Cold as Ice (40 page)

"So they're safe."

"
No.
You see, they took the
Danae
, a ship that was being modified and wasn't ready for full use. And they're not just under the ice, exploring; they're
stuck
under there, with no way back and not enough oxygen. They closed Blowhole
themselves
; it iced over when they cut off the power below. And I had nothing to do with
any
of that." Sandstrom's voice rose to a wail just as the signal for the final descent phase sounded through the ship. "But I'm being blamed for the whole stupid thing!"

* * *

Blowhole had vanished. To Nell and the others approaching in the ground cars, its former location was signaled only by a circle of buildings and a long, shallow-sloping ramp that ran down to end in a blank wall of new ice. A glittering submersible—the
Spindrift
, or its identical twin—sat at the top of the ramp, surrounded by half a dozen cars.

"See, water-ice is different from most ices. When it freezes, it
expands
." Buzz Sandstrom was in the same ground car as Nell. He had been enormously relieved when Hilda Brandt did not accuse him of permitting an unauthorized ship to land at Mount Ararat. As soon as she found out who the three newcomers were, she had actually told him to bring them along to help. Now Buzz was explaining to Nell—and to her insatiable unseen recorders—the problem of recovering the bodies of Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer from underneath the ice.

"So Blowhole doesn't just fill with ice if the heat is turned off," he went on, "because the column of water wants to expand when it freezes. The only way it can go is
up.
It squeezes higher in the cylinder. See the ramp? It used to lead down to open water, when the water level was down below the ice level. Now you could drive this car right out where Blowhole used to be."

"How thick is the ice? It's not solid all the way down the hole, surely?"

"No. It hasn't had time to freeze that much. But it's maybe thirty meters, according to sonar readings. They might as well be digging at it with toothpicks. Maybe that's just as well. If they broke through, they'd fall into the water."

"They" were a dozen suited figures, working with mobile construction equipment on the ice over Blowhole. As Nell's car approached on its caterpillar tracks, closely followed by the car holding David Lammerman and Tristan Morgan, all excavation work stopped. Two of the suited people came hurrying across to meet the arriving cars.

"Waste of time digging." Hilda Brandt nodded to the new arrivals. She was easily recognizable by the high-level insignia on her suit. "We need a fresh idea. I was hoping that one of you might think of something."

Nell was impressed again by the other woman's self-confidence and concentration. She offered no explanation of why she had put Europa in isolation mode, and made no comment as to why she had now chosen to change her mind and accept help. Just the statement: We have a problem that needs a solution.

A problem?
Nell couldn't make herself see it that objectively. The death of Jon Perry wouldn't be a problem, it would be the worst thing in the world. But Hilda Brandt remained so damned
calm.

Don't let yourself brood on it. Be a reporter—ask questions.
"Why did they seal themselves down under the ice if they knew it might kill them?"

"They didn't." Camille was at Hilda Brandt's side. It was clear that she knew nothing of the recent embargo of Europa and regarded the arrival of Nell and the others simply as extra help. "They thought they were quite safe. They would have been, under normal circumstances, because the
Danae
can carry a fourteen-day oxygen supply, and more than that of food and water. But when the hull was strengthened to withstand greater pressure, most of the air tanks were temporarily removed. They hadn't been replaced when Jon Perry stole the submersible. The gauges
show
a fourteen-day supply, but that's totally misleading. The air will last less than two days for two people. Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer have been down for over two and a half days. If they've spent most of their time asleep, or sitting very still, it's possible that they are still alive. But time's against us. And we're farther from getting them out than we've ever been. The layer of ice covering Blowhole gets thicker by the hour."

Nell found herself staring at Tristan. There it was, the explicit statement that neither Buzz Sandstrom nor Hilda Brandt had been willing to provide. Jon and Wilsa, according to Camille's numbers, were surely dead. This was no rescue mission. It was the doleful recovery of corpses.

Yet Hilda Brandt still seemed to be denying it, acting as though every minute counted. She had moved to stand by David Lammerman and was listening intently. He was pointing at Blowhole and then back toward Mount Ararat. After a few seconds, she began to nod. She waved.

