Gregory Benford: In the Ocean of Night

“I guessed as much. But then, they’re not here, are they?”

Len chuckled. “I guess not.”

“How far around are you? Ready for me to go in?” “Almost. Take a few more minutes. What’s it like down there?”

“Pretty bleak. I wonder why Icarus is so close to spherical? I expected something jagged.”

“Can’t be gravitational forces.”

“No, there’s not enough to hold down even gravel— everything is bald, there’s no debris around at all.”

“Maybe solar erosion has rounded the whole asteroid off.”

“I’m going in,” Nigel said abruptly.

“Okay, I guess I can track you from here.”

The rotation of Icarus had brought the left wall closer. He nudged the craft back to center, remembering the first time he had learned in some forgotten science text that the Earth rotated. For weeks he had been convinced that whenever he fell down, it was because the Earth had moved beneath him without his noticing. He had thought it a wonderful fact, that everyone was able to stand up when the Earth was obviously trying to knock them down.

He smiled and took the craft in.

Jaws of stone yawned around him. Random fragments of something like mica glinted from the seared rocks. Nigel stopped about halfway down and tilted his spotlights up to see the underhang of a shelf; it was rough, brownish. He glided toward the vent wall and extended a waldoe claw. Its teeth bit neatly with a dull snap and brought back a few pounds of desiccated rubble. Len called; Nigel answered with monosyllables. He nudged the module downward again, moving carefully in the shadowed silence. He used a carrier pouch on the craft’s skin to store the sample, and added more clawfuls of rock to other pouches.

He was nearly to the bottom before he noticed it.

The pitted floor was a jumble of rocks that rose from pools of ink. Nigel could not make out detail; he turned his spotlights downward.

A deep crack ran down the center of the rough floor. It was perhaps five meters wide and utterly black.

At irregular intervals things protruded from the crack, angular things that were charred and blunted. Some gave sparkling reflections, as though partially fused and melted.

Nigel glided closer.

One of the objects was a long convoluted band of a coppery metal that described an intricate, folded weave of spirals.

He sat in the stillness and looked at it. Time passed. Ten meters away a crumpled form that had been square was jammed in the crack, as though it had been partly forced out by a great wind. There were others; he photographed them.

Len had been calling for some time.

When he was through Nigel pressed a button to transmit and said, “We’re going to have to recalculate, Len. Icarus isn’t a lump of ice or a rock or anything else. I think”—he paused, still not quite believing it—“it has to be a ship.”

It took Houston an hour to agree that he had to leave the module. Both he and Len had to argue with a Project Director who thought they had wasted too much time already; the man obviously didn’t believe anything they reported, thinking it a cock-and-bull story designed to give Nigel more time for sample collecting. Len could only barely be restrained from coming into the cloud himself and only the necessity for reevaluating the mission stopped him.

Even after agreeing, Houston demanded a price. The Egg had to be secured to the vent floor first. This could be done without Nigel’s leaving the module and, rather than argue, he moved quickly and efficiently to make short work of it.

The Egg was a dull gray sphere with securing bolts sunk into its skin. Nigel maneuvered it near the dark fissure wall and fired the bolts that freed it. The sphere coasted free.

Before it could glide very far he shot the aft securing bolts and they arced across the space to the wall and buried themselves in the stone. Steel cables reeled in and pulled the Egg to the rock face. Nothing could move it now and only Len or Nigel could detonate its fifty megatons.

Nigel ate before he left the module. Houston was divided about contingency plans; Dave gave him a summary to which he half listened. He and Len had another twenty-two hours’ margin of air, and some changes could be made in their braking orbit back to Earth.

The two unmanned backup missions were being stepped up, but they looked less promising now. The radar sensing modules had to close on Icarus at high velocity, and the dust and pebbles inside the cloud, impacting at those speeds, could disable the warheads before they searched out Icarus itself.

“Popping the cover,” Nigel called, and switched over to suit radio. The hatch came free with a hollow bang. He inched gingerly out, went hand over hand down the module’s securing line, and stood at last on Icarus.

“The surface crunches a little under my feet,” he said, knowing Len would pester him with questions if he didn’t keep up a steady stream of commentary. They had both ridden in a small, sweaty cabin for five weeks to intercept Icarus, and now Len was missing a payoff larger than anything they had dreamed. “It must be something like cinder. Dried out. That’s the way it looks, anyway.”

A pause.

“I’m at the edge of the crack. It’s about two meters across here, and the sides are pretty smooth. I’m hanging over it now, looking in. The walls go on for about four meters and then there’s nothing but black. My lights can’t pick up anything beyond that.”

“Maybe there’s a hole in there,” Len said. “Could be.”

Before Dave could break in, Nigel added, “I’m going inside,” and caught a lip of rock to pull himself into the crack.

As the rock fell away behind him there was only a faint glimmering reflection ahead. A white rectangle loomed up as he coasted on. It seemed to be set into the side of some larger slab, flush against the rock on one end and at least a hundred meters on a side. There were odd-shaped openings in it, some with curlicues and grainy stone collars like raised parentheses. Nigel lost his bearings as he approached and had to spin his arms to bring his feet around. There was a faint ring as he landed.

The white material had the dull luster of metal. Nigel used a cutting tool to gouge out a sliver. Nearby, a contorted thing of red and green appeared to grow smoothly out of the white metal, with no seam. To Nigel it looked like an abstract sculpture. When he touched it there was a faint tremor in his fingers; an arm of it moved infinitesimally, then was still. Nothing more happened.

He moved on, examined other objects, then shone a light down one of the holes in the face. The opening was a large oval and in the distance he could see where other dark corridors intersected it.

He went in.

A long tube of chipped rock. He took a sample. Volcanic origin? Something strange about its grainy flecks.

A vault. Gray walls, flash-burned brown.

Coasting.

Stretched lines shaping up…through…an eager bunching into swells. Should he go further? Beneath his torch light shadows swung with each motion of his arm, like eyes following every movement. Rippling patterns.

Patterns.

In the walls?

Should he? Behind each smile, teeth await.

Down, down now. Level. Gliding. Legs dangling

dangling

soft

something like a cushion but he sees nothing, only the shadows now melting something.

hot

then cold old

drawing him down again, telescoping him into fresh cubes of space, all aslant, a spherical room now, glowing red where his torch touches or is that a trick of the eyes?—he has difficulty focusing, probably loss of local vertical, an old problem in zero g, just a turn of the head will fix it—