In the Ocean of Night

From the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17th Edition, 2093: Icarus (ik΄-ə-rəs)

Icarus

One

He found the flying mountain by its shadow.

Ahead the sun was dimmed by a swirling film of dust, and Nigel first saw Icarus at the tip of a lancing finger of shadow in the clouds.

“The core is here,” he said over the radio. “It’s solid.” “You’re sure?” Len replied. His voice, filtered by sputtering radio noise, was thin and distant, though the Dragon module waited only a thousand kilometers away.

“Yes. Something bloody big is casting a shadow through the dust and coma.”

“Let me talk to Houston. Back in a sec, boy-o.” A humming blunted the silence. Nigel’s mouth felt soft, full of cotton: the thick-tongued sensation of mingled fear and excitement. He nudged his module toward the cone of shadow that pointed directly ahead, sunward, and adjusted attitude control. A pebble rattled against the aftersection.

He entered the cone of shadow. The sun paled and then flickered as, ahead, a growing dot passed across its face. Nigel drifted, awash in yellow. Corona streamed and shimmered around a hard nugget of black: Icarus. He was the first man to see the asteroid in over two years. To observers on Earth its newborn cloak of thick dust and gas hid this solid center.

“Nigel,” Len said quickly, “how fast are you closing?” “Hard to say.” The nugget had grown to the size of a nickel held at arm’s length. “I’m moving to the side, out of the shadow, just in case it comes up too fast.” Two stones rapped hollowly on the hull; the dust seemed thicker here, random fragments bled from Icarus to make the Flare Tail.

“Yeah, Houston just suggested that. Any magnetic field reading?”

“Not—wait, I’ve just picked up some. Maybe, oh, a tenth of a gauss.”

“Uh oh. I’d better tell them.”

“Right.” His stomach clenched slightly. Here we go, he thought.

The black coin grew; he slipped the module further away from the edge of the disk, for safety margin. A quick burst of the steering jets slowed him. He studied the irregular rim of Icarus through the small telescope, but the blazing white sun washed out any detail. He felt his heart thumping sluggishly in the closeness of his suit.

A click, some static. “This is Dave Fowles at Houston, Nigel, patching through Dragon. Congratulations on your visual acquisition. We want to verify this magnetic field strength—can you transmit the automatic log?”

“Roger,” Nigel said. Conversations with Houston lagged; the time delay was several seconds, even at the light-speed of radio waves. He flipped switches; there was a sharp beep. “Done.”

The edge of the disk rushed at him. “I’m going around it, Len. Might lose you for a while.”

“Okay.”

He swept over the sharp twilight line and into full sunlight. Below was a burnt cinder of a world. Small bumps and shallow valleys threw low shadows and everywhere the rock was a brownish black. Its highly elliptical orbit had grilled Icarus as though on a spit, taking it yearly twice as close to the sun as Mercury.

Nigel matched velocities with the tumbling rock and activated a series of automatic experiments. Panel lights winked and a low rhythm of activity sounded through the cramped cabin. Icarus turned slowly in the arc light-white sun, looking bleak and rough… and not at all like the bearer of death to millions of people.

“Can you hear me, Nigel?” Len said.

“Right.”

“I’m out of your radio shadow now. What’s she look like?”

“Stony, maybe some nickel-iron. No signs of snow or conglomerate structures.”

“No wonder, it’s been baked for billions of years.” “Then where did the cometary tail come from? Why the Flare?”

“An outcropping of ice got exposed, or maybe a vent opened to the surface—you know what they told us. Whatever the stuff was, maybe it’s all been evaporated by now. Been two years, that should be enough.”

“Looks like it’s rotating—ummm, let me check— about every two hours.”

“Uh huh,” Len said. “That cinches it.”

“Anything less than solid rock couldn’t support that much centrifugal force, right?”

“That’s what they say. Maybe Icarus is the nucleus of a used-up comet and maybe not—it’s rock, and that’s all we care about right now.”

Nigel’s mouth tasted bitter; he drank some water, sloshing it between his teeth.

“It’s knocking on one kilometer across, roughly spherical, not much surface detail,” he said slowly. “No clear cratering, but there are some shallow circular depressions. I don’t know, it could be that the cycle of heating and cooling as it passes near the sun is an effective erosion mechanism.”

He said all this automatically, trying to ignore the slight depression he felt. Nigel had hoped Icarus would turn out to be an icy conglomerate instead of a rock, even though he knew the indirect evidence was heavily against it. Along with a few of the astrophysicists, he hoped the Flare Tail of 2017—a bright orange coma twenty million miles long that twisted and danced and lit the night sky of Earth for three months—had signaled the end of Icarus. No telescope, including the orbiting Skylab X tube, had been able to penetrate the cloud of dust and gas that billowed out and obscured the spot where the asteroid Icarus had been. One school of thought held that a rocky shell had been eroded by the eternal fine spray of particles from the sun—the solar wind—and a remaining core of ice had suddenly boiled away, making the Flare Tail. Thus, no core remained. But a majority of astronomers felt it unlikely that ice should be at the center of Icarus; probably, most of the rocky asteroid was left somewhere in the dust cloud.

