The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  When Angela rejoined them, she was excited. “I don’t know whether it has anything to do with what we’re looking for, but we’ve got a couple of very strange beasties out there.” She described what the ship had seen. “Terry thinks they’re clouds.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No. Clouds would get ripped apart in the gravity fields. They look like clouds, but it couldn’t be. They have to be solid bodies. The lopsided appearance will turn out to be an illusion.”

  “They can’t be hydrogen clouds?” asked Hutch.

  “No.”

  “I thought there were a lot of hydrogen clouds.”

  “There are. But they don’t come in this size. These are too small. I can’t even imagine how such objects would form.” She smiled, and looked pleased. “We’ll keep an eye on them.” Angela helped them lock down the 1600, and then went up front and took the pilot’s seat. “Are we ready?”

  They were.

  “Okay. I’m going to seal off up here. The thing that I’m worried about is that you two and the sixteen hundred are all going to be concentrated on the starboard side. Don’t make any sudden changes of position. And if I ask you to shut down, I want you to do it immediately, and move to the other side. Clear on that?

  “If the thing does break loose and fall out, don’t try to stop it. It doesn’t weigh nearly as much as it looks, but neither do you. I don’t want any dead people.”

  She wished them luck, and closed off the cockpit. Hutch sat down and made herself comfortable.

  They would ride with the outer door open, because the unit’s housing stuck out of the vehicle. They fastened tethers to their belts.

  Angela engaged her engines, and they lifted off. The shuttle circled the three domes, turned east, and glided out over the plateau. The weather had cleared, and a light wind blew out of the north.

  “The plateaus were probably carved by methane glaciers,” Angela said. “It would be interesting to know whether this moon has periodic ice ages.”

  She continued in that vein, while Carson and Hutch endured an uncomfortable ride in back. They looked out at the endless snowscape, watched the edge of the plateau fall away, maybe two hundred meters, and they were cruising over the plain. Carson’s idea was to do the easy ones first. Get the hang of the equipment.

  Hutch wondered if Angela had ever flown before with an open cargo door. It was unlikely, but the woman knew her shuttle. It developed a drag, and a tendency to turn to starboard, but they seemed to be compensating.

  The least challenging of the four mesas was on the south. It was already a passable rectangle, except that one side had partially collapsed and left a big hole in the symmetry. They’d have to square that off. For the rest, they wouldn’t have to do much more than straighten the corners.

  The projector’s phase controls were set in a bright yellow teardrop case; its black mirror housing looked like a rifle barrel. There was provision for both automatic and manual operation. Rewriting the programming to factor in the shuttle was simply too time-consuming, so they had opted to go manual. “When in doubt,” said Carson, “fly by the seat of your pants.”

  There was a pair of handgrips, a sight, and a trigger. But the instrument was unwieldy. So they ignored the trigger, and rigged a remote. The plan was that Carson would aim and, on command, Hutch would push the button.

  “Coming up on target,” said Angela. “Let’s do a couple of flybys and see precisely how we want to do this.”

  Janet was surprised to discover that Harley Costa, whom she knew, had flown the original mission to 4418. At the time they’d met he was en route to Canopus. He was a busy little man who talked too fast, and who could not tolerate anyone who didn’t share his passion for astronomy. Janet had taken the time to find out about his specialty, asked the right questions, and they’d become fast friends.

  Harley didn’t have much use for simple sentences. His energy overflowed ordinary syntax. His ideas sallied out to battle. He trampled (rather than refuted) opposing views, lit off objections with glee, and imposed decisions with crushing finality. Harley never expressed an opinion. He delivered truth. She wondered what sort of person his partner had been, cooped up with him for a year or so.

  Reading through the report of his visit to 4418, she could hear his voice. Harley had found things to engage his interest here, as he did everywhere. He found volcanic and seismic activity in unlikely places, and an anomalous magnetic pattern around one of the gas giants. He took a series of measurements of the sun, and entertained himself by calculating the date of its eventual collapse.

  They had surveyed the individual worlds, and moved on. Since Bode’s Law told them where to look for worlds, they might not have bothered doing an intensive sweep, and it was therefore possible to understand how he might have missed other objects in the system, even objects of planetary dimensions.

  Had the two objects been here at that time?

  “Okay. Now.”

  Hutch punched the button, and a ruby beam flowed from the nozzle. Carson could feel the hair on his arms rise. The beam was pencil-thin. It flashed across the landscape, and bit into the ice.

  “That’s good,” said Hutch. And, to Angela: “Ease it around to port just a mite. Okay. Hold it there.” Carson knelt behind the unit, aiming it. He tracked vertically down the face of the cliff. A cloud of steam began to form. Ice, snow, and rock fell away. But the cloud grew, and obscured the target.

  Carson shut the projector off. “This may take longer than we thought,” he said.

  The commlink chimed. Channel from Ashley. “Go ahead,” said Angela’s voice. It was Terry.

  “Got some more information for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Neither of the two objects is in solar orbit. They are passing through the system. They are not attached to it.”

  “Are you sure?” Angela sounded skeptical.

