Fiasco (23 page)

"All healthy. Rotmont has a trace of arrhythmia."

"Stay with them. I'll read the mail…"

"News?"

"News five years old."

"Good or bad?"

"Enigmatic. Ter Horab advised a change of program. They saw something on Quinta before the plunge. Also on the moon."

"What does it mean?"

Steergard stood at the door as the doctor helped Rotmont to his feet. Three men were already washing themselves. The others floated around, met, looked in the mirror, all trying to talk at once.

"Let me know when they come around. We have time." With these words the captain pushed off from the hatch, flew between naked bodies as if among white fish underwater, and disappeared into a passage to the control room.

After considering the situation, Steergard took the ship up above the ecliptic plane, emerging from the cone of shadow at the lowest drive to make the first observations of Quinta. It shone as a crescent near the sun. Completely covered with clouds. Its noise had increased to four hundred gigawatts. The Fourier analyzers showed no kind of modulation. The
Hermes
was now wrapped in a veil that absorbed nonthermal radiation, so that it could not be located by radar: Steergard preferred to err on the side of caution. A technological civilization meant astronomy, and astronomy meant sensitive bolometers, whereby even an asteroid—warmer than space—could call attention to itself. To the water vapor now used for maneuvering he added some sulfides, the kind abundant in seismic gases. Volcanically active asteroids were a rarity, true, especially with a mass as small as that of the scout ship, but the circumspect captain sent out probes, then aimed them back at himself to make sure that the use of the vapor jets necessary for future flight corrections would go unnoticed even when the vessel eventually descended to Quinta. His intention was to steal up on the side of the moon, in order to examine it in detail.

By now everyone was gathered in the zero-gravity control room. It resembled the inside of a large globe, with a conical recess closed in by a wall of monitors. The seats were covered with a fastening material. If you gripped the arms and pressed your body down into the chair, the fabric would hold you firmly. If you wanted to get up, you pushed away in one strong motion. It was simpler and better than straps. They sat, all ten of them, as in a small projection room, and forty screens showed the planet, each in a different range of the spectrum. The largest, central monitor could synthesize the monochromatic images, superimposing them as instructed.

Through the breaks in the clouds, furled by trade winds and cyclones, deeply notched, blurred coastlines appeared. The light, filtered in stages, allowed them to see now the cloud surface and now the surface of the globe concealed beneath it. Meanwhile they listened to the lecturing monotone of DEUS, which repeated the last radiogram from the
Eurydice.
LoBianco had raised the possibility of seismically caused damage to the technological infrastructure of the Quintans. Field and a few others held to this hypothesis, which they termed "environmental." The inhabitants of the planet had thrown part of the ocean waters into space in order to increase the land area. The pressure exerted by the ocean on the ocean floor decreased, and as a result the equilibrium in the lithosphere was disturbed. The upward force from within produced great cracks in the crust, which was thinnest beneath the ocean. Therefore the hurling of water into space was discontinued. In short, the enterprise backfired catastrophically.

But others believed that this hypothesis was false, as it failed to take into account additional incomprehensible phenomena. Moreover, beings able to work on the planetary scale would surely have foreseen the seismic consequences. According to calculations that used Earth as a model, cataclysmic movements of the lithosphere could not be produced by the removal of less than one-quarter of the ocean's volume; the reduction of pressure from the ejection of even six trillion tons of water would not cause global devastation. Another hypothesis suggested a disaster of the "chain-reaction" type as the undesired effect of gravitological experiments gone out of control. Other notions included: the deliberate destruction of an outmoded technological base, a kind of demolition; the unintentional disruption of the climate during the hurling of the water into space; and civilizational chaos of unknown causes.

None of the hypotheses was able to encompass all the observed phenomena to form a coherent whole. Thus the radiogram sent by Ter Horab immediately before the
Eurydice's
entrance into Hades authorized the reconnoiterers to act independently, and to dispense with any or all of the established variants of the program if they saw fit.

