Encounter Below Tharsis - Bob Buckley, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
//-->EncounterBelowTharsisWhere there's life there's adaptation—and danger.BOB BUCKLEYThe wind was out of the west. It carried before it a ruddy haze of dust that whispered gently against thedeserted recreation dome. All about lay the canyon, an abyss of ragged, multicolored stone. It seemed tocup the Noctis Lacus Mining and Exploration Settlement with friendly, severe shelter.Tom McCormick rested his broad forehead against the cool plastic of the port a moment longer,enjoying the view while he attempted to ignore the persistent twinges of conscience that threatened totear him away. The evening, descent of the sand spiders had begun. The tiny wisps of life, not spiders atall but small insectoids with limbs as attenuated as a king crab, whirled down the cheer crags like Duffs ofebony snow, their unbelievable numbers concealing the brilliant exfoliations of lichen that stippled the cliffslike heatless flames of orange, scarlet, and chrome yellow. For the spiders the dunes that mounded thePflats spelled insulated safety from the rigors of the freezing Martian night.The second man in the dome lounge was not interested in the view. He was young, with plain, strongfeatures, and his large hands almost swallowed up his knees as he sat hunched on the edge of the couchstaring at the free-patterned floor of fused plastic."I've never asked you for anything before, Tom, but . . ."The little biologist turned away from the port with a long sigh. "Then don't ask now, Paul. You know myposition, and I think you understand why I came to it. If it weren't that you were being . . . well, we canlet that drop for now. What matters is that I'm rejecting an applicant I suspect to be unable to adjust tocolony life. If Jeanne won't fit into a crew successfully there's no way she can fit into the colony. Shemight not even survive."McCormick's light cotton tunic, an import from the pressurized farms of Hellas City, revealed a wellmuscled, but compact frame, for he was just barely over five feet tall. But it was his face that caught andheld the attention: the skin was patterned by a tangled web- work of tiny wrinkles that puckered into tinysunbursts about his deep-set eyes."You probably think I'm being paternalistic, Paul," he went on. "Perhaps I am. I'm remembering a—dome blow-out a long, long time ago when the Noctis settlement was a single dome and threeprospectors. One of them was a girl. Her name was Jeanne, too, fresh out from Earth she was."McCormick glared at the other. "I couldn't save her. But at my age a man's already made a lot ofmistakes. He avoids making them again because he just doesn't have the energy. If you were older you'dunderstand.""I understand just fine," Culkin snapped. "What all this boils down to is prejudice." But if the boy wasexpecting an angry retort he was disappointed, for McCormick only smiled sadly. Behind him the portwas glowing with a soft, rosy-colored twilight. The flats were in deep shadow, now, and in another fewminutes the entire canyon would be dark."She's been pretty friendly, hasn't she?"Culkin flushed a deep crimson that was not entirely due to the sunset flaming along the bluff-tops. "That'snot why I'm defending her.""Isn't it?" McCormick's eyes were as expressionless as polished glass."No! Jeanne's an excellent geologist. And Sheldon's given her top scores in sandcar handling.""And that's not all she handles well." The overhead lighting of the lounge came on with a shimmer, makingit seem even more spartan. The Noctis Lacus Settlement was still little more than an outpost. The maincolonies at Claritas and Hellas were different, both of them growing up around subsurface aquifers andrich loess soils with the farming supplemented by ore extraction contracts leased to Lunar Industries andHomeworld corporations. Noctis would grow, also; but in time, not immediately. The caverns had to bemapped, the ore veins identified, before the heavy work could begin. But there was a future in the greatcanyons. McCormick knew it, and so did the slim brunette standing framed by the airseal of the portal. Ithad been Norah who had convinced McCormick to bring the crew west and hire their two cave buggiesout to the Noctis division of the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Lands, the only government on Mars.Waist-length braids swung like glossy snakes about the girl as she moved into the lounge.Culkin seemed to sense the arrival of an ally. "Tom's rejected Jeanne Alexander as a replacement forSally. Can you believe that, Norah?"The girl laughed as she threw herself down on a couch. "Yep." Then she looked at McCormick "Why?"For an answer the biologist fished in one of his tunic pockets and tossed a tiny object to the girl. Shecaught it on the fly automatically and easily. "Know what it is?" he asked.Norah turned the thing about in her fingers. "Drug capsule with a red gel coating. So what?""I found it in my office after Alexander had been there for an interview. She doesn't know she droppedit.""Must be pretty terrible from the way you're looking at it, Tom.""It's an