The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  “A peace offering from Stecker.” Glengarth poured it from the syncafe machine on the end of his desk. “His man Hinch had smuggled a truckload of gourmet goodies aboard even before they turned up.”

  “A double whammy!” Andersen muttered. “Stecker and Roak.”

  “Or triple, if you want to count Hinch.”

  “Maybe we should.” Andersen frowned. “I don’t know him, but Roak’s still in the brig. I’ve known him, or thought I did, since he came to the site to make his first inspection. We’ve played chess. He’s sharp enough to best me more often than not. He’s supposed to be an engineering jack-of-all-trades. I thought we might use him on the search team, but when I went by …”

  He shrugged.

  “A mental wreck, useless to himself or anybody else.”

  “You can imagine the jolt, if he’s as innocent as he says he is. Expecting to spend his days back on Earth.” Glengarth scowled. “The hard fact is that some bastard did try to kill us.”

  “Maybe the Mexican.” Andersen shook his head. “Though now I hate to think so.”

  “Mondragon?” Glengarth’s eyebrows lifted. “He’s been working with you?”

  “A better man than Roak. Two dogs of very different colors.” Wryly, Andersen grinned. “In spite of what he says about his origins, Carlos is a very remarkable man. You wouldn’t guess it from his English, but I believe he has a better native brain than Roak. Along with a natural affinity for computers—almost as if he thinks in binary digits.”

  “How’d he get on your search team?”

  “Thanks to Kellick and Washburn. They booked both prisoners into the brig, watched Roak go to pieces and Mondragon happy to be on his way to the stars. They’ve got no actual evidence that Mondragon’s a Fairshare agent, or anything but what he says he is. He begged to help with any sort of work. They let him inventory the electronic devices she was holding. A lot of them had been disabled by launch effects. He fixed them. Recovered lost files in her computer. When Washburn heard of our own problems with the search computers, she sent him up to see me. He’s made himself useful.”

  “A man that smart could tell a good lie.”

  “He says he likes computers because they never lie.” Thoughtfully, Glengarth rubbed the dark stubble on his chin. “So you think Roak’s the culprit.”

  “No proof.” Andersen shrugged. “Carlos did sneak aboard. He admits he did it with help from the Fairshare pickets. He had a Fairshare newsletter in his pocket. He says it was in the coveralls they gave him. Washburn likes him. I like him. I’d rather think he’s just the victim of his own mala suerte.

  “As for Roak …” Frowning, he was silent for a moment. “Washburn says he came unglued when he found himself trapped on the ship. He admits nothing. Does nothing except walk the deck or sprawl on his berth. Wouldn’t eat the first day out. Washburn doesn’t trust him.”

  The call for Rima woke Kip. He agreed to stay in the cabin with Day. Rima took the elevator to the control deck and came out into blinding midnight.

  “Rima!” Glengarth called warmly out of the darkness. “You know Cruzet and Andersen? This is Carlos Mondragon.”

  In a moment she was able to make out the little group standing in silhouette against the blaze of stars across the arching holoscreens.

  “Señora Virili!” She recognized the stowaway’s accent. “I know your son. A child of great promise.”

  Kip’s sudden friendship with him was a festering splinter, but she had to murmur, “Hello.”

  “I called the other team leaders.” Glengarth turned soberly from the dimly glowing instruments. “Lieutenant Washburn’s stuck at the security desk. Dr. Senn’s still on his radar search. Mr. Hinch says Captain Stecker is sleeping, not to be disturbed.”

  “Just as well,” Andersen murmured.

  “The search?” she asked. “Is there anywhere to land?”

  “We were groping in the dark.” Andersen’s voice rang as if amplified by the dome. She thought he would sing bass. “But we have located a planet. Tony’ll tell you how.”

  “We deployed a reference satellite.” Cruzet’s high, precise tones reflected no emotion except perhaps an iron control. “Tracking it, we were able to detect a gravitational anomaly. The same effect that enabled Adams and Leverrier to discover Neptune. Thanks are due, I might say, to Carlos at the computer.”

  With a nod for Mondragon, he pointed at a dull red disk against the field of stars.

