The Pandora Probe
by Jerry Oltion
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
I was anchoring a set of attitude jets to a hundred-meter ring fragment, getting it ready for its long drop into the inner Solar System, when I spotted the artifact. It glistened under the ice like a fish in water, and I thought for a moment it might be a ring trout that had somehow burrowed into the rock-hard surface, but ring trout are gold and this was silver. When I scraped a flat spot in the ice to look through, I saw that this was long and cylindrical, without the tentacles of a ring trout, either.
It was about a meter deep, embedded in remarkably clear ice. Usually the frozen mountains we mine from Saturn’s rings have a milky, bubbly texture from all the fracture lines and voids left over from their accretion, but the area around the artifact was clear as glass. When I shined my spotlight at it I could hardly see the beam; just the silver cylinder resting there, about as big as a person’s thigh.
“Hey Gretchen,” I said. “I found something buried here.”
She was on the opposite side of the snowball, setting more jets, but with our shuttle drifting just a few klicks out to relay radio signals, her voice came through clear. “What sort of something?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a piece of an old booster. It looks like it melted its way in.”
“Gonna dig it out?”
My air gauge, a big rectangular patch on my suit’s left forearm with glowing centimeter-high red numbers, said I had two hours of oxygen, enough to tunnel down to whatever it was in the ice and still have plenty to finish wiring the jets.
“Yeah, what the hell,” I said. “Could be worth something; who knows?” If it was part of one of the early probes, maybe we could sell it to a museum back home.
“Need a hand?”
“No, go ahead and finish your side. This shouldn’t take long.”
“All right.”
I had already set foot- and handholds in the ice so I could anchor the attitude jets; I made sure I had a good grip, then pressed the tip of my hand drill against the surface and pulled the trigger. Ice chips and steam blew outward as the vibrating tip and the hydrogen flame both ate into the surface. I leaned into it.
A drill isn’t the best excavation tool, but a ring miner learns to make do with what’s available. I sank a couple dozen holes all around the buried cylinder, then chipped between them with my axe, flaking off big chunks with each swing. It was hot, sweaty work, and I had to pause a couple of times to let my helmet unfog.
The fresh ice chips attracted a flock of periscope herons. They anchored themselves to the surface with their claws a few meters over my head and reached out with their filter-scoop mouths, sweeping them back and forth through the debris. It wasn’t so much the ice as the impurities in it they were after: minerals and stray organics from the nightoplankton and flutterbies, and other creatures that lived in the rings. I ignored them and kept digging. We hadn’t yet found anything to worry about among the local fauna.
Eventually I got down to metal. I chipped more carefully, glad the cylinder was lying sideways, and eventually pried it free. It was about as long as my space-suited arm, and twice as thick. It felt massive, definitely not empty. I worried for a second that it might be an unfired booster, its propellant unstable and ready to explode the moment I jarred it, but a quick look at both ends quieted my fears. Neither one had a nozzle.
The surface wasn’t smooth anyway, like a booster’s would be. It was covered with fine lines and little knobs and protrusions, some capped with glassy—lenses? It looked like some sort of instrument package. It could have been the core of an old exploration satellite, I supposed, with the antennas and solar array sheared off in its flight through the ring, but with the bumps and squiggly lines etched in the surface it didn’t look like any kind of satellite I’d ever heard of. As I drifted there in Saturn’s cold light, the ring a dusty halo around me, I knew it had to be, though. Just not one of ours.
Gretchen’s voice startled me. “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden, Jack. You OK?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “I got it out.”
“So what is it?”
“I think it’s a piece of an alien spacecraft.”
We met back at the shuttle. Gretchen was floating outside the airlock when I got there, gently shooing away a flock of flutterbies that had gathered on the ship, attracted by the heat. She had a little cloud of them around her, dancing about on their biological rockets and bouncing off one another like visible molecules in Brownian motion, their solar-collector parasails glittering in the sunlight. “This had better be good,” she said. “We’re supposed to have the jets in place by the end of our shift.”
I handed her the cylinder. She looked at it for a minute or so, silently, and when she did finally speak it was just one word: “Oh.”
There was no one thing about it that said “alien,” but all the same, nobody could look at it and come up with a different conclusion. It was like African art or baroque music to a North American; even if you’ve never seen or heard it before, you know on first exposure that it’s foreign. This was just a cylinder with bumps and lenses on it, but even so it had a definite alienness about it.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Should we take it inside?”
“The ice’ll melt. Might damage something.”
“Good point. We can melt it out here. In vacuum the water will boil away even if we warm it just a few degrees above freezing.”
So we strapped it to the hull where it would get a little thermal conduction going and we both aimed our spotlights at it. They’re a thousand watts each at full power; it didn’t take long before the ice began to bubble. Within a few minutes, the cylinder was dry.
Gretchen leaned close and squinted against the glare. “Doesn’t look like anything got inside,” she said. “It’s not outgassing.” She poked at one end with her glove. “There are threads here. It’s meant to be screwed off.”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to be opening up some sort of alien Pandora’s box, but I supposed somebody would have to do it and it might as well be us. If there was anything to be learned from it, we might as well get in on it right from the start.
And if it blew up in our faces, well, better it happened out here in the ring than back at the station.
We unstrapped the cylinder and took it inside. I giggled once, and Gretchen said, “What?”
“It feels so strange. Just carrying this thing in like a bag lull of tools. I feel like we should be more… reverent or something.”
“Like this?” Gretchen tucked her feet into footholds just inside the airlock and bowed up and down with her hands outstretched, saying, “Ooga booga wooga…”
I laughed and let the artifact drift free while we took off our pressure suits, then I reached out and held it for the first time with my bare hands. It was still cold.
The lenses—if that’s what they were—glittered like windows spaced evenly around the cylinder, six of them in the middle and one on either end. I wondered for a moment if they might be windows, and if I was holding an entire interstellar spaceship in my hands, but the screw cap on the end made me doubt that. It looked more like a mailing tube than a starship.
Gretchen pulled herself up close and looked it over, too. “Those bumps look like latch points,” she said, pointing to the dozen or so mushroom-shaped knobs dotting the surface.
When I’d first seen it, I’d thought its antennas and solar panels might have been sheared off, but now that Gretchen pointed it out I could see they had been jettisoned, if there had ever been any in the first place. Something had been attached to those knobs, anyway, and later released.