by Jerry Oltion
"Wait a minute," she said. "This is totally backward."
"It kind of is, isn't it?" Allen zoomed in with his camera until they could count the portholes. They weren't actually holes; from the inside they looked like rubber casts of portholes, and the airlocks looked the same way. He focused the camera on the outside, where the features were less distinct. "It's like the ship has been turned inside out."
Judy focused her own camera on the center of the open end. Sunlight didn't penetrate all the way to the nose, but when she zoomed in until the brightly lit parts of the ship slid off screen, the camera irised open and she could see deeper into the recesses of the ship by reflected light. The interior details went all the way up.
"It's a mold."
Allen narrowed his eyes. "A what?"
"A mold. You spray liquid metal on the inside surface, let it harden, and you've got a ready-made hull. Either that or somebody sprayed this stuff all around an already-built spaceship and then peeled it off."
"Why would they do that?"
"How should I know?"
That had to be it, though. Now that she had the right mental picture, the pods spaced around the tail made more sense. Those were engines, and probably fuel tanks as well, or at least that was where they would go. Even then the ship had a hell of a lot of power, but by the size of the body, Judy was willing to bet that it needed it. That thing could hold a couple of thousand people, easy. It was wide enough to spin on its axis for gravity. If the beings who built it were anything like people, the ship that came out of that mold was big enough to live in for months, maybe longer.
"There's got to be a habitable planet somewhere else in this system," she said. "That's a passenger ship."
Allen looked at the comparator screen. "There's five others, but they're not good candidates. One's tucked right up next to the star even closer than Mercury, and the other four are quite a ways out."
"One of them has to be inhabited," Judy insisted. "This thing came from somewhere, and I'll bet money it wasn't here."
He zoomed back out with his camera and swiveled it around until he could see the water world. "I don't know; there could be a whole society of dolphins or something like that down there."
"And how would they build something like this? They couldn't mine anything. And even if they could, they couldn't make a fire to smelt metals. They couldn't build telescopes, so they probably wouldn't even know about planets, or that there was any point in going out to them."
"Fish have eyes," Allen countered. "Clams build shells without fire. It would be harder for us to build a spaceship underwater, but who's to say how tough it would be for someone who lived there?" Judy looked at the cloud-and-ocean-shrouded world. "How many other satellites are there?" she asked.
Allen checked the comparator display again. "Just the one. But we probably wouldn't be able to see communications satellites or smaller spacecraft."
"We'd be able to hear them." She pointed at the radio, still set to receive and still silent.
"Maybe, maybe not. This is a shortwave receiver, not microwave. If they're using high frequencies to pack more information into the signal like we do, we'd never hear them." This was all just too much. Judy said, "So what do you want to do about it? Parachute down to the water? Then what? How are we going to talk to intelligent dolphins, even if they're down there? What happens if our cameras get wet and short out? We'd have to navigate home by dead reckoning." He held up his hands, palms out. They looked ridiculously small inside the oversize spacesuit cuffs, like a child's hands stuck on an adult body. "Whoa, slow down there. Nobody's talking about landing in the water. I was just saying maybe we shouldn't write this place off so quickly."
"And I'm saying we've already used up half our air. I'm all for meeting whoever built that spaceship mold, but I'm not willing to hang around searching for flying fish when there are five other prospective homeworlds that we haven't even looked at yet."
"Four," Allen said. "You can't seriously suggest that a planet closer to its star than Mercury could support life. Especially when the star is twice as bright as the Sun."
"All right, then, four. But let's go see."
He thought it over, then nodded. "Okay. No big deal."
No big deal. She nearly threw a can of beans at him, but it would have been too much trouble to dig one out of her sleeping bag. She just zoomed her camera back to wide-angle display and waited for him to key in the coordinates.
They hit the planets in order of distance from the primary rather than along the most direct route.
"Direct" didn't mean much anymore, Judy supposed. She wondered how long it would be before people stopped thinking in terms of distance altogether. Hopefully longer than it took her and Allen to find something actually worth going to all the trouble of coming out here for. The first planet was a bust. It was an airless rock with no moons, no satellites, and no evidence that intelligent life had ever visited it. Of course there could have been vast cities underground, or networks of small ones aboveground, and they would never be visible from space, but there was no radio traffic either, and no time to make a more detailed search.
The second planet was a gas giant, nicely ringed and accompanied by several moons of its own, each of which required at least a cursory look. Unfortunately, that was all they required; they were all either rocky or icy or both, and far too inhospitable to human life even if they had sported alien presence, which they didn't.
The third planet was a double gas giant, a Jupiter-sized ball of banded yellow-and-brown clouds and a pale blue one about half its size orbiting one another a couple million kilometers apart. Gravitational perturbations had swept the space between them clean of anything else, so there was no reason to stick around there.