  “A radar image. The color’s false, of course. The face toward us is apparently ice. Actual color probably white or gray, if we had light to see it. We came out of quantum mode already in motion almost directly toward it—and the dwarf it orbits—at seven kilometers a second.”

  She asked Glengarth, “Can we land?”

  “Perhaps.” Hesitant, he looked at Cruzet and Andersen. “That’s what we must consider. At once.”

  “Nothing I like.” Andersen made a mock shiver. “It would be cold. Close to absolute zero.”

  “Certainly not promising.” Cruzet nodded. “Though I think it may once have been rather like Earth. Just slightly more massive, it has mountain chains that seem to show early tectonic activity. The orbit’s almost circular, only nine million kilometers out from the dwarf. It rotates in tidal lock. Same face always toward the star. That’s the face away from us.”

  He gestured at the disk.

  “I take the ice as evidence that it once had seas. And, of course, an atmosphere. All lost or frozen out since the star died ages ago.”

  “The other hemisphere?” she asked. “Would it be warmer?”

  “Once, maybe. Not today.”

  “When we get a better look—”

  “By whose authority?” Hinch’s raucous squawk startled her. He had come out of the elevator and stopped close behind her, a gaunt gray ghost blinking blindly into the dimness though thick-lensed glasses. “Captain Stecker must be consulted.”

  “You said he was sleeping.” Glengarth shrugged and turned back to the others. “We have to act at once, because we came out of quantum mode with such a high velocity. Braking into an approach orbit will take a lot of fuel. I believe we can get down safe, though with too little left for takeoff if we don’t like the place. I want you to realize that we’d be there to stay—”

  “Not so fast!” Hinch snarled. “Hold everything till the captain awakes.”

  Seeming not to hear him, Glengarth gestured at Cruzet.

  “Before we decide, there’s something else.”

  “Nothing we expected.” Cruzet’s thin sharp voice reflected none of the anxious tension that had seized her. “The planet was certainly warmer once. Life may have been possible, but that was long ago. A star takes time to cool. It must have stopped emitting any significant radiation a billion years ago. We’d assumed that it was dead.

  “Till Andy got this.”

  Andersen touched the console behind him. She watched that dim red globe swell to fill its window in the simulated sky. A faint green dot appeared on the center of the great ice cap and grew to outline a wide green blot that spread across the ice from a mountain ridge.

  “He’d been with Mark Senn on the search telescope. He can tell you—”

  “What the bleedin’ hell?” Standing close beside her, Hinch yelped in dismay. “What’s that?”

  “You tell us.” Andersen shrugged and turned again to the others. “What you see is our digital record of something the radar sweep picked up. False color again, now to show elevation differences. A cluster of objects that stand two or three kilometers tall above the level of the ice. They look as massive as mountain peaks. Some of them have sharply defined geometric shapes. Senn thinks they have to be artificial.”

  Rima’s breath had stopped. She heard a fan whirring faintly, and a muttered obscenity from Hinch.

  “Constructed by intelligence. That’s what he believes.” Andersen had paused to stare at that green-glowing enigma, and she felt his awe. “There’s something on the ice, maybe made of
ice, larger than anything artificial ought to be. A city? A fortress? What else can you imagine?”

  “Or can it be natural?” She tried to shake off her dread. “We don’t know the geology, or how the planet froze. Glaciers do form hummocks and split into crevasses. Icebergs can be enormous.”

  “Rima, there’s something else.” Glengarth was still craning at the outlined images. “Evidence of something, I don’t know what. Listen to Andy.”

  “I was on the light telescope while Senn ran the radar scan,” Andersen said. “Not that I could actually see the planet, only its shadow on the stars it occluded. I wasn’t really expecting to make out anything more. Not till I saw a flashing light almost at the center of that radar pattern.”

  She heard Hinch gasp as if from a blow.

  “Only a flicker, really. Off and on. And nearly too faint to see—the planet’s still half a million kilometers away. I called Tony.”

