New Earth

by Ben Bova

  Jordan felt impressed.

  With a wicked grin, Brandon punned, “Now we’re going to get down to the core of the matter.”

  “Can we go deep enough to disprove that the planet’s hollow?”

  “Yes indeed, Jordy.” Brandon couldn’t suppress another pun. “We’re going to knock the stuffing out of the hollow planet idea.”

  It’s going to be a long week, Jordan told himself.

  SOONER OR LATER

  It took two days to wipe the confident grin off Brandon’s face.

  The afternoon that they landed was spent in setting up the laser drill. Brandon picked a spot away from the beach, up amidst the trees and ground foliage. With Jordan’s help, he set up a pair of seismometers and a miniature radio transmitter that allowed the GPS satellites in orbit overhead to fix their position with nanometer precision.

  While they were doing that, the robots erected their tent. Brandon had politely refused Aditi’s offer of an energy shield.

  “We won’t need it,” he said.

  Jordan thought it might have been interesting to sleep out in the open, without a tent hemming in their view, but he went along with his brother’s decision. Bran’s been on field trips a lot more than I have, he told himself.

  Once the tent was up and filled with their two cots and footlockers, Brandon led one of the robots, carrying a power shovel, to dig a latrine back in the brush and trees that fringed the beach. Adri and the city’s biologists had assured them that there would be no environmental problem from the latrines. Same DNA, Jordan thought. We won’t contaminate anything here.

  They slept on side-by-side cots in the tent, but Jordan awoke in the middle of the night. Restless, he got up quietly from his cot and tiptoed out into the night. It was cool in nothing but his T-shirt and briefs; the breeze coming in off the sea chilled him.

  Yet the sea itself was magnificently beautiful and he regretted not bringing Aditi with him to share it. No moon, but the Pup, low on the horizon, sent a stream of glittering silver across the softly murmuring sea. Stars twinkled in the sky. Jordan tried to make sense out of their configurations, but he couldn’t recognize any of the constellations he knew from Earth.

  Except—he peered into the dark sky and, yes, there was Orion, leaning lopsidedly above the sea horizon. Good old Orion! Jordan’s heart leaped at the familiarity of it. Rigel, Betelgeuse, the Belt, and the Sword. Eight point six light-years from home, and there was Orion, friendly and familiar.

  On an impulse, he ducked back into the tent and rummaged in the dark until he found his pocketphone. Then he went back outside and called Aditi. She was thickheaded with sleep at first, but as Jordan showed her the beach and the soft glow of the Pup she revived.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “I wish you were here,” said Jordan.

  “Well, we can share the view, at least.”

  He sat on the sand, his back against one of the gracefully bent trees, and held the phone so that Aditi could see the silvery waves running gently up the beach. They talked until he grew drowsy.

  At last Aditi said, “You’d better get back to your bed, Jordan. You’re half asleep.”

  “Good night, love,” he said.

  “Good night, darling,” she replied.

  “I wish you were here.”

  “So do I.”

  He went back to his cot and slept soundly until sunrise.

  * * *

  Drilling began with the morning. Brandon spent much of his time on the phone with de Falla, making certain that everything was just right, before turning on the laser. It rumbled to life, and a plume of smoke burst up from the ground.

  “Won’t the smoke block the laser’s beam?” Jordan asked.

  Standing with his fists on his hips like some old-time plantation overseer, Brandon replied, “De Falla says it won’t. The beam is intense enough to burn right through the smoke. It just recondenses as the gases rise above the laser’s output head. What you’re seeing won’t affect the laser at all.”

  And it certainly appeared so. All day long, Jordan watched the control console that the robots had set up next to their tent. It was linked to the laser equipment by a tangle of snaking cables. The laser growled away and the graph on the console’s central screen showed a single bright green line heading straight down, deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust. By sunset it had passed the eight-kilometer mark and was still blazing away, without stopping.

