Marooned on Eden

by Robert L. Forward; Martha Dodson Forward

  We shared his hopes, but I am privately dubious. My own hope is that the Jolly will be able to provide us with information we can use much more readily than this hit-or-miss technique. With this in mind I turned to see if our visitor was where we had parted from it.

  The Jolly was not visible in the gloom, but without any real worry I rose to search for it. A moment's reflection led me to the thorn thicket, and peering through the tightly interlaced branches I beheld our guest, motionless and quiet, secure within the protection of those spiky defenses. If we had landed as planned, and conducted our explorations encased in spacesuits, and flying in airplanes, we might have posed a real threat to this native. As it was, we met on much more equal terms! Rather more pleased than otherwise, I left the Jolly undisturbed. The quiet talk around the fire centered on all we had learned from our visitor, both by observation and the halting struggle of conversation.

  How achingly weary I am! It was exciting beyond belief to meet this new creature, and to try to absorb so many new ideas, but exhausting. How strange—I have given no thought to Prometheus or its crew for hours. Now that I consider the heavy clouds above us, I can only wonder when some message will come. The ship itself is invisible tonight. It is time to awaken the next watch.

  When shall I glimpse our soaring home again?

  FINDING

  Unbidden, the dream played itself out again. First the scream from Shirley: "We're spin . . ." cut off in mid-cry. Then, the interminably dry voice of James: "Engineering telemetry reports left rear rocket engine has burned through. Beagle is now sinking in Crater Lagoon . . ."

  "George! Wake up George!"

  I awoke in my dark bedroom, lit only by the soft laser lights of my imp, who was trying to comfort me as best as it could. "Your heart beat had risen to dangerous levels and I thought it best to try to wake you. Was it the same dream again?" asked the solicitous voice of James.

  "The same one I have every time I try to go to sleep these past few days. I feel so helpless and useless. I'm in charge and there is nothing I can do!"

  I wearily got out from under the tension sheet as James raised the lights in the bedroom. I was still dressed in the wrinkled coverall I had worn when I turned in. I stopped at the bathroom, avoiding the bleary-eyed and unshaven grisly-gray face in the mirror as I took care of the necessities. I was too impatient to hold still and wait while my imp gave me a shave, pulling up and snipping off each whisker in turn, so I palmed my way out the door of my apartment, dove down the central shaft, and swung out onto the control deck of Prometheus.

  The night shift crew was busy at their consoles and did not look up. Tony was managing the lightsail, keeping Prometheus balanced over the inner pole of Zuni, where the Beagle had gone down. Linda was monitoring the communications console—silent except for the occasional engineering status report from one of the orbiting commsats around Zuni. At the same time, she was continuing to use her astronomical telescope to look down at Zuni in a search for the missing spacecraft. From the image on her console screen, there was little to see except layer after layer of dark rainclouds, which had not broken since the Beagle had crashed.

  Sam was at the science console, evaluating the floods of data still pouring in from the robotic orbiters and surface vehicles scattered all throughout the Barnard planetary system. Despite the tragedy that lay below us and the desires of everyone to help, someone had to keep working at the primary reason we had been sent to this distant star—collecting scientific information about the Barnard system and transmitting it back to Earth—six light-years away.

  When Sam saw me appear he murmured to his imp, "He looks terrible, James! Tell him to go back to bed and get some sleep!"

  "Can't sleep," I replied grimly back at James. I turned to look hopefully at Linda's console screen. "Has Linda seen anything yet?" I asked James.

  Linda avoided looking at me. "Nothing but clouds," came back her reply through my imp. Then, knowing full well what the next question was, she added. "Nothing over the radio but lightning static. The cloud cover is starting to break up, however. If I could only predict the weather, I might be able to forecast when the clouds will part enough to let us get a glimpse of the crash site."

  "Weather is what I'm good at," I said, finally relieved to have something constructive to do. I swung around her console and sat myself in front of the second science console. My fingers flew about the touchscreen, setting up the icon menu. "Bring up the weather map for Zuni, James," I ordered.

