The Diamond Moon (3 page)

Ari settled beside him and rested her hand on his knee. “Tell me about your trip.”

“It was quite wonderful.” Jozsef’s eyes lit with enthusi-asm. “If I were a jealous man, I should be jealous that For-ster came unaided to his great discoveries. He fired me with his own enthusiasm—I believe he is a
heroic
figure.”
“He was hardly unaided.” Ari was defensive on her hus-band’s behalf. “You—and Kip and I—have been of critical help to him.”

“Yes, but he had nothing like the Knowledge to guide him. By himself he deciphered the Venusian tablets, and then the Martian plaque—and from that he deduced the na-ture of Amalthea.”

 

“Its presumed nature,” said Ari.

 

“All without hints from any ancient secrets,” Jozsef in-sisted, “which confirms our own belief that the truth needs no secrets.”

 

Ari looked uncomfortable, but like the commander she said nothing, unwilling to contradict Jozsef’s version of the creed.

 

“But let me tell you what I saw,” Jozsef said, recovering his enthusiasm. He settled himself deeper into the couch cushions and began to speak in the relaxed manner of a professor opening a weekly seminar.

“What we North Continentals call Ganymede is popu-larly known to those who live there as Shoreless Ocean, a poetic way of referring to a moon whose surface consists almost entirely of frozen water. The same name applies to Ganymede City, and it’s written over the pressure portals in half a dozen languages. I was in trouble almost before I’d gotten through the gates.

“As I left the formalities at entry control—all on my own, and somewhat bewildered—a strange young Asian persist-ently beckoned to me from beyond the barrier. His eyes showed a pronounced epicanthic fold, his hair was glossy black, pulled straight back into a ponytail that reached below his waist, and he was sporting quite a diabolical mus-tache. With that and his costume of tunic and trousers and soft boots, he could have been Temujin, the young Genghis Kahn. I tried to ignore him, but once I was through the gates he followed me through the crowd, until I turned on him and loudly demanded to know what he wanted.

“He made noises about being the best and least expen-sive guide a stranger to Shoreless Ocean could find, but between these declarations—for the benefit of the people around us—he commanded me in an urgent whisper to stop drawing attention to myself.

“As you have guessed, it was Blake. His remarkable dis-guise was necessary because, as he picturesquely phrased it, a pack of newshounds had driven Professor Forster and his colleagues to ground and now kept them in their den. Blake, being the only one of them who could speak Chinese, was the only one who could move freely in the town.

“I had thought I would need no disguise, of course; no one had the slightest idea who I was or how I had got here, the Board of Space Control having smoothed my passage. Blake took my luggage—which weighed very little, for al-though Ganymede is larger than Earth’s moon it is still less massive than a planet.

“The city of Shoreless Ocean is less than a century old but appears as exotic—and as crowded—as Varanasi or Cal-cutta. We were soon lost in the crush. After pushing through corridors which, as it seemed to me, became narrower and louder and smellier with every turn, it was all I could do to keep up with Blake, and I suspect he became somewhat ex-asperated with me. He hailed a pedicab and whispered something to the rangy boy who drove it. Blake pushed my bags into it, then me, and said he would meet me where the cab let me off; I need say nothing to the driver, for the fare had already been arranged.

‘The cab took me through corridors which grew rapidly less crowded as we moved away from the commercial and residential quarters of the city. A final long run down a dim, cold tunnel—whose walls, seen through bundles of shining pipe, were slick with ice—brought me to my destination, a plain plastic door in a plain plastic wall with a single caged red light burning above it. There was nothing to indicate what sort of place this might be, except that it had some industrial purpose. As soon as I got myself and my luggage out of the cab the boy pedaled away, blowing his breath in clouds before him, anxious to be out of the cold.

“I shivered alone for several minutes, peering about me at the vast steel manifolds that formed the ceiling and walls of the ill-lit tunnel. Finally the door opened.

“Blake had brought me a heavy parka. Once I was dressed for the cold he led me inside the plant, along clacking plastic-mesh catwalks and up ladders, through other doors, other rooms. Pressure hatches and sealed doorways warned of possible vacuum, but our route had been fully pressurized.

