The Wave and the Flame

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Danforth slumped resentfully. “Didn’t I make major sacrifices for economy?” He gestured around the crowded cubicle, at the tangles of flatwire snaking about his feet, at the monitors in their noncustomized racks. “Not exactly state-of-the-art, if you know what I mean.”

  Clausen’s sigh was mild. “What an ungrateful wretch you are, Tay.”

  “Oh? How often have I had to sit here listening to you bitch about having to spend six weeks doing nothing but polishing your goddamned hand-sewn multimillion-dollar imported Italian climbing boots!? With a little more money, just a little, we’d have a Lander capable of more than one lousy round trip, and you could have spent those weeks in the relative comfort of the Orbiter!”

  Clausen nodded tolerantly. “I’m surprised you don’t blame this unfortunate weather on CONPLEX’s funding level. But enough of this bickering. Tell me, Taylor, how good is your practical geology?” He dipped deep into a pocket and produced a chunk of pale granitic rock. “Know what this is?”

  Danforth sulked, not looking up. “I bet you can’t wait to tell me.”

  “You should spend more time in the field, Tay. You’ve been staring at those screens so long, all you can do is whine like a little old lady.”

  “So leave. You won’t have to listen.”

  “Fresh air and sun would do wonders for your disposition.” Clausen tossed the rock in a loop and caught it neatly. “Well, it’s granite. I bring it to cheer you up. Pegmatites similar to this are a source of recoverable deposits of lepidolite. Lepidolite is a respectable lithium ore. I would be happy with lepidolite.”

  “You think raiding your sample box is likely to cheer me up?”

  “Taylor, this is local rock. I found it in the Caves, just inside the Fourth Entrance, practically lying on the ground. Imagine what I might find up there, deep inside those cliffs, if the clever little buggers didn’t manage to sidetrack me every time I think I’m getting in past the first maze of caverns. I know it goes in deeper than they’d like us to think!”

  “You show me this now, after you rake me over the coals?” Danforth glowered. “You are one bona fide sonofabitch, Clausen.”

  The prospector grinned. “Just you keep that in mind.”

  Danforth massaged his forehead. “I’m the one who should have stayed with the Orbiter.”

  “Six weeks in parking orbit? That prospect amuses you? They’re eating each other alive up there these days.”

  “Nah. Spacers are used to it. Look at Weng. She’s happy as a clam sitting all day long with a plug in her ear. Plus taking up valuable computer time with her so-called compositions.”

  “Weng’s music is actually rather interesting. If I understand her correctly, she’s exploring the use of game theory as a compositional rubric.”

  “Nothing new,” muttered Danforth.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you heard the results. Music of the spheres and all that. Ask CRI to play some back for you sometime.” Clausen’s stubby hands toyed with his hunk of rock. He held it up to the amber light flooding through the port. Minute specks glinted in tiny ragged crannies, sharp as the gleam of anticipation in the prospector’s eye. “So. You ready to go out looking for some more of this?”

  “Sure. You bet.” Danforth swiveled back to his console without enthusiasm.

  “Now.”

  Danforth chuckled dutifully.

  “I’m quite serious, Tay.”

  The black man shook his head. “It’ll take more time than we have till sunset to dig out one of the Sleds.”

  “Nope.” Clausen placed the rock on the keypad, between Danforth’s outstretched hands. “Because, one, the snow is melting faster than you can imagine, and two, the way B-Sled’s positioned down there…” He paused to straighten a forefinger toward the floor. “If we dropped the force field, we could use the hot air from the Sled fans to melt an exit ramp up through the ice.”

  “Drop the field? Risky.”

  “Mmmnh.”

  Danforth steepled his fingers over the rock. “With the melt, we don’t know how stable the icepack is.”

  Clausen shrugged.

  Danforth pushed the rock aside. “Get McPherson to help you. She’s into risking everyone’s life. I’ve got to stick it out here, with all this new data coming in.”

  “Ah, Taylor. You do weary an old man’s patience.”

  “That so?”

  “And you will force me to say it, won’t you?”

  “Now what’s that, Emil?”

  Clausen’s jaw twitched. “That you have something I need.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t pout, Tay. It’s so boring.” Clausen moved sharply to the console. “CRI, local wind speeds, please.”