engram transplant, a memory capsule. No way of knowing precisely what it is without ingesting it.Might be a technical journal article, or a joyride across the ice fields of Titan.""Oh!" Norah put the capsule into an empty dish and wiped her fingers delicately on her pants-leg. "Iwonder how she got it past the customs inspection on Phobos?""It's no crime to possess engram caps," Paul Culkin protested loudly. "Any of us could place an orderwith Earth. The things are expensive, but certainly not the instruments of destruction that Tom accusesthem of being. The caps are even catching on at Luna, and I think that's all the more reason fornotrejecting Jeanne just because she conforms to Homeworld technology and mores."The landscape outside the port was growing darker. The sky was almost black, holding a thin tracery ofice clouds that were slowly drifting southward, toward the icebound pole. The highlands atop the bluffswould have another thirty minutes of light, but for the canyon abysses night had fallen already.Norah shifted on the couch."Well, we need a replacement for Sally, Tom. There's no getting around that. If you delay any longerwe're going to lose credits. It's no good just letting a buggy go unused. And the Bureau won't like yourrejecting an applicant without so much as a trial run. I also agree with Paul that you can't reject her solelybecause she lives up to Earth mores.""You'd have me sign on a New Guinea cannibal just so long as he could drive a cave buggy,"McCormick said with a sigh."That's an idea." Norah grinned. "Let me propose a compromise. Give Jeanne a chance to prove herselfin the field. We can rearrange buggy crews.""You want me to double up with Paul?" McCormick glanced at Culkin thoughtfully. "That would work.He's a geologist, and that maintains technical balance. But still ...""I like it," Culkin declared loudly, standing up to begin pacing the floor, his hands clasped behind hisback. "It gets you off the hook, Tom.""It gets nobody off any hook. Mars can still kill, especially in the caverns, and your Jeanne doesn'tunderstand us, nor does she understand how a crew functions. On Earth the individual works for himself,and equality is legislated. Put someone like that into the Bureau system and you've got all the makings ofbad trouble.""I'm willing to risk it," Culkin shot back angrily."Damned decent of you, considering it's going to be Norah who's taking the chances.""Relax, Tom." The girl was smiling. "If I don't mind a risk, don't you mind it for me. I'm a big girl, andbesides, it's a lot harder for a woman to fool a woman."The golden bar of sunlight that had emblazoned itself across the east rim of the canyon narrowed to asliver and vanished. Black shadow swallowed up the port. Off in the distance, where the sole roadwayclimbed out of the canyon on a series of switchbacks, the headlamps of an ore truck threw banners ofwhite glare across the walls of rock, painting them for an instant in stark relief."One patrol?" McCormick asked finally."It only takes one to smoke out a loser," Norah said quietly. "Tomorrow you can check her out on thebuggies while Paul and I finish up that workdome contract. That night we go down in the caverns, andwhen we get back the lady might very well ask for a transfer on her own. The caves can do that to anewcomer who goes deep for nothing more uplifting than a few credits."2.The creature was without awareness, without identity. It could not comprehend the endless dark, nor theslow ebb of heat energy into its jelly-like body through the thermopods bedded deeply throughadamantine rock toward the magma pockets that underlay the deep caverns. In its structure, partprotoplasmic, part mineral, the creature was a curious combination of life and unlife. It had existed in anunchanging state for millions of years. It had sensed when the floods had come, it had sensed when thetorrents had drained away. Its main body lay unmoving within the ancient grotto with the evidence of itshunger all about: empty crevices where once there had been rich veins of ore. The feeder tentacles hadetched the stone with powerful acids and left it pocked and crumbling. Now the ores were played out.They had lasted long, but all things come to an end. The creature was quietly, inevitably starving to death.It did not "know" this, but its great bulk was permeated with foreboding. The five simple ganglia, copiesmade from the brains of insectoids that had blundered into its feeding tentacles at long intervals, werealert. But there was no prey to be found, or absorbed. Dissolution was coming rapidly. Nothing was leftto it but division, the entire bulk disintegrating into a thousand-plus mobile, diminutive reproductions, oneor two of which might chance upon another rich grotto and grow to maturity, sending thermopods downto suck the heat of the planet. Already the process of division was beginning as chromosomal structureswithin the central cell mass began aligning into a precise and complex pattern.3."Coffins with wheels!" The girl's tone implied that she was not impressed by the two cave buggies drawnup in the equipment dome. She put her gloved hands on the hips