Shirley took the diamond from her coverall pocket and suspended the rock in mid-air. It drifted slightly in the air currents but fell neither toward or away from Roche or Eau.
"Zero-gee," she announced.
"Now that the sun is shining on Eau, the ammonia will start to boil out of the water, and the wind will start blowing the other way," said George. "If we're going to get any samples or make any measurements we'd better do it soon, before the waves build up."
"We go down?" said Arielle, starting the lift-fans. The aerospace plane gathered speed, and within a few minutes was hovering over the surface of the rounded tip of ocean at the inner point of Eau. The gravity had risen to a half-percent of gee and things once more took on their normal orientation, except now overhead was a conical mountain of rock instead of a conical mountain of water.
"Three meter above surface," said Arielle. "The wind is drooping down."
"Lower the sonar scanner, Jill," commanded Shirley. There was a bumping noise from beneath the ship as a small dense package of sophisticated sound generating and detecting equipment dropped out of a hatchway on the bottom of the plane and splashed into the water.
There was a blip on the screen as Jill fired the first strong burst of sound down into the depths. There was a pause as the trace made its way slowly across the screen. As the green line approached the right side of the screen, there was a blink, and the scale increased ten times. The blip, now moving only one-tenth as fast, continued across the screen, passing one depth marker after another.
"It's really deep," said Shirley. "The marker is at fifty kilometers and still going."
"That's five times deeper than the deepest ocean on Earth," said George. "I wonder what the pressures are like down there."
"Shouldn't be too bad," said David. "Don't forget the reduced gravity."
"I think the signal must have been attenuated by a muddy bottom or something," said Jill through Shirley's imp. "I'll try a longer burst with a chirped frequency and then compress the returns."
"Fine," said Shirley, then watched as a ten second slowly rising whistle of sound hurtled into the depths.
"There it is!" cried Shirley as a return showed up on her screen.
"That is a return from the first signal," said Jill. "I will reconfigure the screen." Instantly the engineering screen was rewritten with a time display that contained a new length scale, while below it was a two dimensional picture of the bottom surface that grew second by second as the acoustic pulse made the round trip to the bottom at fifteen hundred meters per second.
"The bottom is a hundred and fifty kilometers down!" said Shirley. "We're on the top of a mountain of water a hundred and fifty kilometers high!"
"...and it doesn't fall down," added David.
Shirley watched the screen as the second and third pulses returned with their information and the details on the map cleared up. Richard looked over at her screen and pulled a copy of the map onto his screen.
"Those circular features are obviously volcanic craters," he said. "But from the sonar distance plots, they seem to be the lowest points on the terrain. You would expect them to be on top of mounds of lava."
"What are those jagged features?" asked Shirley. "They look like underwater alps."
"Perhaps that's what they are," said Richard. "There are certainly enough tidal stresses to cause mountain building."
"There was nothing like that on Roche," said Katrina.
"Right," said David. "Lots of volcanoes there, but nothing like those mountains." He pulled a copy of the display onto his screen and peered closely at it.
"The mountains seem to avoid the volcanoes," he said. "How tall do you estimate them to be?"
"About two kilometers," said Richard. "Not really big for mountains considering the gravity. If they are mountains..." he added.
"Pull the sonar in," said Shirley to Jill.
"Don't forget to get a sample," said Katrina. "I want to analyze the water."
"My sonar scanner has a built-in analyzer," said Jill. "The scanner needs a density and composition analyzer to calibrate the range, so they just made it a little more complicated so that it could do a complete isotope analysis. The ocean at this point is minus twenty-three Celsius and warming, with a composition of thirty-nine percent ammonia and fifty-five percent water, with various things like methane, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen cyanide dissolved in it."
"Any trace of anything unusual?" asked Katrina eagerly. "It would certainly be wonderful to find a life-form. Even the tiniest microbe would pay back Earth for what it cost to send us here."
"Nothing," said Jill.
George had been looking out the cockpit window at the horizon. "The waves are rising," he said. "If we are going to get any more samples and bottom maps, we'd better be moving."
"We go up!" said Arielle, and the Magic Dragonfly leapt into the air and moved along the flanks of the mountain of water, trying to stay as long as possible in the rapidly diminishing patch of sunlight.
"Can't you bring her down a little lower?" asked Shirley. "The sonar is breaching the surface in some of the troughs."
"You argue with Jill," said Arielle with a fatalistic shrug of her shoulders. "I could go lower, but she is not allowing me to try."
