“Keep well back, Liddy. This may splash. I expect that it’s water, but I’m not sure.”
It was another test of a sort. When he opened one end of the cylinder’s chamber to allow it to come into the ship, it would be forced in by whatever pressure existed at the other end. Bony placed his left palm in the way, preparing himself for the idea that the cylinder could possibly shoot out hard enough to break the bones of his hand.
Bony opened the valve. The cylinder, its flat end about two inches across, shot backward and smacked into his open palm. It didn’t hurt. The pressure outside couldn’t be much more than a standard atmosphere. That corresponded to a thirty-foot column of water, back on Earth; which meant that the liquid outside, assuming it was water under a sixth of a gravity, couldn’t be more than a hundred and eighty feet deep. Once in suits and outside the ship, they could easily float up to the surface.
In spite of his warning, Liddy had stood too close. As the cylinder came backward, liquid splashed out of it onto her hand.
“Don’t touch it!” Bony cried, but he was too late. Liddy had already bent her head and touched her tongue to the wet spot. Now she was standing absolutely still. Bony added, “Don’t drink any,” but she smiled at him.
“It’s all right. I might as well be useful for something, even if Captain Indigo doesn’t believe I can be.” She licked her lips and frowned in concentration. “It’s water. Not pure water, though. It tastes a little bit strange and salty. And it’s fizzy on my tongue.”
If she could risk it, so could he. Bony raised the cylinder and licked a few drops from the end. As Liddy had said, it was salty, but less salty than water from Earth’s oceans. You could drink this if you had to. And it was carbonated, though the touch on his tongue was not quite the same as the carbon dioxide normally used in making fizzy water.
He poured more of the liquid from the cylinder into a triangular beaker and held it up to the light. It was quite clear; although of course, that didn’t mean for a moment that the sample was free of microorganisms. Possibly he and Liddy had already allowed lethal alien bacteria into their bodies. The chances, though, were very much against it. Experience all through the Stellar Group showed that alien organisms were just too alien to find a human body an acceptable host.
Bony went across to the miscellaneous equipment cabinet and rummaged around inside. After a couple of minutes he found what he was looking for and pulled out a graduated measuring cylinder and a spring balance.
“What are those for?” Liddy said at last.
Bony smiled. He had been waiting for her to ask. “Tasting and guessing isn’t the best way to do scientific testing. We think it’s water — in fact, I’m almost sure it’s water — but we have to do a real test. This tube holds fifty milliliters.” He held up the measuring cylinder. “So first I weigh it on the spring balance. Then if I filled it with water and weighed it again, back on Earth that would weigh fifty grams more on the spring balance.”
“But we’re not on Earth.”
“I know. So we don’t know how much fifty milliliters of water weighs here. But we don’t need to know that, to test that it’s water. First, we weigh the empty measurer.” He hung it on the spring balance and held it up to Liddy. “You note where the pointer is. Now we take some regular water, water that we brought with us.” Bony went across to a small faucet set into the side wall and filled the measuring cylinder to the fifty-milliliter mark. He hung it on the spring balance and pointed to the new level of the pointer. “See, now we know how much ordinary water weighs here.”
He looked for a place to pour the measure of water that he was holding, and after a moment tilted it up and drank it.
“All that’s left to do,” he went on, “is pour some of the water we collected from outside, and fill the measurer to the same level.” Bony did that carefully, his eye on the marks on the side of the measuring cylinder. “And now, you see, because the balance is weighed down to the same place as it was with the water we brought with us, we know that …” His voice faded away.
“But it isn’t at the same place on the balance,” Liddy said. She gazed at him with dark, wide-open eyes. “It’s pulled down quite a bit farther. That means it weighs more, doesn’t it?”
“It weighs more.” Bony was staring in disbelief at the balance. “Nearly fifteen percent more. It’s a lot denser than water. And that means …” Bony went across to an access cover for the main drive and flopped down onto it. So much for his big show-off demonstration, the one that was supposed to impress Liddy Morse.
