Trappist-1, page 12
part #3 of Mark Noble Space Adventures Series
‘Okay, keep suited up. Can you take us north, Chi?’ I said.
‘Sure thing, but it might be better to have a rest period now. I’d like to know we have plenty of daylight when we get onto the ice.’
We boarded Rimor and purged the air in case alien air had entered with us through the airlock. We could then strip out of our suits and sleep as best we could on our couches.
Outside, night was falling as our first day on an alien world came to an end.
19 Glacier
‘Some of that plant in here,’ said Tosh, as I stirred into wakefulness. He was standing by the airlock, vacuuming the black material.
‘We’ll have to do a spring clean before we leave the planet,’ said Chi.
‘Damn right,’ said Tosh. ‘We can’t take this stuff home except under controlled conditions. There’s more here.’ He continued to vacuum areas near the door. ‘And on our suits and boots,’ he added, using a stiff brush attachment on the vacuum to clear it.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Thought I’d got it off my boots.’
‘This is yours?’ Tosh said, holding up my left shoe. I nodded.
‘We’d better use overshoes when we next go outside,’ said Bill.
‘Definitely,’ I said, examining my boot. The plant was attached to several parts around the sole, but also above the ankle.
Tosh took it back from me and finished the cleaning process.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get ourselves organised, breakfasted and then set off north towards that snowfield Tosh wants to see.’
I sat on my couch and called Spirit. ‘You there, Mary? Over.’
‘Yes, reading you loud and clear.’
‘We slept well. We’ve obtained dozens of plant samples and some invertebrates from the shallows,’ I said.
‘You using the dinghy again?’ asked Mary.
‘No, I don’t think so. We’re all a little rattled by the size of that water creature we saw. I know it’s easy to overestimate sizes seen over water, but it looked the size of an elephant seal to me. Could overturn the dinghy or swamp it. We didn’t see either end of it, but, presumably, it could even have been a predator wanting to make us its meal.’
‘Think yourselves lucky that there’s not a land version,’ said Mary.
‘There still could be. Look, we’re preparing to jet up northwards. Tosh wants to look at thicker snow and we’re hoping the planned landing spot is actually a glacier. He’d like a core as it might have trapped any creatures living on the land today or in the past.’
‘Roger that. Take care,’ she said. ‘I got a fix on Earth, by the way.’
‘Good news. We’ll be careful. Will keep you in the picture. Out.’
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
We lifted off vertically and Chi swung us out over the sea.
‘Keep us low and head out over deeper water, Chi,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see if we can spot any of those larger animals.’
‘Will do,’ she said, banking us to the left and flying only twenty metres above the surface, swivelling the jets to allow us to hover over the growing swell which developed once we passed the headland.
‘There!’ shouted Bill.
One of the alien seal-like animals was moving along at the surface, just its back showing.
‘And another,’ Bill said pointing a little farther away.
‘I’m filming. Can you get over the top of it, Chi,’ said Tosh.
‘Okay. Give me a minute,’ Chi said, changing to vertical power and creeping towards the animal.
‘Oh, good stuff,’ said Tosh. I turned to look at his monitor.
The creature was just hanging at the surface now, the second one was almost directly underneath us.
Tosh and I both jumped at the same instant and recoiled as the second animal launched itself upwards. ‘Up!’ I shouted. There was a clang against the hull and the creature fell back into the water as Chi gained altitude.
‘What the devil was that?’ she asked.
‘It attacked us,’ I said.
‘What with?’
‘Its teeth!’ I said.
‘Look, there’s six of them down there now, circling like a pack of sharks,’ said Tosh.
‘What was our altitude when that thing hit us?’ I asked.
Chi checked her readings. ‘Eighteen metres.’
‘Eighteen metres!’ I said in astonishment. ‘It jumped eighteen metres vertically out of the water?’
‘It did,’ said Tosh. ‘I’ve got it in slo-mo.’
We watched a second individual launch itself skywards, but it didn’t reach us this time and fell back in a cascade of spray.