"Jill!" said Shirley. "We're at a hundred meters and the waves are only thirty meters high. Surely we could go down another ten or twenty meters."
"No."
Arielle, who had never stopped her automatic scan of outside view, instrument panel, outside view... suddenly reached for the controls and thundered Dragonfly upwards on its rocket thrusters.
"Arielle!" yelled George. "Rockets!?!"
In reply Arielle swiveled the plane on its lift fans in time for George to see a large tsunami wave head away from them up the mountain, overtaking the smaller ordinary ocean waves and getting larger as it traveled.
"Its direction of travel is different than the wind waves," George said. "That must have been caused by an underwater disturbance."
"There was a loud underwater noise not too long ago," reported Shirley. "Must have excited that tsunami. I wonder how tall it was."
"Eighty meters," said Jill.
"Then Arielle didn't really have to use rockets," said Shirley.
"If Dragonfly had been where you wanted it," said Jill, "It would have been the only thing that would have saved us." The tone of the computer voice was unusually severe.
"Touché!" laughed David. "Hoist on your own petard!"
"What are you talking about?" asked George.
"I'll let Shirley tell you," said David, getting up and making his way back to the galley.
"Shirley?" asked George.
For a while Shirley didn't answer, then she said, "After David had all that trouble developing a 'worried mother' tone for Jill, I volunteered to do the next one. It was the severe 'I told you so' tone that you just heard."
"I think you did a good job," said George. "After hearing that, I certainly wouldn't argue with Jill over a safety matter. Wouldn't want to get on her bad side."
Barnard set behind Eau on one side. They watched it go, then Arielle took the Magic Dragonfly around to the other side to await sunrise two hours later. She took the plane to maximum altitude in the neck of atmosphere that stretched between the two planets. They hovered there, resting and napping until the sun rose again from behind Eau.
"Wow! Look at those waves!" said George.
"Surfer's paradise?" said Shirley.
"Purgatory," said David. "Those waves are so big that there's no way you could ride them, even if you didn't need a suit to survive."
"It would still be fun to try," said George. "If you could handle the big waves at Makaha, you ought to be able to take on these, especially in the reduced gravity. Just think, a hundred kilometer ride on a thirty meter wave."
"Until you reached the top," reminded David.
"Yes... the top..." said George, looking out the window at the sunlit side of the mountain. Heated by Barnard, the ammonia-water ocean had gotten warmer and the ammonia had boiled off into the atmosphere, raising the pressure on Eau and causing a stream of wind to flow up along the mountain of water and funnel through the narrow gravitational neck onto Roche. As the winds climbed the mountain, they pushed the waves ahead of them, adding to the wave energy. As the waves approached the top of the mountain three things happened. The depth of the water, measured in terms of the distance to the other side of the mountain, became shorter. As a result, the waves became slower and taller as they would on a shallowing beach. In addition, as they traveled up the mountain, the waves became confined to a smaller and smaller perimeter, while the energy in the waves remained the same, so they became even taller. On top of all that, as they moved toward the peak of the mountain, the gravity dropped. It was nearly three percent of Earth gravity near the base of the water mountain, but by the time the wave had reached the peak, the gravity had dropped to a half-percent. Under the reduced gravity, the waves became enormous.
"That was a BIG one," said George, admiring the fountain of water that appeared at the top of Eau mountain. In the light gravity, the spume of water from the kilometer high wave shot twenty kilometers into the air, where the spray was tossed up still further by the rush of air from Eau to Roche. Lightning flashed, and clouds formed in the turbulent saturated air.
"Look," said David, pointing at the clouds above and below. "The clouds are swirling one way north of the peak and the other way in the south."
"It's the Coriolis force," said George. "Whenever you have mass flow in a rotating system, the Coriolis force makes the air flows to move in circles. We have the same thing on Earth. Counterclockwise hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise ones in the Southern Hemisphere. It's different here, though. On Earth, the maximum Coriolis force is at the North and South Poles, but there are no strong air currents, so the maximum storm action is in the mid-latitudes. Here the air-currents are a maximum right at the center of rotation, so we get strong interactions."
"The clouds look like giant tornados," said Shirley. "One stretching north and one going south."
"They are," said Arielle. "But they are lazy ones because of low gravity. Not to be afraid."
The sun set, painting the whirling cloud columns a deep red color, fading to dusky grey at their inner points, where lightning flashes would occasionally illuminate the foaming white towers of spray leaping up from below.
