Deep Freeze

by Zach Hughes

  "Metals," Dan said. "Concentrations of them here and here." He pointed to two spots on the featureless globe. "Other places, too. This might be quite something, Mama. How'd you like to be very, very rich?"

  "I would rather have been very, very rich when we were young," she said with a smile.

  "But you wouldn't object to being rich now, I take it."

  "Not too much."

  Dan began to give the computer orders.

  "You're not going down?" Fran asked in alarm.

  "It's all right."

  "There's nothing there but ice."

  "Mama, it's colder in space than it will be on the surface. There's some solar heating."

  "Why must we go down?"

  "Because we want to be rich," he said. "Because I need better readings of those metal sources. I can get them by driving a heat probe through the ice."

  Fran was still doubtful. She watched nervously as Old Folks lowered into a hint of atmosphere and then landed on the gleaming, icy surface.

  It was not necessary for Dan to leave the ship. Old Folks was equipped with some basic exploratory tools, one of which was a probe that punched its way easily through two hundred feet of ice in less than an hour.

  "Wow," Dan said, as the instruments recorded the nearness of masses of metal, ore so pure that he couldn't believe it. There was so much of it and so many metals were mixed together that all he got on the locater was a big mass of light.

  He directed the probe to bend and melt its way toward the nearest metallic mass.

  "I really don't understand this," he said.

  The probe was within feet of something that showed on the instruments as a great heap of metals.

  "Dan, I'm cold," Fran said, clasping her arms.

  "Your imagination, Mama," Dan said. "The ice is outside."

  Fran shivered. The probe neared the source of the fantastically high metallic readings. Dan, himself, felt a chill, looked up to see that Fran was shivering.

  "Papa, let's go."

  "Yes."

  He reached. His hand froze. He felt a deadness creeping up his arm. He cried out. His breath made a cloud of vapor that froze instantly. Fran toppled, crashing stiffly to the deck. Dan reached for the panic button. His finger made contact, but he was so numb that he wasn't sure he actually pushed the button that would send a call for help beaming outward from Old Folks. He managed to fall beside the woman he had loved since he was sixteen, taking her into his arms with the last of his strength as the terrible cold penetrated into his stomach. He could not feel her. He wanted to weep.

  The water in the tanks froze and burst the containment bulkheads.

  Rime formed on the outer hull. Motion in the computer's Verbolt Cloud chambers began to slow. Metals were weakened as temperatures droppedtoward and past the cold of empty space. The hull crumbled and the air gushed out to freeze into drifting clouds that soon sank to the permanent snow cover and became a part of it. Over a period of months Old Folks collected crystals of ice from the thin atmosphere and whitened to become nothing more than a lump on the smoothness of the plain of ice. On a line toward the periphery the temporary beacons left behind by Dan Webster to guide him back to Rimfire's routes began to lose power and fail one by one. No trace of Old Folks remained. The only hint as to her final resting place was a nodule of ice protruding from the smoothness of the snows.

  CHAPTER TWO

  David Webster tried to get back to Tigian II once every three years. He had missed that goal by ten months when he blinked a sleek, new, Zede-built executive liner into a holding position over the T-Town Interplanetary Spaceport and contacted T-Town Control to report arrival and ask for landing instructions. He had named the multimillion credit ship the Fran Webster, for his mother, and he was looking forward to showing it to her.

  Since the Fran Webster shouted money to anyone who knew ships, she attracted her share of attention. The young man who met David on the pad at the foot of the boarding ladder was full of questions, questions that David answered patiently as he was driven toward the terminal, for he could remember when he had worked at the T-Town port and when his goal had been to board a ship, any ship that was going to blink anywhere away from Tigian II.

  "Yep," David said, "The Zedes build a good ship." He had sold his last cargo to a jewel broker in the Zede League and, to his own surprise, he had come away with the Zede-built Starliner. He had had no intention of buying a new ship. His Little David, a civilian conversion of an X&A scout, had been only five years old and he was very fond of it. The difference between fondness and love became apparent when he took one look at the Zede Starliner.

