Spinneret

by Timothy Zahn

  “Sure,” Hafner nodded. He waited until the two of them had taken a few steps downslope before turning and starting up again.

  They climbed for another half hour in relative silence, most of the conversation between Hafner and his assistant, Al Nichols. The technical jargon was annoyingly cryptic, but Perez got the impression they were making a catalog of anomalies to be found on and about the volcano. Apparently, Hafner’s contention that Olympus was something other than it seemed was still open to debate. A sliver of sunlight broke the horizon, and with the official coming of day Perez felt his step lightening, raising his spirits along with it. A southerly wind began whispering at his back, as if Astra had noticed the tiny band and was offering her help. At this rate they’d be at the summit in no time—

  He almost bumped into Hafner as the geologist abruptly stopped. “What’s up?” he asked, his growing contentment changing to irritation at the near-collision.

  Hafner turned, and the look on his face made Perez’s eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t you feel it?” Hafner shot glances at the other three, now grouped around them. “Don’t any of you feel it? We’re light—we’re too light.”

  “We are climbing a mountain—” Perez began.

  “Al—stopwatch,” Hafner cut him off. He dug a heavy-looking hammer from his pack and was holding it in front of him and a few centimeters above his head by the time Nichols had the watch ready. “This is just about two meters up; Astra’s gravity is about three percent under Earth’s”—he tapped his wrist calculator—“so it should take about point six five seconds. Ready; on one: three, two, one.”

  Perez had never paid much attention to things like this; but even to him the hammer’s fall looked somehow wrong. Nichols’s slightly choked report merely confirmed it: “Point eight two.”

  Someone swore gently. “Try it again,” Hafner said. “Three, two, one.”

  This time it took point eight five second to hit the ground.

  “You must have calculated wrong,” one of the soldiers suggested.

  “No,” Nichols said. His eyes were darting everywhere, squinting when he faced south into the wind. “No, I checked his numbers. For it to take point eight second to fall, it’d have to start three meters up. We’re not making an error that big.”

  “Broken stopwatch, then,” the soldier persisted.

  “Or maybe the wind is affecting it,” Perez offered. “It’s been picking up for the last few minutes.”

  Whatever the revelation was, it hit Hafner and Nichols simultaneously. “Damn,” Hafner breathed. “We’d better try it again, Al—and then get the hell out of here.”

  He dropped the tool again; it hit the ground point eight nine second later.

  “All right, everyone; down the mountain,” Hafner ordered, his voice sharp with apprehension. “Move.”

  They moved. Perez hadn’t realized just how strong the wind had become until he started pushing through it, and it scared him more than the falling hammer had. “What’s going on?” he yelled over the gale in his ears.

  “The gravity around here is decreasing,” Hafner shouted back, his words barely audible. “Maybe even goes to zero someplace upslope. All the air’s shooting up the mountain and out into space!”

  Perez’s heart skipped a beat. “But that’s impossible.”

  “So is a planet that eats shelves and bulldozers,” Hafner retorted. “Save your breath for running.”

  Swallowing, Perez tried to increase his speed. This can’t be happening! he thought wildly—but he knew full well that that was nothing but emotional wish-making. He could feel the bounce in his feet now, the extra time it took to come down from a running step. And—whether an effect of the wind in his face or not—it was getting harder to breathe.

  At his hip his radio buzzed. Fumbling it out, he thumbed up the volume and pressed it against his ear.

  It was Carmen, calling on their general frequency. “—down the mountain; repeat, the wind here is coming down the mountain, not up.” There was a moment of silence. “Peter, did you copy? I said—”

  “I heard you,” Harrier’s voice cut in, his panting just barely audible. “It doesn’t make sense—wait a minute. Everybody; hold it a minute. Hold it!”

  They came to a disorganized stop, crouching down against the wind. “Who’s got a good throwing arm?” Hafner called. Wilson? Here—take this.” He handed one of the soldiers his hammer. “Now throw it—as far as you can—toward the flyer.”

