The man swinging his pick beside her stopped and joined her at the trail’s edge. He nodded at the Lander, made a speculative comment. She shook her head in reply. He nudged her elbow, spread his palms, then held up four fingers. The woman sniffed, considering. The man dug into a hidden pocket and hauled forth a fistful of small white stones, flat and smooth from long handling. He counted, put a few away, held the others out to her. She shook her head, grinning faintly, held up six fingers. The man chuckled, dug again and returned one more stone to his palm. She looked, then finally nodded in agreement and reached for her pick but did not immediately raise it. For a moment more, she and her companion regarded the alien metal shape in silence. Then they exchanged brief, dubious glances and returned to their work.
At the foot of the cliffs, the sound of water could be heard, running beneath the snow.
6
The cubicle was low-ceilinged, a narrow pie wedge atop the starboard engine, tucked inside the Lander’s curving shell. In the sickish glow of a double bank of screens and holographic monitors, Taylor Danforth hunched over his console, his long legs cramped into the abbreviated space beneath the keypad. One fist supported his forehead. The other pushed fitfully at knotted muscles in the small of his back.
“Run that by once more, CRI,” he muttered wearily.
The center screen blanked and flicked back to dim life as data chattered across it. Danforth stared, glanced at the dimensional wind vector map floating above the holo pad to his right, rubbed his eyes, then returned them to the screen in front of him, wagging his head in reflex negation. “Heat flux profile’s building too fast,” he sighed. “CRI, forget the cross sections. Give me the hemispherics on holo. I want to try this station by station, just the raw numbers.”
“Time period?” The computer offered no comment on Danforth’s implied rejection of its data analysis. Its voice mode was thin and scratchy, humanized by undertones of strained patience.
“Just the last five ship’s days, local conditions first.”
The screens blanked obediently and the holographic vector display vanished, to be replaced by a slowly revolving black-and-white image of a cloud-draped sphere. A broad cut of clear sky crossed the equatorial regions on a diagonal running northwest to southeast. In the northern hemisphere, gray patches of ocean were visible through scattered breaks in the clouds. The geographical features not hidden by clouds were whitened into indistinction by the heavy snow blanket, except in one anomalous area in the southern hemisphere, where a circular upthrust of mountains remained oddly free of both snow and clouds. Between these southern mountains and the clear equatorial band, the holograph was incomplete in several sectors, so that the image was of a partial sphere, a planet missing square chunks of its anatomy.
New figures marched across the center monitor.
“Home station L-Alpha,” the computer announced. “Position, Lander. 24.09 degrees north latitude, 31.66 degrees east longitude. Activated ship’s day 119, Landing plus one. Functional to present, L plus 47.5, 1600 hours.”
Danforth stirred restlessly. “Spare me the calendar, CRI. Just give me the readings. Display the six-week averages on Four.”
Ranks of numbers built rapidly across the center screen. A more leisurely listing began on a screen to the left. Watching, Danforth worried his full lower lip with the tip of his tongue. “Include surface radiation with each listing.” His hand left off massaging his forehead long enough to tap briefly at the keypad. “Six weeks’ average temp, minus eighteen C., and look at it now,” he growled. “Okay, store that for the time being and move on. Wait. Shit. Those high winds are back again.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Danforth, but Mr. Ibiá is requesting immediate clearance.”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
“I have done so, sir, but Mr. Ibiá insists that it’s urgent.”
“Patch him through to the Underbelly.” Danforth grimaced, focused on the screens. His fingers hovered over the keypad, indecisive with frustration.
“I have done that also, sir, but no one is answering downstairs.”
Danforth’s hands curled into fists. “So where’s Weng? Am I the only one dumb enough to be always available? Tell Stavros you couldn’t raise me either.”
After a minute’s hesitation, the computer admitted, “I already told him you were in your office, sir. He seems very concerned to speak with someone in the Lander. Anyone.”
“Tell him I’m in the head!” Danforth’s tone threatened retribution. “Move on to L-Beta.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
The big man’s slippered feet wrestled with each other dangerously. “Don’t get sullen with me, CRI. I haven’t got time for it. L-Beta?”
“Weather station L-Beta.” The computer’s words were noticeably clipped. “Position, 25.18 north, 32.46 east. Activa—”
“CRI, just the readings.”
New figures slammed onto the screen. Danforth glared at them and entered his notes in silence, working at the pad as if it were resisting his touch. “Where the hell is that south wind getting all its energy? Display the moisture flux alongside, please.” He sucked his cheek disconsolately. “Bottomed out. Damn!” He shook his head. “Go on.”
“Station L-Gamma. Posit—”
“Goddammit, CRI!” Danforth’s hand swung and stopped millimeters above the keypad. His swivel stool screeched with the sudden movement. “L-Gamma’s been dysfunctional for two weeks! Get on with it!”
All ten screens went dead and the holographic sphere blinked out, leaving the planetologist fuming in the dark. There was a pause like a sigh, then the sphere popped back into glowing, revolving life and the screens regained their columns of data. “L-Delta,” CRI continued stolidly.
