Cold as Ice Read online

  "It's all right, Martin. Everything's going to be all right."

  "Dad, look. Dad!"

  As space around the Pelagic bloomed yellow and crimson, the Great War claimed its last casualties. But Vernor Perry did not see it happen. He was holding his beloved son close. His eyes were closed, and the agony in his heart had nothing to do with his own fate.

  His final thought was a prayer for the end of all such sorrow.

  INTERLUDE

  This is the size-distribution law of the Asteroid Belt: For every body of given diameter, D, there will be ten bodies with diameter d = D/3.

  Corollary: As the body you are searching for becomes smaller, the problem of distinguishing it from others of similar size becomes rapidly more difficult.

  Conclusion: Personal survival pods, each a couple of meters long, will be lost in a swarm of natural objects, more numerous within the Belt than grains of sand on a beach. Visual search techniques in such an environment will be useless.

  Solution: Although the sky in and beyond the solar system glimmers and glows with visible light from stars, planets, diffuse and luminous gas clouds, novas, supernovas, and galaxies, other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are far less busy. Choose carefully. At the right wavelength for observation, Earth shines brighter than a thousand suns.

  The designers of search-and-rescue systems choose very carefully. The available signal energy must be radiated in many directions, travel millions or hundreds of millions of kilometers, and fill an immense volume. The amounts of power available for distress calls are usually just a few watts. No matter. The radio energy needed for signal detection and location is truly minute; the total microwave power received at the solar system's largest radio telescope would not carry a crawling fly up a windowpane.

  SAR systems are designed to detect and triangulate a crippled survival pod operating on its last dribble of power. From a single one-minute fix, a ship or pod's position and velocity can be computed. A rescue vehicle will be chosen, and a matching trajectory defined.

  What SAR systems cannot do—because no one ever anticipated such a need—is to operate efficiently when wartime battle communications swamp every channel. And when war ends, emergency needs for reconstruction are no less demanding.

  The last urgent and one-time call from the Pelagic, giving trajectories for nine small objects, goes unheeded.

  The pods drift through space. The sedated infants within them dream on. Their sun-centered orbits carry them steadily closer to the monitored zone of the Inner System, but they move at a snail's pace, too slow for the internal resources of the pods. Life-support systems, intended for at most a few weeks' use, begin to fail. The pods' own calls for help continue, but they, too, weaken, merging into the galactic radio hiss that fills all of space.

  Months pass. The pods drift on, interplanetary flotsam borne on sluggish tides of radiation pressure and the changing currents of gravitational force.

  No one knows that they exist.

  1

  2092 A.D.: Black Smoker

  Nell Cotter had visualized the sequence precisely during the final minutes before the hatch was closed: a slow fading of light, a gradual extinction that would grow ever fainter as they descended, never quite bleeding away completely.

  And had she got it wrong! Here was reality, a few seconds of cloudy green filled with drifting motes of white. A sudden school of darting silverflsh all around them, and then, moments later, no trace of diffused sunlight. Only darkness, absolute and implacable. Scary.

  But reporting personal discomfort was not what she was paid to do. "We are now moving through the three-hundred-meter level," she said calmly. "That little cluster of shrimp was probably the last life we'll see for a while. All external light has disappeared."

  She spoke into her main microphone, the one that Jon Perry could hear, but after that, she automatically went on subvocalizing for the private record. Don't need to say the depth. One of the cameras is trained on the instrument panel. Can hardly see it though, it's so dim in here. She glanced at the other two video recorders. Getting nothing from outside. We need action, or all of this sequence will be edited out.

  The third camera showed Jon Perry at the submersible's controls, leaning back, totally relaxed, even bored.

  Cold fish, as cold-blooded as anything outside. Well, I was warned. The Ice Man. Wonder if Mr. Personality does any better when he knows he's on camera. "Dr. Perry, would you narrate while we're descending? I could do it, but I'd only be parroting what you told me earlier."

