Benford, Gregory - In the Ocean on Night

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IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT

GREGORY BENFORD

e-book ver.1.0

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. and of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Portions of this work first appeared in substantially different versions in the following publications: Worlds of If, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and i

Threads of Time, an anthology edited by Robert Silverberg.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-87161

ISBN 0-553-26578-4

To Joan who knows what it means

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T. S. Eliot

1999

From The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17th Edition, 2073: Icarus

Minor planet 1566. Had the most eccentric elliptic orbit of all the known asteroids (e = 0.83), the smallest semimaj

axis (a = 1.08) and passed closest to the sun (28,000,000 kilometers). It was discovered by Walter Baade of Mt.

Palomar Observatory in 1949. Its orbit extended from beyond Mars's to within Mercury's; it could approach to wit

6,400,000 kilometers of the Earth. Radar observations showed it to have a diameter of about 0.8 kilometer and a

rotation period of about 2.5 hours. The unusual orbit attracted only minor interest until June 1997, when Icarus

suddenly began emitting a plume of gas and dust. Since it was presumably a typical rocky Apollo asteroid, this

evolution into a cometary object excited the astronomical world. The oddity became of intense concern when

calculations in October 1997 showed that the momentum transferred to the escaping cometary tail was altering the

orbit of Icarus. This orbital perturbation could, within a few years, cause a portion of the comet to collide with the

Earth. Impact of the tenuous gas would be harmless. But the head of the comet Icarus was by then obscured, and s

conjectured that a solid core could remain, in which case . . .

Icarus

In Greek legend, the son of Daedalus. After Daedalus, an architect and sculptor, built the labyrinth for King Minos

Crete, he fell out of favor with the king. He fashioned wings of wax and feathers for himself and Icarus, and escap

to Sicily. Icarus, however, flew too near the sun and his wings melted; he fell into the sea and drowned. The island

which his body was washed ashore was later named Icaria. The legend is often invoked as a symbol of man's quest

knowledge and fresh horizons, whatever the cost. Icarus was invoked in van Hovens masterwork, Icarus Descendi

(1997), as an emblem for the decline of Western cultural eminence . . .

ONE

He found the flying mountain by its shadow.

Ahead the sun was dimmed by a swirling film of dust, and Nigel first saw Icarus at the tip of a lancing finger of shadow

the clouds.

"The core is here," he said over the radio. "It's solid."

"You're sure?" Len replied. His voice, filtered by sputtering radio noise, was thin and distant, though the Dragon module

waited only a thousand kilometers away.

"Yes. Something bloody big is casting a shadow through the dust and coma."

"Let me talk to Houston. Back in a sec, boy-o."

A humming blunted the silence. Nigel's mouth felt soft, full of cotton: the thick-tongued sensation of mingled fear and

excitement. He nudged his module toward the cone of shadow that pointed directly ahead, sunward, and adjusted attitude

control. A pebble rattled against the aftersection.

He entered the cone of shadow. The sun paled and then flickered as, ahead, a growing dot passed across its face. Nigel

drifted, awash in yellow. Corona streamed and shimmered around a hard nugget of black: Icarus. He was the first man to s

the asteroid in over two years. To observers on Earth its newborn cloak of thick dust and gas hid this solid center.

"Nigel," Len said quickly, "how fast are you closing?"

"Hard to say." The nugget had grown to the size of a nickel held at arms length. "I'm moving to the side, out of the shado

just in case it comes up too fast." Two stones rapped hollowly on the hull; the dust seemed thicker here, random fragments

bled from Icarus to make the Flare Tail.

"Yeah, Houston just suggested that. Any magnetic field reading?"

"Not—wait, I've just picked up some. Maybe, oh, a tenth of a gauss."

"Uh oh. I'd better tell them."

"Right." His stomach clenched slightly. Here we go, he thought.

The black coin grew; he slipped the module further away from the edge of the disk, for safety margin. A quick burst of t

steering jets slowed him. He studied the irregular rim of Icarus through the small telescope, but the blazing white sun wash

out any detail. He felt his heart thumping sluggishly in the closeness of his suit.

A click, some static. "This is Dave Fowles at Houston, Nigel, patching through Dragon. Congratulations on your visual

acquisition. We want to verify this magnetic field strength—can you transmit the automatic log?"

