Gateways (34 page)

I did my best to look bored, but once Trevor had taken his media focus off my command deck, I had a serious chat with my systems chief. “Can we get out of here by landing plus eight—and will we need to?”

Jim Russell looked up from his displays. “Yes to the first question,
assuming Park and Ohara”—both of whom had insisted on crewing their submersibles—“obey the excursion guidelines. As for the second question . . .” He glanced at the seismic time series scrolling past on his central display. “Well, the problem is that we don’t yet have a baseline to make predictions with, but my models show a seismically stable period lasting at least forty hours.”

“This is seismically stable, eh?” I was an army brat. I’ve lived everywhere on Earth from Ankara to Yangon. I was in Turkey after the quake of ’47. For weeks, the aftershocks were rattling us. That was nothing compared to this place. The deck beneath our feet had been quivering constantly since we landed.

Jim gave a smile. “Actually, Captain, if we go for more than an hour or two without any perceptible shaking, it would be a very bad sign.”

“Um. Thank you so much.” But at least that was something definite to watch for.

“I always try to look at the bright side, Captain. You’re the one who’s paid to worry. And your job could be harder.” He waved at a view of the outside. It showed Trevor Dhatri hassling crew and scientists to create the most photogenic base camp possible. Now I saw why our sponsors had paid for state-of-the-art O2 gear. The transparent gadgets barely covered the nose and mouth. Jim continued, “Dhatri is playing the paradise angle as hard as he can. If he ever gets tired of that, I bet he’ll go for the high drama of explorers racing the clock to escape destruction.”

I nodded. In fact, it was something I had considered. “I welcome the lack of attention. On the other hand, I don’t want our passengers to get
too
relaxed. If those subs go beyond the excursion limits, all our diligence is for nothing.” It was a delicate balance.

I grabbed one of the toylike oxy masks and went outside. Damn. This was stupid. And dangerous. Explorers on a new world should wear closed suits, with proper-size O2 tanks. But everybody in our glorious base camp was wandering around in shirtsleeves, some in T-shirts and shorts. And barefoot!

I moseyed around the area, discreetly making sure that my crewfolk were aware of the situation and dressed at least sensibly enough to survive a bad fall.

“Hey, Captain Lee! Over here!” It was Trevor Dhatri, waving to me from a little promontory above the camp. I walk up to his position, all the while trying to think what to say that would make him cautious without exciting his melodramatic instincts. “How do you like our view of Paradise, Captain?” Trevor waved at the view. Yes, it was spectular. We were
looking down upon a vast jumble of fallen rock, and beyond that the beach. From this angle it looked like some resort back home. Turn just a little bit, and you could see my starship and the busy scientists. I debated warning him about the perils of the view. That talus looked
fresh
.

“Isn’t the base camp splendid, Captain?”

“Hm. Looks cool, Trevor. But I thought the big deal of this expedition was the Search for Life.” I waved at his bare feet. “Shouldn’t your people be more worried about contaminating the real estate?”

“Oh, you mean like the Mars scandal?” Trevor laughed. “No. Near the landing site, it’s impossible to avoid contamination. And from the Mars experience, we know there will be low-level global contamination in a matter of years. We’re concentrating all our clean efforts on the first sampling of likely spots. For instance, the exterior gear on the submersibles is fully sterile. I daresay you won’t find even inorganic contamination.” He shrugged. “Later landings, even later runs on this expedition—they’ll all be suspect.” He turned, looked out to sea. “That’s why today is so important, Captain Lee. I don’t know what Park or Ohara may bring back, but it should be immune to the complaints that mucked up Mars.”

Yeah, so besides their well-known rivalry, Park and Ohara had reason to take chances right out of the starting gate. I glanced at the range traces that Jim Russell was sending me. “I notice Park’s submersible is more than sixteen kilometers down, Trevor.”

“Sure. I’ve got a suite of cameras inside it. Don’t worry, those boats are rated to twenty kilometers. Dae Park has this theory that fossil evidence will be near the big drop-off.”

“Just so she doesn’t exceed our excursion agreement.”

