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Hidden Variables

Page 33

by Charles Sheffield


  I looked back at him before I set my foot down onto Quake's surface. "That's what I've been trying to say. You don't. That's why we have to be back here in twenty hours or less."

  I was getting through to him. It was no good getting back to this point, unless we could do it in time. I went on with the unshipping of the hover-craft from the cargo pod that had followed us down, while Rebka walked over to the cables that hung loosely by the edge of the tether. He was inspecting them closely.

  "We could still use one of those, couldn't we?" he said. "It looks as though they will still be hanging down to the surface. Couldn't they serve as an emergency hoist to the bottom of the umbilical?"

  I went over and took a look for myself. He was right, the cables would hang down to the surface, even when the umbilical was high in the sky. I looked at their size and weight, then went back to the hover-car.

  "Rather you than me, but I suppose you're right. In fact, I think that if you look at the specifications on the umbilical, you'll find a statement that says the cables can form an emergency system."

  "I gather that you do not regard them as such."

  I shrugged and climbed into the driver's seat on the hovercraft. "It all depends what you define as an emergency system. If I open my shirt and look at my chest I find I've got two nipples, and I guess they're my emergency system in case I ever get pregnant. I'm hoping the idea that we'll have to shin up those cables is somewhere about the same level of probability. I never thought of using them before, and I handle all the shipment of materials from here to Egg and back."

  "Do you like your work?"

  I didn't care for his change of subject.

  "It's a good job. It passes the time."

  Since we had nothing else to do for a couple of hours, while we drove off towards the lake side, it looked as though Rebka was proposing to try his hand on me. I felt I had to improve on my last answer.

  "I wouldn't change it for any job on Egg or Quake, so I guess I like it."

  Leave me alone, Rebka, my tone said. Not a chance. "Do you realize how fond Governor Wethel is of you, Captain Mira?"

  "Wethel? I always thought he felt uncomfortable with me." I had set the speed to forward maximum, and was skimming us across the quiet surface of Quake. It was hard to believe that all this peace would soon be broken.

  "He is uncomfortable with you. Most uncomfortable. Do you know why?"

  Wethel wasn't any more uncomfortable than I was. How rude could I be to a Sector Moderator? "No, I have no idea why."

  "Then I will tell you. He is uncomfortable because he is convinced that you could do his job much better than he can."

  I was tempted to look round at him, but at the speed we were going it could be fatal.

  "I couldn't do his job at all. I couldn't stand it. In fact, if you want to know the truth I once refused it."

  "I know. Three and a half years ago, after your second visit to Quake in summer, and before your third visit."

  Damn the man. I didn't know just how long he had been in the Dumbbell system, but he seemed to have found out everybody's whole life history.

  "And that's exactly why Wethel feels it's really your job," went on Rebka calmly. "You refused it—so he feels like a second choice, with the first choice there to prove it."

  I was holding the controls so hard that I thought they ought to snap off in my hands. This type of conversation may be nothing to Rebka, but I couldn't take it—and where it was leading. The sudden orange glow in the sky ahead of us was exactly what I needed. I switched the screen to maximum transparency.

  "See that?" As I spoke, the tremor shook the car. We were travelling on a meter-deep cushion of air, but we were also skimming forward at forty kilometers an hour. The ground ahead was moving in smooth, linear waves, rippling out from the quake center. Driving the hover-car over them was like sitting in a power boat and shooting the Grand Rapid on Egg's eastern limb.

  Ten seconds after the land waves we heard the deep rumble of the eruption. Rebka had moved forward to sit next to me, craning closer to the front screen.

  "Is that a big one?"

  "Medium size. I'd say it's fifteen kilometers away. You'll see break-outs ten times that big in another five hours, when we're really getting in to the maximum tidal force. Hold tight now. We'll hit the secondary wave front in a second, and that'll be choppy."