of her suit and shook her head from sideto side within the transparent helmet.McCormick grinned. He knew the buggies weren't pretty and he didn't much care. They had beendesigned for strength, and they gave off the massive presence of two granite boulders. Neither waslonger than twelve feet, nor wider than six, even taking into account the six large wire wheels arrayedalong the lengths of the tubular hulls, three to a side. Each of the vehicles was double-ended, since rarelydid a buggyman find himself with the luxury of the room to turn around. A pressure-tight bulkheadseparated the forward control-room from the rearmost, and the hull itself was 200mm machined Martiansteel, the finest this side of Luna, with a bright orange envelope of Teflon bonded over the metal. Twohatches, one at the bow, the other at the stern, opened inward, and above their rims were the inset,glassine-shielded driving lamps, three to, an end, and above these the tiny driving ports arrayed in a curvebefore the padded couch on which the driver had to lie, belly down, the entire trip. Caving was profitableand interesting, but no one as yet had been foolish enough to acclaim it as fun.McCormick reached through one of the open hatches and moved a switch on a control panel. A sectionof hull rose with a hum, exposing a slim pod mounted on an extensible pivot arm."This is the sensor pod," he explained. "It contains a spectrographic laser, a TV camera, and asearchlight. Both crewmen share it, but it is usually operated by whoever isn't driving the buggy at thetime. Now, climb inside. You've got until 1400 to memorize the controls. I want you to be able to workthem in complete darkness, because even in a power outage the motors run. They're fail-safe, and thewire wheels serve as sensing antennae even if you can't see the cave walls. If you want to live to be anold caver you'll need every trick we can teach you."The girl dropped into a crouch and peered through the open hatch into the interior of the buggy. "Notmuch room in there, is there?" When McCormick didn't answer she frowned. "Look, I spent most of lastnight going over the construction plans and control schematics with Paul. It's all up here now." Shetapped a gloved finger against her helmet."Schematics in the brain don't mean reflexes in the muscles. Inside." When the girl didn't moveMcCormick sighed and gazed resolutely up at the straining plastic of the dome. "It's that or the next oretrain back to Claritas," he said firmly.This time Jeanne moved, though not without complaint.P4. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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//-->EncounterBelowTharsisWhere there's life there's adaptation—and danger.BOB BUCKLEYThe wind was out of the west. It carried before it a ruddy haze of dust that whispered gently against thedeserted recreation dome. All about lay the canyon, an abyss of ragged, multicolored stone. It seemed tocup the Noctis Lacus Mining and Exploration Settlement with friendly, severe shelter.Tom McCormick rested his broad forehead against the cool plastic of the port a moment longer,enjoying the view while he attempted to ignore the persistent twinges of conscience that threatened totear him away. The evening, descent of the sand spiders had begun. The tiny wisps of life, not spiders atall but small insectoids with limbs as attenuated as a king crab, whirled down the cheer crags like Duffs ofebony snow, their unbelievable numbers concealing the brilliant exfoliations of lichen that stippled the cliffslike heatless flames of orange, scarlet, and chrome yellow. For the spiders the dunes that mounded thePflats spelled insulated safety from the rigors of the freezing Martian night.The second man in the dome lounge was not interested in the view. He was young, with plain, strongfeatures, and his large hands almost swallowed up his knees as he sat hunched on the edge of the couchstaring at the free-patterned floor of fused plastic."I've never asked you for anything before, Tom, but . . ."The little biologist turned away from the port with a long sigh. "Then don't ask now, Paul. You know myposition, and I think you understand why I came to it. If it weren't that you were being . . . well, we canlet that drop for now. What matters is that I'm rejecting an applicant I suspect to be unable to adjust tocolony life. If Jeanne won't fit into a crew successfully there's no way she can fit into the colony. Shemight not even survive."McCormick's light cotton tunic, an import from the pressurized farms of Hellas City, revealed a wellmuscled, but compact frame, for he was just barely over five feet tall. But it was his face that caught andheld the attention: the skin was patterned by a tangled web- work of tiny wrinkles that puckered into tinysunbursts about his deep-set eyes."You probably think I'm being paternalistic, Paul," he went on. "Perhaps I am. I'm remembering a—dome blow-out a long, long time ago when the Noctis settlement was a single dome and threeprospectors. One of them was a girl. Her name was Jeanne, too, fresh out from Earth she was."McCormick glared at the other. "I couldn't save