  “Yes, I’m sure. And here’s something else for you: they are maintaining parallel courses. And they’re moving at almost the same clip.”

  Carson grinned at Hutch, Maybe we’ve got the son of a bitch, and the smile widened as they heard Angela inhale the way she might if she were standing in front of an oncoming glidetrain.

  Hutch broke in: “The velocity,” she said. “What’s the velocity?”

  “Twenty-eight hundred for the far one and slowing down. Thirty-two and accelerating for the other.”

  “The speed of the wave,” Hutch said hopefully. “They’re in the neighborhood of the speed of the wave.”

  Carson was trying to keep his imagination under control. “Janet, what do you think?”

  “Just what you’re thinking.”

  Maybe that was it, that single piece of encouragement from the only other professional archeologist in the area. The old colonel’s reserve fell away, and his eyes blazed. “Terry,” he said, “how close will they come?”

  “To us? One’s already past,” he said. “The other will get within thirty million klicks. Give or take a few.”

  “How big did you say it was?”

  “It’s twenty-three thousand kilometers wide. Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?” asked Hutch. “What kind of thing is this?”

  “We don’t know. It isn’t a sphere. We get a lot of different measurements. False readings, maybe. Hard to say.”

  The steam clung to the cliff wall. “It sounds as if the dragon might really be here,” said Hutch.

  “Premature,” he said. But his expression belied detachment.

  “I still think it’s a cloud,” said Drafts.

  “Let’s take another look,” said Angela softly.

  Thirty minutes later, they had piled back into the shelter, and were studying incoming images. The more distant object was little more than a misty star, a blur seen through heavy rain. But its companion was a thundercloud, lit ominously within, a storm on the horizon just after sunset.

  “Well,” said Angela, as if that single word summed up the inexplica
ble. “Whatever it is, just the fact that something is there, that anything is there, is significant. The intrusion of an extrasolar object into a planetary system is a rare event. I can’t believe it just happened to occur while we’re in the area. Since there are two of these things, I’d be willing to bet there are more coming. A lot more.”

  “Sounds like a wave to me,” said Hutch.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Nevertheless it does.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Janet, “if that’s our critter, we’re not going to get a very good look at it.”

  “Why not?” demanded Carson.

  “Thirty million klicks is not close.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said Hutch. “If Angela is right, there’ll be another along shortly. I think we ought to finish making our Oz, and see what happens.”

  On the Ashley, Janet and Drafts took turns monitoring the commlinks.

  Unlike most of the hard-science specialists she knew, he had interests outside his chosen field. He had a sense of humor, he knew how to listen, and he encouraged her to talk about things she was interested in. She decided that if her duties required her to be holed up inside a tin can for a year with a single companion, Drafts would be easy to take.

  He asked her about the book of Japanese poetry she’d been reading, and challenged her to produce a haiku. After a few minutes, and a lot of rewriting, she had one:

  If they ask for me,

  Say, she rides where comets go,

  And outpaces light.

  “Lovely,” Drafts said.

  “Your turn.”

  “I can’t match that.”

  “Not if you don’t try.”

  He sighed and picked up a pad. She watched him intently during the process. He smiled tentatively at her, struggled a lot, and finally presented her with one:

  I have walked on stars,

  And sailed the channels of night.

  To sip tea with you.

  “I like it,” she said.

  His dark eyes found her. “I know it’s not on a level with yours,” he said. “But it’s true.”

  Delta. Tuesday, May 17; 1535 hours.

  The corner was almost a perfect 90 degrees. The problem was that the ice was brittle, and tended to crumble. But it was good enough. Carson called it a victory, cut power to the 1600, and accepted a handshake from his partner. “That’s it, Angela,” he said. “We’re done for now. Let’s go.”

  She acknowledged, and laid power to the engines.

  They wheeled overhead and admired their work. Not bad for amateurs.

  Angela spent the evening looking at the data coming in from Ashley. She kept moving files around, switching images, talking to herself.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hutch.

  “These things,” she said. “There’s no way to explain them. And I’m thinking where we’re going to be if we let them get away and another one does not show up.”

  “Looking dumb?” suggested Hutch.

  “To say the least. We’ve got a major discovery here. Whatever it is. They violate physical law. The one that’s approaching us will pass the sun and apparently keep going. I mean, this thing is really traveling.” She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know what holds them together.”

  “What are you suggesting, Angela?”

  “I think we should arrange to take a close look as it goes by.”

  “Is there time?”

  “We can arrange an intercept. We won’t have much time alongside, because the ship can’t begin to match the object’s velocity in the time available. But we can get a quick glimpse, and maybe the sensors will be more effective up close.” She looked at Carson. “What do you think?”

  “Can’t we catch it later if we have to?” He directed the question to Hutch.

  She considered it. “Hazeltines are notoriously poor for pinpoint work. We did pretty well at Beta Pac, but that’s the exception. Usually, you pick a star system, and land somewhere in the general neighborhood. With something that’s moving the way this thing is, if we let it get away, we might never see it again.”

  “I don’t think running after it right now would be prudent,” Carson said.