"Bedtime," announced George. "We've had fun admiring the sights, but we got to get into our survey routine so we can keep it up for the next few weeks. I want us off Eau and tied down back at Rocheworld Base five days before periapsis. Eau will generate lots of bad weather from all the heating, but we can bask in the warm sun at Rocheworld Base, then come back again for a more detailed survey." He flickered his fingers over the screen and pulled out the science schedule.
"Good," he said. "We're two rotations ahead of schedule." He modified the time intervals, with Jill adding and subtracting tasks to make sure that the visual and infrared images were taken with the right illumination. When it was all done, he looked at the crew assignments for the first segment.
"It says here that Katrina and I should be in bed while you four are working," he said, getting up and heading for the rear of the plane. Katrina went ahead of him.
"Right," said Richard, taking command. "Arielle, start the survey spiral, while I set up the scanning sensors. Shirley, we'll need to get the bottom sampler set up and into the air lock, ready to drop at a good sampling point."
Shirley headed for the rear of the plane, hesitating for a second at the privacy curtain that lead to the sleeping area. George and Katrina were talking in loud whispers.
"...and at least you could have said, 'in our bunks's instead of 'in bed'..."
"Look, Katrina, I didn't plan the teaming schedule, Red did."
"Goodnight, George." There was a slam of a Sound-Bar door, then a deep sigh. Shortly thereafter Shirley heard the sound of a shower, so she slipped through the first privacy curtain, made her way silently toward the back and passed through the second privacy curtain to the workroom at the rear of the plane. She spent the next fifteen minutes getting the bottom sampler checked out and into the air lock. On the way back she noticed that the shower was empty and so was George's bunk. She smiled, pleased that her crewmates and good friends were no longer arguing, and headed forward into the busy front section of the airplane. All of a sudden she felt hungry, and stopped off at the galley for a quick snack.
The exploration survey turned routine. They would fly a hundred kilometers, hover to dip down the underwater sensor package, measure the distance to the bottom, drop the bottom sampler if it were close enough, analyze the water content, then take off again for the next survey point.
"I'm beginning to see a definite pattern in the water composition," said Katrina. "It matches the weather and temperature patterns."
"The usual yin-yang pattern?" asked David.
"More like the two halves of the cover on an American baseball," said Katrina. "Barnard heats up the equatorial and outer pole region to about zero degrees centigrade, and the ammonia boils out of the ocean, leaving it water-rich and heavy. The high pressure atmosphere then travels to the cold region and the ammonia rains down on the spin poles and the inner pole, making the ocean there ammonia-rich and light."
"That would explain the ocean current patterns I'm getting from the doppler-radar mapper," said David. "There is a general motion from the cold arc to the warm arc. That would be the lighter high-ammonia liquid returning over the surface, while the heavier high-water liquid closes the circuit along the bottom. Makes for a topsy-turvy ocean, hotter in the middle than at the top."
"I wouldn't call zero-cee hot," remarked Shirley. She turned to Katrina. "Do you have all the measurements you need?" When Katrina nodded, Shirley started the winch that would retrieve the ocean-sensor package from beneath the waves and nodded in turn to Arielle, who smoothly lifted the Magic Dragonfly up into the air on its VTOL fans and transitioned into level flight. The nuclear jet kicked in and the Magic Dragonfly screamed through the thin air toward the next survey point.
Warm§Amber§Resonance lay spread out on the surface basking in the red rays of Hot, the heating light. Hot was getting bigger and the heat that it emitted was increasing, while Warm was shrinking again, and would soon fade away, not to return for four hundred eighty days. The huge body relaxed even more and spread into a thin layer in the shape of a rough circle a hundred meters in diameter, a large amber blotch that rode the waves as they rippled underneath the jellylike flesh.
Then, weakly, there came a high-pitched noise. The acoustic senses in the amber creature went on alert. It sounded like a whistle from an underwater volcanic vent, but it had no direction, it seemed to come from every direction at once! The noise grew louder as if some invisible monster were emitting a hunger cry. Warm§Amber§Resonance searched the water beneath it with burst after burst of sound pulses from its body, but it could see nothing. Then just after the shriek from everywhere had reached its peak, the red glow from Hot flickered into blackness for an instant, then regained its glow. Frightened, the vulnerable sheet of amber rapidly contracted into a three meter ball, its sonar still searching for the source of the danger. It sank to the bottom as the ocean liquids were squeezed from the jellylike flesh to turn it into a tough plastic-like rock.