  An hour later I allowed himself a weak smile. "In about six hours there is going to be a break between two low pressure fronts. There is a good chance we will be able to see St. Vincent Island for about three hours."

  "That will be around high noon there," came Tony's response through my imp. He was looking at the three-dimensional space navigation display in front of him, which showed the placement of Prometheus with respect to Barnard, Gargantua, and its moons. The display also contained computer generated lines that outlined the invisible shadow cones of the giant planet and the moons, for knowing the position of those shadow cones was essential in piloting a spacecraft powered by sunlight. The shadow cone of Gargantua was approaching the orb of Zuni. "It's going to be dark for almost two of those three hours."

  "Damn!" I said, feeling frustrated again. I sent out orders through my imp. "Linda. James. Have the Christmas Bush get the infrared detector array ready to substitute for the visible photoelectric array in the telescope. The resolution won't be as good, but something is better than nothing."

  "You forget I have a searchlight," said Tony. "By the time the break comes, I could have Prometheus just outside Gargantua's shadow cone and in position to reflect some sunlight on the landing area. I won't be able to hold the sail in position for the whole two hours, but I should be able to cover most of the eclipse period."

  "I was planning on using both the visible and the long infrared arrays at the same time, anyway," injected Linda. "I just have to insert a wavelength selective mirror in the ray path to pull out the infrared portion and send it to the infrared detector array. That way I can look for infrared signatures from objects warmer than the background, and correlate them with any visible spectrum signatures that match typical vehicle, spacesuit, coverall, and skin reflectance spectra."

  "Skin reflectance! Are you going to be able to see individual people?" I asked.

  "Sorry, no," replied Linda, again avoiding my eyes and speaking softly through her imp while her fingers flew over the touchscreen. "I'm afraid not. To keep the sail out of Gargantua's shadow, Tony is going to have to put Prometheus at least one Gargantuan radius from Zuni. That's a hundred thousand kilometers. The best resolution I can get with my ten meter telescope aperture at that distance is ten meters. But the Beagle made a careful multispectral survey of the beaches around Crater Lagoon before it went down to land, so we know what infrared and visible spectra to expect. If we see any sections of beach that are significantly different, then there is something new there. And if that something new has the right spectra and is far enough away from the high tide line, then someone escaped from the crash and is on the beach waiting for us to see them."

  "I hope so . . ." I said soberly, and turning my eyes again to my screen I felt the command responsibility weighing heavily on my shoulders again. "Although if they got out, why haven't they radioed us?" I asked my imp. No one answered.

  I got up from the console and headed for the lift shaft.

  "I think I'll go up to the kitchen and get some coffee so I'll be awake when the break in the weather comes."

  "No, you don't!" Sam yelled behind me. I turned to see him looking at Tony. "Tony—you're technically commander of Prometheus during this shift. You tell that bleary-eyed, baggy-suited, bone-weary, blowzy-bearded bum to go back to bed where he belongs. We'll wake him before the action starts."

  "Sam . . ." protested Tony. "He's a Colonel and I'm just a Captain . . ."

  I interrupted. "Sam's right, Tony. I'll go to bed like I shoul
d. Besides, now that I have something positive to look forward to, I'll probably be able to get some decent sleep this time. We don't know what we'll find when we're finally able to see the surface, but at least the uncertainty will be over."

  Five hours later, the whole crew was on the control deck, either operating a console or looking over the shoulder of someone who was. Tony was flying Prometheus while Katrina had taken over the communications console. Linda was operating the main telescope at maximum resolution. She had three helpers, each one monitoring one of the magnified images the telescope obtained in different parts of the spectrum. Sam and Red watched the long- and short-infrared images and Thomas the visible image, while Linda glanced occasionally at the long ultraviolet display in case anything interesting showed up there.

