  Nightingale met that remark with a frown. But he said nothing.

  She dismissed the rest of the team and ran a short course for Chiang in wearing the e-suit. The others were experienced with working inside a Flickinger field.

  They joined Scolari and Embry for dinner. Whatever tension might have existed seemed to have dissolved. Embry even made a point of taking Hutch aside and apologizing. “I hope you don’t think this is personal,” she said. “My objection is to management. If they hadn’t had a chance to do this earlier and get it right—”

  “I understand,” Hutch said.

  The lander was loaded and ready to go. Hutch opened the cargo hatch and turned to face her four passengers. “We’ve stowed rations for ten days,” she said. “That’s more than we’ll need. Temperature is a few degrees below zero Celsius at noon near the tower. Atmosphere is breathable, but the mix has a little more nitrogen than you’re used to. Breathe enough of it and you’ll start feeling detached and lazy. So we’ll leave the e-suits on when we’re outside. There’s no known problem with biohazards.

  “I want to reemphasize that nobody wanders off on his or her own.” She looked around, made eye contact with each of them to make sure her meaning was clear, and to assure herself they would comply. She was prepared to refuse passage to anyone who looked amused. But they all nodded.

  “A day on Deepsix is a bit over nineteen hours long. We’ll be landing near the tower in the middle of the night, and we’ll stay with the lander until sunrise. After that we’ll play it by ear.

  “Incidentally, we’ll be going down on snow. We don’t think it’s very deep because it’s close to the equator, but there’s no way to know for sure.” She looked at Nightingale. “Randy, anything to add?”

  He stood up. “I just want to underline what Hutch said. Be careful. Protect one another’s backs. We don’t want to leave anybody down there.” His voice sounded a bit strained.

  “I tend to ask people to do things,” Hutch continued, “rather than tell them. Habits are hard to break. But I’ll expect immediate compliance with any request.

  “You’ll have a vest that you should put on after you activate the e-suit. You can put tools, sandwiches, anything you like, in the vest. Keep the cutter in the vest and never put it in a trouser or shirt pocket. The reason is simple: If you need it and it’s inside the suit, you won’t be able to get to it. Furthermore, if you figure out a way to get your fingers around it, and you activate it inside the suit, you’ll be limping for a long time to come.

  “Any questions?”

  There were none.

  Hutch checked the time. “We’re going to launch in eight minutes. In case anybody wants to use the washroom.”

  If the experts were right, they had twelve standard days before breakup would begin, which meant they really had about a week before conditions would become unduly dangerous on the surface. So her intention was to move with dispatch.

  Kellie’s enthusiasm caught hold of the others, and they carried it into the lander. Everyone was excited, and even Nightingale seemed to have shed his dark mood.

  Somebody applauded when she launched. A half hour later they dropped into a blizzard, and emerged finally into gloomy, overcast skies at an altitude of four thousand meters. The landscape below was utterly dark. The sensors provided glimpses of rolling hills and broad plains marked by occasional forest. Several large clearings might have been frozen lakes. The ocean, the Coraggio, lay a couple of hundred kilometers north, behind a wall of mountains.

  The lander possessed dual-purpose jet/rocket engines, to enable it to maneuver in space, or to function as an aircraft. It was an exceedingly flexible vehicle, owing largely to its spike technology, which was the heart of its lift capability, allowing it to hover, to land in any reasonably flat space, and to leave the atmosphere without the necessity of hauling along vast amounts of its hydrogen fuel.

  Power for all systems was supplied by a Bussard-Ligon direct-conversion reactor.

  Hutch listened to her volunteers talking about how anxious they were to get into the tower, and she wondered about her own responsibility bringing them down
. She couldn’t do the work alone, yet she had the sense that only Nightingale understood the dangers. She had never before led people into a hazardous situation. She had seen what Nightingale’s errors had cost, what they’d done to him personally, and she wondered why she was taking so large a risk. What the hell did she know about keeping people alive in what Kellie had accurately described as a lethal environment? She thought seriously about calling the whole thing off, returning to Wildside, and sending her resignation to Gomez.

  But if she did that no one would ever know who had built the tower.

  Hutch picked the structure up on her sensors and put it onscreen. It was a night-light image, brighter than it would be in normal optics. Nevertheless it looked old, dark, abandoned. Haunted.

  She was descending almost vertically, using the spike and guide jets, coming in cautiously. Her instruments did not reveal whether the snow-covered surface would be firm enough to support the spacecraft.

  She’d left the storm behind, but there were still a few flakes blowing past the windscreen. Otherwise, the night was calm, with only a breath of wind. Outside air temperature read -31° C. Here and there stars were visible through the partly cloudy skies.

  Hutch turned on the landing lights.

  Kellie was seated beside her, her dark features illuminated in the glow of the instrument panel. Watching her, Hutch became aware of a precaution left untaken. “Kellie’s our alternate pilot,” she said. “In the event something unexpected happens and I become…” She hesitated. “…kaput, Kellie will take over. Will succeed to command.”

  Kellie glanced in her direction, but said nothing.

  “I’m sure nothing’ll happen,” Hutch added.

  The ground surrounding the tower was flat, bleak, and empty. There was a scattering of hills on the western horizon, a patch of woods, and a couple of solitary trees.

  “I’ll set down as close to it as I can,” she said.

  The snow seemed to run on forever, losing itself finally in the dark. There was, she thought, a lot to be said for having a moon.