by Pam Uphoff
"Right. I hope we don't need that sort of flexibility. Thanks, Lon."
Lon sighed, but . . . an ice age world. He might be glad of the extra week into spring. He turned to the Cadre bulletin board and posted the new departure time, and last acceptable arrival time to the Asian Gate Complex that everyone referred to as Nowhereistan.
Three weeks later, nine large trucks and four gyps drove through the gate to a new world.
Lon grinned in delight, as they emerged from pre-dawn Nowhereistan into a bright sunny day. Rolling green hills, deer bounding away, then stopping to stare at the new comers. His gyp kept going, bumping over thick tufts of long grass. The first rule of gate travel was never ever stop in the gate or stop where someone else will be halted in the gate. Collisions in transit tended to get energetic. The big trucks were all coordinating well, splitting left and right to immediately space themselves, and then turning as they reached their designated distances. "Loop around, Roxy."
Roxy Seabaugh was an old hand at driving around new worlds. She turned right and swung around to give him a good view of the deployment. He spotted the red flagged final vehicle—Ray's gyp—as the glowing night view of the gate complex shrank and disappeared. They were on their own.
This world, like all the so-called parallel worlds, was an Earth with a slightly different history. The gate should have put them down somewhere with in a two thousand mile radius of the same location on their Earth. Exactly where they were would be one of the first things they'd try to find out. Then they'd find out if the same rock formations were present, check for known ore bodies, or start from scratch if the geology was different.
Ray was already in action, taking a long steady look around the gate area and nodding in satisfaction. Next he'd grab his soil tester, yep, there he went. Lon turned around and took a look himself. "Roxy, top of that hill there, please." The view was close to spectacular. Rolling green hills climbing to foothills and then mountains to the southwest. The tall pointed peaks of volcanoes stood up against a cloudless deep blue sky. East of them, a large river wound between hills, perhaps three miles away. Beyond it, a long steep ridge running more or less north-south poked sharp edges at the clean blue sky. North held more white, a long ridge, and to the south, rolling hills faded into the distance. The air was chilly, and would be down right cold tonight, but the grass didn't look like it had been frost burned. Everything was green and fresh, and Lon could feel himself grinning. "Now this is a lovely world. I hope we find something here to rival that mountainous mess of Twelve-seventeen."
Roxy sniffed. "I know all about mountains." She turned up the collar of her company jacket.
Lon chuckled. "I suspect we've got enough here to keep you busy. For now, let's let Ray know he's got a nearby river, for water."
Ray had the tractor down and one of the 'scouts' mowing the tall grass already. Scout was just the short term for the guys that did the muscle work, and if there was danger, the shooting. Some of them had hunting experience, all had extensive travel histories. Ray was walking around placing stakes. Lon flipped on his radio comm and frowned at the crackling static. Odd, with no clouds in sight.
Ray measured and noted his way up to Lon's hill. "I don't see any reason to prefer north or south of the gate, so pick your favorite. Want your box right here?"
"And steal the best view? I'm afraid I should be nearer the anchor. Let's put everything south of it. Unless you need the river."
"Nah. The soil's deep and moist, there will be water in every gravel or sand layer, so it's just a matter of going deep enough to have filtered out all the bio-contamination. All right. I'll run the entrance road straight out for five hundred meters, and the return lanes just north of them. Fuel tanks and water tower to the north, boxes south . . ." He marched off and Lon hauled all the scientific staff off and out of the way of the work going on. After mowing came the grading and the building of elevated pads for the boxes, in a neat double row south of the gate. Then they started dropping the boxes and expanding them. The size limitations of the gate had created some interesting challenges for engineers, but these 'boxes' were simply accordion folded or had sections that slid inside each other, or both. They, and the trailer they were mounted on, had to fit through a three and a half meter circle, and be no longer than eleven meters. Ray dropped the HQ box just up the hill from the anchor. For now Lon would be living in the HQ box. If they got lucky, he'd bring in more staff (and boxes) and it would become all office space. The BioSci unit was next. Again, if they were lucky it would become the medical center for the expanded operations, and the biologists would get one or more boxes of their own. The Geology/Physics box would likewise be augmented, according to the specific things they found. The aerial mapping box, mess, two boxes of private living quarters, one barracks box for the drivers who'd be coming and going. It was a small cadre, leaving him the funds to hire short or long term specialists at need.
The scientific staff, pretty much as a whole, turned their backs on the camp construction and started poking around. Nelson wheedled Roxy and the gyp from Lon and headed east, with his assistant and the biologist, who was muttering about the lack of trees. Apart from the brushy willows along the fringes of the river and the little creeks running into it, there were no trees to be seen.
Kia Farr, the physicist Nelson had recommended, was fooling with some of her equipment. She was an unknown quantity, being one of the new hires. She was supposed to be a solid mapper, but with plenty of theoretical background as well. The tiny fluctuations in the local gravity and magnetic fields gave clues as to deep faults or dense ore bodies. The drone aircraft would carry out a grid search of the planet, full spectrum, IR through gamma, magnetic as well as gravity. Then they'd go out and check on the ground to determine the cause and meaning of changes in any of the surveys. The gyps had a range of about two thousand kilometers, could carry extra alcohol to extend the range, and if all else failed, they could limp slowly home on the electric motors and solar panels.