“Not to worry, ma’am. Of the two, Dae is the rule-follower—and you’ll notice that Ron Ohara is still very close to the beach, barely at scuba depth.” His gaze hung for a moment, perhaps watching what his cameras were showing from Ohara’s dive. “There’ll be some important discovery today. I can feel it.”

Ha. So while I obsessed about ship, crew, and scientists, Dhatri obsessed on his next big scoop. I messaged Jim Russell to ride herd on the ocean adventurers—and then I let our “mission documentarian” guide me back to the center to the base camp. That was okay. I don’t like standing ten meters from a cliff where magnitude seven earthquakes happen every few days.

Back in the camp, I began to see what Dhatri was up to. Of course, it wasn’t science and in fact he wasn’t doing much with the exploration
angle. Dhatri was actually making a case for colonizing the damn place. No wonder he kept calling it “paradise.” All this was sufficiently boggling that I let him lead me this way and that, showing off the crusty starship captain working with scientists and crew. My main attention was on the range traces from the submersibles. Besides which, Trevor’s video work was really confusing, just little unconnected bits and gobs, all set pieces. It was quite unlike most web videos from my childhood. After a while I realized I was seeing the wave of the future. Trevor Dhatri was a kind of pioneer; he realized that in coming years, the most important videos would never be live. Even the shortest interstellar flights take hours. On this expedition, the
Frederik Pohl
was almost four days out from our home base in Illinois. Dhatri could sew this mishmash into whatever he chose—and not lose a bit of journalism’s precious immediacy.

I was still outside when a siren whooped, blasting across the encampment. I got to my system chief while the noise was still ramping up. “What in hell is that?”

Jim’s voice came back: “It’s not ours, Captain. It’s . . . yeah, it’s some kind of alarm the scientists set up.”

Dhatri seemed to have more precise information. He had dropped his current interview when the siren blared. Now he was scanning his cameras around the camp, capturing the reaction of crew and scientists. His words were an excited blather: “Yes. Yes! We don’t know yet what it is, but the first substantive discovery of this expedition has been made.” He turned toward me. “Captain Lee is clearly as surprised as we all are.”

Yes. Speechless.

I let him chivvy me toward where the scientists were congregating.

Trevor was telling me, “I gave all the away teams hot buttons—you know, linked to our show’s Big News feed. That siren is the max level of newsworthiness.” His voice was still excited, but less manic than a moment before. He grinned mischievously. “Damn, I love this asynchronous journalism! If I botch up, I can always recover before it goes online.” As we got close to the others and the fixed displays, he reverted to something like his official breathlessness. His cameras shifted from faces to displays and then back to faces. “So what do we have?”

An oceanographer glanced in Trevor’s direction. “It’s from one of the submersibles. Dae Park.”

“Dae—?” I swear, Trevor suffered an instant of uncontrived amazement. “Dae Park! Excellent! And her news?”

In my own displays, I was checking out Park’s submersible. It was still
sixteen kilometers down. Thank goodness the “Big News” did not involve her going deeper. Her boat was either on the bottom or just a few meters up, motionless. Okay, she was within the excursion rules, but near a hillside that could be a serious problem in a big quake. You’d never get me down there. I fly between the stars. Just the idea of being trapped in a tiny cabin under sixteen thousand meters of water makes me queasy.

Around me, I heard a collective indrawing of breath. I glanced back at the fixed displays, seeing what everyone else was seeing—and I got an idea why someone might go to such an extreme: Park’s lights showed the hillside towering over her boat. It looked like nondescript mud, but some recent landslide had opened a cleft. The lights shone on something round and hard-looking. The picture’s scale bar showed the object was almost forty centimeters across. If you looked carefully, you could see knobbly irregularities.

The oceanographer leaned closer to the display. “By heaven,” he said. “It looks like an algae mat.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Even my crew—well, all but the cook—knew the significance of such a discovery.

“The fossil of one,” came Dae Park’s voice. She sounded very pleased.

