While I was still full of my furious fancies, a high-pitched whistle from the navigation console announced that the balanced drive had turned off completely. We had reached our rendezvous position, two hundred thousand kilometers from Vandell. I was moving away from the control panel, heading towards our own transfer pod, before the sound had ended. At the entrance I stopped and turned, expecting that McAndrew would be close on my heels. But he hadn’t left the displays. He had called back the list of Vandell’s physical parameters, showing mass, temperature, mean diameter, and rotation rate, and was staring at it blindly. As I watched he requested a new display of Vandell’s rotation rate, which was small enough to be shown as zero in the standard output format.
“Mac!”
He turned, shook his head from side to side as though to banish his own version of the insane ideas that had crowded my mind when I saw the change in Vandell, and slowly followed me to the pod. At the entrance he turned for a last look at the screens.
There was no discussion of our move into the pod. We didn’t know when, or even quite how, but we both knew that we had to make a descent to the surface of Vandell. Somehow we had to recover the bodies that lay beneath the flickering, pearly cloud shrouding the rogue world.
In another time and place, the view from the pod would have been beautiful. We were close enough now to explain the rosy shimmer. It was lightning storms, running back and forth across the clouded skies of Vandell. Lightning storms that shouldn’t be there, on a world that ought to be dead. We had drained Merganser’s data banks as we went round and round in low orbit. Not much new had come to light, but we had found the last set of instrument readings returned to the main computer when the other landing pod had made its approach to Vandell’s surface: Atmospheric pressure, zero. External magnetic field, less than a millionth of a gauss. Temperature, four degrees absolute. Surface gravity, four-tenths of a gee. Planetary rotation rate, too small to measure.
Then their pod had touched down, with final relative velocity of only half a meter a second — and all transmissions had ceased, instantly. Whatever had killed Jan and Sven Wicklund, direct impact with the surface couldn’t be the culprit. They had landed gently. And if they hadn’t been killed by collision when they landed…
I tried to ignore the tiny bud of hope that wanted to open in my mind. I had never heard of a pod being destroyed without also killing anyone inside it.
Our instruments had added a few new (and odd) facts to that earlier picture. The “atmosphere” we were seeing now was mainly dust, a great swirling storm across the whole of Vandell, littered by lightning flashes through the upper part. It was hot, a furnace breath that had no right to exist. Vandell was supposed to be cold. Goddammit, it should be drained of every last calorie of heat. McAndrew had told me so, there was no way the planet could be warm.
Round and round, orbit after orbit; we went on until I felt that we were a fixed center and the whole universe was gyrating around us, while I stared at that black vortex (it came and went from one orbit to the next, now you see it, now you don’t) and McAndrew sat glued to the data displays. I don’t think he looked at Vandell itself for more than ten seconds in five hours. He was thinking.
And me? The pressure inside was growing — tearing me apart. According to Limperis and Wenig, I’m cautious to a fault. Where angels fear to tread, I not only won’t rush in, I don’t want to go near the place. That’s one reason they like to have me around, to exercise my high cowardice quotient. But now I wanted to fire our retro-rockets and get down there, down onto Vandell. Twice I had seated myself at the controls, and fingered the preliminary descent sequence (second nature, I could have done that in my sleep). And twice McAndrew had emerged from his reverie, shook his head, and spoken: “No, Jeanie.”
But the third time he didn’t stop me.
“D’ye know where you’re going to put her down, Jeanie?” was all he said.
“Roughly.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice at all. Too scratchy and husky. “I’ve got the approximate landing position from Merganser’s readings.”
“Not there.” He was shaking his head. “Not quite there. See it, the black tube? Put us down the middle of that funnel — can you do it?”
“I can. But if it’s what it looks like, we’ll get heavy turbulence.”
“Aye, I’ll agree with that.” He shrugged. “That’s where they are, though, for a bet. Can you do it?”
That wasn’t his real question. As he was speaking, I began to slide us in along a smooth descent trajectory. There was nothing to the calculation of our motion, we both recognized that. Given our desired touchdown location, the pod’s computer would have a minimum fuel descent figured in fractions of a second.
I know McAndrew very well. What he was saying — not in words, that wasn’t his style — was simple: It’s going to be dangerous, and I’m not sure how dangerous. Do you want to do it?
I began to see why as soon as we were inside the atmosphere. Visibility went down to zero. We were descending through thick smoke-like dust and flickering lightning. I switched to radar vision, and found I was looking down to a murky, surrealistic world, with a shattered, twisted surface. Heavy winds (without an atmosphere? — what were winds?) moved us violently from side to side, up and down, with sickening free-fall drops arrested by the drive as soon as they were started.
Thirty seconds to contact, and below us the ground heaved and rolled like a sick giant. Down and down, along the exact center of the black funnel. The pod shook and shivered around us. The automatic controls seemed to be doing poorly, but I knew I’d be worse — my reaction times were a thousandfold too slow to compete. All we could do was hold tight and wait for the collision.
Which never came. We didn’t make a featherbed landing, but the final jolt was just a few centimeters a second. Or was it more? I couldn’t say. It was lost in the continuing shuddering movements of the ground that the pod rested on. The planet beneath us was alive. I stood up, then had to hold onto the edge of the control desk to keep my feet. I smiled at McAndrew (quite an effort) as he began an unsteady movement towards the equipment locker.
He nodded at me. Earthquake country.
I nodded back. Where is their ship?
We had landed on a planet almost as big as Earth, in the middle of a howling dust storm that reduced visibility to less than a hundred yards. Now we were proposing to search an area of a couple of hundred million square miles — for an object a few meters across. The needle in a haystack had nothing on this. Mac didn’t seem worried. He was putting on an external support pack — we had donned suits during the first phase of descent.
“Mac!”
He paused with the pack held against his chest and the connectors held in one hand. “Don’t be daft, Jeanie. Only one of us should be out there.”
And that made me mad. He was being logical (my specialty). But to come more than a light-year, and then for one of us go the last few miles… Jan was my daughter too — my only daughter. I moved forward and picked up another of the packs. After one look at my face, Mac didn’t argue.
At least we had enough sense not to venture outside at once. Suited up, we completed the systematic scan of our surroundings. The visual wavelengths were useless — we couldn’t see a thing through the ports — but the microwave sensors let us look to the horizon. And a wild horizon it was. Spikes of sharp rock sat next to crumbling mesas, impenetrable crevasses, and tilted blocks of dark stone, randomly strewn across the landscape.
I could see no pattern at all, no rule of formation. But over to one side, less than a mile from our pod, our instruments were picking up a bright radar echo, a reflection peak stronger than anything that came from the rocky surface. It must be metal — could only be metal — could only be Jan’s ship. But was it intact? Lightning-fused? A scoured hulk? A shattered remnant, open to dust and vacuum?