Resurgence

CHAPTER TEN A useless diversion?

Hans Rebka deliberately steered clear of Darya Lang during the day before departure. If she thought that he was angry because he would not be in charge of the expedition on Iceworld, that couldn’t be helped. Two years ago she and Hans had been so close that she could sweet talk him into revealing almost anything. In some ways he’d like to think that was still true, but he didn’t want her knowing his current intentions. He wasn’t sure he understood them himself.

To avoid Darya, he sought out and spent as much time as possible with the two survival team members assigned to his group. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner might not know the value of understanding your team members before you got into trouble, but Hans had learned it in a score of dangerous situations.

At Hans’s suggestion, the three of them took a ride outside the Pride of Orion in one of the ship’s pinnaces. There he watched with amazement as the main vessel reconfigured itself to permit two smaller vessels to be spun off from the main body. The process resembled the reproduction of some great animal, as a new ship grew out of and finally separated from the mass of the old. It occurred to Rebka that the analogy might be more than that. Could it be that the Pride of Orion was a mixture of biological and inorganic components? If so, the technology of Fourth Alliance worlds had advanced far beyond what that group was willing to admit to the poorer clades. It also offered the promise of flexible structure for the sub-ship they would be using.

The casual attitude of Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner convinced Hans that what they were seeing was nothing new to them. They treated Rebka himself as though he were the odd and interesting phenomenon.

“Didn’t you have medical treatments and curative drugs available when you were a child?” Lara Quistner asked. “If we’d had anything as bad as your condition, we would have been treated before we were old enough to remember.”

Until he encountered the fortunate inhabitants of the rich planets of the spiral arm, Hans Rebka had not realized that he had a condition. A large head and a small frame, on his birth world of Teufel where a shortage of food and essential trace elements was taken for granted, had been the rule rather than the exception. He considered explaining this to Lara Quistner and Ben Blesh, then decided it would be a waste of time. He could quote what residents of the Phemus Circle said about his home world—"What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?"—but he suspected that the other two would still have no idea what he was talking about.

He contented himself with a shrug, and ended the conversation with, “Where I grew up, I was considered normal—and pretty lucky.”

The new ship was full-sized now, and taking final shape before his eyes. Hans inspected it from bow to stern. Fully equipped for interstellar or interplanetary travel it might be, but no one would call it large. Four people would be a tight fit—even if they all got on with each other, which Hans knew would not be the case once they were on the way.

It was time for a change, to a subject that might reveal more of his companions’ personalities. He said, “We’re going to be flying in a vessel that never flew before. We ought to have some kind of naming ceremony. Any thoughts as to what we should call it?”

Lara Quistner glanced at her companion but said nothing. Fair enough. Ben was the senior member. Regardless of her individual competence, she was someone who would respect authority and a chain of command.

After a few moments, Ben Blesh said, “I agree that the ship should have a name. But don’t you think that Professor Lang ought to have a voice in what we call it? I certainly do.”

Blesh was pointing out, fairly directly, that he would not go along with any suggestion made by Hans. Maybe he was looking for an argument, and given what Hans had in mind once they were on the way, argument with Ben Blesh was almost certain. Until that time, however, it was best to avoid confrontation.

Hans said mildly, “Oh, I wasn’t by any means trying to exclude Professor Lang. We certainly wouldn’t decide anything until she gave her opinion. I was just asking your preliminary thoughts.”

“In that case, what about Savior as a good name?”

Ben Blesh’s suggestion came without any pause for thought, and the proposed name told Hans a lot about the speaker. Blesh must have a greatly inflated idea of what a small exploration team to Iceworld might accomplish. They were seeking facts, and only facts. Savior? Saving anything more than themselves and whatever they might discover was too grandiose an ambition. If Lara Quistner deferred to Blesh on the basis of his seniority, and if he was consistently unrealistic, difficulties for the group were guaranteed. Julian Graves had not helped. He had put Hans in a position where after they reached Iceworld he could offer advice until he ran out of breath, but there seemed little chance that Blesh would take any notice.

Well, it would not be the first time that Hans had been forced to lead from behind. He said, “Savior? Yes, that has a lot to recommend it. We’ll see what Darya Lang thinks.”

He had a good idea of her response, even if they did not. She would remain neutral. Unless it involved the Builders, Darya went along with most things. Unfortunately, that might not include what Hans had in mind as soon as they were on their way.

