As she warmed to her subject, all pretense at impersonal scientific discourse faded from Julie’s voice; she could not filter out her excitement that verged on a kind of love. She paused, watching the swirling alabaster blizzards at twilight’s sharp edge and, on the dawn side, the great solemn racks of cloud. Although admittedly no Jupiter, this planet—her planet, for the moment—could put on quite a show.
“The result is a shallow sea of methane that moves slowly around the world, following the sun. Who’d a thought, eh, you astro guys? Since methane doesn’t expand as it freezes, the way water does”—okay, the astro guys know that, she thought, but the public needs reminders, and this damn well was going out to the whole wide bloomin’ world, right?—“I’m sure it’s all slush a short way below the surface, and solid ice from there down. But so what? The sea isn’t stagnant, because of what the smaller Counter-Moon is doing. It’s close to the planet so it makes a permanent tidal bulge directly underneath it. And the two worlds are trapped, like two dancers forever in each other’s arms. So that bulge travels around from daylight to darkness, too. So sea currents form, and
Miles high, in fact, in Counter’s weak gravity. Massive peaks, worthy of the best climbers…
But her enthusiasm drained away and she bit her lip. Now for the hard part.
She’d rehearsed this a dozen times, and still the words stuck in her throat. After all, she hadn’t come here to do close-up planetology. An unmanned orbital mission could have done that nicely. Julie had come in search of life —of the beings who had sent the gravitational wave signals. And now she and Al were about to walk the walk.
The cold here was unimaginable, hundreds of degrees below human experience. The suit heaters could cope—the atmosphere was too thin to steal heat quickly—but only if their boots alone actually touched the frigid ground. Sophisticated insulation could only do so much.
Julie did not like to think about this part. Her feet could freeze in her boots, then the rest of her. Even for the lander’s heavily insulated shock-absorber legs, they had told her, it would be touch-and-go beyond a stay of a few hours. Their onboard nuclear thermal generator was already laboring hard to counter the cold she could see creeping in, from their external thermometers. Their craft already creaked and popped from thermal stresses.
And the thermal armor, from the viewpoint of the natives, must seem a hot, untouchable furnace. Yet already they could see things scurrying on the plain. Some seemed to be coming closer. Maybe curiosity was indeed a universal trait of living things.
Al pointed silently. She picked out a patch of dark blue-gray down by the shore of the methane sea. On their console she brought up the visual magnification. In detail it looked like rough beach shingle. Tidal currents during the twenty-two hours since dawn had dropped some kind of gritty detritus—not just ices, apparently—at the sea’s edge. Nothing seemed to grow on the flat and—swiveling point of view—up on the ridge’s knife-edge also seemed bare, relatively free of life. “It’ll have to do,” she said.
“Maybe a walk down to the beach?” Al said. “Turn over a few rocks?”
They were both tiptoeing around the coming moment. With minimal talk they got into their suits.
Skillfully, gingerly—and by prior coin-flip—Julie clumped down the ladder. She almost envied those pioneer astronauts who had first touched the ground on Luna, backed up by a constant stream of advice, or at least comment, from Houston. The Mars landing crew had taken a mutual, four-person single step. Taking a breath, she let go the ladder and thumped down on Counter. Startlingly, sparks spat between her feet and the ground, jolting her.
“There must be a
Al followed. She watched big blue sparks zap up from the ground to his boots. He jumped and twitched.
“Ow! That smarts,” Al said.
Only then did she realize that she had already had her shot at historical pronouncements, and had squandered it in her surprise. “
Al said solemnly, “We stand at the ramparts of the solar system.”
Well, she thought, fair enough. He had actually remembered his prepared line. He grinned at her and shrugged as well as he could in the bulky suit. Now on to business.
Against the gray ice and rock their lander stood like an H. G. Wells Martian walking-machine, splay-footed and ominous.
“Rocks, anyone?” They began gathering some, using long tweezers. Soil samples rattled into the storage bin.
“Let’s take a stroll,” Al said.
“Hey, close-up that.” She pointed out toward sea.
Things were swimming toward them. Just barely visible above the smooth surface, they made steady progress toward shore. Each had a small wake behind it.
“Looks like something’s up,” Al said.
As they carefully walked down toward the beach she tried her link to the lander’s wide-band receiver. Happily, she found that the frequencies first logged by her lost, devoured probe were full of traffic. Confusing, though. Each of the beasts—for she was sure it was them—seemed to be broadcasting on all waves at once. Most of the signals were weak, swamped in background noise that sounded like an old AM radio picking up a nearby high-tension line. One, however, came roaring in like a pop-music station. She made the lander’s inductance tuner scan carefully.
That pattern—yes! It had to be. Quickly she compared it with the probelog she’d had the wit to bring down with her. These were the odd cadences and sputters of the very beast whose breakfast snack had been her first evidence of life.
“Listen to this,” she said. Al looked startled through his face plate.
The signal boomed louder, and she turned back the gain. She decided to try the radio direction-finder. Al did, too, for cross-check. As they stepped apart, moving from some filmy ice onto a brooding brown rock, she felt sparks snapping at her feet. Little jolts managed to get through even the thermal vacuum-layer insulation, prickling her feet.
The vector reading, combined with Al’s, startled her. “Why, the thing’s practically on top of us!”
If Counter’s lords of creation were all swimming in toward this island ridge for lunch, this one might get here first. Fired up by all those vitamins from the lost probe? she wondered.
Suddenly excited, Julie peered out to sea—and there it was. Only a roiling, frothing ripple, like a ship’s bow wave, but arrowing for shore. And others, farther out.
Then it bucked up into view and she saw its great, segmented tube of a body, with a sheen somewhere between mother-of-pearl and burnished brass. Why, it was
Too late to back out now. She powered up the small lander transmitter and tuned it to the signal she was receiving from seaward.
With her equipment she could not duplicate the creature’s creative chaos of wavelengths. For its personal identification sign the beast seemed to use a simple continuous pulse pattern, like Morse code. Easy enough to simulate. After a couple of dry-run hand exercises to get with the rhythm of it, Julie sent the creature a roughly approximate duplicate of its own ID.
She had expected a call-back, maybe a more complex message. The result was astonishing. Its internal rocket engine fired a bright orange plume against the sky’s blackness. It shot straight up in the air, paused, and plunged back. Its splash sent waves rolling up the beach. The farthest tongue of sluggish fluid broke against the lander’s most seaward leg. The beast thrashed toward shore, rode a wave in—and stopped. The living cylinder lay there, half in, half out, as if exhausted.
Had she terrified it? Made it panic?
Cautiously, Julie tried the signal again, thinking furiously. It
She braced herself—and her second signal prompted a long, suspenseful silence. Then, hesitantly—shyly?—
