“Yes. That’s too bad for us. They’ve got to be much closer to the ship already. I wanted to be the one who found it.”
“Now, now, Geralt, you already got yourself a freezing era, or whatever you called it.”
“Ice age.”
“Yes, that was it. Plus, you couldn’t go announcing the discovery of this ship. We’ve got to keep it secret.”
“That’s true. You’re right.”
Boris put his hand on Geralt’s shoulder. It was strange to see his friend like this, in his peculiar snail shell-like spacesuit. But it was probably just as odd for Geralt to see him here outside without a suit on, apparently unprotected against the harsh environment.
They caught up with the two women after ten minutes.
“What’s up? Need a break? You’re not throwing in the towel so early, are you?” Jenna asked.
“We were getting scared, being all alone,” Boris said.
“Oh, then we’ll protect you two. Did some scary shadows frighten you?” Anna asked.
“No,” Geralt replied, “we determined, that is, I determined, that the ship must be farther up above than where we were.”
“Up above?”
“Sorry, I should be a little more precise. Above the layer of carbon dioxide ice that I found in the ice walls.”
“We were just going to get the detector from the rover,” Anna said.
“Did you find traces of the ship?” Boris asked.
“Not exactly, but we wanted to take a closer look with the detector.”
“That’s smart, Sis. Got anything against us tagging along?”
“On the contrary. We’d be delighted, Boris,” Jenna exclaimed.
They divided up the components of the detecting equipment. Then they started marching back in the direction from which the women had just come. Now and then Geralt stopped, knelt to the ground, and took a sample. Each time he had shaken his head after looking at the results.
“Come on, let’s set up the detector,” Boris said. Maybe Geralt had been wrong about his ice age theory, he thought.
“We’re still in the layer of carbon dioxide ice,” Geralt said. “There’s no point using it here.”
“Maybe we should set it up anyway. Then at least we could all get trained on how to use it,” Anna suggested.
His sister had caught on to his growing doubt in Geralt, but instead of directly contradicting the archeologist, she was cleverly trying to pass off their doubt as training. Maybe Geralt even saw through the little game Anna was playing, but at least this way he wouldn’t lose face.
They assembled the device following Jenna’s instructions. Boris was surprised at how good the scientist was with the nitty-gritty engineering work.
“Have you done this kind of work before?” Anna asked.
“Yes. We once had to save an injured colleague from a cave. His suit contained enough metal that we could use a detector like this to find him after I increased the hardware’s sensitivity by ten times.”
“You modified a detector?” Not bad. She wasn’t just a pure theoretician. He liked people who could solve problems with their hands.
“Yes, but that wasn’t a very complicated problem. The only tricky parts were the time pressure and the limited resources. I ended up using two pins and duct tape to get it working.”
“You’re joking, right? Pins and duct tape?”
“The pins were almost pure iron, so they were ferromagnetic. I used them to extend the antenna, and I needed the tape to fix them in place.”
“Too bad we don’t have any pins here,” Geralt said.
“Since then I always keep a set of pins in the toolbelt. But the ship is such a massive hunk of metal that we should be able to find it even without any special tricks.”
But this time Jenna’s prediction turned out to be wrong. They reached the opposite end. From there the ground sloped downward on all sides. And they were still in an area of the carbon dioxide ice layer.
“Shit,” Boris said. “I guess that’s it, then.”
“How sure are you that the ship is here?” Anna asked.
“Very sure.” Jenna turned all the way around once. “But I can understand why you’re skeptical.”
“Could it be hidden in one of those caves that we saw further down?” Boris asked.
Dark holes in the walls that they’d walked past lower down had shown where the cryovolcano had been supplied with material from the underground ocean.
“The ship is much too big to fit in one of those. I guess you wouldn’t be likely to know, but it should be at least a hundred and fifty meters tall and about thirty meters wide.”
“What if that’s just a legend, Jenna?”
“No, it’s accepted as true by science historians,” Geralt countered. “Otherwise the founders couldn’t have brought with them all the materials they needed to build our settlement. Someone did the calculations for the necessary transport volume.”
“Science people... Well, who knows? They’re also the ones who told us the ship had been destroyed,” Boris said.
“There’ve always been a few scientists who spoke out against the official line—but I admit not loud enough.”
“Then your cold-epoch theory must be wrong.”
“Ice age. We can go over the entire area again with the detector. If we can’t find the ship, then it’s not there.”
Too bad, Boris thought. In that case, they wouldn’t be able to do anything but wait until help arrived, bringing an end to their joint adventure.
A warning sign appeared on the back of his hand. His outer skin could protect him for maybe two more hours. Boris needed to start making his way back to the tank. “I suggest we take a break and head back to the rover.”
“Agreed,” Jenna said.
That was fast. The others were apparently just as disappointed as he was. Boris entered the command to display the route back to the rover on his hand. The red number disappeared, and an arrow appeared in its place.
“May I?” Geralt asked. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to drive a rover.”
