“If you do—” Eisen nodded reluctantly. “We’ll certainly have to meld all our resources.”
“I never expected this.” Indra Singh raised her voice, a sharp-edged nasal drone. She was a tall, willowy woman wearing heavy gold rings and bracelets, her thick black hair piled into an untidy bun. She had come from anthropology to earn degrees in soil chemistry and bioengineering. “We can’t hope to survive on the surface. We’ll have to burrow into the permafrost.”
She made a dismal face at the rocky beaches below.
“I suppose we can thaw it and bury ourselves in mud. Or will we strike native granite the machines can’t touch? We can’t plan anything till we can drill test holes and run seismic surveys.”
“Which we’re already planning,” Rima said.
“Not much for me to plan.” Nels Norgin was the Norwegian meteorologist, an expert in atmospheric circulations and climate control. “With no air and no weather and all the water frozen close to zero Kelvin …”
He shrugged and spread his hands.
“Stuck or not, I think we’re here to stay.” Mark Senn, the astrophysicist from the search team, spoke with quiet authority. “Krasov and Fujiwara spoke of getting back into quantum drive, but that’s not possible.”
“Are you certain?” Roak asked. “Captain Stecker was hoping—”
“I’m certain!” Eisen cut him off. “We terraform or die. I prefer not to die.”
“Which is why we’re here,” Rima said. “We do have problems. Let’s invent solutions.”
“I stand with Dr. Virili.” Ignoring Eisen’s cold-eyed hostility, Roak smiled at her and turned to the others. “I hope you’ll let me help with those solutions.”
Calling the ship, Mondragon waited for la rubia’s voice. For a long time all he heard was the faint rush and murmur of the galaxy’s distant heart. When at last he caught a voice, it wasn’t hers.
“… garbled … signal garbled … please repeat …”
“Alpha calling.” He tried again. “Reporting a wall of ice—”
“Carlos?” Glengarth’s voice, suddenly stronger, edged with sharp concern. “What’s happening?”
“A wall of ice across our path, Señor. Muy alto. El Doctor Cruzet is backing the spider away.”
“Take no chances—”
“Something else, Señor. Más extraño. A bright light burning in the ice …”
“Can you describe it?”
“Circulos, señor. Circles of light that grow from the center like ripples on water till they show every color del arco iris. Though I think they cease now as we move away.”
“Strange.” Glengarth paused, perhaps not wanting to believe. “Can you determine any likely cause?”
“No, Señor, except that it appeared as we came near. El Doctor Cruzet thinks perhaps it is intended as a signal.”
“From whom?”
“Yo no sé. Perhaps the beings of the mountain.”
“Have you seen any mountain?”
“Not yet, Señor. All we see is the white frost that covers the ice all the way to the sky.”
“I hope you find no mountain. Are you in danger now?”
“Creo que no. Now we are stopping again, a kilometer from the wall. The circles of color do not return.”
“Let me speak to your commander.”
“Mr. Hinch is below, sir. Sleeping. Or I think borracho.”
“Get me Mr. Andersen.”
“Andy here, sir.” He spoke at once from the nose. “On the interphone.”
“This wall?” Glengarth’s tone had an anxious edge. “What about it?”
“It looks natural enough, sir. A natural geologic upthrust. The fault line runs north and south as far as we can see. Nothing to tell us when it happened. Could have been yesterday or more likely a billion years ago. But still I wonder….”
Doubt slowed his voice.
“A riddle, sir. It stands in our way like a barrier. That beacon was burning in it like a warning to stop us.”
“What’s this about Mr. Hinch?”
“He’s down in his berth. Probably drunk.”
“I see.” Glengarth paused. “He’s an odd one. A surprise to me that Stecker sent him out, unless they’d had some kind of dustup. Any trouble to you?”
“None, sir. He just told us to carry on.”
“Do that. Keep in touch. Any more you can say about this light in the ice?”
“It’s nothing I can explain, sir. A target shape of expanding rings. The same colors we saw in that flash from the ice cap. Maybe meant to tell us we’ve come close enough.”
“I think you have. Wake Mr. Hinch if you can. Inform him that his orders are to turn back at once. Hold the line open. I want constant contact.”
