Double Planet

Book 300: Gateway Essentials

by John Gribbin, Marcus Chown

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Dragon, an enormous comet, is on a trajectory that will bring it perilously close to an Earth that is still suffering from the scars of a nuclear incident, and from the problems of the Greenhouse Effect. For the optimists - those that remain - it is a sign of change for the better; for others, the comet foreshadows humanity's final doom. But to Francis Reese and the hard-pressed astronauts of the depleted space programme, the Dragon presents a third outrageous, yet irresistible possibility - the transformation of a barren world into a new home for the beleaguered peoples of Earth.

Release date: November 30, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 216

Sample

“Don’t go too far, Jan.” Frances Reese’s warning was still ringing in Du Toit’s ears as he cut the jet pack and attempted a landfall a kilometre from the cluster of spacecraft. The terrain a hundred metres below was largely hidden, cloaked in mottled shadow, but it was unlikely, in such low gravity, that he would come to grief by dropping blind. Still, there was no sense in taking chances. He peered down into the gloom, trying to make out something as he fell in a long, leisurely arc towards the surface.

He had had to get away, get some precious solitude, and even mother-hen Reese had relented, grudgingly, when he’d told her, in all seriousness, that he was set to explode. It was true; make no mistake. He might have been the most even tempered and phlegmatic spacer on the long flight out to the Dragon, but intolerable pressure had built up inside him like a head of steam, until he didn’t like to think what he might do to any of his crewmates if he didn’t crack a release valve, and soon.

Du Toit felt the metal claws on his boots snag the surface, and flexed his legs to take up the momentum. The Sun was directly overhead, forever at zenith now that the comet was no longer spinning, but it was still too distant and dim to illuminate the surface properly. But some detail was visible close by. Where the ice wasn’t streaked with dust it seemed to glow eerily as if from an internal light source, deep down inside. He’d seen the same ghostly effect on Earth, walking across freshly fallen snow on a starry night.

Du Toit turned off his helmet light and felt himself poised between the stars and the faint Sun and the glowing surface of the comet. He seemed to be in a valley, or at least a depression of some kind, cupped in a giant hand carrying him through space. He had to remind himself that this really was a world, with a substantial surface area, with hills and cliffs, mountains and crevasses. It was difficult to reconcile this reality with the image of a tiny speck – for that was all it had been – that he had watched for three months in the Hoyle’s 50-centimetre finder.

When he clicked the full beam of his light back on, the cone of illumination lit up a wide cleft with sheer ice walls towering on both sides of him. The wall to his right had to be fifty metres away, but the left-hand wall was just a few strides from him. His gentle landing, floating down almost parallel to the ice face, could so easily have become a tumble down the nearly vertical face. Back home they’d call the feature a kloof. Du Toit’s kloof! How about that? He would talk to Reese on his return and request that they name it after its discoverer. He had no idea how long the feature would persist in the heat of the Sun once the ice started buckling and boiling off into the vacuum, but it was the nearest he would ever get to immortality.

He began walking parallel with the ice walls – long, loping, comical strides, each of which ended in an awkward manoeuvre he had yet to perfect, in which he corkscrewed the claws of one boot into the ice to gain purchase for the next stride and to ensure he didn’t bounce off into space. All this was unnecessary. He had a jet pack and, if he floated away in the minuscule gravity of the comet, all he had to do was orient the nozzle and trigger a short burn to nudge himself back down to the surface. But that would be cheating. He wanted to walk, or at least practice what laughingly passed as walking on this oversized snowball. He had spent too much time, these past few months, floating inside a spaceship or tethered to one or another of the vehicles, directing the burns that cancelled the angular momentum of the comet. He wanted the pretence of normality, and that was why he was out here, doing silly walks on a chunk of primordial ice between the planets.

In two days’ time Reese would order the big burn which would change the course of this ponderous iceberg of the vacuum. Only a couple of hours before, they had finished orienting the fusion engines. So Reese had given them all a much needed forty-eight hour break from their daily toil. And he had taken a walk in the dark rather than oblivion in his bunk. Sleep wasn’t what he needed. No, he needed a breath of fresh air. Metaphorically, of course.

