The Engines of Dawn (13 page)

"Or worse," a graduate student added, "you might never touch ground. At those speeds, the winds could keep you aloft forever."

In the upper right corner of the screen was a full-image view of Kiilmist 5 taken at a distance of a million miles. A reddish orange band of airborne gunk-or so it seemed to Ben-girdled the equator. It was easily a thousand miles in width, and was no telling how many miles deep. It looked similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot, probably a stagnant jet stream.

A closer view of the planet's northern hemisphere showed that it had several more continents than did the Earth, and a feed from a landsat in polar orbit revealed ice caps at the poles. But the continents near the mid-latitudes away from the stagnant jet stream seemed to be quite congenial, with green forests, large lakes, and diverse river systems.

"By the way the continents are distributed I'd say that continental drift may have come to an end," someone said.

"Especially if there are no mountain ranges," added a vigilant student.

Along the side of the large viewscreen appeared readouts of measurements and other data. Another student had been examining this and said, "Look at its axial tilt. It's nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic. If it ever had any axial tilt in its past, it doesn't have one now."

"A rotational period is almost seventy-two hours long," a female student added. "With an oxygen-nitrogen mix at twenty-three to seventy-six, the planet is very, very old."

"Strike a match," someone else said, "and you might set whole continents on fire."

"But
how
did the oxygen level get so high?" another student asked.

Throughout the lecture hall, students were busy at their computer notebooks analyzing the data-everyone, that is, except the Bombardiers. And Ben. Ben was torn between the many 2D screens of Kiilmist 5 and the woman by his side-Julia.

Julia suddenly spoke up. "That one continent there. What are those formations? Do you see them? They look like craters."

Everyone craned forward. Through the haze of slowly drifting clouds their landsat picked up the distinct images of small speckles, circular formations that peppered most every continent, particularly along the seacoast edges.

Professor Holcombe was already typing in commands for a zoom image on the one large continent that was slowly turning beneath them. The view, much enhanced by their computers, brought the landmass into better focus.

Julia grabbed Ben's arm with surprising ferocity. "Look at that coastline! It looks like we've got signs of a civilization down there!"

Voices rose as excitement raced through the room. The new images were revealing the distinct characteristics of surface engineering: roads and bridges, rerouted river systems-probably for irrigation purposes-even the rectangles of tilled or partitioned land were all too evident now.

And a dozen small cities.

"Bingo!" someone shouted triumphantly.

If these markings were signs of intelligent beings, then they would be the first race discovered since humans had encountered the Enamorati two centuries earlier. The discovery was historic and no doubt the other lecture halls, seminar rooms, and auditoriums throughout the university were thinking the very same thoughts.

From behind Ben and Julia, George Clock spoke down to the gathered faculty. "Has ShipCom picked up any kind of signals? Like radio or television signals?"

Professor Holcombe pointed to the left side of the screen, where a column of statistics was illuminated. "ShipCom hasn't detected any signals on any known bandwidth. The entire electromagnetic spectrum is dead."

"It's possible they may never have discovered radio," Ben said.

"Or bypassed it altogether," George Clock said. "They might have gone directly to optical cable or line-of-sight laser communication."

"Or discovered it and decided they didn't need it," said a student behind them.

"Or are using some other means of communication," someone else said.

"Telepathy?" said a student.

"How about semaphores?" suggested another.

"Unless," Ben said, squinting at the screen, "those circular formations are what's left of a war of some kind."

Professor Holcombe began typing quickly. On the left side of the giant 2D screen appeared a column of different numbers.

"If they had a nuclear war," Professor Holcombe said, "it happened a long, long time ago. Our landsats aren't showing any kind of radioactive materials in the air."

"What about that equatorial band?" a young woman asked in the back. "If it happened a long time ago, the trade winds could have easily trapped airborne debris at the equator. If that's an active system, it could be highly radioactive."

