Satan's World Page 10

  Van Rijn drained his mug. “Ahhhh! Well,” he said, “we made a compromise. They go away, except one of them, in a ship that is not followed. Their own detectors can tell them this is so. The one stays behind and settles legal details of transferring ownership. That is Thea Beldaniel. She was not too unwilling, and I figure she is maybe more halfway human than her friends. Later on, she guides one ship of ours to a rendezvous agreed on, some neutral spot, I suppose, where maybe we can meet her bosses. They should be worth meeting, what made so brilliant a scheme like Serendipity for learning all about us. Nie?”

  Adzel lifted his head with a jerk. “I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed. “Do you mean that you personally and . . . and I—”

  “Who else?” van Rijn said. “One reason I kept you back. I need to be sure some fellow besides me will be around I can trust. It is going to be a cold journey, that one. Like they used to say in Old Norse and such places, ‘Bare is brotherless back.’ ” He pounded the table. “Cabin boy!” he thundered. “Where in hell’s name is more beer?”

  XI

  In the decade or so that had passed since the Lemminkainenites found it, the rogue had fallen a long way. Watching Beta Crucis in the bow viewscreen, Falkayn whistled, low and awed. “Can we even get near?” he asked.

  Seated amidst the control boards, flickering and blinking and clicking instruments, soft power-throb and quiver, of Muddlin’ Through’s bridge, he did not look directly at the star, nor at a true simulacrum. Many astronomical units removed, it would still have burned out his eyes. The screen reduced brightness and magnified size for him. He saw an azure circle, spotted like a leopard, wreathed in an exquisite filigree of ruby, gold, and opal, a lacework that stretched outward for several times its diameter. And space behind was not dark, but shimmered with pearliness through a quarter of the sky before fading into night.

  Falkayn’s grip tautened on the arms of his chair. The heart thuttered in him. Seeking comfort for a rising, primitive dread, he pulled his gaze from the screen, from all screens, to the homely traces of themselves that his team had put on unused patches of bulkhead. Here Chee Lan had hung one of those intricate reticulations that her folk prized as art; there he himself had pasted up a girlie picture; yonder Adzel kept a bonsai tree on a shelf—Adzel, friend, now when we need your strength, the strength in your very voice, you are two light-centuries behind us.

  Stop that, you nit! Falkayn told himself. You’re getting spooked. Understandable, when Chee had to spend most of our voyage time nursing me out of half-life. The horror hasn’t quite left me. But damnation, there’s work to do. And I’ve seen bigger, brighter stars than this one.

  Only a few, of course. The blue giants are also monsters in their rarity. And the least of them is terrifying to contemplate. Those flecks on the photosphere were vortices that could each have swallowed a planet like Jupiter. That arabesque of filaments comprised the prominences—the mass equivalents of whole earths, vaporized, ionized, turned to incandescent plasma, spewed millions of kilometers into space, some forever lost and some raining back—yet given its faerie patterns by magnetic fields great enough to wrestle with it. The corona fluoresced across orbital distances because its gas was sleeted through and through by the particles, stripped atoms, hard and soft quanta of a star whose radiance was an ongoing storm, eight hundred and fifty times the measure of Sol’s, a storm so vast that it could endure no longer than a hundred megayears before ending in the thunderclap of a supernova. Falkayn looked upon its violence and shivered.

  He grew aware that the ship’s computer had spoken. “I beg your pardon?” he said automatically.

  “I am not programmed to take offense; therefore apologies to me are superfluous,” said the flat artificial voice. “However, I have been instructed to deal as circumspectly with you as my data banks and ideational circuits allow, until you have fully recovered your nervous equilibrium. Accordingly, it is suggested that you consider indulgence as having been granted you as requested.”

  Falkayn relaxed. His chuckle grew into a guffaw. “Thanks, Muddlehead,” he said. “I needed that.” Hastily: “Don’t spoil it by telling me you deduced the need and calculated your response. Just start over.”

