Cold as Ice (15 page)

"Well, Dr. Hamilton?" He was cheerfully unaware of the atmosphere in the room, or pretended to be. "What do you think of my proposal?"

Camille frowned at him in perplexity. He picked up on it in a fraction of a second, flashing a glance at Lammerman.

David shook his head but did not speak.

"No? Then I suppose I'd better have a try." Mobarak came back to the table, settled opposite Camille, and steepled his fingertips. She again noticed his tiny, neat hands—totally different from David's great paws. David's height and massive build must have come from his mother's side.

"I'd heard a lot about you from Tim Kaiser," Mobarak went on. "You might not like some of it too well. Kaiser tells me that you're donkey-headed and determined, so once you get your teeth into a problem, you never give up."

"You don't solve a difficult scientific problem if you give up easily, Mr. Mobarak."
And when you grow up grubby and penniless on Mars, you get nothing—not even your next meal—if you give up easily.
Camille had acquired her education as she had her dinners: the hard way. Persistence was nothing more than a childhood survival trait carried on into adult life. But she was damned if she'd weep on Mobarak's shoulder to tell him that things hadn't always been easy.

"But Tim says that although you're stubborn," Mobarak continued, "you're sometimes impulsive, too. Even when you're wrong, it's a waste of time trying to push you around. Don't worry, I won't try it—people say the same thing about me. But Tim also insists that you're the best damned theorist in fusion processes that he's ever met. He says that you seem to know what's going on in fusion stability, even in complicated situations, without having to think about it. When the computer models give answers that you don't like, you look for errors in the programs."

"No." Camille could handle this at least without starting a fight. "He's wrong. I calculate
everything
, and I don't trust intuition. It's just that I've found some geometric shortcuts, ways to visualize complex interactions for quick results. Like a fusion version of Feynman diagrams."

"Even better." Mobarak smiled with what appeared to be genuine delight. "I'm just an experimenter, so I've learned to mistrust theorist intuition, too. It's usually no better than an extrapolation of solved cases."

Camille was beginning to understand why they called him the Sun King. She had assumed that it was for his development of the Mobies and his mastery of practical commercial fusion. But you could make just as good a case for the name based on his warmth and personal charm. The vacant eyes were not at all empty now, and she could feel his interest in her pouring across the table. It was impossible to hold her anger against him.

Poor David! How could a youngster have possibly handled that force?

"Now," Mobarak was continuing, "I've been saying all these personal things about you. But that's not why I'm here. May I take a few more minutes of your time and explain the reason? You see, I have a problem. I'm hoping to start work soon on the biggest project of my career, and I need help. You'll see why when I tell you what I want to do. And if what I say next sounds grandiose, it's because it
feels
grandiose—even to me.

"I want to add something major to the solar system. I want, in fact, to give humanity a whole new habitable planet." He took a split second to study her reaction and then swept on. "Europa. You probably know at least as much about Europa as I do, but I'd like to offer my own summary. I'll keep it short. Please interrupt me if you disagree with anything I say."

Camille noticed that despite his polite words, he began at once, without waiting for permission. She knew a good deal about Europa, so she had a chance to evaluate Mobarak's technique. He used a simple, down-to-earth style, talking neither up nor down to his listener but watching her face intently for signs of boredom or confusion. The description that he offered was spare and logical, with a manageable minimum of numbers. And he seemed to have his facts right.

Europa: second closest of Jupiter's four Galileian satellites, orbiting less than seven hundred thousand kilometers out. Sandblasted on its surface by an even more intense rain of high-energy particles than struck Ganymede, Europa shared with Earth, and with Earth alone in the solar system, one unusual feature: a water ocean. In Europa's case, the ocean lay beneath kilometers of ice.

The ice on Europa was a protective blanket, varying in thickness but continuous over the surface except at one point: the side perpetually facing away from Jupiter. At this Jovian antipode, the small landmass of Mount Ararat jutted through, just far enough to provide a space landing site and a base of surface operations.

