“What do you mean, putting us on?” Randi Queson asked him. “According to the records, if that indeed was Thomas Cromwell of the Woodward expedition he was not known for having any sense of humor whatsoever.”
“Nevertheless, he made his joke. Think about it. These—what’cha callit— Meskoks were telepaths, right?”
“So he said.”
“And poker is based on cards and on your ability to convince opponents that your hidden hand can beat theirs, whether or not it could.”
“Yes, I— oh! I see! How could you play cards with telepaths? Fascinating. Either Woodward’s discovered a solution to that problem or, you are correct, Cromwell was pulling our leg. The odds are he was doing the latter, but if a man who’s not known for his sense of humor does that, he’s got an ulterior motive. He also was a lot gabbier than the files say he should have been.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stake in that last thing,” An Li commented. “I mean, he’s been a very long time between conversations with folks from the outside.”
“True. Funny, though, that aside from commenting on how our technology wasn’t any better than he remembered from way in the past, he asked no questions at all about things back in his home region. Not even whether or not they’d been missed,” Nagel noted. “Yeah, they’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”
“You think they were doing that bit with the probe to keep us from coming down and finding out their secrets?” An Li asked him.
“Could be. Probably not them, but maybe their alien friends. We didn’t see any of them, but we do know they’re there because of the energy signatures, and we had indications of their downed ships as well. I don’t know. That’s Woodward’s survivors, though. I’m pretty sure of that. And I really do think they got stuck there. What they’re hiding, what they found, and what they might be working on under those pink dresses and white beards, well, you got me, at least for now. As to whether or not they or the aliens or some mysterious force was doing it with the probe, who knows? The solution there is a lot more pragmatic. Something was doing it. It was for real. It means that if we did choose to find out what’s below there, what they’re hiding, then we’d probably be stuck there anyway. We can still take some more looks later on, though. Let’s see how many probes we have left when we finish up here. If it’s any at all, I’d like to take a real close look at some of the other parts of that planet.”
The captain broke into the conversation. “You will all be relieved to know that we have just pulled out of orbit around Balshazzar and are now heading for Melchior. Unless, of course, you have second thoughts on that.”
“Huh? Why should we?” Nagel asked her.
“Because that’s where your Cromwell sent us, the man you just decided was lying through his teeth. Magi gems all over, he said. That’s a good lure for saying to us all, ‘Don’t look here any further, go over to Melchior. The riches are all over the place there.’ ”
“Well, they invited us back before we left,” Sark pointed out.
“Yeah. To pick up their grocery list. Please send milk, bread, and toilet paper. And maybe some dyes that aren’t a shade of pink,” Lucky Cross said. “That also gives them time to get together and decide what the hell they want to do about us when we do come back. I don’t like it.”
Randi Queson sighed. “Maybe we should drop Eyegor off on the way out. It could get great footage of alien civilizations and technologies to beam up to us or other ships when we return.”
“That is not my primary mission,” the robot said, repeating its favorite phrase. “If I cannot leave once down, I cannot fulfill my entire mission, as I will not be able to be on this ship when it leaves. My footage means nothing if it does not get back.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure whoever runs things around here wants detailed directions, pictures, and a road map to get back,” An Li pointed out. “The record isn’t very good on that score.”
“We got to keep that in mind at all times,” Lucky Cross said firmly. “Nobody’s ever gotten back, and no ship’s even gotten back with all its data. We’re not even halfway yet—we don’t have nothin’ to cash in to pay the bills and make us rich and famous. And that last third, getting back whole, could be the roughest part of the deal.”
XI: FIRE AND SMOKE AND MIRRORS
“I don’t know what frankincense or myrrh smell like, but I bet neither of ’em smells like Melchior does now,” Lucky Cross commented, looking at the planet coming into full-screen view.
If Kaspar had been cold and forbidding, and Balshazzar warm and sweet, then Melchior could only be described as someone’s vision of Hell.
Clouds shrouded the planet, which was much larger than the other two combined yet seemed to have a gravitational pull only fifteen percent or so above “average,” or one gee. There were oceans down there—in one way it might be called a water world, as it had countless enormous islands but, for its size, no great continents—but the oceans weren’t the warm and pleasant blue-green of Balshazzar nor the icy but crisp ones of Kaspar, but rather oceans dark and deep. Measurements using subsurface scanning often could not find their bottoms.
It was, however, simply a matter of time, for Melchior seemed hellbent on spewing its guts out. Every one of the islands, great and small—and they were so numerous that definitions had to be changed in order to properly count them—seemed to have a volcano or two or three or several dozen that, if not active, was certainly not dead. And so active were the forces coming up from below the ocean floor that some of the larger islands could be seen coming apart, with that rippling jigsaw magma creating a patchwork quilt. Just as suddenly the magma would vanish, leaving black border scars and smoking black lava marks across even the regions that had no active belching mountains.
“Now that is not a land to cross in your bare feet,” Lucky Cross said with a shaking of her head. “I’m not sure I want to cross that place at all.”
“What I want to know is whether or not the damned moon’s coming apart or coming together,” Jerry Nagel said. “This place almost redefines the term ‘geologically active.’ Doc? You’re our part-time geologist. What do you think?”
“I think it’s another example of when you believe you’ve seen every combination in the universe you come up against something strange. This place is totally volcanic; I can’t see any signs of massive erosion except on the very oldest and largest islands, and they’re most likely to come apart in that nasty fragmentation effect. Plenty of flowing water, but I doubt if it stays the course long enough to create great canyons, and the eruptions and fragmentations tend to break down attempts at walling it up as lakes. Still, with the combination of sudden heating and cooling and the large amount of dust up there, it appears that what saves it from becoming a total oven is that it’s only facing the sun one quarter of the time. It loses that heat pretty fast, but convection causes massive storms. Look at it now. It’s raining over probably half that world down there, and it’s a big one.”
“It’s closer than it should be to its mother planet,” Cross noted. “That’s what keeps it right in line to be victimized by all the forces tugging at it. Still, I see an awful lot of what looks to be vegetation down there. Just like Balshazzar, that soil’s got to be absolutely wonderful for growing things, as long as it lasts, that is.”
“Some green,” Queson agreed, “but also a lot of purples, yellows, reds, oranges, even patches of vegetative white. I wonder how edible it is?”