“Ari, the Space Board hasn’t the will or—so the people in the line departments claim the resources to maintain the quarantine of Amalthea much longer. The Indo-Asians are applying tremendous pressure at Council level.” He sighed impatiently. “They talk about safety, about energy resources, even about basic science. Meanwhile they’re count-ing lost tourist dollars.”
Blake Redfield forced his way through crowded winding corridors, past stalls selling carved jade and translucent rubber sandals in the many colors of jujubes, past shelves of bargain-priced surveillance electronics, past racks of spot-lit fresh-killed ducks with heads and feet attached—while people pushed him from behind, elbowed him aside, and blocked the way in front of him, none maliciously or even with much force, for gravity here was a few percent of Earth’s and too vigorous a shove was as awkward for the shover as for the shovee. More people sat huddled in circles on the floor throwing dice or playing
hsiang-ch’i
or stood bargaining excitedly before tanks of live trout and mounds of ice clams and piles of pale, wilted vegetables. Students and old folk peered at real paper books through thick rimless glasses and read flimsy newspapers printed in what to most Euro-Americans were indecipherable squiggles. Everyone was talking, talking, talking in musical tones most North Continental visitors heard only as singsong and jabber.
Usually auburn-haired—even handsome, in a fresh-faced, freckled way—Blake had disguised himself well, look-ing less like young Ghengis Khan than a Pearl River dock rat. He was in fact half Chinese on his mother’s side, the other half being Irish, and although he did not know more than a few useful phrases of Burmese or Thai or any of the dozens of other Indochinese languages common on Ganymede, he spoke eloquent Mandarin and expressively earthy Cantonese—the latter being the favorite trade language of most of the ethnic Chinese who made up a substantial proportion of the Shoreless Ocean’s non-Indian population.
From the low overheads hung paper banners which flut-tered endlessly in the breeze of constantly turning ventilator fans; these did their inadequate best to clear the corridors of the smell of pork frying in rancid oil and other, less pal-atable odors. The stall owners had rigged up awnings against the flickering yellow glare of the permanent light-ing; the awnings billowed ceaselessly, waves in an unquiet sea of cloth. Blake pushed ahead, against the tide. His des-tination was the contracting firm of Lim and Sons, founded in Singapore in 1946. The Shoreless Ocean branch had opened in 2068, before there was a sizable settlement on Ganymede; a generation of Lims had helped build the place.
The firm’s offices fronted on the chaotic intersection of two busy corridors near the center of the underground city. Behind a wall of plate glass bearing the gold-painted ideo-grams for health and prosperity, shirt-sleeved, bespectacled clerks bent studiously to their flatscreens.
Blake stepped through the automatic door; abruptly the corridor sounds were sealed out, and there was quiet. No one paid him any attention. He leaned over the rail that separated the carpeted reception area from the nearest clerk and said in careful Mandarin, “My name is Redfield. I have a ten o’clock appointment with Luke Lim.”
The clerk winced as if he’d had a gas attack. Without bothering to look at Blake he keyed his commlink and said, in rapid Cantonese, “A white guy dressed like a coolie is out here, talking like he just took Mandarin 101. Says he has an appointment with Luke.”
The commlink squawked back, loud enough for Blake to overhear. “See what happens if you tell him to wait.”
There were no chairs for visitors. Blake walked over to the wall and studied the gaudy color holos hanging there, some stiff family portraits and wideangle views of construc-tion projects. In one, pipes as tangled as a package of dry noodles sprawled over a kilometer of surface ice; it was a dissociation plant, converting water ice to hydrogen and oxygen. Other holos showed ice mines, distilleries, sewage plants, hydroponic farms.
Blake wondered what role Lim and Sons had played in the construction of these impressive facilities; the holos were uncaptioned, allowing the viewer to assume anything he or she wished. Unlikely that Lim and Sons had been prin-cipal contractor in any of them. But one in particular cap-tured his attention: it depicted a big-toothed ice mole cutting through black ice, drilling what was presumably one of the original tunnels of the settlement that had become Shoreless Ocean.
Another five minutes passed. A man appeared at the back of the room and came to the railing, hand extended. “Luke Lim. So sorry, Mr. Redfield”—
Ruke Rim. So solly, Missa Ledfeared
—“Most unavoidable detained.” Lim was tall even for the low gravity of Ganymede, almost emaciated, with sunken cheeks and burning eyes. On the point of his chin a dozen or so very long, very black hairs managed to suggest a goatee. Unlike his facial hair the hair of his head was thick and glossy, long and black, hanging to his shoul-ders. He had inch-long nails on the thumb and fingers of his right hand, but the nails of his left were cut short. He was wearing blue canvas work pants and a shirt patterned like mattress-ticking.
