by Ian Stewart
Carlesson crawled on. He hoped Kandinsky would be dead before the next survsat passed overhead. Should have slit the bastard's throat, stupid, stupid. But he knew he never could have done it, not in cold blood.
He could leave Kandinsky to be eaten by hyenas, though.
The mind is very strange.
Prudence had held high hopes for the return trip to lo, hut she hadn't reckoned with Pele.
For millions of years lo had been locked in a gravitational resonance with Jupiter's other Galilean satellites — those that, along with lo, Galileo had named the "Cosmian stars": Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. Held fast in its inflexible orbit, the moon was repeatedly squeezed like a pat of butter, molded by forces beyond comprehension. Friction produced heat, which escaped too slowly; trapped heat created a sea of molten sulfur and sulfur dioxide, overlaid by two miles of hardening crust, the top mile frozen solid. The crust — gray, white, and pallid yellow to the naked eye, but a spectacular splatter of mustard, white, orange, red, purple, and black when enhanced in a ship's viewscreens — was brittle, riddled with cracks, and fragile. Plumes of molten sulfur and dioxide gas forced their way through flaws and spewed into space in vast fountains, with romantic names like Loki, Marduk, Pele.
Surrounding lo's orbit was a plasma torus of ionized sulfur, half a million miles in diameter An electric current of five million amperes flowed perpetually between lo and Jupiter in a ring-shaped flux tube, at right angles to the moon's orbital plane. lo was wild, beautiful, harsh, inhospitable, deadly.
lo was ever-changing.
lo was treacherous.
lo was the home of huge, intricate, flowerlike sulfur formations, as bright as the moon's false-color images, worth millions to any wealthy rock collector They were found only on Mafuike Patera, a few degrees due west from Pele. At least, that's where Prudence had found them on her first visit.
Between her first and second visit, Pele had become plugged with a solidified mix of sulfur and silicates. The pressure had built, until it became intolerable. In an explosion that would have dwarfed a hundred Krakatoas, Pele had exploded, becoming Pele Caldera.
She had known of the disaster from the data that streamed from the ever-present monitor satellite. But she'd had an irrational hunch that the field of sulfur flowers had survived.
It had proved to he just that: an irrational hunch.
Thwarted, Tiglath-Pileser had cast off from lo in an improvised search for a substitute cargo. Europa had proved a dead loss. The region of Ganymede around Gilgamesh was littered with weird ice extrusions, hut Tiglath-Pileser lacked the necessary refrigeration facilities, and there was no way to tow them outside the vessel without damaging them. They had made a halfhearted search for giant tektites, hurled from neighboring moons by meteor impacts aeons past, but without success.
They moved on to Callisto, where once a lucky rockhound had dug up a dozen diamond-encrusted geodes, formed in a grazing impact with a fragment of carbonaceous asteroid.
Callisto is the least dense of the Galileans, and a large part of its hulk is water, some of it liquid — but water that lies buried beneath a thick layer of rock and ice. It is more heavily cratered than any other body in the solar system. At each destination they had left Tiglath-Pileser in fovian orbit, tracking the moon in its own path, and piloted an OWL down to the surface. Callisto's craters had made this particular descent especially tricky, and part of the landing gear had been damaged. Several days had gone by and nothing of value had been found. While Prudence was supervising the welding of a new strut for takeoff. Fat Sally had taken her teddy hear for a walk in a small meteorite crater nearby. A strange metallic glint had drawn her attention to a lump protruding from the crater wall. Slowly warming the ice around it, careful not to cause any damage, she had pulled the object free and popped it into a sample bag at her waist.
Later, back inside the OWL, a casual remark had caused her to remember what she had found, and she dug it out of the bag and placed it on the table for them all to look at. In the dim light outside the Orbit/World Lander she had thought it was some kind of mineral — metal, crystal, a chunk of mica. . .
But minerals aren't shaped like a wheel.
They had half dismissed the resemblance as coincidence, a freak of blind nature . . . until Prudence went prospecting in the crater and dug up six wheeled objects.