“Okay, sir.”
Mondragon kept the headphones on, but the contact was broken. He heard Andersen calling Hinch and then the whisper of the turbine as they pulled farther back from the barrier.
“Hold it!” Hinch’s hoarse sardonic bark came close behind him. “If Mr. Glengarth’s still on the line, tell him I’ve been informed. Awake and not too drunk to run this bleedin’ circus. We ain’t going back.”
Twisting, Carlos found Hinch behind him at the top of the cabin steps, gaunt face flushed behind the straggle of beard, a pistol in his hand.
“Que?” he whispered. “Qué quiere?”
“Escuche!” A slurred command. “Get this! All three of you. To hell with Stecker and his ruttin’ ship. We’re going on to that bleedin’ mountain. If it is a bleedin’ mountain. Or if it’s the mouth of hell.”
“Señor—” He had to catch his breath. “Señor Hinch, have you looked outside?”
“I see the cliff.” Hinch was breathing hard. The pistol shook in his hand. “I heard about the bleedin’ flash. Maybe meant to scare us off, but Jake Hinch don’t scare. We’ll climb the ruttin’ ice—”
“Señor!” he begged. “Cuidado con la pistola!”
“Cuidado yourself!” Hinch waved the gun. “I ain’t borracho, and we ain’t turning back.”
“I think we are in danger, sir,” Andersen called, “if we ignore that signal—”
“Afraid to die?” Hinch laughed, a brief, harsh snort. “So what the bleedin’ devil! We’re already done for, murdered when this crazy ship took off. We can die slow, starvin’ and freezin’ here on the ice. Or faster, if that bleedin’ scumbag Stecker gets us back on his death-trap ship and shoots it off to God knows what. I’ll take the ice gods, if you want to call ’em gods. No worse than old Rip Stecker.”
“Señor …” Mondragon watched the pistol and searched for words. “La Doctora Virili says we need not die. She says we came to make the planet a new home for humanidad. She says we know the science to stay alive, on the ice or under it.”
“Turned to bleedin’ cannibals!”
“Creo que no, señor. I think we need not die.” He shrank from a sweep of the gun. “Please, Señor, I think we must continue our search for the masters of the planet. Perhaps they burn the signal light to make us welcome.”
“Not very bleedin’ likely!”
“We don’t know.” Andersen’s quiet voice again. “Mr. Hinch, may I ask why you’re with us? Are you here for Captain Stecker? Or have you had some difference with him?”
“If you give a bleedin’ damn …” Hinch stepped back and lowered the pistol, but his eyes were wild with desperation. “Let me tell you what a slimy bastard Rip Stecker is.”
“No friend of mine.” Cruzet spoke somewhere below. “A dirty trick he played, throwing Captain Alt off the ship.”
Startled, Hinch jumped and tipped his haggard head.
“A filthier trick on me! Kidnapped me off the bleedin’ Earth. Got me drunk and kept me aboard when I never meant to come. Just to shut me up. To stop my testimony back at home about how he’d robbed the Mission.”
Livid now, his gaunt face twitched.
“But I ain’t dead. Not quite yet!”
“I see, Mr. Hinch.” An
dersen nodded soberly. “Anything you want to add?”
“No secrets here. Not among the dead.” Hinch grinned, his hollowed eyes glaring past Mondragon at the ice wall and the stars. “If you care, I know enough to hang the thievin’ skunk. He’s a slick one. Top con man of the bleedin’ century, if you ain’t already guessed it. He’d embezzled millions. Jumped on the ship two minutes ahead of the law. If you wonder how I know, he used me for his bleedin’ cat’s-paw.”
“Huh?”
“StarSeed Mission used to be big business. Real big business!” His ragged voice had slowed, and his arm seemed to relax with the gun. “Every bleedin’ ship cost a lot of millions, and they launched a lot of ships. Rip Stecker’s job was raising the millions. Conning it out of the bleedin’ true believers. He knew how to diddle the senseless nuts into trading all they had for their chance to shape human destiny—that’s what he called his one-way tickets to hell.
