Deirdre had been helping Little White adjust the amplification on the transponder in his suit. The crawler’s voice amused her — but Little White spoke in obvious dismay.
^All the time that thing going?^
Firmly though she refused to succumb to anthropomorphism, Deirdre felt quick sympathy for Little White, and hastened to reassure the flouwen.
“No, no, it’s just blethering, now, so David can test it out. As soon as you’re away it’ll only be the ping-signal, unless you call for more.”
Little Red too had stopped, to turn almost menacingly towards the little crawler, but David was finished checking Babble out, and it stopped talking, so he resumed his ponderous progress toward the edge of the lake.
George and Richard hoisted the hundred kilo crawler easily between them in the low gravity of Zulu. Walking over to the brink of the ice, they hung it from the hook at the end of the cable and stepped back to join the others.
Carefully maneuvering the lines and the winch, Shirley and Richard swung the crawler out and over the edge, to lay it gently upon the surface of the water. As the lines were released and removed, the flipper-treads on either side of the machine began their slow and steady motion.
“Off I go, into the water. PING and listen…”
Little White and Little Purple edged close to the rim of the snow-covered ice, and the humans came up to assist them. Attaching a line to a lifting point on the flouwen’s backpack harness, they used the winch to lower Little White’s cumbersome bulk into the water. Spreading out the baggy suit into a flattened shape that was suitable for swimming through the water, Little White dove below the surface with a happy-sounding sigh. Little Purple soon followed, and the two humans turned to reach for Little Red.
Little Red, however, had quietly moved back, away from the shore, and was standing, waiting — for all to notice.
“What is it, Little Red?” asked Richard in surprise. “Aren’t you going to let us lower you…” then he grinned, in comprehension. Portentously, dramatically, Little Red tilted to one side in the round-bottomed suit and began to move, rolling over the ice faster and faster, his head whirling around and around at dizzying speed while his pseudopods pushed on the ice to make himself go faster. By the time he reached the edge of the ice, his speed was sufficient to propel him out over the water with a triumphant shout, and he cannonballed into the water with a tremendous and satisfying splash that sent a geyser of water up onto the shore. The drenched humans chuckled; such obvious joy was a delight to see, and the drops rolled harmlessly off their suits.
“Water warm!” was the first communication from the flouwen, already nearly invisible deep under the clear dark water.
“Only someone brought up in an ocean made out of an ammonia-water antifreeze solution would think that ice-cold water was warm,” remarked Richard dryly.
The little crawler set off busily after the flouwen, it’s treading flippers churning smoothly. Watching it move across the surface, the humans could follow the direction the flouwen were taking, down below. Meanwhile, Babble was transmitting back the comments that the flouwen were making.
^Water feels warmer than home, even through suit,^ commented Little White. ^Not bad, but when we get closer to the hot vents, we may be glad we have suits on, so we don’t lose ammonia.^
Shirley and George exchanged a pleased look — the comment was as close as Little White was likely to come with a compliment.
*Find coelasharks! Come on!* roared Little Red, and the small crawler’s amphibious tread splashed up a froth of foam as it headed rapidly off into the lake and was soon lost to sight of the watching people on the shore.
CHAPTER 06 — SPEAKING
Back at the lander, Barnard was just setting behind some low clouds hanging over the leading pole horizon when Sam got to his feet, wincing just a little as his back straightened. He had been kneeling on the cold basalt for nearly a half-hour, driving a corer through the stone to extract a pristine sample of rock from a location deep beneath the possibly contaminated surface, while leaving behind, in an even deeper pilot hole, a thermocouple probe to measure the temperature gradient through the rock.
“Uff. A little cold and a little gravity — sure makes a difference to the old knee joints and backbone, doesn’t it?”
Thomas agreed, as he raised his ever-present electrocamera to take a snapshot of Sam holding his prize — a cylinder of fine-grained dark gray rock with crystallites of shiny augite and greenish-yellow olivine embedded in it. The electrocamera chittered as it stored the picture away in its memory.
