Cold as Ice (9 page)

The first full tests of the Distributed Observation System had been mind-blowing. Camille and David's hard work on calibration had paid off, and the system exceeded specifications. The best images were already showing city-like features on a planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Other images had revealed thousands of mysterious reflecting spheres, each perfectly round and the size of Earth's moon, orbiting a star in one of the Virgo cluster's prominent galaxies. That oddity alone was worth the whole price of DOS.

The press certainly thought so. It had gone wild, clamoring for more. The schedule for DOS use, with its plan for availability to guest observers—who would squeeze Camille's personal use of the telescope system to a minimum—should have been sent to DOS Center days, even weeks, ago.

Instead, nothing had arrived. Queries from Camille to headquarters had been met with vague answers: The project was under review; basic management decisions had to be made. She fidgeted and fretted. With DOS so obviously a success, why did anything
need
to be reviewed? The instrument was ready for users.

While Camille waited, she carried on with her own observations, setting up a computer-controlled program to examine low-intensity fusion targets twelve billion light-years away. But even that did not bring satisfaction. She was wondering all the while if she would ever be allowed enough DOS time to complete her task.

The terse message that David Lammerman was returning from Earth came as a relief, even if it also made her a bit miffed. He'd told Camille, maybe with a little prompting from her, how much he would miss her when he was away. And then she had heard nothing from him after his departure.

Not even a form message to say that he had arrived safely on Earth. Of course she would certainly have heard about it on the news programs if he
hadn't.
But damn it, it was the
principle
of the thing . . .

Now David was coming back, as he had departed, on one of the high-acceleration passenger ships that were turning solar-system travel into a simple problem of linear trajectories. Camille decided that she would ignore him, as he had chosen to ignore her. She would stay at work and not meet the ship when it docked.

In the final couple of minutes, she changed her mind. She would go and
tell
him that he was a thoughtless jerk and that she had every right to be annoyed with him. She went drifting over to the periphery of DOS Center and arrived at the dock just in time to confront him as he was emerging from quarantine.

"So." She stood, hands on hips, in the classical ham-video pose of the slighted lover. "You finally decided to drop in."

He turned. She saw his anguished face and slumped shoulders, and all thought of accusation vanished.

"David, Are you sick?" Except that he was never sick. And he had a crushed, beaten look that was more than physical.

He shook his head. He did not speak as they traveled back through the hub and arrived at last at their living quarters.

She had forgotten how crowded the room was with the two of them present. David's great limbs sprawled across three-quarters of the available space. He sighed as he relaxed into his favorite seat, but still he showed no desire to talk.

Camille dropped into his lap and put her arms around his neck. "Well? So what was Earth like?" She kept her voice light, as though nothing was wrong. "It doesn't seem to have agreed with you."

She had been raised on Mars herself and had gone to Earth only twice for short visits. But it hadn't been that bad, nowhere near as awful as it was described.

He sighed again and rubbed at his tangled blond hair. "I was told . . . something. Something I'm not supposed to know. That's why they took me there."

"What was it?" Camille relaxed a little. She could pry it out of him, whatever it was. She knew how. She stroked his cheek, with its fuzz of downy hair—David still needed to depilate only once a week. "Come on, David. A secret's safe with me."

"I promised not to tell anyone. That's why I couldn't send you any messages."

"Well, when you promised whoever it was, did you really think you weren't going to tell me?"

"No." He leaned his face into her stroking hand. "I knew I would." He gave her a wan smile. "You'd worm it out of me, wouldn't you? I'll tell you. Anyway, you'd learn it directly in another week or two."

"Learn
what
, for God's sake?" If he was trying to soften a blow, he was certainly failing. "David, don't do this."

"Learn that we're out. You and me." His eyes wandered the familiar room. "We're off DOS."

"That's ridiculous." She sat up straight and placed her hands flat on his chest. "Who told you a stupid thing like that?"