  As we came to the region where surface and body waves had created their complicated interference pattern I had to slow our speed. The hover-car was rolling and yawing, even when I cut us to walking pace. It wasn't a bad quake—for Quake—but it had given Rebka something else to think about. We were going to see more and worse before we reached the Carmel twins.

  The early records of the Dumbbell System make interesting reading. The first settlement party had arrived at Eta-Cass A in the winter months of Dumbbell, and had the choice of landing on Egg or on Quake. It looked like an easy decision. Quake was more fertile, it had lots of metals and available radioactives, and it was less humid and muggy than Egg. I'm used to the Egg climate, but I must say I wouldn't care to live over on Cloudside.

  The settlers put small camps on both planets, but they made it clear that Egg would be a temporary facility, only to be used for general exploration.

  The tone of the old records on Quake gradually changes as their first summer approached. They knew it would be hot, because the orbit of Dumbbell had been known since the first scout ship came through. What worried them was something else. They could see recent evidence of widespread vulcanism, even though there had been no signs of volcanic activity when they landed.

  Dumbbell swept in closer to the sun. The temperature shot up, all the plants began to die off and root deeper, and the earth tremors began. Even then, no one seemed to realize how bad it would get.

  One colony camp stuck it out until three Days before summer maximum, before they finally gave up and ran over to Egg for shelter under the clouds.

  Reading between the lines, you can detect another tone in those old records. It is almost one of disbelief. If Quake is as inhospitable to life as this, they seem to say, how could life ever have arisen here in the first place?

  It took several hundred years before anyone could definitively answer that old question. The gas-giant, Perling, orbiting Eta-Cass A seven hundred million kilometers farther out, emerged as the villain of the story. Dumbbell had circled its sun peacefully for several billion years, not changing much in climate or distance. Life had emerged and developed on both Quake and Egg. It had been a tranquil environment on both members of the planet pair, until a third component of the planetary system, perturbed by the gravitational forces of the dwarf sun Eta-Cass B, had suffered a close encounter with Perling, two hundred times its mass. The giant had thrown it into a close swing-by of Eta-Cass A, from which it should have emerged with an eccentric but stable orbit. But Dumbbell lay in its path.

  The stranger had done a complex dance about the doublet, moving the components closer together and changing their combined orbit to one that now skimmed much nearer to Eta-Cass A at perihelion—the present orbit. And the other planet had been slung clear out of the system by the encounter. Somewhere in interstellar space there was a solitary planet on an endless journey, waiting for encounter with and possible capture by another sun.

  I couldn't help wondering about the old Quake, the planet before the encounter that gave it its present orbit and unruly surface. Had it been a true garden planet, with tranquil streams and clean, fragrant air? The present atmosphere was breathable, but near summer there was always a faint sulphurous smell to the air, a reminder that new eruptions were on the way to buckle and scar the face of Quake. I didn't mind it, but Rebka had reacted strongly when we first encountered that faint smell. He was sitting near a side window that had been left cracked open— everything would have to be closed as the sun rose, so that the air-cooler could do its job, but near dawn the temperature was still tolerable.

  When the breeze carried in its trace
of sulphur, Rebka had stiffened and sniffed. He seemed like a hunting animal, turning to track a scent. It took his mind off the thought of the eruptions ahead of us.

  "You all right?" I asked. He was acting strangely, head rigid and cocked to one side.

  He leaned back, and nodded. "That smell brings back old memories too clearly. I had an experience on Luytens, a long time ago. Curious, how strongly the stimulus of smells can affect our recall."

  So I was not the only one who could be troubled by my memories. I didn't know if I was pleased or worried. It was easy to think of Rebka as a superman, the image that the words 'Sector Moderator' carried with them. If he was as frail and human as I was, it was good to know that. We might need a superman in the hours ahead, but if we didn't have one it was better to know it ahead of time.

  Rebka reached out and closed the side window. The thermometer was beginning to show a rapid rise outside the car, and we might as well enjoy cool air while we could—I knew that soon enough we would have to go outside.