Danforth scanned the figures like an alchemist in search of an elusive spell. His head nodded heavily. His shoulders drew up around his neck as if seeking to deny their natural broadness, thereby perhaps avoiding some part of the burden currently weighing on them. “Is L-Delta showing any signs of sensor malfunction?” he complained. “Its temp reading hasn’t moved a degree in seventy-two hours.”
“Any malfunction would be noted with the data,” CRI returned crisply. “This new activity is highly localized. You will note that I am registering sharp temp increases from both the western stations, Epsilon and Iota.”
The door at Danforth’s back slid open noisily. He half turned on his stool, blinking into the glare of the corridor lights. “I’m busy,” he growled.
“For Christ’s sake, Tay, pull your nose away from your instruments long enough to take a look outside!” Clausen touched the light pad by the door. The room remained in semidarkness. He clucked his tongue and crowded into the cubicle. “Your lights are broken.”
“I said I’m busy.”
Plastic clattered as Clausen tripped on a discarded meal tray. “Greetings, CRI, my little metal chickadee.”
The computer’s voice brightened. “Greetings! The reference is to an ancient celluloid…”
Danforth groaned.
“You really ought to get out there, Tay,” Clausen pursued.
“I’m perfectly aware of what’s going on outside,” Danforth snapped. “Zero to seventy in eight-six minutes.”
“Excellent acceleration for an old car.” grinned the prospector.
“Emil, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Sense in whose terms? Come on, Tay, worry it to death later. The sun’s out… the sun, which you haven’t seen since you set foot on this planet, which is going to set in another sixteen hours and which will then not reappear for another two weeks. Get out and get it while you can! Up in the Caves, the natives are restless. You can almost hear the drums beating.” Clausen paused to let his sly grin build. “You’ll feel right at home, Tay.”
Despite himself, the black man smiled. “My ancestors were ruling desert kingdoms when yours were still trying to figure out which end of a stone ax to use!” He arched his back and stretched, giving in to the prospector’s intr
usion. “So how’re you coming with the radar imaging? Any intimations of paydirt?”
“That’s better.” Clausen chuckled, then rubbed his hands together. “I do have some promising sites located. Resolution’s only decent, at about fourteen meters, but it beats all that blank white in the photo survey. The altimetry and gravity anomaly data seem to correlate interestingly with a few of them.” He edged around Danforth’s seated bulk to crank open the metal shutters covering the cubicle’s single port. They squealed softly on their pivots.
“Oil,” CRI muttered absently as late sunlight flooded the tiny space. Bright amber bars slashed high across the smudged gray walls, picking out craterlike dents and graffiti consisting largely of numbers and scrawled Greek letters. Danforth gazed at the liquid warmth as if it were an alien invader. “Oil,” the computer repeated.
“Regular use,” Clausen corrected. “And, CRI… the paint’s chipping on your keypad.”
“Mr. Clausen, there is no paint on my keypad.”
“Figure of speech, CRI. Full of subtle human connotations.”
When the machine remained silent, Clausen added, “The proper response to that remark is ‘Up yours, Clausen.’ ”
“That would be the human response, I believe,” said CRI.
“Touché! You’re learning, my girl!”
“Christ, Emil, don’t encourage her.” Danforth twisted his stool away from the invading sunlight and stretched his legs out through the open door. His dark head sank low into his shoulders. “Really isn’t fair,” he mused.
“Fair? What’s fair?” Clausen leaned against the console, watching the planetologist’s back. His eyelids drooped, a watchful lizard sunning on a rock. Though his arms lay folded casually across his chest, his fingers twitched.
“Fair,” replied Danforth, “is arriving at a planet and finding some correlation between speculations based on the probe data and what the climate actually turns out to be. Fair is when preliminary modeling offers some Success in forecasting. Right now I’d be doing better if I’d brought along an almanac, or a wand and a pointy hat!”
The prospector repressed an impatient sigh. “Relax. It’s obvious that the probe wasn’t here long enough to record an entire seasonal cycle.”
“The probe!” Danforth sneered. “The damn probe lied!”
“Why, Taylor. How quaint and anthropomorphic. And you object to my small attempts to civilize our back-model queen of circuitry.”
“Ecch. The only ship’s brain in the Colonies with an entire unit devoted to cultural trivia.” The black man shook his head disgustedly. “Look, Emil: you want a profitable lithium operation on this planet-how can you pretend this doesn’t concern you? Based on the probe data…”
“We’ve been over this…” Clausen began.
“… there shouldn’t be ten meters of snow in the first place!”
“… and over, and over…”
“All right. So I spend six weeks chasing whatever indeterminable it is that’s been keeping the temp down and the humidity up. Just when I think maybe I got it psyched, the damn temp shoots up, the moisture bottoms out, and we’ve got a major thaw on our hands!” He spread his palms in exasperation. “Not a hint of it in my long-range data. Emil, how can it happen so fast? The heat’s even coming from the wrong direction!”
The lizard eyes narrowed as Clausen yawned. “Snow happens. Thaws, too. Assume an unusually harsh winter.”
“Gods, Emil, don’t you care about anything except what goes on under the ground? How about a glacier in the Amazon? Would that perturb you?”
Clausen’s tongue flicked, a lizard grin. “It might, if it got in the way of my prospecting.”
