Cromwell laughed, something he clearly didn’t do much of. “No, he would be here, but he has something to finish first, and that always comes first.”
“A religious period? Some kind of solitary wilderness preparation of prayer and fasting?”
“Oh, my, no! He went to a small Meskok village to negotiate for some superb sparkling wine they get from one of the other less approachable races, and I believe he got sucked into a poker tournament there. Texas hold ’em, I believe it is. For a full cask, of course…”
* * *
“He was putting us on, you know,” Jerry Nagel commented as they prepared to leave orbit. In the back of all their minds was whether or not they’d be able to break orbit, but it wasn’t something any of them wanted to dwell on until or unless it happened.
“What do you mean, putting us on?” Randi Queson asked him. “According to the records, if that indeed was Thomas Cromwell of the Woodward expedition he was not known for having any sense of humor whatsoever.”
“Nevertheless, he made his joke. Think about it. These—what’cha callit— Meskoks were telepaths, right?”
“So he said.”
“And poker is based on cards and on your ability to convince opponents that your hidden hand can beat theirs, whether or not it could.”
“Yes, I— oh! I see! How could you play cards with telepaths? Fascinating. Either Woodward’s discovered a solution to that problem or, you are correct, Cromwell was pulling our leg. The odds are he was doing the latter, but if a man who’s not known for his sense of humor does that, he’s got an ulterior motive. He also was a lot gabbier than the files say he should have been.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stake in that last thing,” An Li commented. “I mean, he’s been a very long time between conversations with folks from the outside.”
“True. Funny, though, that aside from commenting on how our technology wasn’t any better than he remembered from way in the past, he asked no questions at all about things back in his home region. Not even whether or not they’d been missed,” Nagel noted. “Yeah, they’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”
“You think they were doing that bit with the probe to keep us from coming down and finding out their secrets?” An Li asked him.
“Could be. Probably not them, but maybe their alien friends. We didn’t see any of them, but we do know they’re there because of the energy signatures, and we had indications of their downed ships as well. I don’t know. That’s Woodward’s survivors, though. I’m pretty sure of that. And I really do think they got stuck there. What they’re hiding, what they found, and what they might be working on under those pink dresses and white beards, well, you got me, at least for now. As to whether or not they or the aliens or some mysterious force was doing it with the probe, who knows? The solution there is a lot more pragmatic. Something was doing it. It was for real. It means that if we did choose to find out what’s below there, what they’re hiding, then we’d probably be stuck there anyway. We can still take some more looks later on, though. Let’s see how many probes we have left when we finish up here. If it’s any at all, I’d like to take a real close look at some of the other parts of that planet.”
The captain broke into the conversation. “You will all be relieved to know that we have just pulled out of orbit around Balshazzar and are now heading for Melchior. Unless, of course, you have second thoughts on that.”
“Huh? Why should we?” Nagel asked her.
“Because that’s where your Cromwell sent us, the man you just decided was lying through his teeth. Magi gems all over, he said. That’s a good lure for saying to us all, ‘Don’t look here any further, go over to Melchior. The riches are all over the place there.’ ”
“Well, they invited us back before we left,” Sark pointed out.
“Yeah. To pick up their grocery list. Please send milk, bread, and toilet paper. And maybe some dyes that aren’t a shade of pink,” Lucky Cross said. “That also gives them time to get together and decide what the hell they want to do about us when we do come back. I don’t like it.”
Randi Queson sighed. “Maybe we should drop Eyegor off on the way out. It could get great footage of alien civilizations and technologies to beam up to us or other ships when we return.”
“That is not my primary mission,” the robot said, repeating its favorite phrase. “If I cannot leave once down, I cannot fulfill my entire mission, as I will not be able to be on this ship when it leaves. My footage means nothing if it does not get back.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure whoever runs things around here wants detailed directions, pictures, and a road map to get back,” An Li pointed out. “The record isn’t very good on that score.”
