“What are you talking about?” she asked.
I started packing the reader back into the cylinder. “I’m talking about complete economic panic, that’s what. When news of this gets out, every research project in the Solar System is going to come to a screeching halt. No point in re-inventing the wheel, after all. Factories won’t know whether what they’re producing will be obsolete next week, so people will dump their stock. Workers will lose their jobs, and—”
“I get the picture.” Gretchen pushed off from the workbench, drifted to the airlock, bounced off toward the deck, and kicked off back to the workbench. Zero-g pacing.
“So what’s it going to be?” I asked.
She glared at me as I wadded up the crinkly foil and stuffed it around the reader again. “It doesn’t have to be a choice between armageddon or the status quo,” she said.
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But I’m not sure enough about that to risk it.” I shoved the last of the foil inside, then picked up the end cap and screwed it back on. “Besides,” I said, “I kind of like the status quo. I like being an ice miner, sending water into the inner system for the colonies. I like knowing there are colonies, and that we’ve got a frontier again. I’d kind of like to keep that going for a while.”
“So you’re going to drop this into Saturn and just go back to work?” she asked.
I unstrapped the cylinder from the workbench and held it in my hands again. The entire knowledge of an alien race. Could I throw it all away? Would Gretchen let me if I tried?
There was only one way to find out. I shoved the cylinder past her into the airlock and started putting on my spacesuit. Gretchen watched silently as I slid into the legs and zipped up the chest, then with a sigh she began putting on her own suit.
“Can we at least compromise a little?” she asked.
I hesitated with my helmet over my head. “Like how?”
“Like just put it back into the rings with a coded transponder on it, so we can find it again if we have to. We can each put in half the code, so it’ll take both of us to turn it on, but that way we’ll have an ace in the hole if we need it.”
I didn’t like the idea, but as soon as she proposed it I knew it made sense. The Universe wasn’t necessarily a friendly place. There might come a time when we needed the aliens’ knowledge. The trick would be in knowing when we didn’t.
I wondered if Gretchen would come back and look for it on her own. It probably wouldn’t matter if she did; things drifted in the rings, and by the time she could get back here on her own with a ship to look for it, it could be thousands of kilometers away. Even with radar, she could search for centuries without finding it.
“OK,” I said. “We can compromise.”
So we robbed the transponder from an attitude jet and keyed in eight numbers each, then went outside and found a smaller ice boulder to embed the whole business in. One that would be too small to attract a miner’s attention.
When we were done, I waved toward the hundred-meter mountain where I’d found it and said, “Come on, we’ve still got to finish mounting the attitude jets on that snowball out there.”
Gretchen let out a long sigh. “Right.”
We kicked off, scaring a handful of flutterbies off the surface with our motion. A ring trout had been nosing around the scar I’d left in the ice, but with a flick of a tentacle it bounced away, dodging behind another chunk of ice. I watched it flee, and as I looked out over the surface of Saturn’s rings I wondered how many more time bombs were hidden in their depths. And why here? Why hadn’t the aliens planted their package closer to Earth, where we could have discovered it as soon as we got into space? Then, when we’d been struggling with limited resources and hadn’t yet begun to build settlements in orbit, we’d have been much more vulnerable to the temptation.
Another ring trout swept past overhead, this one almost two meters long. Its single eye swiveled down toward us as it drifted over, and one of its tentacles dipped down, hesitated, then withdrew. Caution had won out over curiosity.
I suddenly shivered as I watched the trout move on, hunting for easier prey. I must have said something, because Gretchen asked, “What?”
“I just realized something,” I answered. “That package wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for them. For the trout. Or their descendants. The aliens weren’t afraid of us at all.”
Gretchen’s laugh was wild, almost maniacal. “They should have been,” she said. “Anybody who’d throw away all the knowledge in the Universe is someone to fear.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking up out of the ring plane into dark space and the stars. “And so are the people who handed it out.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ring trout and the ecosystem they inhabit first appeared in “Big Two-Sided River,” in our February 1989 issue.