Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  * * *

  The next few days were spent installing a system of communication relay spacecraft so that any point on Zulu was always in sight of at least one. Three orbiters were set up at points 120 degrees apart in an equatorial orbit, while two statites were established over the north and south spin poles.

  Shirley and Richard suited up and took the second of the statites into the airlock on the engineering deck. It looked like a large hockey puck made out of metal, two meters in diameter and a meter thick — designed to fit, just, through the airlock door. They pushed the statite through the open airlock door and watched as it drifted away from the lander, rotating slightly.

  On the crew quarters deck above, a number of the rest of the crew were watching the deployment out of the viewport window in the small lounge, while having a lunch that had been prepared in the nearby compact galley. Most of them contented themselves with drink ball squeezers filled with a nourishing “milkshake” of algae protein, essential minerals and vitamins, and various artificial flavors, but Arielle, unable to wait, was eating one of her “specials” — a flip-top tray of crisp green beans, cauliflower buds, and strips of white meat from Chicken Little, coated with James’s secret seasoning, and pressure fried to a crisp, golden brown. The smells brought Arielle a great deal of attention, and she sacrificed one strip of real meat to those around her, one tiny bite at a time. Little Purple, who had been in the video lounge in its drysuit, watching children’s cartoons broadcast from Earth, was drawn by the commotion and floated over to ask questions about the food they were eating. Cinnamon kindly took Little Purple aside in order to explain what a chicken was.

  After letting the statite drift for a while, Shirley gave it a call.

  “You look like you’re far enough away, now, Colin,” she said. “You can start deployment of your lightsail.”

  “I have been programmed to orient my spin axis toward you, so you can watch deployment,” said Colin, as its attitude jets fired, first turning the spacecraft so that its upper face was toward the two humans standing in the airlock in their exploration suits, and next setting the spacecraft into a moderately fast rotation. “Deployment commencing.” Slowly, four collapsible booms extended out from the main body, dragging with them a shiny gray foil of finely perforated aluminum.

  “Deployment looking good!” reported Richard encouragingly as he scanned the unfurling acres of lightsail. Suddenly the deployment stopped.

  “I sense an imbalance in tensions,” reported Colin.

  “I see the problem!” said Shirley. “There is a small tear starting in the third quadrant, about ten meters from the central body. It’ll continue growing if you keep up the deployment. You’d better send out your Christmas Twig.”

  At the center of the spacecraft body, a bundle of greenly illuminated twigs, laser beams flashing from their tips, emerged from a small hole, carrying some small round patches. Using its finest cilia to grasp the nominally smooth metal surfaces, it climbed like a fly across the spacecraft body and out along a mast. It split in two, each half carefully crawling across the thin sail foil until it reached the tear. They placed a patch over each side of one end of the tear, and paused while their arms seemed to blur.

  “What are they doing?” Richard asked Shirley.

  “Sewing up the tear,” replied Shirley. “First they sew a patch on the ends to prevent further ripping, then they lash the edges together.” As she spoke, the actions of the statite imp replicated her words. The imp went back inside the spacecraft, and the deployment commenced again.

  An hour later, the last of the sail was pulled forth from the flat metal cylinder. “Deployment completed,” reported Colin. “No indication of any further malfunctions.”

  The statite, its sail now fully deployed, started to drift away from the lander as the light pressure forces from Barnard pushed it to higher and higher speed. Like a giant gray moth, it flew off toward the nearby moon.

  “Your assigned position is over the north pole,” Shirley reminded it. “Report in to James and Josephine when you get on station.”

  “Will comply,” radioed Colin, and the statite went off to hover over the north pole of Zulu, where the light pressure from Barnard would counterbalance the gravity pull from Zulu. Being always over the north pole, instead of orbiting the moon, it was always in sunlight, except for the few hours when Barnard was behind Gargantua. Each Zulu day, a few hours before the eclipse, Colin would use its excess sail area to lift itself higher, so that its drop during the darkness would bring it back to its nominal altitude.

