Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  Glyn Sefaris savored the look on Nell's face for a second before he left the dining room. It wasn't easy to surprise her. He knew she wanted to ask him questions, but he had just told her all he knew about the new Mobarak project. If she wanted more, she would have to dig it out for herself.

  There was just one thing he had not told Nell, and he was not sure that he was going to, at least not until she was well on the way to the Jovian system. Earlier in the day he had read an incoming news clip from Arenas. The travel recorder from the runaway carousel float at the Midsummer Festival had been examined by security police, and its accuracy was now being questioned.

  The recorder showed that the vehicle had reached a speed of more than fifty miles an hour during its wild downhill rush.

  Faster than a world-class sprinter. Far faster, according to Glyn Sefaris's research service, than any human could ever run, under any conditions.

  7

  Let's Make a World

  It was the saddest job imaginable, like abandoning your half-grown children. Camille sat alone at the terminal in a trance state, closing files, shutting down experiments, putting programs in mothballs. In another hour she would be finished; nothing at DOS Center would remain of her and her work.

  So good-bye, NGC 3344. Her spectroscopic probing of low cross-section helium fusion at the center of that perfect spiral galaxy had to end. Good-bye, SGC 11324. She would have no more observations of that dark mystery three billion light-years from Sol.

  And good-bye now to her special babies: galaxies so far away that even DOS could not resolve their centers to individual stars.

  Camille erased the program sequences for four of them. At the fifth, she paused. The observational program for this experiment in the far infrared had only just begun. She was using multimillimeter wavelengths to study fusion processes of the heavier elements as they built their way from carbon to iron. The early results from this galaxy, seven billion light-years out, were already showing intriguing anomalies. She had a thin scatter of data points far from what theory predicted.

  Did she have to erase this experiment? In principle, she did. Those were her instructions. But suppose she just dropped it into background mode on the DOS sequencing algorithm? Then her observations would be made only in dead time, when no other observer was asking for use of the telescope array. No one would miss it, or probably even notice.

  It was a dreadful way to perform an experiment, with no guarantee that results would ever be obtained. But it was the way that she and David had been forced to operate during the whole period while DOS was being checked out. She had learned how to deal with data gaps and incomplete recording sequences.

  And suppose that someone found out what she had done? Well, she would be banned from future use of DOS—and no worse off than she was now.

  Camille placed her experiment at the bottom of the DOS priority list and gave it an innocuous name, one that a casual reader would assume was part of the telescope array's own diagnostic routines. She set up an off-site tap with her own ID so that she could query the relevant DOS data bank remotely. Then she signed off the system, feeling like a criminal.

  But an unrepentant one.

  She left the DOS control chamber and headed back to the living quarters. David had to be told what she had done, and he should have a chance to do the same thing for one of his own pets. The canceling of the DOS deep probes had produced at least one beneficial side effect; she and David had nothing left to fight over. They were being extra-nice to each other. Camille had, with enormous self-control, managed to avoid further prying into his trip to Earth.

  "Want to know what a hardened criminal looks like?" she started to say to his broad back as she floated into the chamber.

  She cut herself off just before she reached the incriminating word. David Lammerman was not alone. She could see a pair of feet sticking out from beyond the little table.

  The newcomer's face had been shielded from view by the bank of supply cupboards. As she moved past David, Camille saw a jutting nose, prominent brow ridges, and a thick shock of grey hair. She recognized that strong profile at once. Anyone who worked in fusion, even if it was in abstract science rather than commerce, knew him from a hundred cartoons.

  She stared at Cyrus Mobarak too hard to be polite, while he casually turned and smiled. The pale, vacant eyes warmed and lit his whole face. He held out a manicured hand.

  "Dr. Camille Hamilton. It is a pleasure to meet you. I know your work, of course."