NASA hoped the controversy would stimulate funding for an Icarus flyby. The Agency, ever press-conscious, needed support. It had come a long way from the dark days of 1986, when the explosion of the Challenger had begun a fundamental shift in Agency thinking. NASA went on to develop the transats—trans-atmospheric rocket-airplane combinations that flew a good piece of the way to the upper atmosphere, then boosted into orbit on rocket thrust—but it had been badly mauled. As soon as it could, it edged away from the milk-run, commercial and military business of carrying tonnage into orbit. NASA was trying to become a primarily scientific agency now.

Icarus seemed a pleasantly distant spectacle. Its sudden, bright, fan-shaped coma was larger and prettier than Halley’s Comet’s rather disappointing apparition in 1985. The Los Angeles Times dubbed it “the instant comet.” People could see it, even through suburban smog. It made news.

But in the winter of 2017, the question of Icarus’s composition became more than a passing, academic point. The jet of gas spurting from the head of what was now Comet Icarus seemed to have deflected it. The dust cloud was moving sidewise slightly as it followed Icarus’s old orbit, and it was natural to assume that if a core remained, it was somewhere near the center of the drifting cloud. The deflection was slight. Precise measurements were difficult and some uncertainty remained. But it was clear that by mid-2019 the center of the cloud and whatever remained of Icarus would collide with the Earth.

“Len, how’s it look from your end?” Nigel said. “Pretty dull. Can’t see much for the dust. The sun’s a kind of watery color looking through the cloud. I’m off to the side pretty far, to separate your radio and radar image from the sun’s.”

“Where am I?”

“Right on the money, in the center of the dust. On your way to Bengal.”

“Hope not.”

“Yeah. Hey—getting a relay from Houston for you.” A moment’s humming silence as the black pitted world turned beneath him. Nigel wondered whether it was made of the original ancient material that formed the solar system, as the astrophysicists said, or the center of a shattered planet, as the popular media trumpeted. He had hoped it would be a snowball of methane and water ice that would break up when it hit Earth’s atmosphere—perhaps filling the sky with blue and orange jets of light and spreading an aurora around the globe, but doing no damage. He stared down at the cinder world that had betrayed his hopes by being so substantial, so deadly. The automatic cameras clicked methodically, mapping its random bumps and depressions; the cabin smelled of hot metal and the sour tang of sweat. No leisurely strolling and hole-boring expeditions with Len, now; no measurements; no samples to chip away; no time.

“Dave again, Nigel. Those magnetic field strengths sew it up, boy—it’s nickel-iron, probably eighty percent pure or better. From the dimensions we calculate the rock masses around four billion kilograms.”

“Right.”

“Len’s radar fixes have helped us narrow down the orbit, too. That ball of rock you’re looking at is coming down in the middle of India, just like we thought. I—”

“You want us to go into the retail poultry business,” Nigel said.

“Yeah. Deliver the Egg.”

Nigel lit a panel of systems monitors. “Bringing the Egg out of powered-down operation,” he said mechanically, watching the lights sequence.

“Good luck, boy,” Len broke in. “Better look for a place to plant it. We’ve got plenty of time. Holler if you need help,” he said, even though they both knew full well he could not bring the Dragon module into the cloud without temporarily losing most communications with Houston.

Nigel passed an hour in the time-filling tasks of awakening the fifty-megaton fusion device that rode a few yards behind his cabin. He repeated the jargon—redundancy checks, safe-arm mode, profile verification—without taking his attention fully from the charred expanse below. Toward the end of the time he caught sight of what he had anticipated: a jagged cleft at the dawn edge of Icarus.

“I think I’ve found the vent,” he called. “About as long as a soccer field, perhaps ten meters wide in places.”

“A fracture?” Len said. “Maybe the thing’s coming apart.”

“Could be. It will be interesting to see if there are more, and whether they form a pattern.”

“How deep is it?”

“I can’t tell yet; the bottom is in shadow now.”

“If you have the time—wait, Houston wants to patch through to you again.”

A pause, then: “We’ve been very happy with the relayed telemetry from you, Nigel. Looks to us here in Control as though the Egg is ready to fly.”

“Has to be hatched before it can fly.”

“Right, boy, got me on that one,” Dave said with sudden exuberant levity.

A pause, then Dave’s tones became rounded, modulated. “You know, I wish you could see the Three-D coverage of the crowds around the installation here, Nigel. Traffic is blocked for a twenty-kilometer radius. There are people everywhere. I think this has caught the imagination of all humanity, Nigel, a noble attempt—”

He wondered if Dave knew how all this sounded. Well, the man probably did; every astronaut a member of Actor’s Equity.

He grimaced when, a moment later, the smooth voice described the sweaty press of bodies around NASA Houston, the heat strokes suffered and babies delivered in the waiting crowds, the roiling prayer chains of New Sons, their nighttime vigils around bonfires of licking, oily flames. The man was good, no possible qualm over that; the millions of eavesdroppers thought they were listening to the straight stuff, an open line between Houston and Icarus meant for serious business, when in fact the conversation at Dave’s end was elaborately staged and mannered.

“Anybody you’d like to talk to back here on Earth, Nigel, while you’re taking your break?”