He stared at the new ship, fully formed and gleaming. He wanted to make sure it contained a few extra features. Apart from that, he would smile and lie low. There would be plenty of time for feuding after they left. And plenty of reason to expect that feuding would occur.

“Councilor Graves was quite specific. Call him if you wish, and confirm his intentions. But I know he said that until this ship touches down on Iceworld, I make the decisions.”

“And I know he never had anything like this in mind.” Ben Blesh was standing behind Hans, who sat at the ship’s controls.

Rebka did not look around. He could hear the anger in the other man’s voice. “Ben, I’m not sure that I understand your objection. We will still arrive at Iceworld in a few days. I’m simply trying to add to the store of information that we will have when we get there.”

“By a pointless diversion to examine a dead planet? I don’t see how that tells us a thing. If I’m wrong, explain to me what I’m missing.”

“I can’t guarantee that you are missing anything. All I know is that the world we are heading for sits smack in the middle of the life zone for a normal main sequence star with mass equal to the one at the center of this system. There’s no life on the surface of the planet at the moment, it’s far too cold. My question is, was life there once? Might there even have been intelligence, before the sun dimmed and every living being was condemned to freeze to death?”

The members of the survival team were emerging as distinct personalities. Lara Quistner might be good at her job, but she was certainly not a controlling type. She would go along with what her boss, and maybe anyone else, suggested. Ben Blesh was not only interested in being that boss, he made snap judgments and didn’t like anyone to disagree with him. Hans Rebka’s announcement that they would visit a different planet first, made when after a full day of powered flight Iceworld was clearly no closer, had provoked loud and instant disagreement from Blesh. Darya Lang had come down on Hans Rebka’s side. Her support was unexpected, but it was no more than reasonable—Hans’s actions had saved her skin often enough to earn her respect.

Behind Rebka, Ben Blesh said, “I’m not going to let this stand. I intend to find out what Julian Graves has to say. He’ll put an end to the nonsense.”

Hans, his attention on the planet growing in size on the display, was inclined to agree. Graves would put an end to it—when he erred, it was on the side of caution. Given any small chance that a visit to another planet would increase the odds of survival on Iceworld, the Ethical Council member would be all for it.

As for Ben Blesh, his disappearance to use the ship’s communications equipment at the very time when a new world was coming into view was, in Hans Rebka’s opinion, one more piece of evidence that he was dealing with a fool. What else could you call a man who was more interested in having his authority confirmed than in increasing his chances of living? And what did that say about the general selection of survival team members? It was a pity that Lara Quistner and the others could not have been dropped off on Teufel for a few weeks during training. One encounter with the Remouleur, Teufel’s terrible dawn wind, would be worth a year of lectures from their “famous"—according to Graves—trainer, Arabella Lund.

The time for philosophical speculations on the training of survival teams was past. Hans concentrated on the planet ahead. It was about fourteen thousand kilometers in diameter, which together with the readings of the mass detectors suggested a world possessing a metallic core beneath rocky outer layers. The substantial magnetic field confirmed that idea. Surface gravity was about fifteen percent more than standard, a bit high but well within the tolerable range. Surface temperature was another matter. There was an atmosphere, and it contained oxygen as well as nitrogen and argon. But the spectra revealed no hint of water vapor or carbon dioxide.

Detailed maps of what lay below that frigid atmosphere would have to wait until they were in a parking orbit. However, the high albedo response to a remote laser probe, together with glints of specular reflection, suggested extensive ice cover—perhaps over the whole planet. If that implied worldwide glaciation, high-resolution radar measurements would be needed to probe its depth and learn what land or former oceans lay beneath.

Those measurements could only be done on the surface, and that in turn implied their journey to Iceworld would be delayed by at least two extra days. Before the group left the Pride of Orion, Hans had suspected something like this might be necessary. With a warm world you could take high-resolution images from orbit. But if a world froze over and you wanted to know what it had been like before the freeze, you had to make measurements down on the ground. Also, Hans himself needed to visit the surface, no matter what the orbital measurements showed. You could never get a gut feel for a world from orbit.

It was useless to try to explain this to the others. He stared at the frosted ball of the planet, enhanced in the ship’s display to gleam faintly with reflected starlight. With luck, maybe Darya and the rest would conclude for themselves the need for a trip all the way down.