The kloof had tributaries, narrow fissures which swallowed up the light of his helmet beam. Du Toit stopped and peered into one. He could see at least a hundred metres into the crack, which stretched downward into the comet, maybe to its rocky core. He would never know, since a sharp bend interrupted his line of sight. Better watch out for crevasses, he reminded himself. His quest for solitude had taken him out of radio touch with the ships. That, perhaps, was unwise. But he would be careful.

He swung his helmet beam out of the crack and began examining closely the wall of the kloof. It had a curious texture, looking like fabric; narrow sinuous runnels were criss-crossed by dust veins. He pressed the palm of his glove against the wall, and convinced himself that he could feel the roughness. He had a good imagination.

Thoughts of scientific investigation slid from his mind as he imagined the great bulk of the comet, a sleeping Dragon waiting to be warmed into life as it neared the Sun. This was a landscape that no other eyes would ever see, let alone investigate scientifically. He moved on, trying now to think of nothing at all, to blank out all the tedious events of the past months, using the walk to recharge his mental batteries. Breathing deeply, and leaping along rhythmically as he learned the trick of the twist in each step, he began to fall into a meditative, trance-like state, and felt fatigue seeping out of his bones. He glided to a halt, cupped in the bowl of ice, and turned slowly to see how far he had come. It was then that he felt the first, faint rumble beneath his feet.

Du Toit froze. His pulse rate and a dozen other physiological signs somersaulted off the scale. What was that? Movement where there should be no movement, deep down inside the comet. The Dragon was coming to life – but much too early, it shouldn’t stir for weeks yet. For an age he stood motionless, with only the flutter of a muscle and the beating of his heart preventing the complete fusion of his awareness with the structure of the comet. He felt himself fusing with the ice, imagining layers upon layers of icy crystal plane stretching down into the cryogenic core. He felt that he could detect any microscopic slippage of these crystal planes. Poised on the knife-edge between comet and space, he felt for the heartbeat of the vacuum – but the rumble had stopped. With sudden relief, the answer came to him. The fusion engines! Reese must have been testing the main drive. Of course!

Then the world fell apart. Literally. He was thrown loose from the ice and found himself floating in a shower of splinters as the comet convulsed beneath him and a great gaping canyon opened up before him, barely ten metres away along the floor of the kloof. A rising berg of ice, tens of metres across, nudged him to one side as it moved ponderously upward and out into space; Du Toit saw he was heading for the nearest ice wall, and fast. A spacer’s instinct made him lunge at his tool belt, activate the emergency grapple line. There was no time to see whether the explosive harpoon buried itself in solid ice or powdered snow. The stars were obliterated, eclipsed by a moving mountain of ice. Then he hit, and darkness closed in.

When he awoke, he was floating. But the grapple line had held. Thank God. His head was muzzy and his left elbow bruised and stiff. The suit had not been pierced. But when he triggered his jet pack, nothing happened. He was alive, but his principal means of propulsion was useless. He hauled in the grapple line, hand over hand, until once again he could hook his boots into the surface and “stand” on “solid” ice. How long had he been out? The needle on the gauge showed thirty minutes of oxygen used; given that he’d been unconscious and breathing shallow, that meant maybe an hour had passed.

What had happened? The massive quake couldn’t have been anything to do with Reese. The Dragon, dormant since the birth of the Solar System, had hiccupped. They knew it would happen when the heat of the Sun got stronger – but not this soon. They were still out near Mars, and the Sun was too feeble to melt off even a film of surface ice. Perhaps it was a result of the outburst of activity during the first pass of the comet near the Sun, months before. But, surely, it had had ample time to settle down again. No, it had to be the fault of the expedition, somehow, with heat from the engines and the change in stresses caused by halting the comet’s spin combining to release an old pressure along a line of weakness that had been there since the beginning of time. But that was no excuse.