"Roger," Nigel said. Conversations with Houston lagged; the time delay was several seconds, even at the light-speed of r

waves. He flipped switches; there was a sharp beep. "Done."

The edge of the disk rushed at him. "I'm going around it, Len. Might lose you for a while."

"Okay."

He swept over the sharp twilight line and into full sunlight. Below was a burnt cinder of a world. Small bumps and shall

valleys threw low shadows and everywhere the rock was a brownish black. Its highly elliptical orbit had grilled Icarus as

though on a spit, taking it yearly twice as close to the sun as Mercury.

Nigel matched velocities with the tumbling rock and activated a series of automatic experiments. Panel lights winked an

low rhythm of activity sounded through the cramped cabin, Icarus turned slowly in the arc light-white sun, looking bleak a

rough . . . and not at all like the bearer of death to millions of people.

"Can you hear me, Nigel?" Len said.

"Right."

"I'm out of your radio shadow now. What's she look like?"

"Stony, maybe some nickel-iron. No signs of snow or conglomerate structures."

"No wonder, its been baked for billions of years."

"Then where did the cometary tail come from? Why the Flare?"

"An outcropping of ice got exposed, or maybe a vent opened to the surface—you know what they told us. Whatever the

was, maybe it's all been evaporated by now. Been two years, that should be enough."

"Looks like it's rotating—ummm, let me check—about every two hours."

"Uh huh," Len said. "That cinches it."

"Anything less than solid rock couldn't support that much centrifugal force, right?"

"That's what they say. Maybe Icarus is the nucleus of a used-up comet and maybe not—it's rock, and that's all we care a

right now."

Nigel's mouth tasted bitter; he drank some water, sloshing it between his teeth.

"Its knocking on one kilometer across, roughly spherical, not much surface detail," he said slowly. "No clear cratering, b

there are some shallow circular depressions. I don't know, it could be that the cycle of heating and cooling as it passes near

sun is an effective erosion mechanism."

He said all this automatically, trying to ignore the slight depression he felt. Nigel had hoped Icarus would turn out to be

icy conglomerate instead of a rock, even though he knew the indirect evidence was heavily against it. Along with a few of

astrophysicists, he hoped the Flare Tail of 1997—a bright orange coma twenty million miles long that twisted and danced

lit the night sky of Earth for three months—had signaled the end of Icarus. No telescope, including the orbiting Skylab X t

had been able to penetrate the cloud of dust and gas that billowed out and obscured the spot where the asteroid Icarus had

been. One school of thought held that a rocky shell had been eroded by the eternal fine spray of particles from the sun— th

solar wind—and a remaining core of ice had suddenly boiled away, making the Flare Tail. Thus, no core remained. But a

majority of astronomers felt it unlikely that ice should be at the center of Icarus; probably, most of the rocky asteroid was l

somewhere in the dust cloud.

NASA hoped the controversy would stimulate funding for an Icarus flyby. The Agency, ever press-conscious, needed

support. It had come a long way from the dark days of 1986, when the explosion of the Challenger had begun a fundament

shift in Agency thinking. NASA went on to develop the transats—trans-atmospheric rocket-airplane combinations that fle

good piece of the way to the upper atmosphere, then boosted into orbit on rocket thrust—but it had been badly mauled. As

soon as it could, it edged away from the milk-run, commercial and military business of carrying tonnage into orbit. NASA

trying to become a primarily scientific agency now.

Icarus seemed a pleasantly distant spectacle. Its sudden, bright, fan-shaped coma was larger and prettier than Halleys

Cornet's rather disappointing apparition in 1985. The Los Angeles Times dubbed it "the instant comet." People could see it,

even through suburban smog. It made news.

But in the winter of 1997, the question of Icaruss composition became more than a passing, academic point. The jet of g

spurting from the head of what was now Comet Icarus seemed to have deflected it. The dust cloud was moving sidewise

slightly as it followed Icaruss old orbit, and it was natural to assume that if a core remained, it was somewhere near the ce

of the drifting cloud. The deflection was slight. Precise measurements were difficult and some uncertainty remained. But it

was clear that by mid-1999 the center of the cloud and whatever remained of Icarus would collide with the Earth.

"Len, hows it look from your end?" Nigel said. "Pretty dull. Can't see much for the dust. The sun's a kind of watery colo

looking through the cloud. I'm off to the side pretty far, to separate your radio and radar image from the sun's."

