“Of course not, Chile. But you wouldn’t have minded making me uncomfortable, with a real order on file.”
“And you’re still in my way,” Ling cut in impatiently. ZH50 crossed to the data console in a single floating step, uncovered its input jack, and inserted the plug now extending from the heel of his right hand. The woman controlled herself; his metal was still cold enough to feel from a few centimeters away, but at least the frost was gone. She aimed her annoyance more appropriately.
“Why all this rush for a new picture? Did you finally find something which isn’t too radiation-saturated to date?” She disapproved basically of sarcasm, but had more control over aim than fire power. Ling knew her well enough to ignore the second question.
“We caught another glimpse of Chile’s ghost.”
“We?”
“We. The lovebirds saw it too, so I’m not floating.”
“Did Chile?”
“Not this time, Sheila,” the robot answered for himself. “I was with Luis and Chispa near the Banjo, at Square Fifty-four. Robert and the Eiras were at Ninety-one.” The woman frowned.
“Then why the hurry to get Chile inside?” she asked. “He could have been here long before you, if you started at the same time from those areas. “
“I didn’t think of him until I was nearly back. Then I had an idea, and needed him to check it. Luis and Chispa found two more of those blocks a while ago. The Eiras and I heard them; you probably weren’t listening. Of course Chile hadn’t filed them with Dumbo yet.”
“I was listening. And your idea needs all their positions.”
“Right.” If Ling noticed the remaining sarcasm he ignored it. “Look. Whether we want to believe it or not, those cubes are artificial. Shape may be an intrinsic property of a natural crystal, but size isn’t. Even if they were life forms, they wouldn’t all match dimensions to four figures. It occurred to me that they might be sensors-detectors of some sort.”
“It occurred to Chispa days ago. You didn’t want to believe then that anyone else beat us to Miranda.”
“I know. I still don’t. There’s no way a group from Earth could have set up this expensive a trip in secret, and I can’t make myself believe the other explanation. We’ve been hoping for ETI too long. But I thought of a way of checking.” He smiled, with a distant look on his face as though he were contemplating the approach of Fame.
“And?”
“The things radiate-broadcast-infrared patterns, nonthermal ones, at unpredictable times.”
“I know.”
“Well, we’ve mapped way beyond the local horizon. If that IR output is being coordinated, there must be a central unit they can all reach. You could have Dumbo mark any points on the map which are in eyeball touch with all the cube positions at once. If we’re lucky, there’ll only be a few. If we’re very lucky-”
The woman was already keying at Dumbo, the central data unit.
“And if there aren’t any?” she asked dryly.
“Well, it won’t prove I’m wrong. It’ll just mean…” His voice trailed off as the display popped into view, and a grin split his freckled face. Sheila rolled her eyes zenithward; it would happen to Ling. As though he weren’t bubbly enough already.
Chile accompanied them, naturally. The display had indicated a projecting spur at the top of a cliff which Chispa Jengibre had called El Barco, from the shadow pattern the sun was casting along its face when she first saw it. It was in block ninety-two, a little over twenty kilometers from the Dibrofiad. The location was understandable enough by hindsight; there would be splendid line-of-sight coverage from there. However, a one-hundred-fifty meter fall on Miranda would be dangerous for a human being; even if no limbs were broken, damage to the armor needed against the airless heat sink and Uranian radiation was nearly certain. While Dibrofiad’s crew had gotten fairly used to two-plus percent normal gravity, this hadn’t made anyone a good walker; it was doubtful that anything ever would.
Chile, therefore, viewed a human trip to the cliff as a parent would his one-year-old toddling out on a diving board. The actual visit to the spur must be robot’s work, if it had to be done.
