Deep Freeze

CHAPTER ONE

Dan Webster came into the control room wearing gym shorts. He had a towel draped around his neck. Sweat gleamed on his chest and shoulders.

"Nice of you to decide to join me," his wife said. "Not that it's anything of priority. Certainly not as important as your daily exercise."

Dan grinned. "I did detect a certain amount of urgency in your voice, Mama."

"Don't call me Mama," she said. "I am not your mother."

"Thank God," he said. He came to stand behind her. "With this machine it is impossible to get lost."

Fran Webster lifted her eyebrows and said, "Tell that to the machine."

"Let me take a look. Let's see what you've done wrong," Dan said, taking Fran's place in the command chair and swiveling it toward the console of the Century Series computer.

Fran said, "Hummmph."

Dan reached out to pat her on her soft rump. Touching her renewed his awareness that at an age which represented almost three quarters of her life expectancy—and his—she was still shapely and firm, but there would be time for that. There was always plenty of time when two people alone on a small ship set out to cover considerable distances across theemptiness of space. At the moment it was of interest to find out why the computer was confused.

He was a tall man, Dan Webster, a smiling man. Although in a certain light his pale scalp gleamed on the back of his head he still had most of his hair. The decades had been kind to him. Fran, almost as tall as he, had a mature figure. She was an attractive woman. Her brown hair was just beginning to lighten with gray. She pinched him playfully as she moved aside to let him take the command chair.

"Now the thing to remember," Dan said, "is not to push any buttons until you know exactly what buttons to push. As they taught us, you've got to remember the proper buttonology." So saying, he pushed a button that caused an explosion of telltale trouble lights on the display.

"I do like to learn from an expert," Fran said smugly.

Dan grinned widely. "Just giving you a demonstration of what not to do."

He corrected his error and punched in the Navpro. As the old Century Series computer began to muck around in its Verbolt Cloud memory chambers it made a sound so much like a labored grunt that Dan pulled back, startled. Star maps began to flash on and off the display with dizzying speed.

"Come on now," Dan said, pressing buttons soothingly. The computer's frantic searchings slowed, but the star fields on the display bore no resemblance to the dots and blazes of light visible on the optic viewscreen over Dan's head.

"I told you," Fran said. "I said, Papa, if we're going to go jumping off into unexplored space on a little ship not much bigger than my dressing room at home, I think we'd better have a new computer."

"Yes, Mama, that's what you said," Dan sighed, as he spoke comforting things to the computer through his fingertips.

"Staying close to home wasn't adventurous enough for Mr. Daniel Webster. No, sir. Taking a nice vacation on Terra II or one of the nice new wilderness worlds wasn't for him. He had to go where no one else had gone. He had to spend all sorts of money on—what?" She paused. Actually,there was no venom in her comments. They had been together for seventy years. She had borne him two sons and three daughters, all of them doing quite well, thank you, and she'd been just as eager as he to have one last little adventure before settling down into that final quarter of man's allocated six-score years.

"I spent a considerable sum of money on the Rimfire charts," Dan said patiently. "But not, as a certain person has hinted, enough to cause us to spend our last years in privation."

Fran looked upward. "He spent it on charts that show nothing but exit and entry points into completely unexplored segments of the galaxy," Fran said to the ship, to the humming little mechanisms, to the purring power of the blink generator, and to the expanse of unknown stars that glittered like hard diamonds on the black background of nothingness.

"Ah," Dan said, caressing a button that changed the search mode of the computer. "Look here, Mama. Somehow or other you hit this white button. See?"

"I see."

"And when you hit it you started the computer working on charts for the other side of the galaxy."

"Mummmmph," Fran said.

"The computers couldn't locate us because it was looking for us on the wrong charts."

The Rimfire charts were so voluminous that they had been clouded in sectors. Rimfire, in her time the most advanced ship in the fleet of the Department of Exploration and Alien Search, had circumnavigated the galaxy, making short excursions into promising looking areas along the periphery. She had marked her trail carefully with blink beacons. With her charts it was possible for a ship, even a small, antiquated Mule like Dan and Fran's Old Folks, to blink all the way around the disc of the Milky Way in a few hundred settings of the generator.

At first it had been a bit spooky making the long, long jumps outside the disc of the galaxy. Even a gentleman amateur space traveler like Dan Webster knew the fundamental rules governing the use of a blinkgenerator. Rule number one: Never blink into the unknown. Odd things happen when a ship traveling in that never-never land that is outside of but concurrent with space and time comes into contact with an object of mass. Certain alterations in molecular bondings merge the two masses.

