New Earth (27 page)

“Any time you want to fly one of the birds yourself, just let me know,” Hazzard said, with a malevolent grin. “Just tell me where you want the bodies sent.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Brandon.

Jordan watched the jagged peaks go past. There were patches of snow huddled in hollows that were sheltered from sunlight; otherwise the rocks were bare. Jordan thought he saw what looked like a herd of mountain goats peacefully negotiating the steep slopes.

Suddenly Brandon sat up straighter and pointed. “There’s the sea!”

Jordan saw a broad expanse of water glittering
beneath the afternoon sun. A rim of white beach ran along its edge, and the swells appeared to run up smoothly onto the sand without breaking. A gentle, peaceful sea, Jordan thought. No surfing, but the sparkling water looked warm, inviting.

De Falla had chosen this spot for drilling because his geology profile indicated the planet’s crust was thinner here.

“If the damned planet really is hollow,”
he had told Brandon and Jordan, “then you might be able to break through the crust and prove it.”

Brandon had laughed at the geologist. “It’s not hollow, Silvio. You know that and I know that.”

De Falla had nodded grudgingly. “But nobody’s told the damned computer program.”

Jordan couldn’t help picturing in his mind what would happen if the planet really was hollow and they punctured its thin
shell. He saw a balloon collapsing, whizzing every which way as the air inside it escaped.

Not very likely, he told himself. Still, he couldn’t shake the image.

With Hazzard piloting remotely, the plane made a long, swooping turn out over the water, then glided in for a smooth landing on the hard-packed beach sand. Even before the engines had completely shut down, Brandon unbuckled his seat
harness and headed for the hatch.

“Looks like a tropical paradise out there,” he said over his shoulder. “We should have brought the women.”

Fine time to think of that, Jordan grumbled silently as he got up from his seat.

He followed Brandon to the hatch. His brother swung it open and Jordan heard the murmur of surf. Looking past Brandon’s shoulder, he saw that the waves lapping up on the beach
were only a few centimeters high. Babies could play here, he thought. Then he remembered that Aditi’s people had no babies, not at present.

The beach was as lovely as a video scene, with graceful palmlike trees fringing it, swaying gently in the warm breeze blowing in off the sea. Sirius was high in the brazen sky, bright and hot. Jordan welcomed its warmth on his shoulders, although he had to
put on a pair of dark glasses to cut down the glare.

Turning, he saw a pair of humanform robots already at work, unloading equipment from the plane’s cargo hatch. The crates looked big, heavy.

“What’s that?” he asked as they walked toward the hardworking robots.

Brandon peered at the nearest crate. “Laser drilling equipment. For de Falla’s deep core.”

“How far down will it drill?”

“Tens of
kilometers, unless there’s a hitch.”

“You mean, unless the beam strikes especially hard rock?”

Brandon shook his head vigorously. “No, Jordy. The beam’s powerful enough to vaporize any kind of rock. The only problems we might encounter will be equipment breakdowns. Once we’ve got the laser running, it’ll cut through anything like butter.”

Jordan felt impressed.

With a wicked grin, Brandon
punned, “Now we’re going to get down to the core of the matter.”

“Can we go deep enough to disprove that the planet’s hollow?”

“Yes indeed, Jordy.” Brandon couldn’t suppress another pun. “We’re going to knock the stuffing out of the hollow planet idea.”

It’s going to be a long week, Jordan told himself.

SOONER OR LATER

It took two days to wipe the confident grin off Brandon’s face.

The afternoon that they landed was spent in setting up the laser drill. Brandon picked a spot away from the beach, up amidst the trees and ground foliage. With Jordan’s help, he set up a pair of seismometers and a miniature radio transmitter that allowed the GPS satellites in orbit overhead to fix their position
with nanometer precision.

While they were doing that, the robots erected their tent. Brandon had politely refused Aditi’s offer of an energy shield.

“We won’t need it,” he said.

Jordan thought it might have been interesting to sleep out in the open, without a tent hemming in their view, but he went along with his brother’s decision. Bran’s been on field trips a lot more than I have, he told
himself.

