The Getaway Special

23

“Once more into the breach,” she muttered.

They were moving past it at a pretty good clip. At nearest approach they were still a couple of kilometers away, but that was close enough. The thing was huge. It filled the monitors even at the cameras’ lowest magnification, and at full zoom they could see the outlines of thousands of airlocks and cargo bay doors and various other less definitive lumps and projections. Everything had a rounded look to it, as if it had partially melted or was made of something soft right from the beginning. There was no writing on it, unless the subtle variations in its brownish color conveyed meaning in some alien script.

It was not human built; that much was obvious. For one thing, the race that was still struggling to keep Fred in orbit couldn’t build something like that in a decade, much less the week they had had since Allen had dropped the hyperdrive plans in their laps. And the Onnescus of the world notwithstanding, nobody just happened to have one lying around in their back yard, either.

“Try the radio,” Judy said, with no trace left of the hesitation she had felt the first time.

“Right.” Allen called, listened, called again and listened while the two ships drew apart, but nobody answered. “I’m beginning to think that radio isn’t the best way to get someone’s attention,” he said.

“Have you got a better idea?”

He nodded. “Let’s shed some velocity and see if we can actually come up on ’em slowly enough to be seen by naked eye.”

Judy didn’t really want to waste the time it would take to do that, but she couldn’t see any way around it, short of going back for another pass, depressurizing the tank completely, standing in the open hatch, and simply throwing a can of beans at the ship as they swept past. Considering what even a modestly speeding can of beans could do to a spaceship—even one that size—she didn’t suppose that would be a good idea.

“All right, let’s see if we can slow down,” she said. They needed to see if this “tangential vector translation maneuver” of Allen’s would work anyway, preferably before they tried using it to land somewhere. This would be as good a test as any.

He spent a couple minutes at the keyboard, keying in his best estimate of the relative velocity between the two ships and getting an exact distance to the center of the planet, based on triangulation from their current position and the point where they had first showed up next to it. He entered the data into the “TVTM” program, pressed the “Enter” key, and said, “According to this, we’ve got about twelve minutes to fall, provided I got all the bugs out.”

“We can always hope,” Judy said as the program shifted them to a point above the planet where its gravity would pull them into just the right vector. She wasn’t really that worried about this part; she had great faith in Allen’s programming. His planet-finding routine had worked without a hitch, even if the planets themselves had been disappointments.

They fell freely in their new position, examining the planet as they rose away from it, but there was really not much to see. Judy would never have imagined that she could grow bored in so short a time looking at an extra-solar planet, but when all there was to see were storm systems that looked exactly like the ones she’d seen from Earth orbit, there really wasn’t much to hold her interest.

She refreshed their air again, lowering the pressure another pound now that they were breathing almost pure oxygen. They used both valves this time, carefully keeping their rotation rate slow enough to allow them to pan the cameras without struggling. When they were done repressurizing, their oxygen supply stood at just over fifty percent.

Her legs were cramping from being bent so long. She wanted desperately to stretch out, but there simply wasn’t room with all the stuff wedged in around her. At least she didn’t have gravity to contend with; if she were packed this tightly into place on Earth, half her body would be in agony by now.

At last the program beeped to warn them that their velocity change was complete, then it automatically took them back to their starting point. Allen had to find the alien ship again from there, but when the comparator did its thing and he took them close to it, they could hardly detect any relative motion.

Now that they had a chance to examine it at leisure, they could see that the other ship was tumbling end-for-end. The motion was almost too slow to see, about like the minute hand on a watch, but the effect was apparent immediately: the ship’s nose had been pointing toward the sun before, but now the tail faced about sixty degrees into the light.

“Jesus, look at those rocket nozzles,” Judy said. The entire backside looked like one cavernous exhaust port. The opening looked like it extended inward at least a third of the length of the ship, too. “It’s all engine,” she said, but the moment she said it she realized that didn’t make any sense. A rocket with a nozzle that size would accelerate at dozens of gees if the engine was at all efficient, but even if the passengers could take that kind of punishment, there was no point in it. Rocket engines were most effective when they burned small amounts of fuel over long periods of time, not the other way around, and anybody who could build something like this ship would understand that principle just as well as she did.

And besides, she had seen portholes and airlocks all along the flank during their first pass. The way things looked from here, they would open directly into the nozzle—for about a millisecond until their seals burned through and the exhaust flame ripped the ship apart from the inside out.

But there were the hatches. They were tiny compared to the size of the ship, but she could see them quite clearly down inside. Far more clearly, in fact, than from the outside. They didn’t have any of that melted look she had seen before.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “This is totally backward.”

“It kind of is, isn’t it?” Allen zoomed in with his camera until they could count the portholes. They weren’t actually holes; from the inside they looked like rubber casts of portholes, and the airlocks looked the same way. He focused the camera on the outside, where the features were less distinct. “It’s like the ship has been turned inside out.”

Judy focused her own camera on the center of the open end. Sunlight didn’t penetrate all the way to the nose, but when she zoomed in until the brightly lit parts of the ship slid off screen, the camera irised open and she could see deeper into the recesses of the ship by reflected light. The interior details went all the way up.

“It’s a mold.”

Allen narrowed his eyes. “A what?”

“A mold. You spray liquid metal on the inside surface, let it harden, and you’ve got a ready-made hull. Either that or somebody sprayed this stuff all around an already-built spaceship and then peeled it off.”

“Why would they do that?”

“How should I know?”

That had to be it, though. Now that she had the right mental picture, the pods spaced around the tail made more sense. Those were engines, and probably fuel tanks as well, or at least that was where they would go. Even then the ship had a hell of a lot of power, but by the size of the body, Judy was willing to bet that it needed it. That thing could hold a couple of thousand people, easy. It was wide enough to spin on its axis for gravity. If the beings who built it were anything like people, the ship that came out of that mold was big enough to live in for months, maybe longer.