"Anomaly noted!" said Jill to both Shirley and Arielle. A picture appeared on their screens from the video scanner. Jill had outlined the anomaly with a blinking green circle, but the cue was unneeded. In the center of the screen was a large ragged circle of amber ocean.
"It appears in the infrared scanner too," said Jill. The same scene in the false colors of the infrared flashed on in place of the video scene. The blotch was still amber in this scene, indicating it was significantly hotter than the water.
"Must be a plume of ejecta from an underwater volcano," said Shirley. Richard looked up from his seat in the galley, put down his bowl of vegetable soup and came forward, bounding in the low gravity in his eagerness.
"I'd like to see that!" he said, stopping himself by grabbing on Shirley's shoulders. "Can Jill find the spot again?"
"We're on our way around," said Arielle, putting the Magic Dragonfly into a wide turn. "Should be easy to see something that big."
"Are you sure this is the spot?" asked Richard ten minutes later as they hovered above the surface of the ocean.
"I have Clete in sight, and Barbara just gave me a position update a half-hour ago in its last orbit, so my navigation accuracy is better than one meter," replied Jill.
"Go up," said Richard. "Perhaps it floated off from where we saw it." Arielle took the plane rapidly to altitude. They went up a kilometer, the scanners in the eyes of the Magic Dragonfly vigilantly searching the rapidly increasing circle of ocean.
"The currents aren't more than a few kilometers an hour in this region, and it only took us ten minutes to return. We would have seen it if it just drifted off," said David, monitoring the infrared scanner while Shirley and Richard looked at the visible display.
"Let's go back down and take a look underneath the surface," said Richard. "Even if the cloud has dissipated, the underwater volcano should still be there."
Arielle pushed the down button and the magic elevator dropped smoothly to a position ten meters above the top of the waves. Shirley lowered the under-ocean sensor package down on the cable and it splashed into the water. Through the noise of the splashing the sonar sensor on the package heard some high-pitched squeaks, then echoes of those squeaks from distant rocks and underwater hills. They were too few to get an accurate direction but they seemed to come from nearly directly below.
Jill hesitated before starting the sonar sender, waiting to see if the strange squeaks would reoccur, but the volcanic vent had fallen dormant. Jill started the sonar pinging, and soon a picture of the bottom built up on Richard's screen.
"There's nothing but mud and a few rocks here," Richard complained. "I don't see any sign of a vent."
"It could be a small new one that hasn't built up a cone," said Shirley.
"The water composition is just what it should be in this region," said Katrina. "If there were significant volcanic activity in this region you would expect an excess of impurities like hydrogen sulfide, but there is no evidence for that."
"Then the amber blotch wasn't volcanic," said Richard. "But what caused it? And where did it disappear to?"
"Barnard will set in twenty-five minutes, and we are behind our schedule," reminded Jill.
"OK," said Richard. "Why don't I let Shirley and Katrina continue the survey and I'll finish my soup. But would you rerun the data on the video in the galley? Maybe I can puzzle it out during lunch."
Warm§Amber§Resonance Stayed quietly on the bottom for a long time with its senses alert, but it could see nothing. The strange noise returned, then its screaming changed to a throbbing. The throbbing grew loud, then faded away, only to return once again. Suddenly something big and hard appeared with a splash at the top of the ocean. The amber rock fell silent while it carefully analyzed the returns from last few sound pulses it had emitted after they had bounced off the strange monster. The monster was not too big, but it was as hard as a rock. None of the sound pulses had traveled to the inside of the monster. If the monster was that hard, how did it float? The monster was quiet for a while, then it gave off a blinding burst of sound that repeatedly flooded the bottom with illumination. Warm§Amber§Resonance stayed motionless and waited while the sound that reflected from the bottom reached the top again, self-illuminating the hard visitor from the sky. Tiny doors opened in the monster and sucked in water. Strange, stiff appendages with inset circles pointed this way and that, while burst after burst of sound throbbed from the underbelly of the monster. Then as suddenly as it began, the being stopped seeing, and without seeming to move anything, it swam upward and out into the nothing above the surface of the ocean. The throbbing noise increased, then faded off, to be replaced by the hideous shriek that thankfully also faded off. The dread creature was gone. The amber rock dissolved into a floating blob of jelly and swam rapidly away.
Warm§Amber§Resonance had lived over five hundred seasons. This hard screaming monster was something unknown, and that was nearly impossible in a world where no one ever forgot. There were others that were much older, such as Sour#Sapphire#Coo. Perhaps the elder would know about the strange monster.