Once the tent was up and filled with their two cots and footlockers, Brandon led one of the robots, carrying a power shovel, to dig a latrine back in the brush and trees that fringed the beach. Adri and the city’s biologists had assured them that there would be no environmental problem from the latrines. Same DNA, Jordan thought. We won’t contaminate anything here.

They slept on side-by-side
cots in the tent, but Jordan awoke in the middle of the night. Restless, he got up quietly from his cot and tiptoed out into the night. It was cool in nothing but his T-shirt and briefs; the breeze coming in off the sea chilled him.

Yet the sea itself was magnificently beautiful and he regretted not bringing Aditi with him to share it. No moon, but the Pup, low on the horizon, sent a stream of
glittering silver across the softly murmuring sea. Stars twinkled in the sky. Jordan tried to make sense out of their configurations, but he couldn’t recognize any of the constellations he knew from Earth.

Except—he peered into the dark sky and, yes, there was Orion, leaning lopsidedly above the sea horizon. Good old Orion! Jordan’s heart leaped at the familiarity of it. Rigel, Betelgeuse, the
Belt, and the Sword. Eight point six light-years from home, and there was Orion, friendly and familiar.

On an impulse, he ducked back into the tent and rummaged in the dark until he found his pocketphone. Then he went back outside and called Aditi. She was thickheaded with sleep at first, but as Jordan showed her the beach and the soft glow of the Pup she revived.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I wish you were here,” said Jordan.

“Well, we can share the view, at least.”

He sat on the sand, his back against one of the gracefully bent trees, and held the phone so that Aditi could see the silvery waves running gently up the beach. They talked until he grew drowsy.

At last Aditi said, “You’d better get back to your bed, Jordan. You’re half asleep.”

“Good night, love,” he said.

“Good
night, darling,” she replied.

“I wish you were here.”

“So do I.”

He went back to his cot and slept soundly until sunrise.

*   *   *

Drilling began with the morning. Brandon spent much of his time on the phone with de Falla, making certain that everything was just right, before turning on the laser. It rumbled to life, and a plume of smoke burst up from the ground.

“Won’t the smoke block
the laser’s beam?” Jordan asked.

Standing with his fists on his hips like some old-time plantation overseer, Brandon replied, “De Falla says it won’t. The beam is intense enough to burn right through the smoke. It just recondenses as the gases rise above the laser’s output head. What you’re seeing won’t affect the laser at all.”

And it certainly appeared so. All day long, Jordan watched the
control console that the robots had set up next to their tent. It was linked to the laser equipment by a tangle of snaking cables. The laser growled away and the graph on the console’s central screen showed a single bright green line heading straight down, deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust. By sunset it had passed the eight-kilometer mark and was still blazing away, without stopping.

“Should we leave it running overnight?” Jordan asked.

“Why not? The robots can tend to it. If there’s any problem they can wake us.”

Over their prepackaged dinners, Jordan said, “So this is what field work is all about. The robots do the work and you take the credit.”

Brandon frowned at his brother. “I gather the data. I make sense out of what the equipment is doing. I’m the brains of this operation.”

“And the robots supply the muscle.”

“Used to be grad students that provided the muscle. I put in my time as slave labor, believe me.”

“I suppose you did,” said Jordan.

They finished eating, did their ablutions, and got ready for sleep. Jordan could hear the laser growling away out in the darkness. It ruined the romantic aura of the place, he thought.

As he stretched out on his cot, hands cradling
the back of his head, Brandon reminisced, “Grad students included women, of course. Field trips were a lot more interesting then.”

“Perhaps Thornberry could rig one of the robots for you,” Jordan suggested, grinning into the shadows.

“That’s a filthy idea, Jordy. I like it.”

“Ask Thornberry about it,” Jordan joked.

“You think Mitch is making out with Tanya?” Brandon asked.

“Yes,” Jordan answered
without hesitation. “It’s Longyear and de Falla I wonder about. They’re both young and unattached.”

“Maybe Yamaguchi’s giving them something to dampen their sex drive.”

“Then there’s Yamaguchi herself. What about her sex drive?”

“She’s Japanese. Terrific self-discipline.”

“And Hazzard?”

