Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  “Amen to that,” said Sam. “My feet are still sore from trying to sleep vertically last night.”

  “I’ll start the flouwen transfer system, if someone will go into the airlock and watch to make sure they get pumped into their suits safely,” said Cinnamon, climbing up the passway rungs to the flight deck at the top of the lander.

  The rest of the mid-day eclipse seemed very brief to Deirdre, as, with the others, she quickly sorted through the few belongings she would take over to her storage area on the Dragonfly. Shirley glanced quizzically at the small bundle Deirdre had under one arm, the other arm swinging Foxx’s travel cage, caps now screwed onto its porthole-like windows to make it a hermetically sealed box.

  “You do travel light, don’t you, Deirdre? That parcel would barely hold my extra socks, let alone shampoos and lotions.”

  Deirdre didn’t bother to answer. The efficient shower aboard the Dragonfly worked as well as the one in her apartment aboard Prometheus, and Deirdre was content with the daily scrubbing that kept her fair skin glowing and smelling faintly of soap. She was soon back in the airlock, helping Richard check out the drysuited flouwen.

  Cinnamon’s voice was warm and reassuring over the link from the communications console as she checked the quality of the communications channels to and from each of the flouwen’s chestpacks. “We’ll be able to keep in constant touch, I know. David’s got a great software package rigged up to insure that, he’ll tell you about it as you go.”

  *Let’s go!* said Little Red as soon as he had filled up his suit and pushed out the unwanted water. He surged towards the outer airlock door, heedless of Little White and Little Purple still going through their checkout.

  “Now, when you meet up with the coelasharks, be sure to find out where they eat, as well as what sort of food it is,” said Deirdre.

  Katrina, who was now monitoring the airlock controls, and watching the suiting up process through the airlock porthole, injected her own admonitions. “We need to know if they are entirely dependent on the volcanic vents for food. But be very careful. Even if they are intelligent, they sound like they are bad-tempered. We don’t want you ending up as part of their menu!” Katrina laughed gaily, but Little Red stopped in his tracks.

  *Hunh, more like other way around,* he growled.

  “Aye, it would be,” agreed Deirdre softly. When she and Richard had the flouwen checked out, Katrina opened the outer airlock door. One after the other, the flouwen were lowered to the ground, where they plodded, slid, and rolled their way across the snow-blown rock, looking like penguins crossing hummocky ice, until they got to the airlock door of the Dragonfly. There, Richard boosted them up, while Deirdre cycled them through.

  The airlock for Dragonfly was under the left wing. Inside, it opened into the back portion of the long fuselage that was used for utility functions — suit storage, air conditioning, laundry, and the Christmas Branch’s work wall — a labyrinth of narrow corridors lined from floor to ceiling with racks of compact analyzing and synthesizing machines. Aft of the work wall was the power conditioning section and behind that was stored the spare air and water, and a large tank of monopropellant fuel that augmented the fuel tanks interior to the hollow wings. The equipment, consumables, and fuel, along with a heavy lead shadow shield, provided shielding for the crew from the radiation emitted by the small nuclear reactor in the tail.

  Forward of the utilities section, closed off by privacy curtains at each end, was the crew quarters section with six private bunks and a toilet and shower. Forward of the bunks was a small galley and food storage, and forward of that were the two science consoles and the computer console. At the nose of the plane was the cockpit for the pilot and copilot, while between the cockpit and the work consoles were the port and starboard science scan platforms, whose sensors looked out through the bubble-like domed windows. Because the imaging sensors on the scan platforms produced a better view of the outside than could be seen with the human eye, the only views out of the plane were from the cockpit windows, around the instruments in the scan platform domes, and through the porthole in the airlock door.

  Arielle and George went forward to the cockpit, swiveling by the chairs at the science consoles occupied by Richard and Deirdre, Arielle stopping off at the galley first to grab an algae-shake to take with her. David followed along behind and settled himself in at the computer console, while Shirley stayed in the back, checking out and hanging up all their exploration suits. Then, she jury-rigged a harness inside the airlock to hold each of the three flouwen, ostensibly for their safety in case the flight became rough, but mostly to keep them from getting in the way. As the sun was peeking out again from behind Gargantua, Arielle, David, and Josephine put Joe through the final checkout of the Dragonfly.

