and most if not all of us are considering making this place our permanent home.”
“Which means that breaking it up according to the original plan to supply farming volume is no longer on the books.”
“Precisely.”
“How do you expect to get away with that? This whole project was planned and paid for as a new source of food.”
“That was when it was a government project. As you know, it became a private concern recently; the government was paid full value for Raindrop, the station, and the shuttle which keeps it supplied. As of course you do not know, over eighty per cent of the stock of that corporation is owned by people like myself. What we propose to do is perfectly legal, however unpopular it may make us with a few people.”
“More than a few, I would say. And how can you afford to be really unpopular, living in something as fragile as Raindrop?” queried Bresnahan. “There are lots of spaceships available. Even if no official action were or could be taken, anyone who happened to have access to one and disliked you sufficiently could wreck the skin of this tank so thoroughly in five minutes that you'd have to start all over again even if you yourselves lived through it. All the life you'd established would freeze before repairs could be made complete enough to stop the water from boiling away.”
“That is true, and is a problem we haven't entirely solved,” admitted the other. “Of course, the nasty laws against the publication of possible mob-rousing statements which were found necessary as Earth's population grew should operate to help us. Nowadays many people react so negatively to any unsupported statement that the word would have trouble getting around. In any case, we don't intend to broadcast the details, and comparatively few people know much about the Raindrop project at all. I don't think that many will feel cheated.”
Silbert's reaction to the last sentence was the urge to cry out, “But they
He subsided. He himself had been living with the Raindrop project for three years, had become closely identified with it, and the change of policy bothered him for deeper reasons than his intelligence alone could recognize.
Bresnahan was also bothered, though he was not as deeply in love with the project as the spaceman. He was less impressed by Weisanen's conviction that there would be no trouble; but he had nothing useful to say about the matter. He was developing ideas, but they ran along the line of wondering when he could get to a computer keyboard to set the whole situation up as a problem. His background and training had left him with some doubt of any human being's ability — including his own — to handle all facets of a complex problem.
Neither of the Weisanens seemed to have any more to say, either, so the sphere drifted downward in silence.
6
They had quickly passed the limit which sunlight could reach, and were surrounded by blackness, which the sphere's own interior lights seemed only to accentuate.
With neither gravity nor outside reference points, the sphere was of course being navigated by instrument. Sonar equipment kept the pilot informed of the distance to the nearest point of the skin, the distance and direction of the lock through which they had entered, and the distance and direction of the core. Interpretation of the echoes was complicated by the fact that Raindrop's outer skin was so sharply curved, but Weisanen seemed to have that problem well in hand as he drove the vehicle downward.
Pressure, of course, did not change significantly with depth. The thirty per cent increase from skin to core meant nothing to healthy people. There was not even an instrument to register this factor, as far as Silbert could see. He was not too happy about that; his spaceman's prejudices made him feel that there should be independent instrumentation to back up the sonar gear.
As they neared the core, however, instruments proved less necessary than expected.
To the mild surprise of the Weisanens and the blank astonishment of Silbert — Bresnahan knew too little to expect anything, either way — the central region of the satellite was not completely dark. The light was so faint that it would not have been noticed if they had not been turning off the sphere's lamps every few minutes, but it was quite bright enough to be seen, when they were a hundred yards or so from the core, without waiting for eyes to become dark-adapted.
“None of your samples ever included luminous bacteria,” remarked the official. “I wonder why none of them ever got close enough to the skin for you to pick up.”
“I certainly don't know,” replied Silbert. “Are you sure it's caused by bacteria?”
“Not exactly by a long shot; it just seems the best starting guess. I'm certain it's not heat or radioactivity, and offhand I can't think of any other possibilities. Can you?”
“No, I can't. But maybe whatever is producing the light is attached to the core — growing on it, if it's alive. So it wouldn't have reached the surface.”
“That's possible, though I hope you didn't think I was criticizing your sampling techniques. It was one of my friends who planned them, not you. We'll go on down; we're almost in contact with the core now, according to the fathometer.”
Weisanen left the lights off, except for the tiny fluorescent sparks on the controls themselves, so the other three crowded against the bulge of the viewing port to see what was coming. Weightlessness made this easier than it might have been; they didn't have to “stand” at the same spot to have their heads close together.
For a minute or so, nothing was perceptible in the way of motion. There was just the clear, faintly luminous water outside the port. Then a set of slender, tentacular filaments as big around as a human thumb seemed to writhe past the port as the sphere sank by them; and the eyes which followed their length could suddenly see their point of attachment.
“There!” muttered Brenda Weisanen softly. “Slowly, dear — only a few yards.”
“There's no other way this thing can travel,” pointed out her husband. “Don't worry about our hitting anything too hard.”
“I'm not — but look! It's beautiful! Let's get anchored and go outside.”
“In good time. It will stay there, and anyway I'm going out before you do — long enough before to, at least, make reasonably certain it's safe.”
The wife looked for a moment as though she were about to argue this point, if her facial expression could be read accurately in the faint light, but she said nothing. Bresnahan and Silbert had the intelligence to keep quiet as well; more could be learned by looking than by getting into the middle of a husband-wife disagreement, and now there was plenty to look at.
The core was visible for at least two hundred yards in all directions, as the sphere spun slowly under Weisanen's control. The light definitely came from the life forms which matted its surface.
Presumably these were fungi, since photosynthetic forms could hardly have grown in such an environment, but they were fungi which bore little resemblance to their Terrestrial ancestors. Some were ribbon-like, some feather-like, some snaky — even patches of what looked like smoothly mown lawn were visible. The greenish light was evidently not pure color, since other shades were visible; red, purple, and yellow forms stood out here and there in eye-catching contrast to grays and browns. Some forms were even green, though it seemed unlikely that this was due to chlorophyll. Practically all seemed to emit the vague light which bathed the entire scene — so uniformly that outlines would have been hard to distinguish were it not for a few specimens which were much brighter than the others. These types bore what might have been spore pods; brilliantly luminous knobs ranging from fist to grapefruit size, raised “above” the rest of the surface as much as eight or ten feet on slender stalks. These cast shadows which helped distinguish relief.
The woman was right; weird it might be, but the scene was beautiful.
Weisanen cut off the water jets and waited for a minute or two. The vehicle drifted slowly but perceptibly away from the surface; evidently there was some current.
“We'll have to anchor,” he remarked. “Bren, stay inside until we've checked. I'll go out to see what we can