  “Variable,” the computer replied. “Gusting from eighteen to thirty-five meters per second.”

  “That’s thirty-six to seventy mph,” Danforth offered automatically.

  “I am well aware of that,” Clausen growled.

  “And I am required to remind you,” CRI continued, “that although the manufacturer’s safety limit for the Sleds in this atmospheric density is twenty-five meters per second, Commander Weng insists on a limit of twenty.”

  “Thank you, CRI.” Clausen reached to cut off the computer’s audio intake.

  “Why did you… ahhh.” Danforth met the other’s glance with a sudden schoolboy leer. “You haven’t checked this out with Weng, have you?”

  The prospector matched his grin silently.

  “And where is our Commander at the moment?”

  “Up in the Caves.”

  “So? Go ahead. Go.”

  Clausen pursed his lips, eyes half-lidded once again. “Due to certain technicalities in the chain of command, I need proper authorization in order to instruct CRI to lower the shield.”

  Danforth snorted. “Why bother with technicalities? You can fox your way around CRI’s programming well enough to get her to do anything you want.”

  “I prefer to walk the right side of legal whenever possible.” Clausen lowered his head and regarded Danforth sideways. “With the Commander unavailable, you can make that authorization.”

  “So I can.” Danforth stretched his legs, leaned back against the pockmarked wall, playing the moment, enjoying himself hugely. “She’s not going to like this, you know.”

  “Tay, do you care? This is a minor insubordination compared to the ones you’d like to commit.”

  Danforth chewed his lip and glanced unnecessarily at the data screens. “One hell of a wind out there. You’ll pilot?”

  “Of course. You think I’d trust you at the stick?”

  “I’m not happy about letting down the shield,” Danforth began, “but since you’re such a sly bastard…” He finished with a grin of appreciation, drew in his long legs and rose. “As Chief Scientist and Captain of the Landing Party in the Commander’s absence, I hereby authorize this use of expeditionary equipment.” As he stood, the cubicle became too small to hold him. Energized, he swung an abbreviated punch at the air, narrowly missing the shorter man’s ear. “Well? Let’s get on it, before she comes back!”

  “DANFORTH!”

  Out in the corridor, the magnetic lift rattled as it bumped up the Lander’s central shaft with a slowness obviously maddening to its occupant.

  “DANFORTH!”

  The conspirators hesitated at the cubicle door. Clausen swore softly as he watched Danforth’s enthusiasm twist into a scowl.

  “DANFORTH, WHERE THE HELL…!” The stream of outrage broke off as the cage rose to level with the floor. The safety grating was slammed aside with a screech and a crash.

  Clausen’s easy grin reappeared on cue. “Why, Stavros, what a pleasant surprise.”

  A wiry young man whirled out of the lift and stormed down the corridor, dismissed Clausen with a single glance and glared up at Danforth. His thick black hair fell matted across his eyes as if he had been tugging at it. Over soiled white ship’s fatigues, he wore a brown knitted Sawl tunic. The wool stretch
ed tight across his shoulders and the sleeves had been extended in an unmatching rust color to fit his longer arms. Though his ordinary height allowed Danforth to tower over him, this did nothing to dampen his fury. “Since when do you refuse emergency calls?”

  “Couldn’t have been much of an emergency, Ibiá,” Danforth drawled nastily, “since you’re standing here in one piece.”

  Clausen stood a bit aside, wishing that someone, like the Commander, would order Ibiá to get a decent haircut. In an earlier colonial era, the boy would have been disciplined for setting a bad example to the natives. Clausen’s objection was mainly aesthetic, the welfare of local populations not being high on his list of priorities. But in addition, Ibiá was always the wild card in the prospector’s machinations. He wore his eccentric demeanor as if in reproof of the others’ willingness to observe some measure of comfortable convention. Danforth was particularly vulnerable to this goading, perhaps afraid that successes unorthodoxly achieved might somehow undervalue his own. Danforth’s fragile ego made him an easy target.