  We were traveling now across a sea of dry spiky plants that cracked and powdered beneath the skirts of the hover-car. It was hard to believe that the brittle stems had been healthy and growing less than ten Days before.

  "I don't understand how life survived here," said Rebka, peering out at the dead landscape. "After the orbit changed, everything else must have changed too. Temperatures, seasons, even the atmosphere. How could the life forms have endured?"

  "I'm sure most of them didn't." I was skimming us along into a dry ravine, where we could make better speed. It was going slower than I had hoped. "Look at the plants that you'll see in a few minutes in the valley bottoms. Most of them are primitive forms, nothing like as complex as you'd expect on a planet this old. And mere are a lot less species than you find on Egg. It must have been touch and go here. Egg was lucky, it had more water and it's less dense."

  "You think it was simple adaptation of existing forms?"

  "What else could it be?" I skirted us around a smoking patch of black rock. We could probably have gone over it without damage, but the underside of the hover-car was its most vulnerable part.

  "Talk to the biologists when we get back to Egg," I went on. (If we got back?) "The forms that were already here and adapted to summer inactivity and deep rooting took that trend further. You won't see any animals at all at midsummer—they've found their hideaways. Quake has no viviparous forms, and all the eggs are tucked away ten meters down. Some of those will survive almost any violence on the surface."

  While we were talking, the face of the land around us had been changing, slowly becoming flatter and less dried-out. There was only one body of water of decent size within two hundred kilometers of the foot of the umbilical, and we were getting close to it. Even in the worst earthquakes, I had never known it to dry up. I had come here on each of my summer visits to Quake. The first time had been pure exploration. On my second trip, Amy had wanted to see everything, but I had carefully chosen areas that I already knew, where the dangers would be reduced. I was sure that she would behave in her usual way, dancing on ahead of me and revelling in every new sight. I couldn't control her, had never been able to. Now we were tracing back over the same familiar ground, heading for the side of the lake. As we curved around a deep caldera, I halted our craft completely and let us settle to the ground. I remembered this spot from my previous visits—it had been inactive for at least five years, and that was unusual for Quake.

  I opened the door. The heat sprang in at us, as though it had been waiting outside for its chance. We were still many hours from midsummer, and more than that from maximum temperatures. I breathed shallowly, reluctant to impose that sulphurous hotblast on my unprepared lungs.

  "See those, Councilman?" I pointed down the steep caldera side. "At the bottom there. This is one place that Eta-Cass never shines. You might expect it to, at noon, but that's when Egg eclipses it. Those places, the bottoms of the steep craters—that's the coolest place on Quake in midsummer. If anyone wants to survive summertide here, that's where they ought to go."

  Rebka peered gingerly down the steep slope. "So you think that's where we'll find the Carmel sisters?"

  "Not in this particular one—in one nearer to the lake. We have time to look at maybe three of them before we have to turn back. But it's still our best bet. We have to keep moving and hope that Quake doesn't decide to fill the bottom of the one we want with molten lava."

  Now it was Rebka's turn to look anxiously at his watch. He nodded. "We ought to be able to look at more than three, we've done well."

  "Less well than you might think. I expect we'll be slower going back. Quake will be a lot livelier then." I slid the door shut, turned the air-cooler to its maximum setting, and started the lift and forward motors. As we moved closer to the lake, Rebka studied again the images that we had made from the umbilical. They were high-resolution, and he was looking for any signs of unusual activity in the craters by the lake.

  "See anything on those?"

  He shook his head. "I'm not used to looking at pictures of Quake. You'd do a better job."

  "I think it's better if I stick with the driving. Time is the most important element of all now. Are any of the craters more heavily vegetated than the rest?"

  He puzzled over them for a couple more minutes. Outside, it was again growing dark, but we had to press on through the night—not too difficult, thanks to the steady light from Eta-Cass B.

  "I think three of them have more growths in the bottom than the others," he said at last.