her. But at my age a man's already made a lot ofmistakes. He avoids making them again because he just doesn't have the energy. If you were older you'dunderstand.""I understand just fine," Culkin snapped. "What all this boils down to is prejudice." But if the boy wasexpecting an angry retort he was disappointed, for McCormick only smiled sadly. Behind him the portwas glowing with a soft, rosy-colored twilight. The flats were in deep shadow, now, and in another fewminutes the entire canyon would be dark."She's been pretty friendly, hasn't she?"Culkin flushed a deep crimson that was not entirely due to the sunset flaming along the bluff-tops. "That'snot why I'm defending her.""Isn't it?" McCormick's eyes were as expressionless as polished glass."No! Jeanne's an excellent geologist. And Sheldon's given her top scores in sandcar handling.""And that's not all she handles well." The overhead lighting of the lounge came on with a shimmer, makingit seem even more spartan. The Noctis Lacus Settlement was still little more than an outpost. The maincolonies at Claritas and Hellas were different, both of them growing up around subsurface aquifers andrich loess soils with the farming supplemented by ore extraction contracts leased to Lunar Industries andHomeworld corporations. Noctis would grow, also; but in time, not immediately. The caverns had to bemapped, the ore veins identified, before the heavy work could begin. But there was a future in the greatcanyons. McCormick knew it, and so did the slim brunette standing framed by the airseal of the portal. Ithad been Norah who had convinced McCormick to bring the crew west and hire their two cave buggiesout to the Noctis division of the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Lands, the only government on Mars.Waist-length braids swung like glossy snakes about the girl as she moved into the lounge.Culkin seemed to sense the arrival of an ally. "Tom's rejected Jeanne Alexander as a replacement forSally. Can you believe that, Norah?"The girl laughed as she threw herself down on a couch. "Yep." Then she looked at McCormick "Why?"For an answer the biologist fished in one of his tunic pockets and tossed a tiny object to the girl. Shecaught it on the fly automatically and easily. "Know what it is?" he asked.Norah turned the thing about in her fingers. "Drug capsule with a red gel coating. So what?""I found it in my office after Alexander had been there for an interview. She doesn't know she droppedit.""Must be pretty terrible from the way you're looking at it, Tom.""It's an engram transplant, a memory capsule. No way of knowing precisely what it is without ingesting it.Might be a technical journal article, or a joyride across the ice fields of Titan.""Oh!" Norah put the capsule into an empty dish and wiped her fingers delicately on her pants-leg. "Iwonder how she got it past the customs inspection on Phobos?""It's no crime to possess engram caps," Paul Culkin protested loudly. "Any of us could place an orderwith Earth. The things are expensive, but certainly not the instruments of destruction that Tom accusesthem of being. The caps are even catching on at Luna, and I think that's all the more reason fornotrejecting Jeanne just because she conforms to Homeworld technology and mores."The landscape outside the port was growing darker. The sky was almost black, holding a thin tracery ofice clouds that were slowly drifting southward, toward the icebound pole. The highlands atop the bluffswould have another thirty minutes of light, but for the canyon abysses night had fallen already.Norah shifted on the couch."Well, we need a replacement for Sally, Tom. There's no getting around that. If you delay any longerwe're going to lose credits. It's no good just letting a buggy go unused. And the Bureau won't like yourrejecting an applicant without so much as a trial run. I also agree with Paul that you can't reject her solelybecause she lives up to Earth mores.""You'd have me sign on a New Guinea cannibal just so long as he could drive a cave buggy,"McCormick said with a sigh."That's an idea." Norah grinned. "Let me propose a compromise. Give Jeanne a chance to prove herselfin the field. We can rearrange buggy crews.""You want me to double up with Paul?" McCormick glanced at Culkin thoughtfully. "That would work.He's a geologist, and that maintains technical balance. But still ...""I like it," Culkin declared loudly, standing up to begin pacing the floor, his hands clasped behind hisback. "It gets you off the hook, Tom.""It gets nobody off any hook. Mars can still kill, especially in the caverns, and your Jeanne doesn'tunderstand us, nor does she understand how a crew functions. On Earth the individual works for himself,and equality is legislated. Put someone like that into the Bureau system and you've got all the makings ofbad trouble.""I'm willing to risk it," Culkin shot back angrily."Damned decent of you, considering it's going to be Norah who's taking the chances.""Relax, Tom." The girl was smiling. "If I don't mind a risk, don't you mind it for me. I'm a big girl, andbesides, it's a lot harder for a woman to fool a woman."The golden bar