"I can't say. I promised—really promised this time—that I wouldn't." There was the awkward, cowed look again, the hesitant voice that she had heard when he was first summoned to Earth. "But I know it's true. I saw the documents. We're off DOS."

"But DOS is a
success
, a big one. It's doing
better
than anyone expected. And a lot of the credit for that has to go to us. We did years of good, solid work."

"Success has nothing to do with it. Or maybe it does, and that makes things worse. Camille, something happened at the top of the pyramid. Right at the top. At that level, you and I don't matter. We don't even
exist.
There's going to be a complete change in the use of DOS for the next two years. No extra-galactic targets. Concentration on nearby stellar systems. Stars and planets, a hundred light-years away, or even less."

"That's preposterous. DOS was never designed for local work. You can use it for that, sure, but no one in his right mind would. Who needs to see something a few meters across, fifty light-years away?"

"You don't have to persuade
me
." His voice was unsteady. "Hey, I said all that when I was on Earth. I was told that it makes no difference. The Outward Bound group has been gaining influence, making more noise, finding support in high levels of government. The DOS decision was made to keep them happy."

"By whom?"

"By the only people who matter. Those who control DOS funding. It's not just Outward Bound. There are other politics behind it, have to be."

"It's totally
illogical
."

"So? What's logic got to do with it? When politics comes in the door, logic goes out the window."

Camille wanted to curse and scream. She had enough sense and self-control to realize that it would do no good at all. No matter how bad the news, you didn't help anything by attacking the messenger . . . even if you had no idea of why he had been singled out as the bearer of the news.

It was time for logic, not for shouting matches.

"David, think for a minute. It's not as bad as it sounds. In fact, things may even be
better
this way. If they're going to be crazy enough to revamp the program for close targets, DOS will eat them up. There just aren't that many stellar systems within a hundred light-years. We'll find gaps in the observing schedule. You and I know how to reprogram DOS quicker than anyone, and no one else in the system has any idea of how fast we can do it. We'll take advantage of open slots and still explore the edge of the universe."

He lifted her effortlessly from his lap and placed her on a chair, went to a bunk and sprawled there. His eyes closed. "You weren't listening, love." His voice was gloomy and distant. "I didn't say that
our experiments
were off DOS—we knew that was likely to be the case as soon as the astronomy superstars came to use the facilities. I said that
we
are off DOS. You and me. Camille and David. They'll bring in a new staff, one that specializes in observation programs of near-stellar systems. That's the real message I had to go to Earth to get."

"But damn it, what happens to
us
?"

"That's the worst news of all." He opened his eyes and stared miserably at the ceiling. "We have to go. Within a couple of weeks, we have to be out of DOS Center. I was told that it will be at least two years before we can have any hope of getting back in."

5
The Bat Cave

To the colonists and explorers creeping outward past the Belt in the third decade of the twenty-first century, Ganymede was the plum of the Jovian system. The largest of Jupiter's four Galileian satellites, it was also the biggest moon in the solar system, planet-sized with its radius of 2650 kilometers. There was plenty of Ganymede real estate to explore, shape, and develop.

Ganymede's low density offered a gravity only one-seventh that of Earth's, a factor most appealing to the low-gee Belters. And, finally, Ganymede had volatiles in abundance; ammonia and methane and—most precious of all—water. Half of Ganymede was fresh water and water-ice, the latter covering almost all of the frigid, cracked surface. A human wandering in a suit could split off a chunk of ice, thaw it, and safely drink the slightly sulfurous result.

There was only one snag. Jupiter loomed in the sky, a million kilometers away.
Jupiter pluvius
: Jupiter, the bringer of rain. But this rain was no cooling balm from heaven. It was an endless sleet of high-energy protons, gathered from the solar wind, accelerated by the demon of Jupiter's magnetic field, and delivered as a murderous hail into Ganymede's frozen surface. A human wanderer, garbed in a suit offering ample protection on Moon or Mars, would cook and die on Ganymede in a few hours.

