"It's durametal, sir," Kirsty said. "Two durametal objects close enough together to show as one large metallic deposit on general scan."
"Two spaceships?" Josh asked, his heart pounding as he anticipated her answer.
"That's my guess, sir."
"Angela, have someone put a homing beacon on that ship out there so we can find it again when we want it," Josh ordered. "Kirsty, as soon as that's been done, take us down."
The Erin Kenner hovered two hundred feet above the elongated mound of ice and snow that hid two objects made of durametal. Josh, Angela, and Sheba were on the bridge, watching nervously as Kirsty tilted ship to play the exhaust of the flux drive over the mound. Water began to run down the slope of the mound only to refreeze quickly. It took two hours to expose the distinctive contours of a Zede luxury liner, another hour to melt away the ice that hid the name, Fran Webster.
"All right, Kirsty," Josh said, his voice low. "Secure. Lift to orbit."
"But we haven't seen the other ship," Sheba protested. Her large emerald eyes were red with weeping.
"I don't think we have to, Queenie," Josh said. "I think you can bet thatthe other ship is the Old Folks."
"They must have violated the first rule of exploration," Angela said.
"What's that?" Sheba asked.
"Even if you discover a place that looks, smells, and states in large print that it's the Garden of Eden and there's a fellow there in a long white robe blessing you, don't land until Science has checked it out," Josh said.
From a stable orbit a robotic probe lowered itself on a tiny column of flux force. It landed near the Fran Webster. Already a white film was forming on the exposed metal of David Webster's Zede Starliner. The probe crawled past the luxury liner and began to play a heat beam over the mound of ice next to it. Optics aboard the probe soon showed an open hatch, and, on the ship's bow, the words Old Folks. Heat melted away ice that blocked the open hatch and soon the transmitter on the probe was beaming up a holoimage. Two humanoid forms lay side by side. Dan Webster had thrown his arm over Fran and that pose had been preserved in death.
"But I was told that they were alive," Sheba protested through tears.
The robot crawled back to the Fran Webster. The cutting properties of a molecular disrupter had to be used to gain entry. Sheba was still weeping silently, but when the hololens focused on the two humanoid forms encased in a sheen of ice she gasped and turned away. Both faces were recognizable. There was no doubt that the dead were David and Ruth Webster.
"Something's wrong," Sheba whispered.
"Yes, very wrong," Josh said bitterly. "They're dead."
"No, that's not what I mean," Sheba said, but she did not have to explain. Angela's face was flushed. Josh averted his eyes. Only Sheba continued to stare in horror at the screen where her brother and sister were frozen in an obscene coital embrace.
CHAPTER TEN
Ordinarily a major vessel from the Department of Exploration and Alien Search would not have spent time and effort in the examination of an ice world. Most frozen planets were located far from the life-giving radiation of their star. The reference books were rich in examples ranging from the eighth and ninth planets of Sol, the sun of Old Earth, to hundreds of other lifeless orbs scattered throughout that relatively small zone of the galaxy which bounded the Confederation of the United Planets. After the reunion, when the mutated men of Old Earth became an integral part of the race, it was de rigueur for every institution of higher learning to end expeditions to Sol's solar system. No system in U.P. space had been more studied, and with the archaeological discovery of the original names of the nine planets there had developed a fad of applying the Old English names for the home planets as a generic label. Thus there were Mercurian planets and Saturnine planets and Plutonian planets.
Almost without exception all known planets could be classified by comparison with one of the nine pups of Old Sol. The planet which some of the crew of the Erin Kenner called Deep Freeze, the world that had killed four members of the Webster family, was that exception. She was encased in ice much like Pluto or the small moons of Uranus, but she was not at all like Pluto. Her core was molten, heavy metal, mostly iron. She had geological features which indicated that she had not always been buried beneath a blanket of snow and ice, which was interesting enough, but the feature of the planet that was most difficult to explain was illustrated by the blinding reflection of the sun from her white surface. She swam her orbit in a glare of light. So much solar energy fell on the surface that, according to Kirsty Girard's calculations, there should have been tropical jungles at her waist and great forests in her temperate areas, for the planet was definitely in the life zone of her sun.
The Erin Kenner kept a respectful distance above the surface. Before Captain Josh Webster allowed anyone to set foot on the planet, there were some things to be explained. The inept attack on the Erin Kenner by an unmanned ship was a physical manifestation of the overall mystery of the planet. The failure of two well-engineered and maintained spaceships and the deaths of four people aboard them was a sobering reminder that there were things unknown encased in the ice.
Both Josh and Sheba were achingly aware that their parents and siblings lay locked in the planet's frigid embrace. In the case of Ruth and David their shame was there for any observer to witness, and that bothered Josh almost as much as the basic question which was: Why the hell was the planet so cold when enough solar radiation poured down on her to melt all ice except, perhaps, for small areas near the poles?
The Erin Kenner was not equipped for efficient probings beneath the ice. In the normal course of events the X&A ship would have run a surface survey of the planet while conducting a thorough scan for life readings.
Finding none in the ice, she would have recorded the ice planet's basic measurements, characteristics, and position in space in a claim of discovery for the people of the United Planets. Any utilization of the planet's resources would have been left to private sector prospectors and miners. A mining ship would be equipped with drill drones and probes that could, with relative ease, examine the metallic deposits under the ice.
Josh had three robotic exploration and test drones at his disposal, none of which was designed to burrow through ice. All three of the drones were at work. They measured a temperature well below zero at the surface of the ice while air temperatures a few feet above the ground indicated the strength of the sea of energy poured onto the planet by her sun. The drones began to pinpoint strong readings of metal beneath the ice and an interesting pattern emerged.
Kirsty Girard, in her role as science officer, called the captain into a small space packed with screens and dials and recording devices. "It gets a bit weird," she said, as she punched up a graphic on a monitor. "These large, pink areas are ore fields, some of them quite deep. They're pretty typical of a planet in the life zone."
"And those bright red spots?" Josh asked.
"I'm getting to that," Kirsty said. "That's the weird part." She punched buttons and the graphic expanded to take in a wider area. "So far the drones have covered most of the southern half of this large land mass.
Take a look at the distribution of the red dots."
The dots formed a grid.
"The distance from dot to dot is uniform, almost exactly two hundred miles," Kirsty said. "As you can see by the color, each dot represents ahighly concentrated mass of metal. Each one seems to be identical."
"Emanations? Electrical? Other?"
"None that we can detect," Kirsty said.
"How thick is the ice covering?"
"It varies, but there's at least two hundred feet of ice over the shallowest of the masses."
"Any doubt in your mind, Lieutenant Girard, that we've encountered the work of intelligent beings?"