Shanna looked blank. “You mean—like stuff to sell?”
“We’ll want exclusive media rights from you, for one.”
“What is there to sell on Pluto?” she sputtered.
“For one thing, the experience. Everyone loves to watch other people in danger from the comfort of their living room sofa. Viktor and Julia have lived under the eye of the vidcams for twenty years. Are you willing to do that?”
“I g-guess so.” A pause. “Does the camera follow them everywhere?”
“In the shared rooms, sure. In the contract. Not in their cabins, though.”
“Still…” She blinked, as if she had not thought about this part. Just a kid, really…“It must be hell.”
“It’s what you want?”
The self-doubt blew away with a sigh. “Yes. Yes.”
He did what had always worked at crisis points: just let himself follow his guy instinct. Even when it was his daughter. “I’ll have a contract drawn up.”
Her eyes widened, and he knew suddenly that she had not really thought she would win. She rushed around the desk and hugged him, then ran out the door. “You’ll never regret this! I promise,” she called behind her.
Much later, as he was staring moodily out the window, he recalled one of his mother’s sayings: “If you love them, let them go.” Thanks, Mom.
The Pluto Mission Control auditorium was jammed. Newsies, bureaucrats, some lunar tourists who’d managed to get in from the big luxury hotel nearby—Fly the Great Lunar Cavern!—and even a scattering of scientists. All noisy, chattering. A fair fraction of the lunar population seemed to have wedged itself in. Axelrod took a deep breath and stepped out.
Applause spattered across the tiered seats as Axelrod came in from stage rear, with an apprehensive Swain a few steps to the rear. Behind them an enhanced image of Pluto as Proserpina had seen it from a million kilometers out filled the large screen.
Showtime! Axelrod thought. He hated these and loved them at the same time. Nobody without a streak of showmanship ever got to run a big-time business. Even in its darkest days, with an accountant type as administrator, NASA had put the best possible face on the shuttle-space station debacle.
He acknowledged the applause with a short wave of the hand. The cheers were for Shanna, he knew, not for him. He stepped into the chalk-marked area staked out for the holocamera focus. Uncomfortably he became aware of the unseen eyes of Earth’s billions a light-second and a half away.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “we have exciting news from Pluto tonight. At 10:30 this morning, GMT—which is also our local time here at Moonbase One—we received Astronaut Shanna’s latest report. Tonight she speaks to us again, and this time you are going to hear her in person. She’s well over 6 billion kilometers away from us. That’s 3.6 billion miles for those of you who go in for nostalgia.”
This line got a ripple of light laughter in the hall, a good sign. He made himself smile. “And it won’t be in supersound. But I think we all want to hear what she has to say.” His eye caught the second hand of the big wall clock, closing in on a digital readout coming up on 2100, another (and expensive) concession to nostalgia. Timing his last words to end one second before the hour, he said, “All right, Shanna, come in.”
The words the young astronaut had spoken from Pluto orbit hours before came booming in, overamplified, immediately covering them in a dry wash of static.
Damn solar flares, Axelrod thought, becoming once again the electronics professional. Why’d the sun have to get so wild just now? The scientists say it’s just part of the long solar cycle, but it’s coming on top of all the crackle and fizz from near Pluto. This interference was yet another sign that the bow wave of the solar system was getting pressed back, already close to Pluto’s orbit. Understanding this was the second major motivation for going to Pluto. Could such distant events be significant? Or even dangerous?
As the interference continued, people stirred restlessly in their seats. Yet the room filled with suspense, for whatever words they could get would be from farther than any human had ever spoken. A voice, if not from the infinite, at least pretty damned close. Though there had been other reports, this one came after the first surface landing.
The distortion stopped, the hiss faded. The first word from Shanna that came in loud and clear at Moonbase One and on Earth was, “Life! I’m sure of it!”
The woman’s fresh, youthful voice exulted. The audience stirred. “I matched every molecular combination in the library memory against it. The Kares both checked me, but they wanted me to make the call, so here I am again, stayin’ up late, swillin’ coffee, on the phone, callin’ home.”