He replied that no, there was no one, he wanted to watch Icarus as it turned, study the vent. While, simultaneously, he saw in his mind’s eye his parents in their cluttered apartment, wanted to speak to them, felt the halting, ineffectual way he had tried to explain to them why he was doing this thing.

They still lived in that dear dead world where space equaled research equaled dispassionate truth. They knew he had trained for programs that never materialized. He’d put in time in orbit as a glorified mechanic, and that had seemed quite all right.

But this. They couldn’t understand how he’d come to take a mission which promised nothing but the chance to plant a bomb if he succeeded, and death if he failed. A scrambled, jury-rigged, balls-up of a mission with sixty percent chance of failure; so the systems analysts said.

They had emigrated from England, following their son when he was selected for the US-European program, hard on his final year at Cambridge. As an all-purpose scientist he’d seemed trainable, in good condition (squash, soccer, amateur pilot) agreeable, docile (after all, he was British, happy to have any sort of career at all) and presentable. When he showed superior reflexes, did well in flight training and was accepted into the aborted Mars program, his parents felt vindicated, their sacrifices redeemed.

He would lead in the new era of moon exploration, they thought. Justify their flight from a sleepy, comfy England into this technicolor technocrat’s circus.

So when the Icarus thing came, they’d asked: Why risk his Cambridge years, his astronautics, in the high vacuum between Venus and Earth?

And he’d said—?

Nothing, really. He had sat in their Boston rocker, pumping impatiently, and spoken of work, plans, relatives, the Second Depression, politics. Of their arguments he remembered little, only the blurred cadences of their voices. In memory his parents blended together into one person, one slow Suffolk accent he recalled as filling his adolescence. His own voice could never slide into those smooth vowels; he could never be them. They were a separate entity and, no matter that he was their son, he was beyond some unspoken perimeter they drew in their lives. Within that curve was certainty, clear forms. Their living room had pockets of air in it, spots smelling of sweet tea or musty bindings or potted flowers, things more substantial than his words. There in their damp old house his jittery, crowded world fell away and he, too, found it difficult to believe in the masses of people who jammed into the cities, fouling the world and blunting, spongelike, the best that anyone could do or plan for them.

There was precious little money for research, for new ideas, for dreams. But his parents did not sense that fact. His father shook his head a millimeter to each side, listening as Nigel talked, the older man probably not aware that he gave away his reaction. When Nigel was through describing the Icarus mission plan, his father had cast one of those unreadable looks at his mother and then very calmly advised Nigel to sign off the mission, to wait for something better. Surely something would come along. Surely, yes. From inside their perimeter they saw it very clearly. He had given them no daughter-in-law as yet, no grandchildren, had spent little time at home these past years. All this hovered unspoken behind his father’s millimeter swaying, and Nigel promised himself that when Icarus was over and done he would see more of them.

His father, obviously well read up on the matter, mentioned the unmanned backup missions. Robot probes, ready with a series of nuclear shoves. Why couldn’t Houston rely on them alone? A matter of probabilities, Nigel explained, glad to be on factual ground. But he knew, despite the committee reports, that the odds were cloudy. Perhaps a man was better, but who was sure? Even if only men could ferret out the core of Icarus, amid all that dust, why should it be Nigel? Easy answers: youth, reflexes; and, finally, because there weren’t all that many trained men left. Nigel mentioned not a word of this as he pumped the rocker, drank tea, murmured into the layered still air of the old house. He was going, one way or another. They knew it. And that last evening ended in silence.

On the airplane back to the anthill of Houston, he took up the one volume that he’d noticed in his old bedroom bookcase, and brought along on an impulse. The yellowed hardback was cracked, the pages stiff and stained by the accidents of adolescence. He remembered reading it shortly after applying for the US-European program, to get a feel for the Americans. He paged through remembered scenes and near the end came upon the one passage he had involuntarily memorized.And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me…

Sitting in the contoured airplane seat, he felt more like Huck Finn than the calculating European others thought him to be.

Dave Fowles’s voice broke in.

“We have a recalculation of the impact damage, Nigel. Looks pretty bad.”

“Oh?”

“Two point six million people dead. Peripheral damage for four hundred kilometers around the impact site. No major Indian cities hit, but hundreds of villages—”

“How is that famine going?”

He sighed. “Worse than we expected. I guess as soon as word filtered down that Icarus might hit, all those dirt farmers left their crops and started preparing for the afterlife. That just aggravated the famine. The UN thinks there’ll be several million dead inside six months, even with our airlifts, and our sociometricians agree.”

“And that movement out of the impact area?”

“Bad. They just give up and won’t walk a step, Herb said. It must be their religion or something. I don’t understand it, I really don’t.”

Nigel thought, and something came to an edge in him. “Dave, I have an idea.”

“Sure, we just went off open channel, Nigel, the networks aren’t getting this. Shoot.”

“I’m going to plant the Egg after this rest period, aren’t I? This thing is solid metal ore, the magnetic field proves that. No point in waiting.”

“Correct. The Mission Commander just gave me confirmation on that. We have you scheduled to begin descent in about thirteen minutes.”

“Okay. This is it: I want to put the Egg in that vent I’ve found. It’s a long, irregular fissure. The Egg will give us a better momentum transfer if it goes off in a hole, and this one looks pretty deep.”

