Encounter With Tiber Read online

  He clicked off, setting the message to upload at convenience, and settled in to the difficult job of driving; it was a lot like taking a four-wheeler out in the desert back home, except in extremely slow motion and with the added hazard that if he broke an axle or got them into a spot they couldn’t get out of, they would die.

  He was so intent on working his way down a slippery, loose landslide into the next crater that he actually jumped when he heard the crackle in his headphones. “Tiber Two Mobile, this is Mission Control.”

  “Go ahead, Mission Control,” he said.

  There was a long pause; it takes almost one and one half seconds for radio to travel from Earth to Moon, and of course it would then take one and a half seconds for the return message to arrive; with reaction time, the delay was quite noticeable. “Tiber Two Mobile, we’ve assessed your situation and we concur that you can reach the Encyclopedia site with adequate reserves. We believe from corrections to the radar map that we can give you an alternate improved route; information gathered by the earlier part of your expedition has been incorporated into our interpreting software and the pathway corrected. Upload is underway through the data channel. You are cleared to proceed to the Encyclopedia site.”

  “Thanks, Mission Control, will do. Next time put a gas station on the highway, dammit.”

  Again the time crept by before the reply came through. “Roger, Tiber Two Mobile, we’ll do that for your next alien contact mission. Good luck!”

  “Thanks, Mission Control.” He clicked the heads-up display, which projected a ghostly green image of a computer screen onto the windshield so that he could see what had come over in the data transmission. Positioning the cursor on “IMPROVED MAP—SELF INSTALLING,” he selected it. A moment later, it flashed up “INSTALLED—USE?” He selected YES and clicked to use the new map; it showed a slightly higher position on the slope. He turned a little left and climbed up toward it; he didn’t notice much difference, but maybe that would come later. “Thanks, Mission Control, I’m on the new map now.”

  There was no other real news; a short recorded message from Jason that only said hi and I love you and that sort of thing; an equally short one from Lori Kirsten that told him not to speed and to wear his seat belt; and one from his mother that said she was proud of him. Nobody ever knows what to say to anyone who’s being watched by several million people, in an environment where they might die at any instant if something goes wrong. Especially since usually nothing goes wrong, and it would seem hopelessly morbid to dwell on the danger; and because so much of the time spent in space is dull and routine, and thus almost everything you can say about it sounds melodramatic.

  Chris uploaded short reply messages, all of which said he was thinking of them and he liked hearing from them. True enough, and if anything did go wrong it wouldn’t be a bad set of last words. …

  He wondered again why he was getting so morbid; the premonition before the mission and now he was worrying about whether those might be his last words. Maybe he was just getting tired, or maybe it was the sheer difficulty and frustration of getting the pressurized rover through this shattered terrain. Whatever the cause, he didn’t need it. He took a squeeze bag of coffee, set it in the little warmer, and waited for it to heat up as he worked his way over the ridge top.

  Just at the top, he found that his route lay around the high parapet of a crater, the flattish ring of debris that lay around some of them, through sunlight. Well, this at least would give him a chance to recharge some batteries and run on something besides fuel cell power for a while, and it seemed like more even territory. He wasn’t sure he wanted more time to think.

  With just three hours and fifteen minutes of reserve power left, the pressurized rover rolled up to the parked Tiber Prize lander. “Xiao, time to wake up, we’re here,” Chris said.

  She sat up, pushing her visor up for a moment, blinking at the bright light; almost half of this crater was in sunlight. “Great,” she said. “Where’s the hotel? Order me a Caesar salad and a large spaghetti from room service.”

  Chris snorted. “It was quite a drive. And I’m ahead of you now for time spent driving this damned disgrace of a vehicle. But we are here. How about we get inside and get some rest and a somewhat more comfortable place to use the bathroom? Mission Control has okayed me to sleep for a few hours before we get into this, and I’d like to get started.”