‘What’s the altitude now, Chi?’ I asked.
‘Thirty metres.’
While Chi continued to fly us north, Bill, Tosh and I huddled around his video screen watching the first sequence.
The two animals were circling each other, then, with no warning at all, the second animal leapt into the air. The whole thing was blue-grey in colour. Its front end was rounded, like a Beluga whale. There was no sign of any eyes, but a slit across the front opened and four tusks materialised, one from each corner of the mouth. We saw it shudder as it struck the hull and fell back, creating an enormous splash as it hit the water and vanished into the depths.
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Bill. ‘Thank God we got back to shore quickly yesterday.’
‘For sure,’ I said with a shudder. ‘I think we’ll use the ROV5 in the sea when we return. These things seem to be top of the food chain. We need to study them.’
‘Did you notice its fins?’ asked Tosh, ‘Although they were flattened against its sides as it jumped, they were the same as the ones you filmed on the smaller fish. Seems to be a single fin running along each side.’
‘Hey! What are you guys looking at?’ asked Chi, unable to see the screen.
‘It’s a vicious looking thing with tusks,’ said Bill. ‘It’s what hit our underside, Chi.’
‘What, at eighteen metres?’ she asked. ‘The whole animal? I thought you meant it had hurled a projectile.’
‘No. The whole animal leapt up at us. Staggering,’ Bill replied.
‘How the hell did it produce that thrust? It must have weighed at least a ton. Did you see a tail?’ I asked.
‘Yes, at least a ton. No tail, no,’ said Tosh.
‘I’d like to see the spot it hit when we land,’ said Bill. ‘Those tusks were sharp. It could have damaged the hull.’
‘Hull integrity is one hundred per cent,’ said Chi.
‘The camera’s still working, so it didn’t hit that,’ said Tosh.
‘I’m staggered by the power we’ve just witnessed,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re safe at the landing site?’
‘I’m sure it could sling itself out of the water to where we landed last time,’ said Tosh.
‘Chi, when we return, give us another thirty metres from the shoreline,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but we can’t do anything to relocate the tank.’
‘Well, we’re not living in the tank,’ said Bill.
‘How long to the glacier?’ I asked.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said Chi.
‘I’d like to watch that again, Tosh,’ I said. The three of us peered at the monitor, trying to figure out what had given the creature such incredible propulsion. This wasn’t a low mass world. Gravity was similar to that on Earth.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
‘That’s the location,’ said Tosh as Rimor crossed the snow-covered ridge and a glacier came into view. It was narrow here, only a couple of hundred metres, with bare rock either side. Of course, with the colour of the sun, the ice and snow had a pink tinge to it. The sky remained a dark bluish purple.
‘There’s a patch of clear land on our right,’ said Chi. ‘Can you climb down from there?’
‘Why not land on the glacier?’ Tosh asked.
‘Landing gear could get stuck in the ice,’ Chi replied.
‘Okay,’ said Tosh. ‘Can you set us down as near the ice as possible?’
‘Sure thing,’ she said. We banked to the right and settled gently on the hillside. ‘Okay, jacking up left struts to level us.’
The lander, which had been at a rather rakish angle, gradually levelled itself.
‘Okay. Down,’ said Chi. ‘Spirit. We’ve landed.’
‘Copy you down,’ said Mary.
‘Thought you’d cleaned my boot,’ I said, examining some plant on the side of the sole.
‘I did,’ said Tosh.
‘Well, it’s back again, then,’ I said.
Bill examined his boots. ‘Yes, grown again on mine too.’
‘We’ll need to do a deep clean before we leave Haven,’ said Tosh.
In the cramped cockpit of the Rimor, it was a bit of a crowd to get into our suits. We charged our backpacks from the ship’s air and power supplies, pulled on disposable overshoes and made our way, one at a time, down onto the bare rocky hillside.
‘I’ll take some rock samples while you’re on the glacier,’ I said.
‘Bring two or three core rods please, Bill,’ said Tosh as he headed down the slope onto the ice.