The radio clipped onto his belt crackled a bit over Ray's voice. "Damn static. No sign of a thunderstorm, though. We'll have all the boxes dropped and the mess box up by sundown. Water piped in by tomorrow, so we can set up the lavatories, expand the rooms. Do the labs the day after."
Lon nodded reflexively. "Good. I expect even the newest of the cadre can manage a night out of doors."
"I'll get the Barracks Box opened, so if the temps drop, the faint hearted can sleep inside. There just won't be any working plumbing. And I've got the runway for the drones at the top of my list. We'll impress the Board of Directors yet."
"Bah. They're dead easy to please. Just find lots of anything over atomic number twenty-six."
Ray snorted. "Not anything, just most of it. In fact they'll take iron is if it's easy enough to mine."
Naomi Haskell wasn't wasting any time, she had one of the balloons out, and ready to be filled. She had dozens of high altitude helium balloons with throwaway instrument packages. A complex camm, radar altimeter and ranging unit and the broadband communicator. The communicator sent compressed messages, and could be set to repeat them. That ought to get around the damned static problem. And as long as the balloon was in sight, they'd be able to double check the altitude, giving them better confidence in calculating the altitudes of features to either side that the ranging radar pinged. The complex cam would make analyzing color changes from IR through visual to UV easy, so they could identify surface rocks from a distance. It couldn't be steered, but it was dead easy, reliable and an altogether simple way to locate themselves. If it caught a strong jet stream it might even cross the ocean and get them some information about the Noram continent.
Half of Lon's attention was now on Farr, as she seemed unhappy with whatever equipment she was using. He clicked off on Ray and walked over. "Problem?"
"The readings aren't settling down properly. It's jiggling all over, and showing spikes."
"I thought that was what it always looked like."
&nbs
p; "Only when moving. Just sitting here, it ought to settle. There! See that? A gravity drop of zero point zero five milligals. Absurd. It must have gotten damaged. I've got a spare, but it's in the Box. This is really irritating."
"The drones all have gravity meters too, don't they?"
"The main surveyors do. I just prefer to calibrate them both before they take off and after they return. There's another long dip. I'm going to ream the people who certified this machine."
"It'll be awhile before you can get to them."
She nodded glumly. "Oh well. I should be able to get the spare out tomorrow. After all it's not like the gravity field is actually behaving like this."
"Right." He wandered back to watch the balloon filling with helium.
Naomi released the first balloon immediately and as it drifted south nearly everyone gathered around the small field mapping comp as it translated data and pictures into terrain maps.
When Nelson returned in the twilight, he pounced on the maps.
"Look at those glaciers! That may be the northern ice cap. A thousand miles of rolling dry grasslands to the south and southwest." Nelson quivered in place as the balloon's field of view drifted southward and they lost sight of the ice. "I'll need to take a look on foot, the ice can't be more than a couple of hundred miles to the north."
As the sky darkened, Lon took in the brilliant stars. He loved the skies of primitive worlds. He, and most of the cadre opted to sleep out on the hill. Even the short termers, the drivers of the trucks toting the boxes opted to sleep out in the brilliant night. The doctor dispensed a lotion that kept the few mosquitoes at bay.
George nudged him awake in the predawn.
"Thought you'd like to see this."
Lon sat up and followed George's gesture. Venus was bright in the eastern sky, the almost new moon cut a thin crescent from the inky sky . . . and there were comets. Three of them. No. Four. A bit south of due east, the lowest was nearly lost in the faint predawn. The other three lined up vertically like beads on a string, the pale wash of their tails fading upwards, gas and dust blown away by the solar wind
"That's unusual." George muttered. "Been a while since I've seen even one so obvious, I've never seen a string of them like this."
"Yeah. Same here." Lon made a mental note to take some long exposure pictures. No doubt an astronomer would be able to tell him all about them. He watched them rise, the pale ghosts of the tails fading away before the sun broke the horizon, the brighter cores disappearing not long after.
Then he got up and helped George with breakfast over a small fire.
By noon the next day, the instruments on the balloon were mapping dry hills, with high mountains visible to the south, then a high altitude wind took it away to the west and as the sun set, over the coast and out to sea.
Lon almost refused to move indoors that night. The air was crisp and cool, perfect camping weather.
"Ah, now this is my idea of a proper new world. I hope this place has half the promise of Twelve-seventeen." George grinned. "The Government scouts there reported voracious mosquitoes and high humidity. Maybe your Board will leave the whole planet to JJ."
Lon growled. "It's out of my hands. Nasty little ass kissing backstabber. I'll be happy so long as he's not anywhere on a world of mine."
George eyed him. "Where'd you work with him?"