  Wilson straightened, braced himself momentarily against the wind, and threw. The hammer arced into the air toward the distant silvery shape below; reached its peak and started to fall—

  And slammed straight down with blinding speed, disappearing into the ground where it landed. Even through the gale Perez heard the crack of its impact. “What—?”

  “Forward again—carefully,” Hafner ordered, his voice grim. “Don’t get too close to the hammer. Carmen, get this and get it right; I may not have time to repeat. There’s a zone of high-gravity surrounding us—I don’t know how wide—that’s got us trapped in here. We’re losing air fast. Whatever we’ve got here must be pretty important for a defense this wild to be set up around it.”

  “Peter, listen to me.” Carmen’s voice sounded odd in Perez’s ears. The first sign of asphyxiation? “I can bring the flyer in there and pick you up. Just hold on another few minutes.”

  “No! The way the hammer fell—must be a hundred gees or more in there. You’d never make it.”

  The group had stumbled to within sight of the hammer-dug hole now, and the hurricane wind had cut back to a stiff breeze. Perez’s mind felt somehow sluggish, and it took him several seconds to realize that that was bad: less wind implied less air. Beside him, Hafner stooped and picked up a pebble. He lofted it ahead of them; it slammed to the ground a millimeter from the late hammer. “Everyone on the ground … right here,” the geologist ordered, breathing heavily. “There may be some … air leakage from … other side. No moving, no … talking. Save your strength.”

  Perez dropped awkwardly to the ground, positioning himself with his feet pointing upslope. Directly above him the sky was markedly darker than it had any right to be. Against it, Olympus’s cone looked unreal, the side not directly sunlit almost black. Beneath him, the ground seemed to vibrate, and he almost laughed. An earthquake on top of everything else? Madre Astra, you work much too hard just to kill a few poor humans.

  The thought faded. Closing his eyes, Perez listened to the breeze and waited for the end to come.

  “Peter! Cris! Anyone!” Without taking her eyes off the group lying motionless on the ground, Carmen slapped the radio selector switch. “No response, Colonel. I don’t know whether they’re dead or just unconscious, but I can’t wait any longer. I’m going in.”

  “Take it easy,” Meredith’s voice came back, soothing on top, combat-ready underneath. “Flyer Three is scrambling now—”

  “No time, sir,” Carmen interrupted. “Cross your fingers.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she kicked the underside repulsers to life and eased on the main engines. Hovering a meter or two off the ground, the flyer swung around and drifted cautiously up the mountain toward the trapped expedition.

  It was a nerve-wracking trip, caught as she was between the need for haste and the need for caution. She had no idea where the near edge of the high-gee ring was, and if she hit it too fast she could easily lose control and ram the flyer all the way in. Licking dry lips, she kept going, peripherally aware of Sadowski sitting tensely in the seat beside her. The others were ten meters away now … seven … four … the hole the hammer had made was visible—

  With a snap of sheared connectors and the boom of a sledge-hammered oil drum the flyer’s nose slammed to the ground. Carmen shoved on the throttle, but even as she cut the drive the nose flipped up again, overshooting level by a meter or so. For that instant the underside repulsers were aiming slightly forward, giving the flyer a small backwa
rd thrust. By the time they’d leveled out once more they were three or four meters from the high-gee field, leaving behind a very flat piece of metal to mark the place.

  “Nice flying, Miss Olivero,” Sadowski said tightly. “I hope whatever we lost there wasn’t vital.”

  “Me, too,” Carmen agreed, the first glimmering of real hope stirring in her. The high-gee ring was no more than a meter wide—an impassable barrier for a human being, but perhaps not for what she had in mind. Taking a deep breath, she swung the flyer around and backed into the field.

  They were moving faster this time, and hit the ground with a correspondingly louder crash. Ignoring the groans and snaps of tortured metal and plastic, Carmen ran the thruster limit all the way up and waited tensely for the automatic leveler to raise the tail off the ground. The usual background rumble rose to a scream, and she felt her hands curling into fists. The repulser units themselves could handle enormous temperatures, but it was doubtful the designers had expected the flyer to be flat on the ground at the time. She envisioned the underside plates buckling with the heat, perhaps melting or even boiling away—

  And with a barely perceptible lurch the tail came off the ground.

