Analog SFF, October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then there was the explosion itself. What caused it, and why hadn't the crew been able to prevent it? This took much longer to figure out; in fact, it wasn't until a year later, when the Pax Astra dispatched an investigative team to Eros, that a cause was definitely determined. Even then, it was something that surprised even accredited experts: the Explorer's laser drill had apparently hit a methane pocket deep within Eros. Such gas pockets are sometimes found within type-C asteroids, but are practically unknown among type-S rocks. Indeed, most media commentators had already ruled this out as a possibility. But the findings of the Pax investigation were conclusive: the explosion had occurred the instant Explorer's laser pierced the rock surrounding the pocket and ignited the volatile gas, and the resultant blast had gone straight up the mine shaft to devastate the rig above.

  These things took a while to discover, though, and in the meantime, the imps of the net came out to play. People of our time take pride in their sophistication, but that doesn't mean that the superstitions of the past have vanished. Thus it wasn't long before someone mentioned the Great Galactic Ghoul.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Ghoul would be remembered. Nothing lives quite as long as a myth, particularly when it takes the form of a ghost story to be told around the flames of a virtual campfire. And the Great Galactic Ghoul was no mere legend; he had a long history behind him, one that could be accessed with only a few keystrokes. The fact that the Ghoul had originally been a joke was forgotten. Like the Loch Ness Monster, foo fighters, or Big Foot, he gradually took on a life of his own.

  Sterling Crow, the Nettimes star commentator, was the first to mention the Ghoul. That was appropriate; Crow was not only knowledgeable enough to be aware of the Ghoul, but also gullible enough to indict him as a possible culprit. Since most of Crow's viewers watched his show only for its unintentional humor, the majority of them didn't take him seriously . . . but The Morning Crow boasted a daily audience of sixty million, so even the minority who accepted Crow's ravings at face value was a significant figure.

  Shortly afterwards, The Public Inquisitor ran a story claiming that a senior Pax Astra official, who'd insisted upon anonymity, had told the site that “a mysterious alien entity” was responsible for the Explorer disaster, and that Pax investigators believed this entity to be the Great Galactic Ghoul. The Inquisitor went on to say that the Ghoul had been blamed for spacecraft disappearances as long as a hundred years ago, and both American and Russian officials of the last century had covered up the creature's existence. Again, while most people didn't take the Inquisitor seriously, quite a few did, and so its story helped push the Great Galactic Ghoul further into the public consciousness.

  Seeing what was coming out of the rumor mill, the Pax hastily released reports of what the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses had found thus far. By then, however, theories about what had really happened to the Ritchie Explorer had already appeared in the news media. There hadn't been a mine shaft explosion; instead, the blast had been the result of an energy beam fired by another spacecraft, one doubtless of extraterrestrial origin. The six missing crew members weren't dead, but had been abducted instead; even after four of them were eventually found, the fact that two were still unaccounted for only helped to fuel this particular hearsay. The Ghoul had been gone for a long time, yes, but only because he'd been asleep on Eros; the Ritchie Explorer had disturbed him, and so he'd reacted by wiping out those who'd trespassed on his domain.

  All this might have been harmless were it not for the fact that the scare may have contributed to the outbreak of the System War. Royalists within the Pax—notably Lucius Robeson, who'd later become Queen Macedonia's Chief of Naval Intelligence once the New Ark Party was overthrown and the Pax became a constitutional monarchy—were quick to claim that the Explorer disaster wasn't an accident at all, but rather an act of war by the TBSA. The TBSA hotly denied this, of course, and Robeson had nothing to back up his allegations. Nevertheless, insurance premiums on ships traveling between Earth and Mars soared to an all-time high, and some vessels began to add weapons their captains thought they'd never need. It wasn't just the idea that ships might be attacking one another, though. There was also the prospect—however remote or absurd it might seem—that there really was a Great Galactic Ghoul lurking out there. So when actual hostilities broke out between the Pax and the TBSA a few years later, vessels on both sides were already armed with ship-to-ship missiles.

  In the midst of all the hysteria and saber- rattling, the investigation quietly continued, even if it had reached something of an impasse. By then, the bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys had been recovered, and it was clear that they'd died when an explosion had ripped through the command center and hurled them into space. And although no one was yet certain what caused that explosion, it strongly appeared that the rig's laser drill had ignited some volatile gas deep within the asteroid. So the only questions that remained unanswered were why no one in the command center had acted to prevent the accident in the first place, and also the whereabouts of other two crewmen.

  Unfortunately, the ships that had responded to the mayday—the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses—had to leave before the matter was resolved. All had missions that needed to be completed, and their original destinations were getting farther away with every passing day. So the bodies of the four dead crewmen were loaded aboard the Woman, the only one of the three vessels that was headed for Earth, and the recovery teams sealed the rig as best as they could. And then the TBSA and Pax ships made their departures from Eros.

  Yet one person would eventually return to solve the mystery.

  * * * *

  "I never believed in the Great Galactic Ghoul,” Quon Ko says. “Maybe it was fun for people to think some invisible space monster was responsible, but I couldn't accept that. I have to work out there, y'know. There had to be another explanation."

