George landed the airplane at the north pole without incident.
“What’s the weather prediction, Joe?”
“James predicts a few mild snowstorms, but no high winds for at least two days.”
“Great!” exclaimed Richard. “I should be able to get at least a kilometer deep core in that time.”
“Where are you going to put a kilometer long ice core?” exclaimed Cinnamon.
“In Joe’s memory,” replied Richard, heading for the airlock.
After they landed, everyone not asleep put on suits to go outside. George helped Richard haul the electrically powered coring machine out from the storage hold underneath the airplane, while Shirley pulled out a power cable connected to the Dragonfly‘s electrical power system. Before he started the machine, Richard explained how it worked to Cinnamon.
“It’s not really an ice coring machine that cuts out a core and brings it to the surface to be analyzed. It’s more like a mole with an analysis machine built into it. This millimeter-sized cylindrical cutter in the very nose cuts a core and passes it back through a sophisticated analyzer that continuously measures the ice’s density and opto-electrical properties, then melts the core to extract the air and dust, and analyzes those. The data collected is then passed back up the power cable. I start it out by using a coring tool to make a hole for the mole to start in.” He demonstrated using a sharp edged cylindrical tool that quickly cut a half-meter deep hole in the packed snow. “I then put the mole in the hole — it’s a snug fit — and these screw treads along the side push it forward, while these sharp rotating teeth in front cut up the ice, pass the chunks up through these channels, and out the rear. If it encounters a rock, it backs up — you can see that there are cutters in the rear too — starts another hole at an angle, and works its way around the obstacle and continues on down, sending back data as it goes. The real trick was getting ten kilometers of power and data cable in this storage canister at the end. It’s all done optically through a very low loss optical fibre and high efficiency electro-optical and opto-electric converters.” He started the mole up, and it soon was out of sight.
“What happens when it gets to the bottom?” asked Cinnamon.
“I can either leave it there, or have it climb out, either back up the hole it made on the way down, which is the fastest way, or upward through pristine ice to get a confirming set of data. I won’t decide which option until I see how fast it is penetrating through this ice, or George or the weatherman warns me that my time is running out.”
Once the mole was on its way down, and Shirley and her helpers had anchored the Dragonfly down with ice anchors, there was little else to do except watch Barnard circle around the sky, eight degrees above the horizon. When the noon-time eclipse occurred, with Barnard going behind Gargantua, cut in half by the horizon, the crew went back into the plane, and the flouwen habitat was restored.
Later, Deirdre found herself idly staring out the cockpit windows at the darkening sky, swirling with another snowstorm. All of the humans were apt to do this; the sight was mesmerizing. The snowflakes changed shape with the force of the wind, ranging from clusters held together by sleet, to fine, tiny particles like diamond dust, now drifting into huge mounds, now swirling in miniature cyclones, now blowing horizontally. Trying to imagine how cold it would feel on her skin, Deirdre shivered, and turned away from the bleak landscape. Although Dragonfly was comfortably warm inside, Deirdre’s long reverie out the window had left her feeling chilled, and she headed purposefully for the galley. Pausing only to get a cup of hot tea, she put Joe to work on some puff pastry. The computer was capable of producing a fine, thin sheet that, in the hot oven, burst into delicate layers of crispness. Deftly, Deirdre wrapped the unbaked pastry around a rich filling of chunks of real meat from Chicken Little, fragrant mushrooms, and crisp bits of onion, moistened with a clear sauce redolent of wine from James’s chemical synthesizers. The aroma of the little triangles, baking to a rich brown, brought the crew in plenty of time to savor them hot, with a bit of freshly mixed mustard. Deirdre called the little pies “bridies”, and the crew loved them. They were improved even further by their contrast to the forbidding landscape outside.
The ice at the north pole must have been fairly clean of micrometeorites, because the mole never encountered one. The only excitement came after two Zulu days, when, four kilometers down, the mole broke through into the ocean under the ice. Fortunately, it was able to back up in time, and after turning the mole around, Richard had it climb back up, taking more data on the way.
