by David Brin
“Hope you’re sure.”
—The calculation’s straightforward. I’m confident.—Saul eyed Carl. —Look, if it works on purples, I can tune it to some of the worst varieties of green gunk, too.—
“To kill this stuff you might have to blister everything else around. If the exposed ice vaporizes, we’re going to be smack in front of a hurricane.”
Saul caught his look. —My calculations show… oh, to hell with it. Let’s try anyway.—
—She all tuned?—Jeffers asked.
Saul nodded. Carl put his glove on the manual switch “Firing.”
There came a faint buzz beneath his hand as the capacitors discharged, and then the wall flew at him. A white streaming gale hit Carl, blowing him across the shaft, slamming him into the wall.
He bounced off, spun, regained his attitude. The comm line carried grunts, swearing, a yelp of pain. —Watch the spider! It’s gonna crash into the wall,—Jeffers said.
The microwave unit was drifting backward with ponderous menace. If it slammed into the fiberthread—
“Mechs! Mechs!”
Jeffers and Carl leaped for the mech-command module. Stopping the mammoth machine by themselves would be impossible.
Jeffers punched his side console, swearing. Figures moved in the dim light, frantically grappling for purchase on the ponderous, awkward bulk. Mechs surged in several directions, slowing the unit. In a slow-motion swirl they applied force and leverage, while seconds ticked and forces merged.
It worked—barely. The unit bumped into the wall in a slow scraping of green.
“Any injuries?”
—No.—
—Only to my pride,—Saul sent. He brushed at a smear of green on his suit bottom. —Ouch. I guess I must’ve sprained my wrist, too.—
Slowly they assembled. The burst of vapor had blown Lani in a three-bank shot, ending up a hundred meters away.
—Hey!—Sergeov sent. —Regard.—He pointed to the rim of Tunnel E.
“The plants… they’re gone,” Carl said.
—Not just fried. We disintegrated ’em,—Jeffers sent.
—Of that I was certain,—Saul said. —But why so much vapor? Must’ve boiled the water in their tissues. I’ll have to adjust the frequency better.—
“Tune all you want,” Carl said. “Come on! Slap patches on those holes before something else grows through them.”
It took another two hours of tuning before they could blow the native forms apart with a single short burst from the spider and cause only a minor steam-storm of hot steam. Carl slowly admitted that the idea seemed to work. It was hard to get used to.
Dr. Oakes was enthusiastic. She approved orders to bring in two more spiders and crews to man them. If they worked three shifts per day they might clear the most important shafts and tunnels inside forty-eight hours.
The advantage of the microwave technique was that it ripped apart the Halleyforms down at the molecular level—much more effective than chopping them up or tearing them out of the ice by hand, hoping you had gotten every root and strand.
Now, he thought, now to get rid of the goddamn green gunk itself.
Carl began to feel a faint ray of optimism cut through his bone-deep weariness. He sent Virginia slow-frame pictures of purples exploding as the microwaves hit the bulbs. She sent back an enthusiastic “Yaaaaay!” then echoed it artificially so that it sounded in his headphones as though an entire stadium were applauding him. That lifted his spirits more than anything.
They were heading back toward Central, inside a pressurized tunnel, when the madman struck.
“Leave it, leave it, leave it be! You killers! You’re the aliens here!”
They turned to see a man in a tattered ship-suit, hanging from a side passage, glaring at them angrily.
“What… ?” Carl began to say. But the man screamed and leaped forth.
He threw himself at Carl, shouting, incoherently—a high pitched babble, laced with obscenity, and the eyes wide with fevered energy. Hands stretched forward like claws, legs set to kick.
Before Carl could react, hands had grabbed his helmet ring and they went spinning away together. His helmet flew out of his hands when they smacked into a wall. The madman wrapped his legs around Carl and pounded with hard, quick fists.
Carl was sluggish, dazed. He punched at the other but missed. A right cross caught him in the eye—brilliant crimson flashes. He swung wildly. Missed.