“No problem,” said Blake coolly, giving the outstretched hand, the dangerous one, a single short jerk. A curious fel-low, thought Blake: his accent was as phony as they come, straight out of an ancient Charlie Chan movie-chip; the fin-gernails were not a Mandarin affectation but apparently for playing twelvestring guitar, and the work clothes suggested that the guy wanted to present himself as a man of the working class.
“Yes.” Lim’s voice was suddenly low and conspiratorial, his expression almost a leer. “You come with me now?” Ostentatiously, he held the gate of the railing open and waved Blake through it. Blake followed him to the back of the office and into a low dark passageway. He caught glimpses of small, dim rooms on either side, crowded with men and women bent over machine tools.
A slow ride in a big freight elevator brought them out into a huge service bay, its floor and walls carved from ancient ice. The excavation of the bay wasn’t finished; there was a hole in a sunken corner of the floor as big as a storm drain, to carry off the melt as ice was carved away.
In the middle of the bay, inadequately lit by overhead sodium units, a spidery flatbed trailer supported a big load, securely tied down and wrapped in blue canvas. “There it is,” Lim said to Blake, not bothering to move from where he was standing by the elevator.
Two middle-aged women bundled thickly into insulated overalls looked up from the engine of a surface crawler; most of the machine was in pieces, scattered over the ice. “One of the rectifiers in that thing is still intermittent, Luke,” said one of the women in Cantonese. “Supply is supposed to send a rebuild over this afternoon.”
Blake went to the flatbed and released the tie-down catches. He yanked at the canvas, patiently circling the rig until he had all the cloth piled on the floor. The machinery thus revealed was a cylinder compounded of metal alloy rings, girdled by a universal mount and carried on cleated treads; its business end consisted of two offset wheels of wide, flat titanium teeth, each cutting edge glistening with a thin film of diamond.
Blake jumped lightly onto the flatbed. He pulled a tiny black torch from his hip pocket and switched on its brilliant white light; from his shirt pocket he took magnifying gog-gles and slipped them on. For several minutes he crawled over the machine, opening every access port, inspecting cir-cuits and control boards. He checked bearing alignments and looked for excessive wear. He pulled panels off and studied the windings and connections of the big motors.
Finally he jumped down and walked back to Lim. “Noth-ing visibly broken. But it’s as old as I am, seen a lot of use. Maybe thirty years.”
“Sure it is. I’ll borrow the power supply and commlink from that crawler”—he indicated the machine parts scattered on the floor—“since nobody’s going to need them for a while.” Blake picked his away among the scattered parts in the corner; he hefted one of the massive but lightweight units, jumped onto the trailer, lifted a cowl, and wrestled it into place.
The women, who hadn’t really been concentrating on their work, now watched Blake openly— meanwhile trying to remain impassive, with cautious and uncertain glances at Lim. Reluctantly, as if he were playing without enthusiasm a role that required him to come up with some protest, however feeble, Lim said, “You can’t just do what you want with our . . . this equipment.”
Blake ignored him. He took a pair of heavy rubber-insulated cables from a spring-loaded spool on the wall and shoved their flat, copper-sheathed heads into a receptacle in the rear of the mole; he locked them in place. Then he slipped into the mole’s cockpit and spent a moment fiddling with the controls. With a whine of heavy motors, the machine came to life, its red warning beacon whirling and flashing. The warning horn hooted repeatedly as it backed off the trailer on its clattering cleats. Blake pushed the levers ahead and the mole moved toward a blank spot in the wall of ice.
“Climb on, if you’re coming!” Blake shouted, slowing the machine’s wall-ward progress long enough for Lim to scramble up the side of the machine and sling himself into the open cockpit. The door sealed itself behind him; Blake checked the dashboard to see that the little compartment was sealed and pressurized. Then he shoved the potentiometers forward again, all the way to the stops.
Transformers sang; the giant bits on the mole’s nose spun in a blur of counter-rotating blades. Blake drove the machine squarely into the ice, and there was a sudden screech and rumble; ice chips exploded in an opaque bliz-zard outside the cockpit’s cylindrical polyglas window.
Inside the machine, the air was rank with ozone. False color displays on the dashboard showed a threedimensional map of the machine’s position, built from stored data and updated with feedback from the seismic vibrations gener-ated by the whirling bit. The void in the ice they were en-larging was at the edge of the settlement, only twenty meters below the mean surface, and adjacent to the space-port. The dashboard map displayed the region of ice beneath the port in bright red, with a legend in bold letters: RE-STRICTED AREA.
The machine moved ahead, shuddering and plunging toward the red barrier at top speed—which for the old machine was a respectable three kilometers per hour. Unseen by the riders, a river of melted ice flowed out the rear of the machine and through the tunnel behind them, to pour down the drain.
Blake pulled back on one of the potentiometer levers and the machine skewed, skittering and squirming like a hand drill with a dull bit. “Thing bucks like a wild horse—kind of hard to steer. Say, you smell something hot?”