Launch Pad (2 page)

The Man in the Mirror

By Geoffrey A. Landis

It was pure luck that Lynn Rockross was there. Pure bad luck.

Or maybe not luck at all. Out in the dark, you made your own luck. If the luck of Lynn Rockross was bad, it was luck he’d forged for himself.

Ramblin’ Wreck had come out from the inner solar system on a long, constant-thrust interplanetary trajectory. After eight months in space, on their slow approach to Sedna the crew had nearly missed seeing the anomalous landform. It was a perfect circle of pure black. Ramblin’ Wreck’s crew weren’t being paid to look for unusual things, and really, a twenty-two kilometer circle wasn’t even that unusual. Across the solar system, circles pockmarked the surface of every body, large or small, circles and networks of circles and chains and doodles of circles, craters of every size.

But this one was not just a circle, it was a perfect circle. And on a distant iceball, a world covered everywhere with a thick layer of reddish-brown snow, it was perfectly black.

Who would have expected an alien artifact on Sedna?

Sedna was one of the largest of the objects in the trans-Neptunian belt, a small world nearly the size of Pluto, but in a wildly eccentric orbit, so far away from the sun as to be forever frozen.

It was the topic of discussion on the Ramblin’ Wreck for about a week as they braked into orbit, between poker games, but the crew chief, Kellerman—a hard-nosed miner with the soul of an accountant—told them that investigating alien enigmas was not the job that the crew of the Ramblin’ Wreck had come all this way to do, and he was not about to take good time away from the paying job to go look at it. They were miners, not scientists. Sedna was a rich source of organics. Organics could be shipped to any the colony worlds in the inner solar system. If they could find ammonia as well, they’d have pay dirt. Ammonia was a source of nitrogen, valuable nitrogen, far more valuable than gold or platinum in the built worlds where every volatile molecule had to be imported. Prospecting Sedna was an economic gamble; it was so far from the sun that only a huge strike would make it worth paying the amazing shipping costs to send resources inward. But the built worlds were an ever-expanding market, and if they could show that Sedna had deposits rich enough to justify the travel time, Sedna would be a little money mine for the corporation, a slow but steady source of income.

Braking into elliptical orbit around Sedna, they photographed the strange circular anomaly as they scouted for resources, and they sent back to the inner system all the data they happened to gather on its location and approximate size. In return, they were ordered to stay away from it. It was not a natural artifact, they were told, and it most certainly wasn’t something humans had built, since they were the first people ever to reach Sedna. It was alien. They weren’t qualified to investigate. Back in the inner system somebody worried that a bunch of union-slacker rock jockeys scratching around an artifact of incalculable value would be far more likely to destroy something than they would be to find something valuable.

From their orbital reconnaissance, they had mapped a rich ammonia deposit, a frozen lake of ammonia larger than most asteroids. That, along with the organic tholins frozen into the ice, looked like a good place to start operations.

The mining ship landed on Sedna more than five hundred kilometers around the planet from the artifact, at the ammonia site. Somebody else would be out to investigate the artifact, some slow and careful scientific team, with all the tools and backup from Earth needed. Ramblin Wreck was there to mine.

“That’s crazy,” said Rockross. “All this way, and we stop a lousy five hundred kilometers from the one tourist attraction on the planet?”

His buddy, Dinky Zimmer, gave him a quizzical look. “We’re here to do some mining,” he said. “Who cares about a black circle, if it doesn’t have ammonia?”

Adrian Penn, the third on his three-man crew, said, “If we hit pay ice, with the bonus we’re due, we can see all the tourist attractions we want. You want to check my seals?”

Rockross checked Dinky’s suit seals, and then Adrian’s, and gave them both a thumb’s up; and then Dinky checked his. The suits were the close-fitting style that the crew called nudie-suits; everybody checked their own seals, of course, but then for safety they each checked each other as well, the checklist required that every step be verified with a buddy. After seal checks, he verified his suit battery charge, and then checked Dinky and Adrian’s charges while they verified his charge. They were suiting up for their first eight-hour shift, taking ice cores and setting up the thermal radiators that would be needed for mining. Someday—if the nitrogen strike was good enough—the equipment they were setting up would be the head of an interplanetary pipeline, where induction motors would toss two-ton bricks of frozen ices into trajectories that would, over the course of years, coast downhill to markets in the inner solar system. That would be all automated, of course. But for now, humans were needed to scout and set up equipment.