  “Only lightning, I tried to imagine.” Cruzet’s narrow shoulders twitched as if in apology for all he couldn’t explain. “But lightning shouldn’t happen on an airless planet so close to zero Kelvin. The colors were another riddle. Red at first, shimmering into violet before it went out. A moment of darkness, and then it came again. It repeated every time the search beam passed, as if something had taken it for a signal and tried to answer.”

  “Something?” she echoed. “What?”

  “Ice gods?” Andersen seemed to mock her amazement, or perhaps his own uncertainty. “Ice giants? What sort of creatures would you expect to find there on the ice? What could possibly survive there, where only the stars have shone for geologic ages?”

  “Are you— Are you sure?”

  Her whisper died. They all stared in silence at that enigma on the simulated stars. Hinch moved abruptly, retreating toward the elevator.

  “I wouldn’t trust my own senses.” She heard Cruzet’s quiet comment. “Neither would Andy or Senn. Mr. Mondragon also had a look. We all agree on what we seemed to see. Something none of us is prepared to explain.”

  “If a landing can be made, I wish to volunteer.” The stowaway’s voice was so soft she barely heard him. “I think we must discover what signals us from the ice.”

  “We ought to know more than we do,” Andersen added, “before we think of any landing.”

  “A hard option.” Glengarth turned to scan their faces. “If we don’t put down, our high velocity will take us past the planet and close around the dwarf. The gravity assist will sling us away at twice our present velocity. Sling us out of the gravity well.”

  “With no second chance,” Cruzet added. “We land now or never.”

  “If we don’t …” Rima shivered, staring into the empty midnight sky. “What then?”

  “We’ve found no hint of any other planetary object. I suppose we’d drift—”

  “Drift?” A harsh snort from Hinch. “Drift till our food’s used up? Till we’re eating each other? Till the last man’s gone?”

  “I hope not,” Glengarth murmured. “We’re surely too civilized for that.”

  “Think again.” Hinch glared from the elevator door. “I’m going down to wake the captain.”

  “If you can,” Glengarth called. “And let him read the Mission Covenant, a document he should have signed before he came aboard. He’ll find he had a change of status when we left quantum mode. Our old laws and rules are gone forever. We’re now a new democracy, governing ourselves. I doubt that he ever took the oath, but that’s the situation.”

  Hinch stood gaping, shaking a gnarly fist.

  “Idiots!” he gasped. “A ship of howling idiots if they think the captain gives a bleedin’ damn for a scrap of paper he never saw!”

  The elevator swallowed him.

  “We are civilized,” Glengarth murmured when he was gone. “Most of us. I hope.”

  “And lucky, really,” Andersen said. “Lucky to get out of wave mode alive, with the ship intact and a planet to explore. Even that one.”

  Wryly, he nodded at the radar image.

  “It doesn’t look friendly.” Silent for a moment, Rima shrugged and forced a fleeting smile. “But we are equipped to terraform any world we find. We can hope to find soil under the ice, or at least rock we can grind into soil. More than just water, the ice will give us hydrogen for fusion power. After all, we were never promised paradise.”

  “Seguro que sí!” Carlos grinned more widely. “I saw los topos de hierro in the hold. The great machines that dig.”

  She couldn’t help casting a thoughtful glance at him.

  Hinch didn’t return to the dome. When a steward brought a breakfast tray to Stecker’s cabin, he found the two shouting at each other over a table littered with empty glasses and dirty dishes. They sat silently glowering while he swept up broken dishes and the fragments of a shattered whisky bottle. Leaving the cabin, he heard Hinch cursing the captain for dragging him off Earth to die in a frozen hellhole.

  Kip was awake when Rima returned to their cabin. He listened very quietly to what she said about the meeting in the dome, and asked what ice gods would be like.

  “Not gods, really,” she said. “Dr. Andersen was only using a Norse myth to imply that he had no idea what could be flashing a signal from the ice—if that could really be a signal. There never were any actual ice gods.”

  “Yet they did see something real,” he insisted. “Something big, if the towers in the city are two kilometers tall. What built them, if the ice gods didn’t?”

  “We don’t know what it is.” She frowned and looked past him, speaking half to herself. “I never imagined we’d wind up anywhere like this. We’ve no idea what to expect.”

