“Look at ten o’clock. That’s one of your geodes!” Peter hissed. “I’m marking its location. Why are green geodes scattered around in Aitken crater on the Moon, and in some crater lake in Canada?”
Jan shrugged. Fixated on Cocytus, she found it entirely academic that green geodes should occur in craters both on the Moon and in Canada.
Peter muttered something about organizing a diving trip. “What lake was it?”
“Reindeer Lake. Some geodes lying at the very bottom was what Mike said he found. In the dim cold deep,” Jan replied, probably sounding as distracted as she felt.
“I can’t imagine a meteor impact creating rocks like that.” Peter had decided to worry the geode mystery like a dog with a leather bone. “Tektites yes. Geodes no. If they were embedded in a soft meteor that burned up around them—yeah, maybe—but no known meteorites are like that.”
“We’ve got to get the ice,” Jan said. “That way, there’ll be a base established at Aitken. And then you can have somebody in a space suit hunt rocks for you.”
The bug’s field of view dipped into a chiaroscuro of black and bright spaces. “Ah,” said Mandeep. “We’ve happened into a very fresh crater here in the lip of Aitken. The far side of it is lit by sunlight.”
The camera’s field of view was too narrow for Jan to have guessed that much about the bug’s whereabouts. Annoyed at how little the picture told her, she abruptly summoned a computer-generated sketch of the rover in relation to the Moonscape, displayed in a window of her workstation.
Peter murmured, “If the bug can climb to the main crater rim, it’ll catch some of those rays.”
“It’s in a very fresh secondary crater,” said Mandeep. “And look at the streaking. A good deal of material has been flung about. I’m seeing fractured rocks, too, and other signs of violently ejected debris.”
The real-time animation in the window showed Cocytus in sketchy, car-toonlike form. It emerged from the crater with one last exertion of its drive train, scrabbling and flexing in the middle, like a silverfish crawling out a sink drain.
Sunlit Moonscape flooded the image of the lunar highlands ahead of Cocytus. The stars above the plain vanished, eclipsed by reflected sunlight. Jan tried raising the core drill. Reluctant, it went, higher, intercepting more of the steeply slanting solar radiation. The animated picture made it look like a formidable stinger on an outlandish insect.
Peter said, “Let’s reorient the bug so it catches even more rays, then—”
Without warning, the image flipped. It rotated through at least a full circle, blurred and indecipherable with a brief blaze of sun and a green flash.
“Not like that!” Peter gasped.
“We didn’t do that!’’ Ed retorted, his face aghast.
The screen went blank.
“Loss of signal?” Ed sounded incredulous. Behind him, Main Control became a buzzing hive of activity.
Jan felt a sense of composure wrap itself around her. She always reacted to a crisis this way: with detachment and crystal-clear thinking, emotionality reserved for later. “Did we get hit by a meteorite?” she asked Mandeep. “You said we just traversed a fresh impact crater. Are we in a meteorite shower?”
Mandeep paradoxically nodded but said, “No, the new crater’s not that fresh. It wasn’t made minutes ago, or light-weight debris would still be falling out of the sky.”
They reviewed the final inexplicable imagery, in slow motion. It told them nothing except that the bug had been spun off its feet and landed on its back. At the end came a weird green blur in the field of view, probably an artifact of a damaged, failing camera.
Peter muttered “Almost looked like a bush in that last frame. Can’t be a bush. But darned it if didn’t look like—”
A tap on Jan’s part-opened office door interrupted Peter’s argument with his common sense. Charlie Tangley peered in. “How’s it going?”
“Pretty damn bad,” Jan grated.
“Oh. Sorry to bring more bad news, but we’re getting a lot of rain, and the news radio says there’s street flooding all over the city. If we don’t go home soon, we’ll be stranded here.”
“I’m staying at the Best Western down the street,” Peter said impatiently.
Jan said, “We may not be at this much longer anyway.”
Charlie helped himself to a spare chair and watched the efforts to contact Cocytus. For once, Charlie found nothing irrelevant to remark upon. He had the decorum of an attendee at a funeral.
Half an hour later, the video link showed Ed sitting with his head in his hands, fingers clutching his hair. “I give up. It’s gone. Something nailed us. God threw a rock at us. Something.”
Jan felt sick. If it really had been an incoming meteor, it was cosmically unfair, a one-in-trillions mischance. Charlie shook his head mournfully and slipped out.
Having saved the one unexplored hope until it was the last hope of all, Jan reviewed the EGAD data from the last microsample. And there it was. The signature of water, clear as a bell, standing up to cross-analysis. “Guess what, guys, she said shakily. “All was not lost. It did find water. This we can publish.”
There was moment of surprised silence from her team. Then Murray said, “Thank God the budget cutters didn’t get the EGAD!”
“But I wanted ice stratigraphy,” said Mandeep, forlorn. “It would tell us so much about the history of cometary impacts.”
Jan still had her emergency calm on. Wearing it like an overcoat to hide her emotionality, she said with even-toned assurance, “I think we’ll be back at Aitken Crater before too long, and then we’ll send somebody out for a nice long core sample.”
Peter absurdly added, “We’ll tell ’em to take hedge clippers too.”
An hour later, a few minutes past two A.M., Jan pulled into her driveway, cold, tired, hungry, and wet, especially from the ankles down: the parking lot had been four inches deep in rain water. All the easily-flooded intersections in the area had been inundated, but traffic was nonexistent. She’d been able to take to the middle of the streets and get through.
More than the cold, the memory of the last moments of Cocytus made her shake with turbulent letdown. Time and fatigue had shredded her calm. Fumbling with house keys and key-ring flashlight, she opened the front door and stepped inside before she remembered that she’d left porch and living room lights blazing.
Maybe lightning had knocked her power out.
But Nutmeg normally greeted Jan. Lack of house lights never bothered a cat. More than that was wrong here. Jan’s feeling of habit, of returning home as always, did a sickening reorientation, like that last picture from the Moon, hit by the realization that her house might have been broken into. By somebody who might still be here.
Fear ran down her spine like ice water. Jan stumbled backward to her door and jerked it open. She stood there, undecided whether to retreat through the cold and wet to her car. She had always thought she’d smell sweat, cigarette, something in the air of the room if a criminal was hiding there.
With a cloud-soft touch of fur, Nutmeg materialized to twine around Jan’s legs. Nutmeg took rapid little steps, as if agitated. But she didn’t bolt out the door, and wasn’t cowering under the bed, either. Considering that Nutty was a total coward, there could not possibly be an intruder in the house.
A scratching sound from the direction of the back door made Jan jump. But the noise came from outside. The back door remained firmly shut. Jan crept to the breakfast nook window and parted the blinds to peer out.
Next to the patio, the nameless shrub flailed in the wind. Jan hadn’t realized that the shrub had grown tall enough to scrape the eaves of the house, but it was doing so. The shrub’s greenery still looked like cat fur. In point of fact, it looked like an angry, wet cat’s fur, standing at attention as the shrub twitched in the rainy wind. The plant looked startlingly alive. “Maybe I overdid the fertilizer last time,” Jan muttered.