He began to pay out the grapple line, crawling now, not leaping, over the kloof floor. Something else was wrong. What was it? His fuddled brain tried to take stock of the surroundings. The Sun! Where had the Sun gone? It should be directly overhead; it had been before the quake. Where was the Sun? Scrabbling frantically onward, slipping and sliding on the ice, digging his toe claws into the ice to stop himself, Du Toit reached the canyon he had seen open up in the kloof floor. But it was no longer a canyon. There was nothing on the other side.

Trying hard to swallow panic, he craned over the edge, and found the Sun. It was down a sheer face of glistening ice. How could that be? How – then his brain finally understood, and Du Toit felt a cold hand seize him in its grip. Surely it couldn’t be. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them the scene was still the same.

In the light of the distant Sun he saw rubble and ice, great blocks of the stuff, occulting the stars; a flotilla of calved icebergs setting sail upon the sea of the vacuum. With him riding on one of them.

David Kondratieff had been one of the first people with any real influence to learn about the comet. It took a pretty spectacular item of genuinely scientific news to justify disturbing the science adviser to the Council – his real role was administrative, trying to decide how best to employ the depleted technological resources of the world to the ever pressing problems of food production. News about new crop strains, techniques to combat drought, better rainfall forecasting in the monsoon regions – things like that went straight to his desk. But gone were the days when scientists had unlimited budgets to probe the structure of matter, or the depths of space. Gone too, since the Incident, were many of the large computers that would have made his task so much easier.

Nigel Cooper, the Director of the Canary Islands Observatory, dropped the package in personally with his bi-monthly report.

“This might be your sort of thing, David.”

He glanced at the title on the tape! Comet Osaki-Mori. Acquisition and Orbit.

“A big one? Naked eye?” Nigel nodded. Kondratieff tossed the tape on his desk. “Fill me in quickly, Nigel. I’ll view the tape at home – when I get home.” A wave of the hand indicated the stack of material in his “in” tray.

“Okay. We got the news first from Japan, of course. They’re still doing sky survey work with their Schmidt camera. And we’ve been taking quick looks with the 2-metre almost every night over the past month. Can’t spare too long on it, because of the work on Holly objects – all that’s in the main report. But it’s big all right, definitely a newcomer, and from the orbital information we have so far it should pass close enough to put on a good show. We won’t have the final orbital details for a couple of weeks yet – it’s being quite seriously perturbed by Jupiter. But with luck it will be better than Halley. We’ll be glad to help publicize the event, get video crews down to photograph through the big telescope, and so on.”

“And to drum up some favourable publicity for yourselves, eh, Nigel?” Kondratieff smiled. “You don’t have to worry about influencing me, you know; and it doesn’t really matter what the public think. If you want to get your budget increased, you’d better find a way to convince the Council that discovering a comet is something to make a song and dance about.”

“It won’t bring any more rain to East Africa, will it?”

“It’s not got any short term benefits, David. But it’s one helluva good opportunity for some real work on the origins of the Solar System. Maybe the Council could spare the resources for a probe, to bring back some samples.”

“A probe? Now I know you’re losing touch with reality down there on the island. I have enough trouble justifying all the shuttle flights I schedule as it is; Ustinov knows perfectly well we’re running those little packages from your friends at MIT up into orbit, counting cosmic rays or whatever it is they do, and he seems to think that sometimes I’m timing the flights to suit MIT, not to maximize our cover of the crops. It doesn’t pay to tell politicians the whole truth, but I’d need a pretty convincing story to get official approval for a comet mission, and official approval is what I’d need.”

“I know, David.” Cooper stood and extended his hand. “I mustn’t waste your time with my madman’s schemes. Let’s be grateful that we’ve got a friend like you to help us keep the observatory running, and to smuggle those not so secret packages up into orbit. Anyway, if nothing else this might bring the opportunity for you to come down and see us at work.”

Kondratieff stood and shook the proffered hand. “Maybe.” Releasing his grip, he waved again at the stack of work. “And then again, maybe not. But keep me posted on this comet, Nigel. If it comes close enough we’ll try to get one of those little packages up above the atmosphere at the right time to take a peek at it.”