  "Sure." He displayed no more emotion, dropping in this hollow glass shell through black depths, than she had seen him do on the ocean's surface: He turned his face toward the camera. "We will be making an unpowered descent for the next sixteen hundred meters. That will take approximately ten minutes and put us onto the eastern edge of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge, about forty-five south, a hundred and ten west. The coast of South America and the Arenas Base are fourteen hundred kilometers east. We are already into the stable temperature regime, with the water at a constant four degrees Celsius. It will stay that way for another thousand meters. The only change we'll notice until we reach the seabed is in the outside pressure. It adds ten tons of load to each square meter of the Spindrift's surface for every ten meters that we descend. If you listen closely, you can hear the vessel's structure adjusting to the outside force. At the moment, the pressure on the hull is about a thousand tons per square meter."

  A thousand tons! Thank you, Jon Perry. I could have gone all day without needing to know that. Nell stared around at the transparent goldfish bowl of the submersible. On the surface, the three-meter globe of the Spindrift had seemed substantial enough; now it felt as flimsy and as fragile as a soap bubble. If it were to shatter under the enormous outside pressure . . .

  She felt a twinge of discomfort in her bladder but pushed awareness of it into the back of her mind.

  Is he going to talk his damned statistics all the way down? No one on Earth or anywhere else will want to watch. A pox on you, Glyn Sefaris. Promise me a "quick and easy" assignment, so I'll agree to come here unprepared. And give me this. (And better be sure to edit that out, before Glyn gets his editorial look.)

  It was a party trick, elevated to a practical technique. Nell could keep up her own stream-of-consciousness commentary on the subvocal recorder installed in her larynx and still monitor and direct the course of the video program. The final show would be a mixture of on-the-spot and voice-over comments. Continuous time-markers on cameras and microphones ensured that she would have no difficulty in coordinating, editing, and splicing the different tracks. As she paused, Jon Perry wound up the string of statistics and was moving on.

  ". . . at which point I will begin using our lights. We could do it now—we have plenty of power—but it's not worth it, because the only thing we're likely to see are a few deep-water fish, all of them well-known benthic forms."

  "Not well known to me or to the viewers, Dr. Perry." Nell jumped in on her public mike. The thrust of the show was supposed to be about the seafloor hydrothermal vents and the life forms around them, but final subject matter was irrelevant if viewers turned off before you ever got there. "Can we take a look?"

  He shrugged and turned back to the control panel. Nell watched his fingers flicker across a precise sequence of keys.

  Beautifully shaped hands. Make sure we show plenty of footage of them. Nice sexy voice, too, if I could get more animation into it. Talks old, no juice. Check his age when we get back—twenty-eight to thirty, for a guess. Check background, too. I know next to nothing about him. How long has he been playing deep-sea diver?

  The darkness around them was suddenly illuminated by three broad beams of green light, each beginning twenty meters from the Spindrift and pointed back toward it.

  "Free-swimming light sources," said Perry, anticipating Nell's question. "Half a meter long, two-kilowatt continuous cold light, or pulsed at a megawatt. We have half a dozen of them. They norma
lly travel attached to the base of the Spindrift, but they can be released and controlled from here."

  "Why not just shine beams out from the submersible?"

  "Too much back-scatter. The light that's reflected toward us from an outgoing beam would spoil the picture. Better to send the free-swimmers out and shine light back this way."

  "They're radio-controlled?"

  He gave her a glance that might have been amused, but it was probably contemptuous. He knew she'd been sent here half-briefed as well as she did. "Radio's no use under water. Lasers would do, but focused ultrasonics are better. They travel farther and don't interfere with what we see."

  Which at the moment happens to be nothing. Nell stared out into three empty cones of brightness. Not one hint of fish. Amazing, I can see everywhere. The Spindrift admits light completely from all directions. Even the chairs are transparent. "Progress in ceramic materials since the war, Miss Cotter." Perry had patted the side of the clear globe as they were first boarding. "We can make everything in the submersible as transparent as the best glass . . . except the crew, of course. We're working on that." (Joke!) "And so strong that the Spindrift could descend to the deepest part of the Marianas Trench."