As a geologist, I was in my element here. I saw what I recognised as tourmaline in the lighter veins of the rocky outcrop. No sign of the black plant here. It seemed fairly sterile.
I chiselled out some samples. The main metamorphic hillside held a lot of cassiterite, probably in minable concentrations. Nothing too dissimilar from Earth. I soon had twenty different samples and closed my case.
I looked back to the ship. Chi was underneath, examining the damage inflicted by our tusked sea creature. She saw me looking at her, ‘Nothing serious,’ she said over the suit communicator. ‘Dented the hull, though.’
I gave her a thumbs-up, placed my rocks in the airlock and joined her under the hull. There were three clear dents in the hull. Pointed depressions.
‘If we’d been lower, I think it could have penetrated,’ I said.
‘Yes, not good. Let’s hope there are no land versions,’ said Chi.
‘We haven’t seen any land animals at all. If that means there is no prey, then it would likely mean no predators, I should think,’ I said.
‘I’m still checking three-sixty for mountain lions and pterodactyls. Need to take care,’ she said.
I turned towards the glacier. Tosh and Bill were obtaining ice cores and I made my way over to them.
‘How deep’s the ice?’
‘Sonar says twelve metres here,’ replied Tosh. ‘We’re just taking sections of cores, rather than the whole thing, to keep the weight down.’
A piece of hemp cloth lay on the surface beside them with a growing number of ten centimetre core samples.
‘Anything unusual?’ I asked.
‘What? Apart from the fact that this is ice on an Earth-like planet forty light years from home!’ he said, exhibiting his well-known disagreeable nature when his work was questioned. I’d known him long enough not to take offence. I knew he would want to share his findings, but on his terms.
A minute later, he said, ‘There’s nothing in the way of airborne creatures, but this is interesting.’ Using tongs, he picked up a still intact core of ice, one centimetre in diameter and some forty centimetres long, and showed it to me. ‘Do you see the regular layers of dark grey specks?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What are they?’
‘I’ll have to do some analysis, but it looks like pollen to me. Until we know how long it takes to lay down this glacial ice, we won’t know how long it is between these layers being deposited until I’ve done some more work on it. I’d guess that it is a seasonal deposit.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Haven has no appreciable axis tilt, so there shouldn’t be seasons. Wonder what triggers the pollen production.’
‘How eccentric is the orbit?’ he asked.
‘Almost circular. No seasonal effect there either.’
‘Life cycle of the plant, I assume,’ said Tosh. ‘I’m guessing that it comes from the seaweed, unless there are major areas of plants we’ve not seen from orbit.’
‘Do the layers run the length of the cores?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Bill counted sixty in this one core. It is extremely regular. Other than that, nothing of any immediate interest, but the microscope is sure to reveal much more.’
‘How long, before you’re finished?’
‘As long as it takes,’ he snapped.
‘Roughly?’
‘We’re almost there. Twenty minutes,’ he said, looking around at Bill who was operating the corer. ‘Bill, how long before you have that one?’
‘Any minute, then one more to do on the far side,’ Bill said, waving his arm towards the other side of the glacier, perhaps two hundred metres away.
‘Chi’s nervous about mountain lions and pterodactyls,’ I said. ‘Keep checking your surroundings. You never know. That thing in the water unnerved me too.’
I returned to the Rimor, examined the dents in the polymer strengthened hull again, then stood and took in the view.
The mountains were mainly rounded, suggesting that mountain building had not been happening for millions of years. Over to the west were a few more dramatic peaks, but nothing like as young and jagged as the mountains found on Earth.
Turning the other way, the glacier was a tributary to a much larger ice sheet in the valley below. It, in turn, continued into the far distance where it stopped, relatively suddenly, a kilometre or two before the sea, as usual black fringed by the strange seaweed which had adapted itself to make use of the red sunlight and its strong infrared component.
Beautiful and magnificent, but in a desolate sort of way. I couldn’t wait to get back to base. Tomorrow I intended to get the ROV out into deeper water, for there we knew there was life – sophisticated, and undoubtedly dangerous animal life.
