Deep Freeze

CHAPTER FOUR

The Fran Webster rested in solitude in a black sac seven parsecs inward from Rimfire's extragalactic route, having left total emptiness at the point where Dan Webster's Mule had made a left turn over a year ago.

David had checked the last inward pointing permanent beacon left by Rimfire, but no messages had been entered into the beacon's storage chambers. Now David sat on the control bridge with his feet propped up on the console, hands behind his head, staring at the optic viewer. A few widely spaced stars made faint dots in the blackness. Ahead, if he set the optics for maximum magnification, was the thickening glow of the dense areas far away, so far that measurements in thousands of parsecs were beyond the grasp of the mind.

Ruth came into the control room in a ship's uni-suit, something that she'd sworn never to wear. The tailored shorts showed her long, smooth, pale legs. The loose top hinted at the tipped cone shape of her breasts. The garment was revealing, but comfortable. She was brushing her sable-brown hair and her eyes were swollen from sleep.

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"No hurry," David said. "We're still charging."

Ruth studied the viewscreen. "You think of the galaxy as being made up of billions of stars," she said, "and then when you see it it's all nothingness, dark, hollow nothingness."

Her comment made David realize that he'd been feeling a bit intimidated by the vast, barren spaces that spread away on all sides. He had taken readings on all of the visible stars and it was going to take weeks of feeling his way along with the optics to reach the nearest one because out here on the edge of nowhere there were no close stellarneighbors.

Ruth punched up coffee with cream, asked David if he wanted a cup, made it for him, and delivered it. A soft tone sounded and the computer messaged that the blink generator was now fully charged.

"All dressed up and no place to go," David said.

"There," Ruth said, pointing to a dim group of stars that were as bright as any on the view-screen.

David raised an eyebrow in question.

"Ever go shopping with Mama?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Or to a museum? She always turned to the right. Rules of the road. Keep to the right. Slower traffic keep to the right. In a shop she'd turn to the right and make a circle to the left. Same way in a museum or a shopping mall."

"And what about Dad?"

"Remember how Mama always navigated for him when we were in the groundcar? She kept the maps in the passenger side storage. She watched for signs."

David laughed. "Mama," he said, imitating his father's tones of irritation, "my job is to watch out for the other idiots. Your job is to watch the signs and tell me when to turn."

"Right," Ruth said. "So they're sitting here beside the last blink beacon wondering which way to go, where to begin. The visible stars form sort of a crescent out there in front of them. The distances seem about the same."

"A few light-years difference between that little grouping off at ten o'clock low and those at three o'clock."

"So it's six of one and half a dozen of the other if your intent is to check them for planetary systems, right?"

"Right."

"There," Ruth said, pointing to the group of faint stars at three o'clock.

"There it shall be," David said, punching in orders for the ship'ssystems to look as far into the emptiness as possible. When the optics had verified that nothing solid blocked a straight line extending into the darkness for a few Tigian astronomical units the ship jumped and David initiated the search process again. The actual movement of the ship was instantaneous, the preparation was not, although it took several of the small jumps to deplete the generator of power.

David began to include the Seeker in the search pattern when the distance to the near star fell below one light-year. There was, of course, nothing to be detected. The first star in the grouping was a loner, barren.

The next sun was over twenty light-years away, and that was a close grouping for the rim area. He went back to the routine of jump, search, charge, jump, search, jump.

They swam in the small pool together. In recent years the styles in feminine swimwear had trended again toward the skimpy. David determined that he had one hell-of-a-fine-shaped sister. He looked at her with appreciation for beauty, with pride because she was of his blood, with renewed curiosity as to why there didn't seem to be a single man on Tigian II with eyes to see and persistence to break through his sister's penchant for living alone.

If there hadn't been the underlying worry about his parents, David would have been content to jump, search, jump, charge for an indefinite period. Being a businessman, he'd never taken time for exploration, and it was rather exciting to take those baby-step jumps into unknown space, to see a star growing in brightness and size on the screen, and to wonder if this one had a family, if this one had spawned a water world. He didn't really need the money that would come to the discoverer of a habitable planet, but he wouldn't refuse it. It might be neat to have a world named for you. Webster. Hell of a name for a world. Imagine having to live on a world called that. "Well, I'm from Webster. It's out there in the rim worlds. No glow from the Milky Way at night. Dark as pitch when there's no moon."