  “In reply to your question as to whether we can come near, the answer depends upon what is meant by ‘near.’ Context makes it obvious that you wish to know whether we can reach the planet of destination with an acceptable probability of safety. Affirmative.”

  Falkayn turned to Chee Lan, who hunkered in her own chair—it looked more like a spiderweb—on his right. “I distinctly remember telling Muddlehead to lay off that stupid ‘affirmative, negative’ business, when a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was good enough for Churchill,” he sighed. “Why did you countermand?”

  “I didn’t,” the Cynthian answered. “I don’t care either way. What are the nuances of the Anglic language to me? If it has any,” she sneered. “No, blame Adzel.”

  “Why him?”

  “The ship came new to us from the yard, you recall, so the computer’s vocabulary was engineerese. It’s gotten modified in the course of work with us. But you may recall, too, that while we were on Luna, we ordered a complete inspection. You were hot on the tail of your Veronica creature, which left Adzel and me to make arrangements. Old butterheart was afraid the feelings of the engineers would be hurt, if they noticed how little use we have for their dialect. He instructed Muddlehead—”

  “Never mind,” Falkayn said. To the ship: “Revert to prior linguistic pattern and give us some details about our next move.”

  “Instrumental observation appears to confirm what you were told of the planet itself,” said the machine. Falkayn nodded. Though he had only recovered the full use of his free will in the past several days, Chee had been able to get total-recollection answers from him quite early in the trip. “However, the noise level is too high for exactitude at our present distance. On the other hand, I have determined the orbit with sufficient precision. It is, indeed, a hyperbola of small eccentricity. At present, the rogue is near periastron, the radius vector having a length of approximately one-point-seven-five astronomical units. It will make the closest approach, approximately zero-point-nine-three astronomical units, in approximately twenty-seven-point-three-seven days, after which it will naturally return to outer space along the other arm of the hyperbola. There is no evidence of any companion body of comparable size. Thus the dynamics of the situation are simple and the orbit almost perfectly symmetrical.”

  Chee put a cigarette in an interminable ivory holder and puffed it alight. Her ears twitched, her whiskers bristled. “What a time to arrive!” she snarled. “It couldn’t be when the planet’s decently far off from that bloated fire balloon. Oh, no! That’d be too easy. It’d put the gods to the trouble of finding somebody else to dump their garbage on. We get to go in while the radiation peaks.”

  “Well,” Falkayn said, “I don’t see how the object could’ve been found at all, if it hadn’t happened to be coming in, close enough to reflect a detectable amount of light off its cryosphere. And then there was the galactic communications lag. Sheer luck that I ever heard about the discovery.”

  “You could have heard a few years earlier, couldn’t you?”

  “In that event,” Muddlehead said, “the necessity would have remained of making later, short-range observations, in order to ascertain whether surface conditions are indeed going to become suitable for an industrial base. The amount and the composition of frozen material could not have been measured accurately. Nor could its behavior have been computed beforehand in sufficient detail. The problem is too complex, with too many unknowns. For example, once a gaseous atmosphere has begun to form, other volatile substances will tend to recondense at high altitudes, forming clouds which will in time disappear but which, during their existence, may reflect so much input radiation that most of the surface remains comparatively cold.”

  “Oh, dry up,” Chee said.

  “I am not programmed or equipped
to—”

  “And blow away.” Chee faced the human. “I see your point, Dave, as well as Muddlehead’s. And of course the planet’s accelerating as it moves inward. I got a preliminary orbital estimate a few watches back, while you were asleep, that says the radius vector changes from three to one a.u. in about ten standard weeks. So little time, for the irradiation to grow ninefold! But I do wish we could’ve arrived later, anyhow, when the thing’s outward bound and cooling off.”

