But then he heard Brandon call, “Jordy, take a look at this.”
Jordan walked to where Brandon was sitting and, peering over his brother’s shoulder, saw that the bright green line depicting the depth of the borehole had flattened out.
“That can’t be right,” he said to his brother. “Can it?”
Brandon hunched forward in the rickety folding chair, scowling and muttering as he tapped keys on the console’s control board.
“Damned thing hasn’t gone a centimeter deeper since just after midnight.”
“But the laser’s still running,” Jordan said.
“It is, but it’s not going anywhere.”
“How can that be?”
Shaking his head, Brandon muttered, “Damned if I know.”
“It’s hit something that it can’t vaporize,” Jordan mused. “Some particularly hard form of rock.”
“Jordy, that laser is powerful enough to vaporize any kind of rock. Construction crews used lasers like that to dig the Moho shaft in Siberia, for chrissakes.”
“Well, something has stopped it.”
Brandon bolted out of the flimsy chair, knocking it over, and hurried to the generator that powered the laser. He looked more than a little ridiculous, Jordan thought, in nothing but his briefs and T-shirt, standing between the two silent and unmoving robots.
“Power output’s at maximum,” he called to Jordan as he scanned the generator’s dials. “That beam’s powerful enough to melt the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“How long can the generator go on running?”
“Weeks. It’s nuclear.”
“And the laser is working?”
“Christ, Jordy, you can hear it running!”
Jordan realized how upset Brandon was; he only used language like that when he was distraught. There was no smoke blowing out of the borehole. The laser is running, but it’s not vaporizing any of the rock down there.
How deep has it gone? he wondered. A glance at the console’s screen showed him. The depth line flattened out at fourteen kilometers.
Brandon came back to the console, carefully picked up the chair, then leaned a thumb on a square red button on the control board. The laser abruptly turned off. The world went quiet. Then Jordan heard the sighing of the trees in the soft breeze, the murmur of the surf. A bird trilled, somewhere.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“I’m going to get dressed,” Brandon said, “after I instruct the robots to pull up the laser head.”
“And then?”
With a grim shrug, Brandon replied, “Then we send a camera down the hole and see what the hell’s stopped the goddamned laser.”
They picked at their breakfasts while the robots methodically hauled the laser head back up to the surface.
Brandon said, “Well, it sure isn’t hollow.”
“Apparently not.”
“Might be some weird form of matter. Some super condensate.”
Jordan dipped his chin slightly. “Apparently this planet isn’t an exact duplicate of Earth.”
“Not below its crust, anyway.”
“It only looks like Earth on the surface.”
“Yeah.”
Jordan could see that Brandon was despondent, deeply disappointed that the laser had run into a problem he couldn’t understand.
“Well,” he said, as brightly as he could manage, “perhaps you’ve run into a new kind of planetary structure. You might become just as famous as that fellow who discovered continental drift.”
“Wegener,” Brandon answered dully.
“You ought to call de Falla and see if any of the other drills have run into the same problem,” Jordan suggested.
Cheering up a bit, Brandon said, “Good idea.”
Jordan walked toward the borehole, where the two robots were working the equipment that was slowly hauling the laser head up to the surface. Fourteen kilometers, he recalled. It’ll take several hours to get the laser up here and then a camera down again.
Brandon came over beside him. “De Falla says none of the other drills have gone as deep as we have yet.”
“The perils of the pioneer,” Jordan said, trying to lighten his brother’s mood. “Being first and all that.”
Brandon huffed. “Somebody once said that pioneering is just finding new ways to get yourself killed.”
“Oh, come on now, Bran. You’ve run into something new, something unprecedented, perhaps. You should be elated. It’s a chance to learn new things about planetary structures.”
His brother nodded bleakly. “Maybe.”
It was late afternoon by the time the robots got the camera down to the level where the laser had stopped. De Falla phoned to tell them that two of the other drilling rigs had stopped, as well.
“At what depth?” Brandon asked.
“Fourteen klicks,” answered the geologist. “Give or take a dozen meters.”
“Something’s down there,” Brandon said tightly. He was sitting at the console again. Its central screen showed a murky view from the still-descending camera. Jordan saw from the data bar alongside the screen that the camera had almost reached the depth where the laser had been stopped.
In the phone’s screen, de Falla looked more puzzled than dejected. “Something’s down there, all right,” he agreed. “But what?”
“I’ll call you back,” Brandon said. “We’re starting to get a camera view.” He clicked the phone shut and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Jordan looked over his brother’s shoulder at the console’s main screen. The two robots stood behind him, silent and still. Yet Jordan couldn’t help feeling that they were peering over his shoulder, straining to see what was down there, just as he was.
The lights that accompanied the camera brightened to full intensity. Jordan blinked at what he saw. He heard Brandon grunt.
“It looks like metal,” Brandon muttered.
“Smooth,” said Jordan. “As if it were polished.”
“It is polished,” Brandon said. “And there isn’t even a scorch mark from where the laser beam hit it.”
“Polished metal?” Jordan wondered aloud.
“It’s artificial,” said Brandon, with absolute certainty.
Confirmation
They sent the camera’s view back to de Falla, at his digging site, and the geologist excitedly reported running into the same metallic barrier at the same depth.
Brandon looked sulky, almost angry. Jordan had seen that expression on his brother’s face many times before: when Brandon couldn’t get what he wanted, he pouted.
“A layer of polished metal at a depth of fourteen kilometers below the surface,” Jordan mused. “That’s…” He struggled to find a word.
“All across the planet,” Brandon said, almost growling.
“Only six points,” Jordan pointed out.
“Jordy, we could dig six hundred boreholes. Or six thousand, six million. We’ll find the same thing in every one, guaranteed.”
Jordan thought that nothing they had yet found on New Earth could be guaranteed.
“Come on,” Brandon said. “Let’s pack it all in and get back to the base camp. I want to talk to Adri about this.”
“Yes,” Jordan agreed. “He has some explaining to do.”
It was twilight when their rocketplane touched down at the base camp. De Falla was already there, waiting impatiently as they came down the metal ladder from the plane’s hatch.
“I left the robots to pack up,” the geologist said. “Hazzard’ll fly them all back here tomorrow.”
“Why the rush?” Brandon asked.
Leading them straight to the bubble tent that housed the geology lab, de Falla said, “I wanted to run the data about this metal layer through the profile program, see what comes up.”