“There’s got to be a habitable planet somewhere else in this system,” she said. “That’s a passenger ship.”

Allen looked at the comparator screen. “There’s five others, but they’re not good candidates. One’s tucked right up next to the star even closer than Mercury, and the other four are quite a ways out.”

“One of them has to be inhabited,” Judy insisted. “This thing came from somewhere, and I’ll bet money it wasn’t here.”

He zoomed back out with his camera and swiveled it around until he could see the water world. “I don’t know; there could be a whole society of dolphins or something like that down there.”

“And how would they build something like this? They couldn’t mine anything. And even if they could, they couldn’t make a fire to smelt metals. They couldn’t build telescopes, so they probably wouldn’t even know about planets, or that there was any point in going out to them.”

“Fish have eyes,” Allen countered. “Clams build shells without fire. It would be harder for us to build a spaceship underwater, but who’s to say how tough it would be for someone who lived there?”

Judy looked at the cloud-and-ocean-shrouded world. “How many other satellites are there?” she asked.

Allen checked the comparator display again. “Just the one. But we probably wouldn’t be able to see communications satellites or smaller spacecraft.”

“We’d be able to hear them.” She pointed at the radio, still set to receive and still silent.

“Maybe, maybe not. This is a shortwave receiver, not microwave. If they’re using high frequencies to pack more information into the signal like we do, we’d never hear them.”

This was all just too much. Judy said, “So what do you want to do about it? Parachute down to the water? Then what? How are we going to talk to intelligent dolphins, even if they’re down there? What happens if our cameras get wet and short out? We’d have to navigate home by dead reckoning.”

He held up his hands, palms out. They looked ridiculously small inside the oversize spacesuit cuffs, like a child’s hands stuck on an adult body. “Whoa, slow down there. Nobody’s talking about landing in the water. I was just saying maybe we shouldn’t write this place off so quickly.”

“And I’m saying we’ve already used up half our air. I’m all for meeting whoever built that spaceship mold, but I’m not willing to hang around searching for flying fish when there are five other prospective homeworlds that we haven’t even looked at yet.”

“Four,” Allen said. “You can’t seriously suggest that a planet closer to its star than Mercury could support life. Especially when the star is twice as bright as the Sun.”

“All right, then, four. But let’s go see.”

He thought it over, then nodded. “Okay. No big deal.”

No big deal. She nearly threw a can of beans at him, but it would have been too much trouble to dig one out of her sleeping bag. She just zoomed her camera back to wide-angle display and waited for him to key in the coordinates.

They hit the planets in order of distance from the primary rather than along the most direct route. “Direct” didn’t mean much anymore, Judy supposed. She wondered how long it would be before people stopped thinking in terms of distance altogether. Hopefully longer than it took her and Allen to find something actually worth going to all the trouble of coming out here for.

The first planet was a bust. It was an airless rock with no moons, no satellites, and no evidence that intelligent life had ever visited it. Of course there could have been vast cities underground, or networks of small ones aboveground, and they would never be visible from space, but there was no radio traffic either, and no time to make a more detailed search.

The second planet was a gas giant, nicely ringed and accompanied by several moons of its own, each of which required at least a cursory look. Unfortunately, that was all they required; they were all either rocky or icy or both, and far too inhospitable to human life even if they had sported alien presence, which they didn’t.

The third planet was a double gas giant, a Jupiter-sized ball of banded yellow-and-brown clouds and a pale blue one about half its size orbiting one another a couple million kilometers apart. Gravitational perturbations had swept the space between them clean of anything else, so there was no reason to stick around there.

The last planet was another rock, this time with an atmosphere, but at its distance from the sun there was no way that atmosphere could have any oxygen or nitrogen in it except as methane or ammonia. And there were no satellites in orbit around it, either natural or artificial.

That was the last straw. Somebody had to have made the spaceship mold, and a mold implied that there was at least one complete spaceship somewhere in this planetary system, but it seemed to Judy as if they were deliberately hiding from her. They weren’t listening to radio and they didn’t show any sign of life; what did they expect of her, anyway? To top it off, the farther they got from the star, the colder the Getaway became. They could handle it easily enough inside their spacesuits, but Judy didn’t like subjecting the tank itself to such extreme temperatures. And besides, cold air made her nose run, and the fluids were already pooling in her upper body from weightlessness.

“I’m fresh out of ideas,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

Allen scratched his head. “Well, I hate to leave a solar system that’s got such direct evidence of intelligent life, but you’re right about one thing: there’s no place here for us to land. Even if we could find the ship that came out of that mold, the odds that the crew breathes the same air we do are pretty slim, so unless they can set us up with an environment box, we’re going to run out of air and have to go home in a couple more hours anyway.”

“I didn’t come all this way in this damned tank to spend even more time in a box.”

“The thrill is starting to pall a bit for me, too,” he admitted.

“So what do we do?” she asked again. “Go back to Alpha Centauri and stake a claim before it’s all snapped up by homesteaders?”

He tapped the fingers of his right hand in a nervous rhythm on the hyperdrive canister. “We could do that. That’s actually not a bad idea for a fallback position. But we could be on the ground there in less than an hour from anywhere, so we still have time to explore one or two more stars. We’re only halfway through the cluster; why don’t we at least give it another shot?”

Judy shrugged, biting back a curse as the spacesuit’s neck ring chafed her shoulder blades. “What the hell,” she said. “As long as we’re here.” She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to work the tension out of the muscles. Who would have guessed that interstellar exploration would turn out to be so frustrating?