The trouble was, the Savior’s instruments were almost too good. They represented the best technology available to the Fourth Alliance, and from an orbital altitude of no more than two hundred kilometers the imaging sensors and radar altimeters left little to the imagination.

“Descend to the surface, to learn what?” Ben Blesh was watching on the display a revealing picture. It showed a succession of hills and valleys, all coated with a layer of blinding white. “It’s obvious what happened down there. The whole globe shows peaks and rifts and flat ocean surfaces, which the synthetic aperture radar confirms. There was no worldwide glaciation—no time for that. It’s clear that when the temperature dropped, all the water vapor and carbon dioxide precipitated out. You’d get one fall of water-snow and solid carbon dioxide. After that nothing would change. The air that remains still has some oxygen as well as nitrogen and argon, so things happened fast. There’s no doubt about the sequence of events. What can we possibly gain by going down to the surface?”

He was asking a question that had occurred to Hans long ago. Before they achieved parking orbit, he had fired off a question to the Pride of Orion. Suppose that the internal energy source of a main sequence star were somehow turned off in a short time span (weeks or months). How long would it take to cool down by normal radiative cooling? I’m looking for an order of magnitude result: are we talking years, centuries, millennia, or millions of years?

The first reply from Julian Graves was disappointing. I have consulted E.C. Tally, who is making his own calculations supplemented by the ship’s astrophysics library. Because the answer to your question depends on several other unknowns, in particular the star’s stage of progression along the main sequence, and the amount of gravitational potential energy contributed by the star’s own shrinkage during cooling, Tally is reluctant to provide a firm answer. He is, however, willing to provide a range of possibilities.

Hans could imagine. The embodied computer would hum and mutter and hedge his bets until you were ready to scream. Luckily it was Julian Graves who had to sit and listen, rather than Hans himself. Did that mean E.C. Tally was still aboard the Pride of Orion? He should have been on his way days ago.

Graves’s second answer was a bit better. At an absolute minimum, with limiting values of all variables, E.C. Tally indicates that radiative cooling would require twenty thousand years. A more likely value, including the gravitational energy provided by stellar shrinkage, would be between eight and eighteen million years. Any shorter value than twenty thousand years would prove that some external agent was employed to expedite cooling. One observational indicator is the ice fracture patterns, if any, on the planet’s surface. They will tell you if the cooling was rapid or slow. Here are the characteristic appearances associated with particular rates of cooling.

Hans examined the images sent from E.C. Tally, and then those of the surface of the world that they were approaching. Ben Blesh’s comment was correct. There were visible cracks and fissures, but all were coated with a surface of white. The fusion process in the central star had not simply ceased, to be followed by a slow decline in stellar temperature. The sun had gone out, and its surface had cooled from around seven thousand degrees to a few hundred degrees in a very short period—a few decades, or even a few hours.

What would that mean to any unfortunate creatures living on worlds circling the star? One final, rapid sunset, followed by endless night. The land animals would die off first, as rock and soil and sand lost heat in less than a day to the cold of space. Life would linger longest in the oceans, heat sinks protected by their own thermal inertia and by thickening shields of ice. It was not impossible that some living organisms would survive there even now, drawing chemical energy from hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean floor. But the experience of every known world said that intelligence had no chance of evolving in such locations.

“Well? Did you hear me? What can we possibly gain by going all the way down to the surface?”

Ben Blesh’s repeated question brought Hans out of his reverie. He should be asking himself the same thing, when the instruments were able to tell them almost everything.

What was happening to him? A troubleshooter who indulged in the luxury of idle introspection was heading for real trouble.

“If I could tell you what we would learn, Ben, we wouldn’t need to go down. I’m convinced that this world has something to tell us, but it won’t speak to us while we’re in orbit.”

His answer sounded weak, and he knew it. He meant that the world would not speak to him until he set foot on the surface. There was a question to be answered of paramount importance, but it would not form itself clearly within his brain. What he had given Blesh was the instinctive reply of a ground hog, someone who needed to feel a planet’s ambience vibrating in his bones.

It might be, of course, that instinct was wrong.

Until the ship touches down on Iceworld, I make the decisions.