  “Suits me,” she said, reaching to pull her visor down, but he stopped her for an instant. “Probably, though,” he added, “we ought to park this thing in the daylight and then hop our way back here. With the electrolysis rig it can get itself recharged in a few hours.”

  “Sure.” They drove over into the broad patch of bright sunlight; it would be days before the shadow of the crater reached this far. After shutting down the fuel cell system and putting its recovered water into the electrolysis system, they deployed the solar cell banks to their fullest extent. Now the electricity made from the sunlight would break the water that was the byproduct of fuel cell operation back into its component hydrogen and oxygen, for reuse; the many batteries on the pressurized rover would recharge as well.

  They lowered their visors, secured them, and popped the canopy on the pressurized rover, stepping out onto the lunar surface. Fifty long bounds had carried them about halfway back to the Pigeon Rack when Xiao Be suddenly cried out over the suit radio. “Hey—there it is!”

  They stopped and approached it slowly. The rectangular box, about the size of a large office desk, sat on a metal truss, about a meter tall, extending for more than a meter beyond the box in all directions. The truss had a little device underneath it that looked for all the world like a cheap lamp. Beneath the device, on the landing site, there was a dark mass of glass, as if the stone itself had melted there.

  “Don’t tell me that’s their whole propulsion system,” Chris said, in awe. “Where the hell are the fuel tanks?”

  Xiao Be gestured as well as she could in the pressure suit, raising her arms and dropping them. “Maybe by the time you’re ready to go to the stars, you’re ready to get over silly ideas like needing fuel. Or maybe whatever it runs on only requires a liter of juice to get from Alpha Centauri to here. Or maybe they just left it here and that’s the ritual ground melter that produces the religiously required fused soil. Our job is to get this thing home; it’s the science guys who have to do something about it.”

  They experimented for a moment with seeing if they could lift it off the frame, which was far too large to put into the Pigeon for return to Earth. They discovered some simple hand screws that seemed to attach it, and though they turned to the right rather than the left to loosen, they turned easily enough. Experimentally they tried to pick the whole thing up; it was at least as heavy as an average-sized automobile, Chris judged, and they couldn’t budge it. “Well,” he said, “it’s not going to be as easy as we could have hoped for, then. I’m dead on my feet; let’s get back to the Pigeon Rack so I can stretch out.”

  This Pigeon Rack was different from the others Chris and Xiao Be had dealt with to this point. Pigeons actually had three doors, but normally only two of them were enabled on the Pigeon Rack—the nose hatch, for docking so that the crew could get in and out in space; and the underside hatch, which went through the lower cargo bay, for exit by ladder onto the lunar surface. The door that, on most Pigeons, was used for direct entry into the crew compartment before leaving Earth, and for EVA in earth orbit, was on the upper surface of the Pigeon when it lay in a Pigeon Rack, and so was normally not enabled for that configuration. But for this job, most of the seats had been removed to make room, and the upper hatch was enabled, to allow the Encyclopedia to go in with the help of a crane. On the sloping lower surface inside the Pigeon there were special tie-down points so that the Encyclopedia could be webbed into place; since in that position it would be hanging directly over Chris and Xiao Be during reentry, Chris had to hope the webbing would do its job.

  Aside from the seats, webbing, control
s, and basic set of supplies to keep them alive on their way back, everything else had been stripped from this Pigeon to allow more room for the Encyclopedia and more spare mass for a larger fuel tank; it was all right as a place to take a nap, but they didn’t dawdle over its comforts, because there weren’t any.

  Hours later, when he arose and took a quick sponge bath, Xiao Be had a short list of accomplishments and a slightly longer list of orders from Mission Control. She had removed the screws that seemed to hold the Encyclopedia to the frame and after careful examination had determined that there were no other connections; it should now lift off easily. Using the hook of a force gauge to try to lift up each leg of the frame, she had arrived at an estimate that the Encyclopedia massed at least six metric tons—“so it’s about as dense as solid aluminum,” she said. “Difficult but not impossible, I guess you’d have to say. The weight is only that of a metric ton on Earth, around the weight of a small car, but we’ll have to be very careful with that much mass and make sure we remember that once we get it up on the crane and swing it, it will be very hard to stop—especially because the bigger a thing is here, the worse the discrepancy between weight and the mass we’re expecting, and the more likely we are to screw up. It’s well within what the Pigeon can take back to Earth, anyway.”