  “Should we leave it running overnight?” Jordan asked.

  “Why not? The robots can tend to it. If there’s any problem they can wake us.”

  Over their prepackaged dinners, Jordan said, “So this is what field work is all about. The robots do the work and you take the credit.”

  Brandon frowned at his brother. “I gather the data. I make sense out of what the equipment is doing. I’m the brains of this operation.”

  “And the robots supply the muscle.”

  “Used to be grad students that provided the muscle. I put in my time as slave labor, believe me.”

  “I suppose you did,” said Jordan.

  They finished eating, did their ablutions, and got ready for sleep. Jordan could hear the laser growling away out in the darkness. It ruined the romantic aura of the place, he thought.

  As he stretched out on his cot, hands cradling the back of his head, Brandon reminisced, “Grad students included women, of course. Field trips were a lot more interesting then.”

  “Perhaps Thornberry could rig one of the robots for you,” Jordan suggested, grinning into the shadows.

  “That’s a filthy idea, Jordy. I like it.”

  “Ask Thornberry about it,” Jordan joked.

  “You think Mitch is making out with Tanya?” Brandon asked.

  “Yes,” Jordan answered without hesitation. “It’s Longyear and de Falla I wonder about. They’re both young and unattached.”

  “Maybe Yamaguchi’s giving them something to dampen their sex drive.”

  “Then there’s Yamaguchi herself. What about her sex drive?”

  “She’s Japanese. Terrific self-discipline.”

  “And Hazzard?”

  “Trish.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Jordan said. “What do you make of Zadar?”

  Brandon didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “He’s Greek, of course…”

  “Don’t be a lout!”

  With a chuckle, Brandon said, “I don’t know. Demetrios is a pretty quiet guy.”

  Jordan surprised himself by asking, “How serious are you about Elyse?”

  “Pretty damned serious,” Brandon replied without hesitation. “She means a lot to me, and I think I mean a lot to her.”

  “Good,” said Jordan. “It’s time you found someone.”

  “Approval from my big brother! That’s a first.”

  Surprised, almost hurt, Jordan said, “I want you to be happy, Bran.”

  “Works both ways, Jordy. What about you and Aditi?”

  Jordan sighed. “I didn’t think that, after Miriam, I could ever fall in love again. But I have.”

  “It’s a little tricky, her not being really human.”

  “She’s as human as you or I, Bran. As human as Elyse.”

  Brandon didn’t reply for several moments. Then, “But when it comes time for us to leave, Jordy, what then?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. Neither one of us wants to look that far ahead.”

  “But you’ll have to, sooner or later.”

  “Sooner or later,” Jordan agreed. “Sooner or later.”

  SURPRISE

  Jordan woke with sunlight glowing on the wall of the tent. Brandon’s cot was already empty, though rumpled, unmade. Jordan could see him sitting outside on the folding chair in front of the console that was monitoring the laser’s progress, wearing nothing but his skivvies. He dressed quickly, then went out to the latrine. He could hear the laser thrumming steadily.

  God’s in his heaven, he
thought, and the equipment’s working fine. All’s right with the world.

  But then he heard Brandon call, “Jordy, take a look at this.”

  Jordan walked to where Brandon was sitting and, peering over his brother’s shoulder, saw that the bright green line depicting the depth of the borehole had flattened out.

  “That can’t be right,” he said to his brother. “Can it?”

  Brandon hunched forward in the rickety folding chair, scowling and muttering as he tapped keys on the console’s control board.

  “Damned thing hasn’t gone a centimeter deeper since just after midnight.”

  “But the laser’s still running,” Jordan said.

  “It is, but it’s not going anywhere.”

  “How can that be?”

  Shaking his head, Brandon muttered, “Damned if I know.”

  “It’s hit something that it can’t vaporize,” Jordan mused. “Some particularly hard form of rock.”