Danforth pulled himself upright on his stool, heatedly ticking off items on his fingers. “It’d be real easy to dismiss this as winter and spring if we could expect true seasons here, but you know better than that: axial tilt of a mere eight degrees, 281-day orbit nearly circular with the planet right now as close to her sun as her orbit allows, massive atmosphere, slow rotation…”
“… moderate greenhouse effect,” Clausen recited tiredly. “Short distance from a cool star that’s starting to go red giant and heating up as it moves off from the Main Sequence, blah, blah, blah…”
“… even with the planet’s month-long day, the winds should keep the surface temp from varying much, certainly not as much as zero to seventy! Perihelion was thirty-six hours ago. My model says the global average should be 115 degrees, high summer in the desert, and here we are, socked in for six weeks under ten meters of snow! So much for the rational method!”
Clausen glanced languidly over his shoulder. Through the port shutters, the topaz sky glared hot and cloudless. His blunt fingers beat a controlled rhythm against the perfect knit of his sweater. “Look outside, Tay. It is high summer in the desert. Right now. Time to get up and about.”
“I didn’t come here to do fucking weather, anyway!” growled the planetologist. “Spend so much time wrestling with this damn atmospheric model… should have been the easy part.” He squeezed his eyes shut and surrendered to gloom. “I put my career in hock for this mission, Emil, you know that. When that probe data came in, I thought, man, this is it! A globular cluster we can—I can—get at. Planeted population II stars actually within starship range! A close-up look at a type of planetary evolution we’ve never been able to touch before, planets near a star going off the Main Sequence, and I’m going to be there first! So. What does it all come to? I can’t even get a simple forecast model working, much less a general circulation model. And forget the macro stuff, like a nice climate model or atmospheric and planetary evolution theories, the real publishable material.”
Clausen’s attempt at a sympathetic nod went unnoticed. He considered a moment, then pushed himself away from the console, tugging at invisible cuffs and cackling like a mischievous dwarf. “CRI, take a letter. It seems our boy Taylor is feeling a bit sorry for himself. Let’s see… how does this sound?” He cleared his throat, the lizard eyes watching Danforth carefully.
“A half a league inside the Coal Sack,
Byrnham’s Cluster lies…
Clouds of dust and gas obscuring
Taylor’s Nobel Prize.
You like it?”
Danforth’s look was sour. “Dust and gas are not the problem, but sure, mock away, Emil. Your reputation was made long ago. All you’ve got at stake here is money.”
The easy grin hardened. “All?”
Danforth raised both palms. “I know, I know. No money, no expedition. My acceptance speech will include proper and abject thanks to you and CONPLEX. Don’t lecture me, Emil.”
The grin fell away like a used skin. “A lecture for a lecture, my boy. You will recall that you put my career in hock as well.” Clausen’s hands slid into his pockets as he took advantage of the bigger man’s seated position to stare down at him. “In my biz, you’re only as good as your last strike, and believe me, there are closer worlds than this to go looking for lithium. I had a long list.”
“Oh, right. The list. On every one of those planets, CONPLEX’d be sharing mineral rights three, four ways.”
“Thirty-three percent of a sure thing beats hell out of a hundred percent of nothing.”
Danforth scowled defensively. “There’s lithium here. The system’s history assures us of that.”
“But in what quantity? How pure? How accessible? Will our industries buy it at a higher price than it costs to get it to them?”
“Come on, man! Risks are your business. You cross-checked the data when I brought the idea to you! This is a fucking huge planet! When you strike, you’ll strike big!”
Clausen eyed him steadily, unspeaking.
“What, are you getting cold feet?”
Clausen blinked, slowly. “Just reminding you of your our position here. One month into most prospectings, I’ve made my strike, staked the claim, and ordered the equipment droned in… The Company is going to wonder what’s taking me so long, and was
I maybe crazy to advise them to buy a whole research mission for some young hotshot, on the strength of a theory.”
“It’s here. I know it’s here.”
“Like you knew the climate’d be ideal for mining?”
“Off my back, man! We share the profits, we also share the rap.”
“My point precisely.” The prospector laughed softly, poised ambiguously enough between ruefulness and condescension to leave Danforth at a loss. The black man retreated into disdain.
“The biggest mining conglomerate in the Colonies can afford to fund a little pure science now and then.”
“We do, we do. Our Public Relations Department insists on it. But we don’t usually back it up by rerouting our newest and best FTL ship which could be out making billions for us elsewhere.” Clausen laid a paternal hand on the planetologist’s broad shoulder. “Did you think ‘pure’ was something like ‘fair,’ my boy? If so, I have bad news for you.” He lowered his voice to a sibilant whisper though his grip remained loose and amiable. “Fair is a fairy tale, and pure science went extinct years ago. This is a deal we have, Tay. You get your science, we get out lithium. It’s not take-a-researcher-to-lunch.” He backed off then, and smiled. “It’s simple, really: CONPLEX pays for what it needs. Of course, if you should happen upon a Nobel along the way, we will happily bathe in the reflected glory. But keep your priorities straight, for your own sake.”
The Wave and the Flame Page 4