Cold as Ice (28 page)

She stared up at the rough-sided rectangular hole through which the car had entered. It was about six meters above her head, far out of reach. The pocket in the ice into which she had fallen was a good deal bigger than the entry hole, maybe eight meters long and four meters wide. It had been simple accident that the car had dropped in with its main door flush against one of the walls.

Camille lowered herself carefully over the rear of the car and tested the surface with one foot. It was quite solid, far more so than the friable upper crust. And although the floor of the pocket was nothing like level, she could move over its lumps and furrows and icy spikes with fair ease. Given Europa's low gravity, the top twenty or thirty meters of the moon's surface was probably honeycombed with caves like this, of all sizes.

She worked her way steadily around the base and found no place where the ice underfoot was not solid enough to bear her weight.

Which meant that she was safe.

For the moment.

And after that?

Camille swore. At herself, and at her own stupidity. (She refused even to
think
the word "impulsiveness.") It had seemed to make such good sense to go to Skagerrak Station for easy access to the Europa data that she needed. But how much sense did it make that she had not sent a message of any kind, saying what she was trying to do and where she was going? The outgoing messages from Mount Ararat did not seem to be closely monitored. She could have sent word to David, using the same communications link through which she had tried to reach Hilda Brandt.

But she hadn't done that. Nor had she left any sign at Mount Ararat to show where she was heading. The most that anyone who came to look for her would learn was that she had left in a ground car. They couldn't track her, either, since she had followed the well-worn trail of other cars almost all the way to Blowhole.

Camille went across to the wall of the ice pocket, started to climb it, and found that it was too smooth near the top. She could scramble up to within a tantalizing few feet of the aperture, but then the wall curved over and inward. Even a fly would have had trouble traversing the final stretch.

She allowed herself to slide back down to the floor and stared up. Damn it, in gravity this weak she ought to be able to
jump
right up and out of the hole. Except that there was no place on the floor to provide firm footing, and there was too much danger of landing on some sharp-edged ice spike.

Camille became conscious of the chill in her gloved hands. Her suit was designed more for protection from particle flux than for thermal insulation. Once outside the warm car, her arms and legs were beginning to feel cold. Her idea of walking back to Blowhole if she had to would not have worked. She would have frozen long before she got there.

There was one other way that someone might find her. The ground car had its own transmitter for emergencies, and she could send a distress signal. The big problem was the geometry. The signal beam from the transmitter would not pass through a layer of ice, so it could be received only by a vehicle that lay within an upward-pointing cone, with the transmitter as apex and the rectangular hole in the ice above as its defining outer boundary. In practice, that implied a spaceborne or an airborne search. And it was not clear to Camille that there was such a capability on Europa.

She climbed back inside the car and began to inspect its status indicators; and learned that she was in much worse shape than she had thought.

Air, her first worry, was no problem. She had enough for a week or more. The killer was heat. Or lack of it.

She had checked the car's power supply before she left Mount Ararat and confirmed that it was ample, enough to allow the car to be driven for hundreds of kilometers. But it was not power that could readily be converted to
warmth.
And heat, not mobility, was what she would need as the car's internal temperature dropped.

Even in an emergency Camille thought like a scientist, and the irony of the situation struck her clearly. With the old, primitive engines of a century ago, the energy that allowed a car to move came from coal or oil or uranium. That energy was first produced as
heat
; then heat was in turn converted—inefficiently—to forward motion. But today's propulsion systems were far more sophisticated, and they disdained the redundant intermediate step. Raw energy powered the rotation of wheels or produced linear motion
directly.
The engines were far more efficient, and in every way superior—except in the one-in-a-million case where a car could not move and heat was exactly what the passenger needed.

So what about the power source
designed
to warm the passenger compartment?

That was pathetically inadequate. The ground cars were intended for trips of, at most, a couple of hundred kilometers, which in turn meant that no one expected them to be occupied for days at a time. The heaters, fully charged when she left Mount Ararat, would keep the cabin tolerable for another twenty hours or so. That was for a car out on Europa's frigid surface, and Camille would gain a little more time than that because the ambient temperature in her ice cave was higher. So she had, say, thirty hours at the outside, and then the cabin would slowly go into a deep freeze, where no human could possibly survive.

Camille turned on the transmitter—its power draw was negligible—and began to send a distress signal. She turned her attention next to the food supply. It, too, was energy of a sort: chemical energy, whose slow release within her body would provide its own heat.

There was plenty of food, enough for several days. But long before it was exhausted, she would be a block of ice.

Water was also ample: twenty gallons of it. It could be heated. But that would draw from the same energy source that heated the cabin.

The car's spare suit? She could pull that on over the one she was wearing and improve the insulation. But that would not buy her more than another hour or two.

Camille was out of ideas. She leaned back in the seat and felt her mind drifting away from the problem. All she could do was to sit, and wait, and live for as long as she possibly could. Her salvation, if it came, depended on someone searching for her, locating the signal beacon, and finding the car in time.

She took out the storage unit for her DOS experimental data and inserted it into the car's computer. It was an act of deliberate folly, a recognition of the fact that she had given up hope of saving herself.

She watched the first data elements creep onto the screen in front of her and felt as though her mind were dividing into two parts. At one level, dark and primitive, she was desperately concerned with sheer survival. At another, higher level she had already retreated into the abstract, manageable world of astronomy and physics, where time and space were measured in billions of years and billions of light-years, where an individual was of no possible importance.

The data analysis continued, and Camille began to see patterns. At the same time, her hands and mouth were continuously at work. She was eating the food supplies, and without thinking about it, she kept on doing so long after her hunger was satisfied. And while she ate, she was drinking water, as hot as her mouth and throat could tolerate it.