  “Jordy, that laser is powerful enough to vaporize any kind of rock. Construction crews used lasers like that to dig the Moho shaft in Siberia, for chrissakes.”

  “Well, something has stopped it.”

  Brandon bolted out of the flimsy chair, knocking it over, and hurried to the generator that powered the laser. He looked more than a little ridiculous, Jordan thought, in nothing but his briefs and T-shirt, standing between the two silent and unmoving robots.

  “Power output’s at maximum,” he called to Jordan as he scanned the generator’s dials. “That beam’s powerful enough to melt the Rock of Gibraltar.”

  “How long can the generator go on running?”

  “Weeks. It’s nuclear.”

  “And the laser is working?”

  “Christ, Jordy, you can hear it running!”

  Jordan realized how upset Brandon was; he only used language like that when he was distraught. There was no smoke blowing out of the borehole. The laser is running, but it’s not vaporizing any of the rock down there.

  How deep has it gone? he wondered. A glance at the console’s screen showed him. The depth line flattened out at fourteen kilometers.

  Brandon came back to the console, carefully picked up the chair, then leaned a thumb on a square red button on the control board. The laser abruptly turned off. The world went quiet. Then Jordan heard the sighing of the trees in the soft breeze, the murmur of the surf. A bird trilled, somewhere.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “I’m going to get dressed,” Brandon said, “after I instruct the robots to pull up the laser head.”

  “And then?”

  With a grim shrug, Brandon replied, “Then we send a camera down the hole and see what the hell’s stopped the goddamned laser.”

  They picked at their breakfasts while the robots methodically hauled the laser head back up to the surface.

  Brandon said, “Well, it sure isn’t hollow.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Might be some weird form of matter. Some super condensate.”

  Jordan dipped his chin slightly. “Apparently this planet isn’t an exact duplicate of Earth.”

  “Not below its crust, anyway.”

  “It only looks like Earth on the surface.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jordan could see that Brandon was despondent, deeply disappointed that the laser had run into a problem he couldn’t understand.

  “Well,” he said, as brightly as he could manage, “perhaps you’ve run into a new kind of planetary structure. You might become just as famous as that fellow who discovered continental drift.”

  “Wegener,” Brandon answered dully.

  “You ought to call de Falla and see if any of the other drills have run into the same problem,” Jordan suggested.

  Cheering up a bit, Brandon said, “Good idea.”

  Jordan walked toward the borehole, where the two robots were working the equipment that was slowly hauling the laser head up to the surface. Fourteen kilometers, he recalled. It’ll take several hours to get the laser up here and then a camera down again.

  Brandon came over beside him. “De Falla says none of the other drills have gone as deep as we have yet.”

  “The perils of the pioneer,” Jordan said, trying to lighten his brother’s mood. “Being first and all that.”

  Brandon huffed. “Somebody once said that pioneering is just finding new ways to get yourself killed.”

  “Oh, come on now, Bran. You’ve run into something new, something unprecedented, perhaps. You should be elated. It’s a chance to learn new things about planetary structures.”

  His brother nodded bleakly. “Maybe.”

  It was late afternoon by the time the robots got the camera down to the level where the laser had stopped. De Falla phoned to tell them that two of the other drilling rigs had stopped, as well.

  “At what depth?” Brandon asked.

  “Fourteen klicks,” answered the geologist. “Give or take a dozen meters.”

  “Something’s down there,” Brandon said tightly. He was sitting at the console again. Its central screen showed a murky view from the still-descending camera. Jordan saw from the data bar alongside the screen that the camera had almost reached the depth where the laser had been stopped.

  In the phone’s screen, de Falla looked more puzzled than dejected. “Something’s down there, all right,” he agreed. “But what?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Brandon said. “We’re starting to get a camera view.” He clicked the phone shut and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  Jordan looked over his brother’s shoulder at the console’s main screen. The two robots stood behind him, silent and still. Yet Jordan couldn’t help feeling that they were peering over his shoulder, straining to see what was down there, just as he was.

