She dug obliquely at Norm. “The Universe always has these tricks up its sleeve, when you go bopping blithely into something you don’t understand.”
Norm snapped back, “If it was so obvious, Mary, how come you didn’t see it? You were supposed to be figuring out the surface environment.”
She just glared at him for answer. Everybody knew the reason: the mindlink and the computer behind it would answer just about any question you could think of to ask it, but you had to think up the question yourself. The mindlink wasn’t an artificial intelligence; it had no initiative of its own.
Norm looked away from her, saying, “And life. How can there be life? This planet would have been a ball of ice till its sun went red giant, and that can’t have been more than a few hundred million years ago, at most. There hasn’t been time for life to develop.”
Ivan said, “We knew there had to be some life to make all that O2.”
“So there were microbes. Not monsters. How can there be multicelled life?”
Shrugging, Ivan said, “The planet closest to the star is about Earth sized, and this star was probably about like Sol before it went red-giant. Maybe the ice world was seeded beforehand.”
George felt a shiver run through his spine. He sat up in astonishment. “You mean spaceflight? You think a spacefaring culture left things behind?”
Ivan shrugged again. “Well, I suppose that’s possible, but I was thinking more of spores from the Earthlike world, preserved on the ice. Bacterial, fungal, whatever . . . that would give life a big head start when the ice thawed. It’s happened before. In the Home System, viable spores from Earth were found on some of the ice moons around the outer planets.”
Mary looked thoughtful. “Yeah, I remember that. There was a big sensation for a while, because it looked like we’d discovered extraterrestrial life.”
Impatiently, Norm said, “It doesn’t matter; we’ve discovered it here. So what do we do now?”
Ivan laughed. “We go down in history,” he said. “Provided we survive long enough to get the word out.”
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
–Part II, Stanza 8
Norm was beginning to loathe the meeting room almost as much as he loathed the people in it. In the meeting room he actually had to link up with his three crewmembers, had to ignore their hostility and pessimism and weakness while attempting to use their group intellect to come up with a solution to their dilemma. He came away from each such meeting feeling soiled, befouled with a filth no amount of water would wash away.
But he could see no other choice. Four minds – even if three of them were pitifully inadequate – were better than one when it came to brainstorming. He donned the link and said, “All right, let’s get this started. We’ve got to figure out a way to upload a couple million liters of concentrated acid through a couple hundred kilometers or so of high density oxygen mixture. As we’ve seen, shuttles won’t do the job. How about the skystalk?”
“It’s pure carbon, Norm,” Mary said. “Carbon burns.”
“It’s diamond fiber. Pure C-12,” Norm said as calmly as he could manage. “Diamond has an extremely high ignition point, uh . . .” He link-thought a moment. “Over 600°C. If we’re careful on descent, it shouldn’t get hot enough to ignite.”
George shook his head. “We’d have to take it in practically subsonic.”
“Yes, we would. Is that too difficult for you?”
George reddened. “I can do it. But that still doesn’t get us any water. The elevators are going to blow up just like the shuttle did.”
“Why should they? They aren’t hydrogen powered; they’re electric.”
“They’re aluminum. As soon as they touch acid, there’ll be plenty of hydrogen around. And once that starts burning, there’ll be plenty of heat to ignite the skystalk.”
“We can make them out of something else,” Norm said. “Iron—”
“Oxidizes,” Ivan interrupted. “And besides, it would be a bitch to program the substitution. Iron atoms and aluminum atoms are like apples and oranges to nanofabs.”
“You did it with the ship’s hull,” Norm pointed out.
“Yeah, but patching a hole is a lot simpler than building an elevator.”
Norm said, “All right, then. Maybe we can’t build an oxygenand acid-proof elevator. How about a pump? Can we pump the water up here?”
Mary snorted. “Thirty-three thousand kilometers to Clarke orbit? Do you have any idea what kind of pressure you’d have at the bottom?”
“We could use a peripump,” Ivan said. “It squeezes its cargo along, like peristaltic waves in the intestines. Each wave is a separate system, so the pressure doesn’t build.”
“That could take years.”
“No, more like months,” George said. “An industrial-grade pump could do it in . . . about seventy days.”
Norm took a deep breath before he spoke. “We only need to get it above the atmosphere,” he said. “Six hundred kilometers. That means—” he waited for the number “–about thirty hours. Then we can fill tanks in the elevator cars, and carry them up the stalk.”
“Thirty hours for the first liter,” Mary said. “Then we have to pump a million more of them.”
“Nearly . . . a million are already in the hose by the time the first one arrives,” Norm said. “If we want two million liters, we pump for thirty hours longer, then lift the hose out of the atmosphere and finish pumping from safety.”
“It could work,” George said.
“If the pump doesn’t burn first, or corrode,” Ivan said.
Norm called up the design parameters with a wish. “We have a template for an acid-rated pump. Would that do?”
Ivan shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
Mary had been rapt, listening to the headlink. Then she shook her head. “No, there isn’t. You can check the materials parameters on the peripump. The thing’s made of diamond fibers, just like the stalk. And it’ll burn just like the stalk will. Even worse, the pump’s got other organics in it, for the contraction fibers and whatnot. It’ll burn even better. I wish you guys would remember, that’s not air down there. It’s oxygen.”
