The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  A multi-colored blob filled the screen. It was a set of concentric ellipses, color coded to run from a dark red in its center portion to a violet on the outer boundary.

  “Different colors represent different temperatures.” McAndrew touched a button, and a dark ellipse appeared around the red and orange portions at the center of the image. “I’ve just put in the contour for zero degrees Celsius. See? Significant, eh?”

  “See what?” said Anna. She was sitting close to McAndrew, their shoulders touching.

  “The inside—inside the curve. It’s warmer than the melting-point of ice. If Manna has a water-ice core, it must be liquid. There’s a couple of kilometers of frozen surface, then that liquid interior.”

  “But we’re out in the Halo,” I protested. “We’re billions of miles from a source of heat. Unless—did Lanhoff already put one of his fusion plants in there?”

  “No.” McAndrew shook his head. His eyes were sparkling. “The temperature distribution inside was like this before Lanhoff arrived. You’re right, Jeanie, it looks impossible—but there it is. Manna is three hundred degrees warmer than it has any right to be.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Will Bayes cleared his throat. “All right, I’ll be the dummy. How can that happen?”

  McAndrew gave a little bark of excitement. “Man, if I had a definite answer to that I wouldn’t hold out on you. But I can make a good guess. There has to be a natural internal source of heat, something like uranium or thorium deep inside. That’s consistent with the high radioactivity value, too.” He turned to me. “Jeanie, you have to get us over there, so we can take a good look at the inside.”

  I hesitated. “Will it be safe?” I said at last. “If it’s uranium and water—you can make a nuclear reactor from them.”

  “Yes—if you try really hard. But it wouldn’t happen in nature. Be reasonable, Jeanie.”

  He was looking at me expectantly, while Anna sat silent. She liked to see him putting the pressure on me for a change.

  I shook my head. “If you want to go over there and explore, I won’t try to stop you. But my job is the safety of this ship. I’m staying right here.” Logic was all on my side. But even as I spoke I felt that I was giving the coward’s answer.

  From a distance of fifty kilometers, Manna already filled the sky ahead, a black bulk against the star field. Star Harvester hung as a cluster of glittering spheres near one end of the planetoid. It steadily grew in size on the screen as the pod moved in, one of its television cameras sending a crisp image back to my observing post on the Hoatzin. I could see the dozen Sections and the narrow connectors between them, hollow tubes that were flexible now but electromagnetically stiffened when the drive went on.

  “Approaching outermost cargo sphere,” said McAndrew. I could see him on the screen that showed the inside of the pod, and a third image showed and recorded for me the pod control settings exactly as he saw them himself.

  “Everything still appears perfectly normal,” he went on. “We’ll make our entry of Star Harvester through the Control Section. What is it, Anna?”

  He turned to where she was monitoring another sensor, one for which I was not receiving coverage.

  “Cut in Unit Four.” I said quickly.

  At my command the computers sent the image Anna and Will were watching to fill the center screen. I saw a long shaft that extended from a cargo hold of Star Harvester and drove down to penetrate the rough surface of Manna. The camera tracked its length, switching to deep radar frequencies to generate an image where the shaft plunged below the planetoid’s surface.

  “Is that a drilling shaft?” I asked. “It looks as though they were getting ready to put a fusion plant in the middle of Manna.”

  “Wouldn’t make sense.” McAndrew spoke in an abstracted grunt, and I saw him rubbing at the balding spot on the back of his head. “Lanhoff knew quite well that Manna has a liquid core—he had the same computer base to look at as we do. With that core he didn’t need a fusion plant at all. The interior would be warm enough already for his enzymes to thrive.”

  “Was he looking for radioactive material?” I asked; but I could answer that question myself. “It wouldn’t make sense. He could locate them the same way we did, from remote measurement. So why would he drill into the core?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Anna suddenly. “That’s the way Arne always was. Anytime he saw something that he didn’t understand he wanted to investigate—he couldn’t resist it. I’ll bet he drilled to the core to take a closer look at something he’d detected in there—something he couldn’t examine closely enough from outside.”

  The pod had been creeping in nearer and nearer to the hatches on the Control Section. I suddenly realized that once the three of them went inside I would be blind.

  “Mac, as soon as you get in there, turn on all the monitors and tell the computer to send the signals back to me here on the Hoatzin.” I raised my voice. “And one of you has to stay in the Control Section if you go down to the surface. D’you hear me?”

  He nodded vaguely, but he was already moving toward the hatch. Anna followed him. The last thing I saw before the camera could no longer keep them in view was Will Bayes’ face as he turned to take a last worried look around the pod.

  Deserted, but in perfect working order; that was the conclusion after a thorough examination of the Control Section of Star Harvester.

  I had followed on the remote monitors as the other three made their inspection, step by step, and I could not fault them for lack of caution.

  “We’ll not find Lanhoff and his crew here,” said McAndrew finally, when they were back in the main control room. “They must have gone down into the interior of Manna. Look at this.”