  He didn't often do business with the Zede worlds. In spite of their having been absorbed into the United Planets Confederation well over a thousand years past, the worlds and the people of the Zede systems were vaguely, inexplicably alien. It was difficult to get anyone to talk about itopenly, but, even after a thousand years, there was still deep-seated resentment over the loss of a war that the Zedes had started and which the U.P. ended with a devastating salvo of planet busters. But, yes, indeed, they built a good ship, especially when money was no object and the buyer wanted every luxury that could be packed into a liner.

  "Anything we can do, Captain Webster, in the way of servicing your ship?" the young driver asked.

  "Thank you, no," David said.

  "If there's anything, anything at all, just let me know. Ask for Pete."

  "I'll do it, Pete," David said.

  The young driver fell silent when David pulled out his communicator and punched in a call. The call went through four exchanges before David was connected with the proper department at X&A Tigian.

  "My name is David Webster, pilot's license number TG2-7L90-300. I want to record ownership of a Zede Starliner, serial number 789—"

  "Hold on, Captain Webster."

  He held. The boy, Pete, pulled the groundcar to a stop at a private entrance to the T-Town Space Terminal.

  "Hope you're not in a hurry," David said as he waited.

  "Not at all, sir."

  "Captain David Webster, TG2-7L90-300?"

  "Correct."

  "There is an urgent for you."

  David felt a little tinge of apprehension. "Yes?"

  "It's six months old, Captain Webster." The speaker was a female of pleasant voice and some sensitivity. "Perhaps you have already received it."

  "No, I haven't," David said.

  "The message, which went out on all routes, is from a Miss Ruth Webster," the voice said. "She requests that you return to Tigian II as quickly as possible."

  "And that's it?"

  "That's it."

  "Thank you. I imagine that the urgent was addressed to the Little David."

  "Yes, sir."

  So that was why he hadn't received it. His old ship had been left on Zede IV and even as he had lifted off in the new Starliner the Little David was undergoing renovation and renaming. "May we finish registration of my new ship?" he asked politely.

  "Yes, sir."

  He made one more call, to his sister, Ruth.

  "I'm glad you're home, David," Ruth said in her deep, pleasant voice.

  "How soon can you get here?"

  "Half an hour. Shall I meet you at the house?" He spoke of his parents'

  house, his childhood home, Ruth's childhood home.

  "No. Please come to my place."

  He fought back the urge to ask her what was wrong. He didn't want to hear it by communicator.

  Tigian City, T-Town, was humming with activity. Ground and aircars purred, zipped, soared, sank, rose, stopped, started, darted in and out of exits. There was a smell in the air, hints of things industrial, of crowded habitation, a smell that made David pleasantly nostalgic. He was carrying only his overnight case containing toothbrush, razor, and other items of personal hygiene. He ordered up an aircar and placed a call from the passenger's seat to an old-line men's store which had records of his body measurements and his tastes. He believed in tr
aveling light. A couple ofchanges of clothing with the appropriate auxiliary items, underwear, socks, would be delivered to his sister's house not long after his own arrival.

  He cringed down in the seat as the aircar avoided total catastrophe with a deft maneuver. The driver had the controls on manual.

  "You don't use auto?" he asked, getting just a little concerned.

  "Not when it's quiet like this," the driver said, soaring to the left to avoid flying into the flux outlets of a public transporter.

  David's last trip had covered parsecs running into four figures. Little David had landed on half a hundred outpost worlds, had flown approaches through belts of whizzing asteroids. There wasn't a flying problem in space that David Webster couldn't have handled, but T-Town aircar traffic caused him to close his eyes and sigh in resignation. He opened his eyes again when the jockeying for position eased into smooth flight. He recognized the old home place by the contour of its sun panels, began to pull out credits to pay the driver as the aircar fell like a stone toward the driveway in front of his sister's house. His every impulse was to tell the driver to land at his parents' home. It was sheer fear that stifled that urge.