“Means what?” asked Liddy.
“It means it’s not water. I don’t know what the hell that stuff is out there.” Bony waved his hand toward the expanse of silent green beyond the port. “But I know what it isn’t. And it isn’t water.”
4: GENERAL KORIN
The office suite of Dougal MacDougal was appropriate in size and splendor for someone with the exalted title of Solar High Ambassador to the Stellar Group. Lying within a huge and perfect dodecahedron, two hundred meters on a side, the suite sat deep beneath the surface of Ceres. In an architect’s conceit, the other four Platonic regular solids were nested within it at a considerable loss in useful living space. A crystal tetrahedron formed the very center. By an ornate desk in that tetrahedron sat Chan Dalton. Awaiting MacDougal’s return, he had been drinking steadily and popping fizz slugs. Now he felt wasted and was asking himself why he had done it.
The prospect of danger in the Geyser Swirl was not the problem. Danger was nothing new. Anyone who reached a position of power in the Gallimaufries faced danger every day. Chan had received — and given — his share of sudden and violent attacks. His facial scars spoke more of blood and guts than thrown floral bouquets.
Treachery was not the problem, either. You expected to be stabbed in the back, figuratively and literally, by everyone who wanted to get close to the Duke of Bosny. That was fair enough. Hadn’t you done the same thing yourself?
Lies were not the problem. Of course you were lied to; you expected it and you discounted what you were told, no matter the source. Even when people were not trying to lie, their output was usually wrong because some rat-head had given it to them wrong. Over the years you had met a few men and women you could rely on, but no more than you could count on the fingers of one hand. Trying to reach them over the past few days, you learned — not surprisingly — that they were scattered all over. Quality was like a thin veneer on the unfinished rough-cut of the extended solar system.
Even uncertainty was not the problem. You didn’t know where you would land when you passed through the Link Network to the Geyser Swirl, or what you would find there. But what else was new? The only certainties in life were unpleasant ones. Tomorrow was uncertain unless you were sentenced to die tonight. And even that was uncertain. You might be reprieved. You might escape. There might be a war or an earthquake.
Chan helped himself to one more fizz slug.
No. The problem today was not danger, treachery, lies, or uncertainty. Perhaps it was impossibility . The impossibility of things going so wrong, and the questions that raised.
Consider the evidence. Give them half a chance, and humans were likely to do stupid, rash things just for the hell of it, or to save themselves from dying of boredom. No other Stellar Group member was like that. The Tinkers, the Pipe-Rillas, and the Angels — especiallythe Angels — did not take risks. And they applied their safety-first approach to the Link Network. The system itself would not permit the violation of its three Golden Rules:
1. Close is not good enough . Travellers who missed the long, coded sequence of Link settings by a single digit might arrive as thin pink pancakes, or as long, braided ribbons of mangled flesh. Therefore, the settings must pass a multiply redundant checklist, so detailed and foolproof that every black hole in the universe would radiate itself away long before an incorrect sequence would be activated.
2. Know your exit point . Careless travellers who needed to breathe could arrive
suitless in hard vacuum. An organism for whom high gravity was instantly fatal might land on the surface of Earth. To prevent those things, the Link checking system was supposed to match traveller life-support needs to destination and refuse to allow inappropriate transfer.
3. Two into one won’t go . A Link arrival point had to be empty before a Link would be initiated. That lesson, too, humans had learned the hard way. A small high-temperature cloud of plasma in orbit near Jupiter marked the simultaneous arrival of two ships at a Sargasso Dump Link exit point.
The Stellar Group applied the safety rules scrupulously. They would have examined the Geyser Swirl Link point closely before sending their first exploration team. And before sending a second team? Chan couldn’t begin to imagine the checking and the rechecking and the triple-checking that must have been done. Undoubtedly, their ships would also have been set up to return through the Network at the first sign of difficulty.