"Come here, would you? I want you to hear this, then tell me what you think."

Her call and gesture were to Camille Hamilton, but of course everyone else crowded around as well.

"Actually, it's not just my idea." David Lammerman had been confident and in command since leaving Ganymede. Now he showed, just for a moment, a trace of his old diffidence. It vanished as he went on: "When we first landed at Ararat Base and learned what had happened at Blowhole, I wondered about ways to open up the ice. I didn't know that you were trying to excavate, but I'd decided straightaway that excavation couldn't work. It seemed to me that only something really powerful would do the job fast enough and yet keep the ice open long enough for us to find . . . whatever's down there."

David glanced from Nell to Tristan, then away. "So I asked myself, what's the most powerful energy source that I know of on Europa? And it became obvious:
the drive on the ship that brought us here.
It's powered by a Moby. I called Cyrus Mobarak—" He caught Camille's shocked expression and gave her an embarrassed smile. "I know, Camille. But I really did. On my own. I spoke to him, and by now he should have landed and be on his way to Blowhole. But I didn't want to wait until he arrived, so I asked him, could a ship's Moby be modified to melt a path down into Blowhole without destroying itself and anything down there in its way?"

"And his reply?" Hilda Brandt spoke for everyone.

"He said he didn't see why not. But it would be very tricky, because a ship's fusion drive was never designed to interact directly with water and ice. It's an unstable situation, he's pretty sure of that. But he says he's not the real expert on Moby stability." He pointed at Camille. "She is. He says we must ask her. That was Cyrus Mobarak's opinion, and it's mine as well. Camille?"

Camille hardly seemed to be listening. She was staring all around at the grey-white, lifeless ice-world, then up into the black, star-swarmed sky; everywhere except at the waiting circle of people. At last she shook her head.

"I'm not an expert. Not on Mobies. I'm still learning."

"We're all learning," said Hilda Brandt. "All our lives. That's not the point. The point is, can the ship's Moby do it? If it can, someone at Ararat Base will fly it over here as soon as I give the order."

"You don't understand." Camille sensed what they were going to ask her to do. It sounded like the only way that Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer might be saved . . . except that she knew it was impossible. "The Moby has the
power
to do it; it has raw energy to spare. That's not the question. It's the stability. A stability analysis, even a first-order one, for a ship's Moby sitting in Blowhole—that would need a huge amount of computation."

She took a couple of steps backward, distancing herself from the group.

"But you can do that!" said David. He and the whole party were following Camille, drifting across the spongy ice. He took her arm. "You've done a hundred calculations like it. And I could have the Moby out of our ship in five minutes."

"I might be able to do the calculation—given enough time. But you need an answer
now.
I'd have to go back to Mount Ararat, get on the computer, and enter all the parameters for the ship's Moby.
And
the Blowhole geometry, and then the surface-material properties, and radiation rates, and ambient temperatures." Camille shook herself free of David's grip. "You're talking about a monster computation, about something that might run for days before it converged."

"And we don't have days, do we?" murmured Hilda Brandt thoughtfully. "Or even hours." She lowered her head as though studying the mottled patterns of ice at her feet. Finally she said, as though to herself, "That's it, then. Damned, aren't we, either way? But really, what is the choice?"

She sighed, walked up to Camille, and reached out to take her by the shoulders. She stared in through the visor of the suit, oblivious to the ground car that was grinding its way across the ice from Mount Ararat, and unaware of the strange-looking figure that emerged from it.

Rustum Battachariya, an exception to the "one-size-fits-all" rule of surface superconductor suits, had been stripped to his shoes and underwear and stuffed into a translucent container of green shielding plastic designed to hold large flux-intolerant equipment.

It was big enough . . . barely. Bat could walk, after a fashion, by shuffling his feet a few inches at a time while he held his arms close to his sides. But it was freezing cold; the radio of his improvised suit was not working right; and while the green plastic was not opaque, it was far from transparent. Bat could see little and hear only the scuffle of boots across the surface. At his side, guiding him along, walked Cyrus Mobarak.

