—Adam11
Chapter 49
JAKE, SAMANTHA, AND Tony rode the lander down through clear skies, tracking the transmission from the radio Jake had left with the wreckage. They were at about a thousand meters when Samantha caught her breath. “Look!” she said.
Jake looked, but saw only the opaque, snow-covered landscape.
“No question,” said Tony. “They have to be artificial. No way that could happen naturally.”
They were talking about the symmetries. They were hard to make out in the darkness, but they were there, surface features that were almost but not quite polygons, ovoids, cones, and cubes. A thousand assorted shapes. Lost in the blowing snow, they were easy to miss. Literally buried in snow. But they were there, arranged in grids and circles and abstract dispositions that might have been chaotic yet nevertheless suggested a kind of order.
Mountains might have been oddly shaped bubbles. A canyon cut through snowfields like a lightning bolt. Then it all went away, and they were over an area in which nothing unusual could be distinguished. “They’re incredible,” said Samantha. “Seeing them like this is a little different from just looking at the record—” She took a deep breath. “That settles it for me. Somebody’s been here. Or still is.”
There was more. Directly ahead, they could make out a cluster of parabolic hills.
* * *
“WHERE DO YOU plan to put the base?” asked Jake.
“Originally,” Samantha said, “I thought locating it near the downed lander would be as good a spot as any.”
“But—?”
“It probably wouldn’t hurt to set it up near one of those grids.” She took a deep breath. “Jake, you know what we’re dealing with here, right?”
That took him by surprise. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Whenever you referred to the presence, you always used plural pronouns. As if it were a species of some sort.”
“What else could it be, Samantha?”
“I think we’re about to give new meaning to the term living world.”
Jake grunted. “That’s crazy. You’re saying the planet’s alive?”
“Not exactly. I doubt that’s possible. But I think there’s something alive in the atmosphere. More or less the atmosphere itself, maybe. It takes a lot of air to support a falling lander. If we were looking at an ordinary world, with sunlight and oceans, I doubt I’d even consider the possibility. But out here—” She shook her head.
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Jake, we’re just beginning to look around outside the solar system. Before we’re finished, I’d be surprised if we don’t discover that a lot of what used to be basic dogma is really pretty narrow. So yes, let’s recover Otto first. Then we try to send a message to the occupant any way we can. Meantime, we can talk about where to locate the base.”
“What do you think the grids are?”
“An art form. It’s hard to see what else they could be.” Jake couldn’t hide his skepticism. “Look,” she continued, “if there is something here, it’s been here a long time. What else would it have to do other than carve designs?”
“Using what?”
“The wind. Snow, dust—”
* * *
THE NIGHT WAS absolutely still.
Jake followed the signals, a steady beep-beep-beep, through the darkness. They were at about three hundred meters when Samantha tapped on her display. “There it is.”
“Okay,” said Jake. “So what’s the plan?”
“Let’s see if we can find that missing wing. The scanners can penetrate a couple of hundred feet of snow and ice. So even if it’s buried, we should be able to see it.”
“Why do we care?”
“I don’t want any loose ends.”
“All right,” said Jake. Waste of time, though. He activated the scanners, turned on the searchlights, dropped lower, and began to circle the area. They saw nothing they hadn’t seen before.
“All right,” Samantha said finally, “let’s go pick up Otto.”
* * *
JAKE STILL DIDN’T like the landing area, but it was all they had. He bounced down and rolled toward the rocks. His passengers were clinging to their seats, and he heard a few gasps. But they stopped where they needed to, and he tried to act as if it were routine. “Thank God,” said Denise.
“Actually,” said Jake, “I’m getting better with practice. That’s the best one I’ve done.”
“Glad I wasn’t here for any of the others,” said Tony.
He turned the spacecraft around and assured them that the departure would be less exciting.
They pulled on air tanks and activated their Flickinger units. Jake liked the slight tingle that always accompanied the process. It reminded him that this was what he lived for. The sensation was a built-in characteristic of the field to alert the user that it had turned on. Jake recalled the story of Alan Jarvais, who would probably be featured in every pilot-training program for years to come. Jarvais had not been aware of a defect in his unit. When he pressed the activator, the field had not formed. He hadn’t noticed and went into an air lock and started to depressurize. When he discovered that breathing was becoming a problem, he could have reversed the process, but he apparently hadn’t known how, or he had simply panicked. In any case, it was exit Jarvais.
He trained the spotlights at the top of what he had come to think of as Vincenti Hill, and the lander came into view. “We’ll leave them on for now,” he said, “and shut them down when we’re coming back, so they don’t blind everybody. It’ll be slippery out there, so be careful.”
The air lock opened, and Jake stepped down onto the ice. The others followed, and they pulled the pallet out of storage. Tony insisted on carrying it.
Samantha wore a blue jumpsuit. She was rotating her shoulders. “I see what you mean about the gravity,” she said.
Mary’s voice broke in from the Venture: “Be careful, guys.”
“We will,” said Samantha.
Jake switched on a wrist light and took the lead. The darkness was oppressive. Midnight World. Priscilla had it right. “This way,” he said, starting the uphill trek. A mild breeze sprang up behind them and pushed him gently, as if urging him forward.
* * *
THE LANDER GLOWED in the spotlights. Samantha circled it, looking for damage. She didn’t find much they didn’t already know about. Then she opened the hatch and, followed by Tony, went inside. Jake heard Tony react when he saw Otto. Jake preferred the wind to the grisly interior, so he waited where he was.
Lights moved around inside. After a few minutes, Samantha came back out. She stood looking at the lander, then lifted her eyes to the sky.
Jake went in. He and Tony picked up the body and carried it out. Tony lost his footing coming through the air lock, staggered against the hull, and almost went down. Samantha, fortunately, grabbed his shoulder and steadied him. “Careful,” she said.
They laid the body on the pallet.
“Pity,” said Samantha. “He was a likable kid. With a bright future. Now all he gets is his name on a wall.”
Jake’s footprints from the earlier mission were still visible. “Doesn’t snow much here, does it?” said Samantha.
“I guess not. At least not in this area.”
“What’s really odd,” said Denise, “is that, if nothing else, the wind would have filled them in. We’ve got some wind now, and it’s moving the snow around. Does it only blow when somebody’s here?”