One of the landsats had been sent directly to investigate the ugly ring at the planet's equator. But its reading of the equatorial debris belt indicated that nothing radioactive was being held in suspension there.

"If a war happened a hundred thousand years ago," Julia said, "then the half-lives of debris would have expired by now."

"That would depend on what sort of fissionable materials they used in their weapons," Professor Holcombe said. "The purest grade of plutonium would take millions of years to decay."

"And yet there are green forests," Tommy Rosales said. "The plants could have easily recovered in that length of time."

"Can you get a higher resolution, Dr. Holcombe?" one student asked. "I want to see the cities, if that's what they are."

Their screen jumped to its highest power of resolution until the seaboard cities came more fully into view. And cities they were. But cities that were lifeless and deserted. There were no industrial smokestacks, no power plants, no high infrared readings of factories in use of any kind. No cars or vehicles on the roads. No carbon by-products of fossil fuels being burned. No planes in the air, no jet contrails, no ships at sea leaving visible wakes. There weren't even any signs of pollution beyond the equatorial band thousands of miles away from the continents of the upper mid-latitudes.

"The place couldn't be
dead,
could it?" Julia asked.

The pall that descended upon the lecture hall instantly dashed everyone's spirits. To have come all this way to find a dead civilization-and one that had possibly been dead for hundreds of thousands of years-was obviously a letdown.

"Well," said Professor Holcombe, leaning back in his chair. "I guess this means that we'll just have to go down and find out for ourselves."

16

"Hey, man. Are you up for some trouble?"
came George Clock's voice from the com/pager at Ben's collar.

"What?" Ben said, tweaking his com.

The verification that Kiilmist 5 was human-habitable, and that the requests of several university departments to send gondolas down to explore it had been granted by the Grays, was the talk of the day. Ben had spoken with Julia about it over lunch, then spoke about it some more while escorting her back to the archaeology department, where she was going to help Dr. Holcombe provision their gondola for a trip down to the planet.

Ben left Julia at the archaeology department, promising to pick her up later, at dinnertime. He was on his way down to the next level in a regular elevator to look in on Eve Silbarton. Eve had made herself scarce over the last twenty-four hours and he was curious as to why. That was when George called him.

"We're in astronomy pod number three,"
Clock's voice returned.
"You've got to see this."

"See what?"

"Just get here as soon as you can."

Ben reversed the elevator's course and rerouted it to the astronomy labs.

The astronomy department was the only department on campus that had actual access to the outer hull of the ship. It had six different viewing blisters, each manned with several kinds of telescopes for both students and faculty. Besides the usual optical scopes, there were infrared and ultraviolet telescopes, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes, as well as solar-mapping telescopes. All of these telescopes came with the best photographic equipment available, all of it operable from inside the ship or outside it.

"What's this all about?" Ben asked when he arrived at the lab. President Porter had lifted his ban on student, staff, and faculty travel in the ship, and so many students and faculty had gone back to their labs to work on their various projects. Therefore, their presence in the astronomy lab 3 wasn't technically forbidden.

It's what the Bombardiers had in mind that was forbidden.

Ben found Clock and Rosales sitting at a monitoring station next to the entrance to the number-three telescope blister. Standing next to the blister was Jim Vees, already suited up in standard EVA gear.

George Clock turned to Ben. "Want to see the Engine?"

"What?"
Ben asked.

"Jim thinks the Enamorati are getting ready to remove the Engine," Tommy Rosales said. "It'll take two to monitor the extension pod from in here while the other two are inside it. That'll be you and Jim."

"Are you nuts?" Ben asked. "Do you have any idea how much trouble we're already in?"

Jim Vees had always been a difficult young man for Ben to read. His dorm room was right across from Ben's, but he mostly kept to himself. They only got to know each other through intramural football games, which Jim enjoyed.

"We know exactly what we're doing," Clock said.

"No, you don't," Ben countered.