Hilda Brandt ignored the waddling green-clad figure with its penguin gait. She had been staring at Camille steadily, eye to eye. "Camille Hamilton," she said at last, "look at me, and listen. The ship will be here in ten minutes. I already sent the order to fly it over. The Moby can be taken out of it and made ready for use in fifteen minutes. At the end of that period, we need to know how to position the Moby, and what settings to use with it. There will be no opportunity to return to Ararat Base, or to sit at a computer. You must decide the settings
yourself.
Fifteen minutes. You hear me? You will have fifteen minutes. No more."

"I can't do that!" Camille was trying to pull free. David Lammerman made an instinctive gesture to help her, then controlled himself and turned away. Everyone else stood motionless, as frozen as the Europan ice crystals beneath their triple-insulated boots. Nell, not understanding what she was seeing, knowing only that it was dramatic and somehow important, prayed that her hidden recorder was working.

"I
can't
," repeated Camille. "Without my models, and without a computer and all the parameters—"

"You
can.
I know you better than you know yourself. Look inside, Camille. Don't you realize that you can
always
feel the answers, even before the computers come back with theirs? You understand fusion stability, even in complicated situations, without having to think about it. You've studied it and studied it until it's part of your deep subconscious.
Look inside
."

"No." Camille was shivering. Hilda Brandt's eyes were enormous twin moons that filled the sky. Camille could not look away. "You're wrong, quite wrong. I calculate
everything
."

"You do. But you don't need to calculate everything
with the computers
, because you are already doing it in your head. The computer solutions are just your security. If you don't like the look of their answers, what do you do? You run them again,
until they are the way you feel they ought to be.
You've talked to a lot of people about the 'shortcuts' that you use to get quick results. Use them
now
—when we need them."

Camille could not escape. She could not even move. A terrible force, hot and imperative, was holding her to those luminous eyes. A voice, far away, was saying, "Fifteen minutes. You will have fifteen minutes."

It said it again. A third time. On the fourth repetition, the Europan sky and landscape vanished. Camille slipped away into that strange interior domain of rippling plasma, hers alone, where no one else could ever follow.

* * *

The Moby, stripped of its accessories, was surprisingly small for its fifty-gigawatt output. A bright-blue rounded cylinder, two meters long and no more than half that across, it sat cradled in an upright frame, its broad end down. The open lattice of the supports, held in exact alignment by twin gyroscopes at its top, had been carefully placed in the center of Blowhole.

David Lammerman was checking the Moby's power settings and nozzle diameters for the third time. He really needed to consult Camille on a fine point or two, but she had been led away, pale and close to fainting, as soon as her listing of Moby parameters was complete. She had stood motionless for twenty-five agonizing minutes—twenty-five, not fifteen—and not even Hilda Brandt had dared to interrupt her concentration. Finally she had called for an audio link and begun to define Moby settings as fast as she could speak.

It was left to David to make those settings, and to worry that Camille's answers might be disastrously wrong. Suppose that the unknowns of local gravity or temperature proved more important than anyone realized? Had anyone, ever, examined such a direct plasma/water-ice interaction? He wanted to ask Camille about the effects on the Moby of the ambient high-energy particle flux, about latent heats, about conductivities, about radiation losses to the open space above Europa's surface. About
everything.

But time had run out. Somewhere beneath his feet—he wished he knew how far; if the Moby performed as planned, that depth was a crucial variable—somewhere down there, anything from fifty meters to a hundred kilometers below, Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer were either dead or dying, from oxygen starvation.

There could be no delays.

David prepared to switch on. At his side, Cyrus Mobarak had observed his son in his task of calibration. Three times he had held out a hand to interrupt, three times drawn it back. He resisted the urge to take over and make his own check of Moby settings. The only exception was at the end, when he realized that David was within seconds of switching on. Mobarak began to urge everyone away from Blowhole.