Beyond the Ice Limit

57

GARZA CRAWLED ALONG the horizontal supply-air duct that ran the length of the ship, with his two remaining men ahead of him, Moncton behind. They were all wearing construction helmets equipped with powerful headlamps. It was noisy and dirty, but there was, at least, a flow of fresh air. They were approaching the engine room, but so far had seen no sign of worms.

He had in hand an improvised weapon: an electric zapper. They all had them. Moncton had had the idea, and he’d assembled them quickly, using flashlight shells, a spark circuit and spark gap, and a capacitor, the whole thing powered by a pair of D batteries. Moncton was turning out to be some kind of genius: the chief engineer had taken a piece of worm, found it conducted electricity like mad, and decided they must be highly vulnerable to surges in voltage. In about fifteen minutes he assembled all the necessary zappers, and now they were on their way to the engine room, to see if they could find where the worms were breeding.

So far they’d found and zapped a couple of worms—and the zappers had worked beautifully. The zapped worms were dead—or at least so they seemed, all withered and contracted into little gray knots.

Using his radio, he’d ordered Bettances, the chief of security, to deploy his own teams into the ductwork in the other areas of the ship. If they didn’t locate the breeding source of the worms soon, they’d be overwhelmed—and fast.

Now they came to an X-junction. Garza consulted the HVAC diagram on his tablet and noted they were just a few bends away from the engine room duct. The two men in front of him used cameras on selfie sticks to peer around the corners, but saw nothing.

The crawling went on forever. They had to pause at every junction, every gasket, and inspect for worms. Garza believed that the worms might be like denning rattlesnakes, seeking each other out and gathering in one mass for mating. He believed that could very well be taking place in the ducts above the engine room—because of the heat. If he was right—if they were all assembled in a single nest—maybe they could take them all out at one go.

“Take the left duct,” he said, and they crawled on. They were almost there.

Patrick Brambell awoke, feeling terrifically refreshed, although his body ached from lying on the floor. How had he gotten on the floor? He recalled going to sleep in the chair. As he sat up, he saw that Sax was sleeping in another chair, her feet propped up on the lab table, still set up for the blood tests. Her face was smooth and peaceful, her lips a little wet, her glossy hair spilling across her neck.

“Dr. Sax?”

She opened her eyes, then sat up. “Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean to be sleeping.” She glanced at her phone. “Not for that long, anyway. The cell phone alarm was supposed to go off.”

Brambell picked his phone off the countertop. “Looks like we slept through the alarm. Well, we certainly needed it!” He chuckled, with a twinkle in his eye. “Haven’t we been naughty—sleeping like this. Better not tell anyone.”

“I feel so much better. I was just about dead. I feel like a new woman.”

“Me, too. New man, I mean.”

Sax laughed lightly. She stretched, stood up, and looked over the setup on the table. “Do you really think you can come up with a blood test for that thing?”

Brambell sighed. “I doubt it. It seemed worth a try, but you know, on further reflection it’s pretty far-fetched.” It was crazy, really, to think a simple blood test would somehow reveal an infection from an alien parasite.

“There must be better ways to spend our time,” said Sax.

Brambell cast his mind back to the problem. What they desperately needed, he realized, was more information about the creature. That was the real problem: their ignorance of the Baobab, what it was, how it thought, why it was here. He felt extremely curious about it. It had come such a vast, lonely distance, and its life cycle was proving to be as complex as anything on earth—even more so.

“We’re spinning our wheels in this lab,” Sax said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“No, indeed.”

“I wish there was a way for us to be more useful.”

Brambell fell back into musing. “The problem,” he said slowly, “is that the wrong people have been sent down to observe the Baobab. Gideon Crew: a nuclear engineer. Lispenard: a marine biologist. Garza: another engineer.”

Sax nodded. “That’s a good point.”

“Technocrats all. None of them are humanists—not like you and me.”

Sax nodded, running a hand over her glossy brown hair, smoothing it down. Brambell found himself admiring just how healthy it looked, and how delicate and white her hand was. He wondered why he hadn’t paid more attention to her before.

“What they really should have done,” Brambell said, “is to send someone like you or me down there—you, with an MD and PhD in medical science, or me, with an MD and decades of experience. We’re the ones best suited for understanding an alien organism like that.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Brambell fell into another musing silence, thinking. His mind seemed unusually clear; it was remarkable, really, what a good nap could do. As he went back over in his mind the progress of the expedition so far, it really did appear to him now to have been a dog’s breakfast from the very beginning. Everything had been done the wrong way. The whole concept—of killing the creature—was flawed. It was clearly intelligent, and as such it could be communicated with. Reasoned with. Understood. Prothero had started down that path, but there had been no concerted effort; not really. If the Baobab could learn whale speech, surely it could learn human speech…

“You know?” said Brambell, turning to Sax. “I think one of us should go down there and try to communicate with that thing. That would solve all our problems in one fell swoop.”

He found Sax looking back at him with admiration in her eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how pretty she was. “Dr. Brambell, that is truly insightful.” She hesitated. “But…how would we get down there?”

“We’ll simply borrow a DSV. I believe John is right there in the hangar, ready to go. I truly feel that a simple conversation, a respectful meeting of the minds, would solve all our problems.”

“We…just take it?”

“Yes,” said Brambell. “We take it. Only one of us can go, of course, and that one will be me.”

“I should be the one to go,” she said. “After all, I’ve had some experience piloting DSVs.”

“I’m not sure,” Brambell said.

“Oh, please do let me go. You’ll be with me every step of the way—in spirit.”

Brambell thought about this. Then he nodded. “Very well. Since we’ll be launching the DSV without any help, I suppose it might take my strength to manhandle the necessary equipment alone.”

“Thank you, thank you!” Sax said, her eyes shining.

“Dr. Sax, I don’t believe we should waste any more time—do you?”

“Dr. Brambell,” she said, clasping her hands together, “I so admire your wisdom and courage.”