But even with all this, nothing had come back. Chan could imagine being more wily, cunning, and brave than a Stellar Group team. Hell, he wouldn’t be here if that weren’t true. What he couldn’t imagine was being more careful . And that was a very bad omen.
The outer door of the office was sliding open. At last. Chan glanced at the clock built into the ornate surface of MacDougal’s desk. As he suspected, the Ambassador had taken far too long. More problems.
“You couldn’t get it?”
“Oh, I got it all right.” MacDougal had a sour look on his face as he went to his desk. That was all right. Chan was in a foul mood, too. “The answer is not reassuring. It seems that we were provided with false information.”
“Happens all the time. Our ship didn’t go to the Geyser Swirl?”
“It went there all right. But I am no longer surprised that it failed to return. You see, this was very much a secret and undercover operation. We had to take many things on trust that would normally be checked through official channels. The `highly competent and experienced private team’ that I told you about? It doesn’t look so good now. The crew captain, Friday Indigo, is a rich man, but it is all inherited wealth. He describes himself as an `entrepreneur,’ but he has never earned a penny in his life. And he is a `space expert’ who failed his space navigation examination three times and his engineering tests four times. Most upsetting.”
“Not to me. It’s more worrying when competent people don’t come back.” Chan studied the scowling image that MacDougal threw up on the display set into the surface of the desk. “That’s Friday Indigo? He looks like he’s got a pickle up his ass. What about the other crew members?”
“Two of them. The chief engineer and astrogator is a total mystery. We have been able to discover nothing at all about him. There is no name in the files, and we have no background. Not even a picture! He is described vaguely as a `big, fat man.’ Certainly he does not have official certification in either engineering or astrogation. But there is another mystery here. When we checked with Venus Equilateral, the Mood Indigo’s last stop before it departed for the Geyser Swirl, their senior engineering staff insisted that the ship carried an engineer who knew what he was doing.”
“Self-taught, maybe. I am, pretty much.”
“You are not claiming credentials that you do not have.” MacDougal drummed his fingers nervously on the top of the desk. “Are you?”
“I’m not claiming anything. But if I thought I could get more out of this deal by lying about my credentials, I’d do it before you could spit. What about the third crew member, what do you know about him?”
“Not him. Her. The third crew member is a female, Liddy Morse. I am hoping you can help us.”
Chan studied the image of a young woman with dark hair and curiously lustrous and liquid eyes. “Mm. How old?”
“Twenty-four. That’s one of the few things we do know about her.”
“She’s a beauty. But I never heard of her, and I never saw her before.”
“Maybe not. But she’s from Earth, we think from the Gallimaufries.”
“So are a hundred million others. Odd place to look for a space crew member. What are her qualifications?”
“For space work? None. She is described in the crew duty roster as a `general worker with versatile personal skills.’ But I think that is Friday Indigo’s idea of a joke. Judging from her picture and the limited information that we do have about her, it looks rather as though Friday Indigo—” MacDougal paused. “Well, it seems as though he bought her a few months ago, when he was down on Earth. For purely sexual purposes. Is that possible?”
“If she’s a Commoner, it’s more than possible. Happens every day of the week and every week of the year. All he’d have to do is find out who owned her contract. Not me or the Boz, in this case. I would have remembered her.”
“In this case? Are you admitting that you—”
“I’m not admitting a damn thing. I’m just telling you the way things run in the basement warrens. It’s not all flowers and nectar down there, you know. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, stick it. Tell the boys in Unimine and Foodlines that I’m too immoral for you to work with, and the whole expedition is off. I’ll be more than happy to go back home to the warrens.”
“You know that is not an option. They would kill me.”
“I doubt it. They know what the Stellar Group wants. They’d more likely come straight to me and put the screws on some other way. All right, what else do you have? You might as well get it over with — I can see you’re fidgeting.”
“Word from the Stellar Group members. I forwarded to them your requirement that the ship you take to the Geyser Swirl must have a Tinker Composite, a Pipe-Rilla, and an Angel on board.”
