Cold as Ice (2 page)

"It's not our best bet, it's our
only
bet. We have to try it."

"But if you can do that for the life-support pods," said Mary Vissuto, "why not do it for the whole ship?"

"And then what?" Vern Perry was losing patience. "Even if we had enough liquid helium that we could spray the whole
Pelagic
—and we don't—we have no fuel to go anywhere. The Seeker wouldn't go away. It would sit and wait, and after a while our hull temperature would warm up again. It has to, or we'd all die of overheating. Then the Seeker would zap us. And when it realized what we had done to cool the ship, it might start looking around for other things that had been treated in the same way."

"But what will we do about the other children?" asked Mary Vissuto. It was as though she had not heard one word that Perry had said. "And what will happen to the rest of us?"

This time no one answered. If Mary still refused to look reality in the face, that was her problem.

* * *

The easy part was the desperate action. The nine pods were coated with an extra layer of thermal insulation, as much as could be installed and still permit the body heat of the infants within to dissipate. Ejection vectors were computed to make the pods seem as much as possible like ordinary members of the cluster. Finally the metabolism of the nine young children was reduced as far as Mimi Palance dared. No one had ever determined how long a child could survive in a pod, let alone with a reduced metabolic condition. Perhaps it was as well that no one knew.

When everything was ready, each pod would be thrown out into space at a preselected moment, chosen to optimize the masking effect of the natural bodies of the cluster. The pods shared no common destination, but all of them were targeted for the inner solar system. After nine days, when they should be safely beyond the Seeker's attention, each would begin to broadcast a distress signal.

As soon as the ninth life-support unit was ready, Vernor Perry placed an unconscious child inside it. He tenderly kissed the little boy good-bye. All of the children on the
Pelagic
were special, but to Vern this one was extra-special, Vern's own flesh and blood. He surveyed the cold anonymity of the pod and shuddered at the thought of his baby facing empty space, unnamed and unknown. With Mimi Palance's consent, he attached a little name card to the infant boy's shirt, then helped to prepare cards for the other eight babies.

He watched as they were launched, one by one. When the ninth pod was ejected with its precious cargo, Vern Perry muttered to himself, "The ark went upon the face of the waters. And the spirit of God moved over the vasty deep."

And then there was nothing more to be done. They could not run, they could not hide.

The hard part began.

Vern could not bear to stay with the other adults. He went to where his older boy, Martin, was playing, and retreated with him to the navigation room.

The
Pelagic
had emerged from the shelter of the rocky asteroids as soon as the last pod was on its way. The Seeker was close enough now to show a visible image. It was a long, sharp-pointed cone, with a broad lip on its thick base. There had been no change in its behavior when the six-foot ovoids of the life-support units were launched.

Seated on Vern's knee, his eight-year-old son watched the Seeker with no fear and a good deal of curiosity. "I've never seen a ship like that before, Dad," he said. "Is it a Belt design?"

"Yes. It's called a Seeker. It's a . . . a weapons ship."

"Well, the war's over now. Thank goodness. Hey!" Martin could see everything that his father saw. "It's coming this way, isn't it?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"Well, the picture looks the same size, but the scale bar on the display keeps changing."

"Quite true. You're a smart boy."
He is, too—super-smart. When he grows up—

Vern choked off the thought and squeezed his eyes tight shut.

"Why is it getting closer to us?"

"It's coming to . . . to take us home." Vern opened his eyes again and peered at the other screen. There, diminished to a tiny dot, was pod number nine. It was still safely retreating. He stared and stared. It was all he had to hold on to.

"Back home to Mandrake, you mean? That's great." Martin was still gazing at the first screen. "Hey, look, Dad. The other ship's turning around."

The Seeker was rotating slowly on its axis, bringing about the end of its blunt cone to face the
Pelagic.

Remote weapons system.
Vern's analysis when he turned again to the main screen was automatic.
So it doesn't intend to destroy us with impact.

