The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  An hour or two of those thoughts, and I felt a new sympathy for Achilles in Zeno’s old paradox, trying to catch the tortoise and never quite getting there.

  Travel for a year, according to McAndrew, and you’d begin to have effects on the large-scale structure of space-time. The vacuum zero-point energy tapped by the drive isn’t inexhaustible; but as to what would happen if you kept on going…

  An academic question, of course, as Mac pointed out. Long before that the massplate would be inadequate to protect the drive, and the whole structure would disintegrate through ablative collision with intergalactic gas and dust. Very reassuring; but Mac’s intrigued and speculative tone when he discussed the possibility was enough to send shivers up my spine.

  The position fixes we needed to refine Wicklund’s original position and velocity for Vandell rendezvous were made by our computer during the final three days of flight. Those observations and calibrations were performed in microsecond flashes while the drive was turned off, and at the same time we sent out burst mode messages, prepared and compressed in advance, to the Merganser’s projected position. We told them when to send a return signal to us, but no counter-message came in. There was nothing but the automatic “Signal received” from their shipboard computer.

  One day before rendezvous we were close enough to throttle back the drive. We couldn’t see Vandell or Merganser yet, but the ships’ computers could begin talking to each other. It took them only a few seconds to collect the information I was interested in, and spit out a display summary.

  No human presence now on board. Transfer pod in use for planetary descent trajectory. No incoming signals from pod.

  I keyed in the only query that mattered: When descent?

  Seven hours shipboard time.

  That was it. We had arrived just too late. By now Jan and Sven Wicklund would be down on the surface of Vandell. Then another part of the first message hit me. No incoming signals from pod.

  “Mac!” I said. “No pod signal.”

  He nodded grimly. He had caught it too. Even when they were down on the surface, there should be an automatic beacon signal to fix the pod’s position and allow compensation for Doppler shift of communication frequency.

  “No pod signal,” I said again. “That means they’re—”

  “Aye.” His voice was husky, as though there was no air in his lungs. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jeanie. For all we know…”

  But he didn’t finish the sentence. The pod antenna was robust. Only something major (such as impact with a solid surface at a few hundred meters a second) would put it out of action. I had never known a case where the pod’s com-link died and the persons within it lived.

  We sat side by side in a frozen, empty silence as the Hoatzin brought us closer to the rogue planet. Soon it was visible to our highest resolution telescopes. Without making a decision at any conscious level, I automatically set up a command sequence that would free our own landing pod as soon as the drive went off completely. Then I simply sat there, staring ahead at Vandell.

  For much of our trip out I had tried to visualize what a planet would be like that had known no warming sun for millions or billions of years. It had floated free—for how long? We didn’t know. Perhaps since our kind had descended from the trees, perhaps as long as any life had existed on Earth. For all that time, the planet had moved on through the quiet void, responsive only to the gentle, persistent tug of galactic gravitational and magnetic fields, drifting along where the stars were no more than distant pinpricks against the black sky. With no sunlight to breathe life onto its surface, Vandell would be cold, airless, the frozen innermost circle of hell. It chilled me to think of it.

  The planet grew steadily in the forward screens. As the definition of the display improved, I suddenly realized why I couldn’t relate the picture in front of me to my mental images. Vandell was visible, at optical wavelengths. It sat there at the center of the screen, a small sphere that glowed a soft, living pink against the stellar backdrop. As I watched the surface seemed to shimmer, with an evanescent pattern of fine lines running across it.

  McAndrew had seen it too. He gave a grunt of surprise, cupped his chin in his hands, and leaned forward. After two minutes of silence he reached across to the terminal and keyed in a brief query.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, when after another two minutes he showed no sign of speaking.

  “Want to see what’s in Merganser’s memory. Should be some images from their time of first approach.” He grunted and shook his head. “Look at that screen. There’s no way Vandell can look like that.”

  “I was amazed to see it at visible wavelengths. But I’m not sure why.”