  An urgent is never sent lightly. Personal urgents were usually bad news. If that were true in this case, chances were good that the dire tidings concerned either his mother or his father. The others, Ruth, Sarah, Sheba, and brother Joshua were too young and vital to be ill or—worse.

  "Have a nice one, Cap'n," the driver said as David handed him a generous tip. After selling his load of diamonds and emeralds in the Zede System he could afford to be generous. His years in the jewel trading business had made him a very rich man, but that last cargo represented a coup that would have impressed men far richer than he.

  Ruth Webster checked him by viewer before she opened the door.

  "Welcome home, David," she said. She made no offer to hug or be hugged, but her smile was warm. She was a woman at the peak of her feminine appeal, lithely built, slender, and shapely. Her hair matched David's in color, mouse brown, and their brown eyes were of a kind. It had often been said that the only way you could tell David and Ruth apart was that Ruth was smaller and prettier.

  "Hi, Sis," he said. "Sorry I'm late."

  "Come in," Ruth said.

  Nothing had changed in Ruth Webster's house since the last time David had visited Tigian II. The carpets were thick enough to need mowing. The furniture was traditional, dark woods gleaming, rich fabrics blending their colors with the very good works of art which adorned the walls.

  "I got your urgent when I arrived at T-Port," David said.

  Ruth sat in a leather chair. She was dressed in a light blue sheath that showed her slender body to good advantage. "Do you care for something?" she asked, as she drew one shapely leg up under her.

  "No, thanks."

  "You're tired. Sit down."

  "No," he said, smiling. She had always tended to think that she knew him better than he knew himself. "I'm not tired. Is your news so bad that I need to sit down?"

  "I don't know," she said.

  "Perhaps you'd better tell me then, and let me decide."

  "Shortly after your last visit home Papa and Mama bought a Mule,"

  Ruth said. Ruth was the only one of the five children that called their parents Papa and Mama.

  "I'll be damned," he said, relieved. Dan Webster had never been a totally predictable man. Buying a space-going tug was just the sort of thing he might do. David laughed. "Was that why Dad wanted me to give him a quick course in space navigation last time I was here?"

  "I don't know whether he had formed his plans completely by that time.

  He bought the ship about three months after you left. Sarah and I thought that they'd just use it to take little trips, like over to Xanthos, or to Terra II for camping and wilderness hiking and all those things that Papa talked about doing when he retired. Instead—"

  David felt apprehensive again. Ruth was the rock of the family, always capable of handling any crisis without mussing her hair, and he could see that she was worried.

  "—he provisioned the Mule for a long trek and started out down the Rimfire's extragalactic routes—"

  "Whee," David said.

  "We had regular messages from them for a while. Mama would send them. She was very impressed by the distances. Each message was just about the same, something like, 'well, here we are two-thousand-three-hundred parsecs from home.' "

  "And then?"

  "We had not heard for more than six months when I sent the urgent to you."

  "Over a year since you heard from them?"

  She nodded.

  "You notified X&A?"

  "I called the Tigian office. Then Joshua arranged for X&A

  Headquarters on Xanthos to send out an all-beacons search bulletin."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing. An X&A patrol vessel crossed paths with them out beyond the periphery. The patrol ship was downrange when Mama sent her last message, so they noted Old Folks' position in their log."

  "Do you have those position coordinates?"

  "Joshua does."

  "Where's old Josh now?"

  "He's doing a stint of administrative duty on Xanthos."

  "Serves him right," David chuckled.

  "X&A says not to worry. It looks as if Old Folks left the established routes right after Mama's last message. Joshua says that he'll have a patrol take a look in-galaxy from that point next time one is passing."

  "Sounds as if Josh isn't too worried."