“We got to keep that in mind at all times,” Lucky Cross said firmly. “Nobody’s ever gotten back, and no ship’s even gotten back with all its data. We’re not even halfway yet—we don’t have nothin’ to cash in to pay the bills and make us rich and famous. And that last third, getting back whole, could be the roughest part of the deal.”
XI: FIRE AND SMOKE AND MIRRORS
“I don’t know what frankincense or myrrh smell like, but I bet neither of ’em smells like Melchior does now,” Lucky Cross commented, looking at the planet coming into full-screen view.
If Kaspar had been cold and forbidding, and Balshazzar warm and sweet, then Melchior could only be described as someone’s vision of Hell.
Clouds shrouded the planet, which was much larger than the other two combined yet seemed to have a gravitational pull only fifteen percent or so above “average,” or one gee. There were oceans down there—in one way it might be called a water world, as it had countless enormous islands but, for its size, no great continents—but the oceans weren’t the warm and pleasant blue-green of Balshazzar nor the icy but crisp ones of Kaspar, but rather oceans dark and deep. Measurements using subsurface scanning often could not find their bottoms.
It was, however, simply a matter of time, for Melchior seemed hellbent on spewing its guts out. Every one of the islands, great and small—and they were so numerous that definitions had to be changed in order to properly count them—seemed to have a volcano or two or three or several dozen that, if not active, was certainly not dead. And so active were the forces coming up from below the ocean floor that some of the larger islands could be seen coming apart, with that rippling jigsaw magma creating a patchwork quilt. Just as suddenly the magma would vanish, leaving black border scars and smoking black lava marks across even the regions that had no active belching mountains.
“Now that is not a land to cross in your bare feet,” Lucky Cross said with a shaking of her head. “I’m not sure I want to cross that place at all.”
“What I want to know is whether or not the damned moon’s coming apart or coming together,” Jerry Nagel said. “This place almost redefines the term ‘geologically active.’ Doc? You’re our part-time geologist. What do you think?”
“I think it’s another example of when you believe you’ve seen every combination in the universe you come up against something strange. This place is totally volcanic; I can’t see any signs of massive erosion except on the very oldest and largest islands, and they’re most likely to come apart in that nasty fragmentation effect. Plenty of flowing water, but I doubt if it stays the course long enough to create great canyons, and the eruptions and fragmentations tend to break down attempts at walling it up as lakes. Still, with the combination of sudden heating and cooling and the large amount of dust up there, it appears that what saves it from becoming a total oven is that it’s only facing the sun one quarter of the time. It loses that heat pretty fast, but convection causes massive storms. Look at it now. It’s raining over probably half that world down there, and it’s a big one.”
“It’s closer than it should be to its mother planet,” Cross noted. “That’s what keeps it right in line to be victimized by all the forces tugging at it. Still, I see an awful lot of what looks to be vegetation down there. Just li
ke Balshazzar, that soil’s got to be absolutely wonderful for growing things, as long as it lasts, that is.”
“Some green,” Queson agreed, “but also a lot of purples, yellows, reds, oranges, even patches of vegetative white. I wonder how edible it is?”
“For us? Who knows?” Nagel responded. “Same problem as every new world. Which is poison and which isn’t? Mineral content’s mineral content, but who knows what vitamins it might have, or other nastier chemicals?”
“One thing’s for sure,” An Li put in. “You ain’t gonna build any cities down there. Your roads would be washed away or crumbled away or dissolved by that lava, and the shakes and the rain would make permanent building a mess.”
“Floaters,” Jerry Nagel said.
“Huh?”
“The best place to live down there would be on a boat. A ship, maybe.”
“Ship? You mean like on water?”
“I mean exactly that. You avoid that uncertainty, tie up and go ashore to harvest what you can there and bring it back, have an area where you make salt to pack things, and maybe you also have things in the sea you can catch or fetch and eat. If I were going to try to survive down there, that’s what I’d have. A big boat.”
“And what about those storms?” An Li argued. “There’s lightning down there, you can see that, and ashfalls, and who knows what else. Out on that ocean in a monster storm, you’d be at the mercy of the elements more sudden and dangerous than the lava.”