  “Available energy.” He shrugged, but his gaze never left the display. “See, Jeanie, the only thing that can provide energy to that planet’s surface is an internal source. But nothing I’ve ever heard of could give this much radiation at those frequencies, and sustain it over a long period. And look at the edge of the planet’s disk. See, it’s less bright. That’s an atmospheric limb darkening, if ever I’ve seen one—an atmosphere, now, on a planet that should be as cold as space. Doesn’t make any sense at all. No sense at all.”

  We watched together as Merganser’s data bank fed across to our ship’s computer and through the displays. The screen to our left flickered through a wild pattern of colors, then went totally dark. McAndrew looked at it and swore to himself.

  “Explain that to me, Jeanie. There’s the way that Vandell looked in the visible part of the spectrum when Jan and Sven were on their final approach—black as hell, totally invisible. We get here, a couple of days later, and we find that.” He waved his arm at the central display, where Vandell was steadily increasing in size as we moved closer. “Look at the readings that Wicklund made as they came into parking orbit—no visible emissions, no thermal emissions, no sign of an atmosphere. Now see our readings: the planet is visible, above freezing point, and covered in clouds. It’s as though they were describing one world, and we’ve arrived at a completely different one.”

  Mac often tells me that I have no imagination. But as he spoke wild ideas went running through my mind that I didn’t care to mention. A planet that changed its appearance when humans approached it; a world that waited patiently for millions of years, then draped a cloak of atmosphere around itself as soon as it had lured a group of people to its surface. Could the changes on Vandell be interpreted as the result of intention, a deliberate and intelligent act on the part of something on the planet?

  While I was still full of my furious fancies, a high-pitched whistle from the navigation console announced that the balanced drive had turned off completely. We had reached our rendezvous position, two hundred thousand kilometers from Vandell. I was moving away from the control panel, heading towards our own transfer pod, before the sound had ended. At the entrance I stopped and turned, expecting that McAndrew would be close on my heels. But he hadn’t left the displays. He had called back the list of Vandell’s physical parameters, showing mass, temperature, mean diameter, and rotation rate, and was staring at it blindly. As I watched he requested a new display of Vandell’s rotation rate, which was small enough to be shown as zero in the standard output format.

  “Mac!”

  He turned, shook his head from side to side as though to banish his own version of the insane ideas that had crowded my mind when I saw the change in Vandell, and slowly followed me to the pod. At the entrance he turned for a last look at the screens.

  There was no discussion of our move into the pod. We didn’t know when, or even quite how, but we both knew that we had to make a descent to the surface of Vandell. Somehow we had to recover the bodies that lay beneath the flickering, pearly cloud shrouding the rogue world.

  In another time and place, the view from the pod would have been beautiful. We were close enough now to explain the rosy shimmer. It was lightning storms, running back and forth across the clouded skies of Vandell. Lightning storms that sh
ouldn’t be there, on a world that ought to be dead. We had drained Merganser’s data banks as we went round and round in low orbit. Not much new had come to light, but we had found the last set of instrument readings returned to the main computer when the other landing pod had made its approach to Vandell’s surface: Atmospheric pressure, zero. External magnetic field, less than a millionth of a gauss. Temperature, four degrees absolute. Surface gravity, four-tenths of a gee. Planetary rotation rate, too small to measure.

  Then their pod had touched down, with final relative velocity of only half a meter a second—and all transmissions had ceased, instantly. Whatever had killed Jan and Sven Wicklund, direct impact with the surface couldn’t be the culprit. They had landed gently. And if they hadn’t been killed by collision when they landed…

  I tried to ignore the tiny bud of hope that wanted to open in my mind. I had never heard of a pod being destroyed without also killing anyone inside it.

  Our instruments had added a few new (and odd) facts to that earlier picture. The “atmosphere” we were seeing now was mainly dust, a great swirling storm across the whole of Vandell, littered by lightning flashes through the upper part. It was hot, a furnace breath that had no right to exist. Vandell was supposed to be cold. Goddammit, it should be drained of every last calorie of heat. McAndrew had told me so, there was no way the planet could be warm.

