Encounter With Tiber Page 17

  “I don’t either,” Xiao Be said. “But I don’t know how we can possibly get any more information than this.”

  “Here’s a helpful note,” Peter said, looking up from the computer screen. “They want you to drive slowly.”

  “How very helpful,” Chris muttered.

  Jiang glanced up and then looked down; whatever he was working on, on his terminal, he didn’t talk about it much.

  The lander would not arrive at the Encyclopedia site for almost a week, so they continued to develop the base, getting things unpacked in the habitat and the unmanned cargo landers, and setting up the permanent observation instruments. As the days crept by, the Sun shone on different parts of the crater rim above them, working its way around the Moon’s 656-hour day. “And when it gets all the way around it will start over,” Chris pointed out. “You never think of the Moon as having a summer and winter, but it does, because its orbit is at an angle to the Earth’s orbit, and the Earth carries it around the Sun; in six months you won’t see the Sun on the crater wall at all, for many weeks.”

  Peter sighed. “I’m not sure how much people think of the Moon at all. And I suppose from a small-scale perspective they’re right; most of the time it’s just a pretty light in the sky. But I’m sort of glad that Tiber One didn’t find the Encyclopedia right away. If they had, I have a feeling they might have just canceled our mission entirely and left exploring Tiber Base for, oh, some other time. It seems to me that we haven’t changed much in the last fifty years or so; we’re still always looking for a reason to just give up.”

  Chris shrugged and passed his friend a sandwich; they were sitting at what they had nicknamed the “observation terrace,” the one tiny spot in the lunar habitat where there were two places to sit down, a surface to eat from, and a view out the window. “Oh, I’m sure nothing’s changed. And at the same time the world is full of people who would love to be where we are, but will never have the chance, not to mention people who still don’t believe you can land on a light in the sky anyway. Well, do you want to get an early start on our EV so we can catch it?”

  “As long as we’re here we might as well see the sights,” Peter agreed. “And besides, there’s a lot to get done before you and Xiao drive off with the crane and leave it out in the woods to find its own way back.”

  “It’s a big robot and it’s time it started looking out for itself,” Chris said. “Let’s suit up.”

  Twenty minutes later, outside, as they loaded a set of solar panels onto the back of the pressurized rover, Xiao Be’s voice broke in over their suit radios. “Just about time now,” she said.

  “Right,” Chris said. “Well, let’s get to where we can see.”

  The two of them bounded across the dusty plain to an open space they had chosen; Xiao Be bounced along from the other side. All of them looked like pale ghosts in the eternal dark of the crater, lighted only by the reflecting walls above. The dust flew out from their feet in straight lines, forming no roiling clouds, just glimmering once in the dim light, dispersing, and falling back to the surface where it had lain for billions of years.

  The three met together, almost at the center of the crater, where they would have the maximum view of the sky. “Jiang didn’t want to leave the habitat,” Xiao Be explained. “I think he has a long message from home, or maybe a report to file, or maybe he just wants some time to himself.” Neither Peter nor Chris answered. They had both decided that they didn’t want to run the risk of anything they said to Xiao Be getting her into trouble, and it was obvious that nobody was supposed to notice that Jiang had very few duties and seemed to have been trained for very little. Long afterwards, Peter used to say that the one thing a secret policeman can’t stand is people acting like he isn’t secret.

  High above them, the Southern Cross shone brilliantly, amid a blaze of stars.

  “How many more stars are there?” Peter asked, as the three stood together and looked up. “Than we could see from Earth, I mean?”

  Chris chuckled. “Well, that would be a great question for an undergrad astronomy course. And I thought I was never going to teach another one. Part of it depends on what you mean by ‘from Earth,’ because on some very clear nights in some very high, dry places on the Earth you can see a lot more stars than you can in the swampier parts. But putting it roughly; well, since the brightest stars have a magnitude of one, and the next brightest of two, and so forth, and each represents a tenfold decrease in brightness … and since there are always more dim than bright stars and that’s roughly proportional … heck, I don’t know. But I’d figure we can see three more magnitudes, at least, even allowing for the visors on the suits, and if you figure there’s about ten times as many more stars per order of magnitude, that would come to something over a thousand times as many.”

  “It’s still easy to pick out Alpha Centauri,” Xiao Be said. “With a magnitude of a bit less than zero it ought to be. I wonder why they came all this way and then never came back again.”

  “Maybe in a few weeks—or a few years, depending on how long the linguistics people take to crack the Encyclopedia—we’ll know. It certainly is a bright one,” Chris added.

  They had run out of anything to say, but that had always happened to Chris when he looked up at the night sky anyway, ever since he’d been a child. High above them the bright stars shone with the steady brilliance that never happened on Earth; all around them the airless plain, silent in a way that nowhere on Earth ever could be, stretched far and wide. The only sound Chris could hear was his own breathing; better life-support packs had reached the point where air blew softly through the suit without noise of any kind.

