IV

Blake Redfield forced his way through crowded winding corridors, past stalls selling carved jade and translucent rubber sandals in the many colors of jujubes, past shelves of bargain-priced surveillance electronics, past racks of spot-lit fresh-killed ducks with heads and feet attached—while people pushed him from behind, elbowed him aside, and blocked the way in front of him, none maliciously or even with much force, for gravity here was a few percent of Earth’s and too vigorous a shove was as awkward for the shover as for the shovee. More people sat huddled in circles on the floor throwing dice or playing hsiang-ch’i or stood bargaining excitedly before tanks of live trout and mounds of ice clams and piles of pale, wilted vegetables. Students and old folk peered at real paper books through thick rimless glasses and read flimsy newspapers printed in what to most Euro-Americans were indecipherable squiggles. Everyone was talking, talking, talking in musical tones most North Continental visitors heard only as singsong and jabber.

Usually auburn-haired—even handsome, in a fresh-faced, freckled way—Blake had disguised himself well, look­ing less like young Ghengis Khan than a Pearl River dock rat. He was in fact half Chinese on his mother’s side, the other half being Irish, and although he did not know more than a few useful phrases of Burmese or Thai or any of the dozens of other Indochinese languages common on Gany­mede, he spoke eloquent Mandarin and expressively earthy Cantonese—the latter being the favorite trade language of most of the ethnic Chinese who made up a substantial proportion of the Shoreless Ocean’s non-Indian population.

From the low overheads hung paper banners which flut­tered endlessly in the breeze of constantly turning ventilator fans; these did their inadequate best to clear the corridors of the smell of pork frying in rancid oil and other, less pal­atable odors. The stall owners had rigged up awnings against the flickering yellow glare of the permanent light­ing; the awnings billowed ceaselessly, waves in an unquiet sea of cloth. Blake pushed ahead, against the tide. His des­tination was the contracting firm of Lim and Sons, founded in Singapore in 1946. The Shoreless Ocean branch had opened in 2068, before there was a sizable settlement on Ganymede; a generation of Lims had helped build the place.

The firm’s offices fronted on the chaotic intersection of two busy corridors near the center of the underground city. Behind a wall of plate glass bearing the gold-painted ideo­grams for health and prosperity, shirt-sleeved, bespectacled clerks bent studiously to their flatscreens.

Blake stepped through the automatic door; abruptly the corridor sounds were sealed out, and there was quiet. No one paid him any attention. He leaned over the rail that separated the carpeted reception area from the nearest clerk and said in careful Mandarin, “My name is Redfield. I have a ten o’clock appointment with Luke Lim.”

The clerk winced as if he’d had a gas attack. Without bothering to look at Blake he keyed his commlink and said, in rapid Cantonese, “A white guy dressed like a coolie is out here, talking like he just took Mandarin 101. Says he has an appointment with Luke.”

The commlink squawked back, loud enough for Blake to overhear. “See what happens if you tell him to wait.”

“You wait,” said the clerk in English, still not looking up.

There were no chairs for visitors. Blake walked over to the wall and studied the gaudy color holos hanging there, some stiff family portraits and wideangle views of construc­tion projects. In one, pipes as tangled as a package of dry noodles sprawled over a kilometer of surface ice; it was a dissociation plant, converting water ice to hydrogen and oxygen. Other holos showed ice mines, distilleries, sewage plants, hydroponic farms.

Blake wondered what role Lim and Sons had played in the construction of these impressive facilities; the holos were uncaptioned, allowing the viewer to assume anything he or she wished. Unlikely that Lim and Sons had been prin­cipal contractor in any of them. But one in particular cap­tured his attention: it depicted a big-toothed ice mole cutting through black ice, drilling what was presumably one of the original tunnels of the settlement that had become Shoreless Ocean.

For twenty minutes Blake patiently cooled his heels. Fi­nally the clerk keyed the link and muttered “Still standing here . . . no, seems happy as a clam.”

