by Ben Bova
“I have much to do,” he said. “Besides, I eat very little, and it’s difficult to maintain my diet when I dine with you hearty youngsters.”
Jordan felt mildly surprised to be considered a youngster, but then he remembered that Adri was nearly four centuries old.
Over dinner, Brandon was strangely silent. His new responsibilities are weighing on him, Jordan thought. Handling Meek and his cohorts isn’t going to be easy. Then he said to himself, Good! It’s about time Brandon grew up.
Elyse bubbled with enthusiasm over her chance to study the Pup. “To observe a white dwarf star close up,” she said. “To watch its flares, measure the fusion reactions still simmering along its photosphere. I’ll be the most envied astrophysicist in the world!”
Brandon teased, “Until the next batch arrives here.”
Jordan asked, “How’s the planetary astronomer faring, Bran?”
“Plenty to do, plenty to find out. De Falla and I are working up a geological history of this planet. It’s a lot younger than Earth, if what we’ve sampled so far is typical of the whole planet.”
They chatted as they ate, until abruptly Brandon said to Aditi, “Jordy told us about your way of reproduction.”
Jordan felt a flash of anger.
Aditi began, “I know it must seem strange to you, but we—”
“Not strange,” said Jordan. “Different.”
Brandon said, “There’s something to be said about not having to get pregnant, I suppose.”
“Or not worrying about becoming pregnant,” Jordan heard himself say.
“I don’t know,” Elyse murmured, looking straight at Aditi. “For many women, pregnancy is a very special thing.”
“All I’ve ever heard is complaints,” Brandon said. “Backaches and morning sickness and all that.”
“How many women have you gotten pregnant?” Aditi asked.
Brandon’s eyes went wide. “Me?” he squeaked. “None!”
Smiling at his brother, Jordan corrected, “None that you know of, Bran.”
“None,” said Brandon, firmly. “Zero.”
“So far,” said Elyse.
They all burst into hearty laughter, except Brandon.
Reddening slightly, Brandon tried to change the subject. “You know, Aditi, your method of reproducing yourselves reminds me of an old, old joke.”
Oh no, Jordan thought. He’s not going to try to make a joke out of this.
“The only jokes you know are old ones,” Elyse teased.
Ignoring her, Brandon explained, “Back in the early days of space flight, astronauts from Earth landed on this planet that was populated by a race of intelligent robots.”
Elyse rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as she took a forkful of the cakelike dessert before her. Aditi’s attention was riveted on Brandon.
“The robots understand that their visitors are from another planet,” he went on, “and they show the astronauts all through their city.”
“Just as we’re doing for you,” Aditi said.
“Well, yeah, that’s right. But at the end of the day the robots throw a big dinner party for the astronauts. A thousand robots fill the hall.”
“They knew how to make human food?” Jordan asked. “Or did they feed the astronauts machine oil?”
Brandon frowned at his brother. “So, during the dinner, one of the robots gets up and says, ‘We’ve shown you the factory where we make more robots. How do you make more humans?’”
“Oh-oh,” said Elyse.
Brandon plowed on. “Well, the astronauts are embarrassed. They’re rocket jockeys, not scientists. So they try to explain, stammering a lot, how humans make more humans.”
“And?”
“And all the robots bust into uproarious laughter! The astronauts are stunned. They didn’t expect laughter.”
Brandon waited for a suspenseful moment, then went on, “One of the robots apologizes to the astronauts. ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be laughing. But you see, what you just described—that’s the way we make automobiles.’”
The table fell silent. All eyes turned to Aditi. Brandon’s expression morphed from expectant to troubled. Jordan seethed. Of all the insensitive oafs …
And then Aditi broke into laughter. Delighted, tinkling laughter, like wind chimes at a mountaintop monastery Jordan had once visited.
“You make automobiles in factories,” Aditi giggled, “the way the robots make robots.”
“It’s an old joke,” Brandon said weakly.
“But it’s still funny,” said Elyse. “A little.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Brandon said to Aditi.