He’s fast. Carl blocked another punch. He struck—missed—and struck out again. This time he clipped the man on the shoulder. With the energy of the mad a flurry of fists smacked into his cheek, his arm, his chest. Then, at last, help arrived. Someone yanked and the man sun away, yelling, holding out a handful of something.
Carl felt friendly hands grab him, stop his mad tumble. Lani cradled him.
“What the hell?”
“Who was it?”
“Couldn’t tell.”
“Ingersoll, I think. A guy from Chem Section.”
He blinked unsteadily as the figure launched itself away with well-timed kicks off the tunnel walls. The gibberish went on, fading. No one followed. They clustered around Carl, who was still numb from surprise.
“I’ll have bruises, that’s all,” Carl said groggily, fighting down the adrenaline rush.
“Damnedest thing,” Jeffers said.
Lani touched Carl’s face gently. “It’s swelling already. What could have provoked him?”
“He seemed deranged,” Saul said. “I’d heard he had come down with something, but Akio said it did not appear to be fatal. Whatever it was, it’s obviously affected his mind.”
Sergeov’s face took on a grim, gray cast. “Now he flees into lower tunnels. Be very hard to find him, treat him, in there, if he does not want you to catch.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Carl said. rubbing his jaw, “he can stay lost forever.”
Saul nodded, but his voice was pensive and worried as he said, “There were Halleyforms smeared on his face. I wonder how many others have what he’s developing?”
SAUL
At times, the words still haunted him. We are the aliens. Men were the invaders here, the interlopers. Now and then Saul wondered what right they had, killing what they did not understand.
Still, he admitted to a feral pleasure in roaming the deep ice caverns, zapping gunk—a savage thrill in aiming a sort of ray gun down a hallway, whispering “zap, zap” under your breath, and vaporizing the more dangerous outbreaks of comet stuff.
It didn’t surprise Saul that he was of two minds on the matter.
In this instance, it’s the soldier, the caveman in me that wins over the philosopher. My job is to chip flint, to flake new weapons and help save the tribe. It’s a priority that comes down from long, long ago. And it is right.
He touched the dial on his portable beamer. The rheostat kept drifting, and it was important to keep the device tuned exactly on the right frequency, in case they rounded a corner right into a writhing mass of purples.
In the days since that first experiment, the hall crews had learned a lot about how to use the new weapons. There was neither enough power nor labor to keep every passage clear all the time, and the waste heat would prove most unpleasant, if they tried for very long. But the effect on morale had been tremendous anyway. For the first time there seemed to be a chance they might just get through this. Those who weren’t sick were actually starting to catch up on sleep. There was less desperate talk of stripping surface mechs to be brought down below the ice.
Now, if only we can lick the sicknesses. Saul’s major reason for agreeing to come out here, to the remote tunnels near the surface, was to take enough samples to develop his data base, to begin to get some idea how Halley lifeforms interrelated, what roles the microorganisms played.
Just behind him, Lani Nguyen rode a large tunnel mech. The big robot carried a microwave digger that had been modified for hall scrubbing Except for a dicey area back on E Level, they hadn’t had
to use it much. The really tough areas were those closest to human habitation, where heat and light and air fed complex lichenoid growths and attracted the deadly, iron-mawed, worm-like colonies.
Here in the outlying tunnels, the phosphor lamps were far spaced and the temperature was kept well below freezing. Only a thin film of green coated the walls. It was easier moving about—even in spacesuits—than back where the purples crawled.
He raised his hand and Lani halted the mech at an intersection that had once been bright in orange and blue plastisheath. Now the walls were dingy under the verdant pallor of a few green-covered glow panels.
Saul scraped away lichenoid, exposing letters on the wall: D-14-TAU.
Good, they weren’t lost.
—I’ll make soundings for crevices, Saul.—
He nodded. “Okay, Lani. Just don’t venture too far from the intersection.”
