Gregory Benford: In the Ocean of Night

There was precious little money for research, for new ideas, for dreams. But his parents did not sense that fact. His father shook his head a millimeter to each side, listening as Nigel talked, the older man probably not aware that he gave away his reaction. When Nigel was through describing the Icarus mission plan, his father had cast one of those unreadable looks at his mother and then very calmly advised Nigel to sign off the mission, to wait for something better. Surely something would come along. Surely, yes. From inside their perimeter they saw it very clearly. He had given them no daughter-in-law as yet, no grandchildren, had spent little time at home these past years. All this hovered unspoken behind his father’s millimeter swaying, and Nigel promised himself that when Icarus was over and done he would see more of them.

His father, obviously well read up on the matter, mentioned the unmanned backup missions. Robot probes, ready with a series of nuclear shoves. Why couldn’t Houston rely on them alone? A matter of probabilities, Nigel explained, glad to be on factual ground. But he knew, despite the committee reports, that the odds were cloudy. Perhaps a man was better, but who was sure? Even if only men could ferret out the core of Icarus, amid all that dust, why should it be Nigel? Easy answers: youth, reflexes; and, finally, because there weren’t all that many trained men left. Nigel mentioned not a word of this as he pumped the rocker, drank tea, murmured into the layered still air of the old house. He was going, one way or another. They knew it. And that last evening ended in silence.

On the airplane back to the anthill of Houston, he took up the one volume that he’d noticed in his old bedroom bookcase, and brought along on an impulse. The yellowed hardback was cracked, the pages stiff and stained by the accidents of adolescence. He remembered reading it shortly after applying for the US-European program, to get a feel for the Americans. He paged through remembered scenes and near the end came upon the one passage he had involuntarily memorized.And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me…

Sitting in the contoured airplane seat, he felt more like Huck Finn than the calculating European others thought him to be.

Dave Fowles’s voice broke in.

“We have a recalculation of the impact damage, Nigel. Looks pretty bad.”

“Oh?”

“Two point six million people dead. Peripheral damage for four hundred kilometers around the impact site. No major Indian cities hit, but hundreds of villages—”

“How is that famine going?”

He sighed. “Worse than we expected. I guess as soon as word filtered down that Icarus might hit, all those dirt farmers left their crops and started preparing for the afterlife. That just aggravated the famine. The UN thinks there’ll be several million dead inside six months, even with our airlifts, and our sociometricians agree.”

“And that movement out of the impact area?”

“Bad. They just give up and won’t walk a step, Herb said. It must be their religion or something. I don’t understand it, I really don’t.”

Nigel thought, and something came to an edge in him. “Dave, I have an idea.”

“Sure, we just went off open channel, Nigel, the networks aren’t getting this. Shoot.”

“I’m going to plant the Egg after this rest period, aren’t I? This thing is solid metal ore, the magnetic field proves that. No point in waiting.”

“Correct. The Mission Commander just gave me confirmation on that. We have you scheduled to begin descent in about thirteen minutes.”

“Okay. This is it: I want to put the Egg in that vent I’ve found. It’s a long, irregular fissure. The Egg will give us a better momentum transfer if it goes off in a hole, and this one looks pretty deep.”

A whisper of static marked the line. Some tiny facet of Icarus gave him a quick white flash and vanished; he ached to seek it out, take a sample. He felt himself suspended beneath the white sun.

“How deep do you estimate?” Dave’s voice was guarded.

“I’ve been watching the shadows move as the vent rotates into the sun. I think its floor must be forty meters down, at least. That’ll give us a good kick from the Egg. I can take some interesting specimens out of there at the same time,” he finished lamely.

“Let you know in a minute.”

Len broke the wait that followed. “Think you can handle that? Securing that thing might get tricky if there’s not enough room.”

“If I can’t get it down to the bottom I’ll leave it hanging. The Egg won’t weigh even a kilo on the surface, I can simply hang it to the fissure wall like a painting.”

“Right. Hope they buy it.”

And then the carrier from Houston came in.

“We authorize touchdown near the edge. If the vent is wide enough—”

He was already readying his board.

It was a world of straight lines, no serene parabolas. He brought his module—cylindrical, thin radial spokes for stability, an insect profile ending in a globular pouch that was the Egg—in slowly, watching his radar screen. It was difficult to sense in this pebble of a world below him the potential to open a crater in the Earth forty kilometers across. It seemed sluggish, inert.

“Sure you don’t need any help?” Len called.

Nigel smiled and his tanned face crinkled. “You know Houston won’t let us get out of contact. The Dragon ’s high gain antenna might not work in all this dust, and—”

“I know,” Len said, “and if we were both on the sunward side of Icarus, Earth would be in my radio shadow. Fine. Just let me know if—”

“Certainly.”

“Get’em, boy-o.”

The textured surface grew. He flew toward the dawn line and the small pocks and angles became clearer. Steering rockets murmured at his back. He concentrated on the distance and relative velocities, and upon speeding up the automatic cameras, until he was hovering directly above the vent. He rotated the module to gain a better view and inched closer.

“It’s deeper than I thought. I can see fifty meters in and the mouth is quite wide.”

“Sounds encouraging,” Dave said.

Without waiting for further word, he took the module down to the top of the vent. Blasted stone rose toward him, brown discolored into black where minute traces of gas had been baked away.

His headphones sputtered and crackled. “I’m losing your telemetry,” Len’s voice came.

Nigel brought the module to a dead stop. “Look, Len, I can’t go further in without the rock screening you out.”

“We can’t break contact.”

“Well—”

“Maybe I should move in.”

“No, stay outside the dust. Move sunward and behind me—there’ll still be a cone of good reception.”

“Okay, I’m off.”

“Listen, you guys,” Dave said, “if you’re having trouble with this maybe we should just for—” Nigel switched him off. Minutes were being eaten away.

He rotated the module to get a full set of photographs.

Icarus was a bumpy, round hill that sloped away wherever he looked. Burnished mounds and clefts made a miniature geography, seeming larger than they were as the eye tried to fit them into a familiar perspective. He glanced at the clock. It had been long enough; he flipped a switch and the burr of static returned.

“How’s it going, Len?” he said.

“Hey, having transmission trouble? I lost you there for a minute.”

“Had some thinking to do.”

“Oh. Dave says they’re having second thoughts back there.”