  “Although not prepared for detailed meteorological calculations,” Muddlehead said, “I can predict that the maximum atmospheric instability will occur after periastron passage. At present, most of the incident stellar energy is being absorbed by heats of fusion, vaporization, et cetera. Once this process has been completed, energy input will continue large. For example, at thirty astronomical units the planet will still be receiving approximately as much irradiation as Earth; and it will not get that far out for a number of years. Thus temperatures can be expected to soar, and storms of such magnitude will be generated that no vessel dares land. Ground observation may as yet be feasible for us, given due precautions.

  Falkayn grinned. He felt better by the minute: if not able to whip the cosmos, at least to let it know it had been in a fight. “Maybe our luck is the best possible,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised,” Chee replied sourly. “Well, Muddlehead, how do we make rendezvous?”

  “The force screens can, of course, ward off more particle radiation than we will receive, even if a stellar storm occurs,” said the computer. “Electromagnetic input is the real problem. Our material shielding is insufficient to prevent an undesirable cumulative X-ray dosage in the period required for adequate study. The longer wavelengths could similarly overload our thermostatting capabilities. Accordingly, I propose to continue under hyperdrive.”

  Falkayn drew his pipe from a pocket of his gray coveralls. “That’s a pretty close shave, so few a.u. at faster-than-light,” he warned. He left unspoken the possibilities: imperfect intermesh with the star’s gravitational field tearing the ship asunder; a brush with a solid body, or a moderately dense gas, producing a nuclear explosion as atoms tried to occupy the same volume.

  “It is within the one percent safety margin of this vessel and myself,” Muddlehead declared. “Besides spending less time in transit, during that transit we will not interact significantly with ambient photons or material particles.”

  “Good enough,” Chee said. “I don’t fancy the nasty little things buzzing through my personal cells. But what about when we reach the planet? We can take station in its shadow cone and let its bulk protect us—obviously—but what can we then observe of the surface?”

  “Adequate instruments are available. As a trained planetologist, Adzel could make the most effective use of them. But no doubt you two with my assistance can manage. Furthermore, it should be possible to pay brief visits to the daylight side.”

  “Bully-o,” Falkayn said. “We’ll grab some lunch and a nap and be on our way.”

  “You can stuff your gut and wiggle your epiglottis later,” Chee said. “We proceed now.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Have you forgotten that we have rivals? That messengers departed weeks ago to inform them? I don’t know how long the word took to get back there, or how fast they can send an expedition here, but I don’t expect them to dawdle very much or be overly polite if they find us.” Chee jerked her tailtip and spread her hands, a shrugging gesture. “We might or might not be able to take them in a fight, but I’d really rather delegate the job to a League battle fleet. Let’s get our data and out.”

  “Hm-m-m . . . yes. I read. Carry on, Muddlehead. Keep every sensor alert for local dangers, though. There’re bound to be some unpredictable ones.” Falkayn loaded his pipe. “I’m not sure van Rijn would call for a fleet action at that,” he murmured to the Cynthian. “It might impair his claim to the planet. He might have to share some of the profit.”

  “He’ll squeeze every millo he can out of this,” she said. “Of course. But for once, he’s seen something bigger than money. And it scares him. He thinks the Commonwealth—maybe the whole of Technic civilization—is at war and doesn’t realize the fact. And if this rogue is important enough to the enemy that they risked, and lost, a spy organization they’d spent fifteen years developing, it’s equally important to us. He’ll call in the League; even the different governments and navies, if he must. I talked to him, after we’d hooked you from the castle.”

  The humor dropped out of Falkayn. His mouth drew into harsh lines. I should know what kind of conflict this is, he thought, considering what was done to me.

  He couldn’t remember clearly. It was as if he tried to reconstruct a fever dream. Everything was vague and grotesque; time twisted about, dissolved and took new evanescent shapes, like smoke; he had been trapped in another universe and another self, and they were not his own, and he could not bring himself to confront them again in memory, even were he able. He had desired Thea Beldaniel as he had desired no other woman since his first youth; he had adored the undefined Elder Race as he had adored no gods in his life; he had donned a cool surface and a clear logical mind at need, and afterward returned to his dim warm abyss. Yet somehow it was not he who did these things, but others. They used him, entered and wore him . . . How could he find revenge for so inward a rape?

