Cold as Ice (7 page)

"Told you," whispered Nell. "He
is
a great man, but he's a real smoothie, too. Someday I'm going to catch him with his pants down."

"You're going to
what
?"

"Catch him with an expression on his face that he didn't calculate and plan. Not tonight, though. He'll wrap 'em around his little finger. Watch him."

Mobarak was shaking his head ruefully. "To my mind, the many honors lavished upon me are unearned. Plasma theory and detailed fusion computations have always been too difficult for me. I've never been more than a tinkerer, playing around and having fun, and now and then finding something that seems to work. So if a group of
scientists
gives me an award, I feel uncomfortable. I always think of what Charles Babbage said about the British Royal Society: 'An organization that exists to hold elaborate dinners and to give each other gold medals.' But when I am given an award by
real
people such as yourselves, people who work in the real world and understand its needs and priorities, why, then I am overcome by a sense of well-being and a totally unreasonable feeling of pride. Pride which, I must now confess, is all too likely to come before a fall."

There were knowing laughs from some of the audience and a few cries of "Never!" and "You can do it!"

Mobarak paused and stared around the hall. "I gather that despite my best efforts at secrecy, some of you must already have heard of my dream. If that is the case, I hope that some of you may even be interested enough to want to take part in it as direct supporters, when the opportunity presents itself. But I have to warn you, by this time next year there is a good chance that the name of Cyrus Mobarak will be the laughingstock of the whole system. And if that happens, I hope that those of you who have been so nice to me when I have seemed near the top will be just as kind when I am down at the bottom."

There were more audience calls of "Count me in!" and "You never had a failure yet!"

"True enough." Mobarak held up a hand. "But there is a first time for everything, including failure. And we are getting ahead of ourselves. Tonight it was never my plan to hold out the promise of a grand new project"—("Except that you'll notice he's done just that," whispered Nell. "He could sign them up now if he wanted to.") —"but rather to thank you for, and to accept—with real gratitude—this award."

He pulled the tall package across the table toward him and with the help of Dolores Gelbman removed the wrappings. A glittering set of nested cylinders was revealed, surrounding a central torus and an array of helical pipes.

"Now where have I seen something like this before?" Mobarak was grinning. "For anyone who does not recognize it, here we have a model of the Mobarak AL-3—what most people call the 'Moby Mini.' The smallest, and the most popular, of my fusion plants." He studied it for a moment. "Thirty megawatts of energy, one like this would produce. And this is a beautifully made model. At a reduced scale of—what?—about four to one?"

"Exactly four to one." Dolores Gelbman turned the model around so that the press table could have a good view of both it and herself.

"And with all of its parts in proportion." Mobarak was leaning over, peering at the interior. "It's just perfect." He frowned. "Wait a minute, though. It's
not
perfect. This is a
fake
—it can't produce energy!"

There were a few titters from the audience, the self-conscious sound of people laughing at a joke they do not understand.

"We can't have that, can we? A Moby that doesn't produce energy." Cyrus Mobarak paused, then stooped to reach down under the table. "What we need is something more like
this
."

With the help of two uniformed men who appeared from the side of the room, he lifted a package and placed it on the table. With the wrapping removed, it proved to be an oddly distorted version of the Moby Mini, with an out-of-proportion central torus and a set of double helices beyond it. Everyone watched in silence as Mobarak turned a control on the side of the machine. He nodded to another man over by the far wall. The room lights slowly dimmed. As they did so, a vibrating whistle came from the machine on the table, followed by the sputter of an electrical discharge. The last room light faded. The hall was illuminated by a growing blue within the central torus.

"Ladies and gentlemen." Cyrus Mobarak, dimly visible behind the blue glow, raised his voice. "May I present to you, for the first time to any group, the Moby Midget. The system's first tabletop fusion reactor. Sixty kilos total mass, external dimensions as you see them, energy capacity eight megawatts. And, as you will also see, perfectly safe."