The walkers looked ridiculous, trunks leaning forward like a sprinter about to leave the block, but legs almost straight along the same line. Walking is essentially coordinated falling forward, and Miranda needs every advantage to provide much fall. Thrust came from lower leg muscles bending and straightening ankles to drive toes hooked into surface irregularities, since bending the knees very far made them hit the ground. Bumps and cracks were fortunately numerous, possibly due to the expansion of freezing water, though none of the crew had a clear idea how water could ever have been liquid this far from the sun. The “hikers” carried alpenstocks, but used a free finger more often than the stick to keep faces off the ground. Luis, Chispa’s husband, had remarked that walking could be called body-surfing if Miranda’s water were only melted. His wife insisted that the analogy was too strained, though it was she who had insisted on the robot’s name being spelled to look Spanish after the Gold team had won the throw for right to select the name itself.
Whatever one chose to call it, Sheila was as good at “walking” as Ling; everyone, regardless of specialty, shared the field exploration, which was the most time-consuming crew duty.
Chile would stay ahead of them, since he alone dared to leap. His memory held a detailed surface map for sixty or seventy kilometers around Dibrofiad, so he didn’t have to see his target; he could jump with enough spin control to be sure of landing on his feet; and being built to operate in the sixty Kelvin temperature range, he had no armor to worry about.
The greenish bulk of Uranus hung beyond Stegosaur, the same jagged ridge of carbon-darkened ice it had silhouetted ever since their arrival, changing visibly only in shape as the sun circled above it to produce phase. At the moment it was about eight hours from narrowest crescent, and a slight darkening of the green, showing through the deeper notches of Stego, showed that the fuzzy terminator of the gas giant would be in view shortly.
The party turned to put the planet to their left rear and the sun behind them, and set out. Neither of the other human couples could be seen, but Ling had reached them on the low-frequency sets to report that the Gold team was going out. Bronwen Eira, engineer and captain of Dibrofiad, had acknowledged.
Little was said even by Ling as they went; each person was coming to terms, in his or her own way, with the increasing certainty that they would be the first group to prove the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. It was hard to believe, like the “yes” to a proposal. Sheila, accustomed to the rugged Miranda landscape as she was, found it now showing a strange, dreamlike aspect; Robert scarcely saw it at all through constantly changing visions of the futures the next hour or two might crystallize. His usual free-time occupation of talking his companion into sharing a name had been put aside, not entirely to her relief. Even the Green and Orange teams, the Jengibres and Eiras, though not going along, were having trouble concentrating on their work; all four had thought of dropping it and following the Golds, though none had so far suggested it aloud.
Travel was fast, in spite of its awkwardness. ZH50 spoke occasionally to guide his companions away from the deeper chasms, though one or the other of them would sometimes issue a startled gasp or exclamation when carried by a “step” over a drop deep enough to jar an Earth-trained nervous system but dismissed by the robot as safe. Their startlingly sharp shadows, that of each helmet surrounded by a Brocken halo visible only to its owner, pointed the way. Dibrofiad was quickly out of sight; even had Miranda been smooth, five kilometers would have put the ship below the horizon.
Finally Chile stopped them with a gesture. “We turn left here. A straight path toward the point marked by Dumbo would have brought us to the foot of Barco. Be careful; there is less than a kilometer to go. Be sure to aim no step beyond a spot you can see.”
The speed of the group slowed accordingly, until he stopped them again. “Tripod fashion from now on; use your sticks. No free fall.”
An unusually smooth horizon now faced them. Neither Rob nor Sheila could estimate its distance; none of the numerous wrinkles and shadows on the ground ahead offered any clue to size, and there was no reason to suppose the general surface was horizontal even if they had been able, in the feeble gravity, to be sure of vertical. They knew from the Dumbo display that there was a possibly lethal drop beyond the edge, but this could have been fifty meters away or five hundred.
“Where’s the spur?” Sheila asked.
“There.” Chile pointed. “Its tip has enough downslope to be invisible from where we stand, though if you jump straight up for a few meters you could distinguish
“Thanks, I’m not sure I could go straight up. I’ll take your word. What’s the actual distance?”
“We are just under one hundred fifty meters from the main line of the edge and from the base of the spur. I advise you not to get any closer, but if you want to see me all the way to the end, you will have to. Please go very slowly indeed, and do not pass me under any circumstances.”