When the Fran Webster was just over half a light-year from the star, the Seeker communicated to the computer that it was getting a signal. A

gong rang softly, raising David's hair, for that warning gong was a demand from the computer for immediate attention. That particular gong could mean only something out of the ordinary and in space surprises were usually unpleasant. "By the way, David, we're about to crunch prowon into a drifting asteroid." Or, "Oh, it seems that we've developed a little leak in the hull and all of our atmosphere is bleeding off into the big empty." Or, "There's an urgent blink message coming in."

David and Ruth were eating when the gong gonged. Ruth's eyes went wide as David leapt into action, his face tense.

"I'll be damned," he said, after he'd taken a couple of seconds to assess the situation.

"David, please," Ruth said, "I have a low threshold of terror."

"It's them," he said. "They're close. The signal from their black box is quite strong."

"Thank God," she said, coming to stand beside him.

His fingers flew, giving commands to the computer. Minute analysis showed that the source of the signal was moving—or that it had been moving when the signal was being originated. For two hours the communications bank blinked and chuckled and determined that the source had been moving in an arc around the near star. Another minute measurement told David that the signal had been shaped by a solid mass in the background.

"Orbital path," David said, asking questions of the computer, nodding.

"Projecting the movement shows this." The computer displayed a diagram of a planetary body orbiting the sun. And then the signal disappeared.

"What happened?" Ruth asked, frightened.

"Don't know." He ordered a careful scan. Just over twelve hours later the signal came again. During the period of silence the source had moved along the predicted arc.

"They've landed," David said. "They're on a body that is orbiting the sun. The orbit is in the life zone area."

"Which means?"

"Life as we know it requires free water. Not water locked up in rockmasses. Not water frozen permanently in ice or heated forever into steam.

Free water. To have free water you have to have a temperature zone that is below boiling and above freezing. The life zone. That area where the energy put out by a planet's sun is confined to a very narrow range. If you have water, chances are you have free oxygen. You can have a lot of other stuff that prevents the planet from being habitable. The odds against having a planet at just the right position in relationship to its sun are literally astronomical, and then you multiple those odds to cover the possible—and very probable—existence of toxic gases and such. That's why a good world is the rarest and most valuable thing in the galaxy."

"Mama and Papa may have found a habitable planet?"

"Well, it's a little early to guess. We know that the ship is on an orbiting body—or was when this signal was sent."

"Yes, I have to keep reminding myself that we're listening to the past."

"We'll just have to move in and see what's going on."

From the time that they first detected the signal from the black box on Old Folks it lasted only seventy-two hours counting the time when the rotation of the body from which the signal originated halted their reception while the transmitter was carried to the opposite side of the planet. With each reemergence of the signal it weakened. It became undetectable at a time when the source was on the side of the body facing them, so it wasn't just a matter of the transmitter being carried behind the bulk of the planetary body again.

"Punch up the Seeker data Josh gave us," David ordered, as he searched for the signal.

"Got it," Ruth said.

"What does it say about the duration of the signal?"

Ruth read quickly, then summarized. "The atomic battery is good for at least twenty years. The box can withstand almost anything except being sucked down into a sun. It's shielded from heat and radiation."

"And, I assume, the cold of space wouldn't bother it."

"Apparently not," Ruth said after scanning. "I'd say that's taken for granted because they don't mention cold temperatures specifically. If a ship lost power and air, it would soon become as cold as space, so the box must have been built to operate under such conditions."

"Any clue as to why it would operate for a while and then stop?"

"Let me read it all again," she said. Then, after a few minutes. "No hint as to what might have happened, David. Whoever wrote this apparently believed that the box is almost indestructible."

"It's beginning to sound to me as if Dad just blinked off and away,"

David said.

"But something had to activate the signal," Ruth said.