  Soon, the last of the relay spacecraft had been deployed, and they were ready to proceed with landing. George, Cinnamon, and Arielle joined Thomas on the bridge, while the rest closed down the galley, pumped Little Purple back into the flouwen tank, then went to their bunks and buckled themselves in. As soon as the first glimmer of sunrise appeared on the icy fields surrounding the gray-black basalt knob, George spoke.

  “Take her down, Captain St. Thomas.”

  “All hands!” Thomas broadcast through his imp. “Stand by for deorbit burn! For those who haven’t been through this before, this’ll be the most gees you’ve felt since you left Earth, so make sure you are buckled in.”

  Deirdre reached down with her toes and pushed against Foxx’s cage to make sure it was securely strapped.

  Slowly Thomas moved the main engine throttles forward. Inwardly, he revelled in the feel of the controlled power in his hands. Precise and smooth, but immensely strong, the engines responded to his skill. He and Arielle sank in their stand-up harnesses, while uncomfortable groans were heard from the deck below.

  “That was only half gee,” Arielle announced over the imp link. “Two and half more gees to go.”

  The huge metal cylinder tilted, and slowly began the backward descent, engines roaring full blast, then throttling down to a more controlled thrust as it passed through the thickening atmosphere, letting the friction of the cold thin air do its work in dissipating the energy of the falling eighty tons of machine, humans, and flouwen. Human eyes and flouwen bodies, watching eagerly on their various screens, looked out at a bleak and inhospitable land, stretching to the horizon with the rough contours of thick ice. Where there was no ice to see, the surface looked like irregular fields, differing from each other in their blue-green shade, but approximately equal in area.

  “Like a patchwork quilt made out of triangles,” murmured Katrina over the imp link. “Made by someone with not much choice in patches.”

  “Or interest in design,” said David. “A crazy quilt, I think they called it.”

  The rocket’s mighty jets lit up the black rock beneath them with more light than it had ever received before. Then the light dimmed, as the controlled thrust of the jets lowered the eighty tons of metal almost delicately, while frost formed, and vanished, on the silvery duralloy surface. Ponderously, but perfectly, the Victoria‘s lowered landing struts accommodated themselves to the uneven surface, and took the weight of the lander upon themselves. The engines cut, as Josephine recognized the support and shut the motors down. It was suddenly eerily silent on the bridge.

  “Victoria has landed. All is well.” George’s quiet message to the waiting lightcraft above was unnecessary, as James and Josephine between them had established that fact, but the human report was equally vital for Jinjur and the others to hear.

  Rapidly, George undid the restraining straps which held him to his console seat and stood, just a trifle stiffly. The flight had been brief, but no one had really relaxed during it, rather had maintained a curious tension. Like Foxx, the others felt the need to stretch, and quickly did so, restoring their harnesses and bunks to neatness and preparing to move outside.

  “We’ve only a few hours before Barnard sets today, so let’s get out there, meet this Pink-Orb fellow, hook up with Splish, and assess the situation.” Sam and Richard looked at him, then each other, and grinned. Old habits of command were coming back to George — but it was good to see; b
oth men knew the value of someone, even nominally, “in charge”.

  Carefully and methodically, the practiced routine of disembarking was completed. Suits were donned, with Foxx assuming her usual place on Deirdre’s shoulder, inside her helmet.

  “You don’t want to leave her safe aboard?”

  Deirdre smiled briefly at Katrina’s quick concern. “With me, she’ll be out of the way. It’s better, I’m used to it,” was the reply.

  Arielle completed the securing of the landing rockets, and took the preliminary steps to ready the Ascent Propulsion Stage as a precaution in case of the need for an emergency takeoff. Richard, ready first, cycled through into the airlock to assist the flouwen as Josephine pumped them into their suits. As usual, Shirley ran a sharp eye over everyone’s suit telltales as they lined up by the sealed airlock door. All of this took time, and during it, the noontime eclipse began.

