Jan hated having to be worried about crime tonight. There was more than enough to make her worry, happening hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Rooted in a mild and fertile soil on its adopted world, the greenling flourished.
Warm and cold airs collided in the sky above. They wrestled with each other, oozing lightning and thunder. The greenling slept through it all.
Racial memory woven through the greenling’s genes made it stay motionless, hiding its active attributes, whenever the human who shared its home-ground came near. On the night of the weather’s tumult, when the human handled its twig, Memory stilled the greenling’s reaction and kept the sensation from intruding on its sleep. Memory deemed the greenling’s sleep—or rather, the dreaming that then unfolded—vital to its development, not to be interrupted by anything less than peril.
Like a taproot, the greenling’s mind was drawn to what lay below the deep dark ground of sleep, a reservoir of lucid dreaming. It dreamed about a once and future war across half a galaxy of stars.
Peter Reiten, the planetologist from the University of Texas, bounced into Jan’s office at the Planetary Science Institute as soon as she had the door open. His shock of dark hair looked even more aroused and uncombable than usual. “Got everybody?”
Jan showed him the screen on her workstation. The blank left half of the screen awaited the reacquired signal from Cocytus. The top right quarter of the screen showed the Main Mission Control Center in Baltimore, while Professors Murray Franklin and Mandeep Singh at the University of Arizona gazed expectantly from the bottom right quarter. “All but the bug.”
Ed Huang, the Program Manager in Baltimore, settled into his chair. “Hiya, Janko. Ready to roll?”
Situated with stack of papers and disks at his side and his laptop computer open, Peter nodded. Jan gave the little CCD camera on top of her workstation a firm, level gaze. “Ready at PSI.”
Peter asked in a whisper, “Why did he call you ‘Janko’?”
“It’s a short cut around a long last name.”
“Cool.”
In a tiny window on the blank side of the screen, the clock ticked toward 7:13. Jan’s office lacked windows. She thought she heard a dim muttering of thunder from outside of the building. Local weather wouldn’t interfere with the signal from Cocytus: relayed through the Deep Space Network, the signal would fly to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and be distributed to Main Control and the Science Sites via the Internet. Thanks to the uninterrupt-able power supply—UPS—not even a local power outage would break the skein of communications. Contact with Cocytus depended only on the orbital alignment of Earth and Moon, which cut off the signal some of the time. Reacquisition hadn’t failed yet. But it always felt iffy.
7:13:03.“Clock accurate?” Peter whispered to Jan.
“I synchronize it with the Naval Observatory when I log on.”
Ed said gravely, “Let’s hope DSN has a signal to relay.”
Murray and Mandeep waited on their corner of the screen with concerned faces.
There’d been difficulty in receiving the transmissions from Sojourner on Mars in 1997, Jan reminded herself. And it hadn’t jeopardized that outstandingly successful mission.
Suddenly the picture from Cocytus wavered in. The M & M’s grinned and Peter let out a sigh of relief.
The picture wobbled and bounced. That meant Cocytus was in motion, receiving the signal from Control and proceeding deeper into Cold Trap Alpha. Jan let out her own breath.
The bobbing image showed ancient alien terrain, rumpled and deeply shadowed. Jan irrationally expected to see a wide white sheen, a frozen lake, in the distance ahead. That was not what they could reasonably expect to find: more like water ice invisibly mixed into dust and grit. Cocytus carried a microsampling instrument and the new Evolved Gas Analyzing Device. The EGAD had not detected water molecules in the tiny samples of lunar soil taken in the traverse so far.
The only good reason to hope for ice was an old radar signal.
Five years ago, the Clementine space probe had found something that reflected radar signals in a way explainable as small ice patches near the south pole of the Moon. Ice might have come from a comet, a cosmic snowball that collided with the Moon, an unknown time ago. The shadowed, frigid environment at the bottom of Aitken Crater might preserve cometary ice in that event. Still, there’d been no incontrovertible proof of it. Confirmation of Clementine’s discovery had had to wait. Until Cocytus. Until tonight. Suspense did a tap dance on Jan’s nerves.
The picture humped up toward the black lunar sky and stars. The picture dropped back toward the Moon surface and a pool of shadow blacker than before.
Mandeep said, “We need the light.”
“Remember, it drains the batteries,” said Ed Huang.
“But tends to keep the bug’s instruments warm,” said Jan. “And that shadow has to be cold as sin.”
Three seconds later, the time it took for a command to reach the Moon, Cocytus’s headlight laid a bright patch of illumination on the terrain, changing inky shadow to ashy dust, grit, and rocks, including, at the edge of the patch, a lumpy but remarkably round rock.
Something clicked in Jan’s mind. “Send it to that round rock,” she told Ed. “I bet there’s paydirt there.”
Cocytus altered its course as directed by Main Control. The calibration scale, yellow lines on the picture, indicated the round rock to be softballsized. Peter, who’d been clicking away on his laptop, paused. “Unless it’s an artifact of the halogen headlight, that’s a funny color for Moon rock. It’s greenish.”
Jan had her own feeling of significance about the rock, even though the soil around it appeared no different from anywhere else in tonight’s traverse. “It’s shallowly embedded,” she said. “We could roll it out of the way and look under it for water.”
“That’s not in the plan,” Ed pointed out. “Can I get a consensus on the suggested activity?”
“I’d like a better looksee,” said Peter.
The M & M’s conferred with each other, then nodded.
Ed’s people had the robot place one wheel against the side of the rock and ambulate forward. The rock rolled away readily in the light gravity. The robot’s microsampler needled the surface beneath.
Jan eagerly waited for the robot’s EGAD to send her results. When the data came, she grabbed it with her interpretive programs.
“I wish the budget cutters hadn’t taken out our rock chipper,” said Peter wistfully. “A piece of that rock might have been a consolation prize if there’s no water ice.”
A few minutes later, Jan slumped in dejection. “No H,0 in this particular ground. Sorry, guys.”
“Earlier, when the robot climbed first up then down, it seems that it entered a secondary or tertiary impact crater,” said Mandeep, who had evidently been making good use of his own time. “That impact would have volatilized any water there.”
“Let’s get a move on,” said Ed. “It hates stopping in the cold.” They’d already had repeated problems with the lubricant in the robot’s joints setting up.
The picture didn’t waver, wobble, or move.
“Uh-oh,” said Peter.
“We’ve seized up,” Ed said, his soft voice unchanged even with bad news. “Either from the cold or the motion involved in moving the rock, putting an asymmetrical stress on the drive train. We’ll try calisthenics to loosen the lubricant. That worked before…”
The picture soon began jerking back and forth.
“Turn off the light to save the battery,” said Murray, his voice harsh with frustration. Three seconds later, the screen went black.
“Now’s a good time for a break,” Jan told Peter and the M & M’s. She stayed calm on the outside. Inside, she asked herself furiously, Any more bright unscientific ideas???