  “Self-check routine continuing — eighteen.” Josephine’s voice was precise, and so was Joe’s.

  “Right, luv. Eighteen.” Arielle was amused by this, but recognized the phrase meant only the more traditional “Affirmative”, as did Joe’s occasional, “Oo, aye”. Sitting in her favorite place, at the controls of the Dragonfly, Arielle felt the warm sense of anticipation she always did before a flight. Interested she certainly was in the alien icerugs, and eager to learn more always, she still felt most at home in this seat, with her hands waiting in her lap, holding the remains of her algae-shake. She used her imp to call the galley imp forward, and after handing it the empty shake tumbler, she took firm hold of the controls.

  Seated beside Arielle, George contented himself with admiring the skill with which she piloted the aeroplane. With exquisite care, she powered up the electrically driven VTOL fans on the wings, and the craft slowly and smoothly rose vertically from the rocky surface. Only at safe altitude did she increase reactor power and cut to the jet-bypass turbines, which sucked in air from the alien atmosphere, heated it up by passing it through heat exchangers connected to the nuclear reactor, and jetted the hot air out the exhaust nozzle in the tail to provide forward thrust.

  Despite Shirley’s company, Little Red was soon bored. *Doesn’t feel like flying at all.*

  ^And nothing to see,^ said Little White.

  “Why not check the mail?” suggested David through his imp. “That’s what I do when I’m stuck somewhere.”

  Deirdre chuckled. How often she’d seen Katrina, confronting a recalcitrant problem, nonchalantly stand and stretch and stroll away, murmuring something about seeing if there were any messages.

  *Mail?* Little Red was puzzled, but Little Purple was pleased with the idea of mail.

  #We can use our suits to talk to our primary selves on Rocheworld.#

  A query was put through Joe, to Josephine, and then to James, who opened up a link between the flouwen drysuits and the underwater communications console in Agua Dulce bay on the Eau lobe of Rocheworld. Although the transmission delay through the laser communicators was several minutes long, since Rocheworld was now moving closer to Barnard in its highly elliptical orbit, the massive flouwen back on Rocheworld could indeed communicate with their traveling small buds. Soon, messages were on their way back, and as the words of support and encouragement began to be received, all three flouwen settled more comfortably into their confining suits.

  “Nothing like a letter from home,” said David, just a little wistfully, as he monitored the communications link. Home was only minutes away for the flouwen, while for the humans it was six years — twelve years for a round trip message.

  “Look at all the icerugs down there!” exclaimed Richard as they rose higher into the air. “They cover the ice clear to the horizon.”

  “They do call themselves the ‘coverers-of-the-ice’,” reminded Deirdre, who was monitoring the imaging instruments on the scan platform that looked in the other direction from the Dragonfly. “But, I’m seeing, on the left there, out about a kilometer, there’s none at all. It must be we’re on the edge, here, of the colony.”

  “Look at all the different colors,” said David appreciatively, switching
his screen to Richard’s. “Peacock blue, cerulean blue, malachite, there’s a sort of lapis — no two of them exactly alike.”

  “It’s a grand view, indeed,” said Deirdre. “We can collect some statistics, with that number of samples. Josephine, what is the average area per icerug?”

  “Discounting the regions near the boundary, which are bound to be atypical, the average area seems to be about four thousand square meters,” Josephine replied. “That would be a square about sixty-five meters on a side, although they seem to favor triangular shapes that allow a number of them to come together at one point.”

  “What’s that come to in acres?” asked Richard.

  “About an acre, or four-tenths of an hectare,” replied Deirdre, who had learned both systems in her youth. “And why so much, I wonder?” she continued. “So large as that, they cannot move easily, nor can they get together readily.”

  “Well,” suggested Richard. “If they’re plants, running on photosynthesis, maybe they need all that area to capture enough of Barnard’s weak light to keep their node alive. Josephine? What is the total illumination falling on an icerug?”

