9: EXPLORING LIMBO

The ocean of Limbo seemed as peaceful as ever, but Bony made a careful survey of his surroundings as he drifted out of the airlock.

No sign of bubble creatures. Small purple objects like floating umbrellas opened and closed to jet rapidly away from him, but they seemed more afraid of Bony than he was of them. He waved to Liddy, peering from the airlock, to join him. While she was doing it he made sure that the line connecting him to the Mood Indigo was clear, then cracked open the suit’s internal pressure valve. His buoyancy became slightly greater, enough to begin a slow rise through limpid water.

He looked down. Liddy was following him upward, her slim figure hidden within the bloat of her over-inflated suit. One of the annoyances of the situation was that radios meant for space use were no good under water. Although Bony could talk to Friday Indigo at long distance via the wire connection to the ship, underwater he could speak to Liddy only when they were close enough for sound waves to move directly between them. That meant they could not afford to get too far apart. He brushed his glove across his faceplate to rid it of the annoying layer of tiny bubbles that coated it after a minute or two in the superaerated ocean. High oxygen content must help the native sea-creatures, but to humans in suits it was a nuisance — like moving inside a gigantic bottle of soda water.

The light level was steadily growing brighter, just as it had when he ascended the undersea ridge. In the cumbersome suit it was difficult to bend his head to look upward. He craned back for a quick look and fancied that he could make out moving variations in intensity above him. Wave patterns, travelling across the surface? That would mean the ship could not be more than thirty meters down.

Before he could confirm that guess, his head burst through into dazzling sunlight. The photoreceptors in his helmet recorded an overdose of ultraviolet and modified the faceplate at once to screen out most of it. As he floated at the surface, chest-deep and feet-down, Liddy’s suit bobbed up a few meters away. A long, sluggish wave gently lifted them and then lowered them as they paddled toward each other.

Bony tried the radio circuit. “Liddy?”

“I hear you. My suit shows a really high light level. Does yours?”

“Yes. It’s real. There’s the culprit.” He raised an arm and pointed at the sun. “It’s a blue giant type. That’s really strange.”

“You mean it looks strange. That’s not surprising.”

“No. I mean it is strange. For a planet around a blue giant star, every astronomer will tell you that there should be no life-forms. A star can’t stay in a blue giant stage long enough for anything alive to develop on its planets.”

“Tell that to those funny little umbrella things down near the seabed. They don’t seem to know much astronomy. Bony, can Friday hear us?”

“Only when I have something we want to transmit. Do you need to talk to him? The circuit is off at the moment.”

“No. I was thinking I might feel like saying things I wouldn’t want him to hear. We’re really away from him for the first time, just the two of us. Isn’t it great?”

Bony had mixed feelings about that. Sure, it was great not to have Friday ordering him around or using Liddy as a personal sex toy. But out of the frying pan …

As another wave lifted them he stared all around, seeking any sign of the winged mystery that had cast the tri-lobed underwater shadow on his first trip outside. He saw nothing like it, but far off to his left he caught a glimpse of a long horizontal line across the face of the sea. Land? Or clouds? Before he could confirm anything they were dropping back into the trough.

“Liddy, look that way when we hit the crest of another wave.” He pointed. “I thought I saw something on the skyline. Could be clouds — if this planet has clouds.”

While they waited he opened the circuit to the Mood Indigo . “We’re at the surface, and in a little while I’m going to try the suit thrustors. They ought to move us about up here even if they have problems lower down. If I have to release our connecting line to give us more mobility, I will. We won’t lose the line. The buoy stays on the surface and the beacon will let us find it easily enough from any distance.”

A grunt from Friday Indigo, and that was all.

One more device that Bony had made from nothing and his boss took for granted. Apparently that’s what it was like when you had enough money to buy anything, including people’s brains and bodies. Bony broke the circuit to the ship before the captain could veto his proposal, and made sure that he could unhook the line and beacon easily from his suit. He was still busy with that when he heard Liddy’s excited voice.

“It’s not just clouds, Bony. It’s clouds and land .”

He stared, but too late. They were again dropping into a trough. “Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without going over and standing on it. See for yourself. Wait for the next crest and you can watch waves breaking on the shore.”

If there was land, it was their best hope of escape. The planet’s gravity field was weak, and the ship’s drive should certainly function in an atmosphere.

But which atmosphere? The water samples he had analyzed back on the ship showed a high level of dissolved oxygen. That was encouraging — the only place it could come from was the air at the surface.

Bony glanced at his suit monitors. They were designed to warn if anything in the ambient environment was dangerous to humans. No red lights blinked. That didn’t mean you could breathe whatever was outside. An excess of carbon dioxide would not show as dangerous, but try to breathe that for long and you would be in trouble.

“See?” It was Liddy’s cry. “It is land.”

He had missed it again. He paddled over until he was again right next to her. “Liddy, I’m going to do two things. I want you to watch, but I don’t want you too close. If anything goes wrong, follow the line and go back down.”

He unhooked the buoy and beacon from his suit, as she said nervously, “Bony, you mustn’t do anything silly. I won’t allow it.”

“I’ll try not to. The first thing I want to do is pretty straightforward. If we’re to get anywhere at all on the surface in a reasonable time, we won’t manage it by paddling. We must try our drives. So I’m going to use my suit thrustors to make sure they work and don’t fizzle or blow up or do something else weird. I want you to stay right where you are. Don’t follow me.”

He swam slowly away until there were thirty or forty meters between them. He used his arms to turn in the water so that he was facing Liddy, and tried to sound more confident than he felt. “All right. Here I come.”

He turned on the rear suit thrustors, keeping the setting to a medium level. That was just as well. Even on medium impulse he went racing through the water at a slight downward angle. The level rose on either side of his helmet and suddenly he was submerged and could see nothing but blue-green bubbles. He cut the thrust at once. When he bobbed up to the surface he was face-to-face with Liddy and only inches away from her. The expression of surprise and relief showing through her visor should have been comical. It wasn’t. It was merely reasonable, because Bony felt the same way himself.

He said, he hoped calmly, “I guess that’s a success. Be careful when you use yours, and keep it to a low or medium thrust level. Now for a trickier one. I’m going to let some outside air into my suit.”

“Bony, that’s dangerous. Suppose it’s a poisonous gas?”

“I don’t see how it can be. We know that the gas dissolved in the sea is mostly oxygen, and there must be a balance between what’s in the water and what’s in the air above it. The big question is, how much oxygen? It won’t kill me, but too little or too much and I’ll pant and pass out. Keep an eye on me and be ready to seal my suit.”