After the period of relative inactivity, the crew was eager to go. The mole was resupplied with a new power cable package and stored under the hull, the anchors were lifted and stowed away, and Arielle was in the pilot’s seat. As it had been continuously since they had arrived, it was still light outside.
“Where next?” asked Arielle, turning to look at George in the co-pilot seat.
“The leading pole,” said George. “That’s were all the atmosphere and water molecules that the geysers threw into space fall back again onto Zulu. We want to get samples at as high an altitude as we can fly.”
“Dragonfly can go all the way into space on its jets,” Arielle reminded him.
“We want to save the monopropellant for real emergencies,” replied George. “Like the ascent module on Victoria not working. Just fly us there at a good mapping altitude, and when we get close, we’ll take it as high as it will go on the atmospheric bypass jets.”
Arielle lifted the Dragonfly, Shirley started the mapping routine, and George pulled up the northern hemisphere weather map obtained from the statite Colin hovering above, and shifted it to cover the region from the north pole to the leading pole. The map was full of strong, tightly coiled cloud features.
“We’re in for a stormy experience,” he said with obvious concern.
“Maybe we should try another pole first,” suggested Shirley. “Perhaps the weather around the inner pole will be better later.”
“The weather around the inner pole is always bad,” replied George. “Because of all the infalling air and water vapor at the leading pole, it’s a region of constant high pressure, high humidity, and relative warmth — the kinetic energy of the infalling molecules heats up the air. As the warm high pressure air mass spreads out onto the rest of the planet, it cools, precipitation starts, and storms are bred. It’s a continuous process — one storm front after another. Waiting won’t do any good, so we might as well go now.”
It was a terribly bumpy flight. Everyone stayed belted in either a seat or a bunk, and the flouwen had an occasional breaking wave in their habitat tank. Shirley complained that they were losing mapping data, but a number of times Arielle had to climb above the clouds because there was no way around them at lower altitudes. Finally, they approached the leading pole region and the air became calmer. The sky was clear overhead, and Gargantua was on the horizon, cut in half by the skyline. Barnard had just set and the visible half of Gargantua was fully illuminated. It was a picture of quiet calm.
“We’re in the permanent center of the storm,” remarked George, now in the pilot seat. He took the plane up as high as he could coax it to go, until the controls became mushy. He wished Arielle were not on her sleep shift, because she could have got a few more hundred meters out of the plane.
“Deploy atmospheric sampler scoops,” he commanded Joe, and the plane wiggled slightly in protest and drifted lower in altitude as its aerodynamic properties were changed.
“The composition looks pretty much as you predicted,” reported Richard from the science console, as he watched the data build up on his screen.
“Except I now have real numbers to put into my atmospheric model,” replied George. “I presume you want an ice core sample?”
“Of course,” replied Richard.
“Then down we go,” said George, turning the Dragonfly into a slowly descending spiral. As he descended, the illuminated portion of the half-hemisphere of Gargan
tua visible above the horizon became thinner and the night grew darker, as Barnard circled around during the night. Finally Gargantua was no longer a source of light, but instead was a large gray-black blank spot on the eastern horizon of the star-studded sky. There was no light except that from the stars and the distant quarter moon of Zouave. George thought for a while about landing on the ice using his wing lights, but decided discretion was the better choice and put Dragonfly into a circular holding pattern until the sun rose. Sunrise was forty minutes late, as Barnard finally rose from behind Gargantua. The eclipse, which occurred at noon-day on the inner pole, occurred at daybreak here at the leading pole.
After four days at the leading pole, a frustrated Richard finally had to give up with only a few kilometers of core data taken because of multiple encounters with stones. It didn’t take a very large micrometeorite to clog up a millimeter-sized coring tube.