  Carmen was ready. The flyer’s nose jets spat at full thrust, pushing the craft backward. Two meters were all they could manage before the underside temp monitors hit critical and shutdown the repulsers, bringing the craft back down with a bone-jarring crunch. But two meters was enough. Flipping to “spacecraft” mode, Carmen shut down all fuel to the main engines, killed the preheating ignition system—and the monitors that might otherwise prevent her from doing this—and slammed the throttle to full power.

  And with nothing to hinder or react with it, the flyer’s compressed oxygen supply began pouring through the main repulser units, spraying directly toward the motionless figures beyond the barrier.

  “They’re moving!” Sadowski, pressed against the side window, turned back to face her, a wide grin plastered across his face. “They’re okay.”

  Carmen closed her eyes briefly and let out a shuddering breath. Reaching down, she put the throttle back to half and popped the door beside her. “I’m going out for a look. Let me know when the O2 level hits point three—that screen over there.”

  Hopping down carefully, she limped around the curve of the flyer, making certain to stay well back of the high-gee field. Beyond it, the five men were sitting up now, looking dazed but otherwise all right. She started to wave; but even as she raised her arm Hafner suddenly clutched Nichols’s shoulder and pointed toward Olympus. Carmen raised her own eyes—and gasped.

  Glittering like spun silver in the sunlight, a filament was shooting skyward from the volcano’s crater. She was just in time to see the leading end vanish into the blueness above, and for an instant the strand seemed motionless, conjuring the image of Astra hanging from an impossibly thin skyhook. Then the other end of the thread left the volcano, and she realized with a fresh jolt just how fast the thread was moving. Escape velocity for sure; perhaps much more.

  She was still standing there, staring upward, when the steady wind blowing in her face abruptly died, nearly toppling her onto her face. Recovering, she looked down at the others. As if on cue they turned back to her as well; and after a moment of uncertainty, Perez picked up a stone and lobbed it in her direction. It landed at her feet without any detectable deviation, and a minute later they were all standing together by the flyer.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, her eyes flicking to each in turn.

  “We’re fine,” Hafner nodded. He had a bemused look on his face, as if wondering whether any of it had really happened. Carmen could sympathize; with gravity back to normal and that mysterious thread long out of sight, she could almost imagine the whole thing had been a dream or mass hallucination.

  Until, that is, she got a close look at the flyer’s crumpled tail section.

  Chapter 10

  “THE SHUTTLE’S MATCHED ORBITS, with the cable now,” Captain Stewart reported. “It should be just a few more minutes.”

  Listening in from a few million kilometers away, Meredith swallowed hard against his frustration. He’d desperately wanted to be on the scene when rendezvous was made, and the fuel-efficiency arguments which had prevented the Aurora from stopping first for passengers weren’t the least bit comforting. Whatever that cable was, it was an Astran discovery, and he didn’t like the feeling that Stewart was cutting them out of things.

  Brown, sitting beside Meredith in Martello’s communications center, seemed to feel the same way. “We’re still not getting the picture you promised,” he told Stewart. “You want to get someone on that, Captain?”

  “So far, there’s nothing to see,” Stewart replied. “Even the shuttle’s cameras still only show occasional glints. We’ll tie you in when they go EVA for the material tests.”

  “Do that,” Meredith said. “In the meantime, have you refined your dimension estimates any?”

  “Not really. We still make it about six centimeters in diameter and something over two kilometers long. When we can get a piece of it to work on we’ll get density and composition, but I’ll bet you the Aurora we’ve got your missing metal right here.”

  “Yeah. Well, there’s just one problem with that.” Tapping computer keys, Meredith called up a list of numbers. “Our best estimate right now is that we lost about forty-seven hundred kilograms’ worth, including all the stuff in the fertilizer. If the cable’s the density of iron, say, it shouldn’t be more than a tenth that length. So where’d the rest of the mass come from?”

  “No idea,” Stewart admitted. “Maybe the chemical analysis will give us a clue.” He paused. “Okay, they’re exiting the lock now. Here we go.”