A whisper of static marked the line. Some tiny facet of Icarus gave him a quick white flash and vanished; he ached to seek it out, take a sample. He felt himself suspended beneath the white sun.

“How deep do you estimate?” Dave’s voice was guarded.

“I’ve been watching the shadows move as the vent rotates into the sun. I think its floor must be forty meters down, at least. That’ll give us a good kick from the Egg. I can take some interesting specimens out of there at the same time,” he finished lamely.

“Let you know in a minute.”

Len broke the wait that followed. “Think you can handle that? Securing that thing might get tricky if there’s not enough room.”

“If I can’t get it down to the bottom I’ll leave it hanging. The Egg won’t weigh even a kilo on the surface, I can simply hang it to the fissure wall like a painting.”

“Right. Hope they buy it.”

And then the carrier from Houston came in.

“We authorize touchdown near the edge. If the vent is wide enough—”

He was already readying his board.

Two

It was a world of straight lines, no serene parabolas. He brought his module—cylindrical, thin radial spokes for stability, an insect profile ending in a globular pouch that was the Egg—in slowly, watching his radar screen. It was difficult to sense in this pebble of a world below him the potential to open a crater in the Earth forty kilometers across. It seemed sluggish, inert.

“Sure you don’t need any help?” Len called.

Nigel smiled and his tanned face crinkled. “You know Houston won’t let us get out of contact. The Dragon’s high gain antenna might not work in all this dust, and—”

“I know,” Len said, “and if we were both on the sunward side of Icarus, Earth would be in my radio shadow. Fine. Just let me know if—”

“Certainly.”

“Get’em, boy-o.”

The textured surface grew. He flew toward the dawn line and the small pocks and angles became clearer. Steering rockets murmured at his back. He concentrated on the distance and relative velocities, and upon speeding up the automatic cameras, until he was hovering directly above the vent. He rotated the module to gain a better view and inched closer.

“It’s deeper than I thought. I can see fifty meters in and the mouth is quite wide.”

“Sounds encouraging,” Dave said.

Without waiting for further word, he took the module down to the top of the vent. Blasted stone rose toward him, brown discolored into black where minute traces of gas had been baked away.

His headphones sputtered and crackled. “I’m losing your telemetry,” Len’s voice came.

Nigel brought the module to a dead stop. “Look, Len, I can’t go further in without the rock screening you out.”

“We can’t break contact.”

“Well—”

“Maybe I should move in.”

“No, stay outside the dust. Move sunward and behind me—there’ll still be a cone of good reception.”

“Okay, I’m off.”

“Listen, you guys,” Dave said, “if you’re having trouble with this maybe we should just for—” Nigel switched him off. Minutes were being eaten away.

He rotated the module to get a full set of photographs.

Icarus was a bumpy, round hill that sloped away wherever he looked. Burnished mounds and clefts made a miniature geography, seeming larger than they were as the eye tried to fit them into a familiar perspective. He glanced at the clock. It had been long enough; he flipped a switch and the burr of static returned.

“How’s it going, Len?” he said.

“Hey, having transmission trouble? I lost you there for a minute.”

“Had some thinking to do.”

“Oh. Dave says they’re having second thoughts back there.”

“I guessed as much. But then, they’re not here, are they?”

Len chuckled. “I guess not.”

“How far around are you? Ready for me to go in?” “Almost. Take a few more minutes. What’s it like down there?”

“Pretty bleak. I wonder why Icarus is so close to spherical? I expected something jagged.”

“Can’t be gravitational forces.”

“No, there’s not enough to hold down even gravel— everything is bald, there’s no debris around at all.”

“Maybe solar erosion has rounded the whole asteroid off.”

“I’m going in,” Nigel said abruptly.

“Okay, I guess I can track you from here.”

The rotation of Icarus had brought the left wall closer. He nudged the craft back to center, remembering the first time he had learned in some forgotten science text that the Earth rotated. For weeks he had been convinced that whenever he fell down, it was because the Earth had moved beneath him without his noticing. He had thought it a wonderful fact, that everyone was able to stand up when the Earth was obviously trying to knock them down.

He smiled and took the craft in.

Jaws of stone yawned around him. Random fragments of something like mica glinted from the seared rocks. Nigel stopped about halfway down and tilted his spotlights up to see the underhang of a shelf; it was rough, brownish. He glided toward the vent wall and extended a waldoe claw. Its teeth bit neatly with a dull snap and brought back a few pounds of desiccated rubble. Len called; Nigel answered with monosyllables. He nudged the module downward again, moving carefully in the shadowed silence. He used a carrier pouch on the craft’s skin to store the sample, and added more clawfuls of rock to other pouches.

He was nearly to the bottom before he noticed it.

The pitted floor was a jumble of rocks that rose from pools of ink. Nigel could not make out detail; he turned his spotlights downward.

A deep crack ran down the center of the rough floor. It was perhaps five meters wide and utterly black.

At irregular intervals things protruded from the crack, angular things that were charred and blunted. Some gave sparkling reflections, as though partially fused and melted.

Nigel glided closer.

One of the objects was a long convoluted band of a coppery metal that described an intricate, folded weave of spirals.

He sat in the stillness and looked at it. Time passed. Ten meters away a crumpled form that had been square was jammed in the crack, as though it had been partly forced out by a great wind. There were others; he photographed them.