“Well, maybe. But there are so many islands there you’re just about never out of sight of land, and if you chart the area there are, I’ll bet, a ton of sheltered harbors. And for anything other than a direct hit, you might get seasick and damaged, but being out at sea during a severe storm is, believe it or not, the best place to be if your boat’s built to take it,” Nagel pointed out. “I was a sailor once, for fun, on an associate’s boat.”
“Anybody remember where we packed the yacht?” Sark asked in his usual cynical tone.
Randi looked over at Nagel. “He has a point, Jerry. Boat or ship or whatever or not, could you build one now, with just us, by hand?”
“With the salvage robots, maybe. That and a lot of design and some useful programs. That would presuppose that some of those trees down there are tough enough to take it and waterproof enough to build with. And, if we had access to ship’s stores here, I suspect I could knock out a pretty good set of plastic plugs and bolts to hold it all together, and strong, unbreakable ropes for rigging and control. Yeah, with a little help from what’s down there I might just be able to do a decent one.”
“You mean people-type help?”
“No, I mean wood and such. We have a lot of stuff here that can disassemble a prefabricated unit, but I don’t have a fabricator for large structures like a hull, keel, full decking, that kind of thing.”
The captain interrupted. “Have all of you stopped discussing your dream sailboat long enough to look at the night side right now? If not, you should.”
They all immediately looked at the screen and saw what the captain meant.
Melchior was a large planet with a low axial tilt; it revolved on its axis once every forty standard hours, giving it an average twenty-hour night.
They might all have expected some spectacular views, clouds or not, from the dark side, since it would produce full illumination of volcanic activities on the surface, lava flows, magma beds, and the like, and it certainly did that. The place was lit up like a festive holiday ornament, and from pole to pole. Factoring out the clouds, it was spectacular.
But there were other kinds of lights as well, much less pretty to look at but much more difficult to explain. On the larger islands and the smaller ones, and even in areas that should be ocean, there were definitely patterns that looked very much like the lights of small towns seen from a height. Most seemed to be on volcanic plains between large, dormant but threatening monster mountains, but some were up almost against the big volcanoes where the latter met the seacoast. Beyond the land areas, small but unnaturally regular shaped fields of lights could be seen in the waters, often rectangular or square, and in some cases triangular in shape.
“Is it just me, or do a lot of folks manage to live there somehow?” Sark asked.
“It appears that they do indeed, although none inland. Nobody’s that crazy,” Nagel pointed out.
“Who or what are they?” Randi Queson asked. “Can’t we get detail?”
“We are stuck with infrared and off-spectrum measures down there,” the captain informed them. “Lots of lifesigns, very little in the way of recognizable signatures. I’m going to put us back on the planet side and we’ll see what we can see. I hope you did notice that there was considerable light but not heat from the forests, jungles, or whatever they are? And along the volcanic spillways? It appears that there is a great deal of natural phosphorescence down there. Not practical if you require a fire, but very handy if you protect it when you are suffering heavy clouds, ashfalls, major storms or a twenty-hour night.”
“You said there weren’t many recognizable signatures. I gather you mean that the people or whatever it is we’re seeing aren’t human?”
“That would be a good inference,” the captain agreed. “Coming into daylight. I’m going to scan and see if we can find one of those towns or floating whatevers and enlarge it. The problem here is that there’s a fair amount of stuff in the upper atmosphere that’s distorting good visuals. I can’t get more than a rough picture. Let’s see if close-in IR helps at all.”
The infrared pictures suffered equally because of the volcanism and the apparent inner heat that close to the surface. There were some pictures, both visual and IR, that showed vague shapes and strange-looking creatures, but they weren’t detailed nor could much be inferred about them.
“Natives?” Queson asked.