  But Ibiá was not so easily manipulated. Clausen’s pre-expedition snooping had assured him that the boy was brilliant, that his new translation programs represented a unique approach to computer linguistics, but he was also, Clausen suspected, genuinely unstable. It was the prospector’s usual habit to encourage such bitter rivalries, but lately he had found it inconvenient that Danforth, the older and far better established in reputation, could not occasionally relax into his seniority. Instead, he rose to Ibiá’s bait every time. In his humbler moments, Clausen doubted that even his own long-practiced diplomatic skills could effect any resolution between two men who had hated each other from the first day out.

  Ibiá shoved damp hair back from his eyes. His skin glistened with sweat even in the controlled dryness of the Lander’s air system. “We’ve got to evacuate to the Caves!” he blurted. “All the equipment! Everything we can carry!”

  Danforth gave a hard incredulous laugh.

  Ibiá hesitated. The lean, stubborn angles of his face, a legacy from the westerly side of his Mediterranean ancestry, smoothed under his conscious effort to collect himself and pump more credibility into his message. “We have to leave, Taylor, you understand? We’re too vulnerable down here on this plain. The priests say…”

  “The priests say?” Danforth folded his arms across his broad chest with a magisterial air. “Now let me get this straight. You want us to desert ship, uproot the entire base camp into some dank cavern, on the strength of some native dictum?”

  The younger man began to pace the narrow corridor, focusing his agitation on the white-tiled floor. “Just listen to me for once, okay? The Sawls say a big storm’s coming. Wind, rain, terrible flooding. They’re concerned for our safety. They’re making serious preparations up there, and they’ve warned us to do the same.” His dark eyes flicked toward Danforth in a resentful pleading. “Liphar convinced the guildmasters that it’s their responsibility to offer us shelter in the Caves. You think they’d sacrifice precious space if it wasn’t critical?”

  “You’re nuts, Ibiá. You actually thought I’d buy this nonsense?”

  Ibiá blinked, then gathered himself back into strained calm, as if trying to talk a moron out of doing himself harm. “Taylor, you don’t know that it’s nonsense. This is their world. You will grant that they know it a bit better than you do.”

  Clausen chuckled softly, understanding why Danforth found the young man so infuriating. “Tay, I share your distaste for all that smoke and sweat and dubious sanitation,” he put in languidly, “but they do seem to be engaging in some rather extensive efforts to batten the hatches up there.” He nodded toward the sunlit porthole. “Take a look.”

  Ibiá surprised him with a grateful look in his direction.

  “Impossible,” countered Danforth. “There is no storm coming.” He ducked back into the cubicle. “CRI, display…” he called, then remembered. He cut the audio back in. “Display all current weather data from the local stations, up on Six and Seven, then give me an updated short-range forecast on Eight and Nine, long-range on Ten. Oh, and restore hemispherics to holo.” As the screens filled, Danforth reached through the door to grab Ibiá by his knitted sleeve and drag him into the room. “Show me. Show me any indication of this monsoon you’re predicting!”

  “I’m not predicting it, the Sawls are!”

  “Look at the data!” Danforth thundered. He jabbed stiff fingers at each screenful of figures, his hand slicing through the holographic image of a clearing planetary sphere. “Warm wind out of the southwest, bone-dry, temperatures up, pressure steadying… or are pictures easier for you?” He fiddled needlessly with the holopad’s contrast controls. “See? Not a cloud in the entire hemisphere, Ibiá, Where’s your precious storm? Where?”

  The young man squirmed in the confining cubicle. As he stared at the ungiving figures, he would have paid dearly for one iota of fact to support the Sawls’ claim. “What about the thaw, then? You didn’t warn us about that ahead of time.”

  Danforth’s mouth tightened. He stooped to squint at the screens reflexively. Ibiá did not smile as Clausen did.

  “That didn’t show up in your data, did it?” the young man demanded, less in triumph than in relief.

  “It…”

  “The Sawls knew,” he insisted, his voice rising. “The moment the snow stopped, they were preparing for the thaw, before the sun came out, before the wind! They knew! The priests told them!”

  Danforth shrugged dismissively. “Coincidence. A local phenomenon.”

  “NO!” Ibiá swallowed, backing toward the freedom of the corridor. His breath came low and rapid as he rounded on Clausen, who was lounging against the doorframe. “Checked your seismometers lately?”

  The prospector nodded, a hint of grudging respect complicating his slow smile.

  “And?”

  “Avalanches, my dear Stavros, as you are obviously aware.”