  He thought, this is one of the best parts; just to get the real calm, for an instant now and then, of not having anyone playing music or running machines in your ears. Not even the brush of a wind or the crash of a wave; just a quiet like the one that’s been there since the rocks of the heavy bombardment stopped falling, broken only every few thousand years. Just the soft fall of light from above, light that started on its way centuries or millennia in the past. Though it was only a short time to wait, and they were each within a meter of the other two; nonetheless they stood all by themselves, in eternity.

  Far away above the crater rim, a dim star moved, and the radios crackled to life “There it is!”

  “Where—oh, I see!”

  “Here it comes!”

  As they watched, a Pigeon Rack seemed to jump over the horizon, up into the Southern Cross itself, shooting fire in front of it as it went. The Tiber Prize lander, operating at the moment only under robot control, was passing over them, far up enough to reflect sunlight, finishing the last third of its descent.

  “I thought you might want to know,” Jiang’s voice said in their headphones, startling them. “Everything’s nominal on the lander.”

  As the brilliant oval crossed the middle of the sky and fell toward the horizon, it grew longer and seemed to go slower.

  The now brighter, bigger dot, not much bigger than a period in type, which was the DT of the lander itself, sank slowly on a twisting, glowing white-hot pillar ten times its size, like an upside-down white exclamation point on the black of night. They watched till it passed behind the dark gray shadowed peaks on the other side of the crater.

  “You know there are going to be people, someday, who won’t bother to look up when something like that goes overhead?” Peter said.

  “Don’t blame me,” Chris said. “I still look up when I hear an airplane.”

  “I’d certainly look up if I saw one here,” Xiao added. “I guess Jiang will let us know if it gets down all right, or—”

  Jiang’s voice crackled to them. “The report from Earth is that it’s making a perfectly fine descent and they expect it to touch down shortly. Mission Control says they’ve got the Encyclopedia on visual and they’re quite sure they’ll manage to land without hitting it.”

  “Now, that would be an anticlimax,” Peter said.

  They sp
ent the rest of the day getting the solar panels up to where they could get some sun; in part this was a chance for Xiao Be and Chris to practice scaling lunar cliffs, in case that should prove necessary on their journey. It was harder than it looked, because, although it was much easier to haul themselves upwards in the low gravity, many of the spires and cliffs were fragile. Early on they realized that the important safety rules were not to try to grab or rope anything directly overhead, and especially not to get directly under each other. It took an hour to get up the first cliff, even though they could stick to it like flies, but once they found a sound spot to put the pulley, and threaded the cable through it so that Peter could use the crane’s winch, the job of getting all the panels up into place went quickly enough. Two hours later a row of them hung on the cliff face, and the cables snaked down to the pressurized rover below. Chris and Xiao Be found that going down a lunar mountain was much more fun, because leaps of twenty feet or so weren’t particularly difficult, and the descent took much less time than they had expected. “All right,” Peter said, “we’re getting power this far anyway; let’s see if we can string the cable to the habitat.”

  A short time later, because they were no longer forced to run on fuel cells, there was a great deal more power at the habitat. Peter and Jiang took the pressurized rover to a deep hole in the crater wall that had been spotted by a robot; sure enough, there was a deposit of ice in there the size of a large house. The pressurized rover could only bring back four tons, but with the added power, they could melt it, run it through a purifier, and heat it—so that late during the following work shift, they were all able to take the first showers on the Moon, with water that had lain undisturbed for more than three billion years. “It isn’t the biggest event in space technology,” Chris wrote in his diary later, “and it certainly isn’t going to revolutionize anything, but still, it’s nice to know we’ll all find it that much easier to get along.”

  The next day, with Xiao Be driving, the pressurized rover rolled off toward the Encyclopedia. Its fuel cell power system, supplemented by solar cells later on, would allow them to cover ground at a steady eight kilometers per hour—and since the Encyclopedia was about ninety kilometers distant, by the winding path that had been picked out as safe for them, this would mean more than eleven hours of travel time. The pressurized rover was good for twenty, so they could get quite close to the Encyclopedia site before they would no longer have the option of turning around. But during the last dozen kilometers, if anything went wrong, they would have to reach the lander at the Encyclopedia site—there would be no option of returning to this base.

  After his experience with Endeavour, and the sort of things that can happen when an area is left between the last safe place to turn back and the first place from which a safe destination can be reached, Chris was less than pleased. He had tried to hold out for waiting a few weeks, until Tiber Three could be positioned somewhere in the middle, to provide them with a fallback base, cache of supplies, and alternate escape from the Moon, but it had fallen on deaf ears; neither the four-power consortium nor the Chinese wanted to wait any longer for the Encyclopedia, and it was much too easy to just tell Chris and Xiao Be to go out there and get it. After all, if everything went according to plan, there should be plenty of safety margin.

  Their route took them by Tiber Base, within the first hour of the journey. They had seen many pictures before, of course, both on the news and in training films, but little could have prepared them for the sight of it as they made their way over the broken rock that separated their older crater from the newer one where Tiber Base lay. The first moment of seeing something so clearly built by aliens was nothing so much as disorienting; the lander was oddly shaped and proportioned, though clearly streamlined, and although it rested on metal legs as their landers did, the legs seemed to reach out from underneath in a way that seemed vaguely spidery.