Over the next two days, they found another hundred and thirty, in a variety of forms. Some had been damaged by the meteorite impact, but most were intact. All of them had wheellike protrusions, usually either four, six, or eight of them, arranged in pairs except where they had been damaged or broken off
Fat Sally named the objects "wheelers," and the name stuck. They were not mineral specimens, but alien artifacts. Wheeled machines the size of a cat. Solid metal robots.
Wheeled robot vehicles, buried in the dead ice of crater-strewn Callisto. . .
It made no sense whatsoever.
Prudence paused to collect her thoughts, momentarily overwhelmed by memories.
"Aliens," said Charity in awe. "There were aliens on Callisto."
"Maybe. But there's no reason to suppose they lived there, and plenty of reasons not to. No atmosphere, bitterly cold—"
"Maybe the aliens didn't need an atmosphere. Maybe they liked it cold."
"Yeah, and maybe there are little green dancing men on Venus who happen to like singing in the sulfuric acid rain at eight hundred degrees Celsius. Yeah, sure, maybe. But I don't think so. I think somebody—something—came down in a landing craft, just like we did, and dumped some worn-out machinery."
"A hundred thousand years ago."
"Give or take a few thousand."
"But why!"
"Why was I there? Not for any reason that would make sense to an alien."
Charity nodded. Hunting minerals for money was hardly likely to be a universal feature of intelligent cultures. In fact, now that she came to think of it, money was a pretty weird thing in its own right. Its value depended solely on a shared delusion that because everybody else shared the same delusion, a few digits in a computer file were valuable.
"Did you find any traces of the aliens themselves? Apart from the wheelers, I mean?"
Prudence grimaced. "No. Didn't really expect to, but it would have been nice to find a six-legged skeleton frozen in the ice, or even the alien equivalent of a knife and fork. But all we ever found was wheelers. Dozens of them, just below the surface, frozen into the ice. Unless we got incredibly lucky and hit just the right spot, there must be thousands of the things."
"But why didn't anybody el—" Charity checked her mouth, which as usual had gotten ahead of her brain. "Sorry. Nobody else had had any reason to wander around melting the ice."
"No. But there have been mining expeditions, so I guess there are plenty of places on Callisto that don't have buried wheelers. We did get incredibly lucky."
Charity spread her cupped hands. "Of course you realize the value of this find to science. It will make your reputation."
Prudence shrugged. "I know that the value to rich collectors will make my fortune. Before we left, we took care to smooth away all traces of our excavations. It was real fun eliminating the marks we made on takeoff, I can tell you . . . Had to go get Tiggy, poise it just off the surface, use it like a blowtorch . . . So, sister dear, if the scientists want to get in on the act, they'll have to pay the going rate." She caught a glimpse of her sister's astonished face. "Chatty, I'm a businesswoman, not a benefactor to the human race. Don't look so prissy. I need the money to finance a real expedition, get back out there, find what else is buried."
"And sell that, too." There was no mistaking Charity's disapproval. "Damn it. Prudence, to think that I slave away in this godforsaken little station trying to save animals from extinction, and here you are turning the biggest scientific discovery of all time into some kind of auction. The media rights alone ought to satis—"
Prudence's mouth tightened. "Chatty, leave it. I know what I'm doing.
I've been working for this all my life, and it's been hard. Bloody hard." Her pulse quickened. "You don't know how hard it is in space."
"The neo-Zen monks in the Cuckoo's Nest spend all their lives in space, but they give their wealth to the world."
"Huh. The neo-Zen monks in the Cuckoo's Nest give a tiny part of their wealth to the world. They're the richest bunch of bastards in creation . . . heck, they paid me a whole cruiser just for translating a single clay tablet! Let them buy the wheelers and give them to the world. They can afford it!" Eyes locked. Prudence and Charity held the tableau for long seconds. Then Charity put one elbow on the table and leaned her head against her hand, closing her eyes in defeat.
Prudence sighed. "Okay, Charity, the scientists can have a few specimens cheap after I've made my first fifty million. Does that satisfy your sense of higher obligation?"
But Charity just turned her head away, and stared out of the v^ndow at the animal pens.