"Where am I?"

"Right on the money, in the center of the dust. On your way to Bengal."

"Hope not."

"Yeah. Hey—getting a relay from Houston for you." A moments humming silence as the black pitted world turned bene

him. Nigel wondered whether it was made of the original ancient material that formed the solar system, as the astrophysici

said, or the center of a shattered planet, as the popular media trumpeted. He had hoped it would be a snowball of methane

water ice that would break up when it hit Earths atmosphere—perhaps filling the sky with blue and orange jets of light and

spreading an aurora around the globe, but doing no damage. He stared down at the cinder world that had betrayed his hope

being so substantial, so deadly. The automatic cameras clicked methodically, mapping its random bumps and depressions;

cabin smelled of hot metal and the sour tang of sweat. No leisurely strolling and hole-boring expeditions with Len, now; n

measurements; no samples to chip away; no time.

"Dave again, Nigel. Those magnetic field strengths sew it up, boy—it's nickel-iron, probably eighty percent pure or bette

From the dimensions we calculate the rock masses around four billion kilograms."

"Right."

"Lens radar fixes have helped us narrow down the orbit, too. That ball of rock you're looking at is coming down in the

middle of India, just like we thought. I-—"

"You want us to go into the retail poultry business," Nigel said.

"Yeah. Deliver the Egg."

Nigel lit a panel of systems monitors. "Bringing the Egg out of powered-down operation," he said mechanically, watchi

the lights sequence.

"Good luck, boy," Len broke in. "Better look for a place to plant it. We've got plenty of time. Holler if you need help," h

said, even though they both knew full well he could not bring the Dragon module into the cloud without temporarily losin

most communications with Houston.

Nigel passed an hour in the time-filling tasks of awakening the fifty-megaton fusion device that rode a few yards behind

cabin. He repeated the jargon—redundancy checks, safe-arm mode, profile verification—without taking his attention fully

from the charred expanse below. Toward the end of the time he caught sight of what he had anticipated: a jagged cleft at t

dawn edge of Icarus.

"I think I've found the vent," he called. "About as long as a soccer field, perhaps ten meters wide in places."

"A fracture?" Len said. "Maybe the things coming apart."

"Could be. It will be interesting to see if there are more, and whether they form a pattern."

"How deep is it?"

"I can't tell yet; the bottom is in shadow now."

"If you have the time—wait, Houston wants to patch through to you again."

A pause, then: "We've been very happy with the relayed telemetry from you, Nigel. Looks to us here in Control as thoug

the Egg is ready to fly."

"Has to be hatched before it can fly."

"Right, boy, got me on that one," Dave said with sudden exuberant levity.

A pause, then Daves tones became rounded, modulated. "You know, I wish you could see the Three-D coverage of the

crowds around the installation here, Nigel. Traffic is blocked for a twenty-kilometer radius. There are people everywhere.

think this has caught the imagination of all humanity, Nigel, a noble attempt—"

He wondered if Dave knew how all this sounded. Well, the man probably did; every astronaut a member of Actors Equit

He grimaced when, a moment later, the smooth voice described the sweaty press of bodies around NASA Houston, the h

strokes suffered and babies delivered in the waiting crowds, the roiling prayer chains of New Sons, their nighttime vigils

around bonfires of licking, oily flames. The man was good, no possible qualm over that; the millions of eavesdroppers tho

they were listening to the straight stuff, an open line between Houston and Icarus meant for serious business, when in fact

conversation at Daves end was elaborately staged and mannered.

"Anybody you'd like to talk to back here on Earth, Nigel, while you're taking your break?"

He replied that no, there was no one, he wanted to watch Icarus as it turned, study the vent. While, simultaneously, he sa

his mind's eye his parents in their cluttered apartment, wanted to speak to them, felt the halting, ineffectual way he had trie

explain to them why he was doing this thing.

They still lived in that dear dead world where space equaled research equaled dispassionate truth. They knew he had trai

for programs that never materialized. He'd put in time in orbit as a glorified mechanic, and that had seemed quite all right.

But this. They couldn't understand how he'd come to take a mission which promised nothing but the chance to plant a bo

if he succeeded, and death if he failed. A scrambled, jury-rigged, balls-up of a mission with sixty percent chance of failure;

the systems analysts said.