  Round and round, orbit after orbit; we went on until I felt that we were a fixed center and the whole universe was gyrating around us, while I stared at that black vortex (it came and went from one orbit to the next, now you see it, now you don’t) and McAndrew sat glued to the data displays. I don’t think he looked at Vandell itself for more than ten seconds in five hours. He was thinking.

  And me? The pressure inside was growing—tearing me apart. According to Limperis and Wenig, I’m cautious to a fault. Where angels fear to tread, I not only won’t rush in, I don’t want to go near the place. That’s one reason they like to have me around, to exercise my high cowardice quotient. But now I wanted to fire our retro-rockets and get down there, down onto Vandell. Twice I had seated myself at the controls, and fingered the preliminary descent sequence (second nature, I could have done that in my sleep). And twice McAndrew had emerged from his reverie, shook his head, and spoken: “No, Jeanie.”

  But the third time he didn’t stop me.

  “D’ye know where you’re going to put her down, Jeanie?” was all he said.

  “Roughly.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice at all. Too scratchy and husky. “I’ve got the approximate landing position from Merganser’s readings.”

  “Not there.” He was shaking his head. “Not quite there. See it, the black tube? Put us down the middle of that funnel—can you do it?”

  “I can. But if it’s what it looks like, we’ll get heavy turbulence.”

  “Aye, I’ll agree with that.” He shrugged. “That’s where they are, though, for a bet. Can you do it?”

  That wasn’t his real question. As he was speaking, I began to slide us in along a smooth descent trajectory. There was nothing to the calculation of our motion, we both recognized that. Given our desired touchdown location, the pod’s computer would have a minimum fuel descent figured in fractions of a second.

  I know McAndrew very well. What he was saying—not in words, that wasn’t his style—was simple: It’s going to be dangerous, and I’m not sure how dangerous. Do you want to do it?

  I began to see why as soon as we were inside the atmosphere. Visibility went down to zero. We were descending through thick smoke-like dust and flickering lightning. I switched to radar vision, and found I was looking down to a murky, surrealistic world, with a shattered, twisted surface. Heavy winds (without an atmosphere?—what were winds?) moved us violently from side to side, up and down, with sickening free-fall drops arrested by the drive as soon as they were started.

  Thirty seconds to contact, and below us the ground heaved and rolled like a sick giant. Down and down, along the exact center of the black funnel. The pod shook and shivered around us. The automatic controls seemed to be doing poorly, but I knew I’d be worse—my reaction times were a thousandfold too slow to compete. All we could do was hold tight and wait for the collision.

  Which never came. We didn’t make a featherbed landing, but the final jolt was just a few centimeters a second. Or was it more? I couldn’t say. It was lost in the continuing shuddering movements of the ground that the pod rested on. The planet beneath us was alive. I stood up, then had to hold onto the edge of the control desk to keep my feet. I smiled at McAndrew (quite an effort) as he began an unsteady movement towards the equipment locker.

  He nodded at me. Earthquake country.

  I nodded back. Where is their ship?

  We had landed on a planet almost as big as Earth, in the middle of a howling dust storm that reduced visibility to less than a hundred yards. Now we were proposing to search an area of a couple of hundred million square miles—for an object a few meters across. The needle in a haystack had nothing on this. Mac didn’t seem worried. He was putting on an external support pack—we had donned suits during the first phase of descent.

  “Mac!”

  He paused with the pack held against his chest and the connectors held in one hand. “Don’t be daft, Jeanie. Only one of us should be out there.”

  And that made me mad. He was being logical (my specialty). But to come more than a light-year, and then for one of us to go the last few miles…Jan was my daughter too—my only daughter. I moved forward and picked up another of the packs. After one look at my face, Mac didn’t argue.