"Basically, what we're doing," Jonas explained to Cashew, "is following the observational protocol worked out by Cassini. He gave Varin and des Hayes their instructions in writing, so we know exactly what he wanted them to do." He paused. "Of course, they could only use the system once they got to Guadeloupe, whereas we can put it to work any time Jupiter's moons are visible. With modem opto-electronics we can take an obervation in a fraction of a second, so the motion of the ship doesn't fuzz everything out."
They sat on crates on the Tanzrouft's deck. Another crate had a flatfilm screen slapped on its side. The ship bobbed erratically on the Atlantic waves. A few clouds scudded over, but through the gaps the stars shone brightly.
Sighting along the wooden tube, Jonas aligned their reconstructed and technologically enhanced nineteen-foot telescope with Jupiter. Deep inside, sophisticated circuitry automatically switched into action.
Cashew peered at the image captured in silicon by the telescope's charge-coupled device, bled off electron by electron into micron-sized bins, marshaled into the computer like diminutive rolling stock, then reassembled one by one into an array of pixels. Jonas spoke to his 'node and one limb of Jupiter expanded, filling the screen. To its left was a small disk of light.
"Ganymede," he said. "Just off the limb. lo's behind, and the other two satellites are off to the other side. Now, to use Cassini's method we have to make six observations—three now, as Ganymede passes behind Jupiter, and three more later on when it emerges at the opposite edge and comes 'round to the front. And we do that whenever any of the Galilean satellites passes across either limb."
Cashew could understand the reasoning easily enough. "He wanted three observations of each event to increase the accuracy, right?"
"Yeah. His equipment wasn't as well made as ours, but it's a sensible precaution anyway. One when the satellite is its own diameter away from Jupiter's limb, one when it just touches, and one just as it disappears. Average the three and you've got a pretty precise estimate of the instant at which it first touches the planet's edge. At the other limb you do much the same thing, but it's difficult to spot the moment when the moon first emerges from behind Jupiter. Cassini advocated recording the time whenever you think you first see anything, and discarding the result as soon as you realize it was premature."
They watched in silence as the tiny dot drew nearer to its parent world. Jonas blew up the image until clear pixels were visible, counting how many were needed to traverse Ganymede's disk. Then he counted the number in the gap.
"Three more pixels to go," he said. "Woops, now its two." He clicked the timer button on his wristnode, in readiness for the real thing, and grinned. "First clear night after we arrive, I'll carry out Cassini's protocol for the final time, and ..." his voice trailed off meaningfully.
Cashew felt her stomach sinking. It looked awfully precise. She began to see just why Jonas had been so confident. And with four satellites to play with, perpetually cycling to and fro across Jupiter's limb . . .
A clock in the sky, accurate to a fraction of a second . . .
Maybe that bet wasn't as safe as she'd thought.
A discreet plaque at the entrance identified the building as the Berlin headquarters of the International Archaeological Society. The plaque was about the only thing that was discreet. The building was huge, with a neoclassical columned entrance and an atrium that rose twenty-three floors above ground level to a nest of rooftop balconies, bars, and restaurants. In a luxuriously appointed conference room on the floor below, an emergency seminar was getting under way.
"I've been in this business for most of my life." The face of Sir Charles Dunsmoore, president of the IAS, glowed red in the light of the holoprojector. Those who knew him could tell, by subliminal signs, that not all of the color derived from the holoslide stills that were ratcheting through the expensive nano-drive projector.
Sir Charles was distinctly peeved; you could tell from the way his fingers wrapped around his beloved laser pointer.
"During that time," he went on, "I've encountered just about every kind of lunatic nutcase you can imagine. And some"—he gave a short humorless laugh—"you can't. But this ..." For a moment emotion overcame him. "This is the stupidest thing that I have ever come across in my entire career. A madwoman with a criminal record arrives back on Earth with a sackful of rusty Tinkertoys, and the silly bi—the woman has the gall to claim they're alien artifacts! Aliens who make toy trucks, with wheels! It's absurd."
"We make toy trucks with wheels," observed a bespectacled woman in the third row.
"Yes, but we're not aliens, are we, Dolores?"
"Well, to us, no," she said. "But to them!"