Europa's weak surface gravity permitted the rise of Mount Ararat all the way from an ocean bed that averaged fifty kilometers deep and, in places, plunged to over a hundred. Small on a planetary scale, Europa nevertheless had as large a body of liquid water as any in the solar system; and unlike Earth's oceans, it was
fresh
water. The leeching of minerals from land surfaces, always adding salinity and minerals to the waters of Terra, had never taken place on Europa.

Fresh, and cold, and more than a billion cubic kilometers in volume, Europa's ocean was lifeless, and useless, because of the thickness of its icy shield.

"But not necessarily always so." Mobarak was keeping his promise to be brief. "If the ice were melted away from below until it was just a couple of meters thick, it would still shield Europa's ocean from hard radiation as well as ever. And below a thin ice layer there would be more than enough light to permit plants to grow—the right varieties already exist. So do the nutrient upwellings. It's all a question of energy supply, and detailed heat-balance calculation and control.

"I plan to provide that extra energy. I'm designing a series of fusion reactors bigger than anything we've ever seen before. The ocean of Europa has all the hydrogen for fusion that we could ask for."

"You can get the hydrogen, but you'll never get the permits." Camille had been invited to interrupt, and she decided that it was time to do so. David certainly would not—he was staring at his father with the helpless, hypnotized look of a rabbit facing a python. "The Jovian General Assembly set the Europan ocean aside for deep submarine experiments thirty years ago. If you change the environment, you'll ruin all that scientific work."

"Permits will be a problem, certainly. And we have to keep the scientists happy." Mobarak was nodding agreement, but Camille read in his manner a suggestion that permits would be no problem at all.

The scientists on Europa would somehow prove to be right out of luck. In the General Assembly, the right wheels had already been greased.

"Well, there's a bigger problem than that," she said. "You may have been too busy to see the announcement, but the scientific grapevine has been full of it. Supposedly there's been a discovery of life on Europa—
native
life, down on the seabed. If that's true, we'll see a hold on all developments there for an indefinite period."

But again he was nodding, calm and reasonable. "I heard that, too. If it's true, of course it will make a big difference. But I'd heard that so far it's all based on indirect evidence. We'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile—" He paused.

"Meanwhile, let me be frank with you. I'm going on the assumption that the benefits of the project to develop Europa will be judged by the Jovian General Assembly to outweigh all possible disadvantages. And that's why I am here. I know you've been wondering, because you can't see DOS Center on any rational Earth-Jupiter flight path.

"And maybe these days I'm not feeling rational. I said I'm designing the fusion plants, and that statement is quite true. But it's also true that I'm running into terrible difficulties of stability, something I've never met on the smaller Mobarak fusion units. These will be Moby monsters. I can't do everything by small experiments and scaling. I need a theoretician to help me. A
top
theoretician.

"I need
you
, Dr. Hamilton. You will be without a job here in a few days, so the timing couldn't be better. There's nothing that would make me happier than for you to come with me to Europa. David, too—that goes without saying—if he'd agree." Mobarak shot an oddly pleading look at Lammerman, and Camille had a sudden insight that the relationship between the two men was nothing like as simple as it seemed. Was she no more than the bait to catch David?

"I'd love to have you," he went on. "Both of you. And think of the
opportunity
, of what you'll be able to tell your children and grandchildren." He smiled, and the old, golden Mobarak was back full force. "How many people in the history of humanity can say they made a whole new world?"

8
The Galileian Suite

The high-acceleration drive had been a direct result of the Great War, a classical spin-off of weapons development. Many scholars argued that if the high-gee drive had been available before the war began, the biggest-ever trauma of the human species might have been avoided.

Their logic was simple and plausible: Prewar travel from Earth to the Outer System had been painfully slow. A trip to the Belt or to Jupiter, even with the best of gravity swing-bys to assist the low-thrust ion engines, had taken years. Tourist travel was quite unthinkable. The worlds of the solar system were far apart physically, and so they had grown far apart culturally and socially.

But postwar travel, even with the high-thrust drive restricted to one gee for reasons of economy, had collapsed the scale of the solar system. With continuous acceleration, travel times grow only as the
square root
of distance. A trip from Earth to the Belt is not much longer than a trip to Mars. Jupiter is a week away, Saturn hardly more, even distant Neptune a fraction over two weeks. A unified system is again possible.

