Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

An Li sighed. “Okay. Well, look, that’s our next stop. We’ll try and locate you via the communicator when we leave and drop by if at all possible. Maybe we’ll meet your Doctor then.”

“Maybe you will. I think you certainly should. He’d like you, and I think you’d like him.”

“With all your gathering, I’m surprised he isn’t already there to greet all of you,” Queson put in.

Cromwell laughed, something he clearly didn’t do much of. “No, he would be here, but he has something to finish first, and that always comes first.”

“A religious period? Some kind of solitary wilderness preparation of prayer and fasting?”

“Oh, my, no! He went to a small Meskok village to negotiate for some superb sparkling wine they get from one of the other less approachable races, and I believe he got sucked into a poker tournament there. Texas hold ’em, I believe it is. For a full cask, of course…”

“He was putting us on, you know,” Jerry Nagel commented as they prepared to leave orbit. In the back of all their minds was whether or not they’d be able to break orbit, but it wasn’t something any of them wanted to dwell on until or unless it happened.

“What do you mean, putting us on?” Randi Queson asked him. “According to the records, if that indeed was Thomas Cromwell of the Woodward expedition he was not known for having any sense of humor whatsoever.”

“Nevertheless, he made his joke. Think about it. These—what’cha callit— Meskoks were telepaths, right?”

“So he said.”

“And poker is based on cards and on your ability to convince opponents that your hidden hand can beat theirs, whether or not it could.”

“Yes, I— oh! I see! How could you play cards with telepaths? Fascinating. Either Woodward’s discovered a solution to that problem or, you are correct, Cromwell was pulling our leg. The odds are he was doing the latter, but if a man who’s not known for his sense of humor does that, he’s got an ulterior motive. He also was a lot gabbier than the files say he should have been.”

“I wouldn’t put too much stake in that last thing,” An Li commented. “I mean, he’s been a very long time between conversations with folks from the outside.”

“True. Funny, though, that aside from commenting on how our technology wasn’t any better than he remembered from way in the past, he asked no questions at all about things back in his home region. Not even whether or not they’d been missed,” Nagel noted. “Yeah, they’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”

“You think they were doing that bit with the probe to keep us from coming down and finding out their secrets?” An Li asked him.

“Could be. Probably not them, but maybe their alien friends. We didn’t see any of them, but we do know they’re there because of the energy signatures, and we had indications of their downed ships as well. I don’t know. That’s Woodward’s survivors, though. I’m pretty sure of that. And I really do think they got stuck there. What they’re hiding, what they found, and what they might be working on under those pink dresses and white beards, well, you got me, at least for now. As to whether or not they or the aliens or some mysterious force was doing it with the probe, who knows? The solution there is a lot more pragmatic. Something was doing it. It was for real. It means that if we did choose to find out what’s below there, what they’re hiding, then we’d probably be stuck there anyway. We can still take some more looks later on, though. Let’s see how many probes we have left when we finish up here. If it’s any at all, I’d like to take a real close look at some of the other parts of that planet.”

The captain broke into the conversation. “You will all be relieved to know that we have just pulled out of orbit around Balshazzar and are now heading for Melchior. Unless, of course, you have second thoughts on that.”

“Huh? Why should we?” Nagel asked her.

“Because that’s where your Cromwell sent us, the man you just decided was lying through his teeth. Magi gems all over, he said. That’s a good lure for saying to us all, ‘Don’t look here any further, go over to Melchior. The riches are all over the place there.’ ”

“Well, they invited us back before we left,” Sark pointed out.

“Yeah. To pick up their grocery list. Please send milk, bread, and toilet paper. And maybe some dyes that aren’t a shade of pink,” Lucky Cross said. “That also gives them time to get together and decide what the hell they want to do about us when we do come back. I don’t like it.”

Randi Queson sighed. “Maybe we should drop Eyegor off on the way out. It could get great footage of alien civilizations and technologies to beam up to us or other ships when we return.”

“That is not my primary mission,” the robot said, repeating its favorite phrase. “If I cannot leave once down, I cannot fulfill my entire mission, as I will not be able to be on this ship when it leaves. My footage means nothing if it does not get back.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure whoever runs things around here wants detailed directions, pictures, and a road map to get back,” An Li pointed out. “The record isn’t very good on that score.”

“We got to keep that in mind at all times,” Lucky Cross said firmly. “Nobody’s ever gotten back, and no ship’s even gotten back with all its data. We’re not even halfway yet—we don’t have nothin’ to cash in to pay the bills and make us rich and famous. And that last third, getting back whole, could be the roughest part of the deal.”

“I don’t know what frankincense or myrrh smell like, but I bet neither of ’em smells like Melchior does now,” Lucky Cross commented, looking at the planet coming into full-screen view.

If Kaspar had been cold and forbidding, and Balshazzar warm and sweet, then Melchior could only be described as someone’s vision of Hell.

Clouds shrouded the planet, which was much larger than the other two combined yet seemed to have a gravitational pull only fifteen percent or so above “average,” or one gee. There were oceans down there—in one way it might be called a water world, as it had countless enormous islands but, for its size, no great continents—but the oceans weren’t the warm and pleasant blue-green of Balshazzar nor the icy but crisp ones of Kaspar, but rather oceans dark and deep. Measurements using subsurface scanning often could not find their bottoms.

It was, however, simply a matter of time, for Melchior seemed hellbent on spewing its guts out. Every one of the islands, great and small—and they were so numerous that definitions had to be changed in order to properly count them—seemed to have a volcano or two or three or several dozen that, if not active, was certainly not dead. And so active were the forces coming up from below the ocean floor that some of the larger islands could be seen coming apart, with that rippling jigsaw magma creating a patchwork quilt. Just as suddenly the magma would vanish, leaving black border scars and smoking black lava marks across even the regions that had no active belching mountains.

“Now that is not a land to cross in your bare feet,” Lucky Cross said with a shaking of her head. “I’m not sure I want to cross that place at all.”

“What I want to know is whether or not the damned moon’s coming apart or coming together,” Jerry Nagel said. “This place almost redefines the term ‘geologically active.’ Doc? You’re our part-time geologist. What do you think?”