“Did it in his own high style.” Hinch laughed again, raucously. “Mark him up for that. Ritzy apartments in New York and Geneva. Women to fit. But he had a fatal fault. Loved to gamble in top casinos all over the world, drunk half the time. Always a loser, drunk or sober. Went crazy toward the end, squandering ten times his pay. That’s when he got his hooks into me.”
He waved the gun, and grinned when Mondragon ducked.
“I’d made my own mistakes. Dipped into the wrong till and did eight years for it. Branded with that, I’d changed my name and tried to make a better start. He found me out when I asked for a Mission job. He took me on to do the worst of his dirty work. He went so far I got sick of his tricks and set the law on him. That’s why he’s done me in.”
He twisted to glare belligerently at Cruzet.
“And why I ain’t afraid of him, or you, or any bleedin’ ice gods. I ain’t going back to end my days on Rip Stecker’s death ship and let the cannibals gnaw my bones. Got it?”
“Sí, señor.” Mondragon nodded hastily. “Seguro que sí.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hinch.” Andersen spoke very quietly through the interphone. “I think we’ve got it. I’m glad to know where you stand, but I wonder how you hope to get past this fault in the ice.”
“Your problem.” Hinch grinned ferociously. “You’re the engineer.”
Muttering, he went back to his berth. Mondragon heard a bottle clink. Another kilometer back from the ice wall, Andersen stopped the spider to inspect the reactor and the turbine. Cruzet put on his airskin and went down through the lock to check the tires and steering gear.
“Vehicle temperature still in safe service range,” he reported. “Ice fog forming around us since we stopped. Frozen air sublimes under the lamp and freezes again as it spreads.”
“Write it in your bleedin’ log.” Hinch was pushing into the lookout bubble. “If you think any bleedin’ idiot will ever get here to read it.”
Yet, in spite of such sarcasm, he turned suddenly amiable, offering to share his whisky. Mondragon made fresh syncafe and toasted omninute wafers in the microwave. They gathered in the cabin for a meal before Cruzet took the controls to drive them along the ice wall. It sank a little, but ten kilometers north it was still four meters high.
“Let’s take a look,” Andersen called. “I think we can climb it here.”
“If you can …” Hinch twisted to squint at him doubtfully. “Do it.”
They stopped near the fault. Andersen climbed down through the lock with a box of tools. In the bubble, Mondragon watched him drilling holes with a laser that exploded the ice into steam that made a thin red fog around them. Loading explosives into the holes, he gestured Cruzet to back them away.
The silent blast brought a great eruption of steam and ice fragments and a flash that dazzled Mondragon. When he could see again, the starlight showed a sloping gap in the barrier. Andersen came back aboard, and Cruzet jolted the spider through it.
“Call the ship,” Andersen told Mondragon. “If Mr. Hinch doesn’t mind.”
Hinch didn’t mind.
“What the bleedin’ hell,” he muttered. “The bleedin’ bastard can’t touch us now.”
Calling, Mondragon heard only the hiss and whisper of the cosmos.
“We’ve dropped below line of sight,” Andersen told him. “Which means that any signals have to be reflected down to reach us. No reflector above us now.”
Staring from the bubble as they rolled on toward the black sun’s round blot on the stars, all he saw was the same flat waste of ash white frost, the same black horizon, the same eternal midnight. Hinch roved the machine for a time, peering ahead from the nose and climbing to peer out of the bubble. He finally vanished again into his curtained cubicle.
Andersen stowed his tools, yawned, and went down to take a nap. When the watch clock chimed, Mondragon read the sextant and the surface temperature, made another black dot on the route map, and got no answer when he called the ship again. He was dozing when he heard Cruzet’s excited yelp.
“Look ahead! Another light!”
He blinked his sticky eyes and found a point of changing color low above the eastern horizon. Red that changed to orange, yellow to green, blue to violet, and then faded into indigo. After long seconds of darkness, it began again.
“One more warning.” Andersen looked at Hinch, who had followed him into the bubble. “Sir, I think we’ve come far enough.”
“Drive on.” Hinch’s eyes were red and hollow, the whisky slowing his gritty voice. “Ice gods or bleedin’ devils, I’ll see how they take human heat.”