"Tournay. And that is all I'm going to say." Lon stalked off far enough to enjoy the bright stars in solitude.
Kia Farr was much more hesitant when she got to the rest of her equipment, and the second gravity meter and all the drones with gravity meters all registered the same fluctuations. "I don't suppose the planet has neutronium pellets in low orbits or something, does it?"
"I really doubt it." He left her disassembling the gravity meters and wandered down to the mapping box.
Nelson had them pretty well spotted on his map. Northwestern China. "The ice probably covers all of the Mongolian highlands. We'll have to circle wider to find out if it is regional, or connected to the polar icecap. South and east we have arid grasslands, the ice age Gobi desert. The shoreline is a vague approximation of the Earth's continental shelf." Nelson tapped a bit of water at the northern limit of the coverage. "The Sea of Japan, probably a land locked lake, possibly salty. I can't pinpoint much else, the sea level is lower and the geologic history different. But those mountains to the south would be the Himalayan complex, however altered. They're taller, can you imagine that? I wonder if we could drive over these mountains to the west and release a balloon there? Map westward?"
Naomi shook her head. "The way the jet stream grabbed the first one, we'll have to use the drones to map to the west. The other balloon I've launched, I set to stay low. We may be able to get a good deal further south, get some data on those mountains for you."
Lon peered at the map and nodded his approval. "Did the first balloon make it across the Pacific?"
"Not even close. It hit a storm a few hundred miles offshore and lost lifting power, either iced or holed. And as I said, number two is low altitude. I'll send up another high altitude balloon in a few days, give that storm time to move or dissipate."
"Right. We'll try to get the drones up and flying quickly. We'll have them up in two weeks even if the gravity meters are recording nothing but garbage."
Lon's first report was sent with the returning empty trucks and all of Nelson's surface and core samples. The report skated past "instrument problems delaying the start of the drone flights" and jumped to the early maps with Nelson Manrique's geologic samples used to denote the surface geology." Not bad for three day's work. The next report was going to have to have drone flights
Spring 1360
Eastern Hemisphere
The ground was getting difficult, the river beside them thick and swollen and fast, taking up a lot of the space between the towering walls of rock and ice.
"The Rip is a lot narrower, now." Lefty rolled up his maps. "The walls are lower too, unless there's a second scarp buried under the ice. I think the faults and all will be running back together a lot further north than the other end, down east of Farofo."
It was only a week since the Auld Wulf had traveled them and their horses, piled with supplies, to where they'd abandoned their wagon last fall when the arctic winter closed in.
The god had jumped them all over two thousand miles to the geyser in the Rip that was closest to the village. Then he'd taken them the rest of the way in mere five hundred miles long steps. Actually it was a bit of a relief to know he was a god. Lefty could stop thinking about how much hard work would be needed to reach that level of ability. Never and Dydit, working together, could travel ten miles or so, more when they had geothermal features to use as mental wayposts. And they had years more training than he'd had.
Never and Dydit, together, were also good at physical manipulations. Lefty watched, admittedly a bit jealously, as they shifted boulders and melted rock for another half mile before relaxing. Even though Never pulled energy from the Earth, and Dydit used and redirected power from sunlight, some metabolic energy was always expended, and could only be replaced the old fashioned way. With a year to refine their techniques, they were both efficient and terrifyingly powerful, when he stopped to think of the sheer weight of rock they moved.
The road cooled quickly in the brisk air. Lefty walked down it, looking over the edge. In places they'd had to build a ledge out over the river. From the end they could see around the shoulder of rock. A narrow canyon, filled with the river, bent out of sight, but showed a tantalizing glimpse of blue, and Lefty was suddenly aware of the scent of grass over the slight sulfur of the river. He hadn't seen a fumarole for the last few miles.
"What do you think? A narrow shelf right over the river's edge?" Dydit scowled down at the fast moving bulk of water on his left. It was cloudy with the fine sediments ground up under the thick ice sheets.
"Looks like it's all down hill from here," Never said. "I wonder how fast it drops off beyond the sh
oulder. It's moving fast and it's loud."
"Only one way to find out." They joined hands and rock softened and moved, deformed like putty into a flat road wide enough for the wagon. Half cut out of the canyon wall, and half a ledge sticking out over the river. They walked forward, and the rock yielded as they approached. Beyond, the ground fell away. To their right, the ice sheet fractured and thinned and disappeared. Across the river on the left the ice marched on, but the rock cliff continued, dipping down as the ice thickened Ahead, from their height they looked across a valley perhaps thirty miles across. The far side was a steep ridge running roughly east-west.
The river plunged off the cliff, to crash down into a narrow lake that curved to the right as it reached the center of the valley floor. The brilliant green of grass sprouted among the white and gray rock, then spread to dominate the valley floor. Birds flew, and the bounding shapes that were probably deer drew the eye.
"No trees," Never murmured.
"Too far north, probably," Dydit leaned out. "How the hell are we going to get down there?"
It took a full three days of rock moving and molding to produce a path the wagon could traverse.