McAndrew had seen it too. He gave a grunt of surprise, cupped his chin in his hands, and leaned forward. After two minutes of silence he reached across to the terminal and keyed in a brief query.
“What are you doing?” I asked, when after another two minutes he showed no sign of speaking.
“Want to see what’s in Merganser’s memory. Should be some images from their time of first approach.” He grunted and shook his head. “Look at that screen. There’s no way Vandell can look like that.”
“I was amazed to see it at visible wavelengths. But I’m not sure why.”
“Available energy.” He shrugged, but his gaze never left the display. “See, Jeanie, the only thing that can provide energy to that planet’s surface is an internal source. But nothing I’ve ever heard of could give this much radiation at those frequencies, and sustain it over a long period. And look at the edge of the planet’s disk. See, it’s less bright. That’s an atmospheric limb darkening, if ever I’ve seen one — an atmosphere, now, on a planet that should be as cold as space. Doesn’t make any sense at all. No sense at all.”
We watched together as Merganser’s data bank fed across to our ship’s computer and through the displays. The screen to our left flickered through a wild pattern of colors, then went totally dark. McAndrew looked at it and swore to himself.
“Explain that to me, Jeanie. There’s the way that Vandell looked in the visible part of the spectrum when Jan and Sven were on their final approach — black as hell, totally invisible. We get here, a couple of days later, and we find that.” He waved his arm at the central display, where Vandell was steadily increasing in size as we moved closer. “Look at the readings that Wicklund made as they came into parking orbit — no visible emissions, no thermal emissions, no sign of an atmosphere. Now see our readings: the planet is visible, above freezing point, and covered in clouds. It’s as though they were describing one world, and we’ve arrived at a completely different one.”
Mac often tells me that I have no imagination. But as he spoke wild ideas went running through my mind that I didn’t care to mention. A planet that changed its appearance when humans approached it; a world that waited patiently for millions of years, then draped a cloak of atmosphere around itself as soon as it had lured a group of people to its surface. Could the changes on Vandell be interpreted as the result of intention, a deliberate and intelligent act on the part of something on the planet?
While I was still full of my furious fancies, a high-pitched whistle from the navigation console announced that the balanced drive had turned off completely. We had reached our rendezvous position, two hundred thousand kilometers from Vandell. I was moving away from the control panel, heading towards our own transfer pod, before the sound had ended. At the entrance I stopped and turned, expecting that McAndrew would be close on my heels. But he hadn’t left the displays. He had called back the list of Vandell’s physical parameters, showing mass, temperature, mean diameter, and rotation rate, and was staring at it blindly. As I watched he requested a new display of Vandell’s rotation rate, which was small enough to be shown as zero in the standard output format.
“Mac!”
He turned, shook his head from side to side as though to banish his own version of the insane ideas that had crowded my mind when I saw the change in Vandell, and slowly followed me to the pod. At the entrance he turned for a last look at the screens.
There was no discussion of our move into the pod. We didn’t know when, or even quite how, but we both knew that we had to make a descent to the surface of Vandell. Somehow we had to recover the bodies that lay beneath the flickering, pearly cloud shrouding the rogue world.
In another time and place, the view from the pod would have been beautiful. We were close enough now to explain the rosy shimmer. It was lightning storms, running back and forth across the clouded skies of Vandell. Lightning storms that shouldn’t be there, on a world that ought to be dead. We had drained Merganser’s data banks as we went round and round in low orbit. Not much new had come to light, but we had found the last set of instrument readings returned to the main computer when the other landing pod had made its approach to Vandell’s surface: Atmospheric pressure, zero. External magnetic field, less than a millionth of a gauss. Temperature, four degrees absolute. Surface gravity, four-tenths of a gee. Planetary rotation rate, too small to measure.
Then their pod had touched down, with final relative velocity of only half a meter a second — and all transmissions had ceased, instantly. Whatever had killed Jan and Sven Wicklund, direct impact with the surface couldn’t be the culprit. They had landed gently. And if they hadn’t been killed by collision when they landed…
I tried to ignore the tiny bud of hope that wanted to open in my mind. I had never heard of a pod being destroyed without also killing anyone inside it.
Our instruments had added a few new (and odd) facts to that earlier picture. The “atmosphere” we were seeing now was mainly dust, a great swirling storm across the whole of Vandell, littered by lightning flashes through the upper part. It was hot, a furnace breath that had no right to exist. Vandell was supposed to be cold. Goddammit, it should be drained of every last calorie of heat. McAndrew had told me so, there was no way the planet could be warm.
Round and round, orbit after orbit; we went on until I felt that we were a fixed center and the whole universe was gyrating around us, while I stared at that black vortex (it came and went from one orbit to the next, now you see it, now you don’t) and McAndrew sat glued to the data displays. I don’t think he looked at Vandell itself for more than ten seconds in five hours. He was thinking.
And me? The pressure inside was growing — tearing me apart. According to Limperis and Wenig, I’m cautious to a fault. Where angels fear to tread, I not only won’t rush in, I don’t want to go near the place. That’s one reason they like to have me around, to exercise my high cowardice quotient. But now I wanted to fire our retro-rockets and get down there, down onto Vandell. Twice I had seated myself at the controls, and fingered the preliminary descent sequence (second nature, I could have done that in my sleep). And twice McAndrew had emerged from his reverie, shook his head, and spoken: “No, Jeanie.”
But the third time he didn’t stop me.
“D’ye know where you’re going to put her down, Jeanie?” was all he said.
“Roughly.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice at all. Too scratchy and husky. “I’ve got the approximate landing position from Merganser’s readings.”
“Not there.” He was shaking his head. “Not quite there. See it, the black tube? Put us down the middle of that funnel — can you do it?”
“I can. But if it’s what it looks like, we’ll get heavy turbulence.”
“Aye, I’ll agree with that.” He shrugged. “That’s where they are, though, for a bet. Can you do it?”
That wasn’t his real question. As he was speaking, I began to slide us in along a smooth descent trajectory. There was nothing to the calculation of our motion, we both recognized that. Given our desired touchdown location, the pod’s computer would have a minimum fuel descent figured in fractions of a second.
I know McAndrew very well. What he was saying — not in words, that wasn’t his style — was simple: It’s going to be dangerous, and I’m not sure how dangerous. Do you want to do it?