Vees clipped his utility belt shut. He said, "The Enamorati have just detached the Engine from its moorings and I think they're going to remove it today. If they haven't already."

"How do you know this?" Ben asked.

"I have my sources," Jim said.

"What sources are these?"

"I'd rather not say just now. But they're very reliable," Jim said.

"And you guys are buying into this?" Ben asked Clock and Rosales.

"It's foolproof," Rosales said.

Rosales may have been their muscle powerhouse; he was also their most cautious Bombardier. If Tommy was in on this, the chances of getting caught must be minimal.

"What else have your sources told you?" Ben asked Jim. Jim said, "I was in the department's computer this morning and discovered that most of our satellites will be on the other side of the planet for the next forty minutes. The landsats are far too low and can't be retasked to higher altitudes. It's perfect for an Engine removal. No one on Eos will be watching."

"And?"

Jim looked at him. "And the Enamorati haven't locked down any of Astronomy's extensor pods, nor have they been shut down from the command deck. I've sent the pod out and back twice now very slowly and no one's noticed."

Ben considered George Clock, the only other Bombardier whose judgment he could trust. "What do you think about this?"

"Well, the gondola bays and service bays definitely are locked. This is routine for the ship in a standard holding orbit, but it's also routine for the
Makajaa
ceremony.
I
think they're pulling a fast one. I say we take a peek."

"Besides," Tommy Rosales added to Ben, "what have you got to lose? If you're caught, what are they going to do? Make you a Bombardier? You've already completed your program."

"They could send us all to prison for breaking the Enamorati Compact. My degree would be useless there," Ben said.

Clock merely smiled, and at the monitoring console Tommy Rosales seemed assured that they could get away with it. "Time's awastin', bud," Clock said.

"Easy for you to say. You're going to be in here, where it's safe," Ben said.

"We can do this and
not
get caught," Clock said, "because technically we won't be physically leaving the ship and the systems override will read as if the whole thing is being done automatically. No one's going to know
that people
are in the pod or here in the lab. What do you say?"

"Why do we have to go outside?" Ben asked. "Why not just extend the pod and watch it from in here?"

"Because I want to see it with my very own eyes," Jim said.

"And so do you," Tommy Rosales said to Ben.

He had him there. Despite the alleged effects of the Ennui, humans still had a trace of primate curiosity in them. There were just some things they
had
to know. Eventually, something like this was going to have happened in the Human Community anyway.

Ben took the EVA suit from the wall and began climbing into it.

While they secured their suits, Tommy Rosales prepared the airlock's pressure sleeve and brought the observation pod's hydraulics on-line, including all optical systems.

Jim said, "The Enamorati don't have any control over the astronomy department's equipment. Plus, our observatory blister is forward of the ship's equator, which they normally can't see anyway. All we're going to do is extend the pod high enough 'over the horizon' to take a peek aft."

"Except that you and I will be going for a ride in it," Ben said.

"That's the plan," Jim said.

It took them another twenty minutes to flight-check the suits and climb into the pod extension arm. Clock and Rosales then sealed Ben and Jim Vees into the extensor pod and unhooked the extensor arm's lock restraints. When Ben and Jim were finally ready, Clock slowly extruded the extensor arm.

When Ben deopaqued the main viewing ports, they saw the full blue-white splendor of Kiilmist 5 three hundred miles below them. It left Ben virtually speechless. Clock rotated the extensor pod, so its main telescope faced aft. When they were ready, Clock gently coaxed the extensor arm just far enough for Ben and Jim to see over the horizon of the hull. At the same time, Tommy Rosales engaged the video recording equipment.

No human being in all the years of Enamorati relations had ever seen an Onesci Engine. When Engines were sent to the H.C. Yards, one near Earth and one near Tau Ceti 4, each came enclosed in a massive casing that was hauled by a large tug. Engines that had outworn their usefulness were always destroyed, never towed back to Virr or refurbished, nor were they recycled in any way.