Warm§Amber§Resonance was not exactly sure where the elder was, but since the research problem the elder was working on was a difficult one, it would take hundreds of returns of Warm before any solution would be found. For that length of concentrated thinking time, Sour#Sapphire#Coo would have to rock up under a protective shell. The shell required periodic exposure to air to maintain itself, and that meant going to one of the Islands of Thought. Warm§Amber§Resonance traveled at top speed, but it was still two turns of the sky before the chain of islands on the warm pole was reached.
"I give up," said Richard. "I don't see anything more in those pictures than we did before. The amber blob was definitely there, not drifting much as we pass over it, then as we go over the horizon it looks like it starts to shrink, but the foreshortened perspective makes it difficult to be sure of that. Then when we return ten minutes later, it's gone!"
"I'll keep working at the analysis," said David. "You'd better get your programmed sleep. You don't want to miss your island vacation trip, do you?"
"Are the 'Hawaiian Islands coming up?"
"They are only nine hours away on the science schedule," said David. "And I know you want to get out and swing your pick at some of the outcroppings."
"Right! Wake me up as we get near. My pick is getting rusty on this water-ball." He headed for the bunks in the rear, grabbing a protoprotein cookie for dessert as he passed the galley.
The "Hawaiian Islands" were six rings of low mountains spread out in a line that crossed over the outer pole of Eau. The ocean was shallowest in this region and was only a few hundred meters deep, allowing modest mountains to stick their peaks above the surface. Each island was named after one of the Hawaiian islands, Hawaii, Maui, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai. Richard was awake and suiting up as George flew a high altitude survey pass over the chain as dawn broke over the horizon. Shirley made her way back through the crew quarters to check Richard out just in time to see Arielle climbing into her upper bunk dressed in her bunny pajamas.
"Aren't you going to stay up and see the islands?" asked Shirley, a little surprised.
"Piloting hard work," said Arielle. "I would have fun to see them, but I now get my beauty sleep." She closed the Sound-Bar door as Shirley continued on her way.
So that's her secret, mused Shirley to herself. Must try it myself some day. She closed the privacy curtain behind her and striding up to the suited figure standing in front of the airlock she unceremoniously began punching the buttons on the chest console and reading the responses. Richard rocked slightly with each punch. Used to this kind of treatment, he ignored Shirley and talked through his suit imp to George.
"Fly back over from the sunlit side and let me watch on my holovisor," he said, reaching a gloved hand up to pull a dark grey lid down over his visor. The inside of the visor lit up with tiny little laser diodes into a hazy image of mostly blue with some reddish splotches. Richard forced his eyes to relax, and as they stopped trying to focus on the nearby points of light from the diodes, the holographic multicolor laser pattern re-formed itself into an image of a rectangular video display at normal console distance, the array of tiny lasers generating at the surface of the visor the same light patterns, complete down to the phase, that would have crossed the surface of the visor from the video display if it had really been there.
"With their ring shape, they look more like atoll islands than the volcanic Hawaiian islands," said George.
"They were only blobs on the fly-by probe pictures," said Richard. "But they're not atolls, either. Those are formed by coral. Although I'd love to find even some low form of life like coral, I don't expect it here."
"What did cause those rings, then?" said George. "Volcanos?"
"My guess is that they're impact craters from a large meteorite," said Richard. "The meteorite came in at a low angle and broke apart in the upper atmosphere."
"I'm going down. Any particular one?"
"Find a flat spot on the inner side of Hawaii, I'm more likely to find some folded back inner crust there."
"Which one is Hawaii?"
"The big one at this end. They're named in the same order as the Hawaiian Islands back home."
George was silent as distant memories of indolent days on the surfing beaches on the Islands flooded through his mind. He blinked back a tear of homesickness and started the long descent.
Shirley patted the broad shoulder of the suit as Richard stepped into the air lock.
"You be careful, now, you big lunkhead," she said. "I'll be right out to back you up as soon as I get my suit on."
As the outer door cycled the second time, Shirley was surprised to see Richard standing at the door with an armload of rocks.
"I got some real beauties!" he said, his enthusiasm bubbling though the communication link. "Here, take these and put them in the airlock. Then come out and help me get some more." He tried to pile his armload into Shirley's hands, but the stack slipped and a half-dozen sharp rocks tumbled to the floor of the airlock, leaving gashes and nicks in the mirror-smooth floor.
"Richard! You lummox! Now you've done it!"
"What did I do? The floor just has a few scratches in it."
