Cold as Ice Read online

  "We're right out of it. All clear." Perry slapped his hand on the panel in front of them. Able to see his profile for the first time in what seemed like hours, Nell found that he was grinning like a madman.

  Nell wasn't. Look at that! The crazy bastard, he acts like he loved it.

  "Are you all right, Miss Cotter?"

  Nell gulped, trying to clear her throat for anything more than subvocal rage. Before she could say a word, he was turning to face her, his expression changing from excitement to concern.

  "I'm afraid I'll have to take us back to the surface. I'm really sorry about your show. I realize that we didn't get the materials I promised you, but there's no way we could examine Hotpot today. It's too dangerous. Anyway, there'll be so much ejecta from the vent that we wouldn't be able to see a thing for hours. We can come back another day."

  Nell looked at the cameras. Still in position. Still working. They would have recorded everything: the eruption, the abyssal darkness, the Spindrift tossed and stressed by forces that had come close to shattering the little vessel.

  Relief and excitement washed away tension. Nell wanted to laugh hysterically. He's apologizing! He brings us back from the brink of death, then he worries because he didn't get me camera shots of his godawful slime-worms. And he must get his kicks from danger, because he was grinning like a loony a second ago, and not a sign of perspiration. And here I am, sweating like a pig in a sauna.

  "Dr. Perry." A maniacal laugh came gurgling up from her throat. Edit that out. "You don't need to say you're sorry. We didn't get the show we expected—we got something a whole lot better. You promised chemosynthesis and photosynthesis and sulfur-chewing clams. You delivered a seaquake, an eruption with us in the middle of it. And a recording of everything. The viewers will love it."

  He's surprised—at the idea that someone might prefer high drama to tube worms? But now Nell could not control her own grin. To be sure that you were dead, and then to know you had survived . . . there was no feeling like it. In that moment of greatest satisfaction, she saw a red alarm winking on the control panel. She pointed to it without speaking.

  "Oh, that's all right. Nothing to do with our onboard status. The ship is fine." He leaned over to activate a small display screen, angled so that Nell could not read it. "That signal shows that the Spindrift has received a message from the surface."

  "I thought that was hard to do."

  "It's damned hard. It takes a tight-focused sonic beam to find us, and an even tighter one to send a signal. Lots of energy waste. That's why it's done so seldom." He was frowning. "It must be for you."

  "I'm sure it's not."

  "Well, I can't believe it's for me. There's nothing in my projects so urgent it can't wait until we return to the surface. But here it comes."

  Nell watched as he read the contents of the screen. She saw his expression change again.

  Bye-bye, Ice Man. I don't know what this is, but it's something that sure frightens or upsets Jon Perry. He's excited by physical danger, and it doesn't worry him—but he's sure worried now.

  "What is it? Is the message for me?"

  Jon Perry was shaking his head. "It's for me. I'm sorry, Miss Cotter, but we have to head for the surface at top speed. The undersecretary's office called, and they say there's a major problem."

  "With our descent? I hope it hasn't caused trouble."

  "It has nothing to do with today's descent. There's a problem with my project to explore the life forms around the hydrothermal vents—the thing I've spent the past six years working on."

  "What sort of problem?"

  "That's what has me worried. They say to return at once, it's most urgent. But they don't say why."

  2

  The Fight at the Edge of the Universe

  All it took was one touch of the finger.

  Camille Hamilton depressed the right-hand key. A prerecorded instruction sequence was initiated. The main computer at DOS Center set up individual commands, and sixty thousand lasers rifled them out across the solar system.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait. It would require almost an hour for the light-speed commands to reach the most distant of the individual waiting telescopes, and another hour before confirming data could be received at DOS Center that those instruments were swinging into precise alignment with the target. Three more hours before the whole network of telescopes, cross-talking continuously to each other about attitudes and orbits, would settle into a final and stable configuration.

  Camille reflected, for the thousandth time, that "observing" with the Distributed Observation System didn't offer the real-time pleasures of olden-day astronomy. Galileo and Herschel and Lord Rosse had enjoyed the results of their efforts at once—assuming you agreed that "enjoyment" could include perching on an exposed platform twenty feet or more above the ground in subfreezing temperatures, peering through soupy skies at an object that might become obscured by cloud at the crucial moment.

  The first confirming message was arriving, showing that the closest telescope of the DOS had already received and was obeying its target command. Camille hardly glanced at it. All of the finicky components of the system were orbiting on the other side of the sun, more than a billion kilometers away. She would not learn their status for another hour and a half. Meanwhile, she pulled the previous display onto the main screen for another look.

  "Playing God, I see. As usual." The voice from behind came at the same moment as the physical contact. David Lammerman had drifted silently into the room and was right behind Camille. He was hovering over her, massaging her shoulders and the trapezius muscles running in toward her neck.

  Or pretending to.

  Camille was sure that what he was really doing was testing—and disapproving of—the thinness of the fat layer between bone and skin. If she ever followed his diet advice, she'd be as zaftig as a Rubens' model.