“No, no,” she replied. “I’m not offended.”
Jordan thought that if she was hurt by Brandon’s joke, she was being very gracious about it. More gracious than I’d be.
HOLLOW PROGRESS
The days rolled by. Brandon shuttled back and forth from the city to the base camp. Elyse spent most of her time at the astronomical observatory. Thornberry and Meek seemed quite contented with what they were learning. Delighted, even.
“The way they can manipulate force fields,” Thornberry enthused one morning, as Jordan visited the laboratory where he spent most of his time, “it’s incredible, it is. Simply incredible.”
Half a dozen young physicists and engineers were in the lab, looking happy that the human roboticist was so impressed with their work.
Pointing to the disassembled components of an energy shield generator scattered across a lab table, Thornberry said, “They tap into dark energy as easily as you or I plug in an electrical appliance, they do.”
“What you call dark energy,” said one of the young men, “is merely another fundamental force, like the strong nuclear force.”
Thornberry nodded impatiently. “Yes, so it is. But the energy shield you create with it absorbs not only charged particles, but neutral electromagnetic energy, as well. Hit it with a burst of gamma rays powerful enough to fry a rhinoceros and it merely soaks ’em up. It actually uses the incoming radiation to power itself!”
“It’s pretty fundamental,” said the physicist.
“To you it’s fundamental,” Thornberry said. “To me, it’s a bit of black magic.”
Jordan felt impressed, although he didn’t fully understand the principles Thornberry was talking about.
Even Meek seemed pleased with what he was learning. His suspicions were melting away—slowly—in the light of newfound knowledge.
“The things they can do with biology,” he said over lunch one afternoon. “Not only do they manipulate DNA to produce new species, they can control genetic expression and suppress aging!”
Longyear, de Falla, Yamaguchi, and Verishkova visited the city in turn, each of them brimming with enthusiasm about what they were learning. Hazzard and the others aboard Gaia came down from time to time and got swept up in the new knowledge Adri’s people were sharing so freely.
Jordan was pleased, very pleased. Especially since he and Aditi were living together now. He spent his days checking with the others, strictly informally, and talking with Adri about how well everyone was getting along. He spent his nights with Aditi.
“It’s uncanny,” Longyear told Jordan one afternoon. “Parallel evolution was just a far-out concept that nobody really expected to be real, but here’s a whole planet full of parallel species.”
The biologist’s earlier suspicions seemed to be washed away by the new discoveries he was making.
Only de Falla remained puzzled. “Either my basic geology program is screwed up, or this planet doesn’t make sense.”
He was having dinner with Jordan, Brandon, Elyse, and Aditi, in the city’s main dining hall. The spacious, high-ceilinged room was filled with whistling conversations and clattering dinnerware. Jordan heard laughter drifting from several tables. He saw Thornberry and Verishkova sitting at a long table with a dozen alien scientists. And Meek sitting amiably with Adri and a pair of other aliens. Meek! Jordan shoo
k his head in wonder.
“What’s wrong with your program?” Brandon asked the geologist.
De Falla’s round, beard-trimmed face looked troubled. “It’s giving me ridiculous results.”
Brandon prompted, “Such as?”
“Well, you know that Adri’s people have been feeding me all the geological data I’ve asked for. And Hazzard’s been dropping seismological probes all across the planet.”
Jordan nodded.
“When I feed the data to the computer for a geological profile I get impossible results,” de Falla complained.
“What do you mean?” Elyse asked.
Looking almost embarrassed, de Falla said, “The model of the planet’s interior that the program draws up shows that this planet is hollow.”
Jordan blurted, “Hollow?”
De Falla nodded morosely. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“How could a planet be hollow?” Jordan asked.
Brandon laughed. “Maybe your computer was programmed by one of the Hollow Earth kooks back home.”
“It’s not funny,” said de Falla. “I’ve gone over the damned program six ways from Sunday and I can’t find the glitch in it.”