“Go right ahead,” Anna said as she climbed onto the cabin’s roof, leaving her legs dangling down the side.
Boris took a place next to her. “Jenna? Are you coming?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I’d rather walk back. I need some time to think.”
“As you wish,” Boris said, disappointed, even if he wasn’t going to admit it. “We’ll see you back at the tank. You can still put the detector on the rover, though.”
“I can carry it. It’s not very heavy,” Jenna answered by radio. “Maybe I’ll be able to think of what we’re doing wrong. I must not be accounting for something. The documents are unambiguous—the ship’s got to be here. Maybe the detector’s not sensitive enough after all.”
“Is it possible that its outer hull’s not made of metal, but something like carbon fiber?” Geralt asked.
“That was the founder’s original plan, but it got too expensive and would have taken too long,” Jenna said. “There must be some other reason we can’t find the ship.”
“Then I hope you get your spark of insight,” Boris said. “You’ve got your pins if you need them.”
“Thanks. See you soon.”
The Rover started moving. Boris had to hold on tight. His sister leaned against him sideways, so he placed his arm around her shoulders. Sometimes she seemed more grown-up to him than he felt himself. And then in a flash she was that little girl again, who’d just lost her mother and now had only him to look after her—only twelve-years-old himself at the time.
Geralt was driving fast. Jenna wouldn’t be able to keep up. Several times, Boris considered asking the archeologist to slow down, but he already knew what Geralt would think. He was just trying to watch out for a member of their team, as all Titanians were taught in school.
“There it is,” Geralt said.
The rover’s headlights lit up the tank, now covered by a thin layer of frost tha
t glittered from the light. All they could do was wait for the inevitable search expedition from the base. Boris considered the uphill slope preventing them from hauling the tank back. They could easily climb up it on foot. It was much too far to the base, but maybe 20 kilometers away as the crow flew, the double peaks of Doom Mons were waiting for courageous gliders.
The hike there would be probably five or six hours. But they wouldn’t need more than 30 minutes for the return route through the air. It would be a physical challenge to climb 3,000 meters in one hike, but it’d be much better than sitting around here uselessly.
“Ahhhhhh!”
Jenna’s scream cut right through to his core, causing Boris to jump up. What had happened? Had she fallen into a crevice? He remembered the fissure that he discovered at the bottom of the Patera. Why had she insisted on going by herself?
“Jenna, where are you?” Boris called.
Anna climbed down from the cabin. “What’s wrong?” she shouted.
Geralt started the rover’s engine, then switched it off again. They didn’t know where Jenna was.
Boris pushed his goggles over his eyes. Maybe he could find Jenna in infrared. He looked around, but all he could see were Geralt, Anna, the rover’s still warm engine, and the outline of the tank. Jenna’s suit had her too well-insulated for him to find. Seconds passed that seemed like hours to him.
“Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi!”
That didn’t sound like a scream of danger or fear, but instead, celebration. What was going on?
“Jenna!” Boris yelled.
“I’m here,” she answered. “You’ve got to come down here right away. All of you. I’ve found it! Yippie-yay! I knew it!”
“The ship? Where are you?” Boris asked.
“North-northeast of you, maybe 150 meters below the position where the tank stopped.”
Just 150 meters? She was practically right next to them. Boris looked in the direction she had indicated, but a slight rise in the ground blocked his view. Then he noticed why he couldn’t see her. The tank had come to rest in a kind of depression, right in the middle of the uniform, downward slope.
Was there some reason for that? He saw Anna running in a north-northeasterly direction, and he started off to catch up with her.
Jenna was jumping up and down on the ice, waving her arms to get their attention. She greeted them ecstatically as they approached. The detecting equipment lay at her feet.
“Where is it? Are you sure about this?” Geralt asked.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Boris said.
Jenna picked up the detector and moved it over the ground. “Look! Did you see that?” She was pointing at the display. There was a significant change in the readings on the screen.
Boris turned around and looked upward. The rover and tank were not even 150 meters away. Both were made out of metal, and the detector was sensitive enough to register their presence. How could he point that out to Jenna without making her feel like he didn’t think she knew what she was talking about? He didn’t want her to hate him.
“Uh, well,” Geralt said softly, “you do know that the rover and the tank up there would affect your measurements here, right?”
“Oh, really, you don’t say.” Jenna dropped the detector. The instrument hit the ground with a crash. Then she placed her hands on her hips. Boris couldn’t help smiling. In her pressure suit, she now looked like a can with handles on two sides.
She extended an arm toward Geralt as if she wanted to hit him. The archeologist quickly took a step back.
“Just stand still. I want to show you something.”
Geralt leaned forward. She held out the back of her hand to him. The archeologist slowly moved his head back and forth.
“You see it?” Jenna asked. “Those are polar coordinates. I plotted a profile of the measured values as a function of angle. If the rover and tank were the primary cause of these measurements, the focal point of the plot would be located on them. But it’s not. The focal point is below them. And what do you see in the area around where the focal point is? A large indentation in the slope of the ground.”
