An academic question, of course, as Mac pointed out. Long before that the massplate would be inadequate to protect the drive, and the whole structure would disintegrate through ablative collision with intergalactic gas and dust. Very reassuring; but Mac’s intrigued and speculative tone when he discussed the possibility was enough to send shivers up my spine.
The position fixes we needed to refine Wicklund’s original position and velocity for Vandell rendezvous were made by our computer during the final three days of flight. Those observations and calibrations were performed in microsecond flashes while the drive was turned off, and at the same time we sent out burst mode messages, prepared and compressed in advance, to the Merganser’s projected position. We told them when to send a return signal to us, but no counter-message came in. There was nothing but the automatic “Signal received” from their shipboard computer.
One day before rendezvous we were close enough to throttle back the drive. We couldn’t see Vandell or Merganser yet, but the ships’ computers could begin talking to each other. It took them only a few seconds to collect the information I was interested in, and spit out a display summary.
No human presence now on board. Transfer pod in use for planetary descent trajectory. No incoming signals from pod.
I keyed in the only query that mattered: When descent?
Seven hours shipboard time.
That was it. We had arrived just too late. By now Jan and Sven Wicklund would be down on the surface of Vandell. Then another part of the first message hit me. No incoming signals from pod.
“Mac!” I said. “No pod signal.”
He nodded grimly. He had caught it too. Even when they were down on the surface, there should be an automatic beacon signal to fix the pod’s position and allow compensation for Doppler shift of communication frequency.
“No pod signal,” I said again. “That means they’re—”
“Aye.” His voice was husky, as though there was no air in his lungs. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jeanie. For all we know…”
But he didn’t finish the sentence. The pod antenna was robust. Only something major (such as impact with a solid surface at a few hundred meters a second) would put it out of action. I had never known a case where the pod’s com-link died and the persons within it lived.
We sat side by side in a frozen, empty silence as the Hoatzin brought us closer to the rogue planet. Soon it was visible to our highest resolution telescopes. Without making a decision at any conscious level, I automatically set up a command sequence that would free our own landing pod as soon as the drive went off completely. Then I simply sat there, staring ahead at Vandell.
For much of our trip out I had tried to visualize what a planet would be like that had known no warming sun for millions or billions of years. It had floated free — for how long? We didn’t know. Perhaps since our kind had descended from the trees, perhaps as long as any life had existed on Earth. For all that time, the planet had moved on through the quiet void, responsive only to the gentle, persistent tug of galactic gravitational and magnetic fields, drifting along where the stars were no more than distant pinpricks against the black sky. With no sunlight to breathe life onto its surface, Vandell would be cold, airless, the frozen innermost circle of hell. It chilled me to think of it.
The planet grew steadily in the forward screens. As the definition of the display improved, I suddenly realized why I couldn’t relate the picture in front of me to my mental images. Vandell was visible, at optical wavelengths. It sat there at the center of the screen, a small sphere that glowed a soft, living pink against the stellar backdrop. As I watched the surface seemed to shimmer, with an evanescent pattern of fine lines running across it.
McAndrew had seen it too. He gave a grunt of surprise, cupped his chin in his hands, and leaned forward. After two minutes of silence he reached across to the terminal and keyed in a brief query.
“What are you doing?” I asked, when after another two minutes he showed no sign of speaking.
“Want to see what’s in Merganser’s memory. Should be some images from their time of first approach.” He grunted and shook his head. “Look at that screen. There’s no way Vandell can look like that.”
“I was amazed to see it at visible wavelengths. But I’m not sure why.”
“Available energy.” He shrugged, but his gaze never left the display. “See, Jeanie, the only thing that can provide energy to that planet’s surface is an internal source. But nothing I’ve ever heard of could give this much radiation at those frequencies, and sustain it over a long period. And look at the edge of the planet’s disk. See, it’s less bright. That’s an atmospheric limb darkening, if ever I’ve seen one — an atmosphere, now, on a planet that should be as cold as space. Doesn’t make any sense at all. No sense at all.”
We watched together as Merganser’s data bank fed across to our ship’s computer and through the displays. The screen to our left flickered through a wild pattern of colors, then went totally dark. McAndrew looked at it and swore to himself.
“Explain that to me, Jeanie. There’s the way that Vandell looked in the visible part of the spectrum when Jan and Sven were on their final approach — black as hell, totally invisible. We get here, a couple of days later, and we find that.” He waved his arm at the central display, where Vandell was steadily increasing in size as we moved closer. “Look at the readings that Wicklund made as they came into parking orbit — no visible emissions, no thermal emissions, no sign of an atmosphere. Now see our readings: the planet is visible, above freezing point, and covered in clouds. It’s as though they were describing one world, and we’ve arrived at a completely different one.”
Mac often tells me that I have no imagination. But as he spoke wild ideas went running through my mind that I didn’t care to mention. A planet that changed its appearance when humans approached it; a world that waited patiently for millions of years, then draped a cloak of atmosphere around itself as soon as it had lured a group of people to its surface. Could the changes on Vandell be interpreted as the result of intention, a deliberate and intelligent act on the part of something on the planet?
While I was still full of my furious fancies, a high-pitched whistle from the navigation console announced that the balanced drive had turned off completely. We had reached our rendezvous position, two hundred thousand kilometers from Vandell. I was moving away from the control panel, heading towards our own transfer pod, before the sound had ended. At the entrance I stopped and turned, expecting that McAndrew would be close on my heels. But he hadn’t left the displays. He had called back the list of Vandell’s physical parameters, showing mass, temperature, mean diameter, and rotation rate, and was staring at it blindly. As I watched he requested a new display of Vandell’s rotation rate, which was small enough to be shown as zero in the standard output format.
“Mac!”
He turned, shook his head from side to side as though to banish his own version of the insane ideas that had crowded my mind when I saw the change in Vandell, and slowly followed me to the pod. At the entrance he turned for a last look at the screens.
There was no discussion of our move into the pod. We didn’t know when, or even quite how, but we both knew that we had to make a descent to the surface of Vandell. Somehow we had to recover the bodies that lay beneath the flickering, pearly cloud shrouding the rogue world.
In another time and place, the view from the pod would have been beautiful. We were close enough now to explain the rosy shimmer. It was lightning storms, running back and forth across the clouded skies of Vandell. Lightning storms that shouldn’t be there, on a world that ought to be dead. We had drained Merganser’s data banks as we went round and round in low orbit. Not much new had come to light, but we had found the last set of instrument readings returned to the main computer when the other landing pod had made its approach to Vandell’s surface: Atmospheric pressure, zero. External magnetic field, less than a millionth of a gauss. Temperature, four degrees absolute. Surface gravity, four-tenths of a gee. Planetary rotation rate, too small to measure.