The space-borne macroscope entered the null-gravity column, still functioning but splayed and ineffective at the thousand-mile elevation. The vehicle descended against the increasingly strong updraft of nitrogen and oxygen.
Near the surface of Triton the circulation became fierce; dust, debris and snow formed a tornado. The ship came down forwards, the macroscope housing leading, and nudged along on fractional power of the main engine.
At three feet per second relative velocity the ship entered the tunnel at the base of the windy column. The turbulence subsided around it. Buoyed by the escaping atmosphere, that passed with a five-foot clearance around the rim of the housing, the assembly descended, gently accelerating. The flowing gas cushioned it, preventing brutal contact with the walls. At fifteen miles per hour maximum velocity, the ship tunneled through the moon.
In three days it came to rest. The null-G column expired; debris filtered down. A nudge from the hot jets, no longer leashed at minimal power; the metallic restrainers, designed for exactly this failure, dissolved. The tunnel imploded, the action shocking back up its length and burying the ship a thousand miles beneath the surface.
Now the immense field generators came into play elsewhere on Triton. Three new null-G columns developed, spearing out from the advance side like the prongs of the Neptune symbol. The atmosphere, augmented by cubic miles of rock pulverized into dust and voluminous byproduct pollutants, rushed into the breach and shot outward in ten-mile diameter thrusts.
Triton slowed in its orbit, reluctantly, as the three vast motors braked it. Slowly it began to spiral in toward its primary — then gained velocity as its tether shortened.
The mighty gravity of Neptune embraced its minion and hauled it into its gaseous bosom. Great ruptures appeared in the sea-god’s ocean of atmosphere, torn up by the gravity of the spiraling ball. The tiny ice-moonlet Schön disappeared into that melee and did not reappear. Triton had lost its satellite, a moment before it lost its own identity.
Well within Roche’s Limit, that proximity that would have sundered a normally orbiting moon, Triton shuddered but did not break up. Events were far too precipitous to allow tidal force opportunity to take full effect.
Contact: the stormy exterior veil of the gas-giant parted. Ahead of Triton, crystals of ammonia-ice exploded into vapor as the heat of friction boiled the atmosphere. Behind, there appeared a turbulent wake five thousand miles wide, the crystals frothing whitely as they rematerialized in the surging breadth of it.
In five hours the moon had looped the planet at the fringe of its atmosphere and was entirely immersed in hydrogen. At fifteen thousand miles per hour it carved an atmospheric trench and looped again. On the third circuit it touched what had been the surface of water-ice and blasted it into steam. Water and ammonia thrust outward convulsively, throwing mile-long splinters of ice high into the storm, to warm and fragment violently again; sleet and boiling water and methane gas battled in the most violent conflation ever to occur on the surface of the planet.
On the fifth circuit the molten moon touched the solid portion of Neptune. At three thousand miles per hour stone met metal, rolling and melting. Now the wake was of bursting lava and precious heavy elements.
The ball that came to rest at last, embedded within a lake of liquid metal, was six hundred miles in diameter — but intact. Precipitously near its margin, like a worm in an apple, nestled the encapsulated ship.
Yet the action was not over. From that capsule spread two Type III technology fields of force: the first encompassed the moon and planet, now forever fused, extending outward twenty thousand miles, permeating every particle of dust, every molecule of gas, every crushed atom of the core. It anchored every atom in place irrevocably, relative to the whole. The second field permeated the first and began a cataclysmic contraction, taking the entire package with it. It fed upon the energies released by that compression, and continued relentlessly.
Neptune shrank, its turbulence abruptly frozen in place. Atmosphere and all, it diminished as though the viewer were retreating from it at a hundred thousand miles per hour — but there was no viewer. It became the size of Earth, of Luna, of Ceres the asteroid. It dwindled to a single mile’s diameter — but its full mass and that of its moon and its moon’s moon remained. It achieved its gravitational radius.
Then it shrank again, so rapidly it seemed to vanish. In a microsecond it was gone.
Five million miles out, tiny Nereid — Neptune’s second moon — became a planet in its own right, circling the sun in Neptune’s erstwhile orbit. Caught on its backswing, it had insufficient velocity even to retreat from Sol, let alone escape it, and fell instead in toward the orbit of Uranus as though looking for a home.
Man’s physical exploration of the cosmos had begun.
CHAPTER 8
The marshes of Glynn: now they were crossed by highways, infringed upon by the welling city that sent its pseudopods of industrial flesh questing outward in a great half-circle. Brunswick — founded in 1771, now more numerously populated than the entire state of Georgia at the date of this city’s inception. The reputed cotton was gone from this area, and the pecans and the peaches, perhaps encouraged in their departure by the advice of the poet who made this region aesthetically renowned. Instead there were shipbuilding yards, the ships not necessarily of the water, and machine shops, the machines not necessarily the servants of man. The old pulp mills, their forest cellulose depleted, had been replaced by more sophisticated refineries, and the canneries by protein-simulatories. There was more to learn about chemistry in Brunswick than any man could ever know.
“Do you have your fix, Ivo? We’re moving into position above the null-G column and it may get a little breezy.”
“Almost, Harold.”
Yet the marshes remained, protected in part by statute of the Empire State of the South, that the live-oak might retain its ancestral home, and perhaps too the Cherokee rose. From the city he flew, disembodied, all observing, passing through obstacles without flinching, seeming to breathe the freer atmosphere of nature. The dusky English sparrows gave way to the red-winged blackbird; the chimney-swift to the belted kingfisher. The ugly cockroach hid, the lovely dragonfly emerged; the bold house rat yielded to the shy cottontail rabbit; the gray park squirrel faded in the face of the gleaming blacksnake.
“Are you about finished, Ivo? We’re descending toward the excavation.”
“Almost, Afra.”
The marshes: and if there were water moccasins and alligators and snapping turtles, were these not more beautiful and less destructive than the stout tourists, the hapless domesticants? From the watery inlets rose the ancient bald cypress trees, magnificently — some would say grotesquely — swollen at the base, their islands of woody “knees” adjacent. Farther along were a rare American elm, several glossy-leaved handsome magnolias, some small sassafras, large sycamore, medium tulip-tree — and finally the aristocrat of the south, the great live-oak, garlanded with hanging Spanish moss.
He came to a halt beneath it, within its somber cathedral of foliage, responding to the massive permanence of it, the solitude.
“Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven / With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven / Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs—”
“What did you say, Ivo?”
“A poem I know, Beatryx. I’m sorry; I did not mean to repeat it aloud.”
“One by Sidney Lanier? But isn’t that poetry meant to be spoken aloud? Please go on with it.”
Not really surprised, he obliged. “Emerald twilights — Virginal shy lights / wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, / When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades—”