“The planet can’t be hollow,” Jordan said. But he turned to his brother and added, “Could it?”
“No way,” said Brandon, wagging his head. “If it were hollow it wouldn’t have the mass to produce the gravity we experience.”
“But the computer keeps saying it’s hollow,” de Falla insisted.
“Your program’s got to be wrong,” said Brandon. “Why don’t you get Thornberry to take a look at it?”
“I already have. He and Tanya went over everything. They couldn’t find the glitch either.”
Brandon made a sour face. “Well, something’s screwed up someplace. Hollow planets don’t exist.”
“Trouble is,” de Falla went on, “the computer’s model is so damned specific. It shows a shell a couple of hundred kilometers thick, and inside it—nothing. It’s hollow.”
“Can’t be,” said Brandon.
“I know,” de Falla agreed. “But there it is.”
Jordan said, “What can you do about it?”
De Falla broke into a sheepish grin. “What would any geologist do in a situation like this? Dig.”
“Dig?”
“Get more evidence. Dig some deep cores and sample what they bring up.”
“That sounds difficult,” said Jordan.
With a shrug, de Falla replied, “It beats staring at a computer screen and wondering why the program’s gone crazy.”
“How many cores?” Jordan asked. “Where?”
“I’ve mapped out six locations, spread around the planet. I can show you, in my lab.”
Brandon said, “Let’s adjourn to your lab, then.”
FIELD TRIP
The five of them stood before the display screen that covered one entire wall of the room de Falla was using as his geology laboratory. It was a fair-sized room, with a floor-to-ceiling window that opened onto one of the city’s gracious, tree-lined plazas. Although it was well past sunset, the scene outside was clearly lit by the glow of the Pup, riding high above the silvery clouds.
Shelves filled with rocks, pebbles, containers of dirt lined the two other walls. The room had two long worktables covered with a spectrograph, microscopes, and other equipment, plus a sizeable desk that bore a humming computer. The ceiling lights were off, the lab was lit only by the wall screen, which showed a map of the planet, slowly rotating, garishly daubed in false colors and marked with a scattering of bright blue dots.
“The colors indicate different types of terrain,” de Falla was explaining, “and the dots show where we’ve taken soil and rock samples.”
“We?” Jordan asked.
“Robots, mostly. I’ve done a few quick field trips, but most of the work’s being done by robots.”
Jordan pulled up one of the stools lining the nearer worktable and rested his rear on it.
Brandon said, “So now you want to dig deep cores?”
De Falla nodded. “Six of them.” To the computer he commanded, “Display deep core sites.”
Three bright red dots began to flash on the sphere. Another one appeared over its northern rim as the image slowly rotated.
“I intend to drill these cores myself,” de Falla said. “The robots can do the heavy work, but I’ll have to be on-site to direct them.”
Brandon said, “Suppose I help you? We could cut down the time it’d take.”
After a moment’s hesitation, de Falla agreed with an easy smile. “Sure. I could use all the help I can get.”
Turning to Jordan, Brandon asked, “You want to come along, Jordy? See how science really gets done?”
He glanced at Aditi, then said, “All right. Providing it doesn’t take too long.”
“A few days,” said de Falla. “Maybe a week.”
“You can be away that long,” Brandon coaxed. Looking straight at Aditi, he added, “You’ve got nothing else to do.”
Jordan seethed inwardly, but said nothing.
Elyse spoke up. “I can’t leave my work at the observatory. The Pup is entering an active cycle, from what the astronomers tell me.”
Grinning at her, Brandon said, “You wouldn’t like it out in the field, anyway. Jordy and I will have to rough it. Tents. Latrines. That sort of thing.”
“I’ll stay here in the city, thank you,” Elyse said.
Aditi said, “We could provide you with energy shields. You wouldn’t need tents.”
Jordan could see that Aditi wasn’t happy about being separated from him for a week.
Later, as they prepared for bed, he asked her, “You don’t want to come out with us, do you?”