  He forced lightness back into voice and brain. “If Old Nick really does end up having to settle for a fraction of the wealth, hoo-hah! They’ll hear his screams in the Magellanic Clouds. But maybe we can save his bacon—and French toast and scrambled eggs and coffee royal and, uh, yes, it was coconut cake, last time I had breakfast with him. Ready, Muddlehead?”

  “Stand by for hyperdrive,” said the computer.

  The power-hum deepened. Briefly, the screened sky became a blur. Then the system adjusted, to compensate for billions of quantum microjumps per second. Stars aft assumed their proper colors and configurations. Forward, where Beta Crucis drowned them out, its disk swelled, until it seemed to leap with its flames into the ship. Falkayn crouched back in his seat and Chee Lan bared her fangs.

  The moment passed. The vessel resumed normal state. She must swiftly attain the proper position and kinetic velocity, before the heightened power of the sun blasted through her defenses. But her internal G-fields were manipulated with such suppleness by the computer that the two beings aboard felt no change of weight. In minutes, a stable condition was established. The ship lay two radii from the rogue’s ground level, balancing gravitational and centrifugal forces with her own thrust. Her riders peered forth.

  The wide-angle screen showed an immense black circle, rimmed with lurid white where the star’s rays were refracted through the atmosphere. Behind this, in turn, glowed corona, and wings of zodiacal light. The planetary midnight was not totally unrelieved. Auroras flung multi-colored banners from the poles; a wan bluishness flickered elsewhere, as the atoms and ions of sun-split molecules recombined in strange ways; lightning, reflected by immense cloud banks further down, created the appearance of running will-o’-the-wisps; here and there glowered a red spark, the throat of a spouting volcano.

  In the near-view screens, mere fractions of the globe appeared, shouldering into heaven. But there you saw, close and clear, the pattern of weather, the range of rising mountains and new-born oceans. Almost, Falkayn imagined he could hear the wind-shriek, rain-roar, thunder-cannonade, that he could feel the land shake and split beneath him, the gales whirl boulders through a blazing sky. It was long before he could draw his gaze free of that scene.

  But work was on hand, and in the watches that followed, he inevitably lost some of his awe amidst the instruments. With it vanished the weakness that his imprisonment had left in him. The basic anger, the drive to scrub out his humiliation in blood, did not go; but he buried it deep while he studied and calculated. What he was witnessing must be unique in the galaxy—perhaps in the cosmos—and fascinated him utterly
.

  As the Lemminkainenites had concluded, this was an ancient world. Most of its natural radioactivity was long spent, and the chill had crept near its heart. But part of the core must remain molten, to judge from the magnetism. So stupendous an amount of heat, insulated by mantle and crust and frozen oceans and a blanket of frozen atmosphere averaging ten or twenty meters thick, was slow to dissipate. Nevertheless, for ages the surface had lain at a temperature not far above absolute zero.

  Now the cryosphere was dissolving. Glaciers became torrents, which presently boiled away and became stormwinds. Lakes and seas, melting, redistributed incredible masses. Pressures within the globe were shifted; isostatic balance was upset; the readjustments of strata, the changes of allotropic structure, released catastrophic, rock-melting energy. Quakes rent the land and shocked the waters. Volcanoes awoke by the thousands. Geysers spouted above the ice sheath that remained. Blizzard, hail, and rain scourged the world, driven by tempests whose fury mounted daily until words like “hurricane” could no more name them. Hanging in space, Falkayn and Chee Lan took measurements of Ragnarok.

  And yet—and yet—what a prize this was! What an incredible all-time treasure house!

  XII

  “Frankly,” Chee Lan said, “speaking between friends and meaning no offense, you’re full of fewmets. How can one uninhabitable piece of thawed hell matter that much to anybody?”