He felt a surge of anger welling up inside him, a dark tide of violence.
To come all this way, to battle past the committees, the officials sitting behind their desks with their nods and smiles while they decided the course of my life, to fight my way out here to fucking Uranus and send the submarine to the bottom of the fucking ocean and find—nothing! Not a goddamned mother-humping shred of evidence, not a shit-faced pissing hint of anything beyond the natural crap that’s down there—it was more than he could bear.
His whole life hung in the balance. Finding nothing meant that he had spent the past three years of his life in vain, and the university committee had spent more than three billion international dollars—for what? A few scoops of rocks and sand.
I’m ruined, he knew. I’ll be known everywhere I go as the idiot who spent a fortune proving that there’s nothing on Uranus worth studying. Nothing that a gaggle of grad students can’t categorize and write a paper about that nobody will bother to read.
Slowly, Gomez pushed himself to his feet. Deep in his guts he felt a burning, raging urge to smash the machines that surrounded him, to destroy the technology that had failed him, to destroy himself and his pointless, worthless life.
How can I face them? he seethed inwardly. How can I go back to Earth with nothing to show them? Better to die here and get it over with.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. And sat down again. Staring at his desktop screen, he let his stubby fingers tap out the command to keep reviewing the results of the submarine’s excursion, to continue searching for something, anything, that might give a hope of discovering a new revelation.
He lost track of time. The images on his screen blurred into a slowly scrolling list of failure, of defeat, of the end of all his hopes and dreams.
In his mind’s eye, he saw himself returning to Earth, reporting his failure, being assigned to some backwater study that would drown him in meaningless details. Add another decimal point to somebody else’s analysis, clean up the work that this group of researchers has published, teach classes to bright and eager newcomers who’ve never heard of your work, sink deeper and deeper into obscurity.
Then a voice from deep within him said, Well, you had your chance and you took it. You tried, but the thing you were searching for just wasn’t there. It’s not your fault. It just isn’t there.
It’s not my fault, Tómas agreed. But I’ll carry this albatross around my neck for the rest of my life.
He realized that his desktop’s screen was blinking.
ANOMALY.
The letters flashed across the list of alphanumerics that filled the screen.
ANOMALY.
A glitch somewhere, Gomez told himself. He spoke to the voice-activated computer program. “Examine anomaly.”
The screen immediately showed a small piece of twisted metal, one of the hundreds of samples the submarine had returned from Uranus’s seabed.
Gomez blinked at the image. Nothing unusual about it, he thought. The data bar at the bottom of the screen showed that the sample was slightly less than eight centimeters long.
A scrap of metal, Gomez thought. We’ve brought up hundreds of similar bits. Natural enough: metal chunks scattered among the sand and rocks.
“Chemical analysis?” he asked the computer.
Letters took shape over the image. Gomez read aloud:
“Iron, ninety-five percent.
“Carbon, two point five percent.
“Manganese…
“Nickel…”
His jaw dropped open.
“Steel,” he whispered, as if afraid that if he spoke the word any louder the analysis would disappear from his screen.
He swallowed nervously, then asked the computer in a trembling voice, “Conclusion of analysis?”
The computer’s synthesized voice answered, “The imaged sample is composed of steel.”
Steel.
Gomez felt his heart thumping beneath his ribs. Steel! STEEL!
Steel does not exist in nature. It is created in ovens, in blast furnaces. Created by intelligent beings!
Gomez stared at the letters of the analysis, and the image of the twisted piece of metal in the screen’s background.
He leaped up from his chair and shouted, “Steel! It’s steel!”
STEEL
Standing there at his desk, slightly bent over, staring at the computer screen, his whole body shaking, his heart racing, Gomez repeated to himself in a heartfelt whisper, “Steel! Steel created by intelligent inhabitants of the planet Uranus.”
He sank back into his desk chair and commanded the computer, “Send this analysis to the chairman of the research division at the University of Valparaiso.”
The computer replied dispassionately, “Sent.”
Then he got to his feet again, slightly surprised that his legs supported him.
“Administrator Waxman,” he said to the computer. “Connect me to him. Urgent!”
“Connecting,” said the computer.
Gomez stood there impatiently, realizing that the difference between intelligent humans and intelligent computers is that computers didn’t care. A sneeze was just as important to the machines as the end of the world.
Waxman’s handsome, dark-bearded face appeared on the screen, smiling, unruffled, at ease. “I’m not available at the moment. I’ll call you back—”
Gomez interrupted, “Mr. Waxman, this is Tómas Gomez. I’ve found steel! At the bottom of the ocean! Steel!”
Waxman’s image on the screen flickered and disappeared, replaced by the man’s actual face.
“What’s that you say? Steel?”
“Steel!” Gomez shouted. “A scrap of steel at the bottom of the sea!”
“Steel,” Waxman repeated, his sculpted features looking puzzled.
“Steel doesn’t exist in nature,” Gomez babbled. “It’s artificial. It was created by intelligent creatures!”
“Are you sure…?”
“Yes! Yes! It had to be made by intelligent natives of Uranus.”
“But Uranus is barren. Dead.”
“It wasn’t always that way! It was alive! It was populated by intelligent people who manufactured steel.”
Waxman seemed uncertain. “Are you certain?”
“Yes!” Gomez replied, beaming. “The sample is at the docking port. The submarine dredged it up, together with a ton or so of other stuff.”
“Steel.”
“It’s not natural. It can’t be natural!”
“Maybe it’s from one of the earlier vehicles that our scientists put into the ocean,” Waxman reasoned.
“No, no, no!” Gomez countered. “It’s native to the planet. It has to be.”
Waxman looked unconvinced. “That’s a big claim, Dr. Gomez. A huge claim.”
“Yes, yes, I know. And I know Sagan’s old line, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ But there it is! We scooped it up from the sea bottom. Steel!”
“Come over to my quarters, please,” Waxman said. “We’ve got to proceed very carefully about this.”
“I’ll be there in three minutes!” Gomez replied.
Steel, Waxman thought as Gomez’s fevered image winked out on his living room’s wall screen. This could change everything.
As he got up from his compact little desk, he thought, If that damned Latino is right, it will mean a horde of scientists descending on us. It will turn Umber’s haven for refugees into a mecca for scientific research.
He stood uncertainly in his living room, silently imagining: This habitat will be crawling with scientists. And engineers. Rocket people. Submarine people.
And news people! Waxman’s handsome face pulled into a scowl. News people will come roaring out here, poking their quirky little noses into every corner of the habitat.