“Okay. Am I also to assume you weren’t responsible for the lights?”
“What lights?”
* * *
JAKE DEPRESSURIZED THE cabin and opened both air-lock hatches. Then he lifted Otto’s body and tried to prop it over his shoulder. But it was too heavy to carry in that manner. Otto wasn’t particularly a lightweight to start with. He got the body into his arms and stumbled toward the air lock.
“Jake,” said the AI, “you won’t leave me here, will you?”
“I wouldn’t leave you here, Simon. I’ll be back in a while.” He got out into the snow, staggered a few more steps, and lost his balance as he started downhill. He had to give it up. No way he could carry the corpse a kilometer across a slippery surface in this gravity. He hauled Otto back up the ladder into the lander and set him in one of the seats. “I’m sorry, pal,” he said. “They’ll have to come back for you.”
“I don’t think,” said Simon, “he will care one way or the other.”
Jake looked out at the icy hills, stretching away in all directions. He knew precisely where the Baumbachner lander was, down in that rift off to the right. But at the moment it was lost in the dark. “Simon,” he said, “during the time you’ve been stranded here, have you seen anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”
“No, Jake.”
“Your landing: From the condition of the vehicle, it was obviously a soft landing.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You must have seen whatever it was that supported you.”
“I am sorry. I did not see anything.”
“Were you still spinning during the descent?”
“No. We gained equilibrium. But I cannot explain how that happened.”
“Were your own engines on?”
“Negative, Jake.”
He sat, staring at the barren landscape. Eventually, he sighed, took the transmitter from the bag, and installed it on the control panel. He was just finishing when Priscilla came back: “Jake,” she said. “What have you got?”
“Priscilla, only one of the crew made it to the lander. Otto. He’s been dead for a couple of days.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. I was hoping maybe they had some extra air tanks. Any idea what happened?”
“No. They got hit by something. But I don’t know what— Weirdest part of this—”
“What’s that, Jake?”
“They came down without wings and landed otherwise intact on top of a hill.”
She took a long time to answer: “Okay,” she said at last. “We can try to figure it out later. By the way, we picked up another piece of the Vincenti in orbit. Part of an exhaust tube. Jake, it was broken off at both ends. But the really spooky thing—It looked as if it had been stretched. Pulled apart.”
“You’re serious?”
“You ever know me to kid?” She was silent for a few seconds. Then: “What were the lights?”
“I have no idea. They went out after I got here.” He got up out of the seat. “I’ll talk to you later. Be up as soon as I can. Meantime, keep an eye open.”
He removed the AI—which once out of its cradle could no longer speak to him—and carried it back to his own lander. It should have been an easier hike this time since it was downhill most of the way, but the downhill part made it more treacherous. He fell once and almost went down a second time. Whatever the manufacturers had installed in the Flickinger control gear, though, must have been working because the force field didn’t shut off.
* * *
THE LANDER ROSE into the night. Priscilla sent pictures of the damaged exhaust tube. He looked at it, brought up images of the Vincenti, and compared the two. It looked as if a giant hand had seized the rear of the tube, crunched it, and pulled it apart. Stretched it, as Priscilla had said.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“The hand of God.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m being serious. Listen, you don’t see anything else up there with you, right?”
“Negative.”
“Tell Myra to keep watching. If you see anything, I don’t care what it is, stay clear of it.”
“You want to tell me what you think is going on?”
“Priscilla, let’s just say that if you suddenly got two feet taller, it would do nothing for your good looks.”
* * *
BAUMBACHNER LOG
It’s hard to imagine what could have happened to bring the Vincenti lander down more or less intact. The only possibility I can think of is a vehicle with advanced magnetic capabilities. Lock onto the lander and carry it to the ground. But if anything like that was in the sky around here, we’d know about it. I’ve never seen a place in my life that looked less likely to be home to anybody, let alone a high-tech civilization.
—Jake Loomis, February 8, 2196
* * *
SHE WAS WAITING for him in the launch bay when he climbed out. “I’ve sent in a report,” she said. “I’m sorry about Otto. He was pretty young.”
Jake nodded. “So was Isha. Everybody’s too young for something like this to happen to them. But we can talk about it later. Let’s get belted down and clear the area.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I can only think of one possibility. If I’m right, it would be a good idea to talk about it somewhere else.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
* * *
JAKE WAS RELIEVED to watch the dark world drop behind them. “So what’s your theory?” she asked.
“They were getting ready to send a landing party down. Otto was packing supplies and whatnot into the lander, when—”
“What—?”
“I think they ran into some sort of superdense object.”
“You mean a black hole?”
“More likely a piece of matter like the kind you’d find in a neutron star. The details don’t matter. The bottom line is that there’s a good chance a superdense object is orbiting Orfano.”
“You think they literally collided with it?”
“I don’t think you collide with something like that. You sort of get sucked in.”
“How much mass are we talking?”
“Myra, how much would a baseball weigh if it were made of this stuff?”
“I don’t think a baseball composed of that type material could hold together, Jake.”
“Forget the theories. Assume that it does, what’s its mass?”
“I would estimate approximately one and a half trillion tons.”
Priscilla shook her head.
“Imagine,” said Jake, “what the gravity would be like if you got anywhere close to something like that.”
Myra applied the math: “Priscilla,” she said, “if you came into contact with the baseball, your weight, relative to it, would be approximately 125 million pounds.”
She shook her head. “That wouldn’t be good.”
“Apparently, assuming that’s what happened, when they came within its influence, Isha reacted immediately. She saw no possibility of escape. Probably didn’t know what was happening. Except that the Vincenti was coming apart. So she told Otto to get into the lander. And she sealed it and launched.”
“Heroic woman.”
“Yeah. For all the good it did anybody.”
“What about the lights? What were those?”