of sunlight that had emblazoned itself across the east rim of the canyon narrowed to asliver and vanished. Black shadow swallowed up the port. Off in the distance, where the sole roadwayclimbed out of the canyon on a series of switchbacks, the headlamps of an ore truck threw banners ofwhite glare across the walls of rock, painting them for an instant in stark relief."One patrol?" McCormick asked finally."It only takes one to smoke out a loser," Norah said quietly. "Tomorrow you can check her out on thebuggies while Paul and I finish up that workdome contract. That night we go down in the caverns, andwhen we get back the lady might very well ask for a transfer on her own. The caves can do that to anewcomer who goes deep for nothing more uplifting than a few credits."2.The creature was without awareness, without identity. It could not comprehend the endless dark, nor theslow ebb of heat energy into its jelly-like body through the thermopods bedded deeply throughadamantine rock toward the magma pockets that underlay the deep caverns. In its structure, partprotoplasmic, part mineral, the creature was a curious combination of life and unlife. It had existed in anunchanging state for millions of years. It had sensed when the floods had come, it had sensed when thetorrents had drained away. Its main body lay unmoving within the ancient grotto with the evidence of itshunger all about: empty crevices where once there had been rich veins of ore. The feeder tentacles hadetched the stone with powerful acids and left it pocked and crumbling. Now the ores were played out.They had lasted long, but all things come to an end. The creature was quietly, inevitably starving to death.It did not "know" this, but its great bulk was permeated with foreboding. The five simple ganglia, copiesmade from the brains of insectoids that had blundered into its feeding tentacles at long intervals, werealert. But there was no prey to be found, or absorbed. Dissolution was coming rapidly. Nothing was leftto it but division, the entire bulk disintegrating into a thousand-plus mobile, diminutive reproductions, oneor two of which might chance upon another rich grotto and grow to maturity, sending thermopods downto suck the heat of the planet. Already the process of division was beginning as chromosomal structureswithin the central cell mass began aligning into a precise and complex pattern.3."Coffins with wheels!" The girl's tone implied that she was not impressed by the two cave buggies drawnup in the equipment dome. She put her gloved hands on the hips of her suit and shook her head from sideto side within the transparent helmet.McCormick grinned. He knew the buggies weren't pretty and he didn't much care. They had beendesigned for strength, and they gave off the massive presence of two granite boulders. Neither waslonger than twelve feet, nor wider than six, even taking into account the six large wire wheels arrayedalong the lengths of the tubular hulls, three to a side. Each of the vehicles was double-ended, since rarelydid a buggyman find himself with the luxury of the room to turn around. A pressure-tight bulkheadseparated the forward control-room from the rearmost, and the hull itself was 200mm machined Martiansteel, the finest this side of Luna, with a bright orange envelope of Teflon bonded over the metal. Twohatches, one at the bow, the other at the stern, opened inward, and above their rims were the inset,glassine-shielded driving lamps, three to, an end, and above these the tiny driving ports arrayed in a curvebefore the padded couch on which the driver had to lie, belly down, the entire trip. Caving was profitableand interesting, but no one as yet had been foolish enough to acclaim it as fun.McCormick reached through one of the open hatches and moved a switch on a control panel. A sectionof hull rose with a hum, exposing a slim pod mounted on an extensible pivot arm."This is the sensor pod," he explained. "It contains a spectrographic laser, a TV camera, and asearchlight. Both crewmen share it, but it is usually operated by whoever isn't driving the buggy at thetime. Now, climb inside. You've got until 1400 to memorize the controls. I want you to be able to workthem in complete darkness, because even in a power outage the motors run. They're fail-safe, and thewire wheels serve as sensing antennae even if you can't see the cave walls. If you want to live to be anold caver you'll need every trick we can teach you."The girl dropped into a crouch and peered through the open hatch into the interior of the buggy. "Notmuch room in there, is there?" When McCormick didn't answer she frowned. "Look, I spent most of lastnight going over the construction plans and control schematics with Paul. It's all up here now." Shetapped a gloved finger against her helmet."Schematics in the brain don't mean reflexes in the muscles. Inside." When the girl didn't moveMcCormick sighed and gazed resolutely up at the straining plastic of the dome. "It's that or the next oretrain back to Claritas," he said firmly.This time Jeanne moved, though not without complaint.P4. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]