The getaway special (20 page)

But the day wasn't over yet. They went through the same routine of checking for planets that they had done at both previous stops. Judy braced herself for disappointment, but she allowed herself to hope when the comparator came up with a good prospect about 3 AU out from the star, which was itself almost as good a prospect as Alpha Centauri. It was brighter than the Sun, but it had no close stellar companions to perturb planetary orbits, so the extra brightness just put its habitable zone farther out.

"Third time's a charm," she said when she saw it, then she searched frantically for something made out of wood to knock on before she jinxed it. She rapped the plywood-reinforced hatch overhead, her gloved hands making a soft
thud
.

Allen calculated the jump and took them closer, but the moment she saw the planet, her heart fell again. The atmosphere looked good—swirls of white cloud swept through it just like on Earth—but the surface was all one color: blue. It looked like one huge ocean, even at the poles, which were only evident by the weather patterns.

She zoomed in with as high a magnification as she could get and searched for any sign of land, but if there was any, it was on the night side. This planet could be water all the way to the core for all she knew.

Allen helped search for a few minutes, but then he turned his attention to the comparator reading again. "Hey, there's a moon," he said cheerily.

"So?"

He narrowed his eyes. "So . . . maybe we should go have a look."

"What's the point?"

"To see what it looks like?"

"It's just going to be an airless rock. Or another one of those piles of crap that doesn't give a shit about us one way or the other."

He lowered his voice the way he might speak to a petulant child. "We don't know that. It could be anything. Maybe this is a double planet, and the other one didn't get quite so much water."

"And maybe it's made of green cheese. That would be good."

They stared at one another, Allen obviously unsure what to do with this stranger who had taken over Judy's body, and Judy past caring. She clenched her fists, but the spacesuit gloves resisted even that little bit of comfort.

"Damn it. Damn it all! This isn't the way it's supposed to work. Space is supposed to be full of habitable planets. Enough for everyone, including left-handed theremin players. Where the hell are they?"

"We've only tried three stars," Allen said reasonably. "And we did hit one. It's too small a sample to be statistically significant, but even if it were, that's not such a bad average."

"Yeah, right." Judy took a couple of deep breaths, trying to wash the anger out of her system. When she could trust herself to speak again, she said, "Look, I know it's not your fault, but this isn't working out quite the way I'd hoped. I don't want to spend all our time looking at astronomical curiosities; I want to find another planet we can actually land on."

"Me too." Allen typed in another set of coordinates. "One quick jump to the moon just to see if it's a candidate, and if it's not, on we go."

She took another deep breath. "All right."

The water planet winked out like a burst soap bubble, but nothing else took its place. They weren't rotating nearly as fast as they had been before, so it took a couple of minutes to confirm what Judy already suspected: there was nothing in sight in any direction.

"Where the heck did it go?" Allen asked, but he was already running the comparator program again to find out. It only took a few seconds to come up with the answer: they had overshot, and now it was nearly hidden in the glare of the sun.

"Hmm. Must be smaller than I'd hoped," he said. "Not enough mass to create much of a gravity well. Let me calculate the right correction . . . and here we go." This time something popped into view when they jumped. It was half in light and half in shadow, giving them a high-contrast view of every bump and groove as they zoomed in on it. Judy didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was another artifact, but this one, at least, was recognizable. It was a long cylinder with a rounded nose on one end and four smaller cylinders spaced evenly around the circumference at the other. The nose was peppered with evenly spaced dimples that could only be portholes, and there were more of them along the side. The cylinder grew thicker toward the back, where the four smaller pods were mounted. Those had to be engines, and while it was no design Judy had ever seen, the whole thing had to be a spaceship.

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."