Another five minutes passed. A man appeared at the back of the room and came to the railing, hand extended. “Luke Lim. So sorry, Mr. Redfield”—Ruke Rim. So solly, Missa Ledfeared—“Most unavoidable detained.” Lim was tall even for the low gravity of Ganymede, almost emaciated, with sunken cheeks and burning eyes. On the point of his chin a dozen or so very long, very black hairs managed to suggest a goatee. Unlike his facial hair the hair of his head was thick and glossy, long and black, hanging to his shoul­ders. He had inch-long nails on the thumb and fingers of his right hand, but the nails of his left were cut short. He was wearing blue canvas work pants and a shirt patterned like mattress-ticking.

“No problem,” said Blake coolly, giving the outstretched hand, the dangerous one, a single short jerk. A curious fel­low, thought Blake: his accent was as phony as they come, straight out of an ancient Charlie Chan movie-chip; the fin­gernails were not a Mandarin affectation but apparently for playing twelve-string guitar, and the work clothes suggested that the guy wanted to present himself as a man of the working class.

“So glad you not in big hurry,” said Lim.

“You have something to show me?”

“Yes.” Lim’s voice was suddenly low and conspiratorial, his expression almost a leer. “You come with me now?” Ostentatiously, he held the gate of the railing open and waved Blake through it.

Blake followed him to the back of the office and into a low dark passageway. He caught glimpses of small, dim rooms on either side, crowded with men and women bent over machine tools.

A slow ride in a big freight elevator brought them out into a huge service bay, its floor and walls carved from ancient ice. The excavation of the bay wasn’t finished; there was a hole in a sunken corner of the floor as big as a storm drain, to carry off the melt as ice was carved away.

In the middle of the bay, inadequately lit by overhead sodium units, a spidery flatbed trailer supported a big load, securely tied down and wrapped in blue canvas. “There it is,” Lim said to Blake, not bothering to move from where he was standing by the elevator.

Two middle-aged women bundled thickly into insulated overalls looked up from the engine of a surface crawler; most of the machine was in pieces, scattered over the ice. “One of the rectifiers in that thing is still intermittent, Luke,” said one of the women in Cantonese. “Supply is supposed to send a rebuild over this afternoon.”

“How long can this one run?” Lim asked her.

“An hour or two. Then it overheats.”

“Tell Supply to forget it,” Lim said.

“If your customer wants to take delivery . . .”

“Ignore the foreigner, go back to work,” Lim said, his breath steaming in the orange light.

Blake went to the flatbed and released the tie-down catches. He yanked at the canvas, patiently circling the rig until he had all the cloth piled on the floor. The machinery thus revealed was a cylinder compounded of metal alloy rings, girdled by a universal mount and carried on cleated treads; its business end consisted of two offset wheels of wide, flat titanium teeth, each cutting edge glistening with a thin film of diamond.

An ice mole—but despite its impressive size, it was a mere miniature of the one Blake had seen pictured on the office wall.

Blake jumped lightly onto the flatbed. He pulled a tiny black torch from his hip pocket and switched on its brilliant white light; from his shirt pocket he took magnifying gog­gles and slipped them on. For several minutes he crawled over the machine, opening every access port, inspecting cir­cuits and control boards. He checked bearing alignments and looked for excessive wear. He pulled panels off and studied the windings and connections of the big motors.

Finally he jumped down and walked back to Lim. “Noth­ing visibly broken. But it’s as old as I am, seen a lot of use. Maybe thirty years.”

“For the price you want to pay, surplus is what you get.”

“Where’s the power supply?”

“You pay extra for that.”

“When somebody tells me ‘like new,’ Mr. Lim, I don’t think they mean thirty years old. Everything made in this line in the last decade has built-in power supply.”

“You want it or not?”

“With power supply.”

“No problem. You pay five hundred IA credits extra.”

“Would that be new? Or ‘like new’?”

“Guaranteed like new.”

Blake translated the figure into dollars. “For that much I can buy new off the shelf in the Mainbelt.”

“You want to wait three months? Pay freight?”

Blake let the rhetorical question pass unanswered. “How do I know this thing isn’t going to break down as soon as we get it to Amalthea?”