—I’m leashed to you like a faithful puppy, you betcha.—
Saul smiled. Lani was smart and brave, but she was also cautious. The combination was one reason he was glad to have her assigned as his partner.
She moved carefully along the walls, thumping the fibersheath and listening with an audioscope, skillfully seeking out breaks and soft spots in the ice underneath.
They had found through hard experience that the tiny, almost imperceptible Halley-quakes that had been going on ever since their arrival kept opening narrow cracks in the icy aggregate. The danger was particularly acute at intersections, where the insulation was weakest. Part of their job out here was to map the worst of these crevices for later remelt and sealing… if there was ever enough manpower to get around to it, that is.
The scrapings from the intersection sign went into a sample vial. Saul was almost certain this was just typical Hallivirensmalenkovi. But on this trip he had also discovered a host of other, as yet undescribed types. The ecosystem clearly varied from place to place as conditions changed.
Right now Akio Matsudo was back in Central’s bio lab, working with Marguerite von Zoon and three weary techs to seek treatment for the growing sick list.
Akio was a competent scientist, but he was ideologically incapable of really adjusting to the implications of this unexpected tide of cometary life.
Everyone’s excited over the success of my microwave disruptor. I’ve got a reputation as a man of action, now. But has it persuaded anyone to take my advice? To step back and try to get the wide view?
Ha!
Saul was resigned to investigating the Halleyform problem on his own, in his own way. One part of that investigation was coming out here and looking into it for himself.
The biggest drawback is missing Virginia so much.
Saul said a grateful prayer every day they woke up together, neither of them yet suffering from some horrible, deadly thing. It was a blessing that she had—so far—not caught anything from him.
Virginia had had a few rough days there, back when the news had come about the coup in Hawaii. The resulting Percell-Ortho tensions had almost overshadowed joy over the success of the beamer technique.
Three steps forward, four steps back, Saul thought.
He wiped his nose on the helmet’s drip pad, took another anti-histamine pill, and washed it down with a sip from a water teat. Saul bent-swiveled his body upside down in the faint gravity to take another scraping of an interesting-looking growth.
There was a low growl as Lani returned with the mech. She muttered rapidly in arcane engineering dialect as she recorded her results, then she looked up at Saul.
—Only small cracks as far as Shaft Six. So, do we toast this stretch of tunnels?—
He shook his head. “No, not here. We’d be half a day finding the right tunings for the individual lichenoid components. The disrupted cells would only spread out and coat the walls anyway, serving as food for a new generation. This stuff doesn’t seem to be doing any harm right now.”
He also wanted to avoid selecting for disruptor-resistant variants. They had a weapon, now. It would be unwise to squander it as twentieth-century man had done with the best antibiotics and insecticides.
“Why don’t you just zap the area around each phosphor panel?” he suggested. “So this corridor doesn’t go completely dark and unusable.”
—And the vent valves.—Lani nodded. —Right, Saul. I know the drill by now.—
In the thin, chill air the mech’s motors gave off a low, brittle rumbling. As the carrier passed, he glanced at the cold cargo strapped to its back…the corpses they had found late yesterday and early today.
One was a spacesuited woman, still twisted in a frozen-backed body arch, as if cold and rigor had taken her in the midst of an agonized spasm. Bulging eyes and a swollen tongue disfigured her nearly out of recognition, but Central had identified her as a Power and Propulsion tech, missing three days now.
The other corpse was clothed only in insulstat coveralls. Saul and Lani had found him in the embrace of a lifeform Virginia had called a hall anemone. Bits of flesh had torn off as they tried to tug the body free. They’d had to readjust the beamer and blast the writhing colony creature to bits in order to recover and bag the poor fellow’s remains.
Who could tell why a man had died out here, so far from Central and all alone? Until they could do tissue analysis, nobody would even know who the unrecognizable jumble had been.
It was a troubling pattern. Other parties had found dead men and women in outlying tunnels. More seemed to be dying in solitary, during their off-duty hours, than suffered casualties during the hall fighting.