They had emigrated from England, following their son when he was selected for the US-European program, hard on his

year at Cambridge. As an all-purpose scientist he'd seemed trainable, in good condition (squash, soccer, amateur pilot),

agreeable, docile (after all, he was British, happy to have any sort of career at all) and presentable. When he showed superi

reflexes, did well in flight training and was accepted into the aborted Mars program, his parents felt vindicated, their sacrif

redeemed.

He would lead in the new era of moon exploration, they thought. Justify their flight from a sleepy, comfy England into t

technicolor technocrats circus. So when the Icarus thing came, they'd asked: Why risk his Cambridge years, his astronautic

the high vacuum between Venus and Earth?

And he'd said—?

Nothing, really. He had sat in their Boston rocker, pumping impatiently, and spoken of work, plans, relatives, the Secon

Depression, politics. Of their arguments he remembered little, only the blurred cadences of their voices. In memory his par

blended together into one person, one slow Suffolk accent he recalled as filling his adolescence. His own voice could neve

slide into those smooth vowels; he could never be them. They were a separate entity and, no matter that he was their son, h

was beyond some unspoken perimeter they drew in their lives. Within that curve was certainty, clear forms. Their living ro

had pockets of air in it, spots smelling of sweet tea or musty bindings or potted flowers, things more substantial than his w

There in their damp old house his jittery, crowded world fell away and he, too, found it difficult to believe in the masses of

people who jammed into the cities, fouling the world and blunting, spongelike, the best that anyone could do or plan for th

There was precious little money for research, for new ideas, for dreams. But his parents did not sense that fact. His fathe

shook his head a millimeter to each side, listening as Nigel talked, the older man probably not aware that he gave away his

reaction. When Nigel was through describing the Icarus mission plan, his father had cast one of those unreadable looks at

mother and then very calmly advised Nigel to sign off the mission, to wait for something better. Surely something would c

along. Surely, yes. From inside their perimeter they saw it very clearly. He had given them no daughter-in-law as yet, no

grandchildren, had spent little time at home these past years. All this hovered unspoken behind his fathers millimeter sway

and Nigel promised himself that when Icarus was over and done he would see more of them.

His father, obviously well read up on the matter, mentioned the unmanned backup missions. Robot probes, ready with a

series of nuclear shoves. Why couldn't Houston rely on them alone? A matter of probabilities, Nigel explained, glad to be

factual ground. But he knew, despite the committee reports, that the odds were cloudy. Perhaps a man was better, but who

sure? Even if only men could ferret out the core of Icarus, amid all that dust, why should it be Nigel? Easy answers: youth,

reflexes; and, finally, because there weren't all that many trained men left. Nigel mentioned not a word of this as he pumpe

the rocker, drank tea, murmured into the layered still air of the old house. He was going, one way or another. They knew it

And that last evening ended in silence.

On the airplane back to the anthill of Houston, he took up the one volume that he'd noticed in his old bedroom bookcase,

brought along on an impulse. The yellowed hardback was cracked, the pages stiff and stained by the accidents of adolesce

He remembered reading it shortly after applying for the US-European program, to get a feel for the Americans. He paged

through remembered scenes and near the end came upon the one passage he had involuntarily memorized,

And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le's all three slide out of here one of these

nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for

couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me . . .

Sitting in the contoured airplane seat, he felt more like Huck Finn than the calculating European others thought him to b

Dave Fowless voice broke in.

"We have a recalculation of the impact damage, Nigel. Looks pretty bad."

"Oh?"

"Two point six million people dead. Peripheral damage for four hundred kilometers around the impact site. No major In

cities hit, but hundreds of villages—"

"How is that famine going?"

He sighed. "Worse than we expected. I guess as soon as word filtered down that Icarus might hit, all those dirt farmers le

their crops and started preparing for the afterlife. That just aggravated the famine. The UN thinks there'll be several millio

dead inside six months, even with our airlifts, and our sociometricians agree."

"And that movement out of the impact area?"

"Bad. They just give up and won't walk a step, Herb said. It must be their religion or something. I don't understand it, I r

don't.

Nigel thought, and something came to an edge in him.

"Dave, I have an idea."

"Sure, we just went off open channel, Nigel, the networks aren't getting this. Shoot."