She countered, “You don’t want me to come with you, do you?”
Stretching out on the bed, Jordan answered, “It might be a bit awkward, your being with me while Elyse stays here in the city.”
She slipped into bed beside him. “You go with your brother, Jordan. I’ll miss you, though.”
“I’ll miss you, too, darling.”
“But not tonight. Tonight we’re together.”
“Together,” he murmured, reaching for her. But in the back of his mind he realized that one day he would have to return to Earth. Will Aditi go with me? he wondered.
* * *
“I’ve got to learn how to fly one of these birds,” Brandon muttered as they soared high above a mountain range in one of the rocketplanes.
“Hazzard seems to do the job quite well,” said Jordan, sitting in the right-hand seat beside his brother. Hazzard’s image filled the main screen on the control panel. He appeared to be quite happy controlling the plane from the bridge of Gaia.
Brandon shook his head. “It still kind of bothers me, letting Geoff pilot us remotely. No reflection on you, Geoff,” he said to the screen.
“Any time you want to fly one of the birds yourself, just let me know,” Hazzard said, with a malevolent grin. “Just tell me where you want the bodies sent.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Brandon.
Jordan watched the jagged peaks go past. There were patches of snow huddled in hollows that were sheltered from sunlight; otherwise the rocks were bare. Jordan thought he saw what looked like a herd of mountain goats peacefully negotiating the steep slopes.
Suddenly Brandon sat up straighter and pointed. “There’s the sea!”
Jordan saw a broad expanse of water glittering beneath the afternoon sun. A rim of white beach ran along its edge, and the swells appeared to run up smoothly onto the sand without breaking. A gentle, peaceful sea, Jordan thought. No surfing, but the sparkling water looked warm, inviting.
De Falla had chosen this spot for drilling because his geology profile indicated the planet’s crust was thinner here.
“If the damned planet really is hollow,” he had told Brandon and Jordan, “then you might be able to break through the crust and prove it.”
>
Brandon had laughed at the geologist. “It’s not hollow, Silvio. You know that and I know that.”
De Falla had nodded grudgingly. “But nobody’s told the damned computer program.”
Jordan couldn’t help picturing in his mind what would happen if the planet really was hollow and they punctured its thin shell. He saw a balloon collapsing, whizzing every which way as the air inside it escaped.
Not very likely, he told himself. Still, he couldn’t shake the image.
With Hazzard piloting remotely, the plane made a long, swooping turn out over the water, then glided in for a smooth landing on the hard-packed beach sand. Even before the engines had completely shut down, Brandon unbuckled his seat harness and headed for the hatch.
“Looks like a tropical paradise out there,” he said over his shoulder. “We should have brought the women.”
Fine time to think of that, Jordan grumbled silently as he got up from his seat.
He followed Brandon to the hatch. His brother swung it open and Jordan heard the murmur of surf. Looking past Brandon’s shoulder, he saw that the waves lapping up on the beach were only a few centimeters high. Babies could play here, he thought. Then he remembered that Aditi’s people had no babies, not at present.
The beach was as lovely as a video scene, with graceful palmlike trees fringing it, swaying gently in the warm breeze blowing in off the sea. Sirius was high in the brazen sky, bright and hot. Jordan welcomed its warmth on his shoulders, although he had to put on a pair of dark glasses to cut down the glare.
Turning, he saw a pair of humanform robots already at work, unloading equipment from the plane’s cargo hatch. The crates looked big, heavy.
“What’s that?” he asked as they walked toward the hardworking robots.
Brandon peered at the nearest crate. “Laser drilling equipment. For de Falla’s deep core.”
“How far down will it drill?”
“Tens of kilometers, unless there’s a hitch.”
“You mean, unless the beam strikes especially hard rock?”
Brandon shook his head vigorously. “No, Jordy. The beam’s powerful enough to vaporize any kind of rock. The only problems we might encounter will be equipment breakdowns. Once we’ve got the laser running, it’ll cut through anything like butter.”