  “With the three flouwen and Richard in the airlock, there is only room for three more on this first cycle,” said Shirley. “George is one of them, of course. Who wants to help me and Richard hook the flouwen up to the winch?” From the volunteers, Shirley selected Thomas.

  Once the three had joined Richard and the flouwen in the airlock, and the inner door had been cycled shut, Shirley firmly opened the outer airlock door and swung it inward, like an airliner door. It was pitch-black outside, alleviated only locally by the landing lights glaring down on the gray-black rock below, while above them was a black circle in the star-speckled sky that was Gargantua. As the airlock allowed the frigid Zulu atmosphere in, there was a momentary fog of frozen water vapor, and soon the lock was at the 820 millibars of Zulu pressure, instead of the 500 millibars used inside the lander. The life-support systems in their backpacks began humming and hissing, adjusting the suits to the outside atmosphere, while also extracting oxygen from it to lessen the load on the oxygen tanks. Shirley swiveled to reach for the winch on the ceiling of the airlock, and her suit, not quite at outside pressure yet, contracted noisily, allowing some of the glassy foil outer layer to press inward on her arms and legs.

  “Migod, it’s cold!”

  Her involuntary comment brought a chuckle from the rest. Her suit imp quickly equalized pressure and raised the suit’s temperature in the affected regions. Comfortable again, Shirley disengaged the locked-down winch and pulled it towards the end of the overhead beam. They waited until the first bead of light from Barnard appeared from behind Gargantua, signalling that the eclipse was over.

  “We’ve only got three hours of daylight left,” said George. “Let’s get a hustle on.”

  He and Shirley made their way down the rungs of the ladder and past the spot where the rungs became steps on one of the landing struts, while Thomas and Richard used the winch to lower the excited flouwen to the surface. There, George steadied them while Shirley undid the lowering harness and sent it back up again. Just before George reached the bottom rung, he had thought briefly about saying something notable as he stepped off the landing pad onto this new world. But since the “people” who owned the world were watching them from a distance, he decided that it would be inappropriate.

  The second group soon cycled through and made it down to the ground via either winch line or ladder rungs. The visitors were quiet a moment, trying to take in the entire scene before them. In the sky overhead, Gargantua hung, as huge as the palm of an upstretched hand, nearly dark except for a fingernail slice of light along the side towards Barnard. Coming out from behind it, Barnard shone dimly, half as big as the Sun appeared from Earth. Off on the other side, two of the other alien moons swung in their orbits. All around the gray-black basaltic knob they were standing on was ice. It looked so frozen that Arielle, watching out the lounge window forty meters above them, shivered, and no longer regretted that duty required her to stay within the ship in case they needed to take off again in a hurry.

  Deirdre stepped silently off to one side of the group, every nerve within her tingling with awareness of her position. Her mind was racing — almost she wished she had a recorder like Reiki’s — as she strove to take in and absorb the uniqueness of this world. Deliberately, she relaxed her muscles, the better to experience the wonders all around her. Barnard’s distant light enabled her to see curious shapes in the mounded and tumbled ice — wind and spray had carved some of the taller drifts into fantastic tunnels and peaks, which glittered, and threw strange shadows. The wind thrust exploratory gusts into every crevice, whirled flakes of snow about, and whistled little sounds, constantly changing. Stretching before her, the landscape was essentially flat, but scarred and littered with grotesquely beautiful shapes in ice and snow. She breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction.

  Richard spoke, so softly that only Cinnamon turned to him in concern. “Damn! How can those toes still hurt?”

  His grin reassured her; the sight of this icy world had triggered the strange sensation, common to amputees, in which the lost member seem to be aching. Two of Richard’s little toes had succumbed to frostbite, years ago in the French Alps during a rescue, and they were now putting in their belated message.

  Little Red was the first to pronounce judgement. *Hunh! Lumpy! Empty! Cold! Nothing to see!*

  At first glance, George was inclined to agree.

  “Yes, there is,” said David in quiet jubilation. “Look there!”