"I'm going to plant the Egg after this rest period, aren't I? This thing is solid metal ore, the magnetic field proves that. No

point in waiting."

"Correct. The Mission Commander just gave me confirmation on that. We have you scheduled to begin descent in about

thirteen minutes."

"Okay. This is it: I want to put the Egg in that vent I've found. It's a long, irregular fissure. The Egg will give us a better

momentum transfer if it goes off in a hole, and this one looks pretty deep."

A whisper of static marked the line. Some tiny facet of Icarus gave him a quick white flash and vanished; he ached to se

out, take a sample. He felt himself suspended beneath the white sun.

"How deep do you estimate?" Daves voice was guarded.

"I've been watching the shadows move as the vent rotates into the sun. I think its floor must be forty meters down, at lea

That'll give us a good kick from the Egg. I can take some interesting specimens out of there at the same time," he finished

lamely.

"Let you know in a minute."

Len broke the wait that followed. "Think you can handle that? Securing that thing might get tricky if there's not enough

room."

"If I can't get it down to the bottom I'll leave it hanging. The Egg won't weigh even a kilo on the surface, I can simply ha

to the fissure wall like a painting."

"Right. Hope they buy it."

And then the carrier from Houston came in.

"We authorize touchdown near the edge. If the vent is wide enough—"

He was already readying his board.

TWO

It was a world of straight lines, no serene parabolas. He brought his module—cylindrical, thin radial spokes for stability,

insect profile ending in a globular pouch that was the Egg—in slowly, watching his radar screen. It was difficult to sense i

this pebble of a world below him the potential to open a crater in the Earth forty kilometers across. It seemed sluggish, ine

"Sure you don't need any help?" Len called.

Nigel smiled and his tanned face crinkled. "You know Houston won't let us get out of contact. The Dragon's high gain

antenna might not work in all this dust, and—"

"I know," Len said, "and if we were both on the sunward side of Icarus, Earth would be in my radio shadow. Fine. Just l

me know if—"

"Certainly. "

"Get'em, boy-o."

The textured surface grew. He flew toward the dawn line and the small pocks and angles became clearer. Steering rocket

murmured at his back. He concentrated on distance and relative velocities, and upon speeding up the automatic cameras, u

he was hovering directly above the vent. He rotated the module to gain a better view and inched closer.

"It's deeper than I thought. I can see fifty meters in and the mouth is quite wide."

"Sounds encouraging," Dave said.

Without waiting for further word, he took the module down to the top of the vent. Blasted stone rose toward him, brown

discolored into black where minute traces of gas had been baked away.

His headphones sputtered and crackled. "I'm losing your telemetry," Lens voice came.

Nigel brought the module to a dead stop. "Look, Len, I can't go further in without the rock screening you out."

"We can't break contact."

"Well—"

"Maybe I should move in."

"No, stay outside the dust. Move sunward and behind me—there'll still be a cone of good reception."

"Okay, I'm off."

"Listen, you guys," Dave said, "if you're having trouble with this maybe we should just for—" Nigel switched him off.

Minutes were being eaten away.

He rotated the module to get a full set of photographs.

Icarus was a bumpy, round hill that sloped away wherever he looked. Burnished mounds and clefts made a miniature

geography, seeming larger than they were as the eye tried to fit them into a familiar perspective. He glanced at the clock. It

been long enough; he flipped a switch and the burr of static returned.

"How's it going, Len?" he said.

"Hey, having transmission trouble? I lost you there for a minute."

"Had some thinking to do."

"Oh. Dave says they're having second thoughts back there."

"I guessed as much. But then, they're not here, are they?"

Len chuckled. "I guess not."

"How far around are you? Ready for me to go in?"

"Almost. Take a few more minutes. What's it like down there?"

"Pretty bleak. I wonder why Icarus is so close to spherical? I expected something jagged."

"Can't be gravitational forces."

"No, there's not enough to hold down even gravel— everything is bald, there's no debris around at all."

"Maybe solar erosion has rounded the whole asteroid off."

"I'm going in," Nigel said abruptly.

"Okay, I guess I can track you from here." The rotation of Icarus had brought the left wall closer. He nudged the craft ba

to center, remembering the first time he had learned in some forgotten science text that the Earth rotated. For weeks he had

been convinced that whenever he fell down, it was because the Earth had moved beneath him without his noticing. He had

thought it a wonderful fact, that everyone was able to stand up when the Earth was obviously trying to knock them down.