“Trish.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jordan said. “What do you make of Zadar?”

Brandon didn’t answer for
a moment. Then, “He’s Greek, of course…”

“Don’t be a lout!”

With a chuckle, Brandon said, “I don’t know. Demetrios is a pretty quiet guy.”

Jordan surprised himself by asking, “How serious are you about Elyse?”

“Pretty damned serious,” Brandon replied without hesitation. “She means a lot to me, and I think I mean a lot to her.”

“Good,” said Jordan. “It’s time you found someone.”

“Approval
from my big brother! That’s a first.”

Surprised, almost hurt, Jordan said, “I want you to be happy, Bran.”

“Works both ways, Jordy. What about you and Aditi?”

Jordan sighed. “I didn’t think that, after Miriam, I could ever fall in love again. But I have.”

“It’s a little tricky, her not being really human.”

“She’s as human as you or I, Bran. As human as Elyse.”

Brandon didn’t reply for several
moments. Then, “But when it comes time for us to leave, Jordy, what then?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. Neither one of us wants to look that far ahead.”

“But you’ll have to, sooner or later.”

“Sooner or later,” Jordan agreed. “Sooner or later.”

SURPRISE

Jordan woke with sunlight glowing on the wall of the tent. Brandon’s cot was already empty, though rumpled, unmade. Jordan could see him sitting outside on the folding chair in front of the console that was monitoring the laser’s progress, wearing nothing but his skivvies. He dressed quickly, then went out to the latrine. He could hear the laser thrumming steadily.

God’s in his heaven,
he thought, and the equipment’s working fine. All’s right with the world.

But then he heard Brandon call, “Jordy, take a look at this.”

Jordan walked to where Brandon was sitting and, peering over his brother’s shoulder, saw that the bright green line depicting the depth of the borehole had flattened out.

“That can’t be right,” he said to his brother. “Can it?”

Brandon hunched forward in the
rickety folding chair, scowling and muttering as he tapped keys on the console’s control board.

“Damned thing hasn’t gone a centimeter deeper since just after midnight.”

“But the laser’s still running,” Jordan said.

“It is, but it’s not going anywhere.”

“How can that be?”

Shaking his head, Brandon muttered, “Damned if I know.”

“It’s hit something that it can’t vaporize,” Jordan mused. “Some
particularly hard form of rock.”

“Jordy, that laser is powerful enough to vaporize any kind of rock. Construction crews used lasers like that to dig the Moho shaft in Siberia, for chrissakes.”

“Well,
something
has stopped it.”

Brandon bolted out of the flimsy chair, knocking it over, and hurried to the generator that powered the laser. He looked more than a little ridiculous, Jordan thought,
in nothing but his briefs and T-shirt, standing between the two silent and unmoving robots.

“Power output’s at maximum,” he called to Jordan as he scanned the generator’s dials. “That beam’s powerful enough to melt the Rock of Gibraltar.”

“How long can the generator go on running?”

“Weeks. It’s nuclear.”

“And the laser is working?”

“Christ, Jordy, you can
hear
it running!”

Jordan realized
how upset Brandon was; he only used language like that when he was distraught. There was no smoke blowing out of the borehole. The laser is running, but it’s not vaporizing any of the rock down there.

How deep has it gone? he wondered. A glance at the console’s screen showed him. The depth line flattened out at fourteen kilometers.

Brandon came back to the console, carefully picked up the chair,
then leaned a thumb on a square red button on the control board. The laser abruptly turned off. The world went quiet. Then Jordan heard the sighing of the trees in the soft breeze, the murmur of the surf. A bird trilled, somewhere.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Brandon said, “after I instruct the robots to pull up the laser head.”

“And then?”

With a grim shrug,
Brandon replied, “Then we send a camera down the hole and see what the hell’s stopped the goddamned laser.”

They picked at their breakfasts while the robots methodically hauled the laser head back up to the surface.

Brandon said, “Well, it sure isn’t hollow.”

“Apparently not.”

“Might be some weird form of matter. Some super condensate.”

Jordan dipped his chin slightly. “Apparently this planet
isn’t an exact duplicate of Earth.”

“Not below its crust, anyway.”