Across a Billion Years (16 page)

But I won’t be there to see it happen. That’s comforting. Or is it?

On that ambiguous note I stopped dictating, ten days ago. It is now close to the end of November, and I pick up this cube again just to add the P.S. that we will be reaching GGC 1145591 in five more days. I doubt that anything significant will happen between now and then, and so I’m going to seal the cube.

Status remains quo in all ways. Whenever I see Jan, she’s with Saul and they’re deep in a discussion of the self-cancelling French stamps of 2115, or whatever. Kelly suggests I take up coin collecting in self defense. The idea doesn’t seem practical. What the zog, I suppose Saul is just the better man. I wish I knew why, though.

Away with such trivia. The dark star awaits us.

December 12, 2375

Planet III of GGC 1145591

W
E ARE VERY MUCH
on our own here. And things are extremely strange. I never imagined, when I picked a sedate profession like archaeology, that it would bring me to anything like this.

We are in a solar system that knows no daylight. We seem bewitched, transformed into gnomes, condemned to scuttle through dark tunnels lit only by a faint purplish glow breaking through from somewhere far above. But there are no tunnels. We are at the surface of the world. This is the condition of life here: unending darkness.

Even on Pluto the sun brings a sort of light, but not here. The sun of this solar system is a dead star, or rather one that is so close to death that we can sense the intensity of its final struggles. Our mood is subdued. We say little to one another. The petty conflicts that sometimes used to break out among us no longer break out. This place casts a mysterious spell. I feel as if I’m caught inside a cage of dreams.

The ultradrive crew that brought us here lost no time in clearing out. The cruiser landed on the third planet of the system, which has no name. (We are trying to think of one.) The crewmen unloaded our gear. Then they took off, fast.

Our rented planetship was waiting for us. It’s a little undersized, but it’ll do: carrying capacity of twenty-five, passengers and crew. For purposes of calculations the eleven of us count as twenty, thanks to Mirrik’s extra tonnage. The ship has a two-man crew. The captain is straight out of bad movies, a veteran-of-the-spaceways type with seamed space-tanned skin and faded blue eyes; he chews some mildly narcotic weed from a Deneb world and goes around spitting everywhere. The weed gives him the smell of a cloying perfume, which is a little at odds with his tough-guy image. His name is Nick Ludwig and he says he’s been piloting rental ships for thirty years. He’s ferried a lot of chartered cruises of millionaires around, but never archaeologists. The copilot is an android named Webber Fileclerk, with the usual glamor-plus appearance. An odd team.

The planetship is both our transport and our housing, for we have no facilities for blowing bubbleshacks. Whenever we go outside, we have to run through a complete airlock cycle, which is a sposhing pain, and we have to put on breathing-suits. There’s no atmosphere on this world. More accurately, there is one, but it’s frozen solid. The temperature here runs maybe five degrees above absolute, and
everything
freezes, hydrogen, oxygen, the whole periodic table. Our suits are insulated, of course, but it would be a quick death if a joint sprang.

Once upon a time this may have been a fairly decent Earthtype world. It’s a little more massive than Earth, and the gravity is maybe 1.25, which is to say enough to slow you down but not anything really uncomfortable. The atmosphere that lies around here in icy heaps was evidently our friendly oxygen-nitrogen mix. A terraforming crew could probably turn this place into a zingo resort planet simply by juicing up the thermonuclear reactions of the local sun until things thawed out.

The local sun …

We are obsessed by that sun. I dream about it, and I’m not the only one who does. When we leave the ship, we lose track of our purpose and stare at it for long minutes.

We wear telescopic glasses for a good view. There isn’t much to see with the naked eye. We’re only 110 million kilometers away from it, a lot closer than Earth is to its sun, but this star is small. And dark. Its visible disk is about one tenth that of the sun seen from Earth. We have to hunt around in the sky to find it, feebly flickering against the backdrop of space.

GGC 1145591 probably has a million years of life left in it, but as stars go it’s on its deathbed. A star takes a long time to die. As it burns up the hydrogen that is its fuel, it begins to contract, raising its density and turning the potential energy of gravitation into thermal energy. That’s what happened here, so many billions of years ago that it zaps the mind to think about it. Long before even the High Ones evolved, this star collapsed in on itself and became a white dwarf, with a density of tons per cubic inch. And burned on and on, gradually cooling, growing dark.