“The seasonal ice layers are extremely thin here,” remarked Richard as he looked at the data. “In some cases, large sequences that we saw in the north pole data are missing, as if there had been no deposit during that period, or the surface was evaporated away at a later time.”
“It is warmer here than anywhere else on the planet,” George reminded him.
“But why are there so many rocks?” Shirley asked. “We didn’t run into any in the north pole core.”
“It is the leading pole,” remarked Cinnamon. “Naturally you would expect more debris to fall in on this hemisphere.”
“That’s part of it,” said Richard. “But I suspect the real reason is that while lots of snow and meteorites fall down onto the surface over time, the snow evaporates away, while the rocks don’t, so pretty soon you have built up a high density of rocks. I give up. Let’s go somewhere else more profitable.”
“And where there is something for the rest of us to do other than watch Richard’s moles dig holes in the ice,” muttered Shirley.
“The next stop is the inner pole,” replied George. “The orbital survey cameras have identified a number of icerug colonies there, so we should all have plenty to see — including the flouwen.”
They headed westward, passing bumpily again through the storm belt around the inner pole. The further west they went, the lower Gargantua sank on the horizon. They finally left it behind, and as a result when nighttime came, it became pitch black, but Arielle kept the plane boring through the darkness.
“The icerugs at the outer pole shall be living a different schedule to the inner pole icerugs,” mused Deirdre. “They’ll have to shut down completely at night, while the ones at the inner pole just slowed down, since they still could see, though their energy intake was lowered.”
“That would be one of the things we’ll have to ask them about,” remarked Cinnamon.
* * *
They didn’t get to ask them anything. Arielle had slowly, and carefully, and quietly, landed the Dragonfly on the outskirts of a prosperous looking icerug city. A greeting party of George, Cinnamon, and Deirdre had exited the airlock — George deciding that including the flouwen on this first meeting would be too confusing. Each member of the greeting party had their suit imp outside on their shoulder, holding a large speaker cone of glassy-foil in their glittering fingers, ready to boom out the icerug words as the humans spoke. The humans had marched up to a vertex where three of the icerug carpets met and waited. George looked up at the sky to see that Prometheus was hovering above them. The crew on the spaceship would be watching the meeting through the video cameras in the helmets of the exploration party. The three icerugs first looked at them from a distance, then together they ventured up enough nerve to bring their nodes to the edge of their carpets. One of them gave a lengthy speech, but instead of an automatic translation of the speech, there was only silence from their imps.
“I am unable to translate,” Joe finally had to admit.
“Do you mean to say you can’t understand a word?” asked George. “Did you ask James to help you out?”
“It is comparable to asking someone to translate Swahili after having been trained to translate Japanese,” came James’s voice over their imps.
“These outer pole icerugs are as distant and isolated from the inner pole icerugs as are Africa and Japan,” remarked Deirdre. “It is not surprising there are major differences in language.”
“If you start talking while pointing at people and things, I can start building up a new vocabulary,” suggested Joe.
“I’m afraid we don’t have time for that,” said George regretfully.
“The reason we were able to communicate with the other icerugs so quickly is that Splish and James had spent the necessary time beforehand learning the language,” Cinnamon reminded him. “What we need is another Splish.”
“We have one — Babble,” remarked Deirdre.
“That’s a good point, Deirdre,” said George, thinking. “We are going to have to leave the visiting of these outer pole icerugs to the follow-on mission, but we can make their life easier by leaving Babble behind to maintain contact so James and these icerugs can learn to speak to each other.”
“We’ll be wanting first to use Babble with the flouwen in the ocean,” reminded Deirdre. “Although we cannot ask these icerugs for samples of themselves, the flouwen can surely get bits of the plants and animals around the volcanic vents here. At least we’ll learn if there are differences between the inner and outer pole underwater ecosystems.”
So; after a baffling exchange of sounds, the humans and icerugs parted.
As expected, the flouwen found the ocean similar to the ocean around the Manannan geyser, and returned with many bags of samples. The flouwen were willing to tackle a coelashark, but George forbade it.
