Well, it would not be the first time that Hans had been forced to lead from behind. He said, “Savior? Yes, that has a lot to recommend it. We’ll see what Darya Lang thinks.”
He had a good idea of her response, even if they did not. She would remain neutral. Unless it involved the Builders, Darya went along with most things. Unfortunately, that might not include what Hans had in mind as soon as they were on their way.
He stared at the new ship, fully formed and gleaming. He wanted to make sure it contained a few extra features. Apart from that, he would smile and lie low. There would be plenty of time for feuding after they left. And plenty of reason to expect that feuding would occur.
“Councilor Graves was quite specific. Call him if you wish, and confirm his intentions. But I know he said that until this ship touches down on Iceworld, I make the decisions.”
“And I know he never had anything like this in mind.” Ben Blesh was standing behind Hans, who sat at the ship’s controls.
Rebka did not look around. He could hear the anger in the other man’s voice. “Ben, I’m not sure that I understand your objection. We will still arrive at Iceworld in a few days. I’m simply trying to add to the store of information that we will have when we get there.”
“By a pointless diversion to examine a dead planet? I don’t see how that tells us a thing. If I’m wrong, explain to me what I’m missing.”
“I can’t guarantee that you are missing anything. All I know is that the world we are heading for sits smack in the middle of the life zone for a normal main sequence star with mass equal to the one at the center of this system. There’s no life on the surface of the planet at the moment, it’s far too cold. My question is, was life there once? Might there even have been intelligence, before the sun dimmed and every living being was condemned to freeze to death?”
The members of the survival team were emerging as distinct personalities. Lara Quistner might be good at her job, but she was certainly not a controlling type. She would go along with what her boss, and maybe anyone else, suggested. Ben Blesh was not only interested in being that boss, he made snap judgments and didn’t like anyone to disagree with him. Hans Rebka’s announcement that they would visit a different planet first, made when after a full day of powered flight Iceworld was clearly no closer, had provoked loud and instant disagreement from Blesh. Darya Lang had come down on Hans Rebka’s side. Her support was unexpected, but it was no more than reasonable—Hans’s actions had saved her skin often enough to earn her respect.
Behind Rebka, Ben Blesh said, “I’m not going to let this stand. I intend to find out what Julian Graves has to say. He’ll put an end to the nonsense.”
Hans, his attention on the planet growing in size on the display, was inclined to agree. Graves would put an end to it—when he erred, it was on the side of caution. Given any small chance that a visit to another planet would increase the odds of survival on Iceworld, the Ethical Council member would be all for it.
As for Ben Blesh, his disappearance to use the ship’s communications equipment at the very time when a new world was coming into view was, in Hans Rebka’s opinion, one more piece of evidence that he was dealing with a fool. What else could you call a man who was more interested in having his authority confirmed than in increasing his chances of living? And what did that say about the general selection of survival team members? It was a pity that Lara Quistner and the others could not have been dropped off on Teufel for a few weeks during training. One encounter with the Remouleur, Teufel’s terrible dawn wind, would be worth a year of lectures from their “famous"—according to Graves—trainer, Arabella Lund.
The time for philosophical speculations on the training of survival teams was past. Hans concentrated on the planet ahead. It was about fourteen thousand kilometers in diameter, which together with the readings of the mass detectors suggested a world possessing a metallic core beneath rocky outer layers. The substantial magnetic field confirmed that idea. Surface gravity was about fifteen percent more than standard, a bit high but well within the tolerable range. Surface temperature was another matter. There was an atmosphere, and it contained oxygen as well as nitrogen and argon. But the spectra revealed no hint of water vapor or carbon dioxide.
Detailed maps of what lay below that frigid atmosphere would have to wait until they were in a parking orbit. However, the high albedo response to a remote laser probe, together with glints of specular reflection, suggested extensive ice cover—perhaps over the whole planet. If that implied worldwide glaciation, high-resolution radar measurements would be needed to probe its depth and learn what land or former oceans lay beneath.
Those measurements could only be done on the surface, and that in turn implied their journey to Iceworld would be delayed by at least two extra days. Before the group left the Pride of Orion, Hans had suspected something like this might be necessary. With a warm world you could take high-resolution images from orbit. But if a world froze over and you wanted to know what it had been like before the freeze, you had to make measurements down on the ground. Also, Hans himself needed to visit the surface, no matter what the orbital measurements showed. You could never get a gut feel for a world from orbit.
It was useless to try to explain this to the others. He stared at the frosted ball of the planet, enhanced in the ship’s display to gleam faintly with reflected starlight. With luck, maybe Darya and the rest would conclude for themselves the need for a trip all the way down.
The trouble was, the Savior’s instruments were almost too good. They represented the best technology available to the Fourth Alliance, and from an orbital altitude of no more than two hundred kilometers the imaging sensors and radar altimeters left little to the imagination.
“Descend to the surface, to learn what?” Ben Blesh was watching on the display a revealing picture. It showed a succession of hills and valleys, all coated with a layer of blinding white. “It’s obvious what happened down there. The whole globe shows peaks and rifts and flat ocean surfaces, which the synthetic aperture radar confirms. There was no worldwide glaciation—no time for that. It’s clear that when the temperature dropped, all the water vapor and carbon dioxide precipitated out. You’d get one fall of water-snow and solid carbon dioxide. After that nothing would change. The air that remains still has some oxygen as well as nitrogen and argon, so things happened fast. There’s no doubt about the sequence of events. What can we possibly gain by going down to the surface?”
He was asking a question that had occurred to Hans long ago. Before they achieved parking orbit, he had fired off a question to the Pride of Orion. Suppose that the internal energy source of a main sequence star were somehow turned off in a short time span (weeks or months). How long would it take to cool down by normal radiative cooling? I’m looking for an order of magnitude result: are we talking years, centuries, millennia, or millions of years?
The first reply from Julian Graves was disappointing. I have consulted E.C. Tally, who is making his own calculations supplemented by the ship’s astrophysics library. Because the answer to your question depends on several other unknowns, in particular the star’s stage of progression along the main sequence, and the amount of gravitational potential energy contributed by the star’s own shrinkage during cooling, Tally is reluctant to provide a firm answer. He is, however, willing to provide a range of possibilities.