20 Undersea
‘Damn it,’ said Chi. ‘There’s some of that plant on my control panel.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill, ‘and on my couch.’
‘Some here too,’ said Tosh.
‘Okay. We’ll have to have a deep clean before we leave, but use disinfected wipes on any you see in here before we suit up,’ I said.
‘My atmospheric test has come back all-clear. We don’t need to wear suits. There were no adverse effects on the plant or the plankton from our exhaled atmosphere or shipboard bacteria either. What do you want to do?’ Tosh asked.
‘Okay, no suits. Our flight suits will do,’ I said.
‘That’ll make it easier to work,’ said Tosh.
‘Yes. Wear throat mikes though,’ I said.
‘All ready? I’m lifting off in four, three, two, one,’ said Chi and we felt the jets pushing us off the rocky outcrop, the undercarriage withdrew, and we flew into the mountains.
‘Still no land plants,’ said Bill.
‘No, but look at that lake down there. Black as coal and fringed with the same weed we encountered on the coast,’ said Chi.
‘Mark. Can we stop there?’ said Tosh. ‘I need specimens. We should find out if it is the same species or a freshwater variation.’
‘Take us down, Chi,’ I said, ‘but at least fifty metres from the water.’
‘Will do,’ she said and banked to the right, circled the lake, found a suitable flat area, and we were down. ‘Spirit. Come in please.’
‘Mary here, Chi,’ came the reply.
‘Note this location. Freshwater lake. Tosh wants samples. We’re also going out without suits.’
‘Copy that,’ said Mary.
The next hour was spent using disinfected wipes to clear the plant. There was more of it than we’d realised. Amazing that it was apparently rooting itself to metal and plastic. What was somewhat worrying was that it could be developing inside equipment consoles.
We climbed out of the airlock and sampled the air.
‘Ugh!’ I said. ‘What is that smell? It’s familiar.’
‘Smells like an old blanket which has been left to fester in a shed or garage,’ Bill said. ‘When you move it, that is exactly the sort of stink it produces.’
‘Yes. Unpleasant,’ I said.
‘Stop moaning,’ said Tosh. ‘In five minutes you’ll hardly notice it.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Chi. ‘Interesting, and at least it’s real, not canned, like our sanitised ship’s air. Alien air. How privileged are we to be smelling real alien air? Growing up in Hong Kong, as a kid I remember hundreds of different aromas, from the cooking, the streets, the sea. Big part of my childhood.’
‘Well, you can keep this one,’ I said. ‘Bill’s nailed it – a damp festering blanket which has been lying in a shed for years.’ I laughed.
While Tosh and Bill set about examining the water and checking if this was a different species of plant, Chi came with me up onto the hill where I could sample the regolith and rocks. Tosh was right, of course. We soon forgot the musty smell of the air.
The rocks here were metamorphic, speckled with mineral crystals. I took eight samples, bagged them and turned, with Chi, to look back at the others.
‘It’s the green I miss,’ said Chi, sadly.
‘Yes. I guess we could plant grass and shrubs here,’ I said.
‘But would they survive in this red sunlight?’ she asked.
‘More importantly, that weed might overwhelm other plants. If it grew over their leaves they’d soon die,’ I mused. ‘I wonder if we could eat it.’
‘I expect that it would need processing,’ said Chi.
In the distance, Tosh and Bill were out in the dinghy. Having taken water samples, they were heading back to shore and ran the boat up the beach.
When Chi and I joined them, Bill had attached the dinghy to the ship and was vacuuming the air out of it, preparing to store it back in its locker.
‘No creature from the black lagoon, then?’ I asked.
‘No large animal could live in a lake that small,’ said Tosh.
‘I was being facetious!’
‘Never!’ he retorted.
‘Come see this, Mark,’ Bill called over to me.
I leaned over the dinghy and we looked into its locker.
‘It’s covered,’ I said.