  Which was a mystery as big as the Sun King's presence at DOS Center. Camille had no false modesty about her own worth and competence. At what she did, she was the best. But what she did was abstruse and little-known theory, far from the sort of thing that Cyrus Mobarak cared about; none of her own delusions of grandeur could convince her that, like him, she was a household name around the system.

  She turned to David and saw on his face the same awkward expression that it had worn when he had been summoned for the meeting on Earth. He was twisting his thick fingers around each other. His shoulders were stiff, his lips were tight, and he showed no sign of wanting to introduce the Sun King to her.

  Camille grasped Mobarak's outstretched hand instinctively and received a businesslike handshake in return. His hand was small, dry, and unusually warm. Or was her own unnaturally cold after that long session of sitting at the DOS computer?

  "What in the world are you doing on DOS Center?"

  It was hardly a diplomatic greeting, but Mobarak took it in stride.

  "I am on my way from Earth to the Jupiter system. I very much want to talk to you, Dr. Hamilton, but would you excuse me for just a couple of minutes first? I need to send a message over the communications net."

  He eased past her and left the room before she could respond. She turned to David feeling something between confusion and accusation.

  "That's ridiculous. DOS Center isn't on a reasonable flight path from Earth to the Jovian system, not for another six months. How do you know Mobarak, and why did you bring him here? And why did he walk out the moment he met me?" Questions spilled out of Camille before David could even try to answer. "He's the one who made you go to Earth, isn't he, the one who told you we were going to be dumped out of the DOS program? Why did he do that . . . and what have you been telling him about me?"

  With Mobarak out of the room, the tense, constipated expression on David's face eased a little.

  "Nothing he couldn't have told me. He seemed to know all about Camille Hamilton before I ever arrived on Earth."

  "How?"

  "Don't know. Maybe . . . maybe from that man who was here before me." David didn't want to mention the name, had never mentioned the name. "Didn't he go to work on Earth?"

  "My God. Tim Kaiser. He did. He went to Earth to work on fusion projects." Camille had a new worry. If Mobarak's ideas about her had come from poor lovelorn and jealous Tim, convinced of Camille's casual carnality . . .

  "But how do you know Mobarak? You never met Tim Kaiser."

  "True." David didn't just look uncomfortable now, he looked ill—and he was as physically tough as Camille. She had never seen him sick for a moment.

  "I don't know Tim Kaiser." The words were being pulled out of him. "I don't want to. You understand that. But I do know Cyrus Mobarak." The twisted smile was out of place on his plump, good-natured face. "You might say that I have always known Cyrus Mobarak. Or maybe you'd say that I've never known him."

  The stiffness left David's shoulders, and he seemed to shrink into his seat with a great exploding sigh of escaping breath. "He's my father, Camille. My real, biological, goddamned father."

  She stared at him in disbelief. She realized that other people had known relatives, even if she didn't. But Mobarak as David's father . . .

  "You never told me that."

  "Of course I didn't. I didn't want you to know . . . didn't want anyone to know."

  "But David Lammerman . . ."

  "Lammerman was my mother's name. She
and Mobarak lived together—for just six months, after the war—when he first arrived on Earth from the Belt."

  "And he disowned you?"

  "No. She disowned him. She didn't want me to mention his name. Ever. I didn't. But she mentioned it often enough. She told me that he was a horrible man, nothing like the pleasant person that he pretended to be. I believed her—I was only a kid. I can see now how irrational and bitter she was, but I didn't know it then.

  "She died when I was seventeen, and she left me broke. But I wouldn't ask him for anything, not to save my life. He came to see me a month after she died. He was too much for me to handle. You know, I couldn't even get up the nerve to ask him to leave, and I really wanted to. He told me that there was a bank account to pay for my education, whether I liked it or not. He would not try to force other money onto me or interfere with my life in any way, and he kept his word until last month, when he called out of the blue and asked me to come to Earth. He paid for my trip, and he told me the news, that our work on DOS was going to be canceled, that we'd have to get out of here."