  To which, thank God, they were not going. The hydrothermal vents lay at what Jon Perry described as a "modest" depth of a couple of thousand meters.

  Which means that we're going more than a mile straight down. Two thousand tons of force on every square meter of the hull. Smash in this Christmas ornament, and no one would ever find the broken shell. Or its contents. God, I hate the deep sea—and I never knew it before. Feel like I have to go to the bathroom. Hope I don't pee in my pants (and be sure to edit that out, too, when I get back).

  Still they were descending, through cold, lifeless water. Jon Perry had his free-swimmers on autopilot, their lighthouse beams creating cones of green, fading in the distance. Over to the left, Nell finally caught a glimpse of movement. Something dark, something faint, a wisp of smoke at the limit of vision.

  "Dr. Perry, I see a big object swimming. Over on your side."

  But he was shaking his head. "Not swimming. That's the first sign of what we came down here to look at. You're seeing the top of the plume from the smoker. Look at the water temperature."

  Nell—and the camera—looked. It was eight degrees above freezing, warmer than it ought to be. They were descending into the region of the hydrothermal vent. A feathery plume of darker water—like up-flowing oil—was the first sign of the vent's proximity.

  Jon Perry had listened well when she briefed him before the descent. He picked up his cue now without a hint from her. "From this point, the water as we descend will become hotter and hotter, all the way to the entry chimney of Hotpot—a crack in the seafloor, the hydrothermal vent that leads right to Earth's hot interior. Actually, this is both the newest and the hottest of the known vents. Those in the Galapagos Rift are deeper, and they have been studied for a long time: Mussel Bed and Rose Garden, Clambake and Garden of Eden. But even the hottest of them, the 'black smokers,' don't run over three-fifty Celsius. Hotpot here tops out at over four-twenty, a super black smoker. If it weren't for the pressure down here, this would all be superheated steam . . ."

  And if it weren't for the calmness down here, this would all look damned good on camera. Beautiful clear eyes, total technical confidence. Pale complexion, because he spends too much time in the dark. Editing color balance will take care of that easy enough. But you need a few pins sticking into you, Jon Perry. We have to liven you up. Because let's face it, what you're saying to our vast but shrinking audience is bloody dull stuff.

  And Nell's experienced ear and eye told her that it was getting worse. Given that the average audience member had an attention span shorter than the time it took to blink. And given that there was not much to look at outside anyway. As they descended farther, the water was becoming steadily more turbid. The lights stopped a few yards beyond the glassy wall of the Spindrift, and in those few yards she could see nothing.

  "There are live organisms thriving down here," Perry was saying, "at temperatures far above the usual boiling point of water—temperatures that would kill a human being in a few seconds. But even that's not the most interesting thing about the black smokers. Every creature on the land surface of the earth or in the upper levels of the oceans depends on the sun for its existence. Plants trap the energy of sunlight, animals eat plants, and animals eat each other. So it all comes back to sunlight and solar energy. But the animals that form colonies around the black smokers don't rely on the sun at all. Their life cycle starts with bacteria that are chemosynthetic, not photosynthetic. They depend on chemical energy, breaking down sulfur-based compounds and using the energy from that to power processes within their cells. If the sun were to go out completely, all life on the surface of the earth would vanish. But it might be centuries before life down here even noticed. It would go on as usual, energized by the earth's own minerals and internal heat . . ."

  Pictures. Nell stared desperately at the roiling darkness out beyond the Spindrift. Great God of the Boob Tube, give me pictures. I've recorded enough talking-head material in the past five minutes for an hour's program.

  It was duller than her worst fears. And she knew what was coming next, because Jon Perry had told her even before they left the surface. They were going to scoop up exciting things like clams and mini-crabs and tube worms and sulfur-munching bacteria from the seabed around Hotpot, with the aid of the Spindrift's remote handling arms. And they were going to push the creatures into the viewers' disgusted or bored faces.

  I told you, Glyn, I didn't need this bloody job. I should have stayed in bed.