‘Must have been a lot on the boat when I stored it back at the base camp,’ said Bill.
‘Sure thing, but it might be better to have a rest period now. I’d like to know we have plenty of daylight when we get onto the ice.’
We boarded Rimor and purged the air in case alien air had entered with us through the airlock. We could then strip out of our suits and sleep as best we could on our couches.
Outside, night was falling as our first day on an alien world came to an end.
19 Glacier
‘Some of that plant in here,’ said Tosh, as I stirred into wakefulness. He was standing by the airlock, vacuuming the black material.
‘We’ll have to do a spring clean before we leave the planet,’ said Chi.
‘Damn right,’ said Tosh. ‘We can’t take this stuff home except under controlled conditions. There’s more here.’ He continued to vacuum areas near the door. ‘And on our suits and boots,’ he added, using a stiff brush attachment on the vacuum to clear it.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Thought I’d got it off my boots.’
‘This is yours?’ Tosh said, holding up my left shoe. I nodded.
‘We’d better use overshoes when we next go outside,’ said Bill.
‘Definitely,’ I said, examining my boot. The plant was attached to several parts around the sole, but also above the ankle.
Tosh took it back from me and finished the cleaning process.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get ourselves organised, breakfasted and then set off north towards that snowfield Tosh wants to see.’
I sat on my couch and called Spirit. ‘You there, Mary? Over.’
‘Yes, reading you loud and clear.’
‘We slept well. We’ve obtained dozens of plant samples and some invertebrates from the shallows,’ I said.
‘You using the dinghy again?’ asked Mary.
‘No, I don’t think so. We’re all a little rattled by the size of that water creature we saw. I know it’s easy to overestimate sizes seen over water, but it looked the size of an elephant seal to me. Could overturn the dinghy or swamp it. We didn’t see either end of it, but, presumably, it could even have been a predator wanting to make us its meal.’
‘Think yourselves lucky that there’s not a land version,’ said Mary.
‘There still could be. Look, we’re preparing to jet up northwards. Tosh wants to look at thicker snow and we’re hoping the planned landing spot is actually a glacier. He’d like a core as it might have trapped any creatures living on the land today or in the past.’
‘Roger that. Take care,’ she said. ‘I got a fix on Earth, by the way.’
‘Good news. We’ll be careful. Will keep you in the picture. Out.’
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
We lifted off vertically and Chi swung us out over the sea.
‘Keep us low and head out over deeper water, Chi,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see if we can spot any of those larger animals.’
‘Will do,’ she said, banking us to the left and flying only twenty metres above the surface, swivelling the jets to allow us to hover over the growing swell which developed once we passed the headland.
‘There!’ shouted Bill.
One of the alien seal-like animals was moving along at the surface, just its back showing.
‘And another,’ Bill said pointing a little farther away.
‘I’m filming. Can you get over the top of it, Chi,’ said Tosh.
‘Okay. Give me a minute,’ Chi said, changing to vertical power and creeping towards the animal.
‘Oh, good stuff,’ said Tosh. I turned to look at his monitor.
The creature was just hanging at the surface now, the second one was almost directly underneath us.
Tosh and I both jumped at the same instant and recoiled as the second animal launched itself upwards. ‘Up!’ I shouted. There was a clang against the hull and the creature fell back into the water as Chi gained altitude.
‘What the devil was that?’ she asked.
‘It attacked us,’ I said.
‘What with?’
‘Its teeth!’ I said.
‘Look, there’s six of them down there now, circling like a pack of sharks,’ said Tosh.
‘What was our altitude when that thing hit us?’ I asked.
Chi checked her readings. ‘Eighteen metres.’
‘Eighteen metres!’ I said in astonishment. ‘It jumped eighteen metres vertically out of the water?’
‘It did,’ said Tosh. ‘I’ve got it in slo-mo.’
We watched a second individual launch itself skywards, but it didn’t reach us this time and fell back in a cascade of spray.
‘What’s the altitude now, Chi?’ I asked.