And then everyone was talking except Trevor—who had his cameras soaking it all in. There was significant incredulity, mainly from Ron Ohara’s staff: the video showed just the one object. If this was really life—or had been real life—where was the context? Park’s guys argued back that this was probably millions of years old, transported by heaven knew what geological cycles to the deep mud. Ohara’s people were unimpressed; the rock looked metamorphic to them.

“People, people!” The voice seemed to surround us. It was probably coming from the same sound system that made the siren noise. It took me a second to recognize Ron Ohara’s voice behind the mellow loudness. “I for one,” Ohara continued, “have no doubt of Dr. Park’s outstanding discovery. I’m sure that if she had focused on shallower water, she would have found living instances of communal life.”

From her submersible, you could hear Dae Park spluttering, unsure what to do with the simultaneous insult and support. On the other hand,
Park
was the one who had just made the biggest discovery in the history of starflight. So after a moment, she said sweetly, “Thank you so much, Ron, but we’ve both seen the preliminary genome dredges. If there was significant life here, it was very long ago.”

“I disagree. I have a—”

Park interrupted: “You have a theory. We have all heard your theories.”

This was true. Ohara had droned on about them at the captain’s table every day of the voyage.

“Oh, it’s not a theory, not anymore.” You could almost hear him gloating, and I guessed what was coming next. After all, Ohara’s sub had been scouting around the coast just a few meters down.

“Take a look at what I found.” Ohara preempted all the displays with the view from his boat. The light was dim; perhaps it was true sunlight. But it was enough to see that my guess had been a vast underestimate: the creature’s thorax was almost fifteen centimeters long, its limbs adding another ten centimeters or so. And those limbs moved, not randomly with the currents, but in clear locomotion. It might have been a terrestrial lobster, except for the number of claws and its greenish coloring.

This was the ninetieth voyage of the Starship
Frederik Pohl
. My ship and crew had visited eighty-seven star systems, all still within a few thousand light-years of Earth. As such, the
Fred Pohl
was one of the most prolific ships of the early years of exploration. My discovery of Lee’s World had been one of the high points of that time. This second visit was shaping up to be something even more extraordinary.

By an hour after sundown all the away teams were back—and we were close to having an onboard civil war. I eventually slapped them down: “I swear, if you people don’t behave, I’ll leave your junk outside and we’ll lift off for Chicago this very night!”

For a moment the passengers were united, all against me. “You can’t do that!” shouted Ohara and Park and Dhatri, almost in chorus. Dhatri continued: “You have a contract obligation to the Advanced Projects Agency.”

I gave them my evil smile. “That’s true but not entirely relevant. APA has clear regulations, giving competent ship management—that’s me—the authority to terminate missions where said competent ship management determines that the participants’ behavior has put the mission at risk.”

Some eyes got big with rage, but to be honest that was the minority reaction. Most folks, including Dae Park, looked somewhat ashamed that their behavior had brought them to this. After a moment, Trevor nodded capitulation. Ron Ohara looked around at his faction and saw no support. “Okay,” he said, trying for a reasonable tone. “I am always in favor of accomodation. But my discovery beggars the imagination.” He waved at the aquarium-sample box that he had set in the middle of my conference table. “We can’t afford to postpone the follow-up, no matter what the demands of the other—”

Park cut him off, but with a look in my direction: “So what do you suggest, Captain?”

Ohara wanted all the ship’s resources turned toward his discovery, a massive dredge around the edge of the continent, led by his techs and using all our sea gear. Park was defending her own find and implying that Ohara was a monstrous fraud. Right now, my job was to keep them from killing each other. I waved those who were standing to take their seats. We were up on the main conference deck, what doubled as the captain’s table at mess. That gave me an idea. “No more fighting about resource allocation,” I said. “The latest seismo analysis shows we have at least one hundred hours of safe time here. So take a moment to cool off. In fact, it is just about time for dinner. We’ll have some light predinner drinks”—taking a chance there, but I’d make sure Cookie watered the wine—“and discuss, well, things that are not so sensitive. I’ll be the umpire, where that’s needed.” Maybe with a good meal in them, I could get something like an even distribution of resources between Park—who had made an extraordinary discovery—and Ron Ohara’s “miracle.”