The Seeker's rotation was complete. Vern Perry was staring right down the emission venturi. But its image was a misty-eyed blur. He put his arms around his son.

Nine billion dead in four months. It's an unthinkable number, when every loss could be as painful as this.

"Dad, quit that!" The boy was laughing. "You're
squashing
me. See, the end's opening up."

"It's all right, Martin. Everything's going to be all right."

"Dad, look.
Dad
!"

As space around the
Pelagic
bloomed yellow and crimson, the Great War claimed its last casualties. But Vernor Perry did not see it happen. He was holding his beloved son close. His eyes were closed, and the agony in his heart had nothing to do with his own fate.

His final thought was a prayer for the end of all such sorrow.

INTERLUDE

This is the size-distribution law of the Asteroid Belt: For every body of given diameter, D, there will be ten bodies with diameter d = D/3.

Corollary:
As the body you are searching for becomes smaller, the problem of distinguishing it from others of similar size becomes rapidly more difficult.

Conclusion:
Personal survival pods, each a couple of meters long, will be lost in a swarm of natural objects, more numerous within the Belt than grains of sand on a beach. Visual search techniques in such an environment will be useless.

Solution:
Although the sky in and beyond the solar system glimmers and glows with visible light from stars, planets, diffuse and luminous gas clouds, novas, supernovas, and galaxies, other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are far less busy. Choose carefully. At the right wavelength for observation, Earth shines brighter than a thousand suns.

The designers of search-and-rescue systems choose very carefully. The available signal energy must be radiated in many directions, travel millions or hundreds of millions of kilometers, and fill an immense volume. The amounts of power available for distress calls are usually just a few watts. No matter. The radio energy needed for signal detection and location is truly minute; the total microwave power received at the solar system's largest radio telescope would not carry a crawling fly up a windowpane.

SAR systems are designed to detect and triangulate a crippled survival pod operating on its last dribble of power. From a single one-minute fix, a ship or pod's position and velocity can be computed. A rescue vehicle will be chosen, and a matching trajectory defined.

What SAR systems cannot do—because no one ever anticipated such a need—is to operate efficiently when wartime battle communications swamp every channel. And when war ends, emergency needs for reconstruction are no less demanding.

The last urgent and one-time call from the
Pelagic,
giving trajectories for nine small objects, goes unheeded.

The pods drift through space. The sedated infants within them dream on. Their sun-centered orbits carry them steadily closer to the monitored zone of the Inner System, but they move at a snail's pace, too slow for the internal resources of the pods. Life-support systems, intended for at most a few weeks' use, begin to fail. The pods' own calls for help continue, but they, too, weaken, merging into the galactic radio hiss that fills all of space.

Months pass. The pods drift on, interplanetary flotsam borne on sluggish tides of radiation pressure and the changing currents of gravitational force.

No one knows that they exist.

1
2092 A.D.: Black Smoker

Nell Cotter had visualized the sequence precisely during the final minutes before the hatch was closed: a slow fading of light, a gradual extinction that would grow ever fainter as they descended, never quite bleeding away completely.

And had she got it wrong! Here was reality, a few seconds of cloudy green filled with drifting motes of white. A sudden school of darting silverflsh all around them, and then, moments later, no trace of diffused sunlight. Only darkness, absolute and implacable. Scary.

But reporting personal discomfort was not what she was paid to do. "We are now moving through the three-hundred-meter level," she said calmly. "That little cluster of shrimp was probably the last life we'll see for a while. All external light has disappeared."

She spoke into her main microphone, the one that Jon Perry could hear, but after that, she automatically went on subvocalizing for the private record.
Don't need to say the depth. One of the cameras is trained on the instrument panel. Can hardly see it though, it's so dim in here.
She glanced at the other two video recorders.
Getting nothing from outside. We need action, or all of this sequence will be edited out.

The third camera showed Jon Perry at the submersible's controls, leaning back, totally relaxed, even bored.