  Angela frowned. “I can’t see any problem. Terry’s a good pilot. And he will keep a respectful distance.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Frank,” said Angela, “the real risk is in not going.”

  He rolled his eyes and opened a channel to the ship. “Let’s talk about it,” he told her.

  Janet appeared on the main display. “How’s the Neighborhood Improvement Group doing?”

  “Not bad,” said Carson. “Where’s Terry?”

  “Right here.” The screen split.

  “What would you think about intercepting the object? Go out and take a close look?”

  He consulted his display and blew unhappily through his fingers. “We’d need to move pretty fast. I make it about two and a half days at max to lay in alongside it.”

  “Can you wait for us?”

  “Frank, this ride is already going to hurt.”

  “How do you feel about doing it?”

  He looked over at Janet. “You game?”

  “Sure.”

  They could see his reluctance. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Terry,” pleaded Angela, “we might not get another chance.”

  Hutch looked at her. She wanted this badly, and it was clouding her judgment. “It would leave us without a ship,” she pointed out. “I don’t know whether that’s a good idea either.”

  “Don’t need one,” said Angela.

  Janet shrugged. “Don’t hesitate because of me.”

  “I can’t see,” said Angela, “that there’s anything to lose.”

  Carson wanted to go. That was obvious. But the assorted shocks on this expedition had taken their toll. Hutch could see his natural instincts struggling with his newfound caution. And she saw them win. “Anybody else with an objection?”

  Drafts looked sidewise at his partner. “If Angela wants it, and Janet has no problem, I’d like to do it.”

  “Okay.” Colonel Carson returned. “Let’s go.”

  There were a few last-minute technical conversations. Drafts entered flight requirements into the navigation systems. They would use Flickinger fields to help negate some of the effects of acceleration.

  Within thirty minutes of making the decision, the Ashley Tee lifted out of orbit into an acceleration that mashed its crew into their seats.

  “You okay?” asked Drafts.

  “Fine,” she said breathlessly.

  “It’ll be a sixty-two hour run.”

  In the screens, Delta, the orange ice world, diminished rapidly to a small globe, and then to a point of light. After a while, only the gas giant remained. Soon it too was only a bright star.

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  Dragon in the dark,

  Your eyes move across the stars,

  Your breath warms the moon.

  —April 24, 2203

  (Found in unassigned file on Ashley Tee)

  29.

  Delta. Wednesday, May 18; 0930 hours.

  The operation on the small mesa had gone so well that they hoped to finish by the end of the day.

  They sliced and buffed until they had three smooth rock walls set at (almost) right angles to each other. Then they turned to the task of straightening the fourth side, with its massive notch. Carson regretted not having the capability to fill the indentation rather than have to pare off the walls on either side. But never mind: he would manage.

  They had developed reasonable facility with the 1600, and were now enjoying themselves. Whenever possible, they stationed themselves on the ground. But for the most part it was necessary to take to the air, and work from above the mesa. Angela pointed out that they were in violation of a wide variety of safety procedures. But she swallowed her reservations, took them up, and, on signal, rolled the shuttle onto its side. In back, restrained by his tethe
r and Hutch’s makeshift harness, Carson rode the 1600, looking straight down. “You’re perfectly safe,” Hutch assured him.

  After about an hour, they changed places. Hutch enjoyed aiming the big cannon, and they learned how to employ the sensors to see through the steam, and so became more proficient. By the time they broke for lunch, a substantial portion of the rear wall lay in rubble. But they had a rectangle!

  The limiting factor in getting to the rendezvous point and laying in alongside the cloud was not the capability of the ship, but that of its crew to withstand prolonged acceleration. They would arrive with aching joints and sore backs, and they would have only a few seconds before the target sailed past and left them hopelessly behind. To ameliorate these effects, Drafts programmed in frequent breaks in the acceleration, during which they could get up and move around. It would not be a comfortable ride, but it would be livable.

  Hutch distrusted hastily planned maneuvers as a matter of instinct. She wondered at the necessity for this trip. Angela’s logic made sense: there was probably another one coming. Why not go after it at their leisure? She was annoyed that Janet had not supported her. Instead, she’d allowed herself to get caught up in the general enthusiasm. They were making snap decisions again, without considering all the consequences. She wondered whether they had learned anything at Beta Pac.

  She derived some satisfaction from knowing that Janet was now pinned in her webchair by the acceleration. Served her right.

  They inspected their work on the south mesa. Seen from the air, it was a child’s block, an orange rectangle. “I wish we could change its color,” said Carson. “The Oz-structures were highly reflective, and they stood out from their surroundings.”

  “You think that matters?” asked Hutch.

  “I don’t know. It might.”

  It occurred to Hutch that the pumpkin-colored block below might be as hard for some future mission to explain as Oz had been.

  The eastern mesa was next. It was three times as big as the one they had just worked on, less regular, heavily scored. Moreover, when they started on it, they discovered it was brittle. Its walls shriveled at the touch of the energy beam, and whole sections crumbled away. They experimented with intensity and angle, and discovered that overhead shots with low power worked best. “Like everything else,” Carson said as they sliced and polished, “the only thing that succeeds is finesse. The light touch.”