“That wasn’t a requirement. Call it more of a test shot. What did they say?”
“They say that they have absolute confidence in you, and that their presence would be quite unnecessary and even indicate a lack of trust. They will have no representatives on your ship.”
“In other words, they’re scared shitless. Don’t blame ’em. That’s one worry out of the way. Don’t want them looking over my shoulder. Suppose I have to off somebody?”
“They still insist that there be no violence.”
“Course not.” Chan fumbled in his pocket and found nothing but empty fizz holders. Had he really taken that many? He shook his head and went on, “Violence. Think we’d tell ’em if there was? Good. No aliens. Makes things a lot simpler. Got a ship picked out yet?”
“The best one in the solar system. The Hero’s Return , a former Class Five cruiser. An appropriate name, don’t you think, considering the mission?”
“Depends whether or not we come back. It takes more than a nice name to make that happen.”
“And you’ll be under the command of a highly respected officer, General Dag Korin.”
“Whoa there, Mr. Ambassador. What’s this `under the command of’ crap?”
“The General is one of the system’s great heroes.”
“I’m sure he is. But if I’m going to a dangerous place I’d rather be led by one of the system’s great cowards. And I’m not supposed to be led by anyone. I thought I was running this show.”
“We need a person of known reputation in charge. With all due respect, that’s not you.”
“Then the expedition can go without me. You can stuff it. I won’t have some general getting in the way when I want to do something a Pipe-Rilla might not approve of.”
“I don’t think you’ll find it’s that way with General Korin. His attitude to aliens is … different. At the very least, you ought to meet with him.”
“All right.” Chan swept his arm across the desktop. “Then bring him on. Bring ’em all on.”
“Not just now, I think.” MacDougal caught the glass as it skidded across and off the desk.
“Why not?”
“I don’t think that you are in any condition to — I mean, I do not believe that the General can be available at such short notice. Let me arrange it
for, let’s say, tomorrow morning.”
“Bright and early.” Chan caught at the edge of another thought. “One more thing, Ambassador. I have to know when this ship — the Return — will leave. How much time do I have?”
“I will have that information for you. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow morning . Bright and early.”
“If you insist.” Dougal MacDougal examined the way that Chan Dalton sat slumped in his chair, eyes half closed. Tomorrow morning, Chan Dalton’s brain would feel like a boiled pudding.
A person ought to be careful what he asked for. He might get it.
* * *
Dag Korin. General Dag Korin. Chan was irritated by him already, and the man had hardly spoken a word.
It wasn’t his age, though the General, hero of Capella’s Drift, looked about a hundred and ninety-nine years old. It was his boots. Ceres gravity was so weak that you couldn’t clatter or stamp on the floor. Chan had tried it, and reaction bounced him high into the air.
But Dag Korin could do it. He must have magnetic soles. He could march up and down on the hard floor of the Ambassador’s main office, and every step produced a brain-piercing crash.
And now he was starting to talk, too. Not just talk, lecture, not in an old man’s voice but in brazen and stentorian tones that resonated off the ceiling and the bare walls and right through Chan’s fragile skull case.
“I share completely Mr. Dalton’s dislike and utter distrust of the aliens.” Crash went the boots, as the General made a sharp about-turn. “We do not want them with us in our expedition to the Geyser Swirl. What are they, after all? A Pipe-Rilla is no more than an oversized praying mantis, an ugly creature put together from lengths of leftover drain pipe. An individual member of a Tinker Composite has less brain than a horsefly. It takes ten thousand of them together to match a human in intelligence! As for the Angels, to my eye they have always looked as though they belong in a stewpot with other vegetables.” Crash, crash went the boots. “And when it comes to the human virtues, of courage and nerve, what do we find? We find them wanting. The aliens — allthe aliens — are the most craven, cowardly, fainthearted — if they even have hearts — pusillanimous, fearful, shivering, timorous beings imaginable. The idea that such objects should be able to limit human access to the universe via the Link Network is so totally outrageous that it takes my breath away.”
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