"And those few scratches with those rough rocks probably increased the surface area inside the lock by ten times. It'll take forever to pump it down! Haven't you ever wondered why the lock has no extraneous equipment and all surfaces are mirror smooth? That's not so you can admire your handsome face in them. Those floors and walls are made that way so not one duralloy molecule sticks its head up above the rest to add to the surface area."
"I remember the briefings now. And those rock scratches have lots of jagged hills and valleys."
"Just eager to adsorb hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen cyanide and release them again when the lock is refilled with inside air."
"I'm sorry," said Richard, really contrite.
"Well... it isn't really that bad," said Shirley. "The Christmas Branch will polish the scratches smooth with a plasma gun while we're gone. Besides, our suits are the major contributor to contamination. The suit imp polishes them when they're in storage, but they get roughened up every time we go outside." She carefully placed the rest of the rocks inside the lock and joined him outside.
"Well, that's about it for Maui," said Richard, an island later.
"Are you planning on visiting all of the islands?" asked George.
"No, just Hawaii and Maui during this daylight period. I think I'll skip Lanai, it's too small to bother with, and go on to Molokai and Oahu during the next period. These three-hour daylight periods sure chop up a work schedule. You just get interested in something and it gets dark."
"Richard," called David over the suit imp. "I've been going over the pictures that the scanners took on the way in. Pull down your holovisor, I want to show you something."
Both Shirley and Richard reached up to pull down their holographic viewing screens. Hidden behind grey visors, they watched as David zoomed the view down into the center pond of Maui. The mountain ring was about ten kilometers in diameter, but was not continuous. There were a number of places where the ocean had broken through passes in the ring and had flooded the interior of the impact crater. Not far from one of those entrances was a small blob of amber and an even smaller blob of blue.
"Jill would swear from the spectrum that the amber blob is the same type of stuff as the large amber blotch that disappeared. We're not sure, though, since this blob is under a meter of water."
"What does the infrared sensor say? Never mind... the water would kill that."
"There is a slight increase in the surface water temperature, but that could be explained just by the difference in reflectance of the blob underneath."
"That's only a half-kilometer from where we are!" said Richard. "I'm going over for a look."
"I'll come over and pick you up," said George. The Magic Dragonfly lifted and floated over to them. George landed and waited until the dust had settled before he opened the air lock. Shirley and Richard sat at the entrance and held on to the hand bars on either side of the door as George ferried them around the inside of the island arc.
Shirley glanced in back of her, then tapped Richard with her free hand.
"Look at the scratches," she said.
Richard looked back. The scratches were still there, but now their interiors were just as mirror smooth as the rest of the floor.
Warm§Amber§Resonance had gone from one island to another, searching. A sour scent led it to the elder, a large blue rock lying just under the surface of the ocean. The amber cloud surrounded the blue rock and shouted.
§Open up! There's a hard screaming monster in the ocean! What is it!?!§
There was no immediate reply, but Warm§Amber§Resonance had not expected one. Sour#Sapphire#Coo had taken for its research project the derivation of an example of the fifth cardinal infinity. It had been fifty seasons of the visitations of Warm since the massive blue elder had left the pod and traveled to the Islands of Thought. Warm§Amber§Resonance had been hesitant to distract the elder, but with an age exceeding two thousand seasons, surely the old one would know if such a strange monster had been seen before and whether it was dangerous. The wait was necessary to allow the thinker to complete its present train of thought and put all the portions of the unsolved problem in a state where they could be picked up again without error. Hot traveled around to the other side of the world, and the tides rose again. Finally a soft voice murmured from behind the protective shell.
#A hard screaming monster?#
§It is too hard to float, but it does! It swims without moving! It can even swim in the nothing above the ocean!§
A crack opened in the shell.
#Let me taste.#
Warm§Amber§Resonance formed a tiny tendril of an appendage and stuck it in the crack. Memory juices were exchanged.
#I never saw or learned of any such monster. It is your problem. I return to mine.# The crack closed and the blue elder returned to the problem of the fifth cardinal infinity.
Warm§Amber§Resonance was so busy absorbing the brief taste of the masterful strokes of the thought processes Sour#Sapphire#Coo used in its solution thus far, that at first it didn't hear the high pitched noise building up around them. The exchanged memory juices finally absorbed and incorporated into its own, the amber cloud suddenly reacted.
§The monster returns!!!§ Like a tuna sensing a shark, the amber blob formed into a slim swimming shape and sped off into the deep ocean.