The last planet was another rock, this time with an atmosphere, but at its distance from the sun there was no way that atmosphere could have any oxygen or nitrogen in it except as methane or ammonia. And there were no satellites in orbit around it, either natural or artificial. That was the last straw. Somebody had to have made the spaceship mold, and a mold implied that there was at least one complete spaceship somewhere in this planetary system, but it seemed to Judy as if they were deliberately hiding from her. They weren't listening to radio and they didn't show any sign of life; what did they expect of her, anyway? To top it off, the farther they got from the star, the colder the Getaway became. They could handle it easily enough inside their spacesuits, but Judy didn't like subjecting the tank itself to such extreme temperatures. And besides, cold air made her nose run, and the fluids were already pooling in her upper body from weightlessness.
"I'm fresh out of ideas," she said. "What do you want to do?" Allen scratched his head. "Well, I hate to leave a solar system that's got such direct evidence of intelligent life, but you're right about one thing: there's no place here for us to land. Even if we could find the ship that came out of that mold, the odds that the crew breathes the same air we do are pretty slim, so unless they can set us up with an environment box, we're going to run out of air and have to go home in a couple more hours anyway."
"I didn't come all this way in this damned tank to spend even more time in a box."
"The thrill is starting to pall a bit for me, too," he admitted.
"So what do we do?" she asked again. "Go back to Alpha
Centauri and stake a claim before it's all snapped up by homesteaders?" He tapped the fingers of his right hand in a nervous rhythm on the hyperdrive canister. "We could do that. That's actually not a bad idea for a fallback position. But we could be on the ground there in less than an hour from anywhere, so we still have time to explore one or two more stars. We're only halfway through the cluster; why don't we at least give it another shot?"
Judy shrugged, biting back a curse as the spacesuit's neck ring chafed her shoulder blades. "What the hell," she said. "As long as we're here." She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to work the tension out of the muscles. Who would have guessed that interstellar explo
ration would turn out to be so frustrating?
24
The next star was off to the side rather than farther away from Sol. Its actual position in space didn't really matter to anyone but the computer, but Judy wanted to keep a picture in her mind of where they had been. The stars were just numbers and dots on the map, but it seemed more real to her to imagine a short line from the Sun to Alpha Centauri, then a long line out to the star with the weird pseudo-organic junk in orbit around it, then another line at a bit of an angle to where they were at the moment, and a final jog off to the left to their next attempt.
She tried to work up some enthusiasm for the jump. Captain Gallagher of the Imperial Space Navy explores yet another star! But flying around in a septic tank and finding incomprehensible mysteries was not her idea of a stellar career. She wanted planets she could land on and aliens she could talk to, and she wanted them now. She knew she was being unreasonable. The universe couldn't be expected to answer to her whims, but at the same time she couldn't help wanting it to. One little terrestrial planet, with one little tropical paradise where she could get a tan under an alien sun—was that too much to ask?
Apparently so, at least so far. But they had air enough for one more try, and she wasn't quite ready to give up yet. She took a few deep breaths while Allen prepared the drive, then got ready on the video controls.
Three jumps later, they were at the target star. Another jump after that gave them data for the comparator to crunch. This star was almost a perfect match to the Sun in luminosity and spectral type, and there was a planet dead square in the middle of the habitable zone, but Judy still didn't allow herself to get excited. It could be another airless rock, or a gas giant, or even a passing comet that just happened to be in that spot in its orbit.
Another jump put them within visual distance. Judy panned her camera around in a spiral, waiting for the moment when her hopes would be dashed again, but when she saw the planet, she let out a gasp of surprise.
"Oh! It's . . . it's . . . there it is!"
It was as Earthlike as anyone could ask for, at least at first glance. White sworls of cloud, blue oceans, and this time—this time—there were continents. The distribution of landmasses wasn't the same as on Earth: This planet had a couple dozen continents ranging in size from Australian all the way down to that fuzzy boundary line where they become islands, with narrow seas dotted with smaller islands in between. The poles were covered with ice, and so were the continents down to about 40 or 50 degrees latitude, but where they weren't frozen they were a medley of color.
"I think we want to land fairly close to the equator," Judy said. "It doesn't look as warm here as Earth."
"You're right. How about the one we're coming up on?" Allen pointed at a continent that was just creeping up over the horizon. They watched it approach: an oblong patch of green and brown with a central mountain range running down its spine.
"It looks good to me," Judy admitted.
Their rotation was carrying it toward the middle of her field of view. She zoomed in on it as they swept over it, checking out the coastline, forests, plains—whatever looked interesting. To Judy it all looked interesting; she felt it calling to her like a siren calling ancient mariners to a perilous but irresistible rendezvous. This was her planet. She could feel it.
But it was already slipping away. They were moving across the sunlit face of it maybe two thousand kilometers up, but they were going way too fast to orbit at this distance. They would have to slow down and move closer if they wanted to go into orbit, then slow down some more in order to land. Judy checked their oxygen gauge: under fifty percent now and it was time to refresh the air again. They would have time to adjust their velocity, but that wouldn't leave them much room for error on the way back to Earth. Even if the planet's air was breathable, they had no compressor to refill their tank with.