Axelrod smiled. The homey touch always worked, clear across the solar system.
“The only compound that even came close was chlorophyll b. So these are not only plants, they’re photosynthetic ones. Back when Pluto was considered more interesting”—she didn’t try to keep an edge of sarcasm out of her voice—“some hackers at JPL worked out a series of biochemical reactions that theoretically could work here. It turns out they do. But!—they’re not powered by Pluto’s distant sun. It’s nine hundred times weaker than our sunlight here. There’s not nearly enough energy in it.”
The crowd stirred. This connected directly to the central riddle. Why was Pluto so warm, just lately? And what did this have to do with the data from the Voyager probes, which showed that the interstellar gas and plasma were intruding farther into the solar system?
Shanna talked right through the buzz. “The plants combine ammonia ice with carbon dioxide ice and get free hydrogen, carbon, and nitric acid. Presto! Then the nitric acid and the carbon recombine, releasing more free hydrogen plus CO2 and nitrogen—and that’s where the animals come in!”
Her voice lilted on “animals,” and the word sent another murmur through the crowd.
“They’re methanogens—eaters of methane. You have methanogenic microorganisms on Earth, kilometers down. Since the Mars-mat discovery we’ve learned plenty about them. They branched off from our chemical forefathers about 3.5 billion years ago. Then they got pushed off to the ecological edge of things—chemical also-rans. Here they’re the main show. They recombine the hydrogen and CO2 released by the plants into free oxygen and methane. They store some of the hydrogen in their bodies, and then they can inflate themselves—hydrogen balloons! I watched two of them floating above the sea that way, apparently just passing the time of day.”
Axelrod smiled. Nobody, not even that idiot press secretary, could believe Shanna was making this up. He had depended on the timbre of her voice. The others had ventured their explanations before the pictures came in. To prove her case, a big glossy picture of two spherical blobs came on the screen. It was at high resolution, and the two hovered over a red lapping background, half shrouded in pink mist. They bobbed and turned in vagrant winds.
The room went absolutely silent. Shanna did not.
“They also store the oxygen, near as I can tell. And they can combine it with hydrogen, like old-fashioned rocket fuel. I saw one of them escape a predator of some kind by gracefully jetting up through the air, while its exhaust froze behind it and fell into the sea.”
“Really, now!” snorted the woman science reporter from the New York Times. Axelrod hoped that gibe hadn’t gone out on the air to Earth. He would have shot her a frown, but he was still on-camera. Instead, smile, damn you, smile. Like it was some mild joke.
With uncanny premonition Shanna’s tone turned a shade argumentative. “Yes, a predator. This is evidently a complete, balanced planetary ecology. But I don’t think the one that got my first rover was just a beast. From the readings I was able to get before the rover hull dissolved, I think nitric acid ate it. Those low bushes produce nitric acid and the animals don’t.”
Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.
“So the creature that ate the rover was using a plant p
rocess, see? Not necessary for its own metabolism. Using it to melt my probe, pry it apart—that’s awfully close to tool-using. There’s not only life on Pluto—there’s intelligent life!”
Shanna went right on, her springy tone rolling over the shocked faces in the auditorium. “That’s what we’ve been able to learn by remote observation. Now, obviously, we have to go down there. I’m the captain and the biologist. My job, the way I figure it. By the time you hear these words”—Shanna’s voice rose in almost childlike delight—“we’ll be on my way to Pluto!”
The rows of blank looks would have been funny if Axelrod hadn’t felt exactly the same.
“I’ve discussed this with the rest of the crew. Let’s say the vote was, um, divided. So as captain I took the responsibility. After all, it’s my risk and my field of study. I’m going down, with Jordin as pilot.” Her voice softened. “Finally…good-bye, gang. And especially, good-bye to my dad. He always said nothing could really do more than slow down an Axelrod, and I’m proving him right again. Bye, Dad!”
After that, from distant Plutonian space came only a whispering hiss.
As soon as the cameras went off, Hilge growled, “You didn’t give her permission to do that!”
Nobody could hear her rough whisper in the growing hubbub.