Now, as a black dwarf, it appears through the telescope like a vast lava field. There’s the gleam of molten metal, or so it seems, with islands of ash and slag drifting on it. The mean surface temperature of the star is about 980 degrees, so nobody’s likely to land on it even now. The ash masses radiate at about 300 degrees, and it’s much hotter inside, where the compressed nuclei still generate considerable kick. Even a dark star produces heat, but less and less of it all the time. A million years from now this black dwarf will be dead, just a big ball of ash drifting through space, cold, burned out. The last flicker of light will be gone from this solar system and the victory of night will be complete.

We do not plan to stay here any longer than we have to. As soon as we trace the asteroid on which the High Ones installed the rock vault, we’ll head for it.

This planet orbits the edge of the asteroid belt. There are thousands of asteroids beyond here, and may take weeks to find the right one. We begin with a very small scrap of information: the globe sequence showing a spaceship of the High Ones landing on a broad plain. From this it has been possible to calculate the curvature of the asteroid’s surface; given that, we can compute its approximate diameter. Luna City Observatory helped us with some of this. There’s a big margin for error, since we’re just guessing at the asteroid’s density, but at least we can eliminate 90 percent of the asteroids in the belt because they lie outside our parameters of size.

Now we’re making use of our planetship’s scanning facilities. Captain Ludwig has his equipment set up to track the whole asteroid belt; as each asteroid within the right size range comes within reach, he has the ship’s computer run an orbit for it. So far he’s found a dozen asteroids that seem to fit the specs. We’ll scan for another week; then we’ll begin to check the asteroids out, one by one. Let’s hope we don’t find too many more.

I think I’m starting to understand the troubles I’ve been having with Jan.

Every three hours somebody has to go outside the ship to set off a flare a thousand meters away. This has something to do with the measurements Nick Ludwig is making—something about triangulation—and I don’t pretend to understand it. We take turns doing it, and Dr. Schein insists that we do it in twos just to be safe. This morning, when flare time came around, Dr. Schein said, “Tom, you and Jan suit up and take the flare, yes?”

It was all right with me, and I started toward the rack where the breathing-suits were kept. But as soon as Dr. Schein had walked away, Jan gave me a poisonous look and whispered, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go outside with
Kelly
?”

“Kelly’s got other work to do this morning,” I said, not getting the point at all.

That was this morning. Jan suited up after all, and accompanied me outside in icy silence, and we lit the flare and came back in. But now I’m finally seeing the picture.

Jan didn’t start cooling on me until after the night when she walked into the cruiser’s library and found me talking with Kelly. I think Jan believes I’ve been fissioning around with her, that I’m having an affair with her.

I swear I haven’t given a cough in Kelly’s direction, not once. Kelly and I have become good friends, but purely platonic. There can’t be anything real between us—and Jan knows it. Kelly just isn’t the sort of one-in-a-million android who’d go in for biologizing. Or is Jan jealous simply of the
time
I spend with Kelly? Sometimes I envy androids. This business of humanity having two different sexes makes for all kinds of headaches.

We now have located seventeen asteroids that are possible sites for the High Ones vault. Captain Ludwig thinks that he’s just about checked out the entire belt, but for the sake of caution he wants to keep scanning for three more days, that is, through December 20. Then we’ll set out to inspect them.

Our chances of actually finding a billion-year-old vault on an uncertainly located asteroid suddenly seem fantastically slim to me. The others probably feel the same way. But we don’t voice our doubts. We try not even to think about them. At least, I try. I start not to understand how we ever committed ourselves to such a chimpo scheme. Walking away from the juiciest High Ones site ever found, defying Galaxy Central, running up huge outlays of stash to romp around from star to star—! Archaeologists are supposed to be stable people, patient drudges who stick to their proper work year after year. What are we doing here? How could we have let this happen? Why did we imagine we’d find anything?

Dark thoughts on a dark world of a dark star.