  “Since the visual luminosity of Barnard is only one two-thousandth that of the Sun, while Barnard is about four times closer to Zulu than the Sun is to Earth, the light here is one five-hundredth that falling on earth, or about three watts per square meter, so the total illumination on a four thousand square meter icerug is twelve kilowatts. Since we don’t know how efficient their photosynthesis process is, the amount that gets converted into useful energy is unknown. At night, when the illumination is coming from light reflected from Gargantua, the incident illumination drops to four percent of that during the day, or about a hundred and sixty watts. There is also a substantial infrared output from both Barnard and Gargantua that cannot be used for photosynthesis, but which does help somewhat in keeping them warmer than their surroundings.”

  “We humans expend hundreds of watts while active,” reasoned Deirdre. “And the nodes are about our size. If these creatures can store up energy by making new flesh during the lighted hours, they then have it then to use to stay warm during the dark times.”

  As the Dragonfly headed away from the lander, Richard and Deirdre kept their view-screens focussed on the surface below, searching for interesting features in the monotonous landscape of acre after acre of blue-green icerugs.

  “The average size of the icerug areas is dropping as we get closer to the city region around the Manannan geyser,” Josephine reported. “Their areas are now closer to one thousand square meters.”

  “Might be getting more energy from the geyser and less from photosynthesis,” remarked Deirdre.

  The infrared scanners methodically swept the terrain, measuring and recording the varying temperatures of the icerug surface. Deirdre and Richard monitored the infrared image on their console screens, watching for a telltale flat yellow region that would mean an open water lake formed by a local hot spring. Suddenly they spoke simultaneously: “There, off to the left!” The Dragonfly banked smoothly and started to descend as Arielle circled around the lake, looking for a good spot to land.

  “Look you, how none of the icerugs go up close to the shore,” observed Deirdre.

  “If the ice along the lake shore is like the ice shelves around Antarctica, those are dangerous places to be,” replied Richard. “If a large ice floe breaks off, an icerug could be torn in two — or find itself stranded on a rapidly shrinking iceberg with no way to get back.”

  Below them, the glacier ice around the lake shore was obviously very thick, rising sheer some three meters from the water. The extreme edge of the cliff was irregular and sharp, suggesting that pieces had broken off abruptly rather than been worn away. Floating in the lake were pale blue-green icebergs and large flat-topped ice floes that had obviously calved from the icy shoreline. Arielle took the little plane slowly along the cliff-top shore, looking carefully for an area smooth enough to land. With a pleased grunt, she veered into a circle, and steered the Dragonfly into a gentle descent onto a wind-slicked slope, which rose gently at the far end. Using her VTOL fans, she settled the Dragonfly slowly into the snow, ready to lift out again if the landing struts didn’t find support. The snow cover wasn’t thick, and they settled smoothly onto the hard ice underneath. Even as Arielle began the routine of closing down the engines and securing the plane ready for take-off, Deirdre and Richard were up out of their seats, Deirdre to stow Foxx in her exploration suit, and Richard heading for the rear to help Shirley with the flouwen.

  “Just wait and stay still until I unhook you!” said Shirley to the three harnessed flouwen. Little Red was not a patient creature, and in his eagerness to get out was beginning to surge awkwardly within his harness.

  “We have to have Richard outside the airlock to help you down,” Shirley reminded them. Richard quickly put on his exploration suit, helped Deirdre check hers, and the two ducked through the airlock, and then out onto the surface of the snow. They stared around them in the dim silence, listening to the moan of the icy wind through the Dragonfly‘s landing struts. Barnard’s light was bright enough, in this clear air, to sparkle redly on the dense snowpack, and Deirdre stamped, enjoying the brief glitter. Both people grinned, in quick appreciation of their strange surroundings, before turning to help the flouwen.

  “Okay, Little Red, easy does it!” The strong shoulders of both humans carefully took most of weight of the hundred kilo flouwen in a controlled tumble to the ground, and Deirdre assisted him upright with a cheerful “Upsy-daisy!” before turning to catch Little White.