  David's burst of words ended. Camille nodded. It made sense, in an oddly distorted way. The rejected—or rejecting—son, in the presence of the larger-than-life father. Cyrus Mobarak was still too much for David to handle.

  And yet it made no sense at all. What else had David kept from her?

  "David, I don't understand. Why would Cyrus Mobarak summon you all the way to Earth just to tell you what we would hear anyway in a few weeks? There's no way they could keep the cancellation of the DOS deep-probe program a secret. A hundred other experimenters are affected as well as ourselves. The whole DOS scientist community was buzzing with the news less than a week after you got back here."

  He shrugged but said nothing. Recounting his relationship to Cyrus Mobarak had apparently drained him. Camille did not push further. Instead, she returned to her worries about Cyrus Mobarak's reason for being here, and David's miserable condition. If Mobarak were going to try to push David around, he'd have to take Camille Hamilton on first. And she was getting madder and madder. The pair of them sat for five minutes in uncomfortable silence until Mobarak returned.

  "Well, Dr. Hamilton?" He was cheerfully unaware of the atmosphere in the room, or pretended to be. "What do you think of my proposal?"

  Camille frowned at him in perplexity. He picked up on it in a fraction of a second, flashing a glance at Lammerman.

  David shook his head but did not speak.

  "No? Then I suppose I'd better have a try." Mobarak came back to the table, settled opposite Camille, and steepled his fingertips. She again noticed his tiny, neat hands—totally different from David's great paws. David's height and massive build must have come from his mother's side.

  "I'd heard a lot about you from Tim Kaiser," Mobarak went on. "You might not like some of it too well. Kaiser tells me that you're donkey-headed and determined, so once you get your teeth into a problem, you never give up."

  "You don't solve a difficult scientific problem if you give up easily, Mr. Mobarak." And when you grow up grubby and penniless on Mars, you get nothing—not even your next meal—if you give up easily. Camille had acquired her education as she had her dinners: the hard way. Persistence was nothing more than a childhood survival trait carried on into adult life. But she was damned if she'd weep on Mobarak's shoulder to tell him that things hadn't always been easy.

  "But Tim says that although you're stubborn," Mobarak continued, "you're sometimes impulsive, too. Even when you're wrong, it's a waste of time trying to push you around. Don't worry, I won't try it—people say the same thing about me. But Tim also insists that you're the best damned theorist in fusion processes that he's ever met. He says that you seem to know what's going on in fusion stability, even in complicated situations, without having to think about it. When the computer models give answers that you don't like, you look for errors in the programs."

  "No." Camille could handle this at least without starting a fight. "He's wrong. I calculate everything, and I don't trust intuition. It's just that I've found some geometric shortcuts, ways to visualize complex interactions for quick results. Like a fusion version of Feynman diagrams."

  "Even better." Mobarak smiled with what appeared to be genuine delight. "I'm just an experimenter, so I've learned to mistrust theorist intuition, too. It's usually no better than an extrapolation of solved cases."

  Camille was beginning to understand why they called him the Sun King. She had assumed that it was for his development of the Mobies and his mastery of practical commercial fusion. But you could make just as good a case for the name based on his warmth and personal charm. The vacant eyes were not at all empty now, and she could feel his interest in her pouring across the table. It was impossible to hold her anger against him.

  Poor David! How could a youngster have possibly handled that force?

  "Now," Mobarak was continuing, "I've been saying all these personal things about you. But that's not why I'm here. May I take a few more minutes of your time and explain the reason? You see, I have a problem. I'm hoping to start work soon on the biggest project of my career, and I need help. You'll see why when I tell you what I want to do. And if what I say next sounds grandiose, it's because it feels grandiose—even to me.

  "I want to add something major to the solar system. I want, in fact, to give humanity a whole new habitable planet." He took a split second to study her reaction and then swept on. "Europa. You probably know at least as much about Europa as I do, but I'd like to offer my own summary. I'll keep it short. Please interrupt me if you disagree with anything I say."

