“I’m sorry, but the evidence seems to point that way. I don’t like the Probation Laws any more than you do. But people who are assigned that status are capable of easy violence, and for Mr. LaRoque to remove his transmitter is against the law.
“But don’t worry, they’ll work it all out on Earth. LaRoque is sure to get a fair hearing.”
“But… he’s already being unfairly accused!” she blurted. “He’s not a Probationer, and he’s not a murderer! I can prove it!”
“That’s great! Do you have evidence here?”
He frowned suddenly. “But the transmission from Earth said he was a Probationer!”
She bit her lip, looking away from his eyes. “The transmission was a forgery.”
Jacob felt pity for her. Now the supremely confident psychologist was stammering and grasping at farfetched ideas in her shock. It was degrading and he wished he was elsewhere.
“You have proof that the maser message was a lie? Can I see it?”
Martine looked up at him. Suddenly she seemed very unsure, as if wondering whether to say more.
“The… the crew here. Did you actually see the message? That woman… she only read it to us. She and the others hate Pierre…”
Her voice trailed off weakly, as if she knew her argument was thin. After all, Jacob thought, could the Commandant have faked reading from a piece of tape and known for certain that no one would ask to see it? Or, for that matter, would she place LaRoque in a position to sue her for every penny she’d earned in seventy years, just for a grudge?
Or had Martine been about to say something else?
“Why don’t you go down to your quarters and get some rest,” he said gently, “and don’t worry about Mr. LaRoque. They’ll need more evidence than they have now to convict him of a murder in a court on Earth.”
Martine let him lead her into the elevator. There, Jacob looked back. DeSilva was busy with her crew, Kepler had been taken below. Culla stood morosely near Fagin, the two of them towering over everyone else in the chamber, under the great yellow disc of the Sun.
He wondered, as the door closed, whether this was really a good way to begin a journey.
PART V
Life is an extension of the physical world. Biological systems have unique properties, but they nevertheless must obey the constraints imposed by the physical and chemical properties of the environment and of the organisms themselves… evolution solutions to biological problems are… influenced by the physico-chemical environment.
14. THE DEEPEST OCEAN
Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born — before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy — old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.
They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.
In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space — a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge!
Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.
Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. Heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.
The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.”
Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.
“Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.”
“And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’ ” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one…”
“No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.
’Here!” She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.”
“And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?”
Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!”
Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.
That era came to an end with Contact. But soon a new type of Sunship was born.
Jacob thought about Tina Merchant He wondered if the great lady would have been proud, or merely bemused, to stand on the deck of a Sunship and cruise calmly through the worst tempests of this irascible star. She might have said “Of course I” But how could she have known that an alien science would have to be added to her own for men to ride those storms?
To Jacob the mixture didn’t inspire confidence.
He knew, of course that a couple of dozen successful descents had been made in this ship. There was no reason to think that this trip would be dangerous.
Except that another ship, the scaled-down replica of this one, had mysteriously failed just three days before.
Jeff’s ship was probably now a drifting cloud of dissolving cermet fragments and ionized gases, scattered through millions of cubic miles in the solar maelstrom. Jacob tried to imagine the storms of the chromosphere the way the chimp scientist saw them in the last instant of his life, unprotected by the space-time fields.
He closed his eyes and rubbed them gently. He had been staring at the Sun, blinking too seldom.
From his point of view, on one of the observation couches flush with the deck, he could see almost an entire hemisphere of the Sun. Half of the sky was filled by a feathery, slowly shifting ball of soft reds and blacks and whites. In hydrogen light, everything glowed in shades of crimson; the faint, delicate arch of a prominence, standing out against space at the star’s rim; the dark, twisting bands of filaments; and the sunken, blackish sunspots with their umbral depths and penumbral flows.
The topography of the Sun had almost infinite variety and texture. From flickers too fast to follow with the eye, to slow majestic turnings, all he could see was in motion.
Although the major features changed little from one hour to the next, Jacob could now make out countless lesser movements. The quickest were the pulsations of forests of tall slender “spicules” around the edges of great mottled cells. The pulses took place within seconds. Each spicule, he knew, covered thousands of square miles.