Andersen turned to Mondragon. “Try the ship.”
Again all he heard was the rush of energies too vast for him to understand. Andersen went down to take a spell at the wheel. Alone in the bubble, cut off from all humankind, he felt that they were utterly alone in their tiny shell, trapped under the uncaring silence of the ice and the weight of endless time. Almost, he thought, as if they were already dead.
The telephone startled him.
“Calling … Calling Alpha …”
La rubia! Her voice was a thread of life, drawn too thin, stretched too far from warmth and life and hope. In a moment like a dream, he seemed to see her as if she stood somehow on the stony hill behind Cuerno del Oro, facing a wind that blew her bright hair back and shaped a thin red dress to her fine body, holding la niñita and the panda doll in her arms.
“Ship calling spider.” Her voice was suddenly stronger. “Can you hear?”
“Si!” He gasped the words in Spanish. “Lo oigo.”
“Carlos?” He was sorry for the Spanish, but at least she knew his voice. “Where are you now?”
“We blasted a way through the ice wall. We are driving on.”
“You were ordered to return.” A crisp reprimand. “Mr. Glengarth thinks you’re in danger.”
“Perhaps. Mr. Hinch doesn’t care.”
“Let me speak to him.”
“He’s below. Probably sleeping.”
“Get him on the phone.” Her voice grew sharper. “Captain Stecker wants a word with him.”
“He won’t want to talk, but I have something else to report. We see something like a new star low in the east, changing through the rainbow colors we saw from space.”
“I think you are in danger. Let me speak …”
That thread of life had broken. Her voice was gone.
He called Andersen to the bubble, to be there if she got through again. At the wheel himself, he drove on toward the light. No star at all, it burned always brighter, swelled into a rippling target shape, climbed higher till he found the mountain under it. Not a mountain, either, but a thin black monolith so tall he could not believe it. He stopped the spider, and they all gathered in the bubble, hushed with puzzlement.
“What the devil!” Hinch exploded. “What the ruttin’ devil!”
“Nothing natural,” Andersen murmured. “Something built it. Don’t ask me who. It’s got to be a building, but tall as a mountain. Perhaps they were gods.”
They drove on,
stopped to study it, drove on again across an ancient beach and up an easy slope toward where it stood, on a low hill smoothed with time and silvered with frost. Higher, higher, the tower climbed to hide half the stars. The flow of color across its face cast a rainbow shimmer over them, brighter than their lamp.
“Enough.” They were still two hundred meters away, but Andersen raised his hand. “Close enough.”
“Qué es?” Mondragon breathed. “What is it?”
They craned their necks and kept on looking. The work of giants, Mondragon thought, if not actual gods. Shading his eyes against the unsteady light, he could trace darker seams between the enormous blocks that formed the wall, blocks twenty meters tall, maybe thirty on a side. One must have fallen from far above, shattering into a great pile of rubble.
“A door?” Cruzet frowned and pointed. “Is that a door?”
A rectangular patch of deeper darkness half hidden by the rubble, at first it looked too small to be an entrance, not half the height of the titanic blocks around it, but when he let his eyes measure it again, he thought it must be wide enough to let them drive on in. Squinting through the glow from overhead, he found only darkness there.
“Near enough,” Andersen said again. “I think we’ve learned enough—”
“Enough?” Hinch’s hoarse rasp stopped him. “Not for me. I’m going in to face the bleedin’ monsters in their den and ask ’em what their bleedin’ signal means.”
Twelve
Kip felt worried for Carlos and the others, lost somewhere out on the ice beyond the reach of the radio. Yet he was happy when Roy Eisen let him hang out in the work balloon. A team of mechanics were busy there, putting together another spider, the Beta. At first he was a little afraid of Dr. Eisen, who was loud and sometimes sharp with people who made mistakes. He had a warm grin, though, and usually time to answer simple questions.
“You were a contractor, Dr. Roy?”
He stood gazing up at the fat-tired wheels, twice as tall as a man. They were feet for the eight tall legs that carried the cabin, a long cylinder that would hold the fusion engine and the crew. Polished like silver to cut heat loss, it reflected strange images of everybody working around it.
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