Jake began decompression. “I’d say so, yes?”
“Can you get out of there?”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
* * *
“TRAPPED IN AN air lock,” said Tony as Jake came through the hatch. “Never heard of that happening to anyone before.” The comment created a painful echo.
“Okay,” said Samantha, “we have to get a sense of where we are. The snow is above every window in the place. Let’s hope it was just a storm and not some sort of avalanche.”
“Couldn’t very well be an avalanche,” said Brandon. “We’re on flat ground.”
“We need a shovel,” Jake said.
Brandon shook his head. “We don’t have one.”
“Sure we do.” Jake picked up a couple of the lids that had come with the plastic containers. “We’ll go into the air lock, open the hatch as much as we can, and start dragging the snow inside until we clear some space. But there’s only room for one person.” He glanced over at Brandon. “Can we decompress the entire cubicle so we can open both hatches together? That would make it a lot easier.”
“We can do that,” he said.
“Okay.” Samantha sounded exasperated. “Let’s get to it.”
* * *
THEY TOOK TURNS digging with the lids, dumped the snow into the containers, and hauled it to one of the showers. Eventually they got outside the cubicle, but they were still buried. When finally they broke through and saw stars again, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” Mary said.
But it was Samantha, climbing out of the hole and in the effort pulling more snow in on top of them, who stopped dead when she got clear. “I don’t believe this,” she said. Her voice shook.
They were standing on a mound of snow that covered the four cubicles but nothing else. The ground beyond it was as bare as it had been when they’d arrived. The grid was still clear. The lander, parked only meters away, showed only a light dusting of snow.
“What the hell’s going on?” said Brandon.
Somebody was breathing hard.
“Not possible,” said Mary.
Jake slid down and went over to look at the lander. “Is it okay?” asked Brandon. “Any damage?”
“No,” Jake said. “At least nothing I can see.”
Tony was looking up at the sky. It was clear. No clouds. No sign of a storm. “Somebody doesn’t like us,” he said.
Mary climbed down off the mound. “You were right, Samantha. There really is some sort of global force here.”
“You wanted to find a way to communicate,” Jake said. “I think we did.”
“What do we do now?” asked Mary.
Samantha delivered a sad smile. “Anybody here who didn’t get the message?”
EVEN IF ONE excludes the monument, Iapetus easily qualifies as the strangest moon in the solar system. One side of it is dark, the other light. It has a crunched appearance, as if something had squeezed it. It is the only one of Saturn’s satellites that, because of its distance and the angle of its orbit, actually provides a decent view of the rings. But these elements shrink in contrast to its oddest feature: a ridge rising from the equator that almost completely circles the moon. It’s fourteen hundred kilometers long and twenty wide. At its highest, it reaches an altitude of eleven and a half kilometers, making it the tallest mountain range in the solar system.
Even stranger, three parallel ridges run beside it.
“How did that happen?” asked Devlin.
“It’s a bit much for me,” Priscilla said. She brought the explanation up on the display, but it was complicated, connected with a more rapid rotation millions of years ago.
Devlin looked at it and shook his head. “Incredible.”
As they drew closer, McGruder came onto the bridge and took the right-hand seat. He wore a pullover and shorts, dressed for a day on the boardwalk. “You know, Priscilla,” he said, “if I had my life to live over, I think I’d apply for pilot training. For interstellars.”
“As opposed,” she said, “to being president of the NAU?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I think so. In fact, to start with, I’m not sure any sane person would want to be president. I understand what you’re saying. But the truth is I’d rather have your job. You run around, you get to see places like this, and you go where no one’s ever been before.” He sat for a few seconds, simply breathing. “I envy you,” he said.
She thought of herself primarily as a staff assistant who checked maintenance records and conducted guided tours, but she let it go. Maybe she should stop feeling sorry for herself. If nothing else, she was on the Wheel, and she was getting some flight opportunities. “You know,” she said, “you may be right, Governor.”
He looked out at the approaching moon. At the dark-tinted surface. It would have been easy to conclude that the sunlight was being blocked by a black cloud. Except, of course, there was no cloud. “You know where it is?” he asked.
“You mean the monument?”
“Yes.”
“It’s in a flat plain near the Persechetti Crater.”
“The Persechetti Crater?”
“It’s named for the person who did the bulk of the theoretical work about the moon. She more or less locked down why it has the two color tones and why it has an angled orbit.”
“You’re pretty knowledgeable, Priscilla.”
She smiled. “Actually, I’ve been reading about it all morning.”
“And you’re honest, besides. May I suggest you not seek a career in politics.”
* * *
DEVLIN AND THE Secret Service guys had worn Flickinger units before. (That, obviously, was why Cornelius and Michael had gotten the assignment.) Priscilla ran over the basics with Vesta and McGruder. When she was satisfied they wouldn’t kill themselves, they got into the lander and waited for the optimum launch time. Vesta appeared uncomfortable. She denied having a problem but finally admitted that the lander seemed very small. “Is it really reliable?” she asked.
“It’s fine, Vesta,” said Priscilla. “We never have problems with landers.”
The campaign manager looked skeptical. Pale. “Wasn’t that the problem at Teegarden?” she asked. “Their lander wouldn’t start?”
Priscilla managed a smile. “Well, almost never. But we’re close to home, just in case.”
“It’s all right,” said the governor. “We wouldn’t be doing this if there were any danger. But, if you want, Vesta, you can stay with the ship.”
“No.” She was pulling herself together. “I wouldn’t want to miss this. Anyhow, if something happens to you, the rest of us better not even think about going home.”
Devlin climbed back outside the vehicle and began taking shots of the lander and of Priscilla at the controls and of the governor seated beside her. As launch time approached, he got back in, and she started to depressurize the cargo bay.
When the process was complete, the launch doors opened, and the lander slipped out into the night. Vesta breathed a long ohhhhh, then held her breath as Priscilla took them down.
* * *
IAPETUS LIVES IN perpetual twilight. The distant sun is little more than an extremely bright star. The moon is riddled with crags and mountains and impact craters. Pole to pole, the terrain is rugged. There’s not much flat ground anywhere, but whoever created the monument found some by the Persechetti Crater. The monument is set in the exact center of a plain bordered by clusters of broken ridges. Nearby, Priscilla could see one of the landers from the Steinitz expedition, a century and a half earlier.
It lay about two hundred meters from the monument. It was a gray, clumsy vehicle. An old US flag imprint was still visible near an open cargo door. She circled the area once, descending slowly, and finally touched down. “Okay,” she said. “Get your air tanks and activate your suit. Let me know when you’re ready, and we’ll depressurize the cabin.”