“Like I say, guaranteed.”

“Meaning what?”

“We send someone to fix. Free labor.”

Blake seemed to consider that a moment. Then he said, “Let’s take it for a test drive.”

Lim looked pained. “Maybe too much to do this week.”

“Right now. We’ll add some space to your work area here.”

“Not possible.”

“Sure it is. I’ll borrow the power supply and commlink from that crawler”—he indicated the machine parts scattered on the floor—“since nobody’s going to need them for a while.” Blake picked his away among the scattered parts in the corner; he hefted one of the massive but lightweight units, jumped onto the trailer, lifted a cowl, and wrestled it into place.

The women, who hadn’t really been concentrating on their work, now watched Blake openly—meanwhile trying to remain impassive, with cautious and uncertain glances at Lim. Reluctantly, as if he were playing without enthusiasm a role that required him to come up with some protest, however feeble, Lim said, “You can’t just do what you want with our . . . this equipment.”

Blake ignored him. He took a pair of heavy rubber-insulated cables from a spring-loaded spool on the wall and shoved their flat, copper-sheathed heads into a receptacle in the rear of the mole; he locked them in place. Then he slipped into the mole’s cockpit and spent a moment fiddling with the controls. With a whine of heavy motors, the machine came to life, its red warning beacon whirling and flashing. The warning horn hooted repeatedly as it backed off the trailer on its clattering cleats. Blake pushed the levers ahead and the mole moved toward a blank spot in the wall of ice.

Lim watched all this as if stupefied, before shaking himself to action. “Hey! Wait a minute!”

“Climb on, if you’re coming!” Blake shouted, slowing the machine’s wall-ward progress long enough for Lim to scramble up the side of the machine and sling himself into the open cockpit. The door sealed itself behind him; Blake checked the dashboard to see that the little compartment was sealed and pressurized. Then he shoved the potentiometers forward again, all the way to the stops.

Transformers sang; the giant bits on the mole’s nose spun in a blur of counter-rotating blades. Blake drove the machine squarely into the ice, and there was a sudden screech and rumble; ice chips exploded in an opaque bliz­zard outside the cockpit’s cylindrical polyglas window.

Inside the machine, the air was rank with ozone. False color displays on the dashboard showed a three-dimensional map of the machine’s position, built from stored data and updated with feedback from the seismic vibrations gener­ated by the whirling bit. The void in the ice they were en­larging was at the edge of the settlement, only twenty meters below the mean surface, and adjacent to the space-port. The dashboard map displayed the region of ice beneath the port in bright red, with a legend in bold letters: RE­STRICTED AREA.

The machine moved ahead, shuddering and plunging toward the red barrier at top speed—which for the old machine was a respectable three kilometers per hour. Unseen by the riders, a river of melted ice flowed out the rear of the machine and through the tunnel behind them, to pour down the drain.

“Watch where you go.” Lim’s accent showed signs of slipping. “Cross that barrier, the Space Board impounds us.”

“I’ll turn here, take the long way back. Let’s see how it holds together after an hour or so.”

“Must go back now.”

Blake pulled back on one of the potentiometer levers and the machine skewed, skittering and squirming like a hand drill with a dull bit. “Thing bucks like a wild horse—kind of hard to steer. Say, you smell something hot?”

“Don’t turn so hard,” Lim said in alarm. “Not good to abuse fine equipment.”

A panel light on the dashboard began to glow, dull yel­low at first, then bright orange.

“Looks like we’re overloading something,” Blake ob­served equably.

“Go slow, go slow!” Lim shouted. “We’ll be stranded!”

“Okay.” Blake straightened the machine and eased off the drilling rate. The overload warning light dimmed. “Tell me about that guarantee again.”

“You see yourself, if not abused, machine in very good condition. It breaks, you bring it in and we fix.”

“No, I’ll tell you what, if it breaks out there on Amalthea we’ll come get your top mechanic. We’ll take that person and whatever parts we need back with us, right then. You pay for everything, including the fuel.” Fuel was gold in the Jupiter system; because of the depth of the giant planet’s gravitational well, the delta-vees between Ganymede and Amalthea were practically the same as between Earth and Venus.