‘Thirty metres.’
While Chi continued to fly us north, Bill, Tosh and I huddled around his video screen watching the first sequence.
The two animals were circling each other, then, with no warning at all, the second animal leapt into the air. The whole thing was blue-grey in colour. Its front end was rounded, like a Beluga whale. There was no sign of any eyes, but a slit across the front opened and four tusks materialised, one from each corner of the mouth. We saw it shudder as it struck the hull and fell back, creating an enormous splash as it hit the water and vanished into the depths.
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Bill. ‘Thank God we got back to shore quickly yesterday.’
‘For sure,’ I said with a shudder. ‘I think we’ll use the ROV5 in the sea when we return. These things seem to be top of the food chain. We need to study them.’
‘Did you notice its fins?’ asked Tosh, ‘Although they were flattened against its sides as it jumped, they were the same as the ones you filmed on the smaller fish. Seems to be a single fin running along each side.’
‘Hey! What are you guys looking at?’ asked Chi, unable to see the screen.
‘It’s a vicious looking thing with tusks,’ said Bill. ‘It’s what hit our underside, Chi.’
‘What, at eighteen metres?’ she asked. ‘The whole animal? I thought you meant it had hurled a projectile.’
‘No. The whole animal leapt up at us. Staggering,’ Bill replied.
‘How the hell did it produce that thrust? It must have weighed at least a ton. Did you see a tail?’ I asked.
‘Yes, at least a ton. No tail, no,’ said Tosh.
‘I’d like to see the spot it hit when we land,’ said Bill. ‘Those tusks were sharp. It could have damaged the hull.’
‘Hull integrity is one hundred per cent,’ said Chi.
‘The camera’s still working, so it didn’t hit that,’ said Tosh.
‘I’m staggered by the power we’ve just witnessed,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re safe at the landing site?’
‘I’m sure it could sling itself out of the water to where we landed last time,’ said Tosh.
‘Chi, when we return, give us another thirty metres from the shoreline,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but we can’t do anything to relocate the tank.’
‘Well, we’re not living in the tank,’ said Bill.
‘How long to the glacier?’ I asked.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said Chi.
‘I’d like to watch that again, Tosh,’ I said. The three of us peered at the monitor, trying to figure out what had given the creature such incredible propulsion. This wasn’t a low mass world. Gravity was similar to that on Earth.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
‘That’s the location,’ said Tosh as Rimor crossed the snow-covered ridge and a glacier came into view. It was narrow here, only a couple of hundred metres, with bare rock either side. Of course, with the colour of the sun, the ice and snow had a pink tinge to it. The sky remained a dark bluish purple.
‘There’s a patch of clear land on our right,’ said Chi. ‘Can you climb down from there?’
‘Why not land on the glacier?’ Tosh asked.
‘Landing gear could get stuck in the ice,’ Chi replied.
‘Okay,’ said Tosh. ‘Can you set us down as near the ice as possible?’
‘Sure thing,’ she said. We banked to the right and settled gently on the hillside. ‘Okay, jacking up left struts to level us.’
The lander, which had been at a rather rakish angle, gradually levelled itself.
‘Okay. Down,’ said Chi. ‘Spirit. We’ve landed.’
‘Copy you down,’ said Mary.
‘Thought you’d cleaned my boot,’ I said, examining some plant on the side of the sole.
‘I did,’ said Tosh.
‘Well, it’s back again, then,’ I said.
Bill examined his boots. ‘Yes, grown again on mine too.’
‘We’ll need to do a deep clean before we leave Haven,’ said Tosh.
In the cramped cockpit of the Rimor, it was a bit of a crowd to get into our suits. We charged our backpacks from the ship’s air and power supplies, pulled on disposable overshoes and made our way, one at a time, down onto the bare rocky hillside.
‘I’ll take some rock samples while you’re on the glacier,’ I said.
‘Bring two or three core rods please, Bill,’ said Tosh as he headed down the slope onto the ice.