The colonists had taken the problem in their stride. After all, the proton rain was far worse on little watery Europa, closer to Jupiter and visible in Ganymede's sky as a disk half the size again of Earth's moon. It was worse yet on sulfur-spitting Io, innermost of the four Galileian satellites.

Ganymede would do nicely. The whole solid interior of the moon was available and safe; all it needed was a little work. A handful of Von Neumanns in the form of tunneling robots was developed, dropped off, and left to replicate and do their thing for a few years, while the humans went away and redesigned their suits.

The new suit models that they returned with carried woven-in threads of high-temperature superconductors. Every charged particle followed the magnetic field lines and traveled harmlessly around and past the suit's surface. The human inside was safe and snug. It was often claimed, in the tall stories that human males apparently could not live without, that the occupant could tell which way he was facing on the surface of Ganymede from the force exerted by diverted protons on the protecting suit.

Whoppers like that could survive, because most settlers never dreamed of going near the surface. Why should they? The outside was ice and cold and dreary rock. All of the life and action was in the burrows and the sub-Ganymedean chambers, ever-expanding and complexly interlocked.

And it never occurred to the colonists to think of their home as alien, or sterile, or hostile. When the Great War broke out between Earth and Mars and Belt, the inhabitants of Ganymede had stayed clear of it, watched in horror as three-quarters of humanity perished, and thanked whatever gods might be that they were snug inside safe, civilized Ganymede.

By the time that Wilsa Sheer received the call from her agent and flew out from Vesta, the war had been over for a quarter of a century and the inversion of native perspective was complete. The idea of living on ravaged, war-ruined Earth, with its dead hemisphere and crushing gravity, was repugnant. The notion of Mars or Moon, dust-grimed and arid, was little better. And the thought of living
anywhere
on an open surface, prey to falling bomb or random hurricane or tidal wave or solar flare, was worst of all.

Rustum Battachariya, thirty-seven years old, was a true child of Ganymede. He had never ascended to the naked surface. Although he was head of Passenger Transport Schedules for the Outer System from Jupiter to the Oort Cloud, he had never visited another planet or satellite. He saw no reason to. Every amenity of life was available in his chambers or within a few minutes of it. From his cave, seven kilometers beneath the surface, he had rapid access to every open library file and data source of the solar system. And to his office, when occasion demanded, any person of importance could find a way.

"You will not see my travel records there, because of course I do not travel." Battachariya spoke to Inspector-General Gobel in the patient, kindly tone of one addressing a small child. "Travel is no more than a distraction. It is a means by which deficient intellects provide themselves with the illusion of progress where there is none."

Magrit Knudsen bit her lip to remain straight-faced. Battachariya resented Yarrow Gobel's presence, as he resented every visitor to his private domain. He knew that the man had to travel constantly, all over the system, to do his work as inspector-general. He was being deliberately distracting and provocative.

But Battachariya was wasting his time. The inspector-general was a match for him. Gobel was a thin-lipped, red-bearded man, losing his hair, and totally devoid of any sign of imagination or humor. He made it clear that he was interested in numbers, and only numbers. Numbers spoke for themselves. He ignored explanations and justifications and obfuscations, and he was not swayed by personalities.

Magrit knew from experience that Gobel was good at his job. Make that superb. She watched him warily when he pored over the stack of reports. If he asked questions, they were always pointed, often subtle, and usually damning. She breathed easier when he returned to the study of the Transport Department schedules, reviewing them, item by item, with the patient and unwavering persistence of a tortoise.

Bat versus turtle. Magrit resisted the urge to become involved. As a cabinet-level official, she had no reason to be here. She should stay aloof and let Battachariya fend for himself.

She thought of the early days. It had not always been this way. She had inherited Bat a dozen years ago, when he had been a junior scheduling analyst and she had just received her first promotion, to Transportation Department branch chief. Advice from the outgoing branch head had been offered on her first day: "Get rid of Battachariya. He's trouble. He's indolent, and gluttonous, and arrogant, and pompous, and it's impossible to control him."