Zach Hughes: Deep Freeze

"Punch up the Seeker data Josh gave us," David ordered, as he searched for the signal.

"Got it," Ruth said.

"What does it say about the duration of the signal?"

Ruth read quickly, then summarized. "The atomic battery is good for at least twenty years. The box can withstand almost anything except being sucked down into a sun. It's shielded from heat and radiation."

"And, I assume, the cold of space wouldn't bother it."

"Apparently not," Ruth said after scanning. "I'd say that's taken for granted because they don't mention cold temperatures specifically. If a ship lost power and air, it would soon become as cold as space, so the box must have been built to operate under such conditions."

"Any clue as to why it would operate for a while and then stop?"

"Let me read it all again," she said. Then, after a few minutes. "No hint as to what might have happened, David. Whoever wrote this apparently believed that the box is almost indestructible."

"It's beginning to sound to me as if Dad just blinked off and away,"

David said.

"But something had to activate the signal," Ruth said.

"Maybe it was just a rough landing," David said.

"Once activated, the signal can be turned off only by an X&A

technician."

"But if he bumped the ship in landing hard enough to set off the signal but not badly enough to do any real damage, it would seem to us that the signal had been turned off if and when he simply blinked away out of range." He sighed. "Well, we'll go have a look at Dad's planet, anyhow."

It was just a matter of covering the last few million miles as quickly as possible and putting the Starliner into the orbital path of what was, yes, a planet in the life zone of the G-class sun. It was getting pretty exciting.

"They've found the Garden of Eden and they decided to stay for a while," Ruth said, as the Fran Webster circled the sun on flux for a meeting with what she was beginning to think of as Papa's Planet.

"It would be like Dad," David said, "to ignore every directive sent down by X&A about landing on a new planet before it's checked out by X&A

scientists."

"Papa wouldn't take any chances he recognized as such, but what if you were flying low over a garden planet? Wouldn't you be tempted to think that nothing could be wrong with such a beautiful place? Wouldn't you be tempted to stretch the law just a little bit to go down and have a closerlook?"

So it was, with the idea of a lush, blue and green, living planet having been planted in her imagination by her brother, that Ruth was at first puzzled, then frustrated by the bright, reflected light that showed the planet to be a gleaming ball of ice.

"Papa must have been so disappointed," she said, as David adjusted the optics to cut down on the glare and get higher magnification.

"I don't think they would have stayed around here long," David said.

"It makes me cold just to look at it," Ruth said.

The Fran Webster settled into a stable orbit. Since David had not as yet had the chance to use the ship's sensors and detection instruments he ran a quick scan on the ice world.

"Hey, now," he said, as the metallic readings nearly went off the scale.

"There's metal everywhere. It's under the ice but definitely not too deep.

I'm not a mining engineer, but if I'm reading these things right those have to be the richest ore fields yet to be discovered."

"Maybe that's why Papa stayed here for a while."

"Could be," David agreed. "I think we'd better go down and run a complete survey."

"Wouldn't that be a waste of time if Papa has already done it and filed his claim of discovery?" Ruth asked.

"If he had filed it, it would be on record."

"Oh, yes," she said. No such claim—no claim at all from Dan Webster—had been filed.

Flying at a few thousand feet over the gleaming surface of the ice, the ship screamed through a thin atmosphere. Instruments clicked and whirred. The ship flew herself. David was sitting in the command chair, watching the screens casually. His head jerked when the sensors zeroed in on a small mound of ice and gave off a sharper note of self-congratulation to indicate that they had found a particularly rich source of metal.

With a grunt, David took control, slowed the ship until she hovered on her flux drives. He did an infrared scan. Nothing. There was something about the shape of the ice mound that drew him. He lowered the ship until the Fran Webster stood on her flux drives a hundred feet above the ice.

The ice coating on the Old Folks was relatively thin. The heat of the flux drives sent clear water dripping, then flooding down the sides of the mound.

"Oh, David," Ruth gasped, as the metallic hide of a Mule began to show through, then the square, awkward shape and U.P. markings along with the name, Old Folks.

David landed the Fran Webster with her port air lock not a hundred feet from the entry port of the tug. At first he was not going to allow Ruth to accompany him, but he relented. After all, if something happened to him on the icy surface of the planet she had neither the skill nor the knowledge to get the ship into space and back to the U.P. He helped her get into her suit, checked the life-support system himself, suited up, led the way out into the almost nonexistent atmosphere. The cold was not the cold of space. Sunlight glared off the ice. The suit's instruments measured the same contrast in temperatures that one could expect to find on an airless moon, torrid in the sun, frigid in shade. By all rights the ice that covered the planet should melt and run rivers during the period of sun and refreeze at night.

David halted, pulled Ruth to a stop beside him.

"What?" she asked.

"Something's just a shade off center here," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Something is not right. What is your suit conditioner doing?"

She was silent for a moment. "It's cooling."

"The sun is quite hot," he said. "But there's no melting. The water we melted down with the flux tubes is already refrozen."

"I don't understand," Ruth said.

"You are not alone." He turned, started back toward the Starliner.

"David, please," she begged. "We've got to know. We've got to find out."

He hesitated. They were a mere fifty feet from the Old Folks. He could see frost reforming on her hull. Worse, he could see the large rent in the metal where the interior water tanks had expanded with deadly results.

Every molecule of air in the ship's atmosphere would have rushed out within seconds.

"Ruth, honey, I think you'd better go on back. I'll take a look."

"No," she said.

The Old Folks' entry hatch was closed. David checked for power with the suit's instruments. The ship was dead. He used a small bonding torch that was built into the suit's right arm to cut away the lock. The hatch resisted opening, creaked and grated as he pulled, then shattered at the hinges, the strong hull alloy turning into powder to fall to the ice below.

He also had to cut his way through the inner lock door and then he was in the Mule's lower area. The blink generator was dead. No flicker of energy showed on the instruments. The ship's atmosphere matched the thin one of the ice world. There wasn't enough free oxygen to allow a gnat to breathe.

He moved forward. A rime of frost covered everything, including an irregular heap of—something— on the deck near the external tools control panel. He started to step over, halted with one booted foot in the air, felt his heart hammer, his gorge rise, for through the coating of clear ice he saw a face, or what was left of a face. The liquid inside the eyeballs had frozen, shattering everything like glass. On the face and neck blood veins had expanded with the cold, thrusting cords of red through splits in the gray, frozen skin.