Silence for a moment, then Norm said, “Damn it, I’m tired of hearing what we can’t do! What can we do?” He turned directly to Mary. “Do you have any better ideas?”
“Yes. We can build a non-flammable peripump.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! We can’t design a completely new nanotemplate from scratch.” Norm rolled his eyes in exasperation.
George asked quietly, “What are you thinking we could make it out of, Mary?”
“Ceramics. Oxides or silicates. They’re fully oxidized already. In fact—” she paused “—plain old silica should work. The hose is only 600 kilometers long. Silica’s strong enough for that, as long as it’s completely bonded.”
Ivan was shaking his head. “Where are we going to get. . . 200 tons of silica? We can’t afford to make a trip to one of the inner planets. Even if the ship could survive being so close to the star, which I doubt.”
“We’ve got more than enough silicates in the shielding mass. I checked.”
“The shielding mass?” Norm asked, incredulous.
“That’s right. It’s nearly all ceramics, and we don’t need it in the hull until we get back up to interstellar speed.”
“You want to use all of our shielding mass to design, from scratch, a completely new peripump out of completely new materials?” Norm was practically shouting now.
Mary shouted back, “We won’t lose the mass. We’ll get it back when we leave. Which is more than will happen when you burn up our C-12 hose in that atmosphere!”
Ivan pointed out another objection, more quietly. “It’d have to be more than just a hose, Mary. We would have to thread the power wires and contractile fibers through the
ceramics. That would be especially hard since silicates are insulators. And brittle.”
She turned on him. “Yes, it would be hard. Would it be too hard for you?”
Ivan’s lips tightened, but he said nothing.
Norm calmed himself enough to say, “This is a brainstorming session, not a debate. Let’s table that idea and go on. What else can we do?”
No one said anything for a minute. Mary again acquired the rapt look of the mindlinked, then said, “All right. Here’s another idea. We could blow up the planet instead.”
“What?”
“I just checked the math. A series of antimatter bombs at depth could theoretically lift a section of the surface into space. If we place the charges right, some of it could still be liquid when it gets here. Of course the shock wave would propagate all the way through to the other side with enough force to kill everything worldwide, but—”
George’s eyes had gone wide. “You would destroy an entire planet for your own survival?”
“Of course not. I just said we could do it; I didn’t say we should. This is supposed to be a brainstorming session, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Norm said, hardly bothering to hide his revulsion, “but we can do without that sort of input.”
“I’m just following orders, Norm. You wanted to know what we could do, so I told you. I can’t think of anything else.” Mary started to remove her headband.
“You will stay linked!” Norm bellowed. “We need ideas. Realistic ideas, and you will help provide them. All of you will help think of ideas.” He glared at each of the three in turn, challenging them to defy him. Mary held his gaze with her damnable blue eyes, but she also held her tongue. Ivan studied the table top. George radiated amusement, his head tilted slightly to the side.
Ivan said, finally, “Let’s try the diamond pump. I think the risk is acceptable.”
Mary started to speak, but George cut her off. “Mary, if it does burn, why can’t we just try your idea then? As it is, you’re saying we should spend our time trying to do something that may not even work. And that we may not even have to do.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Besides the waste of materials and time, the stalk’s only meant to be deployed once. We’re going to have a hard enough time trying to reel it back in when we leave. Not to mention the wasted reaction mass. It’s not like dropping an anchor; the whole stalk is in orbit right now, and we have to brake most of it to a standstill when we drop it, then speed it back up when we raise it. Where do we get the reaction mass to do that twice?”
Ivan shook his head. “Mary, we don’t have to reel the stalk back to install a new hose. That’s what the elevator cars are for. George is right; we lose nothing by trying the simple solution first.”
Exasperated, Mary said, “Yes we do. If we wait until later, there’ll be that much more chance for something to go wrong when we try to install it. And we’ll be under a lot more time pressure.”
Ivan started to say something else, but Mary continued, “And besides, you’re going to burn up almost our whole reserve of C-12 with that pump.”
Norm leaned forward angrily, but George intervened again. “Mary, are you really that sure?” he said quietly.
Mary removed her headband and slammed it down on the table. “Yes, I’m sure. You can link to the data as well as I can.”
“Yes,” Norm said, “but we can also reach different conclusions. I too vote to try the diamond pump.”
Ivan had already said as much. All eyes turned toward George, who wet his lips and said, “I agree. But if it doesn’t work, then I think we should try Mary’s idea.”
Ever the conciliator, Mary thought savagely. Couldn’t he take a stand on anything} But she just said, “I think it’s an unacceptable risk, and I want to log that.”
She knew what they were thinking: Mary is being a maverick again. She’s just not a team player. She should keep personalities out of this. Well, she’d be damned if she’d rubber stamp this asinine decision. Especially just to salve Norm’s ego. In the name of “team play”, they wanted her to confirm the collective CYA, even though there was no chance a board of inquiry would ever know – or care – what their decision was. Well, no way.