He smiled and took the craft in.

Jaws of stone yawned around him. Random fragments of something like mica glinted from the seared rocks. Nigel stopp

about halfway down and tilted his spotlights up to see the underhang of a shelf; it was rough, brownish. He glided toward t

vent wall and extended a waldoe claw. Its teeth bit neatly with a dull snap and brought back a few pounds of desiccated ru

Len called; Nigel answered with monosyllables. He nudged the module downward again, moving carefully in the shadowe

silence. He used a carrier pouch on the crafts skin to store the sample, and added more clawfuls of rock to other pouches.

He was nearly to the bottom before he noticed it.

The pitted floor was a jumble of rocks that rose from pools of ink. Nigel could not make out detail; he turned his spotlig

downward.

A deep crack ran down the center of the rough floor. It was perhaps five meters wide and utterly black.

At irregular intervals things protruded from the crack, angular things that were charred and blunted. Some gave sparklin

reflections, as though partially fused and melted.

Nigel glided closer.

One of the objects was a long convoluted band on a coppery metal that described an intricate, folded weave of spirals.

He sat in the stillness and looked at it. Time passed.

Ten meters away a crumpled form that had been square was jammed in the crack, as though it had been partly forced out

a great wind. There were others; he photographed them.

Len had been calling for some time.

When he was through Nigel pressed a button to transmit and said, "We're going to have to recalculate, Len. Icarus isn't a

lump of ice or a rock or anything else. I think"—he paused, still not quite believing it—"it has to be a ship."

THREE

It took Houston an hour to agree that he had to leave the module. Both he and Len had to argue with a Project Director

thought they had wasted too much time already; the man obviously didn't believe anything they reported, thinking it a coc

and-bull story designed to give Nigel more time for sample collecting. Len could only barely be restrained from coming in

the cloud himself and only the necessity for reevaluating the mission stopped him.

Even after agreeing, Houston demanded a price. The Egg had to be secured to the vent floor first. This could be done

without Nigel's leaving the module and, rather than argue, he moved quickly and efficiently to make short work of it.

The Egg was a dull gray sphere with securing bolts sunk into its skin. Nigel maneuvered it near the dark fissure wall and

fired the bolts that freed it. The sphere coasted free.

Before it could glide very far he shot the aft securing bolts and they arced across the space to the wall and buried themse

in the stone. Steel cables reeled in and pulled the Egg to the rock face. Nothing could move it now and only Len or Nigel c

detonate its fifty megatons.

Nigel ate before he left the module. Houston was divided about contingency plans; Dave gave him a summary to which

half listened. He and Len had another twenty-two hours' margin of air, and some changes could be made in their braking o

back to Earth.

The two unmanned backup missions were being stepped up, but they looked less promising now. The radar sensing mod

had to close on Icarus at high velocity, and the dust and pebbles inside the cloud, impacting at those speeds, could disable t

warheads before they searched out Icarus itself.

"Popping the cover," Nigel called, and switched over to suit radio. The hatch came free with a hollow bang. He inched

gingerly out, went hand over hand down the modules securing line, and stood at last on Icarus.

"The surface crunches a little under my feet," he said, knowing Len would pester him with questions if he didn't keep up

steady stream of commentary. They had both ridden in a small, sweaty cabin for five weeks to intercept Icarus, and now L

was missing a payoff larger than anything they had dreamed. "It must be something like cinder. Dried out. That's the way i

looks, anyway."

A pause.

"I'm at the edge of the crack. Its about two meters across here, and the sides are pretty smooth. I'm hanging over it now,

looking in. The walls go on for about four meters and then there's nothing but black. My lights can't pick up anything beyo

that."

"Maybe there's a hole in there," Len said.

"Could be."

Before Dave could break in, Nigel added, "I'm going inside," and caught a lip of rock to pull himself into the crack.

As the rock fell away behind him there was only a faint glimmering reflection ahead. A white rectangle loomed up as he

coasted on. It seemed to be set into the side of some larger slab, flush against the rock on one end and at least a hundred m

on a side. There were odd-shaped openings in it, some with curlicues and grainy stone collars like raised parentheses. Nige

lost his bearings as he approached and had to spin his arms to bring his feet around. There was a faint ring as he landed.

