“It is spectacular. I looked over the records of Tripley’s previous voyages,” said Kim. “He was here before. Wanted to see the Horsehead.”
Solly stared at the clouds and the world for long minutes, and then turned to her. “What do we do first?”
Good question. “We go into orbit. And then we wait.”
“Kim,” he said, “we were a little critical of Tripley for being unprepared to run a contact scenario. Are we ready? If something happens?”
She drew herself up in her professorial mode. “Be assured,” she said, “nothing will happen.” They both laughed. In fact, Kim had prepared a visual program to transmit in the event there was an encounter. It included pictures of the Valiant and the Hunter, of herself and Solly, of interiors of the Hammersmith. There were pictures of Greenway’s forests and oceans, of people lounging on beaches. There were anatomical charts of humans and several dozen animals and plants. And finally there was an image of three Valiants and three Hammersmiths silhouetted against the rings of the Jovian; and the Jovian itself followed by four hundred lines divided into tens. She showed it to Solly.
“We meet back here when the planet has turned on its axis four hundred times.”
“Good,” he said. A day on the gas giant lasted between seventeen and eighteen hours. So they were talking roughly one year. Enough time to outfit an expedition, work out their strategy, and return. “Kim,” he asked, “how do you want me to program, the sensors? What exactly are we looking for?”
“Set for maximum sweep and range. And we should look for anything that wouldn’t normally be out there. Processed metal. Plastic. Anything that isn’t gas, rock, or ice. Or anything that moves on its own.”
The original survey gave few details for the gas giant. Kim knew it had an equatorial diameter of 187,000 kilometers, and a polar diameter of 173,000 kilometers. Average density was only 1.2 times that of water, indicating a high proportion of the lighter elements, hydrogen and helium. Its axial tilt was 11.1 degrees.
Its most striking feature was the rings, which were coplanar with the equator. They had an overall diameter of 750,000 kilometers, and were divided into three distinct sets. The innermost reached down almost to the cloudtops. They were barely one kilometer thick, so when the Hammersmith passed them edge-on they all but vanished.
Two of the satellites were larger than Greenway; one minuscule worldlet at the outermost extremes of the system was only a half-dozen kilometers across. It orbited almost at right angles to the equator.
“It would help,” said Kim, “if we knew precisely where the incident took place.”
“How do you mean?”
“Altitude. Orbit, if possible.”
“Don’t see how we can determine that,” said Solly. “We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet’s not visible at all.”
“But we know when everything happened,” said Kim. “We know now right to the minute.” Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42 A.M. shipboard time. “We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background.”
“The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system,” he objected.
“The stars would,” she agreed.
But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.
There were two.
They ran the sequence again. Hunter floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights coming on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi’s smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.
They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they’d accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12 P.M., February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.
“Okay.” Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. “In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the Hunter would have had to be here.” He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. “But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it’s not enough to track a complete orbit.”
“We’ve got a second picture,” Kim reminded him. The Emily image, which had been taken two hours later.
Solly brought it up, found more moons, three this time, repeated the process, and smiled triumphantly. “I think we’re in business,” he said.
She was delighted. “Good. Let’s get ourselves into the same orbit. But I want to move a bit faster than the Hunter would have.”
“Why?”
“So that we’ll overtake anything that might be traveling at Hunter’s velocity.”
Solly frowned.
“Just do it, okay?” she said.
“Okay, Kim.”
“And let’s do as thorough a search as we can.”
“What exactly do you expect to find?”
“I expect nothing,” she said, feeling like Veronica King, who always said that. “But the possibilities are limitless.” The hope that she entertained, that she did not want to describe, was that the celestial was still here somewhere, a derelict. It was possible.
Solly passed instructions to the AI. “We’ll be going into orbit,” he told her, “later this evening. And we’ll need roughly twelve hours to do a complete search along the orbit.”
There was something in Solly’s voice. “Anything wrong?” she asked.
“I thought about this before we left but it didn’t really seem like something I wanted to bring up at the time.”
“Tell me, Solly.”
“We’re not armed,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that if this thing is here, it may not be friendly?”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Why not?”
She looked out at the star-clouds. “Solly, even if they were an aggressive species, there wouldn’t be any point shooting at someone in a wasteland like this. What’s to gain?”
“Maybe they just don’t like strangers. Something happened to the Hunter”
“We have to assume they’re rational, Solly. Otherwise they couldn’t have gotten here in the first place.” She enjoyed being with him, alone in all this vast emptiness. It was different now that they could look out the windows and know that what they were seeing was really there. “They didn’t shoot at the Hunter. Or if they did, they’re not very dangerous because the Hunter got home safely.”
“It’s possible,” said Solly, “they’re at war against their own kind. Maybe Ben Tripley got the name right, calling it the Valiant. It could have been a warship.”
“Solly,” she said patiently, “they got home all right.”
“Did they? Who knows? Maybe they were taken. Maybe something else went back.” He made a scary face and hummed a few notes from the old horror series Midnight Express. She laughed. But a chill ran through her nevertheless.
Shortly after dinner they settled into Hunter’s orbit, which was roughly equatorial, varying only a few degrees above and below the line.