"Maybe it was just a rough landing," David said.

"Once activated, the signal can be turned off only by an X&A

technician."

"But if he bumped the ship in landing hard enough to set off the signal but not badly enough to do any real damage, it would seem to us that the signal had been turned off if and when he simply blinked away out of range." He sighed. "Well, we'll go have a look at Dad's planet, anyhow."

It was just a matter of covering the last few million miles as quickly as possible and putting the Starliner into the orbital path of what was, yes, a planet in the life zone of the G-class sun. It was getting pretty exciting.

"They've found the Garden of Eden and they decided to stay for a while," Ruth said, as the Fran Webster circled the sun on flux for a meeting with what she was beginning to think of as Papa's Planet.

"It would be like Dad," David said, "to ignore every directive sent down by X&A about landing on a new planet before it's checked out by X&A

scientists."

"Papa wouldn't take any chances he recognized as such, but what if you were flying low over a garden planet? Wouldn't you be tempted to think that nothing could be wrong with such a beautiful place? Wouldn't you be tempted to stretch the law just a little bit to go down and have a closerlook?"

So it was, with the idea of a lush, blue and green, living planet having been planted in her imagination by her brother, that Ruth was at first puzzled, then frustrated by the bright, reflected light that showed the planet to be a gleaming ball of ice.

"Papa must have been so disappointed," she said, as David adjusted the optics to cut down on the glare and get higher magnification.

"I don't think they would have stayed around here long," David said.

"It makes me cold just to look at it," Ruth said.

The Fran Webster settled into a stable orbit. Since David had not as yet had the chance to use the ship's sensors and detection instruments he ran a quick scan on the ice world.

"Hey, now," he said, as the metallic readings nearly went off the scale.

"There's metal everywhere. It's under the ice but definitely not too deep.

I'm not a mining engineer, but if I'm reading these things right those have to be the richest ore fields yet to be discovered."

"Maybe that's why Papa stayed here for a while."

"Could be," David agreed. "I think we'd better go down and run a complete survey."

"Wouldn't that be a waste of time if Papa has already done it and filed his claim of discovery?" Ruth asked.

"If he had filed it, it would be on record."

"Oh, yes," she said. No such claim—no claim at all from Dan Webster—had been filed.

Flying at a few thousand feet over the gleaming surface of the ice, the ship screamed through a thin atmosphere. Instruments clicked and whirred. The ship flew herself. David was sitting in the command chair, watching the screens casually. His head jerked when the sensors zeroed in on a small mound of ice and gave off a sharper note of self-congratulation to indicate that they had found a particularly rich source of metal.

With a grunt, David took control, slowed the ship until she hovered on her flux drives. He did an infrared scan. Nothing. There was something about the shape of the ice mound that drew him. He lowered the ship until the Fran Webster stood on her flux drives a hundred feet above the ice.

The ice coating on the Old Folks was relatively thin. The heat of the flux drives sent clear water dripping, then flooding down the sides of the mound.

"Oh, David," Ruth gasped, as the metallic hide of a Mule began to show through, then the square, awkward shape and U.P. markings along with the name, Old Folks.

David landed the Fran Webster with her port air lock not a hundred feet from the entry port of the tug. At first he was not going to allow Ruth to accompany him, but he relented. After all, if something happened to him on the icy surface of the planet she had neither the skill nor the knowledge to get the ship into space and back to the U.P. He helped her get into her suit, checked the life-support system himself, suited up, led the way out into the almost nonexistent atmosphere. The cold was not the cold of space. Sunlight glared off the ice. The suit's instruments measured the same contrast in temperatures that one could expect to find on an airless moon, torrid in the sun, frigid in shade. By all rights the ice that covered the planet should melt and run rivers during the period of sun and refreeze at night.

David halted, pulled Ruth to a stop beside him.

"What?" she asked.

"Something's just a shade off center here," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Something is not right. What is your suit conditioner doing?"

She was silent for a moment. "It's cooling."

"The sun is quite hot," he said. "But there's no melting. The water we melted down with the flux tubes is already refrozen."