  At least we had enough sense not to venture outside at once. Suited up, we completed the systematic scan of our surroundings. The visual wavelengths were useless—we couldn’t see a thing through the ports—but the microwave sensors let us look to the horizon. And a wild horizon it was. Spikes of sharp rock sat next to crumbling mesas, impenetrable crevasses, and tilted blocks of dark stone, randomly strewn across the landscape.

  I could see no pattern at all, no rule of formation. But over to one side, less than a mile from our pod, our instruments were picking up a bright radar echo, a reflection peak stronger than anything that came from the rocky surface. It must be metal—could only be metal—could only be Jan’s ship. But was it intact? Lightning-fused? A scoured hulk? A shattered remnant, open to dust and vacuum?

  My thoughts came too fast to follow. Before they had reached any conclusion we had moved to the lock, opened it, and were standing on the broken surface of Vandell. McAndrew automatically fell behind to let me take the lead. Neither of us had any experience with this type of terrain, but he knew my antennae for trouble were better than his. I tuned my suit to the reflected radar signal from our pod and we began to pick our way carefully forward.

  It was a grim, tortuous progress. There was no direct path that could be taken across the rocks. Every tenth step seemed to bring me to a dead end, a place where we had to retrace our steps halfway back to our own pod. Beneath our feet, the surface of the planet shivered and groaned, as though it was ready to open up and swallow us. The landscape as our suits presented it to us was a scintillating nightmare of blacks and grays. (Vision in nonvisible wavelengths is always disconcerting—microwave more than most).

  Around us, the swirling dust came in shivering waves that whispered along the outside of our helmets. I could detect a definite cycle, with a peak every seven minutes or so. Radio static followed the same period, rising and falling in volume to match the disturbance outside.

  I had tuned my set to maximum gain and was transmitting a continuous call signal. Nothing came back from the bright radar blip of the other pod. It was now only a couple of hundred yards ahead but we were approaching agonizingly slowly.

  At fifty yards I noticed a lull in the rustle around us. I switched to visible wavelengths, and waited impatiently while the suit’s processor searched for the best combination of frequencies to penetrate the murk. After half a second the inter
nal suit display announced that there would be a short delay; the sensors were covered with ionized dust particles that would have to be repelled. That took another ten seconds, then I had an image. Peering ahead on visible wavelengths I thought I could see a new shape in front of us, a flat oval hugging the dark ground.

  “Visible signal, Mac,” I said over the radio. “Tell your suit.”

  That was all I could say. I know the profile of a pod, I’ve seen them from every angle. And the silhouette ahead of us looked wrong. It had a twisted, sideways cant, bulging towards the left. I increased pace, stumbling dangerously along smooth slabs and around jagged pinnacles, striding recklessly across a quivering deep abyss. Mac was following, ready to help me if I got in trouble—unless he was taking worse risks himself, which was certainly not beyond him. I could hear his breath, loud on the suit radio.

  It was their pod. No doubt at all. And as I came closer I could see the long, gaping hole in one side. It takes a lot to smash a transfer pod beyond repair, but that one would never fly again. Inside it would be airless, lifeless, filled only with the choking dust that was Vandell’s only claim to an atmosphere.

  And the people inside? Would Jan or Sven have thought to wear suits before descent? It would make a difference only to the appearance of the corpses. Even with suits, anything that could kill their signal beacon would kill them too.

  I took my final step to the pod, stooped to peer in through the split in the side, and stopped breathing. Somewhere deep inside me, contrary to all logic, there still lived a faint ghost of hope. It died as I looked. Two figures lay side by side on the floor of the pod, neither of them moving.

  I groaned, saw Mac coming to stand beside me, and switched on my helmet light for a better view or the interior. Then I straightened up so fast that my head banged hard on the pod’s tough metal.

  They were both wearing suits, their helmets were touching—and as the light from outside penetrated the interior of the pod, they swung around in unison to face me. They were both rubbing at their suit faceplates with gloved hands, clearing a space in a thick layer of white dust there.