"Screw orbiting," she said. "Let's just pick a spot and land." Allen chewed his lower lip. "Mmm, I guess we could da that. The vector translation maneuver assumes we're in orbit over the point we want to land on, but if we can make a good estimate of our vector, we can correct for that."
They didn't have Doppler radar or global positioning satellites to give them accurate numbers, but Judy had been in Earth orbit enough times to know what it looked like to be moving at 27,000 kilometers an hour just outside the atmosphere. It was harder to gauge their speed this far away, but it looked to her like they were crossing the width of the planet at least twice as fast as they should be, and moving away from it as well.
"I'd guess we need to kill about thirty thousand klicks per hour just to put us in orbit," she said. "If we want to come to rest, we probably need to kill fifty or sixty."
"That's going to take a while," Allen said.
"Then we'd better get started."
"Shouldn't we see if there's anybody here first?"
Judy glanced at the radio. It was still on, still in scan mode, patiently sifting through all the channels it could receive in search of a signal, but there had been nothing but crackles. Now that she thought about it, there were more of them here than there had been at the last planet, but that probably meant only that the atmosphere was more active here. There might be a row of thunderstorms on the leading edge of a cold front. She supposed they should call and see if anyone answered, but they would still have to slow down in order to land, and this time Judy was determined to do just that. If there were aliens already living here, so much the better. And if there were humans—well, she was going to set foot on alien soil today even if Nicholas Onnescu and his entire family had already set up a land office.
"We can call while we're slowing down."
"Uh . . . right." Allen set to work at the computer, and a couple of minutes later said, "Okay, this should put us just outside the atmosphere and falling outward, but it's going to be on the night side of the planet, so we won't be able to see for sure. Let me get another set of coordinates ready in case we're headed the wrong way or something. We might need to jump in a hurry."
"We won't be headed the wrong way. We can see our motion."
"Mmm hmm." He copied a set of numbers into the computer's clipboard anyway. "Okay, I guess we're—"
"Do it, already!"
"Here goes."
There was the brief moment of disorientation, and the video image went totally black. No planet, no stars, no anything. Judy tensed up, waiting for them to smack into the atmosphere at thousands of kilometers per hour, but after a few seconds she relaxed. If they were going to hit the planet, they would have done it already.
She swiveled her camera around until she could see the starscape peeking around the curved limb of darkness. New stars kept popping up from behind it as they rose; they were moving at a pretty good clip. It was frustrating not to have an actual velocity figure, though.
"Next time, we bring radar," she said.
"Bingo." Allen stretched, careful to avoid hitting anything vital with his arms. It was hard to do in the close quarters. "Still," he said, "we're doing pretty well, all things considered. I think we've proven pretty definitively that we don't need high-tech gadgets to function in space." Coming from a guy in a million-dollar spacesuit, that statement seemed laughable on the surface, but when you realized that the only thing the spacesuit had accomplished so far was to get in the way, it didn't seem so outrageous after all. Radar would be nice, and so would a spectrometer to help figure out what the atmosphere down below was made of, but they had a low-tech way to . . . no they didn't.
"Shit!" Judy punched the wall of the tank as hard as she could.
"What?"
"We forgot the fucking mice!"
She watched him realize what that meant. They had intended to bring along half a dozen mice, one of which they would expose to the atmosphere of each planet they landed on. If the test subject lived, they would try the air themselves, but if not, they would go on to the next planet. But of course in their rush to escape the cops, they had left the mice in their cage in
the house. They hadn't needed them until now, but they didn't have so much as a housefly to test the air below.
Allen looked as stricken as Judy felt. "What do we do?"
Judy swallowed. "I guess I get to play mouse."
"No way! If anybody should, it's—"
"It's me. You're the pilot. You're also bigger than me. If you keel over, I'd have a hell of a time getting you back inside the tank, and even if I managed it, I'd have to fly us home."
"You could do it. I've shown you how the programs work."
"And I showed you how to land the shuttle, too, but I wouldn't have let you do it unless there was no other choice. No, I'm the one who should test the air."
He didn't like that at all. "We should go home and get some mice," he said. She shook her head. "I didn't come this far just to turn around and go home. Let's at least give it a try. We can both stay right here inside, and you can put on your suit while I let some air in. I can do it just a little bit at a time, and if I start to get dizzy, I can pop my helmet on and be breathing pure oxygen in a couple of seconds."
"If the atmosphere is cyanide, you won't get a couple of seconds."
"It's not cyanide."
"How do you know?"
"Intuition." She stared him down, challenging him to counter that. Forty years of rabid feminism in America had been good for something: like most men, he'd been conditioned not to contest even the most outrageously sexist statement if it came from a woman.
She was starting to feel a little light-headed as it was. She opened the air valve on her side of the tank and bled out a couple of pounds, waited for Allen to do the same with his, then replenished their oxygen from the welding bottle. It didn't help her light-headedness, but she hadn't figured that was from the air anyway. Not directly.