But Lynn Rockross—known as “Lee” to both friends and rivals—wasn’t thinking about his work, although he was paying enough attention to avoid making errors. He wasn’t done with the artifact. He had other ideas.

Lee was a shift leader on the Ramblin’ Wreck’s mining operation, responsible for a crew of three. He was qualified on every piece of equipment used in low-gravity and low-temperature extraterrestrial mining operations. He’d been mining and prospecting ever since leaving his home in the domed cities of Vesta, something he had done at fifteen, the age of emancipation in the middle belt. He’d gone first to the ice-moon Callisto, and after a little time in a low-paying job on a melt-line, had joined the crew on a mining ship. In five years he had worked on four different mining and prospecting ships, earning his Union card, working his way up from unskilled labor to shift leader. When he could, he liked to spend his time with wildcat surveys, where he would be dropped off on a likely body with nothing but an augmented suit, a laser drill, and a mass spectrometer. For weeks at a time, he’d be alone to characterize mineral composition in the hopes of a finding a rare strike of usable material. Lee was perfectly comfortable alone in a suit, out of contact with the rest of the universe.

Lee was smart enough in his own way, but he knew that shift leader was as high as he could climb with only his self-education, learning about whatever subject caught his attention. For the long voyage out to Sedna, he had signed up to take university classes, the first step up toward supervisor and, eventually, running his own ship. Now his personal databot had a load of material for him to study in his spare time: literature, structural mechanics, and physics, to start. Studying should have accounted for his off-shift hours—he had a lot to catch up on—but with the discovery of the strange black circle on Sedna, he was thinking of changing his plans.

The radioed instructions from back in-system, he knew, were more properly a suggestion, not an order. The crew of Ramblin’ Wreck weren’t subject to orders from scientific institutions a few billion kilometers away.

The union mandated that, even mining high-grade ammonia, they had to be paid triple-overtime at hazardous-duty rates for shifts longer than eight hours, and the flint-eyed wretch Kellerman wasn’t about to pay overtime. Lee and his crew got sixteen hours off for every eight working, and the union steward watched damn carefully to see that they weren’t given unofficial duties in their off time. So he had the time.

They finished their shift, bringing back the ice cores for the cryomineralogy lab to analyze, and Dinky and Adrian headed off to unsuit and hit the showers. Lee watched them head in, but didn’t follow.

Lee figured he could skip one day of studying, and bypass the after-shift perpetual floating poker game. There was something interesting out there, and he would be damned if he wasn’t going to go take a look. Although this was a mining operation, not prospecting, Lee was fully certified for solo prospecting and didn’t have to tell anybody what he did in his off-shift hours, if he didn’t want to. And so he slipped away, without telling anybody.

The artifact was half a world away, far from the Ramblin’ Wreck’s position near the ammonia deposits. He topped off his suit batteries and then checked a snowcat out of the equipment depot. It was technically theft, maybe, if you looked at it one way, since he wasn’t actually on shift, but it wasn’t as if he wasn’t going to return it—where could he possibly go? He wasn’t even using up fuel, since the snowcat had a little nuclear generator that gave out a constant 14.3 kilowatts of power whether it was being driven or not.

That had been his first mistake, going out alone. A few hours later, it was beginning to look like it may have been a fatal one.

The drive was a thrill; a little under three hours at an average speed of almost two hundred kilometers per hour. In the low gravity the sled bounced up on every little hummock of snow. The first hour he had steered carefully to the smoothest paths, and the bumps had scared him nearly out of his wits. But the sled had attitude control thrusters that kept it from spilling over when it was airborne (or, technically, vacuum borne, he supposed, since the microbar pressure of mostly helium surrounding Sedna was nothing that could vaguely be given the nomenclature of air.) After a while he realized the snow pack was so thick, it had smoothed out the planet’s hills into natural ski jumps, and he had gotten more and more adventurous. Now he was picking jumps that gave him a hang time of five seconds, ten, thirty.