  The Tiber One crew had discovered, using ultrasound, that most of the lander was hollow; apparently liftoffs and landings had been assisted by pumping all the air out of the tanks, which were made of something fairly similar to the aerogels that had been developed on Earth only about twenty years before. This stuff was clearly far superior to most aerogels in strength and durability, but like any aerogel it weighed almost nothing, was completely transparent, and had an enormous ratio of weight to strength. The SSTO people were already fascinated—it seemed like it must be the perfect material for their hydrogen tanks. The best guess was that the lander had originally been intended for a world with air, probably the Earth. It must have descended on rocket thrust, probably supplied by the strange object that looked like it had to be the engine. Probably when it got close enough to the ground, by putting a hard vacuum in the tanks, at its lower density it had floated, or almost floated, in air, allowing it to move quietly and efficiently. Physically it looked a bit like someone had tried to run a computer morphing program between a rocket, a dirigible, and a submarine, and then stopped when half-finished, leaving various parts of all three sticking out here and there.

  Beyond the lander lay the graveyard, a patch of broken ground with many pits and holes, where the Tiberians had placed their dead and covered them with piles of stones. No one knew if the dead were all buried naked because that was their custom or because they had nothing with which to make grave clothes or a casket; but since the Moon had no animals that might disturb a body, nor anything that would allow it to decay (for every practical purpose the Tiberian corpses in the graveyard were freeze dried), it seemed very likely that burial under a cairn of loose stones was some part of their customs, or at least derived from a custom modified for lunar conditions.

  Beyond that, they couldn’t quite see the huge heaps of melted and fused rock that covered the entrances to the lava tubes that the Tiberians had pressurized, obviously for use as habitats, and those looked like nothing so much as blobs of glass with small round doors. As yet no one had any idea how that could have been done; the common theory due to the geometry of the melt marks was that the Tiberians had some sort of laser that was far more capable than anything we had developed yet, but if so, which of the dozens of inexplicable pieces of hardware it was—if any—was not yet known.

  Tiber station fell behind them as the little pressurized rover continued to pick its way across the lunar surface. On Earth it would barely have been able to move at all, but here it could climb steep hills almost easily, though with the protruding crane tower, Xiao Be had to be very careful not to tilt it too far to one side or the other and thus risk a tipover.

  Chris was supposed to drive the second shift, so he stretched out and did his best to go to sleep, since they were also supposed to arrive rested and capable. It wasn’t easy, with the wild country of the Moon all around him—the sharp edged scarps, high pillars, and all the wild and broken land out the window were fascinating. And because there were so many meter-sized boulders to steer around, miniature avalanches under the wheels, and occasional body-slamming potholes, his reclining chair was not the best of places for getting a nap. But he managed to doze for two or three hours out of the five he was supposed to be resting.

  When Xiao Be officially summoned him to take over, he checked the distance gauge. They had covered only forty kilometers, not the fifty-five that were scheduled. “Damn, what happened?”

  “What you might guess.” She shrugged. “It takes a lot of careful steering and picking to get there without smashing up or tipping over. We’re still covering enough ground so that we’ll make it with some reserves.”

  “I hate narrow margins.”

  “I can understand that, but that’s what’s available, Chris. Now drive carefully, and try not to wake me up; this has been pretty exhausting.” With that, she transferred control of the pressurized rover from her panel to his; as he took control and ran a checkout to see what his status was, she reclined her seat and stretched out, pulling her visor halfway down over her face so that in the event of the cabin’s depressurizing, it would sna
p closed automatically and her suit would pressurize.

  Chris sighed for a moment, tasting the stale air of the cabin. According to the computer-generated map in front of him, they were within five meters of the trail it had picked out; he looked five meters to the right and saw a house-sized boulder there. Probably the computer had liked it because it had a flat top, and for some reason radar and optical hadn’t quite picked up on the problem of its towering over their heads.

  He put the pressurized rover in motion and picked his way forward, at first going very slowly, then gaining some speed as he got more practice and thus more confidence. After a while he checked and discovered he was making only slightly worse time than Xiao Be had been; growling to himself, he pressed on harder.

  Supposedly he had been scheduled to drive for four hours before they would get there, after sleeping for seven; then he and Xiao Be would transfer to the lander, she would finish her rest, he would do the preparatory scouting, and finally the two of them would load the Encyclopedia in and take off for a direct return to Earth. Now at the current speed he would get there in just under nine hours (leaving them four hours of pressurized rover operation to spare) and they would have to rearrange everything drastically. As he drove between boulders he reviewed Xiao Be’s voicemail file and discovered that she had kept Mission Control fully appraised via the polar satellite relays.

  Well, if Xiao Be was reporting, he should too, and here was a stretch of more or less bare rock to pick up some time over, during which he would have time to record a message. He made it short—just confirming that Xiao Be’s decisions had all been perfectly correct and that no one else could have done differently, that they still expected to complete the mission successfully, and that there wasn’t much of anything to report except that the radar and optical maps were just not as good as might have been hoped for.