"I don't understand," Ruth said.

"You are not alone." He turned, started back toward the Starliner.

"David, please," she begged. "We've got to know. We've got to find out."

He hesitated. They were a mere fifty feet from the Old Folks. He could see frost reforming on her hull. Worse, he could see the large rent in the metal where the interior water tanks had expanded with deadly results.

Every molecule of air in the ship's atmosphere would have rushed out within seconds.

"Ruth, honey, I think you'd better go on back. I'll take a look."

"No," she said.

The Old Folks' entry hatch was closed. David checked for power with the suit's instruments. The ship was dead. He used a small bonding torch that was built into the suit's right arm to cut away the lock. The hatch resisted opening, creaked and grated as he pulled, then shattered at the hinges, the strong hull alloy turning into powder to fall to the ice below.

He also had to cut his way through the inner lock door and then he was in the Mule's lower area. The blink generator was dead. No flicker of energy showed on the instruments. The ship's atmosphere matched the thin one of the ice world. There wasn't enough free oxygen to allow a gnat to breathe.

He moved forward. A rime of frost covered everything, including an irregular heap of—something— on the deck near the external tools control panel. He started to step over, halted with one booted foot in the air, felt his heart hammer, his gorge rise, for through the coating of clear ice he saw a face, or what was left of a face. The liquid inside the eyeballs had frozen, shattering everything like glass. On the face and neck blood veins had expanded with the cold, thrusting cords of red through splits in the gray, frozen skin.

"Stay back," he said, but it was too late. Ruth was by his side looking down. Her cry was not a scream of horror. It was almost soft, a hair-raising expression of grief that lanced through him.

Ruth knelt, touched the frozen forms. David knelt beside her.

Dan Webster had managed to get his arms around his wife and there they had stayed so that they were locked together in a glacial embrace.

Ruth was sobbing quietly. David said, "Well, they were together. They would have wanted to be together."

She turned her helmeted face to glare at him. "They would have wanted to live."

"Yes, of course." He looked around. Everything seemed to be in order.

Aboard a ship there is a place for everything and everything had better be in its place if you wanted to have room to move. He left Ruth weeping beside the frozen corpses and walked into the control room. Old Folks was as dead as a ship could be. He used his gloved hand to wipe the rime off the covering of an instrument and the glass powdered under the pressure.

Damned odd. And a lance of cold came through the insulated glove with painful intensity.

"What the hell?" he muttered. He walked back to the auxiliary control panel, lifted Ruth to her feet. "We're going."

"What about them?"

"Something's very wrong here, Ruth. We're going. We're going to go back to the Fran Webster and then we're going to get the hell out of here."

"What about them?" she repeated, desperation in her voice.

"Ruth, they're not going anywhere."

"We can't just leave them here."

"Come on."

"No," she said, jerking away. She fell against the control panel. Glass and metals powdered. He had to catch her to keep her from falling through the once solid panel.

"What?" she asked, her eyes wide.

"Let's go."

She made no further objection, followed him into the sun. Her feet were cold. Where she had touched the bodies of her mother and father with her gloved hands the flesh felt numb, painfully cold. She was shivering when David helped her strip out of the suit.

"You were quite worried over there," she said.

"Damned right."

"What killed them?"

"The cold."

"The sun is hot. It made the suit coolers work."

"Tell me about it," he said, placing his suit on the rack carefully. He moved swiftly to the control room, activated the ship's flux drive, started to push the button that would have sent the Fran Webster soaring away from the planet's icy grip. Ruth's appearance on the bridge stopped him.

The transformation was instantaneous. Hot lances of overwhelming desire brought him to his feet. He could no longer remember who or where he was, or what he had been about to do. She moved to meet his lunge and they were together, lips hot and wet and hungry. He lifted her and carried her, a soft, hot, lovely burden, to his quarters and the big bed, peeled away the unisuit. He was aware only of need, a need so vast, so consuming that there was room for nothing else in his consciousness. It was not sister and brother who coupled, gasping, clutching, moaning in extreme passion, but two sexual animals from whose minds all else had been sucked away.