  Further, she had laid out the lifting slings so that they would be ready to slide between the Encyclopedia and the frame as soon as Chris was available to help lift with a crowbar. “And the most annoying thing is that after measuring it, it turns out that its smallest diagonal won’t quite go through the hatch on top of this Pigeon. It will go through the nose hatch, though, as long as we’re careful, but we’re going to have to swing it in like longshoremen rather than just lower it in from overhead.”

  Mission Control had deliberated all of a minute and a half before telling her that they were to go through with the mission. She added, in a low voice, before they put on helmets that might be monitored, that her home government had made a particular point of sending her a private message telling her that they were putting as much pressure as possible on the Four Powers to deliver the Encyclopedia as soon as possible; a few short months would mark the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Chinese Revolution, and they wanted enough of the Encyclopedia decoded by then to be used in some of the commemorative ceremonies.

  “Well, then,” Chris said, “I guess we’d better get to it.”

  The first part of the job was simple enough: Chris lifted each corner of the Encyclopedia with a crowbar, and Xiao Be slid a strap underneath it and then around it. When they had completed that part of the job, they tied the straps at the top—this involved Chris boosting Xiao Be up onto it, but it seemed sturdy enough and, as she pointed out, the aliens couldn’t possibly have built something that would break apart at the first thump and then sent it all this way. In any case, it seemed none the worse after she finished and lightly jumped down, sinking slowly to the lunar surface. “Time for lunch,” she said. “I negotiated that into our schedule.”

  After a break and some rest in the Pigeon, they got ready for the actual loading. After getting back into their pressure suits they pumped the air out of the Pigeon into storage, then opened and braced the nose hatch. They climbed out through the regular EV hatch and bounded across the floor of the crater, racing to get to the pressurized rover. Xiao Be won, both of them laughing at the silliness of it all, and as they checked on the recharge—which appeared to be a bit ahead of schedule—Chris said, “It will be nice when the work’s over and we’re on our way home.”

  She clicked off her radio; he saw the gesture and did the same. Without radios on, the recording instruments in the Pigeon couldn’t pick up anything they said. They touched helmets, letting physical conduction carry the sound between them (though it required some shouting). “Nicer still when we land,” she said. “Since we’ll be landing right off your state of Hawaii, assuming it’s an American ship that picks us up, I’m planning to request political asylum. I can’t stand the thought of another trip with someone looking over my shoulder the whole way. Are you willing to help me if it comes up?”

  Chris swallowed hard and said, “Yeah. One hundred percent. Now let’s get this thing done.” They turned their radios back on.

  But as he turned back to his work, he could hardly help thinking about how the decisions had shaped up. Normally a Pigeon landed on a parafoil, a cross between a wing and a parachute that allowed it to glide fairly gently down to land. This time, however, with such a heavy cargo on board, their margins were tight. They didn’t have enough available energy to make a plane change into the orbital plane of Star Cluster, and hence they could not take the Encyclopedia back to orbit for transfer down by a Starbird or shuttle; they would have to take it down to the surface themselves. And the extra mass was too much to permit using a parafoil. Instead they would have to descend on an oversized parachute, at the mercy of the winds, and splash down in the ocean, as the early astronauts had, an expensive and occasionally dangerous way to do things.

  Of course the whole problem could be avoided by waiting another year to retrieve the Encyclopedia, until adequate equipment was on line to do the job in a more conservative and careful way, but no politician wanted to tell the voters that we had to wait a year to do it right. Thus, Chris thought, because no one has the wit or guts to explain it to the voters, we are going to take the most precious cargo in human history and subject it to six g’s, after which we will dunk it in the ocean.