“It helps to keep moving. I’ve now been completely around the perimeter of the knob and have a set of shots that should give us a close-up panoramic view of our surroundings that’ll complement the long-distance one I took from on top of Victoria earlier today. In the process I got a lot of shots of icerugs carpeting the ice, and a few nodes, but they seem to be staying well back from the rock.”
The two of them started toward the lander as the deep red sunset faded and the sky darkened, lit only by the half-moon of Gargantua. “Well, how does it look, Sam? This landing site we’re on — is it just another bump of rock, or what? And how come we seem to be in sort of a hole, with ridges of ice all around us?”
“Well, it’s basalt, that’s for sure — and that means its a lava knob. It’s probably come from a small lava extrusion, couple thousand years ago. It can’t have been much longer, since it’s still warm enough to melt snow. The heat must also melt back the glacier ice, causing this depression we’re in. Once I get this sample back to Prometheus to put through an isotope ratio analysis, we should be able to pin the age down to a few hundred years. Meanwhile, as soon as the thermocouple probe stabilizes and I can get a reading of the temperature gradient, I’ll be able to figure out its cooling rate. That ought to help me pin down the date it was formed. But, it would be helpful to have some idea of how big the knob is.”
“I paced it off,” said Thomas. “It’s nearly circular, and about four hundred and twenty meters in diameter — plus or minus about twenty meters depending upon which diameter you take.”
“But we’ve no idea of how deep down it goes,” said Sam. “I’d like to talk with the icerugs again — and see how much they can tell us of their local geology.”
The two men returned to the lander, where Cinnamon cycled them through the airlock.
“Nice paperweight,” remarked Cinnamon, as she saw Sam’s prize. “Little lacking in color, though.”
“What do you mean?” retorted Sam. “Its got lots of color. See…” he pointed at various spots on the dark gray cylinder. “Greenish gray, bluish gray, reddish gray, blackish gray, and grayish gray. David’d see more, of course.”
“Well Cinnamon, what have you been doing while we’ve been out playing in the snow?” asked Thomas, as he handed his helmet to the Christmas Branch. “Do you have our hot chocolate ready?”
“I want marshmallows in mine,” added Sam.
“You can order your own from the galley imp,” replied Cinnamon. “Although I doubt you’ll get real marshmallows no matter how you ask. As for what I’ve been doing, the Christmas Branch and I have opened up the sick bay into the sleeping bay region that the Dragonfly crew vacated, and I’ve checked out all the medical equipment.”
“Did you get the remaining four bunks rearranged, too?” asked Sam.
“Yes. You’ll be able to sleep horizontally tonight,” said Cinnamon.
“If we can figure out when ‘tonight’ is,” said Thomas. “These fourteen-point-eight-hour days are going to make scheduling sleep periods difficult.”
“Since it’s easier to fall asleep when you go to bed late, rather than early, I suggest switching to a thirty hour biological day,” said Cinnamon. “Stay up through a Zulu day, a Zulu night, and another Zulu day, then sleep through the next Zulu night.”
“Sounds fine to me,” said Thomas cheerfully. “Plenty to see and do. We’ll keep busy, all right.”
“Y
ou can also take catnaps while you’re on watch,” added Sam, who was nominal commander of the four-person contingent assigned to Victoria.. “Josephine can wake you up if you’re needed. And — speaking of watch duty — you’re on for the next four hours.”
“But aren’t we going to visit the icerugs again?” asked Thomas. “I wanted to go and take some more pictures.”
“Next time,” said Sam.
“Then take one of my cameras and get some shots for me,” said Thomas, while wondering to himself which of his precious electrocameras to trust with Sam.
By the time they had gathered back down on the engineering deck to put on their exploration suits, Katrina and the Christmas Branch had loaded sampling tools, collection bags, and various items of portable analyzing gear into two large back packs and one small one. With the help of Josephine’s Christmas Branch operating the winch, the three explorers were lowered down to the surface, Cinnamon and Sam riding down first, with Katrina and the three packs following. Although dimmed slightly by the high, thin snow clouds, Gargantua was approaching full-moon phase and the night was bright enough to travel safely.
