How could TOE be wrong? Close to three thousand years of experimentation had validated its basic precepts and structure.
He must have understood my incredulity. “It could be that TOE is correct—and has been for billions of years. There are measurements of light and gravitons from more distant galaxies that don’t quite fit. They’ve been dismissed as measurement errors. What if they weren’t?”
I knew some science, but I was no physicist. “Then what?”
“Maybe something changed in the universe.” He grinned again. “Or maybe we don’t understand things as well as we think we do.”
My wager, were I an aficionado of betting upon matters about which I knew little, for that was the fashion of most who gambled, would have been upon our lack of understanding of a universe about which we knew less than we thought we did.
I made my way to the facilities before getting cleaned up and dressed. Breakfast helped. After eating, I donned the armor in the locker room, later than most of the expedition members, who had already departed for various alien locales.
Nuovyl was suited and waiting for me by the main lock, holding his helmet. I scrutinized him. “Were you able to arrange the transport and opening the towers?”
“Ah… yes and no, sir. Commander Morgan had already insisted that sections of towers be opened all across the megaplex. There is an area where narrow ramps have been melted and doors have been opened some thirty kays to the northeast of here. It has not been investigated, except briefly by the tech crew that cut the door catches.” Nuovyl glanced past me.
I turned. Kaitlin Henjsen stood there, her visage not quite so dark as the airless sky outside of the temporary base where I stood.
“Professor Fitzhugh?”
I waited for her to continue whatever peroration she was about to disgorge upon me.
“You have requested transportation to an unexplored area. Given the vast expanse of the megaplex, we will never be able to explore all sections in the limited time allotted to us. For that reason, more standard archeological practices have been modified. Still, I would request that, should you discover any artifact at all, or any internal attributes that present a new or different aspect of Danann, you do not disturb it, but leave it untouched and contact me immediately.”
“I have no difficulty at all with that stipulation, Doctor, none whatsoever.”
“Good. Best of luck.” Her countenance lightened only slightly.
Within another quarter stan, I was seated on the front bench seat of a slider-sled that was speeding silently northeast along the curved boulevards that had been canals billions of years in the past. The towers conveyed an impression of dark canyon walls, except when the sled lights—or those I trained upon them—momentarily created abstract patterns of silver and shadow.
By the time we had covered twenty-five kays, every new section we passed through looked just like every other one, no matter how often I told myself that that each structure varied from every other tower. My anticipation was that such similarity would soon become un-nervingly overwhelming.
45
Chang
On fiveday, I was scheduled to take shuttle one planetside with the next set of scientists and pick up the returnees. Wondered if Professor Fitzhugh would be coming back up. Had no way of knowing. Made it to the ready room with ten minutes to spare before officers’ call.
Morgan was already there. He motioned me over. “You won’t be doing the regular shuttle run today. Lieutenant Braun will handle it after you finish another assignment. Dr. Lazar and Dr. Polius need you to take shuttle two and make slow passes over the lake where landing zone alpha was. They need to observe what’s happening below the ice, and they want an overview that they can’t get from the surface.”
“The shuttles aren’t designed for that.”
Morgan shrugged. “We all know that, but Danann doesn’t have an atmosphere. Their equipment is too heavy for the flitter. The shuttles are all we have that will carry the instrumentation that they want. They can’t monitor the activity beneath the lake effectively, because all those anomalous composites block or distort the heat patterns and any other signals. We can get some readings from low orbit, but not all, and the ones we have been able to get aren’t precise enough.”
“None of us took anything into low orbit.”
“I took the flitter. That’s why I know its equipment won’t work. You three have been busy enough.”
And he hadn’t? Just looked at him. Hard.
“I needed the practice.”
I understood that.
“You’re not to put the shuttle in any position or configuration that overstresses the hull or drives—or you…” Morgan went on, hurriedly, as if he needed to get back to operations. “… the receivers and receptors are compatible with all equipment they have down there, and they can tap into the shuttle’s system. If they have questions, link them to Major Hondohl in Comm…”
By the time he finished, he’d made it clear he didn’t like what the scientists wanted, but couldn’t say no. His point was clear—no strain or hazard to the shuttle or its equipment.
Took my time in preflighting and running though the checklist. Told Ysario to do the same. Even so, shuttle two and I were planetside by eleven hundred. By eleven-fifteen Maejean Polius and Cleon Lazar were standing with me in the shuttle’s main cargo bay. We all stood in full armor.
Lazar was a big man, huge in armor. Too big to be a physicist. He watched two techs slip equipment into the empty receptors on the bulkhead aft of the pilot’s section. “Fine.” He turned. “There’s enough space here, but will the receivers be able to handle the signals?”
“The equipment is completely compatible,” I assured him. “Let me link you to Major Hondohl in Comm. You can verify that.” Wasn’t about to argue on secondhand reassurance.
Lazar and Hondohl talked for less than five minutes. Polius looked annoyed in a pinch-faced way. Lazar was nodding at the end.
“Better than I’d hoped,” he said, after I broke the link for him.
“Could you explain what you hope to do?” I finally asked.
“We’ve begun to detect various energy emissions,” Lazar began, “but the angle and composition of the confinement basin effectively block any monitoring except on the lake’s surface itself. The emissions seem to be intermittent, or they’re moving, and we don’t have enough equipment to cover the lake in order to monitor what’s happening…”
“And the ice beneath is melting fast enough that you don’t want to risk it, either?”
“That won’t happen. There has to be an equilibrium reached because the surface temperature is so low and the radiating area so large that it can’t melt all the way to the surface. We’re more limited by the lack of enough remotes to cover the surface. By flying higher above the lake, we can obtain the data simultaneously in real time…”
Understood that part, but still wondered about his “equilibrium.” Seemed to me that what the ancient aliens had done didn’t fit a lot of expectations, scientific or otherwise.
“How high do you want the shuttle?”
“We’d like to try a thousand meters, then go higher, if we need to.”
With the power of the shuttle, a thousand meters AGL was almost on the deck. “That will limit the time we have.”
“Can you hover over the lake at that height?” That was Polius.
“For maybe a quarter stan before I burned out the AG drives, and we went straight down.”
“Flitters can hover.”
Ignored the exasperation in her voice. “Only in an atmosphere, and that’s not here. There, they can use diverters. That gives lift because they’re acting against atmosphere.” That was a gross oversimplification, and not really correct, but I didn’t care. The basic point was the same. You couldn’t hover for long without burning lots of power, and the less atmosphere and the more gravs, the faster you burned it.