“Richard will want to measure the next big tide and geyser action anyway. That is bound to eject some coelasharks, and all we have to do is get to one of those thrown out on the ice before the icerugs do.”
Back on the Dragonfly, Richard checked with the tidal tables for Zulu. “The next good-sized tide will be in three Zulu days. It will occur at high noon here on the outer pole. Zuni will eclipse Barnard, and their two tides will add up.”
“And three days should give you enough time to take another ice core sample,” said George with a sigh. “Too bad you need the Dragonfly power supply. It would be nice to use the time to fly around and get mapping data of the rest of the geysers around the inner pole.”
“It’ll give me time to modify Babble,” said Shirley. “I’ll want to add a video camera and a touch-screen so James and the crew on Prometheus can do more than just talk with these icerugs.” She walked down the corridor toward the engineering section in the back. “I’ll also need to leave it some spare parts so it can fix itself.”
* * *
As before, when a geyser eruption was expected, everyone wanted to watch. Sleep shifts were juggled and nudged, and preparations made. Deirdre shared Arielle’s opinion that a good show was made even better by ample refreshments, and expertly blended various tasty ingredients into spreads for the crisp and wholesome but bland crackers that James seemed proud of. She also assembled several spicy sauces, perfect for dipping small hot crunchy portions of “crab” cakes and “sausages”. Four of the crew wedged themselves comfortably into the cockpit area and the jumpseats behind to watch the beginning of the eruption, while Deirdre and Richard went outside; Richard to measure its height, and Deirdre in silent determination to miss nothing, if she could help it. Shirley had activated the radar in the nose dome of the airplane to scan the geyser during the eruption.
“If a big object like a coelashark gets ejected, we should be able to track its trajectory with the radar and calculate its approximate landing point. If it’s far enough outside the icerug city, then it’s fair game for us.”
All of them were in position well in time. Foxx sat quietly on her mistress’ shoulder; Deirdre enjoyed having her small presence to talk to. Now, as the distant waters began to rise up, the woman was too breathless to speak
at all. The sky above was clear, and it was strange not to see the giant bulk of Gargantua taking up a large part of the heavens. Barnard rose higher, rapidly catching up with the fingernail moon of Zuni high overhead. The dark orb of Zuni was four times bigger than the distant sun.
The rising column of water seemed to take on a life of its own. Almost did it seem like some strange god, pulsing with vitality as it thrust upward. No wonder the icerugs regarded it with awe. Higher and higher the giant waterspout climbed, glinting and sparkling redly in the light from Barnard, and as it froze into droplets at the summit, the turbulent upward rising winds driven by the geyser began to catch the vital moisture and fling it outwards in all directions. Barnard finally caught up with the now dark Zuni at the zenith, and disappeared behind it. In the two and a half minutes of total darkness that resulted, the geyser reached its full height of fury, the distant rumbling, gushing sound overwhelming them, the frozen snow beneath their feet shaking with the mighty roar. Barnard came out from behind Zuni to illuminate the peak of the rising column of water, now reaching through the upper atmosphere and out into space. Richard was intent, periodically measuring the height of the geyser top with his sextant and calling out the results to his imp for later analysis, while Deirdre had simply watched, and now had to blink away tears of gratitude for the privilege of beholding this wonder. Not until the waters had subsided, as swiftly as they had risen, was she able to move, and return to the ship.
“That was great! I’m really pleased. I was able to get a good set of data this time. Quite a show, hunh?” Deirdre could only nod, once, before hurrying off, and Richard shrugged. “Just can’t impress that girl,” he thought.
As Richard and Deirdre cycled through the airlock, they were surprised that no one, not even Shirley, was there to help them out of their suits. Helmets in hand, they went forward. Everyone was gathered around the communications console, which showed the worried-looking face of Katrina.
Ocean Under the Ice Page 29