Cold fish, as cold-blooded as anything outside. Well, I was warned. The Ice Man. Wonder if Mr. Personality does any better when he knows he's on camera.
"Dr. Perry, would you narrate while we're descending? I could do it, but I'd only be parroting what you told me earlier."

"Sure." He displayed no more emotion, dropping in this hollow glass shell through black depths, than she had seen him do on the ocean's surface: He turned his face toward the camera. "We will be making an unpowered descent for the next sixteen hundred meters. That will take approximately ten minutes and put us onto the eastern edge of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge, about forty-five south, a hundred and ten west. The coast of South America and the Arenas Base are fourteen hundred kilometers east. We are already into the stable temperature regime, with the water at a constant four degrees Celsius. It will stay that way for another thousand meters. The only change we'll notice until we reach the seabed is in the outside pressure. It adds ten tons of load to each square meter of the
Spindrift
's surface for every ten meters that we descend. If you listen closely, you can hear the vessel's structure adjusting to the outside force. At the moment, the pressure on the hull is about a thousand tons per square meter."

A thousand tons! Thank you, Jon Perry. I could have gone all day without needing to know that.
Nell stared around at the transparent goldfish bowl of the submersible. On the surface, the three-meter globe of the
Spindrift
had seemed substantial enough; now it felt as flimsy and as fragile as a soap bubble. If it were to shatter under the enormous outside pressure . . .

She felt a twinge of discomfort in her bladder but pushed awareness of it into the back of her mind.

Is he going to talk his damned statistics all the way down? No one on Earth or anywhere else will want to watch. A pox on you, Glyn Sefaris. Promise me a "quick and easy" assignment, so I'll agree to come here unprepared. And give me this. (And better be sure to edit
that
out, before Glyn gets his editorial look.)

It was a party trick, elevated to a practical technique. Nell could keep up her own stream-of-consciousness commentary on the subvocal recorder installed in her larynx and still monitor and direct the course of the video program. The final show would be a mixture of on-the-spot and voice-over comments. Continuous time-markers on cameras and microphones ensured that she would have no difficulty in coordinating, editing, and splicing the different tracks. As she paused, Jon Perry wound up the string of statistics and was moving on.

". . . at which point I will begin using our lights. We could do it now—we have plenty of power—but it's not worth it, because the only thing we're likely to see are a few deep-water fish, all of them well-known benthic forms."

"Not well known to me or to the viewers, Dr. Perry." Nell jumped in on her public mike. The thrust of the show was supposed to be about the seafloor hydrothermal vents and the life forms around them, but final subject matter was irrelevant if viewers turned off before you ever got there. "Can we take a look?"

He shrugged and turned back to the control panel. Nell watched his fingers flicker across a precise sequence of keys.

Beautifully shaped hands. Make sure we show plenty of footage of them. Nice sexy voice, too, if I could get more animation into it. Talks old, no juice. Check his age when we get back—twenty-eight to thirty, for a guess. Check background, too. I know next to nothing about him. How long has he been playing deep-sea diver?

The darkness around them was suddenly illuminated by three broad beams of green light, each beginning twenty meters from the
Spindrift
and pointed back toward it.

"Free-swimming light sources," said Perry, anticipating Nell's question. "Half a meter long, two-kilowatt continuous cold light, or pulsed at a megawatt. We have half a dozen of them. They normally travel attached to the base of the
Spindrift
, but they can be released and controlled from here."

"Why not just shine beams out from the submersible?"

"Too much back-scatter. The light that's reflected toward us from an outgoing beam would spoil the picture. Better to send the free-swimmers out and shine light back this way."

"They're radio-controlled?"

He gave her a glance that might have been amused, but it was probably contemptuous. He knew she'd been sent here half-briefed as well as she did. "Radio's no use under water. Lasers would do, but focused ultrasonics are better. They travel farther and don't interfere with what we see."