“Through a little hatch we entered a huge drainpipe of shiny metal, titanium alloy by the look of it, and climbing up I found that we were in a cavernous space, bizarrely sculpted into what seemed like a great curving watercourse of black ice. I was reminded of the dripping ice caves that feed streams running beneath glaciers, like those I entered on the alpine treks of my youth, or of a polished limestone cave, the bed of an underground river. Unlike a glacial cave, these ice walls did not radiate the brilliant blue of filtered sunlight, nor did their frozen surfaces reflect the warmth of smooth limestone, but instead absorbed all the light that fell upon them, sucking it into their colorless depths.

“We clambered over the scalloped edges of a frozen waterfall into a bell-shaped hall, and suddenly I understood that the cavern had not been carved out by running water, but by fire and superheated steam. We were inside the thrust-deflection chamber of a surface launch facility. Its walls, fantastically swashed by repeated bursts of exploding gases, were draped in veils and curtains of transparent ice.

“High above us the pressure dome was sealed, trapping air and cutting off any view of the bright stars and moons and the disk of Jupiter. Inside the dome, lowering over our heads like a stormcloud made of steel, was a Jovian tug. The vessel squatted on sturdy struts and was webbed about with gantries, but what commanded my gaze were the triple nozzles of the main rocket engines and the three bulging spherical fuel tanks clustered around them.

“Beneath this intimation of the refiner’s fire—this sword of Damocles poised to flash downward—stood Professor J. Q. R. Forster and his crew, bundled against the cold. Over titanium deflection scoops a scaffold of carbon struts and planks had been erected; tool benches and racks of elec-tronics stood about, and someone had draped a large hardcopy schematic over a lathe. As Blake brought me into their midst, Forster and his people were bent over this diagram in spirited discussion, like a Shakespearean king and his lords debating their battle plan.

“Forster turned on me almost fiercely—but I quickly re-alized he was displaying a smile, not a grimace. I was fa-miliar with holos of him, of course, but since Kip had thought it wise to keep us from meeting before this moment, I was unprepared for the man’s energy. He has the face and body of a thirty-fiveyear-old, a man in his prime—a result of the restoration they did on him after Merck’s attempt on his life —but I venture that his authority stems mainly from the experience gained whipping several decades’ worth of graduate students into line.

“He introduced me to his crew as if each were a mythic hero: Josepha Walsh, pilot, an unruffled young woman sec-onded from the Space Board; Angus McNeil, engineer, a shrewd and portly fellow who studied me as if reading gauges inside my head; Tony Groves, the dark little navi-gator who had steered Springer to his brief, glorious ren-dezvous with Pluto. I solemnly shook hands with them all. All of them are as well known in their own circles as Forster in his—and none of them is Asian—and therefore all are sentenced to shiver in hiding so long as Forster wishes to avoid the press.

“Indeed, when I remarked on the tortuous paths through which Blake had led me to reach him and asked why he didn’t simply place himself under the protection of the Board of Space Control, Forster told me that the launch pad we stood in was actually inside the Board’s surface perim-eter, but that he did not wish his connection with the Board generally known. It was enough that he and he alone had been granted a permit to explore Amalthea, and that the Space Board were still honoring it despite the subsequent spectacular events there. Professor Forster left many things unsaid, but it was clear to me that —with the possible ex-ception of you, Kip—he trusts no one in the bureaucracy. We broke off then, deferring a deeper conversation until later.”

Jozsef paused in his narrative. Ari leaned forward to pour more tea for the three of them. Jozsef sipped thoughtfully, then continued.

“Forster’s camp inside the ice cave resembled that of a military expedition preparing for battle. The pit was piled high with supplies and equipment—food, gas bottles, instru-ments, fuel tanks—most of it intended for an unmounted strap-on cargo hold, still at ground level and split open like an empty sardine tin. Blake showed me where I was to stay: it was a foam hut built against the wall of the blast chamber, quite warm inside despite its primitive appearance. Not long afterward the work lights dimmed, indicating the approach of night.
“In the largest temporary shelter, the quartermaster’s hut, I joined the little group for a European-style dinner, ac-cented by selections from Professor Forster’s excellent store of wines—and quickly learned to appreciate Walsh’s wry wit, Groves’s penchant for debate (learning that I was a psy-chologist, he was eager to take me on about the latest the-ories of the unconscious, of which he knew very little—but still more than I, since you and I gave the subject up as hopeless, Ari, twenty years ago), and McNeil’s astounding store of salacious gossip (the man may be a noted engineer, but he has the tastes and narrative gifts of a Boccaccio).