Sir Charles shook his head in pity. "What them? It's an evident hoax."
From a comer of the room, half hidden by draping ivy that had escaped its intended container, came another objection. Montgomery Jay had made his fortune with robotic machinery for removing fiberglass roof insulation. His company was about to go bust when the glass had turned out to cause some obscure lung disease in laboratory mice, and suddenly everyone wanted their insulation removed overnight. A year later the observations were disproved, but in the interim Jay had become a multimillionaire. As such, he wasn't scared of Sir Charles, his influence, or that of his many contacts. "Charles: I don't know why you're so bothered about fake alien artifacts—this organization's mandate is to help preserve terrestrial antiquities for science." A thought struck him. "Hey—wasn't the Odingo girl one of your students, on that Sphinx project? It wouldn't do for you to be seen to be harboring a grudge—"
"Grudge? Monty, you know damned well that she nearly wrecked my career! Tried to claim the credit for discovering the true date of the Sphinx!" He glared at Jay as if daring him to contradict, then lowered his voice in an effort to sound calm. "She was registered as a student, sure—but she didn't have what it takes. Just one of those wannabes that get used for grunt labor." It still rankled, clearly, but he tried to conceal how strongly he felt, and almost succeeded. "Not that any of that past history is relevant to this aff—business. Fake antiquities fall firmly within our remit—on the Earth and off it. This ridiculous 'discovery' will attract huge amounts of publicity and it's our job to stop it in its tracks.
"Monty: are you advising me to ignore an obvious fraud merely because it is being perpetrated by somebody who once—briefly and not very competently—worked for me?"
Jay found it all a bit distasteful, and he saw no reason to make waves over a triviality "Charles, I'm sure that your motives are as pure as a newly formed snowdrift and as dispassionate as the Day of Judgment—but if you're going to go over the top, you'd best get some facts straight, otherwise the vidi-vids will crucify you. Firstly there is no hoax, because there has not yet been any official announcement. All we have to go on is rumors."
"Not rumors. Intelligence. And there's going to be a hoax," said Sir Charles firmly. "I am a scientist, and I refuse to condone scientific fraud. We must nip this nonsense in the bud he-fore it becomes public knowledge, not after."
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"Maybe," said Jay, who had been discreetly consulting his 'node. "The fact is that Prudence Odingo does not have, and never has had, a criminal record. She was cleared of all charges in the affair of 2204—"
"Only because the judge was prejudiced," Sir Charles pointed out with mild indignation. "Odingo got off on a technicality." Jay noticed that Charles had not required Xnet assistance to recall the incident, but did not remark on it.
Dolores Johnston, who knew all the scandals by heart, hid a grin behind her hand. On the technicality that she was innocent, yeah. But there was no advantage in pointing anything out to Sir Charles if he didn't want to hear it, and she had long ago learned to keep quiet. After all, she had six ravenous Afghan hounds to feed, and unlike Jay, she needed to keep her job in order to feed them. And herself, for that matter. Instead, she said, "I think Monty's got a point, Sir Charles. What we need is facts. All we have right now is a piece of limited-circulation Xjunk that wasn't intended to come to IAS anyway."
"It came to us," said Sir Charles, "because somebody had the imagination to take out a subscription, under an assumed name, to every bulletin board likely to be accessed by dealers in pirated artifacts. Now, who might that person have been? Anyone recall?"
Several of them nodded. Sometimes Sir Charles's ideas really were bright.
"Which page was it on?" asked Jay "Collectors' Items, something like that? That's a public page, Charles. It's just not very popular."
Jalid Mbaruk, the meeting's secretary, consulted his wristnode. "Rare Collectibles. It's not a page, Monty, it's a limited-access billboard. Subscribers only, and the price is high."
Sir Charles treated them to a predatory smile. "We'll put a team on the case. I want everything we can dig up about Odingo—her past, her family, her career, her legal record, what color she likes to wear in bed, if anyth—whatever. We also want to search the criminal records archives to find out whether she has skeletons in the closet—expired and erased cautions, for example. Also get on drug enforcement to see if she's ever shown up on the narcnode—"