“Don’t bet on it,” the captain replied. “A half dozen distinct signatures with larger numbers, more with very small numbers, and some definite power sources that are not natural. No shipwrecks, if that’s what you mean, but the way the sources show up almost implies that they are from disassembled or salvaged interplanetary or orbital craft. Nothing big enough to go interstellar. Still, what would happen if you came down here? If you land in the water, you are vulnerable to those storms, and if you hit one of them or are otherwise breached, then your next stop is nineteen or twenty kilometers to the sea bottom. If you come in on land, better hit solid crust or you’ll punch right through into liquid magma. If you do make it down, watch out for flows, torrential runoff on the clear downward plains from the first real rains, and so on. I suspect on a world this dynamic that landing and taking off again are going to be your biggest challenges.”
An Li sighed. “I guess the next thing to do is to prep a probe and then send it down to see if we can get down and then get back up again. If we can, then some of us, at least, are going to have to go exploring. Any idea what the temperature is like down there?”
“Hot at sea level,” Nagel reported. “Thirty-six, thirty-seven on the planet side, no lower than thirty even on the night side. Estimates are you can expect as high as forty-eight to maybe even fifty on the full-sun exposed day side, going down to a chilly forty-two or so when that side’s towards the planet. The only reason it’s even within that range is because of the heavy rains that seem to happen at some point every day for ninety percent of the whole damned planet. We’ll need the probe to find out what kind of particulates are in the air. Bet on a lot, which isn’t going to be great for the lungs, so protective masks might be in order. The humidity’s going to be very high at any point where there’s vegetation or other life, so anybody without air conditioning is going to broil pretty good.”
“We could go down with full environment suits,” Randi suggested hopefully.
“No dice. With a fifteen percent average gain in weight on the surface, those suits will weigh a ton. The gravimetric ground shuttles aren’t going to be much good, either; they weren’t desig
ned for it. There’s a surprising magnetic field, though, for being a moon. We might be able to use the maglev scooters Li got us over Normie’s yowls. We’ll see. Let’s get a probe down and back first.”
Within minutes, the probe was programmed and sent on its way by the captain.
“Jeez! I’m not sure I ever was anyplace that hot,” Lucky Cross noted.
“You have the second easiest job here, after the captain’s, at this stage,” Jerry reminded her. “I don’t think we want to keep our shuttle on the ground any longer than we need to get out and drop equipment. You’ll be our cover, shuttling between the ship and us and staying on station in case we need the navy to come to the rescue. Our greedy selves have left us with not nearly enough people for this job, so we’ll just have to suffer for money. First things first. Let’s pick our spots and then we’ll create a prospecting plan, as it were.”
“Be nice if we knew even a little of what we were looking for,” Randi Queson sighed. “In salvage, you’re just looking for the inconsistent, the artificial in a natural environment, like the colony on that wormball. Even in the old days, you prospected for gold, silver, uranium, even copper and lead. Here we’re just looking for ‘valuable things’ we can haul back. Some guidance.”
“We’ll know it when we see it,” An Li said confidently.
“Yeah? Alien changeling gems just lying in heaps all over the place, right? Yeah, sure. I don’t think it’s gonna be that easy.”
“You worry too much.”
You will, too, Randi Queson thought looking over at the small woman. You’ll worry a lot when it’s you who are down there, not safe up here, and it’s your dainty little ass on the line.
The probe did its job and quite well.
“Very low particulate readings,” Nagel reported. “Interesting. The rains must wash most of the junk out, although the winds bring some of it in and, of course, there’s always a little of it aloft and falling. Most of it is staying up there, at least in this region. That’s good. Oxygen and nitrogen content is very good, more esoteric inerts than I’m used, to but being inert they shouldn’t have any real effect. You want to get cool, climb one of those big volcanos. They’ve got snow on them, although it tends to melt when they heat up. Surface ocean water temperature is between thirty and thirty-five, almost like a warm bath. Probably as much sea life, animal and vegetable, as land life, if not more. Looks like there’s enough force for the mag bikes, like I thought, so at least we’ll be able to ride, and since their engines are encased in solid core blocks they won’t tend to get fouled, either. Too bad we couldn’t have used them back on the worm world. Not much magnetic field there.”
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