“Here you go, Sam, and this one’s yours, Cinnamon.” Katrina quickly strapped the smaller pack on her own back.
“Taking it a bit easy, Katrina?” said Sam, easing the burden onto stiff shoulders.
“A little,” she admitted. “But I think it’s fair enough. If I tried to carry the one I gave you, Sam, I’d never make it up to the top of the ridge.”
Cinnamon smiled agreement as she shouldered her pack; better to have their diminutive biochemist bouncing along in the lead, rather than struggling to keep up.
“I can’t wait to get samples of all the icerugs so I can compare them with the samples that we got last time.”
“Slow down, Katrina,” said Cinnamon. “You don’t just march up to new acquaintances and start cutting pieces off them!”
“But we’ve so little time!” said Katrina.
“We’ll do it right,” said Sam decidedly. “Start with the general and proceed to the particular. If we go tactfully, we’ll get a lot more information than if we antagonize any … body.”
Cinnamon was surprised at this attitude — she had not thought Sam would be this careful in his dealings with aliens. Sam, however, was a pragmatist; it worked better to ease living creatures along, heading them gently in the direction one wanted to go; this worked with humans as well as longhorns. It was only rocks one could split open with a carefully placed wallop.
“Are you going to be our … speaker to the aliens, today?” Katrina asked, curious.
Sam considered. Cinnamon, remembering with a smile George’s spur-of-the-moment orations of yesterday, said, “If you are, better polish up the fancy phrases, Sam! Somehow I don’t think they’ll come as easy to you!”
“Sooner him than me,” said Katrina ruefully. “I really am so anxious to probe, I know I’d blurt out something clumsy. Cinnamon?”
“I’m no good at speeches, but I feel — something — friendly with these creatures. I think I could talk with them, but not at them.”
“I’ll start out like George did,” suggested Sam. “But I’ll keep it brief, and see if we can lead into the three of us splitting up so we can learn more, quicker. If they resent that, we’ll yield, but let’s each one try to get friendly with one of them, kind of.”
“Good luck chatting up the aliens,” came Thomas’s voice over their suit imps as he monitored their progress over their imp links. He also was having Josephine store the images that were being captured by the video cameras in their helmets. As they talked, the humans had left the rock done, climbed up the small ridge of ice, and approached the intersection where the aliens they had met previously had been. The exploration crawler, Splish, was there, waiting. A light snow was beginning to fall, and the whispery rustle it made as it touched the frozen surface was all the sound they heard as they stood, rather awkwardly, and looked around. At their feet was a place where three wedge-shaped segments of icerug carpets met — turquoise, azure, and jade in color. Off in the distance they could see the nodes of two of the icerugs next to each other at the far corners of their carpets, talking with a few of their neighbors occupying the areas on that side of their bodies. The body of the third carpet, the turquoise one that belonged to Gray-Mote, seemed vacant, with no node visible anywhere on the triangular carpet, one hundred meters on a side.
Soon, as they watched in fresh amazement, two of the improbable creatures they had met the day before started over their velvety naps to greet them. Then, from nearby, another node seemed to rise up out of a turquoise-colored depression, and arrived first. The creature spoke instantly, in tones of such benevolence that the humans relaxed even before the translated words of welcome sounded in their helmets.
“Greetings! Greetings! Greetings!” Emanated the repeated sound from the visibly vibrating turquoise sides of Gray-Mote’s head.
“Make sure you get lots of pictures,” Thomas reminded Sam over their imp link. “Those video cameras in your helmets are all right for data recording, but you can’t blow the images up very far before the pixels start showing.”
Watching Gray-Mote’s approach, with Thomas’s camera clicking and chittering quietly in his hands, Sam tacitly agreed with Cinnamon’s instincts. This node, with the curious mote in the center of an iris of silvery gray and its ornately embroidered cape, was obviously a creature of some authority, as befit a physician in the community and Leader of the local association. In their previous encounter, Sam had not noticed the device that Gray-Mote now held in its slender turquoise tentacle, holding it up in front of its enormous eye. With a slight jolt, all the humans recognized at once that it was a monocle, constructed of ice in a lens of carefully polished curvature, and held in an ornately engraved frame. Through it, the gray eye inspected them all in turn, while the alien repeated the greeting-words in a bass that rumbled through their helmets like a drum-roll.