Axelrod grinned. “And I didn’t say she couldn’t.”
5.
A DAY AT THE BEACH
THE LONG ICE RIDGE rose out of the sea like a great gray reef. Following its Earthly analogy, it teemed with life. Quilted patches of vivid blue-green and carrot orange spattered its natural pallor. Out of those patches spindly trunks stretched toward the midmorning sun. At their tips crackled bright blue St. Elmo’s fire.
Violet-tinged flying wings swooped lazily in and out among them to feed. Some, already filled, alighted at the shoreline and folded themselves, waiting with their flat heads cocked at angles. The sky, even at Pluto’s midmorning, remained a dark backdrop for the gauzy auroral curtains that bristled with energy. This world had grown its steadily thickening atmosphere only in the last few decades, the astronomers said. The infrared studies showed warming for maybe fifty years. Yet the gathering blanket was still not dense enough to scatter the wan sunlight, so the bowl of sky was a hard black.
Into this slow world came a high roar. Wings flapped away from the noise. A giant filled the sky.
Jordin Kare dropped the lander closer. His lean, hawklike face seemed to be all angles in the cockpit’s red glow. His eyes moved restlessly over the board instruments, the view screens, the joystick he moved through minute adjustments. Shanna’s legs were cramped from the small copilot chair, and she bounced with the rattling boom of atmospheric braking.
Beside her in his acceleration couch Jordin peered forward at the swiftly looming landscape. “How’s that spot?” He jabbed a finger tensely at the approaching horizon.
“Near the sea? Sure. Plenty of life-forms there. Kind of like an African watering hole.” Analogies were all she had to go on here, but there was a resemblance. Their recon scans had showed a ferment all along the shoreline.
Kare brought them down sure and steady above a rocky plateau, their drive running red-hot. Streamers of steam jetted down onto ice hardened like rock by the deep cold.
This was a problem nobody on the mission team, for all their contingency planning, had foreseen. Their deceleration plume was bound to incinerate many of the life-forms in this utterly cold ecosystem. Even after hours the lander might be too hot for any life to approach, not to mention scalding them when nearby ices suddenly boiled away.
Well, nothing to do about it now.
“Fifty meters and holding.” Kare glanced at her. “Okay?”
“Touchdown,” she said, and they thumped down onto the rock. To land on ice would have sunk them hip-deep in fluid, only to then be refrozen rigidly into place. They eagerly watched the plain. Something hurried away at the horizon, which did not look more than a kilometer away.
“Look at those lichen,” she said eagerly. “In so skimpy an energy environment, how can there be so many of them?”
“We’re going to be hot for an hour, easy,” Kare said, his calm, careful gaze sweeping the view systematically. Shanna could see what he meant: the lander rested on its drive, and already, pale vapor rose from beneath, curling up past their downview cameras. The nuclear pile would cool in time, but it might sublime away ice beneath them. The engineers had thought of this, so their footpads spread broadly. Hot water could circulate through them, to prevent getting stuck in hardening ice later.
They had thought of a lot of things, but certainly not this dim, exotic landscape. The ship’s computers were taking digital photographs automatically, getting a good map. “I say we take a walk.”
They were live straight to Earthside, and Shanna was glad he had voiced the idea first. The mission engineers had warned them to venture onto the surface only when unavoidable. Come this far and never feel the crunch of Pluto beneath your boots? Come, now.
The cold here was unimaginable, hundreds of degrees below human experience. In orbit they were well insulated, but here the ice would steal heat by conduction. Their suit heaters could cope, the engineers said—the atmosphere was too thin to steal heat quickly—but only if their boots alone actually touched the frigid ground. Sophisticated insulation could only do so much.
Shanna did not like to think about this part. If it failed, her feet would freeze in her boots, then the rest of her. Even for the lander’s heavily insulated shock-absorber legs, they had told her, it would be touch and go beyond a stay of a few hours. Their onboard nuclear thermal generator was already laboring hard to counter the cold she could see creeping in, from their external thermometers. Their craft already creaked and popped from thermal stresses.