Everyone who had ever read anything about space travel had seen the pictures of the two known incidents of a blinking ship fusing with another body. In sculptured detail the sleek prow of a small X&A cruiser protruded from the iron-black, metallic mass of an asteroid. In even more dramatic pictures the colonizer ship Vulpecula Columbus was shown blended with a smaller merchantman. Bonding with a chunk of rock, an iron asteroid, or any sizable body contacted in non-space was a terminal process for human life.

Unless X&A had laid down blink beacons one never blinked beyond the range of the ship's eyes. So, at first, making those megaleaps out there in the blackness of intergalactic space had been spooky, with Old Folks reluctant to leave the frail security of a blink beacon from which the view of the galaxy was more than spectacular. Off on the port quarter could be seen the galaxy's hot heart bulging in a globular mass from the slightly tilted plane of the disc. Later, as Dan grew more accustomed to blinks measured in parsecs, he was tempted to follow Rimfire's trail all the way around the galaxy.

"Be something, Mama, to say we've made it all the way. Not many can say that."

"I can think of other things I'd rather say," Fran said.

Old Folks was out there in the big dark because Dan Webster wasn't ready to don house slippers and become an old man. He had worked sixty-five years with United Tigian Shipping, a firm that sent ships blinking out to every inhabited world in the United Planets sector. He had started with the company as a trainee bookkeeper and had retired a vice president with a desire to do something other than take up a hobby and wait for his personal support system to begin to malfunction. To his surprise and pleasure, it was Fran who suggested, "Papa, why don't we do some traveling?"

The ship had made a ninety-degree arc around the periphery from its point of exit opposite Tigian II. Back there on the "world" the Webster home was sealed against intruders, climate conditioned against damp ordry or mildew or gnawing insects. It could be opened only by a voice command from Dan or, in the event of necessity, an override of the security system directed by the eldest Webster son.

They had spent two months on Xanthos, the U.P. administration planet, fighting government red tape to get the final permits on the reconditioned space tug, and then they had done some simple blinking, following well established routes toward the periphery. And now Old Folks was a long way from home and had made a shallow penetration into an area of thinly placed stars. She rested within visual range of the blink beacon that marked Rimfire's deepest excursion into the disc at that point.

"Well, Mama," Dan said, after the computer had located them precisely, showing Old Folks as a blinking dot amid a field of scattered stars, "where do we go from here?"

Fran shrugged.

"You've always been the lucky one," Dan said. "Pick us a winner."

"There," Fran whispered, as if in doubt. She pointed out a grouping of stars a few parsecs toward galactic center.

"There it shall be," Dan said.

They didn't even have names, that grouping of seven stars toward which Old Folks made her slow way. Masses of stars and interstellar matter blocked them from the telescopes on the U.P. worlds. They showed on the new Rimfire charts, but there had been no attempt by Captain Julie Roberts or her scientific team to name the millions of stars recorded by the ship's instruments.

Dan didn't know the procedures for naming new stars, and he didn't give it too much thought beyond an idle speculation that it would be nice to name a real pretty one for Fran. He was too busy using the ship's sensors and detectors to make sure that the next short blink didn't put Old Folks into the nuclear furnace of a sun or merge her with a hard, cold asteroid.

The real work began when the ship left Rimfire's well marked trail. The blink generator aboard Old Folks had traveled not a few parsecs, for sure,but it was solid and dependable and it was powerful, for the ship was a space tug, built to take vessels a thousand times her mass into her electronic embrace and blink them safely to the nearest shipyard. The generator was capable of multiple short blinks without recharging, but even so, she spent long hours drifting in the big empty while the generator reached out to the odd mixture of magnetic and radioactive energy emanating from the nearest star.

Since there was no real hurry, they didn't work in shifts. When it was bedtime in the Western Standard Zone on Tigian II, they put the ship's systems on auto and went to sleep. Dan Webster had always looked on bedtime as one of the highlights of his day, for it meant cuddling up to the sleek softness of the woman who had carried his children. Bedtime, depending on Fran's hormonal state, could be a sweet, touching, drowsy sinking into sleep or a mutually satisfying if ritualized romp which ended with Fran making little moaning sounds and Dan laughing like a fool. He always laughed because it was so very good. After so many years they read each other's little signals, responded eagerly, and proved with surprising regularity that youth had no monopoly on the pleasures of the flesh.