  Camille noticed that despite his polite words, he began at once, without waiting for permission. She knew a good deal about Europa, so she had a chance to evaluate Mobarak's technique. He used a simple, down-to-earth style, talking neither up nor down to his listener but watching her face intently for signs of boredom or confusion. The description that he offered was spare and logical, with a manageable minimum of numbers. And he seemed to have his facts right.

  Europa: second closest of Jupiter's four Galileian satellites, orbiting less than seven hundred thousand kilometers out. Sandblasted on its surface by an even more intense rain of high-energy particles than struck Ganymede, Europa shared with Earth, and with Earth alone in the solar system, one unusual feature: a water ocean. In Europa's case, the ocean lay beneath kilometers of ice.

  The ice on Europa was a protective blanket, varying in thickness but continuous over the surface except at one point: the side perpetually facing away from Jupiter. At this Jovian antipode, the small landmass of Mount Ararat jutted through, just far enough to provide a space landing site and a base of surface operations.

  Europa's weak surface gravity permitted the rise of Mount Ararat all the way from an ocean bed that averaged fifty kilometers deep and, in places, plunged to over a hundred. Small on a planetary scale, Europa nevertheless had as large a body of liquid water as any in the solar system; and unlike Earth's oceans, it was fresh water. The leeching of minerals from land surfaces, always adding salinity and minerals to the waters of Terra, had never taken place on Europa.

  Fresh, and cold, and more than a billion cubic kilometers in volume, Europa's ocean was lifeless, and useless, because of the thickness of its icy shield.

  "But not necessarily always so." Mobarak was keeping his promise to be brief. "If the ice were melted away from below until it was just a couple of meters thick, it would still shield Europa's ocean from hard radiation as well as ever. And below a thin ice layer there would be more than enough light to permit plants to grow—the right varieties already exist. So do the nutrient upwellings. It's all a question of energy supply, and detailed heat-balance calculation and control.

  "I plan to provide that extra energy. I'm designing a series of fusion reactors bigger than anything we've ever seen before. The ocean of Europa has all the hydrogen for fusion that we could ask for."

  "You can get the hydrogen, but you'll never get
the permits." Camille had been invited to interrupt, and she decided that it was time to do so. David certainly would not—he was staring at his father with the helpless, hypnotized look of a rabbit facing a python. "The Jovian General Assembly set the Europan ocean aside for deep submarine experiments thirty years ago. If you change the environment, you'll ruin all that scientific work."

  "Permits will be a problem, certainly. And we have to keep the scientists happy." Mobarak was nodding agreement, but Camille read in his manner a suggestion that permits would be no problem at all.

  The scientists on Europa would somehow prove to be right out of luck. In the General Assembly, the right wheels had already been greased.

  "Well, there's a bigger problem than that," she said. "You may have been too busy to see the announcement, but the scientific grapevine has been full of it. Supposedly there's been a discovery of life on Europa—native life, down on the seabed. If that's true, we'll see a hold on all developments there for an indefinite period."

  But again he was nodding, calm and reasonable. "I heard that, too. If it's true, of course it will make a big difference. But I'd heard that so far it's all based on indirect evidence. We'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile—" He paused.

  "Meanwhile, let me be frank with you. I'm going on the assumption that the benefits of the project to develop Europa will be judged by the Jovian General Assembly to outweigh all possible disadvantages. And that's why I am here. I know you've been wondering, because you can't see DOS Center on any rational Earth-Jupiter flight path.

  "And maybe these days I'm not feeling rational. I said I'm designing the fusion plants, and that statement is quite true. But it's also true that I'm running into terrible difficulties of stability, something I've never met on the smaller Mobarak fusion units. These will be Moby monsters. I can't do everything by small experiments and scaling. I need a theoretician to help me. A top theoretician.