  David sniffed disapproval, stopped his prodding and leaned to peer over her shoulder at the full-screen image of the Andromeda galaxy. "Hey, that's not a simulation. It's a real shot. Pretty damned good."

  "Good? Bit picky, aren't we? I'd say it's more like perfect." Camille had been waiting for that important second opinion before she allowed herself to feel the full glow of satisfaction. "Every test shows that we're spot-on in focus, and we're close to diffraction-limited resolution. The last group of telescopes came on-line about five hours ago. It turns out that the mirrors weren't damaged at all—it was just the predictive algorithms in the local computers that needed a wash and brush-up. Watch now. I'm going to do a high-res zoom."

  David dutifully watched, dazzled as usual by the speed and precision of her system control. The field shifted, closing in on one of Andromeda's spiral arms. A cloud of stars rapidly resolved to points, then went spilling off the edge of the field of view until only one yellow dwarf burned at the center. The zoom continued, homing in on a bright fleck of light snuggled close to its parent star. That grew in turn, finally to display a visible disk on which continents formed dark, clotted smudges on a grey-blue background.

  "I picked a close target—M31, two million light-years—for media impact. Then I set up a computer scan for a Sol type. That planet is about the same distance from its primary as Earth is from the sun. Spectroscopic analysis says we're looking at a high-oxygen atmosphere. That's water, too, in the blue areas. Think there's anybody up there, staring back this way?"

  "If there is, I hope he gets better observing time than we will as soon as people see that picture. Here. Put yourself around the outside of this." David Lammerman was carrying two containers of soup in his left hand. He held one out to Camille.

  She took it reluctantly. He was always trying to feed her. He had the best of intentions, but when she was working she could never develop any interest in food. Everyone told her that she was over-thin, that she needed to build herself up. It was futile to explain to all of them that her skinny blond fragility was as illusive as her childlike appearance, that she had never been sick in
her life, that her body was as tough and durable as steel wire—though David, surely, had other evidence of that.

  "Once they see this image, the honeymoon's over," he went on. He squeezed into the chair at Camille's side. Two meters tall and powerfully built, he outmassed her by a factor of three. He emptied his pint of soup in three quick gulps, while she hid hers from him behind a monitor. He at once retrieved it, opened the top, and handed it back.

  "Too good?" she took a dutiful sip. "The images, I mean . . . not the soup."

  "Far too good. As soon as they realize that everything's up and running, we'll be squeezed out of the schedule. All of our time will go to some grey eminence who hasn't had an idea in her head for fifty years."

  He didn't want or need a reply. He and Camille had grumbled through it all before. It was the age-old complaint of aspiring young astronomers. You did the dog work, the years of repairing, cleaning, and calibrating the instruments, while planning observational programs to tackle the most fundamental problems of astronomy; and as soon as everything was perfect, your elders and supposed betters came in, commandeered the prime observing time, and dribbled it away on out-of-date and discredited theories.

  At twenty-four, David Lammerman was good, and he knew it. He was impatient. He was not consoled by the thought that his turn would come someday. And at twenty-seven, Camille Hamilton was beginning to wonder if hers ever would. She had already been at DOS Center two years longer than David, and he knew her powers even if no one else seemed to.

  "Quit, then." She could read his mind, peering at him over the top of the soup carton. "I'll take your observing time."

  "I'll bet you would. You try to do that already." He smiled at her and rubbed his hand through his bushy mop of tight-curled blond hair. Camille noticed how handsome and healthy he looked. Healthy in mind and body. She knew both, better than she was ready to admit to anyone.

  There was irony in that thought. During three years of working together, often around the clock and always sharing the same cramped living quarters—and after the first three months, the same bed—she and David had never once had a real argument. They told each other everything. She would have trusted him with anything that she owned, including her life. But she was not ready to make a commitment.

  David couldn't understand that. She didn't understand it herself. Was it because of Tim Kaiser, David Lammerman's predecessor at DOS Center? She and Tim had been lovers, too, for a little while. But the tensions between them had grown high. When Tim finally announced that he knew she was having affairs with half a dozen others at the center, that he could stand her rejection no longer, and that he was taking an assignment back on Earth, Camille had felt true sorrow . . . and vast relief.

  Don't let that happen again.

  "We won't have more than a day or two." David's voice intruded on her thoughts. "Then they'll realize that the whole of DOS is performing to spec. So we'd better make the most of it. Andromeda's all right for the media, but let's get on with some real targets. Something a decent distance away."

  And here it comes, thought Camille. She would have preferred to avoid David's look, but she forced herself to swivel her chair and face him.

  "I already did that. DOS is set for a target eleven billion light-years out." She hurried on, knowing that her next words would halt his nod of approval. "It's going to observe the proto-stellar cloud that I found on last year's test run."

  "Star formation! That's low energy, and it's useless science. We shouldn't waste a millisecond on crap like that."