Len had been calling for some time.

When he was through Nigel pressed a button to transmit and said, “We’re going to have to recalculate, Len. Icarus isn’t a lump of ice or a rock or anything else. I think”—he paused, still not quite believing it—“it has to be a ship.”

Three

It took Houston an hour to agree that he had to leave the module. Both he and Len had to argue with a Project Director who thought they had wasted too much time already; the man obviously didn’t believe anything they reported, thinking it a cock-and-bull story designed to give Nigel more time for sample collecting. Len could only barely be restrained from coming into the cloud himself and only the necessity for reevaluating the mission stopped him.

Even after agreeing, Houston demanded a price. The Egg had to be secured to the vent floor first. This could be done without Nigel’s leaving the module and, rather than argue, he moved quickly and efficiently to make short work of it.

The Egg was a dull gray sphere with securing bolts sunk into its skin. Nigel maneuvered it near the dark fissure wall and fired the bolts that freed it. The sphere coasted free.

Before it could glide very far he shot the aft securing bolts and they arced across the space to the wall and buried themselves in the stone. Steel cables reeled in and pulled the Egg to the rock face. Nothing could move it now and only Len or Nigel could detonate its fifty megatons.

Nigel ate before he left the module. Houston was divided about contingency plans; Dave gave him a summary to which he half listened. He and Len had another twenty-two hours’ margin of air, and some changes could be made in their braking orbit back to Earth.

The two unmanned backup missions were being stepped up, but they looked less promising now. The radar sensing modules had to close on Icarus at high velocity, and the dust and pebbles inside the cloud, impacting at those speeds, could disable the warheads before they searched out Icarus itself.

“Popping the cover,” Nigel called, and switched over to suit radio. The hatch came free with a hollow bang. He inched gingerly out, went hand over hand down the module’s securing line, and stood at last on Icarus.

“The surface crunches a little under my feet,” he said, knowing Len would pester him with questions if he didn’t keep up a steady stream of commentary. They had both ridden in a small, sweaty cabin for five weeks to intercept Icarus, and now Len was missing a payoff larger than anything they had dreamed. “It must be something like cinder. Dried out. That’s the way it looks, anyway.”

A pause.

“I’m at the edge of the crack. It’s about two meters across here, and the sides are pretty smooth. I’m hanging over it now, looking in. The walls go on for about four meters and then there’s nothing but black. My lights can’t pick up anything beyond that.”

“Maybe there’s a hole in there,” Len said. “Could be.”

Before Dave could break in, Nigel added, “I’m going inside,” and caught a lip of rock to pull himself into the crack.

As the rock fell away behind him there was only a faint glimmering reflection ahead. A white rectangle loomed up as he coasted on. It seemed to be set into the side of some larger slab, flush against the rock on one end and at least a hundred meters on a side. There were odd-shaped openings in it, some with curlicues and grainy stone collars like raised parentheses. Nigel lost his bearings as he approached and had to spin his arms to bring his feet around. There was a faint ring as he landed.

The white material had the dull luster of metal. Nigel used a cutting tool to gouge out a sliver. Nearby, a contorted thing of red and green appeared to grow smoothly out of the white metal, with no seam. To Nigel it looked like an abstract sculpture. When he touched it there was a faint tremor in his fingers; an arm of it moved infinitesimally, then was still. Nothing more happened.

He moved on, examined other objects, then shone a light down one of the holes in the face. The opening was a large oval and in the distance he could see where other dark corridors intersected it.

He went in.

A long tube of chipped rock. He took a sample. Volcanic origin? Something strange about its grainy flecks.

A vault. Gray walls, flash-burned brown.

Coasting.

Stretched lines shaping up…through…an eager bunching into swells. Should he go further? Beneath his torch light shadows swung with each motion of his arm, like eyes following every movement. Rippling patterns.

Patterns.

In the walls?

Should he? Behind each smile, teeth await.

Down, down now. Level. Gliding. Legs dangling

dangling

soft

something like a cushion but he sees nothing, only the shadows now melting something.

hot

then cold old

drawing him down again, telescoping him into fresh cubes of space, all aslant, a spherical room now, glowing red where his torch touches or is that a trick of the eyes?—he has difficulty focusing, probably loss of local vertical, an old problem in zero g, just a turn of the head will fix it—

Worn stone steps leading impossibly up, up into a ceiling now crumpled, spattered with orange drops that gleamed like oil in his murky light. Nigel remembered abruptly, dimly … An old film. A film of the Tutankhamun tomb, the jackal god Anubis rampant above nine defeated foes. Within the Treasury, tossed against a wall near the burial chamber by the necropolis guards after a robbery, lay a chest. Dried wood. It held the mummified bodies of two stillborn babies, perhaps Tutankhamun’s children, in resins, gums and oils.

Opening the tomb.

Stepping inside.

And up from the Valley of Kings, from Karnak and Luxor, winding with the Nile to Alexandria, a woman, ancient, wrists rouged and walking with legs numb in the grip of a gnawing, eating disease—

Nigel shook his head.

The steps were only markings. They led nowhere. He photographed them click whirr and moved on.

