“I think,” he said, “we say thank you very much and skedaddle.”
Priscilla sat quietly. Jake watched the timer click off the seconds.
Priscilla leaned over her mike as the time ran out. “Launch the lander,” she said.
“Vehicle launched,” said Myra.
“Okay, Andrea,” Jake said, “you’ve got it.”
“Roger that,” said Andrea. She turned on the lander’s navigation lights. And one of the interior lamps, whose glow did give the impression someone was in the pilot’s seat.
“No way they could miss that,” said Priscilla.
“Whenever you’re ready, Andrea.” The lander’s engines coughed, died, came back. The vehicle began to struggle.
“Code five,” said Andrea. “Engine failure. Going down.”
Jake watched it slipping through the darkness. “She’s putting on a good show.”
“Anybody who can see it,” said Priscilla, “would have to know the thing’s in trouble.”
The engines sputtered a few more times and died as the lander went into free fall. Jake held his breath. If there was going to be an intervention, it would have to come quickly.
“Code five,” said Andrea. “Please assist.”
“I don’t think anything’s going to happen,” said Priscilla.
Jake had never really accepted the rescue explanation, had not expected to see something snatch the vehicle and carry it safely to ground. Yet what possibility remained?
The lander was in a death spiral. Moments later Andrea’s voice broke the silence: “Negative results. Restarting engines.” Jake heard the thrusters fire. “We are pulling out. Returning to orbit.” The rate of descent slowed, but the ground was coming up fast. Jake found himself holding his breath. But the vehicle leveled off quickly, skimmed along hilltops and clusters of rocks, and began to gain altitude.
“Good, Andrea,” said Jake. “Come on home.”
He sat back and closed his eyes. “Jake,” said Myra, “we have a light.”
* * *
IT BURNED STEADILY, a soft sapphire incandescence. Nothing like the original lights. “Can’t tell what it is,” said Jake. “Too much mist in the area.”
“Myra,” said Priscilla, “will you be able to find it again?” It was already growing dim in their rear.
“If it’s still there,” she said. “It’s in a different area from the original globes.”
They’d need an orbit to recover the lander, and another to set up a second launch. “No hurry,” said Jake.
“We’ll have to go down,” said Priscilla.
Jake shook his head. “I’ll go down.”
“Come on, Jake. I’d like to be part of this, too. How about if I go down this time?”
“Not a good idea.”
“All right. Why don’t we both go?”
Oh, hell. Nothing was likely to happen, so it really wasn’t worth another argument. “Okay,” he said.
The blue light was still there on the next orbit. They brought the lander on board, refueled it, and ran a quick check. Then they waited while the Baumbachner circled the planet again. Priscilla tried to get some sleep, but it was useless.
And finally, they were climbing into the lander.
“The light is still there,” said Myra.
* * *
JAKE CONCEDED THE lander to her. Priscilla took the pilot’s seat. The light had gotten lost in clouds when they launched, but Andrea guided them down, taking most of her data from the ship. And eventually it reappeared, a softly glowing patch of mist.
She swung gently to the right and began a circular descent. The mist was rising from the center of a group of low hills interspersed with broad ice sheets. Jake looked her way. The message was obvious enough: Did she want him to make the landing?
She had no problem taking the lander down. Furthermore, she had nothing to prove. “You want to take over?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Just put us on the ground.”
My kind of guy, she thought. “What’s making the light?” Priscilla asked the AI.
“I can’t tell,” said Andrea.
She brought them down on the ice sheet, went into a skid, but hung on until they stopped. The blue mist was only about fifty meters ahead. “Priscilla,” said Jake, “I think the smart way to do this would be for you to stay here. I’ll take a look and see what we have.”
“Why is that the smart way?”
“Because it ensures we keep control of the lander. We’ll stay in touch, and if something bad happens—I doubt it will, but just in case—you can get out of here, and the people back home won’t be wondering where we went.” He smiled. “You’re glaring at me again, Priscilla. What happened to this Hutch person I was hearing about?”
Jake was pulling on a blue-and-silver WSA jacket with a rocket emblem. The manufacturers of the Flickinger system claimed that the force field provided complete protection against extreme temperatures, but he didn’t believe it. People using the equipment inevitably felt more comfortable wearing a coat or jacket.
“I’m just wondering why the safe thing to do always seems to be to leave me behind,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, “but somebody has to stay. You’re the pilot.”
“All right.”
“Thirty years from now, when you’re in charge of everything, you’ll have to tell people the same thing, that they can’t always go where they want.” He activated his Flickinger unit and went into the air lock.
* * *
SHE GOT UP and retreated into one of the passenger seats to get a better view. The outer hatch opened, and Jake climbed cautiously down onto the hard-packed ice, his weight gain already impeding him. He trudged off across the frozen ground. “How you doing?” she asked.
“It’s a trifle windy out here,” he said.
He was headed between two low hills. She listened as the ground cracked under his feet.
“Be careful.”
“I will, Priscilla.”
He’d left the outer hatch open, as he’d done when he had gone over to the downed lander. She knew why, of course: It would facilitate things if he had to leave in a hurry. She watched through his imager. The sapphire glow got brighter as he rounded the hill. The ground was a combination of ice and rock, then suddenly it changed to water!
She caught her breath.
“It’s a lake,” Jake said. “How the hell is that possible?”
But it was there. Solid ice near the shore leading to open water farther out. And it was the water that was exuding the mist. A beautiful cobalt blue.
Priscilla checked the outside temperature: 185 below zero, centigrade. “Stay away from it,” she said. “Get out of there.”
“Relax, Priscilla,” said Jake.
“No.” Andrea’s voice. “She’s right. It’s radioactive. Come back.”
That was enough. Jake turned and started to retreat. But he wasn’t happy. “What?” he demanded. “Why do you say that, Andrea?”
“It’s Cherenkov radiation. It’s what happens if you take a star drive and drop it twenty kilometers. The fuel spills out, melts the ice, and turns blue in the water. You get a blue glow.”
“Come on, Jake,” said Priscilla. “Move.”
He was coming. But the Flickinger field protected against radiation. Up to a point.
* * *
PRISCILLA’S JOURNAL
I’d never heard of an interstellar coming apart and depositing its drive unit on a planetary surface. When I asked Andrea to take a look at the history, she discovered it did happen once when the Blackford collided with an orbiting rock and simply broke open. That, I decided, was what had happened here. Except that the rock had been heavy, really heavy, and had pulled the spacecraft apart. The drive hit the ground. And the chair stayed in orbit.