  Over the next six months, while the Gold Dust Woman made the long trip home, its chief engineer continued to study the problem, putting together everything he and the others had learned while trying to supply the missing pieces. He studied the photos he'd shot, read the Explorer's logbooks, pored over schematics of the rig. Nothing new came to him, but Ko admits that it became something of an obsession and Captain Zimmerman eventually noticed that it was distracting him from his duties.

  "Ko and I had a talk,” Henry says, “and I suggested that something might shake loose if he put it aside for awhile. It was sort of a roundabout way of telling him to get back to work, but he seemed to take my advice, because Lesley and I finally stopped hearing his theories over the dinner table . . . which, I gotta tell you, was a relief."

  Yet Ko only stopped discussing the Ritchie Explorer with the Zimmermans; he didn't stop thinking about it. And the more he worked at the problem, the more he came to suspect that the two unsolved mysteries—the apparent negligence of the bridge crew, and the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley—were somehow linked. It couldn't be a coincidence that the two surface-operations technicians were both on EVA when the blast occurred. Not only that, but Pax regulations mandated that anyone working outside a spacecraft—even in the low-gravity environment of an asteroid—should use a safety line. So why was only one line tethered to the outside hatch?

  Yet Ko didn't come up with answers to any of these questions until after the Gold Dust Woman came home. And even then, it was only by accident.

  Three days after the freighter parked at the L2 port on the lunar farside, Quon Ko was strolling through Descartes City's crater floor arboretum when he happened to glance at a bulletin board next to a snack bar. His gaze passed over the various items tacked on the board; along with political ads and notices of lost pets, there were also posters for various clubs and social groups . . . and suddenly, Ko found himself looking again at one in particular, featuring a picture of a skinsuited figure hanging precariously by his hands from the edge of a lunar cliff, with only a thin nylon rope b
etween him and death.

  The poster was for the Descartes City Mountaineering Club, and offered instruction in both tethered and free climbing . . . and that was when Ko remembered something he'd seen when he was making his way through the Explorer's crew quarters. A book on the floor, titled Basics of Rock Climbing.

  "Just like that, I had the answer.” Ko snaps his fingers. “I knew why Keith and Jane were out on the surface while an emergency was going on, and why there was only one tether and not two."

  Quon Ko immediately pulled out his phone and scanned the number on the poster. A few seconds later, he was speaking with Jody Suarez, the club president. After Ko explained who he was and why he was calling, Suarez agreed to check the club's membership rec-ords. Although he reported a few minutes later that the Wetherill-Owlsleys were not on its rolls, that didn't necessarily mean they weren't climbers. Port Armstrong and Tycho City had their own mountain-climbing clubs, as did Arsia Station on Mars, and even then it was possible that the missing couple hadn't belonged to any of those societies.

  "I asked him if he'd ever heard of anyone free-climbing on asteroids,” Ko says, “and for a second or two I didn't hear anything. And then he came back and told me that, yeah, he'd heard about this sort of thing, and it was possible that this might have been what they were doing."

  Free-climbing—the art of rock climbing without safety gear—has been practiced on Earth for over a hundred years, but only lately has it made its way to the Moon and Mars, where ropes and tethers are mandated for anyone not on planetary surfaces or spacewalking with EVA maneuvering packs. In recent years, a new sport had been devised by enthusiasts: asteroid free-climbing, where one went EVA without lines or tethers, relying only on their hands, feet, and the asteroid's minimal gravity to keep them from floating away.

  "Both of the Wetherill-Owlsleys were surface techs,” Ko says, “which meant that they had plenty of opportunity to take up free-climbing. So that made me wonder. Maybe one of them had left the rig to go climbing and somehow got into trouble. That might have forced the other to go to the rescue, but in order to do so, he or she might have had to detach themselves from their own line."

  Even though he's describing how he successfully deduced the solution of the mystery, there's no smile on his face, but rather a wary skepticism that persists to this day. “If that were true,” Ko continues, “then maybe the rest of the crew was in the command center, watching the whole thing and not paying any attention to what the drill was doing. So when the laser hit the gas pocket, they'd already lost any chance they might have had to save themselves."

  His theory made sense to the Pax board of inquiry when they summoned him to testify. The TBSA had agreed to let Ko continue to cooperate with the investigation, which is what he wanted to do more than anything else. So when the Pax Astra dispatched a military vessel, the PASS Archangel Gideon, to Eros to finish the official investigation, Quon Ko went along as a consultant. Although this forfeited any chance of landing another chief engineer job for the next eighteen months, Ko was willing to return to the Ritchie Explorer.

  "I wanted to find out what happened out there, once and for all,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to everyone who'd died that day."

  Another person participating in the Pax investigation was Lauren Moore, an astrophysicist from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Moore had spent months studying old NASA data about Eros, and she had discovered an interesting anomaly that had been overlooked until then. When she described it to Ko while en route to Eros, he responded with his own conjecture, and the two of them realized that it might provide an explanation for Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley's disappearance, however far-fetched it might seem. But they didn't reveal their theory to anyone else; they wouldn't be able to test it until they reached Eros and went out on the surface for themselves, and they didn't want to appear foolish if they turned out to be wrong.