The odd humming, again. There was no air in here— how did he hear it? He coasted down a narrowing tube. The humming was stronger. Ahead loomed a sphere. It was not connected to the walls. Nigel touched it. It did not move. The humming increased. He stuck the adhesive webbing on the backs of his gloves to the sphere and used the leverage to swing himself around it. The space beyond yawned black. His torch licked into it and found nothing. The light simply faded away. Nothing was reflected back. The humming continued.

He moved to the far face of the sphere and peered into the abyss beyond. Nothing.

Abruptly the humming rose, shrieked, wailed—and stopped.

Nigel blinked, startled. Silence. Around him was a pocket of darkness. The sphere, when he turned to face it, seemed somehow inert, exhausted.

Nigel frowned. He jetted back to the sphere, worked his way around it and returned through the tunnel the way he had come, searching.

Four

Three hours later, when he had exhausted his film canisters and was beginning to tire, he headed back. The network of corridors was a simple but space-saving web of spherical shells, intricately intersected, and he had no difficulty finding his way out.

“I’m back in the cabin,” he said, sighing with a leaden fatigue.

“My God, where have you been, Nigel? Hours without a peep—I was almost ready to come in after you.”

“There was rather a lot to see.”

“Houston’s patched through—and mad as hell, too— so start talking.”

He took them through it all, describing the small rooms with elaborate netting that might have been sleeping quarters, the places like auditoriums, the ceilings with dancing lights, all the similarities he could find.

And the strangeness: spaces clogged with an infinitely layered green film that did not dissipate into the vacuum around it, but rippled as he passed by; rooms that seemed to change their dimensions as he watched; a place that gave off shrill vibrations he felt through his suit.

“Was there any illumination?” Dave said.

“Nothing I could see.”

“We picked up a strong radio pulse several hours ago,” Dave said. “We guessed you were trying to transmit from inside.”

“No,” Nigel said. “I couldn’t raise Len or anything else on suit radio, so I packed it in and simply looked about.”

“The signal wasn’t on our assigned frequencies,” Len said.

“We missed recording it—only lasted a second or so, and all our monitoring is in the telemetry bands,” Dave said.

“Never mind,” Len said. “Look, Nigel, it’s just abandoned in there? No signs of occupants?”

Nigel paused. There were things he wanted to tell them, things he had felt. But how could he convey them? Earthside wanted facts.

Nigel had a sudden image of himself blundering ham-fisted through those strange stretching corridors. The sphere. That humming. Had he accidentally triggered something?

“Nigel?”

“I think it’s been vacant for a long time. There are big open vaults inside, hundreds of meters on a side. Something must have been in them—maybe water or food—”

“Or engines? Fuel?” Len said.

“Could be. Whatever it was, it’s gone. If it was liquid it probably evaporated when this vent opened.”

“Yes,” Dave said, “that could be what made the cometary plume, the Flare Tail.”

“I think it was. That, and the atmosphere that blew out through the crack. There’s a lot of disorder inside— things ripped off the walls, strewn around, some gouges in the corridors that could have been made by things flying by. I picked up some of the smaller stuff lying around and brought it out.”

No one said anything for a while. Nigel put a hand to the cabin wall near him, feeling the wholeness of it. He looked out at a burnished rock shelf and sensed the problem before him. It was something he could hold in one palm and turn to watch its facets catch the light, much as he had once seen in his mind Icarus slipping silently toward the Earth at thirty kilometers a second, himself and Len arcing out to meet the tumbling mountain, administer the kick, race home. That had been a clean problem with easy solutions, but now it crumpled and fell away from him, replaced by another, darker vision that slowly formed, coming to clarity in his mind—

Just before he had entered the dust plume, while Len was still in view, Nigel had taken a sighting on prominent stars to fix his inertial gyros. It was a simple process, easily done in the allotted time. Before swinging the telescope away from the port, a point of light caught Nigel’s eye and he focused on it. It swelled into a disk, blue and white and flat, and he realized that he was looking at Earth. A featureless circle, complete and serene. Alone. A target, unnoticing. Its smooth, certain curve seemed more than a blotch on a star background; no, it was the center. A hole through which light was pouring from the other side of the universe. Complete. He had looked at it for a long moment.

Through scratchy static, Dave said, “Well, we can give you the time for another trip inside, Nigel. Haul out everything you can, take some more photos. Then you and Len can rendezvous and get clear of the Egg and—”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. We’re not going to set off the Egg, are we, Len?” “Nigel—” Dave started, then paused.

“I don’t know,” Len said. “What have you got in mind?”

“Don’t you see that this changes everything?”

“I wonder,” Len said distantly. “We’re trying to save millions of lives, Nigel. When Icarus hits it’s going to wipe out a big chunk of territory, throw dirt into the air and probably change the climate. I kind of—”

“But it won’t! Not now, anyway. Don’t you see, Icarus is hollow. It has only a fraction of the mass we thought it did. Sure, it’ll make a pretty big blast when it gets to India, but nothing like the disaster we thought.”

Len said, “Maybe you’ve got something there.”

“I can estimate the volume of rock left—”

“Nigel, I’ve been talking to some people here at Houston. We started reevaluating the collision dynamics and trajectory when you found the core was hollow. We’ll have the results pretty soon, but until we do I just want to talk to you about this.” Dave paused.

