Zworkyn grinned, put out his hand and said, “Hello.” Gomez took the hand in his own. “Welcome to Haven, Dr. Zworkyn.”
The man barely came up to Abbott’s shoulder. Even Gomez was a good three or four centimeters taller. His face was swarthy, squarish, with a strong chin and slightly hooked nose. His hair was thick and dark.
“I don’t have a doctorate,” Zworkyn said, without a trace of embarrassment. “I’m a mining engineer.”
Gomez glanced at Abbott, then stumbled, “Oh! I’m sorry… that is, I apologize…”
“No need to apologize,” Abbott said. “Vincente is the top man in his field. He doesn’t need a PhD, do you, Vince?”
Zworkyn shrugged good-naturedly, “I’ve never found the time to acquire one.”
Gomez realized that his mental image of miners was of dirt-encrusted men shoveling rocks in some deep, dank underground cavern. These people are engineers, he told himself: they don’t go down into mines, they direct machinery that does the labor.
Abbott introduced the other three miners, then led the little group through the computers that registered their arrival while they scanned their bodies, leaving Gomez standing there, suddenly alone.
“See you at dinner, Tómas,” Abbott called to him as he hurried the miners to the hatch that led into Haven’s interior.
Gomez felt more than a little shaky as he walked alone toward the habitat’s main restaurant. I’m getting accustomed to having Raven as my dinner companion, he realized. But for the past few evenings, Raven had been busy with Alicia Polanyi, planning the shop they were going to open.
All right, Gomez said to himself as he pushed through the doors of the restaurant’s main entrance. I don’t need her. I can stand on my own feet.
Still, he missed her.
The restaurant was crowded, but the human maître d’ led Gomez directly to the circular table where Zworkyn and his four colleagues were sitting with Abbott and a half-dozen of his astronomers. There was one empty chair, between Abbott and Zworkyn. A robot came up and held it out for Gomez.
“Ah, here at last,” Abbott said, with a big gap-toothed grin.
“It’s still a few minutes before seven,” Gomez protested.
“Yes, yes. We started ahead of you.”
Gomez saw that each of the men and women around the table had drinks at their places. He ordered a margarita.
“With salt?” asked the robot.
“Of course.”
“Of course,” echoed Abbott. Gomez wondered how much he’d already had to drink.
Zworkyn leaned forward slightly and asked Gomez, “What on Earth ever possessed you to search for evidence of life here on Uranus?”
Gomez shrugged. “All the other major planets in the solar system have biospheres—extensive biospheres. It seemed odd that Uranus was sterile. It didn’t fit.”
“Good thinking,” said Abbott. “Go after the anomalies. Find out why they’re anomalies.”
Zworkyn nodded. “And you found this piece of steel.”
“It’s not natural,” Gomez said. “And it didn’t come from one of our own submersibles.”
“That’s not one hundred percent assured,” Abbott corrected.
“Close enough,” said Gomez.
Nodding again, Zworkyn agreed. “Close enough to get us sent out here to help you explore the region.”
“Yes,” said Gomez.
Tugging at one end of his luxurious moustache, Abbott asked the miner, “So when do you start digging?”
With a tight smile, Zworkyn replied, “Once we find something worth digging for.”
“Explain, please,” said Abbott.
“First we’ll have to install our scanning equipment in your submarine, Dr. Gomez—”
“Please call me Tómas.”
Zworkyn dipped his chin minimally. “Tómas, then. And I am Vincente.”
Abbott smiled benignly at the two of them.
“We will survey the area where you found the relic,” Zworkyn continued, “scanning that region of the sea bottom for similar metal. Penetrating radar and isotopic scanners should let us see at least a hundred meters below the seabed’s surface. Once we have a picture of what’s sitting down beneath the surface, then we can start digging.”
“But what if there isn’t any other steel down there?” Gomez asked.
With a shrug of his narrow shoulders, Zworkyn replied, “Then we’ll have to expand our search.”
“Poke around in the dark,” said Abbott, “in the hopes of finding something.”
One of the other miners chipped in, “Playing blind man’s bluff, down at the bottom of the ocean.”
“What we’re looking for might be buried deeper than our instruments can scan,” Zworkyn admitted.
Gomez muttered, “If that’s the case…”
“If that’s the case,” Zworkyn said softly, “then we’re out of luck. You could be sitting atop a gold mine, but if it’s buried too deep for our instruments to detect it, we’ll never know that it’s there.”
Abbott shook his head. “Doesn’t sound terribly encouraging, does it?”
Gomez didn’t reply aloud, but he thought, They don’t expect to find anything. They think they’ve been sent here on a fool’s errand, and I’m the fool who’s responsible for it.
PATIENCE… AND ANTICIPATION
Raven was running through a long list of women’s fashions when her phone buzzed. Glancing at the corner of her screen, she saw that it was Tómas calling. Again.
I’ve been neglecting him, she realized. She looked over at Alicia, busily conversing with the image on her screen of the contractor who was turning one of the habitat’s empty storage areas into their shop.
Leaning closer to her own screen, Raven said softly, “Phone answer.”
Tómas’s face filled the screen. “Raven! Hello!”
“Hello, Tómas,” she said.
“How’s it going?”
She smiled “We’re aiming to open the shop in two weeks.”
“That’s good.”
“It’ll be good only if we can get a thousand and one details squared away in that time.”
“Oh. You must be pretty busy.”
“Very,” she said. “Extremely.”
Gomez looked disappointed. “I guess you don’t have time to go to dinner, then.”
Raven hesitated. Tómas looked disappointed, forlorn.
She asked, “Would you mind if I brought Alicia along?”
It was his turn to hesitate.
“She’s been working awfully hard,” Raven said. “I think a pleasant dinner would be very good for her.”
Gomez nodded, but it seemed clear his heart wasn’t in it. “Okay, I guess.”
Raven smiled her brightest. “You’re a dear.”
“Seven o’clock? In the main restaurant?”
“Can you make it eight o’clock? We have so much work to get through.”
“Eight o’clock, sure,” said Gomez. Then he added, a bit more sullenly, “Dinner for three.”
Alicia objected that she didn’t want to be a third wheel at dinner.
“It’s you he’s interested in, not me.”
“I know,” Raven admitted. “But I don’t think I want to let him get too close. Not yet. Not now.”
Alicia studied Raven’s face for a long, silent moment. At last she said, “All right. I’ll be your chaperone.”
“Thanks,” said Raven. Yet somehow she didn’t really feel grateful.
Once she and Alicia had seated themselves at the table with Gomez, Raven asked, “How’s the search going, Tómas?”
“Zworkyn and his people have just started scanning the area,” Gomez replied, noticeably less than enthusiastic. “Nothing’s turned up so far.”