At the aphelion of Zeta, far from its larger planets, Steergard put the ship into an elliptical orbit so the astrophysicists could make their observations of Quinta. As usual in such systems, there were drifting remnants of old comets, comets stripped of their gas tails and broken into frozen boulders by repeated passages past the Sun. Among these scattered rocks and patches of dust, DEUS noticed, four thousand kilometers away, an object unlike a meteor. Touched by the radiolocator, it gave a metallic reflection. It could not be a hunk of magnetite with a high iron content: the shape was too regular. It resembled a moth with a short, thick abdomen and blunt stubs of wings. Four degrees warmer than icy rock, it did not rotate as a meteor or the fragment of a comet core should have, but traveled straight, with no sign of propulsion. DEUS examined it in all the spectral bands until it discovered the reason for the thing's stability: a faint outflow of argon, an attenuated stream and therefore barely visible. It could be a space probe or a small ship.

"Let's catch that moth," Steergard decided. So the
Hermes
was set on a trajectory of pursuit. At less than a mile from the prey, it discharged a missile that had prehensile arms. The snare opened its jaws wide, exactly over the back of the peculiar moth, and grasped the thing's sides as in a vise. The thing, inert, seemed to fly passively in the grip, but after a moment its temperature rose and the stream of gas at its rear intensified.

The monitor, till now showing the close correlation between the hunt program and its progress, flashed question marks.

"Turn on the absorption field?" asked DEUS.

"No," said Steergard. He watched the bolometer. The trapped object heated to three hundred, four hundred, five hundred degrees Kelvin, yet its drive increased only slightly. The temperature curve peaked, then fell. The captured thing cooled.

"What's the drive?" asked the captain. Everyone in the control room was silent, looking from the visual monitor to the side screens, which were for emissions outside the visible range. Only the bolometer glowed.

"Radioactivity zero?"

"Zero," DEUS assured the captain. "The jet is weakening. What now?"

"Nothing. We wait."

They flew thus for a long time.

"Why not take it on board?" El Salam suggested finally. "We could X-ray the thing first."

"No point. It's dead—the drive is out, and cold. DEUS, show it up close."

Through the electronic eyes in the pincers they saw a black carapace, pock-marked and corroded.

"Take it on board?" asked DEUS.

"Not yet. Tap it a couple of times. Not too hard."

From between the long-armed pincers emerged an oval-ended rod. Methodically it struck the held hull, raising a fine spray of ash flakes.

"It might have a nonpercussive detonator," remarked Polassar. "I think I would X-ray it…"

"All right," Steergard agreed, unexpectedly. "DEUS, run an
SG
on it."

Two spindle-shaped probes, shot from the prow, caught up with the squat moth and aligned themselves on either side of it. The upper monitors in the control room came to life, showing tangled strips, bands, shadows, and simultaneously atomic symbols appeared along the edges of the screens: carbon, hydrogen, silicon, manganese, chromium. The columns of letters lengthened, until Rotmont said:

"This is no good. It should be taken on board."

"Risky," muttered Nakamura. "Better to take it apart by remotes."

"DEUS?" asked the captain.

"It is possible. It will require five to ten hours. Should I begin?"

"No. Send a teletome. Let it cut open the hull in the thinnest place and give us a picture of the interior."

"Bore and broach?"

"Fine."

The probes surrounding the prey were joined by another. A diamond drill met with a hull no less hard.

"Only a laser," DEUS decided.

"A problem. Use the minimum pulse, so as not to melt anything inside."

"That I cannot guarantee," replied DEUS. "Should I laser?"

"Delicately."

The drill retracted and disappeared. On the pitted surface a white point glowed, and when the smoke cleared, a telephoto head entered the melted hole. Its monitor showed blackened tubing that went into a bulging plate, and the whole image trembled slightly. Then DEUS spoke:

"Caution. According to the
SG
, at the center of the object are excitons, and virtual particles warping configurational Fermi space."

"How do you interpret that?" asked Steergard.

"The pressure at the center is over 400,000 atmospheres—or else this is a Holenbach quantum effect."

"A kind of bomb?"

"No. Probably the power source. The propellant was argon. There is none left."

"Can we take it on board?"

"We can. The net energy of the whole is equal to zero."

Except for the physicists, no one had any idea what this meant.

"Shall we?" the captain asked Nakamura.

The Japanese smiled. "Who am I to argue with DEUS?" He turned to El Salam. "And what do
you
think?" El Salam nodded.