  Caroline was operating the laser ranger. She was set to scan the smoothly sloping beach areas around Crater Lagoon, looking for bumps in the topography that hadn't been there during the initial careful topographic survey of the island and lagoon. The laser wavelength had been carefully shifted to the short-infrared band to avoid any possible eye damage. Deirdre was operating the microwave sounder. Any strong returns from that instrument would indicate highly reflective metal objects. I manned the weather console. The display on my screen showed the actual multispectral cloud cover image superimposed on a computer map that indicated the positions of the various islands on the ocean-covered planetoid below.

  "The last clouds of the front are starting to move past the location of St. Vincent Island," I said through my imp. "What's the time to eclipse, Tony?"

  "It's starting right now," said Tony. I watched as the shadow of Gargantua began to take a bite out of the mottled blue, green, and gray marble on my screen. The eclipse darkness passed swiftly over the location of St. Vincent Island before the front cleared.

  "I see a large circular glow through the clouds in the short-infrared," said Red.

  "It's in the long IR too," said Sam. "That must be the lava in the central caldera of St. Vincent Mountain. It matches up perfectly with the caldera in the map overlay."

  "Now that the rain has stopped, I'm starting to get decent returns out of the microwave sounder even through the cloud cover," reported Deirdre.

  "Any returns?" I asked eagerly.

  "None that weren't there before," said Deirdre, switching frequencies and repeating the scan. Every green blip in the return matched up perfectly with the faint blue outlines in the microwave reflectance overlay map that had been generated during the initial surveys.

  "Damn!" I said, feeling the frustration set in again.

  "That just means there's no metal on the beach," said Red encouragingly. "That doesn't mean there aren't people on the beach."

  "What's that glow under the clouds to the south of the volcano?" said Thomas, whose sharp eyes had caught something in the visible display.

  "Must be lava in another volcanic caldera," said Sam. "St. Vincent Mountain has a number of secondary calderas, and they're all potentially active."

  "Nope! It's not!" said Thomas in an elated voice, as the cloud cover finally passed away and Crater Lagoon came into view. "Volcanic calderas don't come in the shape of a giant X!"

  A half-hour later the clouds were covering St. Vincent's island again, and we switched our consoles to a replay of the action that had taken place during the short break in the weather. Sam was busy combining the output from all the instruments that had been looking at the scene. We had already seen one run-through and were about to repeat it with a different multispectral mix.

  "Play it again, Sam," I said eagerly . . .A sense of deja vu floated through my fatigued brain. The answers to three trivia questions rose—unwanted but insistent—into my tired mind . . .

  Ingrid Bergman said it; not Humphrey Bogart.

  She said only; "Play it, Sam." There was no "again."

  The tune was, "As Time Goes By . . ."

  I shook my head to clear it of the unwanted memories and continued my sentence. "I want to make sure the count we got the first time is correct."

  "OK," said Sam. "As I roll the video record again, James will put a circle around each blob whose infrared emission spectra and visible reflectance spectra matches a man-made surface or human skin. During the first run, there were definite matches with coverall spectra and hints of skin spectra, but no indications of metallic or spacesuit spectra."

  "Which is why they didn't radio," I said. "The lander must have sunk so fast they didn't have time to put on suits. The atmosphere must not be too bad for them, if they've been able to survive this long. The main thing now is to find out how many of the crew made it to shore."

  "By having James follow the blobs as they start the fire, tend it for a while, and then put it out, it is possible to gather information along the way that allows James to tighten the error bars on the size of the blobs, and determine how many objects were in each initial blob. Then, once Caroline's laser ranger passes over a blob, James can use that range data to pick out the highest point in the return from that area and get an estimate of the height of the person to within a centimeter. That's good enough to identify specific people, like Richard and Jinjur. Now watch again and count. I'll have James put a number by each blob as soon as it feels certain that the blob contains one distinctive individual."

  "One, two, three . . .four . . ." I counted as the computer generated numbered circles around the scurrying blobs that moved up and down the fiery cross. Some of the circles split in two, and all of them became smaller and smaller until a number appeared next to them. Sometimes the number was joined by a set of initials as a particular individual was identified.

  " . . .seven VJ. That's Jinjur, all right. Standing near the center of the cross and telling everyone else what to do. Eight . . ."