  I shrugged. "That saves any tough decision-making. Mark them up, and pass them over. I'll try and pick us the best path to them."

  There was no point in trying to be too fancy. As Quake became more turbulent, we would have to make course changes to accommodate that. With old memories running on ahead of me, I set our speed as fast as I dared and threw the hover-car on and on, across the lava-lit, smoke-veiled landscape. Black and orange-red, heaving and moving like a wounded animal—Quake summer, the season for nightmare.

  I was glad to be back.

  * * *

  The Winch controllers had promised me an extra four hours. That was my margin for error, as much as they dared grant us without risking huge damage to the umbilical. Rebka had no idea how much that four-hour dispensation would cost in possible recriminations if things went wrong. I did, and I was horrified at how much the controllers were willing to put on the line for my benefit—I knew it wasn't for Rebka or the Carmel twins, they were strangers. If we got back in one piece, I owed the group of engineers a debt that I would have trouble ever repaying. How much is four hours worth? At midsummer maximum, the price was too high to calculate.

  We were approaching the first of our selected craters, moving in on it to the irregular accompaniment of distant thunder. Part weather, part volcanic eruption. As Quake trembled, atmospheric storms grew in intensity.

  Our timing was bad. Quake's three-hour night was rushing in on us, and there was no way that Eta-Cass B could shine into the depths of the crater. I handed the controls of the hover-car over to Rebka, and took a last look at the dark pit-depth in front of us before I opened the door.

  "Hold us steady right here. Don't move, unless you have to because you see a lava-flow getting too near. Sound the siren if that happens—I don't want to come back up and find molten rock coming down to meet me."

  The air outside was stifling. I guessed that it had heated up another five degrees since we had last opened the door. It took me only a few seconds to walk over to the lip of the crater and begin the slither down its steep sides. In that short time I felt perspiration start out onto my face and arms. It took me another couple of minutes to stumble and scrape my way to the bottom, to the place where the head-high purple ferns marked the area shielded from the direct sun. The flashlight that I carried was not much use. It allowed me to avoid the worst stumbles, but I still had a number of semi-falls on the way down.

  After a few minutes of thrashin
g around in the crater bottom, I was confident that it held nothing but plant life. No one could have forced their way into the ferns without leaving a trail of broken stems behind them.

  I turned and began to scramble my way back up the steep sides, noting that the bottom of the ferns had managed to slash through my pants and leave lines of itchy cuts all over my lower calves. I could feel a strong reaction there, a quick swelling caused by the irritant sap. By the time I reached the car the pain and itching were all I could stand.

  "Nothing?" said Rebka, as I swung open the door. It was a rhetorical question. I dropped into my seat and waved at him to get us moving again. While I sprayed my legs with a coagulant and anesthetic, Rebka started us cautiously on our way to the second crater. As soon as I was in reasonable shape I went over and took the controls.

  "We have to go faster. I took too long down in that crater." I risked opening the throttle one more notch, remembering that the path towards the lake side held no major rock outcrops that might cripple the hover-car. "Good thing it's getting light again. We'll find the next one easier with the sun shining. I lost time in the bottom of that one splashing in a sort of messy bog. If I could have seen it from above I'd have known ahead of time that we wouldn't find them in that."

  After a couple of minutes I had to decrease speed again. Rocks or no rocks, there was no way that I could hold our pace. Quake was feeling the full power of the solar forces. The ground that we moved over was in constant motion, an uneasy, irregular stirring. I increased the pressure of the under-blowers, to move us fifty centimeters higher from the ground, and ran us along as fast as I dared.

  Before I went down into the next crater I borrowed Rebka's knee-high boots. They were two sizes too small, but I could stand a couple of blisters and cramped toes better than lacerated calves. Dawn had arrived as we drove. The sun had risen through a red, smoky screen that made everything in the air of Quake diffuse and incredibly beautiful. Dust in the upper atmosphere offered some shielding from the solar rays—not much, but anything was welcome.

 

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