A hell of a lot more fun than studying, he thought.

Viewed through his intensity-enhanced goggles, the landscape was low rolling hummocks of a deep dusky red, the color of Georgia mud. Sedna was beautiful. Lee saw a landscape of soft hills lit by urgently brilliant stars, speckled in colors: the glistening white of water-ice snow splashed across through scars in the surface of red tholins. He tried switching the image intensifier off. At first all he could see was darkness, and the sense of speeding across darkness, trusting in the autopilot to avoid obstacles, made his heart hammer. After a minute he began to make out the smudges in the darkness, and in a few minutes more, even though the sun was billions of miles away, he discovered that he could still see. Without the image intensifier, the surface was colorless, a pale ghostly glistening in the starlight, with sun so small he could have covered it with the head of a pin.

It seemed more real to him this way, so he left the image intensifier off. The heads-up display told him the topography, and the autopilot picked out the smoothest path across the snow.

“You guys should have come with me,” he said, speaking to the empty air. “Poker’s no fun, not until after payday, anyway.”

He was lucky he didn’t sled right into the artifact. He’d been having such a good time hot-dogging the snowcat, he’d stopped paying attention and had lost track of how far he’d come. Fortunately his navigation computer hadn’t, and warned him when he was approaching the artifact.

Once cued to look, he could see it: in the distance, the horizon cut off abruptly. Lee flicked the image intensifier back on, and suddenly it was impossible to miss, a sharp black line across the red horizon. He slowed down to approach it cautiously, edging up to the razor-sharp edge between the snow and the black, and finally getting off the snowcat and creeping forward slowly.

He looked down.

The black was speckled with stars.

For an instant he thought it was a hole straight through the planet, and then he wondered if it could be a portal to another universe.

Lee anchored the snowcat, and clipped a safety tether to it. His toolpack carried all his gear, but carrying the pack made it too awkward for him to bend over, so he took it off and wore only the skin-tight nudie suit. Making sure that his tether was secure, he kneeled down at the edge, and leaned over to look down.

He saw a golden helmet faceplate—his own faceplate—looking up at him.

The black surface was not black at all, but a gargantuan mirror reflecting the blackness of space, angled steeply away from him. Close up, he could see the sharp image of stars reflected in it. He was so close to it that it seemed perfectly flat, but looking across in the distance he could see the subtle curve.

He put his hand on it (the mirror-image hand coming up from below to touch his), and it was perfectly smooth and perfectly slick. Absolutely smooth, slicker than oil, as if he was touching nothing, no resistance at all to him sliding his palm across the surface.

Through his glove he couldn’t sense the temperature. His suit was a near-perfect insulator; it had to be, of course, to operate in the outer solar system, where the miners walked the cryogenic ice fields of trans-Neptunian and Kuiper objects.

Lee checked the external temperature meter on the fingertip of one glove. Pressing his finger to the mirror’s surface, the gauge read five Kelvin. The reading was so unlikely that he pulled his hand away to try another spot. The next spot was still five Kelvin, as was a third spot, and a fourth.

“Sonnabitch,” he said. “Colder than a loan shark’s heart.”

His meter wasn’t broken; he checked a patch of the crusty snow surrounding the pit, and got the right number, thirty Kelvin. The surface of Sedna was colder than the caves of hell, but the temperature of the black surface was twenty-five degrees cooler yet, far lower than it had any right to be.

Slowly, he worked it out. The surface was not black; it was reflective, and only appeared black in that it was reflecting the starry sky. It must be very close to a perfect mirror indeed. Far as they were from the sun, the snows of Sedna still absorbed sunlight, and that heated them a few degrees above absolute. But this perfect reflector must absorb no light at all, and stayed cold. Somewhere in the far infrared, it must radiate away a tiny amount of heat, he realized, but in all the wavelengths in which the sun shone, it absorbed nothing, and so was colder than the surface it sat on.

It was an enormous concave mirror. A giant telescope, miles in diameter—built for what purpose?