  " . . .and ten," completed Sam a little later.

  "Ten SE," I added, feeling the massive but unseen weight of responsibility drop from my shoulders. "Once Richard was identified, the next tallest one had to be Shirley."

  "So, it looks like all ten made it," said Sam. "In addition, there are indications from the visible spectra that a segment of the lagoon is redder than normal, with a spectra that matches Little Red, indicating that at least one of the flouwen escaped."

  "I wonder how that happened?" asked Katrina. "They were sealed in the central water tank on the Beagle. If the crew didn't even have time to don suits, then they certainly didn't have time to release the flouwen."

  "Somehow they did." I paused and took a deep breath. "Well," I continued grimly. "They're alive. For how long we don't know. Now . . .How are we going to get them out of there?"

  No one had an answer.

  "James!" I said to the imp on my shoulder. "Keep an eye on those clouds and let me know if they show signs of breaking again." I looked around the control deck at the eight faces waiting for my next sentence. "Let's all adjourn to the view lounge upstairs with a squeezer of coffee and have a brainstorming session. There must be some way we can rescue them."

  "It's just as you told Jinjur when they left," concluded Red, a few hours later. "If both the Dragonfly and the Ascent Module fail, there is no way the exploration crew can return to Prometheus. We can't pull the same trick that we used on Rocheworld. There's no zero-gee point for the Ascent Module to descend to, and besides the Dragonfly plane is at the bottom of Crater Lagoon. Unless someone thinks of something new that this brainstorming session failed to find, they are marooned on Zuni until the follow-on expedition arrives some twenty-five years from now."

  "If they survive that long," I muttered, beginning to feel weary again.

  "If there was something drastically wrong with the atmosphere, they would have been dead by now," said Katrina. "Of course, there is the problem of food. Even if they can find something non-poisonous to eat, there is the potential of long term malnutrition due to lack of proper vitamins and trace minerals."

  "Thanks for reminding me of that," I said, somewhat sarcastically I'm afraid.

  "We
could send down one of our exploration crawlers with a load of food, medicine, and vitamin pills," suggested Tony. "They can carry up to fifty kilos of cargo if the cargo is compact enough."

  "The first thing we need to do is get them a radio so we can establish contact and find out what it is they think they need," I replied. "Fortunately, the crawlers have an outside microphone as part of their exploration sensor suite. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until the weather clears completely before we attempt to drop in a crawler. The high winds in the jet streams could cause the crawler aeroshell to tumble and burn up, while the updrafts in the storm clouds could cause the crawler parachute to rip apart."

  Thomas spoke up. "If all you want is to send them a radio, you don't have to use a crawler. Use one of the self-powered penetrator harpoons that Sam and I used on the twin moonlets, Zoroaster and Zwingli. Although they're designed primarily to gather subsurface temperature gradient and seismic data, they do have an external acoustic detector, so we can separate underground seismic vibrations from atmospheric vibrations like thunder and volcanic eruptions. That would be a perfectly adequate microphone. All we would need to do is add a speaker."

  "And the best thing about the penetrators," added Sam, "is that they're rugged enough that they can pass through jet streams and storm clouds like they weren't there. Also, they are self-guiding, and as long as they can see a distinctive feature and match it with a preprogrammed map, they can hit any desired point on the surface within a few meters."

  "Let's do it!" I said. "The sooner we give them a reply to their flaming cross signal, the better we all will feel."

  "James?" said Sam to the imp riding on his shoulder. "Do you have a speaker that can take shock loads that we could add to a penetrator sensor suite?"

  "Certainly," replied the computer voice back through his imp. "One of the standard options for the penetrator sensor package is an acoustic ranger designed for scanning the region around the landing point in order to more accurately determine the exact location of the penetrator with respect to surrounding surface features. Normally, a laser ranger is used, since it can be used as a crude video camera to build up a picture of the surroundings, but the acoustic option is available in case the atmosphere is expected to be opaque to laser light. The acoustic ranger has enough bandwidth that it would make a very adequate speaker."