No one said anything as she stood up and left.
All in a hot and copper sky
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
–Part II, Stanza 7
The Cabeza de Vaca swung in Clarke orbit around Teresa – now the planet’s official name, according to the Captain’s decree. Figures, Mary thought. Norm’s image of the Ideal Woman. Pretty, deferential, tactful enough to seem dumb even if she isn’t . . . She knew it was petty to begrudge the dead woman her memorial, but even so, Norm’s heavy-handed method of doing it stank.
When Norm wasn’t around, everyone still called the planet Waterworld. Mary pointedly did so even when he was. This latest scheme of his made her want to say a few worse things in his presence, but she’d already tried that and it hadn’t helped either.
In the monitor before her, the skystalk stretched out from the cargo bay toward the planet, dwindling to invisibility long before it got there. It was actually two skystalks, one for up traffic and one for down, kept separate by the same electromagnetic effects that powered the elevator cars. The twin cable didn’t look as if it were moving at all, and looks were nearly correct: George had slowed it from its initial thousand-kilometer-per-hour descent to less than three hundred as the pump-carrying end entered the upper atmosphere. Cameras along the hose’s lowermost few hundred kilometers showed the receiving tank and the thin peripump leading downward to the cloud-speckled sea below.
“What’s the temperature at the tip?” Norm demanded.
“Climbing slowly past minus forty,” George said without looking up. “Only twenty degrees above ambient at that altitude. We’re okay.”
“Good.”
They watched in silence as the hose dropped. It was a long wait; still, no one seemed inclined to leave, or even look away from the screens while their future literally hung from a thread. It seemed to Mary as if only a few minutes had passed when George said, “Slowing down now. Ten kilometers. Temperature plus thirty.”
“What about that cloud?” Mary asked, pointing to one of the monitors. In it, a puffy yellow-tinged ball of cotton floated over the ocean almost directly beneath the hose.
“I think we’ll miss it,” George said.
“And if we don’t?”
“Shouldn’t matter.”
“You sure? Lightning could—”
“Anyone can see it’s not a thundercloud,” Norm said. “It’s too small.”
“Hmm.” Mary supposed she was just being paranoid. It was a tiny little cloud, and besides, the pump bristled with static discharge spikes, effectively making it a single enormous lightning rod.
It looked as if it would miss the cloud anyway. George called out the distance as the end dropped closer and closer to the ocean. The last few kilometers went excruciatingly slow, but finally he was calling out the distance in meters. “Thirty, twenty, ten—”
The static discharge whisker dangling from the bottom splashed into the water, then a second later the pump followed it in.
“Contact!” Norm announced triumphantly, overriding George’s calm, “Splashdown.” George took a deep breath, then said, “Commencing pump sequence.”
They could see the hose’s wake as it dragged through the water. Their orbital position wasn’t perfectly still in relation to the surface, and in any event the stalk would shift its position as its mass balance changed. It didn’t matter; as long as the end stayed submerged, the pump could suck in its precious cargo.
Provided whatever ate the lander didn’t eat the pump, too. C-12 fiber was tough stuff, but the alien monsters had looked pretty tough themselves.
They could see the end of the pump start to flex. George, Norm and Ivan all cheered, but Mary
said nothing; she was watching for motion in the water. Nothing showed for long minutes, then all of a sudden a shadow with teeth seemed to leap out of nowhere straight at her. She jumped back and screamed, just as the monitor filled with static.
“What was that?” Norm demanded.
“We’re under attack,” George said calmly. “It got the camera, but the pump’s okay. Still – damn!”
“What?”
“End’s plugged. Whatever it was, I think we sucked it in.”
“Reverse the last wave,” Norm said.
“Reversing. That ought to – what the hell?”
Mary was watching the scene from a camera higher on the hose, staring in horror at the water practically boiling with shark-like bodies, when a different shape rose up out of the depths. It looked like a beach ball with wide, flat fins, which it swept back and forth through the water. The sharks gave it plenty of room, as if it were even more dangerous than they, and when it reached the pump, Mary saw why. The electrical arc she’d feared all along lanced out from the creature’s body, and the monitor flashed and died. Mary looked to another monitor, this one showing a scene from a couple kilometers high. It took a moment for the image to register: a brilliant white point glowed on the cable below, disembodied by distance.
Mary recognized the glow. She had once done a science experiment in school where they’d built an old-fashioned incandescent lamp, just like Edison had done centuries before. She’d accidentally broken the globe, and the filament had glowed momentarily white hot, then winked out on its sudden exposure to air. This was like that: fire zipped upward along the hose, and in its wake the diamond fiber glowed brilliant white. Then the glow vanished abruptly, leaving behind not so much as a wisp of smoke.
The fire raced toward her vantage point, toward her – Mary ducked involuntarily, and when she looked up again that screen was also filled with static.
Only a few cameras remained, those at 50-kilometer intervals and the one inside the still-dry water tank. Mary and her companions watched the flame engulf camera after camera as it raced up the hose, until it eventually burned itself out in the thin air somewhere between 250 and 300 kilometers up.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 27