Old Folks was provisioned for a voyage of three years, with emergency space rations for another half year. The Century 4000 held the largest collection of books and films available from the Library of the Confederation on Xanthos. Dan was in no hurry at all. He let the ship's detection systems minutely search the space around a near star and logged the results carefully into the computer's avid maw. It made him feel good. He hadn't discovered anything, not yet, but he was the first man to record that a particular star at a particular coordinate in space had no spawn, that nothing orbited the nuclear furnace but a band of diffuse gases and some almost undetectable floes of space dust.

Fran had attended a good school on Tigian II. Her degree was in the field of literature. She had always felt a bit guilty as she reared her family and made a home for them for not having continued her school days delving into the "better" books produced by the writers of the hundreds of worlds that made up the United Planets Confederation. She had promised herself that she'd use the time in space to catch up on her reading, but so far, she had not made it through one book. The stilted language didn't ring well in her ears. The concerns of the writers of a thousand years in the past seemed, in the light of real life, to be inconsequential. Now, as Old Folks blinked in short jumps toward a G-class star a few light-years awayfrom the first sun examined by the ship's sensors, she decided that she would do a paper for publication by her discussion group on the works and career of a particular holofilm director. This gave her an excuse to watch her very favorite films over and over, eased the irritation of having to make selections from the almost too complete collection in the computer chambers, and drove Dan to catch up on his exercise in the ship's gym.

When Dan called his wife away from her fourth viewing of her favorite of all favorite films she saw immediately that he was excited.

"Look, Frannie," he said, pointing to the screen.

"Oh, my," Fran said.

By optical tricks the ship's eyes showed a little yellow star and its family of no less than six planets. By compressing the distances between the orbiting bodies the optics made the grouping look like a model solar system in a classroom.

"Oh, my, Daniel," Fran said.

"I have to confess, Frannie, that I didn't have too much confidence that we'd actually find something," Dan said.

She bent quickly and kissed him. "Dan Webster, you've always accomplished everything you set out to do."

"Then I guess I set my aim too low, huh, Mama?"

"You hush. And don't call me Mama."

"Well, there they are. Like a hen and her chicks." He chuckled. "Which one shall we name Frannie's World?"

"That would be a silly name for a planet."

"Not in my opinion," he said. He turned to the console. "Let's take a closer look."

Two of the outer planets were dark and ice-shrouded, far from the life-giving warmth of the sun, circling the distant source like unwanted orphans. The next two, as they were enlarged on the viewer, proved to begas giants. The first planet was too near the solar furnace and was nothing more than scorched rock. Dan had purposely saved the second planet for last viewing, because some quick measurements by the sensors had shown the world to lie in what the computer calculated to be the little yellow sun's life zone.

Dan held his breath. He pushed buttons. The Century 4000 grunted and moaned a bit and then the image of a world began to form on the screen. Dan wanted to see the blue of a water world so badly that for a few moments the slowly turning world took on a pale hue of that most wonderful of colors. He ordered the computer to check focus. He shielded his eyes as brilliant reflected sunlight gleamed on the screen before the optics could make a corrective adjustment.

Fran's World, the second planet of a G-class star, was a spheroid of glimmering ice. There was water on the world, but it was locked into a mass of snow and ice that covered the surface almost evenly. Dan was so disappointed that he turned off the viewer and punched up a drink.

Fran came to stand beside him, pressing her soft flank against him.

"There are the mining rights," she said.

"Yes, we can file for discoverer's royalty on any useful minerals," Dan said.

"Papa, how many stars have we examined?"

"Two."

"Don't you remember what we read? People who make a profession of exploration can go for decades without finding a star that has planets."

"Thank you," Dan said, patting her. "You always know what I'm thinking, don't you?"

She laughed. "Well, if I don't know you by now—"

"Some useful heavy metals may have boiled to the surface on the first planet," Dan said.

"We haven't checked for moons around the gas giants, either."

"You're right. Let's have a look."

It took some sublight maneuvering to examine the several moons of the large planets. A couple of them looked promising. Dan named five of them after his children, and applied the names of some of the grandchildren to the others. Deciding which moon to name after which child was a fun thing. The investigations of the moons filled a couple of months. They went about it in a leisurely fashion, taking time to get a full night's sleep, time to watch a film together, time to snuggle close in their large bed and do interesting things.