As a geologist, I was in my element here. I saw what I recognised as tourmaline in the lighter veins of the rocky outcrop. No sign of the black plant here. It seemed fairly sterile.
I chiselled out some samples. The main metamorphic hillside held a lot of cassiterite, probably in minable concentrations. Nothing too dissimilar from Earth. I soon had twenty different samples and closed my case.
I looked back to the ship. Chi was underneath, examining the damage inflicted by our tusked sea creature. She saw me looking at her, ‘Nothing serious,’ she said over the suit communicator. ‘Dented the hull, though.’
I gave her a thumbs-up, placed my rocks in the airlock and joined her under the hull. There were three clear dents in the hull. Pointed depressions.
‘If we’d been lower, I think it could have penetrated,’ I said.
‘Yes, not good. Let’s hope there are no land versions,’ said Chi.
‘We haven’t seen any land animals at all. If that means there is no prey, then it would likely mean no predators, I should think,’ I said.
‘I’m still checking three-sixty for mountain lions and pterodactyls. Need to take care,’ she said.
I turned towards the glacier. Tosh and Bill were obtaining ice cores and I made my way over to them.
‘How deep’s the ice?’
‘Sonar says twelve metres here,’ replied Tosh. ‘We’re just taking sections of cores, rather than the whole thing, to keep the weight down.’
A piece of hemp cloth lay on the surface beside them with a growing number of ten centimetre core samples.
‘Anything unusual?’ I asked.
‘What? Apart from the fact that this is ice on an Earth-like planet forty light years from home!’ he said, exhibiting his well-known disagreeable nature when his work was questioned. I’d known him long enough not to take offence. I knew he would want to share his findings, but on his terms.
A minute later, he said, ‘There’s nothing in the way of airborne creatures, but this is interesting.’ Using tongs, he picked up a still intact core of ice, one centimetre in diameter and some forty centimetres long, and showed it to me. ‘Do you see the regular layers of dark grey specks?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What are they?’
‘I’ll have to do some analysis, but it looks like pollen to me. Until we know how long it takes to lay down this glacial ice, we won’t know how long it is between these layers being deposited until I’ve done some more work on it. I’d guess that it is a seasonal deposit.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Haven has no appreciable axis tilt, so there shouldn’t be seasons. Wonder what triggers the pollen production.’
‘How eccentric is the orbit?’ he asked.
‘Almost circular. No seasonal effect there either.’
‘Life cycle of the plant, I assume,’ said Tosh. ‘I’m guessing that it comes from the seaweed, unless there are major areas of plants we’ve not seen from orbit.’
‘Do the layers run the length of the cores?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Bill counted sixty in this one core. It is extremely regular. Other than that, nothing of any immediate interest, but the microscope is sure to reveal much more.’
‘How long, before you’re finished?’
‘As long as it takes,’ he snapped.
‘Roughly?’
‘We’re almost there. Twenty minutes,’ he said, looking around at Bill who was operating the corer. ‘Bill, how long before you have that one?’
‘Any minute, then one more to do on the far side,’ Bill said, waving his arm towards the other side of the glacier, perhaps two hundred metres away.
‘Chi’s nervous about mountain lions and pterodactyls,’ I said. ‘Keep checking your surroundings. You never know. That thing in the water unnerved me too.’
I returned to the Rimor, examined the dents in the polymer strengthened hull again, then stood and took in the view.
The mountains were mainly rounded, suggesting that mountain building had not been happening for millions of years. Over to the west were a few more dramatic peaks, but nothing like as young and jagged as the mountains found on Earth.
Turning the other way, the glacier was a tributary to a much larger ice sheet in the valley below. It, in turn, continued into the far distance where it stopped, relatively suddenly, a kilometre or two before the sea, as usual black fringed by the strange seaweed which had adapted itself to make use of the red sunlight and its strong infrared component.
Beautiful and magnificent, but in a desolate sort of way. I couldn’t wait to get back to base. Tomorrow I intended to get the ROV out into deeper water, for there we knew there was life – sophisticated, and undoubtedly dangerous animal life.