Drinking, and drinking, and drinking. A gallon; a second whole gallon.

And then a third, as after many hours the cabin temperature began to fall . . . slowly, but steadily, dipping toward a level where the carbon dioxide and water vapor in Camille's exhaled breath would become no more than a puff of ice crystals. Except that long before that, there would be no breath.

* * *

Nell was changing her mind again about Tristan Morgan. Absurdly innocent and idealistic by video-show standards, yes; but put him in the right situation and he became a powerhouse.

He had said that he was no stranger to emergencies, and now he was proving it. Even before all of the facts were laid out for them, he had begun to take action.

"All right, let's look at what we
know
, as opposed to what we guess or wish were true." He cut off the babble that was starting up again around the long conference table deep inside Mount Ararat. "Camille Hamilton is in a ground car, and she's nowhere on Mount Ararat. Given the car's speed, by now she could be as far away as eight hundred kilometers. Every hour that goes by increases that upper limit by thirty."

"I don't believe that she could be anything like that far away," objected a redheaded woman engineer who possessed a lot of Tristan's own mannerisms, and for that reason seemed to disagree with him more than any of the others. "I bet I've spent more time in ground cars than anyone here, and I'm telling you, once you get off the standard routes it's
tough.
You often won't make a kilometer an hour."

"I'm sure you're right. But I'm setting limits on what we
know
, not on what we suspect or conjecture. And I think that's
all
we know." Tristan looked around the table. "Am I missing something?"

"We know that the car has a transmitter to send an emergency signal," said Sandstrom. "And we know that it's not in use."

Tristan frowned. "Not quite. We know that the car has a transmitter, I'll give you that. And we know that we haven't picked up a signal. But it could be operating with lousy geometry for ground reception." Tristan glanced around the table again. "Which brings me to my point. Based on what we
know
, Camille Hamilton could in principle be hundreds of kilometers away. In a case like this, you don't rely on ground search. You conduct search-and-rescue from orbit. The ship we came in can get us started, but it's not enough. It wasn't designed for high-resolution orbital survey. We need
reinforcements
."

"But we called already," said the redhead. "And we got nothing. You came here, but not to answer our call."

"So maybe you've been calling the wrong people." Nell spoke for the first time since the review of Camille Hamilton's situation had begun. "You said you called Hilda Brandt's office. But you already agreed that Hamilton doesn't work for Brandt, and never has. And you admitted that when you first found out who Hamilton
did
work for, you didn't much care what happened to her. Don't you think Brandt's staff on Ganymede might feel the same way you did? You know—some bimbo of Mobarak's arrives on Europa, and she's trying to cause nothing but trouble with her high-power fusion programs. So she gets herself into trouble? Poetic justice. The hell with her—let her find her own way out."

"But we don't feel that way anymore," said Sandstrom. He did not sound quite convincing.

"Maybe not. Because she's
here
, and you met her, and you know she's a real, living person. But I bet that to the staff of Ganymede, she's just a statistic. You won't change their views with a call or two."

There was the unhappy silence of agreement.

"So what can we do?" asked Sandstrom at last.

"Two things. Tristan, with help from a couple of your people, can use his ship to begin a scan from orbit. Even if we don't think it's likely to work, we have to try. And the rest of us can call for help to the only person in the Jovian system sure to want to provide it—the only person who
can
provide it. The man who sent her here: Cyrus Mobarak."

* * *

Cyrus Mobarak.
It was one name able to unite Tristan Morgan and the Mount Ararat group completely. Nell might as well have said Beelzebub. Everyone agreed on Mobarak's power, and wealth, and influence everywhere in the system.

And no one wanted to face him.

They were, Nell decided as she placed the call to Mobarak's office,
scared
of him. And maybe they were right and she was the dummy. But she couldn't pull back now.

The connection was made in seconds, so quickly that Nell expected to find herself facing a Mobarak Fax. But the screen showed a human face, pleasant-featured and with a great shock of wiry, curled hair. His expression changed to a frown when he saw Nell, as though he had been hoping for someone else.

"I have a problem." Nell did not bother with an introduction. "One that I think Cyrus Mobarak will want to hear about."

"He is in a financial meeting and cannot be disturbed. I am David Lammerman. Can I help you?"

Lammerman. Nell knew that name, too. Like Camille Hamilton, he was a recent addition to the Mobarak retinue, recruited for work on the Europan fusion project. And according to the background material that Glyn Sefaris had been sending along, Lammerman and Hamilton were close. Nell had to be careful how she suggested that Camille was in trouble, but she also had to be sufficiently direct to guarantee Lammerman's total attention and cooperation.

"I'm calling from Europa. We need assistance from Cyrus Mobarak. We need high-performance orbital search equipment, able to perform automatic scans for something as small as a ground car, over a large part of the planetary surface. And we need it fast."

Lammerman eyes widened. He was opening his mouth, ready perhaps to point out that she was making an outrageous request.

"We need it
right now
," went on Nell, "because one of your people is lost out on the Europan surface. And if we don't find her
quickly
, she'll freeze. You said that Cyrus Mobarak could not be disturbed. Well, he has to be. You better get in there and disturb him, and get his approval to send the stuff."

The face on the screen no longer seemed easygoing and relaxed. Nell read an odd collection of emotions: shock, worry, disbelief, and a nervousness bordering on terror.

"I can't do that."

"Can't do what?"

"Disturb Cyrus Mobarak when he says he's not to be disturbed. No one does it."

"Well, someone had better start. Or that someone will have to explain to Mobarak that he killed a woman because he didn't have the nerve to break into a bean-counters' meeting." Nell nodded at Lammerman. "I'm going to get off the line now, so you don't have to waste more time talking to me. You know what we need. Go tell Mobarak that Camille Hamilton's life is in great danger."