  The lights that accompanied the camera brightened to full intensity. Jordan blinked at what he saw. He heard Brandon grunt.

  “It looks like metal,” Brandon muttered.

  “Smooth,” said Jordan. “As if it were polished.”

  “It is polished,” Brandon said. “And there isn’t even a scorch mark from where the laser beam hit it.”

  “Polished metal?” Jordan wondered aloud.

  “It’s artificial,” said Brandon, with absolute certainty.

  CONFIRMATION

  They sent the camera’s view back to de Falla, at his digging site, and the geologist excitedly reported running into the same metallic barrier at the same depth.

  Brandon looked sulky, almost angry. Jordan had seen that expression on his brother’s face many times before: when Brandon couldn’t get what he wanted, he pouted.

  “A layer of polished metal at a depth of fourteen kilometers below the surface,” Jordan mused. “That’s…” He struggled to find a word.

  “All across the planet,” Brandon said, almost growling.

  “Only six points,” Jordan pointed out.

  “Jordy, we could dig six hundred boreholes. Or six thousand, six million. We’ll find the same thing in every one, guaranteed.”

  Jordan thought that nothing they had yet found on New Earth could be guaranteed.

  “Come on,” Brandon said. “Let’s pack it all in and get back to the base camp. I want to talk to Adri about this.”

  “Yes,” Jordan agreed. “He has some explaining to do.”

  * * *

  It was twilight when their rocketplane touched down at the base camp. De Falla was already there, waiting impatiently as they came down the metal ladder from the plane’s hatch.

  “I left the robots to pack up,” the geologist said. “Hazzard’ll fly them all back here tomorrow.”

  “Why the rush?” Brandon asked.

  Leading them straight to the bubble tent that housed the geology lab, de Falla said, “I wanted to run the data about this metal layer through the profile program, see what comes up.”

  Brandon nodded. “Makes sense.”

  Meek, Thornberry, and Elyse joined them as they practically tr
otted toward the tent.

  Brandon reached out his hand to Elyse as he asked her, “You came back from the city?”

  “Once Adri told me you were returning from your field excursion, yes,” she said, smiling happily at him.

  “What do you make of this latest finding?” Meek asked Jordan.

  “Harmon, I’m merely an unemployed administrator. I don’t make scientific judgments. That’s your department.”

  “It can’t be natural,” Brandon said.

  De Falla, leading their little parade, said over his shoulder, “That’s my conclusion, too. A sheet of polished metal fourteen kilometers deep isn’t natural.”

  Jordan expected Meek to be glowing with triumph. Instead, he looked worried, frightened. “How could there be a layer of polished metal fourteen kilometers below the surface?”

  “We’ll have to ask Adri,” said Jordan.

  “And if he doesn’t know?”

  “He knows,” de Falla said, with grim certainty. “The question is, will he tell us?”

  * * *

  Jordan phoned Adri, who immediately agreed to come to the camp to answer their questions. Jordan wondered if Aditi would come with him, but hesitated to ask in front of all the others.

  They ate dinner together while they waited for the alien, all nine of them, bouncing unanswerable questions around the table, making guesses, suppositions. Jordan listened to them in silence. Scientists, he thought; they can’t simply sit and admit they don’t know what’s going on. They have to try to find an answer. Or invent one.

  A scrap of poetry came to his mind. Robert Frost, he remembered: We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

  It was full night by the time Adri reached the camp, walking briskly in his usual befigured robe. Jordan’s pulse quickened when he saw that Aditi walked beside him, looking fresh and happy in a knee-length skirt of dark green and a short-sleeved white blouse.

  The night was lit by the Pup, casting a silvery moon glow over the tall, silent trees and the round white domes of the camp.

  “Good evening, my friends,” said Adri, his thin voice carrying through the shadows. “It’s good to see you all once more.”