  A computer-generated profile of the shaft leading down from the ship to the surface appeared on the screen in front of me. It penetrated the frozen outer crust and terminated in an airlock leading to the liquid core. In the graphics display the broad shaft looked like a hair-thin needle piercing an egg. I was astonished again by the size of the planetoid. Its liquid core held half a million cubic kilometers of liquid. Maybe we would never find Lanhoff and the other crew members.

  “We know they went down there,” went on McAndrew, as though he was reading my thoughts. He held up a big clear container full of a cloudy yellow fluid. “See? They brought back samples. I’ll send you the analysis, but I can tell you now that the results are just what Lanhoff predicted.”

  “It’s high-level organic materials,” added Anna. She was looking at me in triumph. “I told you we had to come here to find anything useful. This is just as we expected, but even more concentrated than I hoped. We’ve found a mother lode. The whole inside of Manna is like a rich soup—one of us could probably drink it for dinner and feel well-fed.”

  Will Bayes was staring at it dubiously, as though he expected Anna to tell him to go ahead and take a swig. “There’s things living in it,” he said.

  My old fears came running back. “Mac, be careful how you handle that. If there are organisms there…”

  “Just single-celled ones.” McAndrew was excited. “Lanhoff thought he might find primitive life here, and he was quite right.”

  “And it’s DNA-based,” added Anna. “The same as we are.”

  I looked more closely at the yellow broth. “So the old theories must be right? Life came to Earth from outside.”

  “That’s the real significance of what they found on Manna,” said McAndrew. “Life didn’t originate on Earth. It began out here in the Halo, or somewhere even farther out, and drifted in to Earth—maybe in the head of a comet, or as smaller meteorites. But see the difference; down on Earth we’ve had pressures to make us evolve away from a single cell form. Here, there’s heat from the radioactive materials in the middle of the planetoid, and there’s food galore. There’s no reason for evolution as we know it. That’s why I don’t share your worries, Jeanie, about going down to the interior. There’s no evolutionary reason for predat
ors on Manna. We won’t find sharks and tigers here. It’s the Garden of Eden.”

  Anna nodded her agreement and squeezed his arm. They were both so excited, I wondered if I were the irrational one. The more enthusiastic they became, the more uneasy I felt. No sharks and tigers, maybe—but wouldn’t there still be natural selection, even if it went on very slowly?

  Shades of Malthusian Doctrine: the number of organisms would follow an increasing geometric progression, and the food resources were finite. Eventually there would have to be a balance, a steady state where dying organisms were just replaced by new ones; and then natural selection ought to take over, with competition between different forms. I didn’t have that logic explicitly in mind, all I knew was that something seemed wrong. And I knew that Mac was no biologist. I stared at the screen and shook my head.

  “So what happened to Lanhoff and his crew?” I said.

  There was a long, uneasy silence.

  “Quite right, Jeanie,” said McAndrew at last. “We still have no answer to that. But we’re going to find one. Will can stay here, and Anna and I will go down there now.”

  “No.” My pulse began to race. “I won’t allow it. It’s too dangerous.”

  “We don’t agree,” said Anna softly. “You heard McAndrew, he says we should look down there—and we’ll go in our suits, so we’ll be well protected.”

  Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Anna Griss knew how to survive in an Earthbound bureaucratic free-for-all, but she was a long way from her home ground. And if she was relying on Mac’s instincts to save their skins…

  “No.” My voice cracked. “Didn’t you hear me? I absolutely forbid it. That’s an order.”

  “Is it?” Anna didn’t raise her voice. “But you see, we’re not in the spacecraft rendezvous mode now, Captain Roker. The Star Harvester is tethered to the planetoid. That means I command here, not you.” She turned to McAndrew. “Come on, let’s make sure we’re fully prepared. We don’t want to take any risks.”

  Before I could speak again she reached forward to the monitor. I suddenly found that I was looking into a blank screen.

  It took me a long five minutes to patch in a substitute communications link between the computers of the Hoatzin and the Star Harvester.

  When the auxiliary screen came alive I saw Will Bayes fiddling with the control bank.

  “Where are they, Will?”

  He turned quickly. “They’re on the way down to the surface. Jeanie, I couldn’t stop them. I said they shouldn’t go, but Anna wouldn’t take any notice of me. And she has Mac convinced, too.”

  I knew McAndrew—he hadn’t taken any convincing at all. Show him an interesting intellectual problem, and preservation of life and limb came a poor second to curiosity.

  “Don’t worry about that, Will. Link me to the computer on board the transfer pod.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go after them. Maybe Mac is right, and they’ll be fine, and in no danger. But I want to be the rearguard and trail along behind them, just in case.”

  Will could have probably flown the pod to pick me up in an emergency, and I knew that the computer could have done it with a single rendezvous command from me. But Will and the computer would have followed the book on permissible rates of acceleration and docking distances. I took remote control of the pod myself, overrode the computer, broke every rule in the manual, and had the pod docked at the Hoatzin in less than fifteen minutes. Going back to the Star Harvester we beat that time by a hundred seconds.

  Will was waiting at the main lock with his suit on. “Something has gone wrong,” he said. “They told me they would send a signal every ten minutes, but it’s been over twenty since the last one. I was going to go down and see what’s happening.”