  "Just because your own interests happen to be quasars—"

  "Intense energy sources—that's where you learn something new. Not in proto-stellar clouds. It's a crime to take the whole capability of DOS and piss it away for twenty-four hours on something you could see just as well close-up using a different instrument—"

  "Bullshit! You know that's not true as well as I do. If we're ever going to understand the anomalous fusion cross sections we measure right here in our own solar system, we need DOS. We have to look at stellar fusion and star formation way back in time, before supernovas did element seeding and changed the rules of the game. We have to look ten and eleven and twelve billion light-years out."

  Even while Camille argued as hotly as David—and enjoyed it, that was the amazing thing—she suspected that it was a waste of time. They had recognized for years that this day was coming. While the Distributed Observation System was performing sporadically or not at all, creeping back into operation after its partial destruction during the war, she and David had sneaked in ample observing time in pursuit of their own separate interests. But with the return of DOS to full service—and they could not hide that fact—guest observers would swarm in from all over the system. They would demand access. Their programs would have priority over the needs of a couple of recent graduates. She and David, both cocky and opinionated, would be forced to fight over scraps and slivers of observing time.

  And they would fight. They agreed on the distance of good targets, but on nothing else. He was interested in observations of a certain class of quasars as a tool to answer cosmological questions. She found cosmology too speculative, too akin to theology. The questions she wanted to answer on fusion processes would lead to new experiments in the Vesta labs, and they in turn would suggest new observations. In her view, physics experiments and DOS observations should feed on each other through the intermediary of computer models and drive each other along. But the information flow from David's work, in her opinion, was all one-way.

  "You don't have any method of finding out when you're wrong," she had said to him often enough. "It's the curse of astronomy. You have no way to perform an experiment, here or in the Belt, and then say, 'Well, this result shows that my theory is nothing but piffle, but it also suggests this different theory that I can test.' "

  Camille stood up. It was the old argument. She did not want to sit and repeat it when there were more productive things to do.

  "Where are you going?" He stood up too.

  "It will be at least five hours before observations begin to come in. I'm going to take another look at the Super-DOS configurations."

  It was not wholly a lie. Only a week ago she and David had finished their design for a coordinated space-borne array of five hundred thousand orbiting telescopes, ranging in distance all the way from Jupiter to Mercury. They had agreed that it was the next logical step in exploring the edge of the universe. And they had further agreed that although the orbit computation and the dynamic control of the array presented formidable problems, the main hurdle was not technical. It would be—and wasn't that the story of every major observing instrument ever built?—financial.

  Until today, SuperDOS had been a paper dream. And maybe it still was. What Camille really wanted to do was to read the incoming-message files to DOS Center. The super-sharp images of M31 and the Earth-type planet within its spiral arm had already been sent, beamed out to the Jovian system and in to Mars and Earth. It was the response to those images, to the proof that DOS's first integrated test had been a whopping success, that would tell if SuperDOS, ten times as big, could become more than a dream in Camille and David's lifetime. And those responses should be coming in right now.

  David trailed behind her as she left the DOS observation chamber and headed for Communications. She could tell from the look on his face that he hadn't got everything off his chest.

  "So you jumped in and grabbed your turn without telling me," he said. "You took advantage of the fact that I was off duty. You deliberately didn't tell me. Pretty shitty thing to do."

  "Don't give me that." Camille glanced back at him over her shoulder, but she floated right on across the zero-gee hub of DOS Center. She was not going to pretend a guilt she didn't feel. "Suppose DOS had come into full operation on your shift and I hadn't happened to be around. What would you have done?"

  She could hear his breathing and feel his presence, drifting along a few feet behind her. He did not answer at once
, but silence was all the reply she needed.

  "I'll tell you. You would have trained DOS on one of your stupid, bloody, high-red-shift quasars," she went on. "And when I came on duty, you'd have told me what you'd done, and then I'd have had to lump it—and for a lot longer than a day, too. Your low light levels need longer exposure times."

  "You seem to think everybody's like you." But David's tone lacked conviction. When it came to his sacred experiments, he was no different from Camille. Absolution, not permission. You grabbed observing time now, took the flak later.

  "You certainly are like me," said Camille mildly. "That's why I'm so fond of you."

  She was declaring a truce. They had reached the entrance of Communications. The chamber was empty, but that was normal. DOS Center still ran on a skeleton staff; there were just nine technicians and maintenance personnel, including David and Camille, for a facility that would house over two hundred when the Distributed Observation System was going full bore.

  The incoming-message unit was flashing blue to indicate the arrival of an "Urgent" received signal. All of the on-site staff had learned to ignore it, and the blaring station-wide siren had long ago been disconnected. The ideas of urgency on Earth and Ganymede seldom coincided with the priorities of DOS Center.

  "Let's see how well they like our pictures." Camille scanned the display of incoming messages. "Wait a minute, though. This first one has nothing to do with DOS. It's personal. For you, and it's from Earth. From Husvik. Do you have high-up friends at the capital that you've never told me about?"

  She was making conversation, not expecting an answer. Personal messages were just that. You didn't ask about them. And anyway, David had no secrets from her. But his reaction was shocking. He froze and stood motionless, biting his lower lip.