Hans clung to that thought as the shuttle plunged into the outer edges of the atmosphere. He couldn’t wait for the high-acceleration phase of descent, when for a few blessed minutes the others would be too weighed down in their seats to complain.

It had been a tough half day, with even Darya turned against him. “Hans, you haven’t given us any real idea what you hope to learn. Why bother with this?”

She was saying exactly what Ben Blesh had said. Everyone had asked the same question in a dozen different ways. “Because I’m right,” wouldn’t do for an answer. The entry from orbit came as a positive relief.

Air was beginning to whistle and scream past the ship, while the gee forces within rose steadily. Hans had at his fingertips ample drive power to make their entry easier. One touch, and the autopilot would take over. They would ride easy and be feathered in to a gentle landing.

He decided to do it the hard way. It was time to see if the “survival team” specialists were as tough and well prepared as they imagined.

Apparently they were.

Hans was rustier than he had realized. There was never a moment of danger since the autopilot would take over in an emergency, but the landing was nothing to boast about. He had picked the final site with great care after inspection of hundreds of images, without discussing it with the others. Now he was within visual range, coming down too fast and overshooting. He corrected, but at a price. During the final two thousand meters the deceleration was enough to weld Hans to his seat.

As the ship whomped down onto the icy surface, he felt his innards drive down into the bowl of his pelvis. Darya, sitting next to him, gasped in surprise or pain. It should have taken a minute or two before anyone was ready to move but while the ship was still skidding forward across the ice, Lara Quistner and Ben Blesh released their harnesses and stood up.

Blesh said, quite casually, “Hull integrity maintained. Check monitors and confirm exit station.”

“Check.” Lara Quistner was already by the main hatch and staring outside. “Clean landing and no external obstacles. All clear for exit.”

Not a word from either of them about a botched landing, or why a manual landing had been performed. Hans moved his head from side to side—his cervical vertebrae would never be the same again—and struggled out of his harness. Next to him, Darya said feebly, “Check monitors? To see what? Before we left orbit you told us you were sure that the surface of this world was too cold for anything to survive.”

“I did, and it is.”

Even so, Blesh and Quistner were right. On a new planet you took nothing for granted. Darya was sprawled in her chair, breathing harshly. He made the effort and rose to his feet. He felt awkward and lumbering. Higher gravity, or poor physical condition? Maybe three weeks chained to an iron chair produced permanent effects. Whatever the reason, the heavy thermal suit needed to venture out onto the surface of this world would make him feel worse. The two survival specialists were slipping into theirs with an ease and efficiency that Hans would never match.

“No exit for anyone until all the ship’s sensors report in.” His voice sounded hoarse and strained.

“Of course not.” Ben’s perky tone, rather than his words, added what do you think we are? “There’s plenty of other things to do before we’re ready to go outside. Lara?”

Fully suited, she moved again to the hatch and stared out. “I’m turning on external lights so we can add visuals to the sensor reports. When we go outside we can confirm the surface composition using chemical and physical tests.”

“That’s good, but it’s not just our immediate surroundings that I’m interested in.” Hans was still climbing into his own thermal suit, and making hard work of it. “We’ll be heading for a place about four kilometers away, directly ahead of the ship. Does the surface seem as smooth as it did from orbit?”

“Smooth, and firm enough to support our weight.” Lara Quistner was manipulating an external probe. “We can walk there if we want to.”

“Quite feasible, from the look of it.” Ben Blesh was crouched at a bank of instruments duplicating those at the pilot’s console. “It’s level for a couple of kilometers, until it rises into some kind of low hills. It’s too cold for sleds, so if we don’t walk we’ll need a vehicle with wheels. The ship is provided with at least two, for all-purpose surface work. Want me to go ahead and give the instructions to prepare one?”

“Not just yet.” Hans felt an irrational irritation. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner were fast, efficient, cautious, cooperative, and doing everything right. Wasn’t that just what you hoped for from a survival team?

It was. Unfortunately, their high-quality performance had another implication: Hans and Darya were not going to be particularly useful.

But then, before that thought was complete, Hans understood why he had come to this world. His instincts were right after all. He hadn’t seen anything, but he knew what they were going to find.

It was all psychological, of course, but suddenly his bones didn’t ache and he felt twenty percent lighter.

“We take a vehicle,” he said. “Get one ready, Ben—and make sure that it comes equipped with a power digger.”