So the trophy of the chase was drawn into a vacuum chamber in the prow and surrounded, for safety, with absorption fields. No sooner had they completed this operation than DEUS announced another discovery. It spotted an object considerably smaller than the first, covered with a substance that absorbed radar waves. What gave it away was the spin resonance of the material. The thing was a squat cigar, with a mass of some five tons. Again the orbiters went out and, after heating the insulation, tore it from the gleaming metal of the spindle. Attempts to make the object react were fruitless. It was a corpse: a melted hole gaped in its side. The condition of the rim indicated that the hole was not very old. This prize, too, was put on board the ship.

The hunting had gone well. Problems arose only in the examination and dissection of the double find.

The first wreck, its two-hundred-ton body resembling an enormous turtle, betrayed, by its rough shell pitted from countless collisions with micrometeorites and dust, an age of probably a hundred years. Its orbit's aphelion went beyond the outermost globes of Zeta. The anatomy of the solidly armored turtle surprised the dissectors. The report was in two parts. In the first, Nakamura, Rotmont, and El Salam agreed in their description of the devices found inside the alien artifact; in the second part, however, their opinions as to the purpose of those devices differed widely. Polassar, who also participated in the examination, questioned the speculations of both physicists. The report, he said, was worth about as much as an account of an Egyptian pyramid by Pygmies. Agreement on the building material told nothing about the structure's purpose.

The old satellite possessed a peculiar power source. It contained piezoelectric batteries that were charged by a converter of a type the physicists had never seen before. The electric cells, compressed in a multicascade bank of purely mechanical pressure-amplifiers, produced current while returning to position, in pulses through a system of coils with phase impedance. But the cells could also give sudden and full discharges if the sensors in the hull short-circuited the reactance coils. In that case the whole current, coursing through the two-spool drum, would explode it in a magnetic burst. Between the accumulators and the housing were empty bags or pockets filled with cinders. Into these ran glasslike tubes, the inside surface a dull mirror; perhaps they were eroded fiber optics. Nakamura's guess was that this wreck had at one time become overheated, which burned out some of its units and destroyed the sensors. But Rotmont thought that the destruction was caused not by heat but, rather, catalytically. As if microparasites (nonliving, of course) had chewed through the satellite's circuitry in the front section. And this, long ago.

The inside surface of the hull was covered with several layers of cells, somewhat like a honeycomb except much smaller. Only by chromatography was it possible to identify, in their ashes, silico-amino acids—amino acids based on silicon, with double hydrogen bonds. It was here that the dissectors disagreed. Polassar thought these remains were of interior insulation for the hull; Kirsting, on the other hand, said they were from a system halfway between living tissue and nonliving, the product of a technobiology of unknown origin and function.

There were long, heated arguments. The people of the
Hermes
had before them evidence of the level of Quintan technology a hundred years ago. Roughly speaking, the theoretical basis for this engineering could be compared to Earth's science at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, intuition, more than anything concrete, suggested that the basic direction of development of the alien physics had even then begun to deviate from the terrestrial. There could be neither synthetic virusology nor technobiotics without, first, a grasp of quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics immediately led to the fission and fusion of atomic nuclei. In that period the best energy source for satellites or interstellar probes was the atomic micropile.

And yet there was no trace of radioactivity in this old satellite. Could the Quintans have skipped the stage of explosive chain reactions in nucleonics and gone right to the next stage—of the conversion of gravity into the quanta of strong interactions? But the piezoelectric battery contradicted that. The second satellite was worse yet. It had a battery of negative energy, the result of motion at near-light velocity through the gravitational fields of large planets. Its pulse drive had been smashed by whatever had aimed and hit it—perhaps a gigajoule shot of coherent light. It, too, showed no radioactivity. The internal struts were made from monomolecular carbon in bundles of fibers—no small accomplishment in solid-state engineering. In the uncrushed section behind the power chamber they found cracked tubes with superconducting compounds that unfortunately ended right where "the most interesting thing" had been, as Polassar lamented. What could it have been? The physicists got into speculations that they would not have dared touch in more mundane circumstances. Perhaps the wreck contained a generator of unstable superheavy nuclei. Of anomalons. But for what purpose? If it was a robot laboratory for research, that would make sense. But
was
it? And why did the melted metal behind the place of the hit resemble a kind of archaic induction coil? And the superconducting niobium alloy showed, in the unbroken lengths, cavities—parts eaten away by endothermic catalysis. As though some sort of "erosion viruses" had fed on the current, or, rather, on the superconductor itself.