Their thermal armor, from the viewpoint of the natives, must seem a bristling, untouchable furnace. Yet already, they could see things scurrying on the plain. Some seemed to be coming closer. Maybe curiosity was indeed a universal trait of living things.
Jordin pointed silently. She picked out a patch of dark blue-gray down by the shore of the methane sea. On their console she brought up the visual magnification. In detail it looked like rough beach shingle. Tidal currents during the twenty-two hours since dawn had dropped some kind of gritty detritus—not just ices, apparently—at the sea’s edge. Nothing seemed to grow on the flat, and—swiveling point of view—the ridge’s knife edge also seemed bare, relatively free of life. “Maybe a walk down to the beach?” Jordin said. “Turn over a few rocks?”
“Roger.” They were both tiptoeing around the coming moment. With minimal talk they got into their suits.
Skillfully, gingerly—and by prior coin flip—Shanna clumped down the ladder. She almost envied those pioneer astronauts who had first touched the ground on Luna, backed up by a constant stream of advice, or at least comment, from Houston. The Mars landing crew had taken a mutual, four-person single step. Taking a breath, she let go the ladder and thumped down on Pluto. Startlingly, sparks spat between her feet and the ground, jolting her.
“Wow! There must be a lot of electricity running around out here,” she said, fervently thanking the designers for all that redundant insulation.
Jordin followed. She watched big blue sparks zap up from the ground to his boots. He jumped and twitched.
“Ow! That smarts,” Jordin said.
Only then did she realize that she had already had her shot at historical pronouncements and had squandered it in her surprise. And her first word—Wow—what a profound thought, huh? she asked herself ruefully.
Jordin said solemnly, “We stand at the ramparts of the solar system.”
Well, she thought, fair enough. He had actually remembered his prepared line. He grinned at her and shrugged as well as he could in the bulky suit. Now on to business.
Against the gray ice and rock their lander stood like an H. G. Wells Martian walking machine, splayfooted and ominous. Vapor subliming from beneath it gave a m
ysterious air.
“Rocks, anyone?” They began gathering some, using long tweezers. Soil samples rattled into the storage bin. She carefully inspected under the rocks, but there was no sign of small life—worm tracks, microbe stains, clues. The soil here was just regolith.
“Let’s take a stroll,” Jordin said.
“Hey, close-up that.” She pointed out toward movement above the sea.
Some triangular shapes moved in the air, flapping. “Birds?”
She could faintly hear calls, varying up and down in pitch. Repeating the same few notes, too.
Jordin said, “Look in the water—or whatever that chemical is.”
“Methane? Like molasses.” Her eyes widened. On the slick, wrinkled surface, movement. Things were swimming toward them. Just nubs barely visible above the oily surface, they made steady progress toward shore. Each had a small wake behind it.
“Looks like something’s up,” Jordin said.
She followed and saw something odd. “Hey! What’s that?”
A gray arm with a pincer at the end. Gray, lying on the sand. “Looks metallic,” Jordin said.
There were bits and pieces littering the beach. “Fragments,” Shanna said. “Looks like some body, torn apart.”
They saw other parts along the shoreline, most no bigger than ten centimeters. “Funny,” Jordin said. “Might be a machine?”
“Probably a species we haven’t seen yet,” Shanna said. “Gotta get a sample of that.” They scooped up a few pieces, filed it away mentally under Mysteries, and walked on. When they came to a big boulder, Jordin took an experimental leap. He went over it easily, rising to twice his height.
She tried it, too. “Wheeee!” Fun. And good footage for the auto-cams focused on them from the lander.
As they carefully walked down toward the beach, she tried her link to the lander’s wideband receiver. Happily she found that the frequencies first logged by her lost, devoured probe were full of traffic. Confusing, though. Each of the beasts—for she was sure it was them—seemed to be broadcasting on all waves at once. Most of the signals were weak, swamped in background noise that sounded like an old AM radio picking up a nearby high-tension line. One, however, came roaring in like a pop music station. “Ouch!” She slapped on filters and then made the lander’s inductance tuner scan carefully.
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