The white material had the dull luster of metal. Nigel used a cutting tool to gouge out a sliver. Nearby, a contorted thing

red and green appeared to grow smoothly out of the white metal, with no seam. To Nigel it looked like an abstract sculptur

When he touched it there was a faint tremor in his fingers; an arm of it moved infinitesimally, then was still. Nothing more

happened.

He moved on, examined other objects, then shone a light down one of the holes in the face. The opening was a large ova

and in the distance he could see where other dark corridors intersected it.

He went in.

A long tube of chipped rock. He took a sample. Volcanic origin? Something strange about its grainy flecks.

A vault. Gray walls, flash-burned brown.

Coasting.

Stretched lines shaping up . . . through . . . an eager bunching into swells. Should he go further? Beneath his torch light

shadows swung with each motion of his arm, like eyes following every movement. Rippling patterns.

Patterns.

In the walls?

Should he? Behind each smile, teeth await.

Down, down now. Level. Gliding. Legs dangling

dangling

soft

something like a cushion but he sees nothing, only the shadows now melting something. hot

then cold old

drawing him down again, telescoping him into fresh cubes of space, all aslant, a spherical room now, glowing red where

torch touches or is that a trick of the eyes?—he has difficulty focusing, probably loss of local vertical, an old problem in ze

g, just a turn of the head will fix it—

Worn stone steps leading impossibly up, up into a ceiling now crumpled, spattered with orange drops that gleamed like o

his murky light. Nigel remembered abruptly, dimly ... An old film. A film of the Tutankhamun tomb, the jackal god Anubi

rampant above nine defeated foes. Within the Treasury, tossed against a wall near the burial chamber by the necropolis gu

after a robbery, lay a chest. Dried wood. It held the mummified bodies of two stillborn babies, perhaps Tutankhamun's

children, in resins, gums and oils.

* * *

Opening the tomb.

Stepping inside.

And up from the Valley of Kings, from Karnak and Luxor, winding with the Nile to Alexandria, a woman, ancient, wrist

rouged and walking with legs numb in the grip of a gnawing, eating disease—

Nigel shook his head.

The steps were only markings. They led nowhere. He photographed them click whirr and moved on.

The odd humming, again. There was no air in here—how did he hear it? He coasted down a narrowing tube. The hummi

was stronger. Ahead loomed a sphere. It was not connected to the walls. Nigel touched it. It did not move. The humming

increased. He stuck the adhesive webbing on the backs of his gloves to the sphere and used the leverage to swing himself

around it. The space beyond yawned black. His torch licked into it and found nothing. The light simply faded away. Nothi

was reflected back. The humming continued.

He moved to the far face of the sphere and peered into the abyss beyond. Nothing.

Abruptly the humming rose, shrieked, wailed—and stopped.

Nigel blinked, startled. Silence. Around him was a pocket of darkness. The sphere, when he turned to face it, seemed

somehow inert, exhausted.

Nigel frowned. He jetted back to the sphere, worked his way around it and returned through the tunnel the way he had c

searching.

FOUR

Three hours later, when he had exhausted his film cannis-ters and was beginning to tire, he headed back. The network of

corridors was a simple but space-saving web of spherical shells, intricately intersected, and he had no difficulty finding his

way out.

"I'm back in the cabin," he said, sighing with a leaden fatigue.

"My God, where have you been, Nigel? Hours without a peep—I was almost ready to come in after you."

"There was rather a lot to see."

"Houston's patched through—and mad as hell, too—so start talking."

He took them through it all, describing the small rooms with elaborate netting that might have been sleeping quarters, th

places like auditoriums, the ceilings with dancing lights, all the similarities he could find.

And the strangeness: spaces clogged with an infinitely layered green film that did not dissipate into the vacuum around i

but rippled as he passed by; rooms that seemed to change their dimensions as he watched; a place that gave off shrill vibra

he felt through his suit.

"Was there any illumination?" Dave said.

"Nothing I could see."

"We picked up a strong radio pulse several hours ago," Dave said. "We guessed you were trying to transmit from inside.

"No," Nigel said. "I couldn't raise Len or anything else on suit radio, so I packed it in and simply looked about."

"The signal wasn't on our assigned frequencies," Len said.

