XVII

“Manta, come in please.”

The Manta had disappeared from the bright screens on the flight deck of the Michael Ventris. The sonar channels gave out nothing but the deep throbbing of the core, un­derscoring the watery sounds the crew had grown used to.

“Professor Forster. Blake. Please respond.” When there was no reply, Josepha Walsh turned to the others and said, almost casually, “We’ve lost them in the thermal turbulence. Not unexpected.” The tension in her voice was barely a notch above business-as-usual.

Tony Groves was sitting in at McNeil’s engineering console; McNeil and Hawkins had come into the flight deck still in their spacesuits, helmets loose, to follow the progress of the Manta on the high resolution screens. They matched the captain’s mood—alert, serious, but not alarmed. They’d heard Blake’s and the professor’s descriptions as they dove, seen the fitfully transmitted images from the old sub, read the sonar data. They knew the core was shielded from their sonar probing, and that at any rate communication with the Manta might be difficult in the vicinity of its boiling sur­face. There seemed no good reason to fear mishap.

“At any rate, the last message was they were coming up. Angus, you and Bill might as well head for the lock; it can’t be long before . . .”

A sudden loud wailing from the radiolink interrupted her.

We are receiving an emergency signal. A space vessel is in distress, the ship’s urgent, dispassionate computer voice announced. Repeat. We are receiving an emergency signal. A space vessel is in distress.

“Acknowledged,” Jo Walsh told the computer. “Vector coordinates on graphics, please.”

The big video screen switched to a map of near space. The distressed craft was seen creeping in from screen left, on a projected course that was bringing it into the lee of Amalthea—where, it appeared, it was on a collision course with the moon.

“I’d give it three hours to get here,” said Groves.

“And who the hell would that be?” demanded McNeil. “Nobody could have got this close without sector I.D.”

“Computer, can you identify the distressed vessel?” Walsh asked calmly.

The vessel is an automated tour capsule, registry AMT 476, Rising Moon Enterprises, Ganymede Base, presently off its pre-set course . . .

“You don’t say,” Groves muttered.

The vessel does not respond to attempted radio contact, said the computer.

“Silly question perhaps, but are we sure it’s occupied?” Blake demanded.

“Computer, can you confirm that the capsule is occu­pied?”

According to manifest the vessel is occupied by two pas­ sengers: Mitchell, Marianne; Mays, Randolph.

McNeil looked at Groves and before he could help himself, he laughed a half-embarrassed laugh. Groves nodded knowingly.

Bill Hawkins looked at him in shocked disapproval. “They’ve been in the radiation belt for hours! In a minimally shielded . . . canister. We’ll be lucky to reach them alive!”

“My apologies,” McNeil said. “But Mays—what an ex­traordinary man! What gall!”

“What the hell are you going on about, McNeil?” Haw­kins yelled at him.

“Later, gentlemen,” said Walsh. “We’ll have to see to them.”

“What do you want to do, Jo?” asked Groves.

“You guys jettison the hold, along with everything loose. I’ll need you with me, Tony, to run the trajectories.”

“All right, but what then?”

“Stripped, this ship’s got the delta-vees to cut a low orbit around Jupiter, match orbits with the capsule, take them aboard. Reach them in under three hours, do another go around, get back into the shadow in maybe another four, with maneuvers—before we take too many rads.”

“We’ve got a duty to a vessel in distress—but we’ve got a duty to the mission as well,” said McNeil reluctantly. “If we use all that fuel to rescue them, we’ll be stranding ourselves here.”

“What the hell are you talking . . . ?” Hawkins interjected again, his clear English skin turning bright red.

“No excuse, Angus,” said Walsh, cutting Hawkins off firmly. “The Space Board will take us off. Before then, a few hours in radiological clean-up should do for us.”

“For us, maybe,” said McNeil, persisting. “What about them?”

Groves said, “He has a point. Add three hours to their exposure, even partially shielded, and they’ll be pushing the limit. We’ve got the delta-vees to do what you suggest, Cap­tain,” Groves added quietly, “but not enough time.”

“We’re wasting what time we’ve got, talking,” Walsh said. She ran her hand through her brush-cut red hair; oth­ers had long ago learned to read this unconscious gesture as her way of displacing anxiety when she needed to con­centrate. “We do it my way unless you’ve got a better idea.”

“One idea, anyway,” said Groves. “That capsule is incom­ing with about three hundred meters per second delta with respect to Amalthea. If it’s as well-aimed as it appears to be . . .”

“Yes?”

“Let it crash.”

“What!” Hawkins was quick to react. “Let them die . . . ?”

“Oh, do be quiet, Hawkins,” Walsh snapped at him. Like the others, she had responded to the navigator’s suggestion with thoughtful silence.

“Listen, Walsh . . . Captain Walsh . . . I insist . . .”

“Hawkins, we’re not going to let them die. Now either keep quiet or leave the flight deck.”

Hawkins finally perceived that the others knew something he didn’t and wanted silence in which to think about it. He shrank back into a corner.

“The sublimed ice is about ten meters deep,” said McNeil. “That will take up some energy.”

“Yes, that’s a plus. Given the snow density—what’s your guess, maybe point four gee-cee?—and their inertia”—Groves was bent over the navigator’s board, tapping keys—“they should experience instantaneous deceleration of . . . oh, about forty gees. We’ll have to look up the specs, but it’s my impression those Moon Cruisers are built to maintain structural integrity well beyond that.”

“And the people inside?” Walsh asked.

“Tied in properly . . . they can survive it.”

“Assuming they’re eyeballs-in,” McNeil added. The en­gineer seemed almost diffident. “Should they have the un­fortunate luck to come in upside down . . .” He left the rest unsaid.

“Right,” said Walsh. “We’d better have a look through the telescope.”