  Coming toward them was the familiar shape of Splish. It looked like a miniature landing craft, about one meter wide, a half-meter high, and nearly two meters long, with a broad boatlike front, flippered treads along the side which allowed it to move equally well on the water, ice, or ocean bottom, and a large pressurized cargo hold which stored analysis equipment and samples. On the top were cameras that acted as its eyes, while its arms were two manipulators that could extend to reach any part of itself for repair work.

  After a brief, confirmatory glance at the basalt knob they had landed on, Sam and Richard walked toward the approaching robot in order to look more closely at the surface of the ice surrounding the knob. Deirdre followed.

  “Fresh snow, from that last big burst of geyser activity.” Sam’s gloved hand picked up a portion of the top layer and squeezed it. When he opened his hand, the snow fell from his fingers.

  “Gritty, and pretty dry,” he said. “Ice dust.”

  Deirdre scuffed her boots in the snow, reaching crusted ice at a depth of a few inches. “Not a big snowfall,” she commented, hoping Sam would say more. She knew of Sam’s habit of keeping up a running commentary when analyzing some portion of terrain — his every word picked up by his suit imp, stored in memory in his suit computer, and transferred back to James on Prometheus at the first opportunity. Listening to Sam was a good way to learn a great deal in a short time.

  “No, but I reckon there’s never a real big snowstorm, the stuff just keeps coming, piling up, freezing, never melting, an’ slowly sublimating away — a little at a time, over centuries.” The calm words made even Deirdre shiver. She looked around at the desolation. Apart from the dark-gray rock on which the lander stood, the terrain seemed all of ice.

  Splish arrived at the boundary between the ice and rock, and was greeted by George.

  “Status report.”

  Splish‘s reply was in the carefully formal tones it had been programmed to use. “All is well. The landing appeared normal in every respect. The aliens await to greet you, at a safe distance. Here is the most recent information I have collected on the alien’s vocabulary and grammar.”

  The small robot transferred the translation data to Josephine, who made sure that the translation programs in the exploration suit computers of the humans and flouwen contained the updated information, and they prepared to walk to the distant fields. Stepping out with long legs, Sam was immediately forced to shorten his stride.

  “Sastrugi ‘dunes’ under that new snow,” he warned. The unevenness of the wind-carved hard-packed snow undersurface was concealed by the fresh snowfall, and the crew found themselves slipping frequently. Shirle
y, trying to look about her at the scenery, took a full-length fall, much to her disgust. “Haven’t done that in years,” she grumbled, scrambling up and brushing the snow from her suit.

  “Let me look at your chest,” commanded George. Shirley was surprised, but then realized what he meant.

  “Not too good for the suit material, is it George? Rolling about in this gritty stuff.”

  “I doubt it,” he answered, pushing check buttons on her chestpack. “But you look okay.”

  After this the crew proceeded more slowly, watching where they put their feet, and for quite a while there was only the squeak of the ice beneath their boots, and the clicking of Splish‘s tread. The flouwen, plodding along in their baggy suits, looked like someone walking in a sack. Because of the low gravity, they had no trouble keeping up. They came to the top of the low ridge of ice around the basalt knob, where they could look down at the vast expanse of multicolored waiting icerugs.

  “They really do look like rugs! Elegant, sculptured velvet carpets, fit for a castle’s halls!” Katrina was entranced, as was David.

  “Look at all the different colors!” exclaimed David, whose color sense had not been diminished by the dim reddish light of Barnard. “Not just blue-green. That one’s pure peacock, and the one next to it’s a deep plummy shade, over there is one like moss…”

  Barnard was now getting lower in the sky, and as they drew closer to the creatures, their shadows stretched across the ice and onto the colorful bodies of the icerugs.

  “Look there! Where the shadow of our helmets falls on their surface…” Thomas, always alert for interesting lighting effects, pointed at his shadow. Around the shadow silhouette of each of their helmets there was a halo, of deepest velvety black, dense in the extreme.

  “What causes that?” asked Shirley, puzzled.