  “Did you see any weapons on board when you were looking over the ship earlier?”

  “Weapons?” Will frowned. “No. Lanhoff had no reason to carry anything like that. Wait a minute, though, what about a construction laser? That can be pretty dangerous, and there are plenty of those in Section Six.”

  “Get one.” I was preparing the transfer pod for a rapid departure from Star Harvester if we needed it. One time in a thousand, a precaution like that pays off.

  “I’ll get two.”

  Will was off along the tube between the Sections before I could argue with him. I didn’t want him with me in the middle of Manna—I wanted him available to help me out if I ran into trouble myself.

  What was I expecting? I had no idea, but I felt a lot better when I had my suit firmly closed and a portable construction laser tucked under one arm. Will and I went together to the entrance of the long tunnel that led down to the interior of Manna.

  “Right. No farther for you.” I looked at the peculiar way he was holding the laser, and wondered what would happen if he had to use it. “You stay here, at the head of the shaft. I’ll send you a signal every ten minutes.”

  “That’s what Anna said.” His words echoed after me as I dropped away down the broad shaft.

  The illumination came only from the light on my suit. Seen from the inside, the shaft out of the cargo hold dropped away in front of me like a dark, endless tunnel. Manna’s gravity was negligible, so there were none of the Earth dangers of an accelerated fall. But I had to take care to remain clear of the side of the tunnel—it narrowed as we went deeper into the planetoid’s crust. I drifted out to the center of the shaft, turned on the coupling between the suit’s conducting circuits and the pulsed field in the tunnel wall, and made a swift, noiseless descent.

  The three kilometer downward swoop took less than a minute. All the way to the airlock at the bottom I watched carefully for any sign that McAndrew and Anna had met trouble there. Everything was normal.

  The drilling mechanism at the end of the shaft was still in position. Normally the shaft could extend itself through hard, frozen ice at a hundred feet an hour. When they came to the liquid interior, however, Lanhoff had arrested the progress of the drill and installed the airlock. It was a cylindrical double chamber about six meters across, with a movable metal wall separating the two halves.

  I cycled through the first part of the lock, closed the wall, and went forward to the second barrier. I hesitated in front of it. The wall was damp with a viscous fluid. The airlock had been used recently. Anna and McAndrew had passed through here to the liquid core of the planetoid. If I wished to find them I must do the same.

  Was there a port? I wanted to take a good look at the interior of Manna before I was willing even to consider going through into it.

  The only transparent area was a tiny section a few inches across, where a small panel had been removed and replaced by a thin sheet of clear plastic. Lanhoff must have arranged it this way, to make an observation point before he would risk a venture beyond the lock. Despite his curiosity referred to by Anna, it suggested that he was a cautious man—and it seemed to increase the odds against me. I was diving blind, and in a hurry.

  I drifted across and put the faceplate of my suit flat against the transparent plate. The only illumination in the interior was coming from my suit, and because it had to shine through the port I was confused by back-scattered light. I held my hand to shield my eyes, and peered in.

  My first impression was of a snowstorm. Great drifting white flakes swam lazily across the field of view. As I adjusted to the odd lighting, the objects resolved themselves to white, feathery snowballs, ranging in size from a grape to a closed fist. The outer parts were in constant vibration, providing a soft-edged, uncertain shimmer as they moved through the pale yellow fluid of Manna’s interior.

  Even as I watched, the number and density of the white objects was increasing. The snowfall became a blizzard. And floating far away from me, almost at the limit of vision, I saw two great white shapes. They were travesties of the human form, bloated and blurred outlines like giant snowmen. Every second they grew bigger, as more and more snowballs approached and adhered to their surfaces. They were s
welling steadily, rounding to become perfect spheres.

  I shivered in my suit. Alien. The figures looked totally alien, but I knew what I had found. At their centers, unable to see, move, or send messages, were McAndrew and Anna. As I watched I thought of the guardian white corpuscles in my own blood-stream. The feathery balls were like them, busy leukocytes crowding around to engulf and destroy the foreign organisms that dared to invade the body of Manna.

  How could I rescue them? They were in no danger for the first few minutes, but the snowballs would muffle the escape of heat from the suits. Unless the clinging balls were cleared away, Anna and McAndrew would soon die a blind and stifling death.

  My first instinct was to open the lock and plunge through to the interior. Another look at the feathery snowballs changed my mind about that. They were thicker than ever, drifting up from the deep interior of the planetoid. If I went out there they would have me covered in less than a minute. The laser that I had brought with me was useless. If I used it in water, it would waste its energy turning a small volume close to me to steam.

  And I had no other weapon with me.

  Return to the Star Harvester, and look for inspiration there? It might be too late for McAndrew and Anna.

  I went across to the side of the lock. There was a dual set of controls for the drilling shaft there, installed so that drilling progress could be monitored and modified on the spot. If I started the drill, the fluid ahead would offer little resistance. The tunnel would extend further into the liquid, far enough to enclose the area where the two misshapen spheres were floating. So if I opened the lock first, then activated the drill…