“Sand is not good for my workings, and I do not know if my mobility might be impaired. I believe the ship’s cameras will suffice for this one for now.”
“Then why are you really here?” Nagel put in. “If it’s not your job to get those kind of pictures, then the only conceivable mission you could really be on is to spy on us. That is what you’re really doing, isn’t it? Spying on us?”
“I am documenting you, not spying on you,” the robot responded. “If you go down there, I go down there. But without you, the potential for fulfilling my mission is greatly diminished.”
“Sounds fishy to me,” Sark growled. “I say we take it apart now, file it under spare parts, and forget about it. It can do us no good.”
The robot said nothing, but even the others weren’t sure whether or not Sark was joking and, worse, none of them cared if he wasn’t.
“We could send down a probe,” Cross suggested.
“Too limited,” Nagel responded. “It wouldn’t be able to do much if it could get inside the thing, and we’ve got a finite number. Best to use them when we have questions that have to be answered. This is just something we’d like to know, not something we can easily turn into money.”
After a long silence, An Li asked, matter of factly, “So, what do we do about poor little Kaspar here? Go down or go on?”
“We need stuff that can be picked up and hauled back and turned into money,” Lucky Cross pointed out. “I can’t see it down there with what we got. As you said, we couldn’t haul that thing back on a bet.”
“Any of the life that might exist down there, native or survivors and survivor descendants, will be underground at this point, or maybe underwater,” Queson pointed out. “This isn’t the right time to go looking for them, nor is there a lot of profit in it. I say we note this as potentially valuable but go on. I’ve had enough freezing cold and blowing sand.”
An Li nodded. “Anybody else? Then we’re agreed. Captain, launch your probe and survey satellite and let’s move on. We can always come back if nothing more promising turns up.”
“Very well,” the captain’s voice responded. “Let the log show we are in unanimous agreement. I think personally we should examine all three before doing much in the way of landing anyway. That goes even if the next one has streets paved with gold and the Fountain of Youth in the center.”
“I might stop on that,” Nagel commented. “Still, we all agree with the general sentiment.”
“Setting course for Balshazzar,” the captain told them. “At least it’s very pretty as worlds go. Were I still human, that would be the one that I think I’d go down and look over first anyway.”
“How long?” Nagel asked her.
“Two and a half days. We have to go slow and careful in this miniature solar system without charts and nav beacons. Planets this size don’t just accumulate moons and rings, they pick up a ton of junk.”
And now, from the bleakness of Limbo, they turned towards the spectre of Eden.
Even going the slow and careful route, though, they were well within instrument and sensitive optical range of the second livable moon long before they reached it.
“There’s altogether too much life on that moon,” Randi Queson grumbled. “Can’t pick anything valuable out of it. In fact, the only interesting parts are these energy signatures against some very small but measurably dead points. At least two could be the remains of routine solar-system lander power supplies, and a third could even be the remnants of an interstellar worm drive. There are several more such signatures elsewhere on the planet, but they don’t give off anything familiar or recognizable to the database. If we assume that at least one is ours, from some prior expedition, and maybe two, and we make the reasonable assumption that even a very alien civilization would probably wind up doing it for sheer practical reasons pretty much like we do, then we’re looking at the signatures of at least a dozen shipwrecks down there, at least a few of which are not ancient history. I keep thinking about Dr. Woodward and his evangelical space colony. We’re following in his footsteps and we got here with the same data, so why should we assume that he didn’t?”
“Yeah, but the old records say he had a humongous ship, a real artificial world moving through the universe,” An Linoted. “If that’s so, where is it?”
“It wasn’t cybernetic,” Queson pointed out. “And, as you say, it was huge. Put both of those in our wild hole and you might not be in any condition to get back once you get through, if you do. So let’s assume they did. Lucky, you’ve looked at the old records with the layouts of Woodward’s interstellar holy land. Am I off base here?”
“Nope, right on. In fact, Woodward was a physicist. He had to know, as did his pilots and crew, that it was gonna be damned near impossible to bring something that huge through, and, even if they did, to stabilize it in this environment when it emerged.”
“Faith,” the doctor responded. “Faith moves mountains. He would have no choice but to act on his faith, particularly if he thought God was directing them here.”
“Yeah, faith moves mountains. Faith Explosives, Queenspark, Marchellus,” Nagel said with a chuckle.
They ignored him. “So be speculative based on what you know. What might happen if Woodward got this far but with a banged-up ship?”
“He’d never fully control it if it were really banged up,” Cross noted. “And that thing was a fuckin’ nightmare. All patchwork, the drives of different shapes and sizes and manufacture… Wouldn’t take much to really screw ’em up, and this system’s got everything you need. If he had no real control, then he’s gone, either into the void, into the big gasbag there, or into the sun, and so are all his followers. But if he could get it stabilized to any degree, long enough to cram his people into his planetary lander, then he’d be able to do something if he and they got away from the big mother fast enough. That far out, you’d spend most of your fuel fighting gravity for control, and even then you’d be pulled right into Mama’s orbit here. That many people, that big a craft, that antique equipment and long struggle to get in-system… He’d have to make a quick decision. Pick one and head for there. And which one would you pick under those circumstances, assuming he could see and get some details of all three?”
There was an easy answer to that. “So you’d say the big part probably went into the planet or the sun, but my largest residual power supply is probably his lander?”
“That’d be my guess. Unless they were really creamed, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have gotten down all right, but they would stay there.”
“You think the moon would prevent a takeoff?”
“Nope. But takeoff to where? You ain’t got power to get back to the hole, let alone get through it. And you’d be in a ship with no instrumentation or drives capable of wormhole travel. That’s certain death even if they did the impossible and made it that far back, and I’m damned sure they couldn’t. The best they could do would be to risk that topheavy, probably damaged and overlarge antique to go to one of the other moons. So where do you go? Volcano City or Sandstorm Hell? Even if you could even make it that far.”
“Point taken. But that was only… what? Under a century, certainly. There could very well be survivors of Woodward’s original crew still living down there, assuming it’s not a blind and that some of this life we’re reading is edible. And they’d have a pretty solid colony there by now.”