Lim’s nervous expression vanished. He glared at the man beside him, no more than a few centimeters away. “You not stupid, so you must be crazy.”

Blake smiled. In fluent Cantonese he said, “Besides an intermittent rectifier, what else did your mechanics find wrong with this bucket?”

Lim snorted in surprise.

“Answer my questions, Mr. Lim, or you can look for somewhere else to unload this antique.”

Caught out, Lim looked as if he might just throw a tem­per tantrum and let the deal go. Then, suddenly, his extrav­agant features stretched themselves into a gleeful grin. “Aieeee! You one foxy character, Led-feared. I lose much face.”

“And you can drop the Number One Son accent. I don’t want to get the idea you’re making fun of me.”

“Hey, I am my daddy’s number one son. But never mind, I take your point. My people will tell your people whatever you want to know. If anything needs fixing we’ll fix it.” Lim leaned back in his seat, obviously relieved. “But then you sign off. And we forget all this nonsense about guarantees. And rocket fuel.”

“Okay with me,” Blake said.

“Take me back to the office. You can write me a check and drive away.”

“Throw in the power supply?”

Lim sighed mightily. “The white devil is merciless.” But in fact he seemed to be taking pleasure in Blake’s hard-nosed attitude. “Okay, you win. Get us back in one piece, I’ll even take you to lunch.”


Late the same evening, Blake returned to the Forster ex­pedition’s secret camp under the ice.

The rocket nozzles of the ship that would carry them to Amalthea loomed over them, beneath the frozen dome. For­ster had leased the heavy tug for the duration; he couldn’t legally change its registration, but he could call it anything he wanted. He had named it the Michael Ventris after his hero, the Englishman who’d been the co-decipherer of Mi­noan Linear B and who’d tragically been killed at the age of thirty-four, not long after his philological triumph.

The uneven icy floor of the exhaust-deflection chamber was less cluttered than it had been a few weeks earlier, when Professor Nagy had paid Professor Forster a visit. By now the cargo needed for the month-long expedition had been loaded and the clip-on cargo hold secured to the frame of the big tug. The equipment bay still stood open and empty, however. There was room in it for the ice mole and more.

Blake knocked at the door of Forster’s foam hut. “It’s Blake.”

“Come in, please.” Forster looked up from the flatscreen he’d been studying as Blake ducked into the hut. He peered shrewdly at Blake and knew the news was good. “Success, I assume.”

Blake’s expression sagged only slightly; he wished Forster wouldn’t assume so easily. Finding and leasing a working ice mole, and keeping the search reasonably confidential, was not so straightforward that success could be assumed in advance.

But Blake had been successful, after all, and Forster—who looked only a few years older than Blake, but who had actually been at this game for decades—was accustomed to compromise and improvisation and had probably developed a sixth sense for the problems that were really hard and the ones that only seemed that way. “Lim’s machine will do the job,” Blake acknowledged.

“Any particular problems?”

“Lim tried to cheat me. . . .”

Forster frowned, affronted.

“So I asked him to be our agent.”

“You did what?” One of Forster’s bushy brows shot up.

Good, that got a rise out of him. Blake smiled—mild enough revenge for Forster’s assumptions. “We played a lit­tle game of bargaining. He played by the rules, so I decided to trust him to help us locate the other machine. He’s got unique contacts in the community. My problem is that, even though I can pass, nobody knows who I am. That’s what’s taken me so long to get this far.”

“Sorry if I’ve been presumptuous.” Forster had finally heard some of his young colleague’s hitherto unstated frus­tration. “You’ve been carrying a heavy load. As soon as it’s safe for the rest of us to show our faces, we’ll be able to relieve you.”

“I won’t count on any help until the day we blast off, then,” Blake said, smiling wryly. “According to my informants, guess who’s about to descend on us from Helios.”

Forster’s cheerful expression folded into gloom. “Oh dear.”

“ ’Fraid so. Sir Randolph-Call-Me-Arnold-Toynbee-Mays.”