  ^Near the water! I can tell,^ said Little White, ^Even inside this suit. Must we really keep these things on?^ It was unlike Little White to sound like complaining, and George looked at the creature with sympathy.

  “We talked over the need for the suits very thoroughly, you know,” he said gently. “Not only does it make it possible for us to know exactly where you are at all times, it protects both you and the water from any mutual pollution.”

  Shirley clucked in sympathy: “It really is important, but I know how you must feel — it’d be like swimming in an old-fashioned bathing costume.”

  Deirdre said nothing, her mind automatically rejecting the analogy. Flouwen and human sensations were so alien to each other that comparisons were worse than useless. “You’ll be able to get along just fine, Little White. Here comes David, and he’ll be explaining how your communication link will work.”

  David emerged from the lock, just as Josephine opened a cargo door in the bottom of the Dragonfly and lowered a small amphibious crawler to the ground. Since it didn’t need a large cargo hold and long-lasting power supply, this crawler was smaller than the exploration crawlers — only one meter long and a half-meter wide and high. Its name, Babble, was painted in bright red on its side. It crawled out from under the airplane’s belly on its finned treads, equally effective for travel on ice or water. David jumped down beside Babble, and began to explain its workings to the aliens.

  “Babble will be going into the water behind you three, and will always be trying to stay with you. Of course, since you can swim much faster than it can, even in those suits, it won’t be able to always keep up, but it will soon catch up with you when you stop to explore something.”

  *Not going to wait for it,* grumbled Little Red.

  “Of course not,” said David patiently. “It’s just your message center. See, this bubble underneath is its sonar dome. It’ll be listening to your messages from below sent through the sonar transponder in your suits. When it gets them, it transmits the message by radio through this antenna on top, up to the commsats, and thence to Joe, Josephine, James and us. We can answer you too, and the messages will go by radio up to the commsats, then down through the radio antenna, out the sonar bubble, and down to you. When you aren’t actively sending messages back and forth, you’ll be hearing its “ping!” every six seconds tracking you, but you don’t have to answer, it’s just following along.�
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  “These flipper treads on the side help it to swim through the water,” said Shirley. “It can even move the crawler over the ice, if it has to. Rather like having a water beetle for a pet!”

  *Pet dumber than usual,* said Little Red rudely.

  Deirdre was amused; Little Red’s sulks were not going to obtain his freedom from the hampering suits and the communications relay crawler, but they were entertaining. David, however, reacted in defense of his ingeniously contrived radio link; the crawler had been engineered on Earth and modified by Caroline and Shirley for this mission, but the high reliability multiredundant multichannel communications software that would maintain contact with the flouwen despite underwater sonar channel fading and wave noise was his own.

  “Not at all like a pet,” he said. “It’s a two-way radio, that’s all, but one made just for you, and for this place, and these conditions. Even under the ice, you’ll never be alone!” There was a brief pause, after those triumphant words.

  ^Hunh,^ said Little White dubiously. Little Red’s response was a wordless snort. David’s suit computer made no attempt to translate it.

  Arielle had scrambled out of the Dragonfly last, and the nine living creatures stood in silence, surveying the eerie beauty in front of them. Tiny wavelets lipped soundlessly at the snow beneath their feet, and farther out, chunks of brash ice of all sizes and shapes floated on the quiet surface, forming a disjointed mosaic whose pattern constantly and slowly shifted. Farther out yet, the shrinking icebergs, greenish-gray in the red light of Barnard, increased the perceived perspective of distance; their dwindling masses fooling the human eye into thinking they were very far away.

  Shirley and Richard moved swiftly to fasten a winch to a jury-rigged A-frame derrick that was long enough swing the winch out beyond the jagged cliff-face. David switched on the programmed personality that was Babble, and nodded approval as the calm little voice began.

  “In the water, over the ice — I splash along, crawl along, follow Little Red, follow Little Purple, follow Little White, not worry, not trouble, just follow and talk and listen, and chatter and listen, and babble and listen, and call and listen, and talk…”