  But before Nell had finished that subvocal thought, Jon Perry had moved. He was sitting up straight in his seat, and his face suddenly had an expression on it. A live, interested look, like a real human being. He had stopped speaking in mid-sentence, and he was ignoring the cameras. Nell felt a movement of the Spindrift, an upward bobbing that she had last experienced when the submersible was on the surface.

  "What's happening?"

  He did not reply, did not look at her. But he jerked his head toward the instrument panel, which told Nell nothing. She saw only dozens of dials and digital readouts, most of them unlabeled and unintelligible.

  What was intelligible was the sudden disappearance of every scrap of outside illumination. The free-swimmers' lights had vanished. Nell Cotter and Jon Perry sat at the center of a jet-black globe, dim-lit from within. She saw a streak of dark movement outside—opaque liquid swirling around them. It was followed by another and more violent rocking of the Spindrift. The vessel tilted far to one side, until Nell was thrown across to collide with Jon Perry.

  "Pressure wave." He finally spoke. "A big one. We have to get away from here. The Spindrift was designed for uniform external pressure. It can't take much of this." His voice was calm, but his hands were skipping across the controls at unbelievable speed.

  Nell gasped. Something had reached out in the darkness, grabbing and holding her at her waist, chest, and shoulders in soft, cool tentacles.

  "It's all right." Perry had heard her indrawn breath. "That's only the restraining harness. It operates automatically if we exceed a ten-degree tilt."

  Which we should never do, except when we're bobbing around on the surface. Nell remembered at least that much of her briefing. What's wrong with the attitude stabilizers? They're supposed to keep us level.

  "I saw the temperature rising," Perry went on calmly, "faster than it ought to, but I didn't know how to interpret it. We arrived here at just the wrong time."

  "But what's happening?" Nell could feel all of her weight transfer to the harness on her right side. The Spindrift had rolled through ninety degrees.

  "Undersea eruption. Seafloor quake. The area around the smokers is seismically active, and it chose now to release built-up compressions."

  Nell heard a low, pained moaning. The seabed, crying out in agony? No. It's the
Spindrift, groaning because the hull is overstressed. Can't take much of this, Perry says. So when the ship's had all that it can take—

  The submersible shuddered and spun. Nell no longer had any sense of direction. The seafloor could be right beneath her feet—or directly over her head. Jon Perry was still busy at the controls. And, incredibly, he was talking in the same lecturer's voice as before. Narrating his comments, as though they were still making a video documentary.

  "It is necessary that we leave the eruption zone at once, but it's no use to head straight up toward the surface. The pressure waves fan up and out from the seabed fracture zone to fill a wedge-shaped volume, broadest at the top. We must travel laterally and down to take us out of the active zone. That's what I'm doing now. It's going to be touch and go, because we've already had two pressure pulses that exceed the hull's nominal maximum tolerance. Hold tight. Here comes another one."

  The Spindrift groaned again, a sound like creaking timbers. Nell glanced around. Outside there was nothing but turbid black water at killing pressure. How could Perry have any idea of where he was going? She could see no instruments that told direction or attitude. Yet his dim-lit fingers were never still. He was making continuous adjustments to something. Nell could hear another noise behind her: the whirring of electric motors, driving the Spindrift's propulsion system at maximum thrust.

  Does he know what he's doing? Or is he trying anything, just at random?

  The submersible shuddered and changed direction again, so violently that Nell was convinced that it must be the end. The hull moaned, surely ready to collapse. But in that same moment, Jon Perry was lifting his hands clear of the controls.

  "Are we—" Nell didn't know how to finish the question. Are we doomed? didn't seem likely to receive a useful answer.

  "Almost. Almost clear. Another few seconds."

  The front of the submersible was admitting a faint, faded glow. The water ahead was clearer, no longer filled with dense, suspended solids ejected by the seafloor eruption. Nell could see one of the free-swimmer light sources, leading the way to safety like a pilot fish. The Spindrift rolled slightly, responding to a faint, final tremor from behind. And then Nell could feel no evidence of movement, although the sound of the motors continued from behind. Her restraining harness released and slipped away, retracting into the seat.