Linda Regan didn’t much care about the comet, one way or the other. Of course she knew about it, in a vague sort of way. The newsfax had been full of the story for days. An unrepeatable scientific opportunity, it said; and the spectacle of a lifetime, far better than the disappointing return of Halley’s Comet a couple of decades ago. But a fat lot of good that would do Linda.

In six months’ time she would be eighteen, legally an adult and with a lifetime of opportunity ahead of her. Only, there were no opportunities. Her mother had broken the news that morning.

“I’m sorry Linda. There’s nothing I can do. They’ve cut the ration again and we don’t have the money for the unrationed shops. Maybe next year things will be better.”

“But next year’s no good, Mum. It’s my eighteenth this year. You promised I could have a party.”

“I know.” The tall woman brushed back a strand of her dark hair, just beginning to be streaked with grey, and sat down by her daughter at the breakfast table. She reached for Linda’s hand, trying to comfort her, but the hand was quickly withdrawn. The girl gazed intently at her drink, stirring the brown liquid into a swirling pattern, and pretending not to listen to her mother’s words.

“I really thought things were improving after I got the job. But it’s no good them keeping prices steady when they keep cutting the quota on what we can buy. Maybe it’s better in Russia or America. But the rest of us have to do what we’re told.”

“It’s not fair. They’ve got resources to send spaceships to Mars, but they pretend there’s nothing for the smaller countries. I bet they all have parties. Why do we have to do what we’re told, anyway?”

“Oh, my baby.” This time the offered hand was taken. “Sometimes I wonder, too. But your grandfather knew even worse times. Things are getting better. And I don’t really think they’ve got a better ration than us,” she added gently, “there just isn’t much to go round.”

Yevgeny Ustinov knew only too well how little there was to go round. As Secretary to the Council of the Reunited Nations, Ustinov, as much as anyone, was the ruler of planet Earth. The Council invariably took his “advice”; and the world bowed to the wishes of the Council, as much through lack of any idea what else to do as through fear of the decaying stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Symbolically, the RN’s administrative headquarters – the World Government – was located in Reykjavik, Iceland. Not exactly neutral territory, in terms of the old loyalties, but at least located geographically in between the two land masses of the northern hemisphere where the former rivals held sway. The symbolism, thought Ustinov, might have been better if they had picked somewhere on the equator, midway between the North and South, for that was where the real differences in the world lay today. And then at least he wouldn’t have had to endure these bleak northern winters. But then again, at least the bleakness of the location kept even essential visitors down to the minimum and left him free to concentrate on the task in hand. As long, that is, as he didn’t allow his tired mind to wander off in daydreams about relocating the Council on a tropic isle.

His visitor had stopped talking and was waiting, expectantly, for the Secretary’s response. Ustinov leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands, the fingers lifting his old-fashioned glasses from the bridge of his nose.

“A comet, Doctor Kondratieff, is hardly something to strike terror into our hearts in the twenty-first century, you know.” He smiled wearily, preparing to dismiss another impossible claim upon the world’s limited resources. An unmanned probe, sending back pictures, might indeed be a good idea. A show for the people, to take their minds off the absence of bread in their bellies. But a manned expedition? Out of the question. Why couldn’t these people understand that they couldn’t return to the twentieth century, and that what little effort could be spared for work in space had to be geared to practical ends, weather forecasting and monitoring of cropland from near orbit. After the fiasco of the O’Neill colony, surely anyone could see that deep space was a waste of effort, even though the technology to reach Jupiter did still exist.

“But, sir, allow me to explain.” David Kondratieff felt the sweat on his palms and tried to keep calm. It had been hard enough to get this audience, and on what he said now rested the only chance of deflecting the newly discovered comet from its path.

“You must appreciate, sir, the difficulty of predicting the precise fate of this object. It is a first-time visitor to the inner Solar System, and its orbit has taken it close past Jupiter. Usually, these things dive in from . . .