  In front of Meredith the screen came to life. To one side of the camera was the bulk of the shuttle, from which a spacesuited man equipped with a maneuvering pack was emerging. On the other side of the picture, the cable was just barely visible. A second figure joined the first, and for several minutes they jockeyed around the cable taking pictures. As Meredith had half expected, there was no more detail to the cable’s surface at close range than had been visible farther out.

  “That should be enough,” Stewart said at last. “Try the cutters now—stay near the end.”

  “Roger.” The first astro had undipped a set of what looked to Meredith like a mechanized lobster claw. Moving forward, he set the blades against the cable—and suddenly swore. “Damn! It’s stuck!”

  “What do you mean, stuck?”

  “As in glued to the cable, Captain. I barely touched it, and now I can’t … I can’t even get it loose running the motor in reverse.”

  Meredith exchanged a quick glance with Brown. “Maybe you can still cut it,” he suggested into the mike. “Or at least cut enough groove to give us its hardness.”

  “Yes, sir.” A pause. “I’m trying, sir, but nothing’s happening.”

  “That’s impossible,” Stewart cut in. “I’ve seen those cutters handle ten-centimeter tungsten plate without—”

  “Look out!” one of the astros shouted, and Meredith flinched in automatic reaction as the men on the screen jerked back.

  “You all right?” Stewart asked sharply.

  “Yes, sir,” the rattled answer came. “We’ve just lost the cutters. The motor burned out—scattered small bits of itself all over the place. Uh … I can’t even see a scratch underneath the blades.”

  For a long moment there was nothing but the hum of the radio’s carrier. “I see,” Stewart said at last. “Well … does the reflectivity read low enough to try using a laser on it?”

  “Just a second, sir. … We could try the UV, I suppose; the reflectivity seems to increase with wavelength. But I’m not at all sure it’ll do any better than the cutters did.”

  “Try it anyway,” Meredith instructed. “You can at least get a heat capacity estimate that way.”

  It took a minute to get the laser ready, and two or three more to position the in
frared sensors that would measure the cable’s temperature. “Here goes, sir. Laser’s going … reflection about thirty-eight percent—that seems low for a metal—”

  “Temperature’s starting up slowly,” the second astro put in. “Up to … what the hell?”

  “What?” Stewart snapped.

  “The temp just … dropped, Captain; dropped like a stone all the way down to … well, to a few degrees absolute.”

  “Superconductor,” Brown murmured, sounding awed.

  “That’s impossible,” the astro retorted. “The reading was well above superconductor temperatures when it dropped.”

  Stewart ordered several more tests run, but each one simply added another mystery to the growing list. A portable wire-tester was hopelessly inadequate for measuring tensile strength—the cable didn’t even stretch, let alone break. A standard metal detector gave no reading even a few centimeters away from the cable, but a direct measurement of resistivity showed that, under sufficiently high voltages, the material became a superconductor of electricity. And possibly the oddest discovery of all came when one of the astros accidentally brushed the cable and stuck fast. In attempting to cut him loose, his partner found that the “glue” had somehow penetrated several centimeters into the spacesuit fabric, rendering that section nearly as unbreakable as the cable itself. In the end they had to cut a gaping hole around the affected material; leaving the astro to do a decompressed reentry to the shuttle.

  “I don’t know about you,” Meredith told Stewart when the two astros were back inside, “but I’m ready to call it a day. It’s obvious we’re not going to find out anything more with the equipment you’ve got out there. I think we’re going to have to bring the cable back here.”

  “As in Astran orbit, you mean?”

  “As in groundside.”

  There was a long pause. “And how, may I ask, do you intend to land two kilometers of heavy cable?” Stewart asked. “Without endangering one of my shuttles, that is?”

  Meredith looked at Brown, gestured toward the mike. “We’ve been studying the problem ever since the cable was discovered,” Brown told the captain. “Given the length and stickiness, I think it would be most reasonable to wrap it around itself, pretzel fashion, and tow it into near orbit. Once there, you could put a remote booster and some parachutes on it and send it on down. There are lots of open areas we could drop it in—north of Wright might be good, since a lot of our heavier equipment is up there.”