Old Folks edged cautiously into the solar storm of particles to come near enough to the one planet to record some encouraging readings of heavy metals, then got the hell out of there quickly, for the ship's radiation detectors were getting a bit worried. Dan parked the ship in an orbit around the second planet while he readied his claims for filing. Old Folks would have to blink back within range of the first Rimfire beacon before the announcement of discovery and the proper forms could be blinked back down the long line of beacons to X&A Headquarters on Xanthos. The temporary beacons left behind by Old Folks to guide them back to the beaten path could not handle blink messages.

With everything in readiness, Dan took one last look at the second planet. He set the computer to work confirming her distance from her sun and the strength of the star's radiations. He was not an astrophysicist, but he had a gut feeling that something was wrong with the figures. The second planet was roughly the same size as Tigian II. She was at an optimum distance from her sun. There were no dark and brooding clouds to shield her from the sun's life-giving emanations. When the computer confirmed once more that by all rights the water that was locked up in the vast fields of ice should have been liquid, Dan took Old Folks down toward the glittering surface for a closer look.

Fran watched nervously as the squarish Mule lowered until she was moving over the surface at a rate of speed that made her motion quite apparent. In open space one never realized that the ship was moving so fast.

"What are you doing, Papa?" she asked nervously.

"Just having a look."

He had all of the ship's sensors at work. A long, rounded ridge of ice was a range of impressive mountains. Lower, flatter areas made Dan wonder if once there had been oceans on Fran's World. He let the little ship zip around the planet in an orbit that eventually covered all of the surface. There were no spectacular readings, nothing to cause the systems to shout "Eureka!" with buzzers and flashing lights, but when Dan studied the readings after moving the ship into a higher, stable orbit he whistled.

"Have a look at this, Mama," he said.

"I see it," Fran said. "But what is it?" She was unable to make anything of the charted readings.

"Metals," Dan said. "Concentrations of them here and here." He pointed to two spots on the featureless globe. "Other places, too. This might be quite something, Mama. How'd you like to be very, very rich?"

"I would rather have been very, very rich when we were young," she said with a smile.

"But you wouldn't object to being rich now, I take it."

"Not too much."

Dan began to give the computer orders.

"You're not going down?" Fran asked in alarm.

"It's all right."

"There's nothing there but ice."

"Mama, it's colder in space than it will be on the surface. There's some solar heating."

"Why must we go down?"

"Because we want to be rich," he said. "Because I need better readings of those metal sources. I can get them by driving a heat probe through the ice."

Fran was still doubtful. She watched nervously as Old Folks lowered into a hint of atmosphere and then landed on the gleaming, icy surface.

It was not necessary for Dan to leave the ship. Old Folks was equipped with some basic exploratory tools, one of which was a probe that punched its way easily through two hundred feet of ice in less than an hour.

"Wow," Dan said, as the instruments recorded the nearness of masses of metal, ore so pure that he couldn't believe it. There was so much of it and so many metals were mixed together that all he got on the locater was a big mass of light.

He directed the probe to bend and melt its way toward the nearest metallic mass.

"I really don't understand this," he said.

The probe was within feet of something that showed on the instruments as a great heap of metals.

"Dan, I'm cold," Fran said, clasping her arms.

"Your imagination, Mama," Dan said. "The ice is outside."

Fran shivered. The probe neared the source of the fantastically high metallic readings. Dan, himself, felt a chill, looked up to see that Fran was shivering.

"Papa, let's go."

"Yes."

He reached. His hand froze. He felt a deadness creeping up his arm. He cried out. His breath made a cloud of vapor that froze instantly. Fran toppled, crashing stiffly to the deck. Dan reached for the panic button. His finger made contact, but he was so numb that he wasn't sure he actually pushed the button that would send a call for help beaming outward from Old Folks. He managed to fall beside the woman he had loved since he was sixteen, taking her into his arms with the last of his strength as the terrible cold penetrated into his stomach. He could not feel her. He wanted to weep.

The water in the tanks froze and burst the containment bulkheads.

Rime formed on the outer hull. Motion in the computer's Verbolt Cloud chambers began to slow. Metals were weakened as temperatures droppedtoward and past the cold of empty space. The hull crumbled and the air gushed out to freeze into drifting clouds that soon sank to the permanent snow cover and became a part of it. Over a period of months Old Folks collected crystals of ice from the thin atmosphere and whitened to become nothing more than a lump on the smoothness of the plain of ice. On a line toward the periphery the temporary beacons left behind by Dan Webster to guide him back to Rimfire's routes began to lose power and fail one by one. No trace of Old Folks remained. The only hint as to her final resting place was a nodule of ice protruding from the smoothness of the snows.