20 Undersea
‘Damn it,’ said Chi. ‘There’s some of that plant on my control panel.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill, ‘and on my couch.’
‘Some here too,’ said Tosh.
‘Okay. We’ll have to have a deep clean before we leave, but use disinfected wipes on any you see in here before we suit up,’ I said.
‘My atmospheric test has come back all-clear. We don’t need to wear suits. There were no adverse effects on the plant or the plankton from our exhaled atmosphere or shipboard bacteria either. What do you want to do?’ Tosh asked.
‘Okay, no suits. Our flight suits will do,’ I said.
‘That’ll make it easier to work,’ said Tosh.
‘Yes. Wear throat mikes though,’ I said.
‘All ready? I’m lifting off in four, three, two, one,’ said Chi and we felt the jets pushing us off the rocky outcrop, the undercarriage withdrew, and we flew into the mountains.
‘Still no land plants,’ said Bill.
‘No, but look at that lake down there. Black as coal and fringed with the same weed we encountered on the coast,’ said Chi.
‘Mark. Can we stop there?’ said Tosh. ‘I need specimens. We should find out if it is the same species or a freshwater variation.’
‘Take us down, Chi,’ I said, ‘but at least fifty metres from the water.’
‘Will do,’ she said and banked to the right, circled the lake, found a suitable flat area, and we were down. ‘Spirit. Come in please.’
‘Mary here, Chi,’ came the reply.
‘Note this location. Freshwater lake. Tosh wants samples. We’re also going out without suits.’
‘Copy that,’ said Mary.
The next hour was spent using disinfected wipes to clear the plant. There was more of it than we’d realised. Amazing that it was apparently rooting itself to metal and plastic. What was somewhat worrying was that it could be developing inside equipment consoles.
We climbed out of the airlock and sampled the air.
‘Ugh!’ I said. ‘What is that smell? It’s familiar.’
‘Smells like an old blanket which has been left to fester in a shed or garage,’ Bill said. ‘When you move it, that is exactly the sort of stink it produces.’
‘Yes. Unpleasant,’ I said.
‘Stop moaning,’ said Tosh. ‘In five minutes you’ll hardly notice it.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Chi. ‘Interesting, and at least it’s real, not canned, like our sanitised ship’s air. Alien air. How privileged are we to be smelling real alien air? Growing up in Hong Kong, as a kid I remember hundreds of different aromas, from the cooking, the streets, the sea. Big part of my childhood.’
‘Well, you can keep this one,’ I said. ‘Bill’s nailed it – a damp festering blanket which has been lying in a shed for years.’ I laughed.
While Tosh and Bill set about examining the water and checking if this was a different species of plant, Chi came with me up onto the hill where I could sample the regolith and rocks. Tosh was right, of course. We soon forgot the musty smell of the air.
The rocks here were metamorphic, speckled with mineral crystals. I took eight samples, bagged them and turned, with Chi, to look back at the others.
‘It’s the green I miss,’ said Chi, sadly.
‘Yes. I guess we could plant grass and shrubs here,’ I said.
‘But would they survive in this red sunlight?’ she asked.
‘More importantly, that weed might overwhelm other plants. If it grew over their leaves they’d soon die,’ I mused. ‘I wonder if we could eat it.’
‘I expect that it would need processing,’ said Chi.
In the distance, Tosh and Bill were out in the dinghy. Having taken water samples, they were heading back to shore and ran the boat up the beach.
When Chi and I joined them, Bill had attached the dinghy to the ship and was vacuuming the air out of it, preparing to store it back in its locker.
‘No creature from the black lagoon, then?’ I asked.
‘No large animal could live in a lake that small,’ said Tosh.
‘I was being facetious!’
‘Never!’ he retorted.
‘Come see this, Mark,’ Bill called over to me.
I leaned over the dinghy and we looked into its locker.
‘It’s covered,’ I said.
‘Must have been a lot on the boat when I stored it back at the base camp,’ said Bill.