“After dinner, Forster and I went alone to his hut. There, after I had sworn him to secrecy—over glasses of his superb Napoleon brandy—I brought out the holo projector and re-vealed to him what we had prepared: the distillation of the Knowledge.

“He watched without comment. He has had a lifetime’s practice defending his academic priority. Nevertheless, he showed less surprise than I might have expected; he told me that he had had glimmerings of the truth as long ago as the discovery of the Martian plaque—long before he had managed to decipher its meaning, long before it was possible to know anything at all about its makers, which he himself had first dubbed Culture X.

“The conventional theory—intentionally promulgated, as we know, by the Free Spirit—was that Culture X had evolved on Mars and had died out a billion years ago, when the brief Martian summer ended. Forster’s ideas were different, and far more ambitious: he was convinced that Culture X had entered the solar system from interstellar space. The fact that no one else believed this annoyed him, though not very much, for he is one of those people who seem happiest when in the minority.

“When he learned that an Ishtar Mining Corporation ro-bot had stumbled into an alien cache on Venus, with great energy and dedication he organized an expedition to ex-plore and if possible retrieve the finds. Although his mission was cut short and the material artifacts still rest buried on Venus, he came back with the records”—Jozsef paused and allowed himself a small smile—“I’m retelling these events as I think he views them—at any rate, less than a year elapsed before he proved that the Venusian tablets were translations of texts dating from Earth’s Bronze Age. He was now convinced that representatives of Culture X had visited all the inner planets, had perhaps tried to colonize them.

“Shortly thereafter he was able to apply his translation of the Venusian tablets to a reading of the Martian plaque, with its references to ‘cloud-dwelling messengers’ and a ‘reawakening at the great world.’ Thus through his own research he skipped over millenniums of our hoarded secrecy, arriving instantly at a very substantial part of the Knowl-edge.

“But logic suggested to him—and
Kon-Tiki
later proved—that the clouds of Jupiter, the ‘great world,’ could hide no creatures capable of having fabricated the material of which the Venusian tablets and the Martian plaque were made, much less of doing the great deeds the plaque commemo-rates. And decades of onsite exploration of Jupiter’s sat-ellites had uncovered no trace of a past alien presence. “Despite this, Professor Forster told me, a single clue convinced him that a more thorough search of one of Ju-piter’s moon was justified: it had long been observed that Amalthea radiated almost one third more energy into space than it absorbed from the sun and Jupiter together. It had been assumed that bombardment from Jupiter’s intense ra-diation belts made up the deficit, but Forster looked up the records and noted that, when the radiation flux had been accounted for, a discrepancy at radio wavelengths re-mained—duly noted by planetary scientists but small enough to be ignored as uninteresting, much as the preces-sion of the orbit of Mercury was considered a minor anom-aly, not a threat to Newton, until Einstein’s theory of gravitation retroactively yielded its precise quantitative value two centuries later.

“Then the medusas of Jupiter sang their song, and Amal-thea erupted. With characteristic spirit, Forster insisted upon pressing ahead with his exploration as already planned and approved, without announcing any design changes that might require bureaucratic meddling. He did make some design changes en route to Ganymede, however, and when I met with him three weeks ago, he and his crew were beginning to implement them—clandestinely.

“What I had to tell him confirmed the correctness of his vision and underscored the need for the changes he had already made in his mission plan. But of course, the Knowl-edge implies more. . . .”

 

Ari could not contain her distress. “It implies that any attempt to proceed without Linda will meet with disaster.”

 

“So I told Professor Forster, and he did not deny the force of the evidence,” Jozsef replied quietly. “Nevertheless he is determined to go ahead, with or without her.”

“Then he—and all of them, Blake Redfield with them—are doomed to death and worse. He must be stopped . . . that was why you went to Ganymede, Jozsef! Why did you so easily allow him to dissuade you?” But Jozsef returned her demanding stare with nothing better than soft-eyed resig-nation. “Kip— you can stop him,” she said.