"Let's get the fuck out of here, if we still can." Sealock stood on the node and cranked up his friction coefficient. The door irised open and he was accelerated through.
They left.
Back in Polaris, on the ventral surface of the now dead-seeming alien craft, not far from an airlock door which had failed to shut properly, they sat around suitless and had a meal, mostly in silence. Krzakwa, tidier than usual and perhaps more subdued, put aside his sandwich with a gusty sigh. He tugged softly on his beard and said, "All right, what have we seen? We might as well face this now."
"Obviously," said Hu, "a landing craft."
"We all saw the mother ship in the playback. Given the generally sealike nature of that scene, I think it's safe to say that this Artifact housed some sort of aquarium . . . maybe a whole ecology. And the purpose of it all was to cart this marine ecology down to the surface of a planet."
"Do you believe all that?" asked Ariane.
Brendan paused. "I—I don't know what I believe."
"Could this larger ship be embedded in Ocypete ?" asked Krzakwa . "Or is this some sort of abandoned lifeboat, left behind by its mother?"
Jana said, "Something that large would have shown up even in the low-res gravitational survey. This ship just happened to be overlooked because the large empty cavity perfectly camouflaged the mass of the shell."
"Is there a chance that it's—" said Ariane.
"I'm afraid you're on a wild goose chase," said Jana. "It's not here. Now that we've done a preliminary reconnaissance in the Artifact, I feel we should write up a quick resume and transmit it to the authorities. Then we should go back in."
There was a moment of stunned silence.
"What?" growled Krzakwa . "You want to go back in there?"
"Sure," said Hu. "Why not?"
"I don't know about you, Jana," said Methol, "but it's too dangerous in there for me. I'm afraid."
"What are you going to do—just go back to Ocypete ?" asked Jana, anger rising in her voice.
"That's what I had in mind," said Brendan.
Jana began to struggle in the cramped quarters, trying to get back into her suit. "I'm staying here. There's no point in coming here and then just leaving. I'm not going to share this with the USEC people." She began to push her way into the worksuit.
Tem grabbed her and pulled her out, like the meat from a crab's claw. "You are crazy, lady." He held her in a crushing bear hug, and eventually she stopped wriggling.
"Hey, Tem," said Sealock. "When we get home, want to help me build a quantum conversion scanner?"
The Selenite's eyes seemed to light up. "You've got the components?"
"We can make what we don't have."
"Let's go." Brendan relaxed into his command chair and began to plug in. They would make a quick transit home.
FIVE
From the interior of the transparent CM dome, John Cornwell stood and stared at nothing. He had participated in the debriefing of the Polaris crew and, after the exhilaration of their safe escape from the Artifact had waned, an apprehension was growing that everything he wanted was going to be drowned out by the alien presence. It wasn't that the Aello find wasn't of huge significance, or that he wasn't moved by the adventure that had overtaken them. But, somehow, it all seemed damned irrelevant when compared to the interior world he and Beth had found. The fact that there were intelligences other than man, and that they were on the trail of information that would revolutionize how the human race would see itself, was not meaningful to him, to his life. It was just a manifestation of a cold, rather pointless external reality. . . . Or was it simply that he felt left out of the adventure; jealous of Sealock, who was now moving into a position of leadership? He could not say. He turned and launched himself to the roof of the CM, and slipped through a small clear bubble cracked three-quarters open. Perhaps Beth would have an insight about his motivation, something that was beyond him.
They were back in their habitual positions in the central room of the CM. Sealock and Krzakwa were both eating messy-looking pastries and, as explorers will, were holding forth garrulously on the nature of their discovery. "I'm accessing Jana's statistics for the surfaces of the three satellites," said Brendan. "The thing on Aello makes any divergence from Solar System asterology suspect, even though what happened when proto-Iris was coalescing was certain to be a little different." Stroking her ponytail where it curled down over her collarbone, Jana remarked stiffly, "We still know very little about the primordial conditions of planetary formation. There is no statistical sample of—"
"Jana, even you cannot have failed to notice that Ocypete's 'eye' is not easy to explain. If I didn't know you better I'd say that you are deliberately obscuring things. The old crater above the Artifact was damned peculiar. Why didn't you say something to us about it?"
"It's always easy to see things in hindsight, you jackass." Evidently a raw nerve had been touched in Hu . "My report wasn't finished, either. I was waiting— waiting—to examine Aello close up and do some crater excavation. Even if I wanted to prove that Aello's morphology was influenced by the impact of a large, virtually indestructible object, I couldn't now!"
Cornwell was a little taken aback by this contorted reasoning. "Jana," he said, "we all realize that science has certain rigorous protocols. But are you saying you actually suspected something?"
"I mentioned the unusual features of this system in my preliminary report. I had no intention of allowing the important abstracts Iris offers to be done by someone else." Theasterologist seemed especially vulnerable to John's manifest growing incredulity. "That's certainly my right."
"OK," said Krzakwa. "OK. What is your real opinion about the melting incident that formed Mare Nostrum?"
"Considering that this system contained technological objects, I would say that an artificially processed quantity of radiogenic material impacted Ocypete in the same epoch that Aello was hit by the Artifact."
"Jesus," said Ariane. "That's two. What else is here?"
"That's for the scanner to find out," said Brendan.
The process of constructing a working quantum conversion scanner was principally one of reprogramming the various function boxes which had been used to route some of Shipnet's major elements. A power line was brought out of the main fusion system, since reaching the needed flux-gate thresholds expended vast quantities of energy. They built a superconducting torus mounted on another insulating trivet to act as an accumulator, energy shuttle, and antenna ground. Brendan and Tem stayed in the CM, supervising and structuring the programming, so the on-site work was left up to the others. The communications setup for the colony was still incomplete. There was a period during which both the colony and the Clarke satellite were occulted by the bulk of Ocypete. The result was that they went without contact with the rest of humanity for two days out of every twenty-two. Since lag time was so great anyway, this feature didn't bother anyone much. The only real drawback was that repeat broadcasts of entertainment 'net programs had to be requested, and that was expensive. This relink was different. Enough time had passed for anyone who was interested to have seen the damage to Aello. Tem and Brendan had even taken a break from their labors to join the rest for the moment contact was reestablished.