Yellow-Star arrived at this point, and they saw how clearly the star-like design shone in the green center of its eye, even as it reiterated the welcoming sound. Accompanying Yellow-Star was a node they had not met before. Its iris shone a brilliant blue and it rode on an azure carpet.
“This is Blue-Stare,” introduced Yellow-Star. “The master mason for our local association.”
Sam spoke first, and listened as his suit imp used its speaker cone to translate his words into the booming tones of the icerug language.
“Greetings to you, Gray-Mote. Greetings to you, Yellow-Star. And greetings to you, Blue-Stare. We thank you for your presence. We wish to hear more about you, to learn more about you, to see more about you.”
Fervently Sam hoped the variety of terms would indicate harmless interest. Apparently, they did, as all three nodes began speaking almost at once, and addressing their messages separately to the humans confronting them. Sam struggled briefly in an attempt to listen to all the conversations, but gave up quickly, noticing only that Cinnamon and Gray-Mote were moving slowly off in one direction, with Cinnamon examining Gray-Mote’s monocle, making sure that the video cameras in her helmet recorded it from every angle at close distance, while Katrina had drifted off to the side of Yellow-Star’s carpet, followed by the caped and ribboned node showing her how its harp-drum instrument worked by playing her a ballad, accompanied by its deep bass voice.
Sam’s interest was aroused when he learned that Blue-Stare was a mason, and he hoped the icerug could tell him more about the rock formation on which Victoria had landed. He soon learned that the mason knew “Big Rock” quite well.
“By our measurements, the top portion of the large warm rock here at the surface is about four hundred meters in diameter. Do you have any idea how deep it is, or if it gets much wider under the ice where we cannot see it?”
There was delay, as Splish carried on a side discussion with the alien to make sure they both agreed on the conversion of meters to icerug measurement units and back again. It was amu
sing to Sam to see the robot and the alien making spanning gestures like they were describing the length of a fish that had got away — the robot with its shiny metal manipulators and the icerug with its fuzzy azure tentacles.
Blue-Stare rolled its eye back around to Sam and resumed its booming tones, with Sam’s suit imp making the translation. “Big Rock rises 920 meters high out of the ocean bottom, and is approximately oval in shape there, some 650 meters in one direction and 580 meters in the other.”
Sam was startled. “You’re sure about that?”
“For a long time, I and the others around Big Rock have encountered the rock at various depths while we have been excavating our…” There was a pause while the translation program in Sam’s suit computer attempted to find the right word, and was finally rescued by Josephine figuring out the appropriate word from the context. “…tunnels through the ice.” The booming alien word for “tunnels” seemed to echo in Sam’s ear, and then he realized that Cinnamon and Gray-Mote were using the same word. Her next question to the icerug physician brought a reply to which Sam listened intently.
“Yes, I am pushing tunnels continuously down, through the ice in all directions and into the ocean water below. I line them with my body, searching for tiny … bits of useful chemical compounds,” Cinnamon’s translation program lamely concluded.
“Trace elements?” guessed Cinnamon.
“That translates correctly,” was Gray-Mote’s grave response.
“How do you dig the tunnels?” asked Cinnamon.
“Certain chemical compounds in our bodies have the capacity to dissolve the ice; ammonia is the principal one. The digging portion of our flesh nearest to the ice exudes the ammonia and converts the ice into liquid ammonia-water, which the flesh then absorbs and passes back to the main body along with any nutrients that are in solution. Our body thus forms a long tunnel through the ice which is lined with our own tissue, which then sprouts finer tunnels in all directions, searching for more trace elements. The water that is produced from melting the ice in the tunnels is disposed of down a long waste tunnel that penetrates through the ice into the ocean water beneath. Of course, only the water and other waste products are expelled. The ammonia is retained for reuse, while the trace elements are used to make new flesh.”
Ocean Under the Ice Page 16