Groves addressed himself to the console, releasing the optical telescope from its tracking function, re-orienting it according to the computer’s coordinates for the incoming capsule. The fuzzy image of the gray tubular capsule with its belt of fuel tanks and its single little rocket motor came up on the big videoplate; at this distance it appeared to be motionless against the limb of Jupiter.

The people on the flight deck studied the image in si­lence.

“Remarkable,” said Jo Walsh.

“Now is that luck? Or is that luck?” asked McNeil.

“I think the answer is no both times,” Groves said dryly.

Hawkins could stand it no more and broke his silence. “What is everyone clucking about?”

McNeil explained. The apparently disabled capsule was oriented so that its rocket engine was perfectly aligned to brake its fall onto Amalthea. Even without the help of a retrorocket, the capsule was in the ideal attitude for a crash landing.

“This looks less like an accident than it did two minutes ago,” Jo Walsh said.

“Talk about party crashers; this Mays fellow takes the cake,” Groves said.

“You mean they planned to land here?” Hawkins said, wiping his blond hair, slick with perspiration, away from his staring eyes.

“Not that it makes much of a practical difference,” said McNeil jovially. “Whether they understand it or not, they’ll have taken damn near a lethal dose of rads by the time they arrive—we’ve no choice but to take them under our wing.”

“All right, Tony, you’ve got your way,” said Walsh. “We’ll let them hit and pick up the pieces later.”

“Let’s just hope they don’t hit on top of us,” Groves said brightly, ever the pixie.

“Now that really would be pushing coincidence into the realm of the supernatural, wouldn’t it?” But Walsh’s riposte landed more heavily than she’d intended—no one laughed.


Three hours passed. The timing was lousy: the disabled capsule was incoming on the sidescreen, the Manta was upcoming on the main screen. But Walsh was a cool head who’d handled many a more complex emergency.

She figured Professor Forster and Blake Redfield could fend for themselves. Hawkins and McNeil were already suited up, standing by to rescue the passengers in the cap­sule when it hit. Groves stayed with her on the flight deck to help her keep track of everything and everybody.

The capsule arrived first.


Silence right to the end, too fast to follow by eye, it arrived in a flash of orange light and a hemispherical cloud of vapor.

“Ouch,” said Tony Groves. Walsh just gave him a look, which they both knew meant, let’s hope you didn’t screw up the calculations.

Within seconds, Hawkins and McNeil were out the Ven­tris’s airlock and jetting over the misty landscape toward the impact site.

“God, they hit fast. Did you see rocket flare?” Hawkins asked, his throat tight. “You think they had time to brake?”

“Too quick for my eyes,” McNeil replied. He was reluc­tant to say that there had been no retrorocket flare. “They could have been lucky. People have survived peak gees of sixty, seventy, even more.” Survived, if you could call it that . . .

The point of impact wasn’t hard to find even by eye, for the crash had blown a huge hole in the mist and, like a giant smoke ring, a rolling donut-shaped cloud of weightless vapor held its shape and position over a shallow crater in the ice. In the exact center of the wide bowl, wreathed in steam, was the capsule, rapidly cooling but still glowing from impact.

“Are you all right in there?” Hawkins was shouting into his suitcomm, as if they could somehow hear him better the closer he got and the louder he yelled. “Marianne, can you hear me? Mays?” He flew like an arrow toward the upright capsule.

“Careful, don’t touch it until the temperature’s manageable,” said McNeil. “You’ll burn your gloves off.”

“Wha . . . oh.” Hawkins drew back just in time. “They could be dying in there!”

“Get hold of yourself, Bill. If you blow the hatch and they haven’t got suit pressure, you’ll finish them.”

In his frustration, Hawkins hovered beside the steaming capsule and banged on its hatch with the butt of the heavy laser drill he’d brought along. The suitcomm brought them no sign of life inside.

Walsh’s voice sounded in their helmets. “What’s the sit­uation there, Angus?”

“The capsule seems to be intact, but we haven’t estab­lished contact with the people inside.”

“What do we do?” Bill Hawkins cried in anguish.

“Dump the rocket and tanks and bring the whole thing back to the Ventris and shove it into the equipment bay,” Walsh ordered.

By now the Moon Cruiser had cooled to black and the mist was rising. McNeil showed Hawkins how to trip the latches that fastened the strap-on fuel tanks and rocket mo­tor to the capsule; they kept their distance as the explosive bolts blew the propulsion rig loose.

Even with their suit maneuvering rockets on full, it took several seconds before the two men could get the big can­ister to move. Their helmet beams sent odd shafts through the fog as McNeil and Hawkins grappled with it; finally it rose reluctantly from the steaming fumarole it had blasted in the middle of the ice.

The strange flying assemblage, two white-suited astro­nauts holding a burned and blackened wreck between them, came through the mist like something from a ruined Ba­roque ceiling, a mockery of apotheosis. The lights of the faroff Ventris beckoned them through the white limbo.

The big ship’s equipment bay doors were split wide open. With the Manta still somewhere underwater and the Old Mole parked out on the ice, there was more than enough room inside for the battered Moon Cruiser. Groves had left the bridge and was on hand to help the others wrestle the capsule into the hold. Motors spun in dead silence and the clam-shell hold slowly resealed itself. Valves popped and air poured into the hold, imperceptibly at first, then with a whisper, then in a hissing crescendo.

The men tore their face plates open.

Inside, inside. Get a reaction wrench on those.”

“Watch out, those are explosive bolts—”

“Careful, Hawkins!”

“—let me disarm them before you blow my head off.”

The Moon Cruiser’s hatch pulled away. Hawkins got his head inside first. He found two bodies, completely limp. Inside their helmets, their faces were black and their staring eyes were full of blood.