The glow was still brightening. The blue-lit face and hovering hands above it were those of a magician, drawing power from the air by primordial incantation. The audience gasped as Mobarak's hands, one on each side of the torus, suddenly plunged into the flaring plasma at the center. The glow was instantly quenched, and the lights in the hall just as quickly came back on. Cyrus Mobarak stood behind his tabletop fusion reactor, casual and relaxed. As the members of the Inner Circle rose to their feet, he stepped off the dais and moved down among them, shaking hands and slapping backs.

"And that, kiddies," said Nell quietly, "concludes our show for this evening. What did I tell you? He didn't put a foot wrong. Now I know why it was so easy to get press tickets. Mobarak
wanted
this whole thing to receive maximum coverage."

Jon Perry was sitting in a daze. He lacked Nell's exposure and early immunization to wealth and fame, and most of all, to simple charisma. "He's a genius. An absolute genius. What did he mean when he talked about being laughed at a year from now?"

"I don't know." Nell's eyes were on Cyrus Mobarak, who every few seconds glanced across to the press table. "But it has to be a monstrous new project, big enough for even the Sun King to talk about being a laughingstock. Don't worry, we'll find out what he's planning. I'll call Glyn Sefaris, and he'll set our staff onto it over in Husvik. Mobarak's home base is there."

"No one's going to laugh at Mobarak, whatever he does. What makes you so sure that your staff
can
find out?"

"Because the Sun King would never have thrown it at us—the press—if he had any real interest in keeping it secret. You'll notice that none of us caught even a sniff of the tabletop fusion reactor before tonight's unveiling. It surprised me as much as it did anybody."

Nell tucked Jon's arm in hers and began to steer him into the crowd. "Come on, let's see if we can get a word with Mr. Wizard before he's dragged away to better things. I've a feeling that he's very receptive to press attention just now. We're
meant to
explore and learn what his new project is, so who knows? Maybe if we're lucky enough, or clever enough, we'll find out tonight."

4
Starseed

Nell Cotter and Wilsa Sheer came from different backgrounds. They had never met, or even lived on the same planet. They were a billion kilometers apart. And yet, were Nell transported to Wilsa's side, she would have had no difficulty in recognizing the other woman's feelings. She had experienced them herself, just twenty-four hours earlier.

Wilsa, pleasurably nervous, sat alone in a small submersible cruising turbulent ocean depths. No glimmer of light penetrated from distant sunlight. The submersible's eyes were a combination of radar and ultrasonics, providing a flat, low-contrast image that faded away to uniform grey a dozen kilometers from the ship.

The voice of Tristan Morgan was just as grey and flat, sounding far-off and thin, though the words were spoken right into Wilsa's ear. "All right so far, but now you'll have to descend. See that vortex cloud, right ahead? You want to steer clear of it. And you'll have to go
down.
The upper region has convection currents too strong for the
Leda
, and the cloud top will extend upward for thousands of kilometers. Set yourself into a thirty-degree down-glide. Aim to the left side of the cloud and hold your heading for fifteen minutes. You'll be moving in the same sense as cloud rotation. Any circulation will speed you up. When you come around and out, there should be three or four Von Neumanns right in front of you."

"Check." Wilsa's hands felt huge and clumsy, like monstrous gauntlets, as she slowly operated the
Leda
's control levers. The submersible tilted and began the long slide downward. Another faint voice was chanting numbers, matching a red readout in the upper left corner of the image display. It reported isobaric depth in kilometers: "One-three-one-two. One-three-one-three, One-three-one-four." Thirteen hundred kilometers below the planet's upper cloud layers. The pressure would exceed a hundred standard atmospheres. It was no longer cold. The submersible flew through a helium-hydrogen mixture bubbling at nearly three hundred degrees Celsius. A little deeper and the heat around the ship would melt lead.

The swirling cloud was towering closer on Wilsa's right. She stared hypnotized into its jagged, broadening helix: orange and umber turbulence, transformed by the synesthetic imaging system to a sickly, mottled yellow, rising up forever. The thunderhead was stately, black-centered, and threatening. Flickers of lightning ran around its perimeter and lit the dark interior of the submersible with random pulses of intense green.

Wilsa gazed into its deadly heart. As she did so, another voice spoke unbidden from the secret depths of her mind. Its imperative banished every other thought. The broad, royal theme that it proclaimed rose irresistibly from a low E-flat, arching up to take command of her brain.