  Almost five months later, the Gideon rendezvoused with Eros and its lander was sent down to the Ritchie Explorer. Shortly after it docked with the crippled rig, Ko and Lauren put on hardsuits and, along with Gideon's chief petty officer, Elijah Koons, ventured out on the surface, using the same airlock through which Ko had entered the first time he'd been there. The handful of footprints Ko had spotted were still there, undisturbed in the year that had passed since the Gold Dust Woman had responded to the automated distress signal, and so was the safety line, which the trio followed across Himeros’ basin.

  The discarded rope came to an end a hundred yards from the hatch. The footprints continued from there; they were sporadic, an average of six feet apart from one another, and although they were plainly visible now that Himeros was facing the Sun, they would have been easy to miss a year earlier, when that side of Eros had been in the middle of its long night. As both Ko and Lauren anticipated, the footprints led in to the direction of Himeros's western wall, a little more than a mile away.

  Quon, Dr. Moore, and Chief Petty Officer Koons carried extra loops of safety line, which they attached to each other as they made their way across the basin. It soon became clear that there were two sets of footprints, one set less distinct and on a slightly different track, as if one person had run after the other. The trails led to the bottom of the wall, where they suddenly came to a halt at the edge of an oval-shaped area where the regolith appeared to have been recently disturbed ("It looked like where kids had been horsing around in a sandbox,” Lauren would say later). There were a few handprints on the steep wall above the area of disturbance, but the searchers didn't notice them until later; it was what they saw at the base of the wall that grabbed their attention.

  "Sticking up from the ground was a boot,” Ko says. “It was upside-down, and we could see it from the bottom of its sole all the way down to its ankle. It looked like someone had thrown it there, until we got closer and saw another boot beside it, this one buried a bit more deeply. And then we saw that there were legs attached to them."

  This was the surface anomaly that Lauren Moore had learned about from studying old NASA data. As Eros slowly tumbled end-over-end, landslides frequently occurred within its larger craters and depressions. Over time, these landslides would create sand traps that appeared at first glance to be solid ground, but instead were little more than deep pits filled with powdery gray regolith.

  "They're like quicksand, only dry,” Lauren says. “Fall into one of them, and unless you're attached to a safety line, you're in a lot of trouble.” A grim smile. “Which is exactly what happened here."

  The legs belonged to Jane Wetherill-Owlsley. She lay upside-down above her husband Keith, who was buried more deeply than she was. Her right hand was grasped within his left hand, and their helmets were less than three feet apart from each other, but they were stuck fast, like two insects caught within dusty gray amber. Their suit batteries were dead and the oxygen supplies were depleted; both of them had suffocated, neither of them able to extricate themselves from the death trap into which they'd fallen.

  Now it all came together. Keith Wetherill-Owlsley had unwisely decided to go free-climbing while a drilling operation was in progress. Perhaps he was bored with the monotony of his work; it may have even been possible that no one on the rig, other than his wife, knew what he was doing. Whatever the reason, he'd attempted to make an ascent of Himeros's western wall, only to lose his grip and slide downhill to the crater floor . . . where, unknown to him, the sand pit lay waiting.

  Hearing his call for help, Jane Wetherill-Owlsley had rushed to rescue her husband. Apparently she'd been on EVA at the same time, probably working on the rig while her husband was goofing off. Since the western wall was beyond reach of her safety rope, she'd released the tether. This decision ultimately doomed both of them, because when she tried to pull her husband out of the pit, there was nothing to prevent him from pulling her in as well, and once both of them were trapped in the pit, they couldn't get out by themselves.

  The crisis hadn't gone unnoticed in the command center. The rest of the crew
had dropped what they were doing to see what was going on. Perhaps they were on the verge of suiting up and going to the rescue. In any case, this was the third and final mistake the crew made, because while all this was taking place, no one was paying attention to the drill. Any warning that they might have had that the laser was about to hit a gas pocket came too late, and the explosion probably killed everyone in the rig almost instantly. The two surviving crew members only lived a little while longer; their suits’ air supplies finally ran out though, and they died together, only a few feet from safety.

  Everything could have been avoided. No one had to die that day. But six people lost their lives because stupid things were done in a place where stupidity isn't easily forgiven.

  * * * *

  Quon Ko was one of the co-authors of the final report that revealed the circumstances of the disaster. He continued to serve as a TBSA spacecraft engineer for four more years before taking early retirement. Since then, he has made something of living from the Ritchie Explorer disaster—he has written articles, delivered lectures, and even worked as a consultant on a vid about the tragedy.

  To this day, he's surprised to hear how many people continue to believe that the disaster was the work of a mythical creature. What's far more incredible, he points out, is the realization that the Explorer's crew committed three separate errors that, on their own, might have been trivial, but when combined killed everyone on the rig. Nonetheless, some people feel it necessary to believe that an invisible space monster was responsible. He suspects that, for those people, a supernatural cause for the disaster is preferable to one that anyone could commit.