Before landing, George hovered the Magic Dragonfly over the spot on the ocean where the scanner had seen the colored blobs.
"I see the blue thing, it's a big deep-blue-colored boulder, but the amber blob is gone!" said Richard.
"Again?" said George.
"Yep. But that boulder isn't dissipating," said Richard. "Let me down onshore; I want to wade out and get a chunk."
"Richard!" said Shirley, her cry echoing that of Jill on Richard's suit imp.
"When is low tide?" persisted Richard.
"In a half-hour," said Jill.
"And how much will the water level drop between now and then?"
"Over a meter."
"Which means I'll be able to walk right out to that rock and chop off a chunk and hardly get my feet wet."
"But your suit..." protested Shirley, when Jill didn't respond.
"If my suit is good enough to keep out this poison we call an atmosphere, it is good enough for the cleaning solution that we call an ocean," said Richard. "And the extra amount of heating power I'll need for the short trip is nothing to worry about. Right, Jill?"
Shirley and Jill reluctantly agreed to let Richard have his way. Shirley insisted that she tie a safety rope to him before he started out and he let her. His first steps into the retreating ocean were dramatic, as clouds of evaporating ammonia boiled off at each step, but soon the outside of his suit was as cold as the water and he plowed through the thigh-deep ripples to the deep blue boulder. Once there he looked it over carefully, then raised his pick and broke off a small piece. It was lighter blue inside. Richard put the prize into his collection bag and waded back to shore.
"Maui has too many tourists this season," he said. "Let's take a hop over to Molokai." He and Shirley got into the air lock. They closed the door this time as George lifted for the short trip to the next island sixty kilometers away.
"Any more islands?" asked George after Richard and Shirley had climbed back through the airlock.
"We've done four, Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, and Oahu," said Richard. "That should be enough for a nine-hour tour. Besides, it's almost sunset again. Let's head back to the inner pole."
"I recommend that course," said Jill. "It's only fifteen days to periapsis, or sixty day-night cycles. The weather at the inner poles is already getting stormier as it gets warmer. I would like us to be back at Rocheworld Base at least ten days before periapsis."
"That gives us five days for survey stops. Is that going to be enough?" asked Richard.
"It should be," said Katrina. "We have most of the place mapped, and the data matches the atmospheric and ocean models well. It's just a matter of getting enough samples to keep the statistical errors down. Except for those islands, this place is pretty dull." She sighed. "It would have been different if we'd found any evidence of life, but no such luck."
"Did you get an analysis done on that blue rock?" asked Richard.
"Yes," said Katrina. "It was very similar to that orange silica-gel-type glass that Sam found over on Roche. It must take a strange chemistry for that to form. Neither Jill nor I have been able to come up with a good process yet."
Arielle walked forward between the two and made her way to the cockpit. She was still slurping away at a vanilla algae shake. As she approached, George got up, turned the plane over to her, and stiffly made his way back to the crew quarters and bed. Arielle glanced over the control panel, looked out the window at the setting sun, and raising power, lifted the Magic Dragonfly into the crimson skies.
Two days later, it was George who first spotted Roche from his vantage point at the cockpit window.
"Land ahoy," he shouted throughout the ship as the edge of the twin world showed its brown over the blue-grey waves. After another half hour, they were within line of sight of Rocheworld Base.
"Welcome back," said Carmen. "Red says from down below that she can see your contrail from the viewport window."
"Pretty good eyes," said George.
"Especially when in back of a thirty centimeter telescope," broke in Red's voice. "Even though we're nearly always in contact through one commsat or another, it's still nice to see you directly."
"We'll be home soon," said George. "A few more survey stops to fill in the gaps in the records, then across the neck in time for periapsis."
"Watch that weather," said Red. "There's a big storm brewing above the water mountain and its coming your way."
"We'll fly over it," said George. "See you soon, beautiful."
George got a weather map from Clete and talked it over with Jill.
"It's moving fast, but we should be able to take one more survey sample before dark, then get back to altitude before it arrives." As he spoke, George put the Magic Dragonfly into a steep dive and headed for the ocean surface. He brought the plane to a hovering stop in the strong surface winds, and Richard let down the ocean sampler into the rolling seas.
"That's some wind," remarked Richard as he monitored the drop through the bottom video camera. The cable is trailing thirty meters downwind. "Hold it for a minute until I get a return from the bottom... Got it! Take her up!"