  "I am. And so is Sarah."

  "Well, Sarah would be."

  "Now, David."

  David smiled wryly. "How are Sarah and all the brood?" Sarah had married well, at least by her standards, plucking a plum out of the T-Town social circle, a gold-plated plum that gave her a ten bedroom town house and country homes in all of the right spots. Happy as a grasping little woman could be, she had immediately started producing offspring so that her rich husband would have heirs.

  "She would like very much to see you," Ruth said.

  "Let's get back to Josh. He doesn't seem to be too worried?"

  "He says that if Papa were really intent on doing some planet prospecting he could spend every month of the three years for which he had provisions laying down blink routes out there in the unexplored areas.

  He says there'd be no communications because the temporary beacons a small ship carries don't pass blink signals."

  "Right. The tug was provisioned for three years?"

  "With a store of condensed space rations sufficient for another year of rather boring eating."

  "Hummm. So they've got decent food for another fourteen months and reserves to spare."

  "David, I don't want to say it, hate to think it—"

  "I'll go out there," David said.

  "Thank you."

  "Hey," he said, "they're my parents, too."

  "I knew you'd do something."

  "I think if Joshua thought it necessary he'd have already done something," David said.

  "You know Joshua. He can get pretty well self-involved. Right now his biggest concern is getting good ratings from his superiors. He says that a tour of administrative duties at headquarters is a prerequisite for promotion to captain."

  "I think you might be doing old Josh a disservice, thinking like that."

  Ruth shrugged. "You haven't asked about our little sister."

  "Haven't had a chance," David said. "How is the Queen?"

  "She's on a frontier planet in toward the core filming still another version of the Legend of Miaree," Ruth said, smiling fondly. "She has the lead."

  "Oh, Lord, Sheba with wings?"

  "She'll be cute."

  "She is always cute," David said, remembering his youngest sister with fondness. "So she doesn't know about this?"

  "There's nothing she could do," Ruth said. "I thought it best to let her finish her work before telling her. By that time maybe we'll know what—"

  She
paused as the door chimes announced an arrival.

  It was the delivery from the men's store. David explained to Ruth what it was all about as he gave the delivery boy his card and watched as the charge was recorded. When the boy was gone, he said, "Just put these things on a top shelf somewhere until the next time I visit."

  "If you weren't going to use them, why didn't you send them back?"

  He shrugged. It would have been difficult to explain to Ruth that the few hundred credits involved meant nothing to him. Ruth, the serious one in the family, had majored in basic education. To a schoolteacher a fewhundred credits meant something. Ruth had never married. Her job was her life, the children she taught her family. More than once David, as her twin, had brought up the subject of marriage only to be told fondly but firmly that, one, the right man had not come along, and, two, that she had no desire to be married in the first place. Although it was against his morality and everything that Fran Webster had taught her children, David hoped that now and then a gentleman caller sneaked into Ruth's pristine bed. She was simply too much woman to be wasted. He loved all of his siblings, even Sarah, but his twin sister was special and he wanted her to have everything that life had to offer. It made him angry when he offered to do things such as buy her a larger and more luxurious home only to be refused. She was her own woman, content to live on her teacher's income, reserved, sometimes distant, perhaps just a bit warped by her years of living alone. It embarrassed her for him to kiss her on the cheek when saying good-bye or hello after a long absence. She had accepted his gift of a sporty little aircar with some reluctance; she walked back and forth to her school, took the aircar out only on special occasions.

  He watched as she placed his purchases carefully on a table.

  "Will you leave soon?" she asked.

  "The sooner the better," he said. "The sooner I leave the sooner you'll be relieved of your worry."

  "May I go with you?" She asked the question in a small voice, as if afraid that he would refuse.

  "Of course," he said.

  She looked stricken.

  "Hey, if you don't want to go—"

  "I do, really. It's just that I didn't expect such instant agreement to my request. You'll have to tell me what to pack."