If such unity had been feasible
before
the war, said the students of technology's effects on history . . .

But perhaps they were indulging in no more than wishful thinking. For with travel made easy,
psychological
distance defined the new metric of the solar system. Local surroundings, local calendars, local day length—they all meant far more than absolute location. Easy travel might bridge the physical gap, but local environments guaranteed a steadily increasing social separation. And at the most basic level, the habitable worlds were just too different from each other.

* * *

Jon Perry and Nell Cotter had directly experienced the wide gap between worlds—psychological, social, and environmental—while arrowing from Earth to Ganymede in an interplanetary transit vehicle. The ITV was built for efficiency, not for comfort. It had no observation ports. The two passengers had embarked in Earth geosynchronous orbit, where Sol was a fiery white ball. Less than a week later they left the sealed box of the ITV for the surface of Ganymede, to find the sun dwindled to a fifth of its usual diameter, the tiny blazing disk insignificant. In Sol's place, the broad sprawling face of Jupiter, fifteen hundred times as big, hovered motionless above their suited bodies.

Nell had mixed feelings when they disembarked. She had
needed
to get out of the ship, because she had been going crazy, boxed for seven days into a three-meter space with no way of escaping. It was all very well for Glyn Sefaris to make cracks before she left about an "interplanetary love cruise" for her and Jon Perry. A great idea, and Jon had shown signs in the final hectic day on Earth that he was ready for it as soon as they had a moment's spare time. But fat chance! Not with a bored ship's captain, flying a simple ITV trajectory that was hardly more than a straight line joining planetary destination, and hanging around her so close she could count his nose hairs. The ship had no privacy of any kind!

The
Spindrift
had traveled with them. The submersible, which from the inside had seemed so small, now bulked huge. It had preempted most of the usual living space, and Jon's repeated advice to her—"Relax, we'll soon be there"—had made things worse. He was
used
to living in such a squeeze, and the ITV actually had a lot more space inside than any submersible. But Nell needed air, and space, and the breeze on her face.

Which unfortunately she was not going to get, not for quite a while. She stared around at the rugged surface of Ganymede as she was decanted from the ITV, then spoke into her subvocal recorder.
Well, my mistake. I was told "rock and cold and ice," and I said, "Right—just like Antarctica." But my brain betrayed me. This is a lot starker, a lot less
benign.
No rain or snow to eat away at inclines, no atmosphere to blur and soften edges. I can see ice all right, lots of it. But some of it isn't water-ice. It's frozen carbon dioxide and ammonia, bound to a solid form by cold beyond anything that Antarctica experiences, even in the deepest of bleak July midwinters, I'm feeling peculiar, too. Ready to float up, up, and away. Gravity here must be even less than on the moon.

And there was other strangeness. Over to the left, gleaming at the foreshortened horizon in the eerie half-twilight, there was a great gash in the surface. It was the scar left by a stony meteorite, hitting Ganymede at close to grazing incidence. Logic told Nell that it had happened long, long ago, maybe a billion years in the past. But the outline of the furrow was so crisp, so sharp, that it looked as though it was new-formed this morning.

And maybe another one just like it could arrive right now.

Nell scanned the sky with her video camera. Another body was visible up there, moving to transit the ruddy face of Jupiter.
Europa, it must be. That's where we're going—or at hast Jon is. I still have to find a way to get myself there with him. And it looks
big,
much bigger than I expected. As big as the moon from Earth.

Europa, like Jupiter, was at half phase. It was hard to believe that the fiery spark of Sol, way off to Nell's left, could throw enough light to illuminate the whole of the planet looming over her head. She zoomed in on the frosty half-moon image of Europa and suddenly noticed the blinking light on the side of her camera. The smart circuits inside it were warning her that something was interfering with their delicate electronics. It took a few moments more for Nell to realize what the interference must be. A hail of invisible but deadly particles was whipping at her and being diverted by her suit, but the camera had no protection. Those high-speed protons were searing its inside circuits, and it had not been designed for use under such conditions.