"We missed recording it—only lasted a second or so, and all our monitoring is in the telemetry bands," Dave

said.

"Never mind," Len said. "Look, Nigel, it's just abandoned in there? No signs of occupants?

Nigel paused. There were things he wanted to tell them, things he had felt. But how could he convey them? Earthside wa

facts.

Nigel had a sudden image of himself blundering hamfisted through those strange stretching corridors. The sphere. That

humming. Had he accidentally triggered something?

"Nigel?"

"I think its been vacant for a long time. There are big open vaults inside, hundreds of meters on a side. Something must

been in them—maybe water or food—"

"Or engines? Fuel?" Len said.

"Could be. Whatever it was, its gone. If it was liquid it probably evaporated when this vent opened."

"Yes," Dave said, "that could be what made the cometary plume, the Flare Tail."

"I think it was. That, and the atmosphere that blew out through the crack. There's a lot of disorder inside—things ripped

the walls, strewn around, some gouges in the corridors that could have been made by things flying by. I picked up some of

smaller stuff lying around and brought it out."

No one said anything for a while. Nigel put a hand to the cabin wall near him, feeling the wholeness of it. He looked out

burnished rock shelf and sensed the problem before him. It was something he could hold in one palm and turn to watch its

facets catch the light, much as he had once seen in his mind Icarus slipping silently toward the Earth at thirty kilometers a

second, himself and Len arcing out to meet the tumbling mountain, administer the kick, race home. That had been a clean

problem with easy solutions, but now it crumpled and fell away from him, replaced by another, darker vision that slowly

formed, coming to clarity in his mind—

Just before he had entered the dust plume, while Len was still in view, Nigel had taken a sighting on prominent stars to f

his inertial gyros. It was a simple process, easily done in the allotted time. Before swinging the telescope away from the po

point of light caught Nigel's eye and he focused on it. It swelled into a disk, blue and white and flat, and he realized that he

looking at Earth. A featureless circle, complete and serene. Alone. A target, unnoticing. Its smooth, certain curve seemed

than a blotch on a star background; no, it was the center. A hole through which light was pouring from the other side of the

universe. Complete. He had looked at it for a long moment.

Through scratchy static, Dave said, "Well, we can give you the time for another trip inside, Nigel. Haul out everything y

can, take some more photos. Then you and Len can rendezvous and get clear of the Egg and—"

"No."

"What?"

"No. We're not going to set off the Egg, are we, Len?"

"Nigel—" Dave started, then paused.

"I don't know," Len said. "What have you got in mind?"

"Don't you see that this changes everything?"

"I wonder," Len said distantly. "We're trying to save millions of lives, Nigel. When Icarus hits its going to wipe out a bi

chunk of territory, throw dirt into the air and probably change the climate. I kind of—"

"But it won't! Now now, anyway. Don't you see, Icarus is hollow. It has only a fraction of the mass we thought it did. Su

it'll make a pretty big blast when it gets to India, but nothing like the disaster we thought."

Len said, "Maybe you've got something there."

"I can estimate the volume of rock left—"

"Nigel, I've been talking to some people here at Houston. We started reevaluating the collision dynamics and trajectory

you found the core was hollow. We'll have the results pretty soon, but until we do I just want to talk to you about this." Da

paused.

"Go ahead."

"Even if the mass of Icarus is a tenth of what we thought, its energy of impact will still be thousands of times larger than

Krakatoa. Think of the people in Bengal."

"What's left of them, you mean, Len said. "The famine cycles have killed millions already, and they've been migrating o

the impact area for over a year now. Since the Indian government broke down nobody knows how many souls we're talkin

about, Dave."

"That's right. But if you don't care about them, Len, think about the dust that will be thrown into the upper atmosphere.

might bring on another Ice Age alone."

Nigel finished chewing on a bar of food concentrate. He felt a curious floating tiredness, his body relaxed and weak. The

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INTHEOCEANOFNIGHTGREGORYBENFORDCopyright©1972,1973,1974,1977byGregoryBenford.e-bookver.1.0Linesfrom"LittleGidding"inFourQuartetsbyT.S.Eliot,copyright©1943byT.S.Eliot;copyright©1971byEsmeValerieEliot.ReprintedbypermissionofHarcourtBraceJovanovichInc.andofFaberandFaberLtd.Portionsofthisworkfirstappear...

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