At first I thought it was like the way a wounded animal will sometimes drag itself away from the pack, seeking a hole in which to die. l wondered if, maybe, sick, feverish people just crawled off to be alone.
But that wasn’t it at all.
He drew his sheath knife and picked away at a mosslike growth next to the intersection code sign. The gunk was hiding something else.
Green stuff floated away from his vibrating blade, and there it was… a circle with an arrow coming off to the upper right-the symbol of maleness-with a stylized flower within.
It was the third type of graffito they had found. In this quadrant the most common had been the Arc of the Living Sun—symbol of radical Orthos from equatorial-belt countries. But there had been others as well, including the P and infinity cartouche…
… the Sigil of Simon Percell.
—Finished with that tunnel, —Lani announced. —Good thing we checked. The pressure release was stuck. Could’ve caused problems.—
“What do you make of this one?” he asked Lani, pointing to the uncovered circle-and-arrow symbol.
There was a long silence. Her face seemed pale under the helmet highlights.
—Every variety of crank was sent on this mission, Saul. Even we spacers have ours, I guess. That’s the sign of the Martian Way.—
Saul nodded. His suspicion was growing more firm.
“Clan marks. People really have taken to living out here. At first I couldn’t believe it.”
Lani explained, —It’s picked up since people have grown a little less spooked by the purples. Those guys we met down on Level K… from Madagascar and Fiji… they do their jobs at Central but they’re terrified of Percells. Refuse to sleep in the same chamber with ’em.—
“Terrified,” Saul repeated. He found it amazing that modern men and women would behave this way. He had been astonished by it all his life.
It wasn’t the Percells’ fault that they seemed more resistant to the comet diseases than unmodified humans…or at least showed fewer superficial signs of illness. But that didn’t stop the irrational myth.
During the Middle Ages the same thing happened to the Jews of Europe. Because they killed rats on sight and washed their hands, they tended to suffer less from the Plague. In the end, though, their clean habits made little difference. Enough died at the hands of enraged mobs to more than balance the toll.
Never underestimate the potential for human stupidity
. It seemed that more and more crew were taking to sleeping in their spacesuits, in outlying tunnels. And sometimes, out there, the sicknesses got them and they died, horribly and alone.
—I’ve asked people in the different faction territories to try to report if somebody’s missing. I don’t know what good it’ll do.—
Faction territories, Saul mused. “Everyone still talks to you, don’t they, Lani?”
She looked back at Saul, perhaps a little nervously.
—Well, I guess nobody feels threatened by me. I’m a pretty innocuous type. People tend to tell me things.—
Saul smiled. The Amerasian girl had depth, perhaps more than she realized.
“No. That’s only part of it. You’re a bridge of sorts, Lani, an Ortho, but one who likes Percells. A… what’s it called?”
—A Percephile, Saul?
Her laughter had a dry, nervous edge to it.
He nodded. “You’re the only one of us survivors from First Watch that most of the wakers seem to trust.”
—Mostly ’cause they know I was just a grunt. Had nothing to do with deciding who to thaw. That’s what they blame poor Carl for…—
She shook her head.
—Anyway, you’re wrong about that, Saul. Folks are pissed off right now, but if they had to pick three indispensable people out of the whole expedition, it’d have to be you and Carl and Virginia.—
Saul laughed. What a sweet child! She reminded him of what little Rachel might have been like, had she grown up. But with deep almond eyes.
He almost asked her how things were going with Carl. Rumor had it they were getting together at times… though obviously on less of a committed level than Lani would prefer. Too bad. It would be good to see something going between them, if for no other reason than because it might ease Carl’s stubborn anger over Virginia.
Saul decided against bringing up the subject. Probably I’d just put ol’ foot squarely into mouth.
“Heigh-ho,” he said, lifting his portable beamer carefully to compensate for inertia. “Back to work, kiddo.”