The melody of Jupiter itself. Her piloting of the submersible became unconscious as she allowed the theme to grow, shaping and reshaping in long,
cantabile
phrases while the
Leda
slid around and beneath the cloud base. She exulted as the tune soared higher, rising as majestic as the helical cloud in front of her. Like the starting point for all of her compositions, its arrival came as a complete surprise. Two minutes earlier she could have offered no hint of form, tempo, or key—or even predicted that anything creative was on the way. Everything else in a composition could be produced by thought and hard work, but melody remained aloof, beyond conscious control. And this one, she knew already, was a beauty.

"That will do." Tristan Morgan's voice entered from a million miles outside, touching but not breaking the creative spell. "I know you've decided you can fly blindfolded, but bring it out now."

"Okay." The rolling cloud vanished behind as Wilsa changed course; it was replaced by streaks that ran across the whole field of view.
East-west.
She recalled Tristan Morgan's earlier warning: "Don't forget that the small-scale shear is all east-west. And don't forget that any one of those little pencil lines holds enough energy to tear the ship in two."

But the black, broken striations on the horizon carried another message. They initiated a persistent little sawtooth of a tune, running as an
ostinato
counterpoint to the earlier theme. Wilsa wove the two together, feeling out the harmony. Then, as an experiment, she transposed the whole thing to the key of G Major. Not so good. She had been right the first time. E-flat was much better.

"One-three-two-two," said the depth monitor suddenly.

"Wilsa, your brain's on autopilot again." Tristan's voice was sharp. "Stop the turn and look half-left. You'll see three Von Neumanns—no, make that two. The other one's got a full cargo and it's starting to ascend. If you don't hurry, you'll miss it."

"I'm not sleeping. I'm
working
." But as she snapped back her answer and tucked the nascent composition safely away in the back of her mind—there was no danger that she would forget it—Wilsa was scanning the atmosphere ahead for her first sight of a Jovian Von Neumann.

There.
And not far from it, a second one. But the third that Tristan had mentioned was already far above, rising through the atmosphere on the smoky column of its Moby drive. In twenty minutes it would pass through the colorless layers of ammonium hydrosulfate to reach the base of blue-white ammonia clouds. Fifteen minutes more and the Von Neumann would be at full thrust, striving upward to break the great planet's gravitational bonds.

The other two were quietly harvesting. Monstrous intake venturis, hundreds of meters across, sucked Jupiter's atmosphere into their broad, beetle-shaped interiors. Hydrogen was vented at the rear, except for the tiny amount needed to supply the Moby fusion drive. Traces of sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, and metals were separated and hoarded, awaiting the time when enough of those raw materials had been collected. Then the Von Neumann would create an exact copy of itself, and release it.

Helium, a quarter of the mass of the Jovian atmosphere, remained to be processed. Most of it, like the dross of a mining operation, was of no interest. The precious nugget was the isotope helium-3, ten thousand times as rare as helium-4. The Von Neumanns painstakingly separated the two components, vented the common isotope and stored the lighter molecules in liquid form. When a hundred tons had been collected, the storage tanks would be full and the Von Neumann ready to begin its long ascent to planetary escape.

But that triumphant exit was not the event that Wilsa had come to witness. Anomalous signals had been arriving at Hebe Station, orbiting Jupiter half a million kilometers above the highest cloud layers. Tristan Morgan had pinpointed the signals as deriving from one of the Von Neumanns now ahead of the
Leda.
As the submersible closed on the beetle-backed collection vehicle, Wilsa could see the source of the problem. Intense heat—presumably a lightning bolt—had fused and deformed one set of intake Venturis and storage tanks. The Von Neumann rode lopsided, a pale exhaust of escaping hydrogen hissing out of its base.

Wilsa steered the
Leda
to within a hundred meters and matched their paths. The Von Neumann was descending at a rate of about a kilometer a minute. She focused the imaging systems on the crippled side.

"Pretty bad." Tristan Morgan was inspecting the damage. "In fact, worse than I thought. With that loss of hydrogen, we could fly as far as the upper edge of the atmosphere, replacing as we went. But it would never make escape velocity."