“Go ahead.”

“Even if the mass of Icarus is a tenth of what we thought, its energy of impact will still be thousands of times larger than Krakatoa. Think of the people in Bengal.”

“What’s left of them, you mean,” Len said. “The famine cycles have killed millions already, and they’ve been migrating out of the impact area for over a year now. Since the Indian government broke down nobody knows how many souls we’re talking about, Dave.”

“That’s right. But if you don’t care about them, Len, think about the dust that will be thrown into the upper atmosphere. That might bring on another Ice Age alone.”

Nigel finished chewing on a bar of food concentrate. He felt a curious floating tiredness, his body relaxed and weak. The stimulants he had taken left him alert, but they could not wash away the lassitude that seeped through his arms and legs.

“I don’t want to kill them, Dave,” Nigel said. “Stop being melodramatic. But we’ve got to admit that what we can learn from this relic may be worth some human life.”

“What do you propose, huh? What jackass scheme have you got?”

“That we stay here for a week, ten days, stripping the inside of whatever we can. You fly us additional air and water—use one of the unmanned intercepts that’s carrying a warhead right now. We’ll get clear of Icarus in time for the other interceptors to home on it, and we’ll use the Egg, too.”

“Sounds like it might work,” Len said, and Nigel felt a surge of anticipation. He was going to do it; they couldn’t turn him down.

“You know those interceptors aren’t reliable in that dust cloud—that’s why you guys are out there now. And the closer to Earth we hit Icarus, the less the net deflection before zero hour. If anything screws up at the last minute it might still smack into us.”

“The risk is worth it, Dave,” Len said.

“You’re really going along with him, Len? I had hoped—”

“We’ve got hopes, too,” Nigel said with sudden feeling. “Hopes that we might learn something here that will get the human race out of the mess it’s in. A new physical concept, some invention that might come out of this. The beings who built this were superior to us, Dave, even in size—the doorways and corridors are big, wide.”

“The risk, Nigel! If the Egg doesn’t do the job and—” “We’ve got to take it.”

“—we sent you men out there to do a job. Now you’re—”

Nigel wondered why Dave sounded so calm, even now. Perhaps they had told him to be deliberately cool and not provoke anything more. He wondered what his parents thought of this, of his taking a stand for exploration at the cost of people’s lives. Or whether they knew of it at all—NASA had probably stopped news coverage as soon as they knew something was wrong; it wasn’t just a heroic life-saving mission any more. He noticed his hands were trembling.

“Wait a minute, wait,” Dave said. “I didn’t mean to blow up that way, you guys. We all know you think you’re doing the right thing.” He paused amid the quiet burr of static, as though marshaling his words.

“Something new has come into the picture, though. I’ve just been handed the recomputed trajectory, allowing for the reduced Icarus mass. It makes a difference, a big one.”

“How’s that?” Nigel said.

“It was coming in pretty oblique to the top of the atmosphere already, you remember. With less mass, though, it’s going to skip a bit—not much, but enough. It’ll skip like a flat rock on a pond, and then drop. That takes it clear of the Indian subcontinent, and moves the impact point west.”

Nigel felt a thick weight of dread form in his stomach. “The ocean?”

“Yes. About two hundred miles out.”

The finality of it consumed him. An ocean strike was vastly worse. Instead of dissipating energy as it ripped through the mantle rock, Icarus would throw up from the sea floor a towering geyser of steam. The steam jet would fan out across the upper atmosphere, leaving a planet swathed in clouds, driving great storms over a sunless world. The tidal wave splashed up would smash every coastal city on Earth, and most of civilization would vanish in hours.

“They’re sure?” Len said.

“As certain as they can be,” Dave said, and something veiled in his voice brought Nigel back out of his contemplation.

“Cut off Houston for a minute, Len,” he said.

“Sure. There. What is it?”

“How do we know David isn’t lying?”

“Oh…I guess we don’t.”

“It seems a little funny. A big rock skipping on the top of the atmosphere—one of the astrophysicists mentioned it in a briefing, but he said for a mass as large as Icarus it couldn’t happen.”

“What about for a tenth of that mass?”

“I don’t know. And—damn it!—it’s crucial.”

“An ocean strike…If that happens, billions of people…”

“Right.”

“You know…I don’t think I want to…”

“I don’t either.” Nigel paused. And something flitted across his mind.

“Wait a second,” he said. “Something odd here. This rock is hollow, that makes it lighter.”

“Sure. Less mass.”

“But that will make it easier to fragment, too. The chances of having a big chunk of rock left around after we set off the Egg is less, too.”

“I guess so.”

“But why didn’t Dave mention that? It makes the odds better.”

A silence.

“He’s lying.”

“Damn right he is.” Saying the words made Nigel sure of it.

“So our chances are good.”

“Better than Dave says, anyway. They must be.”

“If the Egg goes off at all. We’ve hauled it all this way, maybe it’s crapped out by now. They told us there would be a seven percent probability of that even before we left, remember? The thing might not work at all, Nigel.”

“I’ll bet it’s going to, though.”

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much will you bet? The lives of the rest of the human race?”

“If I have to.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No. The odds are good. Dave is lying to us.”

“Why would he do that?”