George applied power and climbed the Magic Dragonfly into the scruffy sky. The sun was setting, but George kept track of the clouds by the nearly constant lightning flashes. There was a crash from the galley as the plane dropped a few hundred meters in a vicious downdraft, then they were forced into their seats as an updraft sent them spiraling skyward again. George raced in front of the storm to stay in quieter air while he climbed. They were going around the mountain now and Rocheworld Base dropped below the horizon behind them. The air became smoother as the nuclear jet thundered them upwards, then finally George put the plane into a turn and headed back up the mountain. Arielle had been sitting in the copilot seat, her hands in her lap and her eyes busy alternately scanning the instrument panel and the view outside. George looked over at her, put the plane on autopilot and stepped down into the aisle. Arielle slipped quickly over to the pilot seat and strapped herself in. She left the plane on autopilot. Her hands went back into her lap and her eyes kept busy.
"We've passed over the front, and there's a clear region before the next front," said Richard from the science console. "One of our survey points is there. If you're willing to try a night landing we can get it out of the way and be that much closer to going back."
"Give me good weather maps, a good radar, and a good altimeter, and I don't need to see," said Arielle. "But just to be on safe side, I turn on landing lights near the waves."
Arielle took the controls and spiraled down into the inky blackness below. The distant orb of Gargantua was now too small to be of much use as a source of light, but she didn't need light, for the radar picture of the clouds and surface were all that she and Jill needed. As they came down below five hundred meters altitude, Arielle turned on the landing lights. They were near the high gravity equator, where the gravitational pull peaked at nearly twelve percent of Earth gravity. The waves were smaller but faster moving, and looked somehow harder as they scudded along. Richard dropped in the ocean sampler and waited for the sonar return from the bottom. It came almost instantly.
"The bottom is only thirty meters down here," he said in amazement. "This must be some sort of an underwater plateau."
"The water composition is radically different, too," said Katrina from the other console. There are lots of dissolved gasses and strange chemical compounds. The temperature is also anomalously high."
"I think we must be near a volcanic vent field," said Richard as he watched the sonar map build up to show a slope rolling off to one side. "Let's head upslope and drop the sampler in again."
"OK," said Arielle. "Uphill is which way?"
"Toward Roche."
"Toward Roche we go," she said, lifting the plane and moving it a kilometer east, then lowering it again.
"The bottom is getting closer," said Richard.
"And the water is getting warmer," said Katrina.
"Another kilometer Rocheward?" asked Arielle.
"Arielle!" Jill interrupted. "Radar! Ten kilometers and moving rapidly toward us!"
Arielle glanced at the radar display to see a large rapidly moving cloud breaking away from the more slowly moving front that was approaching. Beneath the cloud was a swarm of smaller swirling clouds. She pointed the video cameras in the Magic Dragonfly's eyes toward that direction and the sensitive cameras turned night into day on her screen. The scene was illuminated by nearly continuous flashes of lightning inside towering columns of foam.
"Waterspouts!" she blurted. Cutting the cable on the ocean sounder she banked the Magic Dragonfly into a tight turn and headed south at right angles to the course of the waterspouts. She didn't try for altitude, but skimmed the surface of the water. The nuclear jet thundered in as the fans faded, and some of their irreplaceable monopropellant fuel was poured into the afterburner as Arielle smoothly accelerated the plane to top speed. There was a yell and a thump from the rear. Like a rocket ship taking off horizontally, the Magic Dragonfly shot forward. A column of water moved in front of them.
"Damn!" said Arielle, and threw the stick over. The left wing tip grazed the foamy tops of the waves below, then swung upward again as the right wing dipped. They missed the first water spout, but a second one rose up above them and dumped its load of water in their path. The Magic Dragonfly shuddered as it hit the cloud of huge droplets. There was a loud bang from the engine compartment, then silence.
"The jet heaters shut down!" said Arielle. "No time to reset."
The powerless plane started to drop in altitude, perilously close to the tops of the waves. Arielle fired the attitude control jets to decrease their rate of descent. Made for space, they could not levitate the Magic Dragonfly in twelve percent gravity. With the rockets fighting off the crash, Arielle brought the VTOL fans up to speed and stabilized the altitude as she turned off the rockets. More precious fuel gone.
She returned her attention to the radar screen just in time to see a tiny twister cross her path. It was too close to miss and the right wing of the Magic Dragonfly sliced right into it and was sucked upward. Arielle fought the controls, and almost pulled them out, but the dipping left wing struck the top of a large wave, spinning them around. The Magic Dragonfly crashed heavily into the deep trough in back of the wave.