Dr. Schein must be thinking similar things. Certainly this quest is out of character for him. The strain shows in his face. We’re a little worried about him. He lost his temper at Steen Steen yesterday and really cranked the Calamorian over, just because Steen accidentally turned on a data mixer, fed two streams of info into the computer, and sposhed a couple of hours’ work. Dr. Schein got so angry we all were shocked, especially when he said right to Steen’s face, “You wouldn’t have been here at all if I had had my way! You were forced on me in the name of racial tolerance!”

Steen kept his/her temper pretty well. His/her tentacles did a little twining movement, and his/her sidemantles rippled in an ominous way. I expected a militant denunciation of Dr. Schein’s bigotry to come tumbling out. But Steen had been discussing Christianity with Mirrik earlier in the day, and I guess he/she was in a Jesus mood, because what Steen said was, “I forgive you, Dr. Schein. You know not what you say.”

A silly interlude all around. But it was disturbing to see our good and kind and rational Dr. Schein screeching that way. He must be worried. I am.

As you know I’m famous for my subtle approach. So after I had had a few days to think about Jan’s remark about me and Kelly, I worked out a subtle way to take the matter up with her.

We went out to light flares again. The rotation schedule called for 408b to accompany me, but I arranged things with Pilazinool, and Jan was substituted. As we emerged from the airlock and stepped out onto the icy plateau I said, “What did you mean by that remark about me and Kelly?” Subtle.

Jan’s helmet hid her expression. The voice that came over my breathing-suit radio was carefully neutral. “What remark?”

“Last week. When you asked if I’d rather come out here with Kelly.”

“I understand you prefer her company to mine.”

“That’s not so! Jan, I swear to you—”

“Hand me the flare.”

“Zog, Jan, you’re absolutely imagining things! Kelly is an
android,
for zog’s sake! How can you imagine that there’s even the slightest—”

“Will you push the ignition plunger or should I?”

I lit the flare. “Give me an answer, Jan. What makes you think that I and Kelly—that Kelly and I—”

“I really don’t care to discuss it.”

She walked away, turned her back on me, and peered up at the dark star in an elaborate display of fascination with astronomy.

“Jan?”

“I’m examining solar phenomena.”

“You’re ignoring me.”

“And you’re boring me.”

“Jan, I’m trying to tell you that you’ve got absolutely no right to be jealous.
I’m
the one who ought to be jealous. Watching you lock yourself up in Saul Shahmoon’s cabin for hours at a time. If you’re in love with Saul, say so, and I’ll zap out. But if you’ve been doing all this just as some way of paying me back for my imaginary affair with Kelly, then—”

“I don’t wish to discuss any of this,” she said.

Females can be pretty wearying—yourself excepted, of course, Lorie. What I particularly loathe is when they begin coming on with secondhand dramatics, handing out a replay of the big love scene from the last tridim they saw. Jan wasn’t speaking out her feelings to me; she was playing a part. The Cold, Aloof Heroine.

Fight fire with fire. Old Earthside proverb. I could play a part too: Dashing, Impulsive Hero. Rush up to stubborn girl, whirl her into your arms, burn away her irrational stubborn frostiness with a passionate embrace. I did. And, of course, smacked the front of my helmet against the front of hers.

We stared at each other across the ten-centimeter gap that the helmets imposed. She looked surprised, and then amused. She wiggled her head from side to side. I wiggled mine. Old Eskimo custom of affection: rubbing noses. She stepped back, scooped up ice, smeared it over the front of my helmet. I made a snowball and tossed it at her. She caught it and tossed it back.

For about ten minutes we capered around on the ice. In our big, rigid breathing-suits we were none too graceful; it was like a
pas de deux
for Dinamonians.

Finally we sprawled out together, exhausted, laughing wildly.

“Chimpo,” she said.

“Zooby quonker!”

“Feeb!”

“You too. To the tenth power.”

“What
was
between you and Kelly?”

“Talk. Just talk. Nobody else was around that night and Leroy Chang was pursuing her, and she wanted protection. She’s quite an interesting vidj. But she does nothing at all for me
that
way.”

“Swear?”

“Swear. Now, about you and Saul—”

“Oh, that’s old stuff,” Jan said. “Absolutely prehistoric.”