  Danforth stared. “Thanks for telling me. Where?”

  “All over the bloody place. Haven’t you heard the rumbling? So much for your local phenomenon.”

  Ibiá’s grin was sudden and manic. “See? One morning you’re frozen solid and by noon you’ve got a plague of avalanches! Anything could happen, eh, why not a monsoon? The point is, Danforth, you don’t know!”

  “Avalanches are not unusual in a thaw,” the planetologist began.

  Stavros knew he would lose control before he actually did. But as always, it was too late to do anything but taste the familiar dry regret at the spectacle he would soon make of himself and wonder if he would ever learn to catch himself in time. He knew the world judged him self-indulgent, but it little realized how close to the abyss such moments brought him. He backed through the cubicle door, brushing past Clausen heedlessly as his voice rose unbidden to a grating squawk… “All right, don’t listen to me! I don’t give a shit! Better for all of us if you get washed into oblivion!” He put a hand to the wall. The emptiness of the corridor was not enough relief. He could not escape the shame of his own ranting. “Stay here as long as you like, the hell with you, but as Communications Officer, I’m ordering every piece of equipment under my command moved up to the Caves immediately!” He sucked deeply for air. The corridor wall was hard against his sweating back. “That includes this installation as well, Danforth! I hope you’re a terrific swimmer!” Nauseated, he bolted for the lift. The gate crashed shut behind him.

  “You’ll need Weng’s permission, damn you!” Danforth roared after him.

  “Already got it!” Ibiá screamed, as the lift descended.

  Danforth swore and slammed his stool against the cubicle wall. “Punk! I’ll be damned if I’ll…” He whirled on Clausen.

  “Is that the best you could do? Some punk fresh from the university with authority over my equipment? You could have said something, you know! You could have stopped him!”

  The prospector raised a mild eyebrow. “I?” He shook his head. “The odds ar
e always against you when you tangle with a lunatic.”

  “Yeah? Well, how’s CONPLEX gonna like its equipment being dragged off into the bowels of the earth?”

  “Most of our equipment is quite at home in the bowels of the earth. We are a mining company, after all.”

  Danforth shoved the stool against another wall, adding a long scrape and a dent to its already tortured surface.

  Clausen sighed. “Look, Tay, it’s of little import to us where our equipment is as long as we have the use of it. Let him move it about if it keeps him occupied. Besides, it’ll give us a good excuse to hang around the Caves, maybe slip in further while they’re not looking.”

  “I can’t work in those filthy holes!” Danforth raged. “That asshole could have me off-line for hours!”

  “Fine. Let him. We now have fifteen and one half hours of light left, and most of that is dusk.”

  “It’s cold and it’s dark and I won’t let the little bastard get away with it!”

  “Tay. He already has. Now shall we get on with our own business?”

  “What business?” Danforth braced both arms against the console and glared possessively into his monitors.

  “B-Sled?”

  “B-Sled. Right.” He was calming, but his fingers still twitched a brusque staccato. “Hell, it’s too late for that now. They’ll be crawling all over the ship, with Ibiá on the loose.”

  Clausen smiled lazily. “So let’s have a little fun, then, what do you say? Snatch that Sled right out from under his nose.”

  Danforth’s answering grin came slowly as the possibilities took hold of him. He took a deep breath, straightened, then nodded. “Emil, you’re on. We’ll do it. Stupid sonofabitch probably won’t even notice.”

  Clausen chuckled. “Oh, I think he’ll notice.”

  7

  Susannah hauled herself up into the long shade of a tower of red rock and dumped her pack and camera in an inglorious heap. The hot south wind whipped damp spikes of hair across her eyes as she struggled to appear less breathless than she felt. She glanced back along the trail at Liphar, whose methodical plodding during the upward climb had made her dance with impatience. Now, as he neared the top, she saw that he was barely winded. By rushing the four-hour climb along the rugged scarp, she had exhausted herself, allowed her sample bags to languish empty at the bottom of her pack and left her sketchbook uncracked. But she could not generate much guilt. She had accepted the lower pay scale for xeno field work in order to avoid the claustrophobia of the labs, only to find herself imprisoned in ice for six weeks. This sudden weather change was like a reprieve. She felt catapulted toward the sun and open air.