Nigel frowned. Len’s doubts were beginning to reinforce his own. How sure was he? But he shook off the mood and said, “They don’t want any risk, Len. They want two heroes and a lot of lives saved and no worries. They want to just keep it simple.”

“And you’re after—”

“I want to know what this thing is. Who built it. How they propelled it, where they came from—”

“That’s a lot to expect of a bunch of artifacts.” “Maybe not. I saw some panels and consoles in there, I think. Could be the computerized records they used are still around.”

“If they used computers at all.”

“They must’ve. If we could get to some of the storage units—”

“You really think we could?”

Nigel shrugged. “Yes, I think so. I don’t know—nobody does. But if we can find out something new here, Len, it could pay off. New technology could get us out of the mess the world is in.”

“Like what?”

“A new power source. Maybe something with higher efficiency. That would be worth the chance.”

“Maybe.”

“Well …” Nigel felt his energy begin to drain away. “If you’re not with me, Len…”

There came a silence.

Ping went the capsule, stretching with the sun’s uneven heating. A metallic voice, asking tick ping its own questions. Could he really do it? No, absurd. Pointless. For what, after all? Why this comical risk? (Why leave England? Why go into space? Ping.) His parents had wondered that, he knew, though they’d never said it. Worried, even as they nudged him onward, where it would lead. And what was he going to look for in there? New wine, in this rocky old bottle? Or had humanity had enough wine already, thanks, hand held flat over the mouth of the glass, no. No, absurd. He was being impolite. All this stuff he’d done, all the work, really, you see, what was the point? Very well to search, but who pays the bill? Did he know—here his hands clenched, whitening—did he know what he was looking for? Step aside for a moment. Look at this matter. Was it rational? No. Absurd. No. He couldn’t. He spun from tick the voice but could not escape it. No. Ping. He spun… spun…

Nigel wet his lips and waited. The sun lay hot on the rock rim above. Its light reflected in the cabin and deepened the lines of strain in his face. He found he was holding his breath.

Then: “Nigel… look… don’t put me on the spot like this.”

Nigel sealed his suit again, automatically. He reached up and popped the hatch cover.

“I… I’ve got to go with Dave, buddy. This thing is too big for me to—”

“Okay,” Nigel said abruptly. “Okay, okay.”

“Look, I don’t want you to feel—”

“Yeah.” He reached up and pulled himself through the hatch, into the full glare. Looking up, his inner ear played a trick and he suddenly felt as though he was falling down a narrow canyon and into the sun, drawn by it. Automatically he clung to the hatch and twisted himself out, letting his equilibrium return with the sense of motion. He felt curiously calm.

“Nigel?”

He said nothing. Halfway along the module’s length was a flat brown box the size of a typewriter. He went for it hand over hand, legs free, his breath sounding abnormally loud. The clamps around the box opened easily and with one hand he swung it to his side and clipped it to his utility belt.

“Nigel? Dave wants to know—”

“I’m here. Wait a second.”

He found the extra food and air units to the aft of the module—emergency supplies, easily portable. He felt clumsy with all of them clinging to his waist, but if he moved carefully he should be able to carry them some distance without tiring. Sluggishly he made his way to the brownish-black rock below.

“Nigel?”

He checked his suit. Everything seemed all right. His shoulder itched around his suit yoke and he moved, trying to scratch.

The irony was inescapable: the blowout of gases through the vent made the cometary tail flare out from this ancient vessel, causing him and Len to come here and discover it—but that same eruption deflected Icarus enough to strike the Earth, and made necessary its destruction. Fate is a double-edged blade.

“Nigel?”

He started toward the vent and then stopped. Might as well finish it.

“Listen, Len—and be sure Dave hears this, too. I’ve got the arming circuits and the trigger. You can’t set off the Egg without them. I’m taking them into the vent with me.”

“Hey! Look—” Behind Len’s voice was a faint chorus of cries from Houston. Nigel went on.

“I’m going to hide them somewhere inside. Even if you follow me in, you won’t be able to find them.”

“Jesus! Nigel, you don’t under—”

“Shut up. I’m doing this for time, Len. Houston had better send us more air and supplies, because I’m going to use the full week of margin I think we’ve got. One week—to look for something worth saving out of this derelict. Maybe those computer banks, if there are any.”

“No, no, listen,” Len said, a thin edge of desperation in his voice. “You’re not just gambling with those Indians, man. Or even with everybody who lives near the seacoasts, if you even care about that. If the Egg doesn’t work and Houston can’t reach that rock with the unmanned warheads, and it hits the water—”

“Right.”

“There’ll be storms.”

“Right.”

“Enough to keep a shuttle from coming up to get us back into Earth orbit.”

“I don’t think they’d want to bother, anyway,” Nigel said wryly. “We won’t be too popular.”

“You won’t.”

“The search will be twice as effective if you come down here and help, Len.” Nigel smiled to himself. “You can gain us some time that way.”

“You son of a bitch!”

He began moving toward the vent again. “Better hurry up, Len. I won’t stick around out here for long to guide you in.”

“Shit! You used to be a nice guy, Nigel. Why are you acting like such a bastard now?”

“I never had a chance to be a bastard for something I believed in before,” he said, and kept moving.