Boris turned around. Yes, the rover and tank were sitting in a depression. He had already noticed that. Could it be possible that this indentation wasn’t formed naturally, but artificially to hide a ship? Then they would have been standing right on top of the object of their search the whole time, without even knowing it.
What irony! But wasn’t that how fate seemed to work so much of the time? On the other hand, Jenna had followed a systematic process to reach her conclusion. He couldn’t see anything questionable in her methodology. She had apparently found something made of metal that was not the rover or the tank. So there really could only be one conclusion.
“Whatever it is you found,” Boris said, “I think we need to dig it up.”
“Yes, let’s get the melting equipment,” Geralt said.
“Congrats on your discovery,” Anna proclaimed.
It took them two hours before they could start work on uncovering the ship. If Jenna’s calculations were correct—and all of them were convinced that they were—the rover and the tank were located straight above the spaceship’s tip. If they tried to free it from above, they’d be cutting off the branch on which they were sitting. That was why they decided to take a step-by-step approach. First, they cut horizontal steps and ledges into the slope downward from where they were now, with room enough for the two vehicles.
They would need the rover for the excavating work. The rover’s gas supplies would be used to feed fuel to the methane torch. Boris held the torch up to the ice wall in front of himself. Two hoses carrying methane and oxygen led backward. The rover could extract both of these gases from the atmosphere, or from the ice, after the rover’s tanks were empty. The torch burned the methane with the help of the oxygen, forming carbon dioxide and water.
“Oxygen on,” Geralt said by radio.
“Methane open,” announced Anna.
A plume of smoke appeared from the torch head. Boris flipped the electric igniter. A spark was set off in the methane-oxygen mixture. The torch head hissed loudly and transformed into a fire-breathing dragon. Boris held the flame, which was at a temperature of up to 3150 degrees, up to the side of the frozen wall in front of him in such a way that the melted water could flow down past him. The flame cut surprisingly quickly into the ice. When the torch shot out soot, he gave Geralt a sign to increase the oxygen. He worked his way toward the spot that Jenna’s measurements had determined to be the heart of the metallic mass.
He melted away the first layer, approximately ten meters thick, without finding anything.
“It’s there,” Jenna said, “I know it is.”
Boris very much wished it to be true.
“The longer it takes for us to find it, the bigger it must be. Otherwise the detector wouldn’t have detected it,” she said.
Boris moved to the next lower step. While the others moved the two vehicles onto the spaces they had prepared for them, he had to take a short break.
“You can keep going,” Geralt announced. “Or do you want me to take a turn with the torch?”
“No, thanks. I’m okay.”
“Oxygen on,” Anna said.
Where was Jenna? It’d be a nightmare for him to blast her with the flame by mistake. At more than 3,000 degrees, neither his outer skin nor a spacesuit could survive that.
“Jenna?”
“Yes?”
He turned red—he could feel it, even though she hadn’t said anything that should’ve made him embarrassed.
“I... I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t climbing around anywhere close to where I’m working.”
“No, I’m a good distance below you. I’m trying to map the ship. Can you even imagine? It must be at least a hundred and thirty meters high?”
“A hundred and thirty meters. That’d be high enough to start a glide from its tip.”
“That’s true. We’ll have to test
it out. Thanks for thinking of me and making sure I was safe.”
“I... Of course.”
Suddenly he felt like he had started sweating all over his body, even though he couldn’t actually sweat at all. Maybe I should tell her that she means a lot to me. That’d be the truth, as crazy and downright impossible as that might be.
“I’ve got to make sure that I don’t hurt anyone,” he said instead.
“Of course.” Jenna laughed briefly.
What did she mean by that? He didn’t understand her. But neither did he understand himself. Why hadn’t he just said what he was thinking? That had never been a problem for him before. On the contrary, he had often been too quick to express his thoughts and wound up saying too much. What was different now?
“Boris? If you let this run too long, you’re going to blow us all up,” Anna said.
“Oh.” He switched on the igniter. Anna was right. If too much of the ignitable gas mixture accumulated in one place, it could spontaneously combust and produce an explosion. Methane was heavier than Titan’s atmosphere, and there was a depression in the landscape in front of him.
The igniter made a ‘click,’ but nothing happened. He tried it again, and this time the dragon roared back to life. There was no explosion. He needed to concentrate more keenly on his work. Fire wasn’t something to play with.
The second layer also contained only ice—and a chunk of rock.
Geralt saw it first and was now examining it. “It’s an iron meteorite,” he said, rolling the rock to the edge of the step. It had to be at least half a meter in diameter.
“Iron?” Boris asked.
“Don’t worry. It’s too small to have messed up the detector’s measurements. I’m just wondering how it got here.”
“What do you mean?” Anna asked.
“Well, with Titan’s dense atmosphere, a large part of it would have burned up before it reached the surface. But then, this thing didn’t just roll around harmlessly in the patera. It must’ve struck the ground with lots of energy and created a crater. But there’s nothing like that anywhere around here.”
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