  “Won’t we meet the giants?” Kip was very serious. “If they made that rainbow flash to answer our search beam, it must have been some kind of signal. What did they mean to tell us?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Mom, are you afraid?”

  “We’re worried.” She nodded, her voice grave and slow. “Mr. Glengarth and all of us. I think we have to land, but it should be on the other face of the planet, as far as we can get from that flash on the ice. If something really saw us, it might be better if they never know we’ve landed. Or not, at least, till we can find out what they are. Anyhow, you’d better forget Andy’s ice gods and go back to sleep.”

  He lay silent for a time.

  “Mom?” his voice came suddenly. “Are you sorry? Sorry we came?”

  She thought she had to be honest.

  “I suppose I should be,” she said. “Because of you and Day.”

  “Don’t,” he told her. “I’m glad we’re here. We’re like the Legion and Captain Cometeer. I want to find out what the ice gods are.”

  Soon she heard his regular breathing, but she lay awake a longtime, trying to imagine the future for him and Day. On a world of dead ice and naked stone, under a sky where no sun had shone for endless ages. To be here forever. To build a home for them. To plant the human seed. Could that happen? Longing for some small grain of Kip’s reckless confidence, she finally slept.

  The children’s voices woke her. Day was molding a tiny Me Me with clay they had brought from the rec room. Kip was busy with his Game Box.

  “Mom,” he called to her brightly, “I had a dream that ought to cheer you up. I was on a great adventure with my Legion crew beyond the Gate. We landed the Starhawk on the ice cap and met the ice gods. Only like you said they weren’t gods at all, but monsters with the shape of thunderclouds. They fought us with ice lightning and hail.

  “But we beat them! Because heat kills them. Their hailstones all melted before they could hurt us. One of them tried to strike me with ice lightning, but my warm breath shriveled it to nothing. The hot blast of our engines drove them off the ice. We’ll be okay on the planet.

  “We’ll be the real ice gods!”

  “I hope,” she whispered. “At least we can hope.”

  Nine

  Roak asked to see Lieutenant Washburn. Kellick
took him to her office on the deck above. In spite of her size and chocolate complexion, she reminded him of his mother. The same alert brown eyes in a very similar wide and patient face. A different, deeper voice, but just as quietly reasonable. He thought the same appeals should work with her.

  “Mr. Roak?” She looked inquiringly at Kellick, who stood with him at her desk. “Still a suspect?”

  “We have evidence to implicate him. His briefcase contains a cashmere sweater. We found fibers from the sweater on the device. The timer shows when it was set. That was after he came aboard.”

  “Device?” he protested hotly. “I know nothing about any device.”

  She turned silently to look him over. The jailer had brought him a razor and a comb, as well as the yellow coveralls that he wore now like a brand of suspicion. He saw no warmth in her searching stare.

  “Imagine the shock to me.” He let his voice sharpen. “I’d finished the inspection and cleared the ship for takeoff. I was planning to go down and watch it from the bunker. With no warning at all, I was shanghaied—”

  “Imagine the shock to us,” she broke in. “We’d be dead if we hadn’t been warned. Luckily, we did discover and disarm the device. But the guards at the entry hatch kept a traffic log. It shows that nobody went off the ship after the timer was set.” Her voice fell. “The perpetrator is still aboard.”

  “The wetback—”

  “Mr. Mondragon?” Sharply, she cut him off again. “A man of remarkable ability. He fixed a glitch in our computer. He’s working with the search team now. Mr. Glengarth says we’re lucky to have him aboard.

  “As for you …”

  She shook her head, looking hard at him.

  “Just give me a chance.” Begging, he recalled long-ago scenes with his mother. “As for the cashmere fibers, ask your people if they stowed the device and my briefcase on the same shelf. You won’t find any evidence to hang me, because I didn’t bring any bomb aboard.

  “My bad luck!” Watching her face, he managed a rueful laugh. “Frankly, I’m stunned. I don’t know what to say, except that now I’ve got to make the best of things as they are. Don’t I deserve as much of a chance as the Mex?”