  Oh, well, it wasn’t his job to worry about that. He turned back to his work. The pressurized rover was fully recharged, with all the water reconverted, so they folded up the solar panels, put it in a driving configuration, and headed back toward the Encyclopedia. The crane swung around, its hook caught the ring on the straps, and they lifted the object—thousands of years old, from light-years away—into the vacuum, and swung it inboard, setting it down on the rear platform of the pressurized rover, as simply as if it were a crate going onto any ship on Earth. “Got it,” Xiao Be said, nodding.

  The pressurized rover handled oddly with such a heavy weight over the rear axle, but it still took only a couple of minutes to drive all the way back to the Pigeon. “You know, twenty centimeters less, and we could have brought it in the top hatch—just lowered it right in,” Chris remarked.

  “It still would have been a nuisance,” she pointed out. “The place we have to secure it to isn’t in a direct line from either hatch. I guess nobody that designed this ever moved into a small apartment up a narrow flight of stairs. So we’ll just have to swing it in through the hatch.”

  “Are we going to be able to pull it in?”

  “Not a prayer,” she said. “We can’t possibly get it in except by using its momentum. It’ll be fine. All you have to do is have a good light hand on the controls.”

  “All I have to do?”

  Xiao Be sighed. “I know I’ve got a better hand on the controls from more practice, Chris, but in case you haven’t noticed, you’re a head taller and a lot thicker than I am. When the Encyclopedia swings through the nose hatch, someone has to be there to give it a hard shove to the side so that it lands more or less where we’re supposed to tie it down. That someone has to be standing along the side to do it.”

  “What if it swings in toward you?”

  “No problem—the cable will be carrying it upward, and anyway, if you hit the hole right it’ll move in a straight line. The thing that worries me more is that after I get it shoved into the right direction, you need to hit the cable release so it doesn’t just fly back out of the hatch. When I yell ‘now’—not before—is when you do that. If you were to release it too early, it would keep moving in a straight line and could either smash something important in the Pigeon, or maybe break, or just possibly get me. On the other hand, if you release too late, or don’t release—all that happens is that it swings back out and we have to try again. So release when I yell ‘now,’ but don’t be early. Got it?”

&n
bsp; “Got it. You’re sure there isn’t room for me in there?”

  “Wish there were. I’d rather have someone with your bulk doing it. But if anything goes wrong, being smaller, I’m going to be a lot better at ducking than you are. Now let me get into place; let’s take a couple of practice swings to make sure we understand how it works.”

  She climbed down out of the pressurized rover—they hadn’t bothered to close the canopy for the short time they would be using it—and scrambled up the frame onto the side of the Pigeon Rack, then in through its open EVA hatch. “Okay,” her voice said over the radio, though Chris could not see her anymore. “Pick it up and bring it up to the hatch, real slow.”

  Using the control panel easily—he had done this in any number of practice runs back in Houston, then at Edwards, then in China—he lifted the Encyclopedia, turned and extended the crane to get it to the nose hatch, and winched the dull black box, wrapped with straps, up to parallel with the nose hatch. “Great,” she said. “You’re right on the line. Now, very slowly, swing it back.”

  He did.

  “Okay, now, give it a quick swing in the door,” she said. “I’m not going to try to catch it this time, I’m just going to see exactly how it comes in, so it’ll swing right back out; let it swing back, bring it to stationary, and if it looks good then we’ll try it for real. Okay?”

  “Roger,” Chris said. “Ready for it?”

  “In place and ready to go. Start it up.”

  He whipped the crane around quickly on its pivot, hoping that the centrifugal force wouldn’t bring it far enough out to hit the side. The Encyclopedia, glowing in the reflected light from the bright side of the crater, flew through space swiftly, following the bending cable. He started to release a sigh of relief as it went into the nose hatch cleanly, without touching anything, and the cable snubbed on the edge of the hatch.