Deepsix

"Thanks," Drummond said. "I can manage."

"It has plenty of juice," said Carla, admiring her laser. From Drum-mond's perspective, she was upside down. His eyes closed tight.

She had already sliced halfway through her target shaft. Beekman was hanging on the edge of it to make sure it didn't drift away when she'd completed the job.

Drummond's eyes opened, and he looked back at the airlock as if it were a half klick away. Its light spilled out into the vacuum.

"I thought there'd be more resistance," Carla said.

"You're okay," Marcel told Drummond. "Can I make a suggestion?"

Drummon's breathing was becoming ragged, but he didn't reply.

"Close your eyes, John. And let me take you over." Wendy hovered only two meters away. Bill was keeping the ship perfectly still in relation to the artifact. But Marcel was aware of Deepsix climbing slowly but steadily up the sky.

"Something wrong, John?" Beekman's voice.

"No," said Marcel. "We're fine."

"John?" Carla this time, sounding worried. "You okay?"

"Yes." His voice was tight and angry. He looked at Marcel. "Yeah. Please get me away from here."

Marcel put an arm gently around his waist. This time Drummond didn't pull away. "Tell me when you're ready," he said.

Drummond stiffened and closed his eyes. "Just give me a minute." But it was too late. Marcel, without waiting, anxious to end the suspense, pushed them forward, off the shaft. They floated toward the open hatch and the light.

"We'll be there in a second, John."

By then the others were watching. Carla's laser went out, and she asked whether she could help. Marcel saw that Beekman was shifting his posture, preparing to join them. "Stay put, Gu

"What happened, Marcel?" he asked.

"A little motion sickness, I think. Nothing serious. Happens all the time."

Drummond struggled briefly and they bumped into the hull. But he got one hand on the hatch and pulled himself into the airlock. Marcel let him do it on his own. When John was safely on board he climbed in beside him. "Damned coward," Drummond said.

They were inside the ship's artificial gravity field. Marcel sat down on the bench. "You're being a little hard on yourself."

Drummond just stared back out of bleak eyes.

"Listen." Marcel sat back and relaxed. "There are very few people who would have done what you did. Most wouldn't have gone out there at all, feeling the way you must have." He looked at the assembly, and the stars beyond. "You want me to shut the hatch and we'll go inside?"

He shook his head. "No," he said. "Can't do that. They're still out there."

Beekman and Carla returned a few minutes later with their prize. They negotiated it carefully into the airlock, into the half-gee gravity field that was normal for ships in flight. (Maintaining full Earth normal would have consumed too much power.) The piece was as long as Marcel was high. They expected it to be quite heavy inside the ship.

Instead, a look of bewilderment formed on Carla's features. She signaled Beekman to let go and easily hefted the object herself. "Im-possibilium is the right word," she said. "It weighs next to nothing."

Beekman stared. "They're pretty good engineers, aren't they?"

"Yes," she said.

"Because of the weight?" Marcel asked.

Drummond was almost breathing normally again. He wanted to speak, and Beekman gave him the floor.

"The problem," he said, summoning each word as if it were Greek, "with this kind of construction…" He stopped to take another breath. "Problem is that you have too much mass distributed over such an extreme length."

He glanced at Beekman, who nodded.

"The strength of the structure at any given point isn't enough to support the strain put on it. Think of the, ah, Starlite Center in Chicago and imagine you had to build it from cardboard."

"It'd collapse," Marcel said.

"Exactly right," said Carla. "The kinds of building materials we have now, applied to this kind of structure"-she nodded toward the airlock door, toward the assembly-"equate to cardboard. If we tried to make one of these, its own mass would crumple it."

Beekman picked up the thread. "If you're going to erect something as big as the Starlite, you want two qualities in your building materials."

"Strength," said Marcel.

"And light weight," finished Carla. She glanced at the sample. "We know it's strong because the assembly holds together. And now we know at least part of the reason it holds together. It doesn't have much mass."

They closed up. Minutes later green lamps blinked, and the i

"So what's next?" asked Marcel.

Beekman looked pleased. "We analyze it. Find out how they did it."

For August Canyon, Deepsix was aptly named. His flight to that unhappy world as pool representative for the various press services, to do a feature that was of only marginal interest to the general public, signaled beyond any doubt management's view of his future. Is there a labor strike in Siberia? Send Canyon. Did they find water on the far side of the Moon? Get Canyon up there to do the interviews.

"It isn't that bad," said Emma Constantine, his producer and the only other soul aboard the Edward J. Zwick other than the pilot.

"Why isn't it?" he demanded. He'd been simmering during the entire five weeks of the outbound flight, saying none of the things that were on his mind. But he was tired of being cooped up, tired of spending his time on virtual beaches while other people his age were doing solid investigative journalism, chasing down corruption in London, sex in Washington, stupidity in Paris.

"It'll be a good feature," she said. "Worlds collide. That's big stuff, if we handle it right."

"It would be," he said, "if we had somebody to interview." Canyon had all the credentials-graduate of Harvard, experience with Washington Online and later Sam Brewster. Brewster was an extraordinarily effective muckraker, and Canyon had been with him a year and a half, just long enough for Brewster to recognize he lacked a muck-raker's stomach while Canyon alienated every power center in the capital. After their less than amicable parting, he'd been.lucky to catch on with Toledo Express.

"We've got a whole boatload of scientists to talk to."

"Right. You ever try to get a physicist to say something people are remotely interested in hearing?"

"We've done it, on occasion."

"Sure we have. Cube theory. Gravity waves. Force vituperations. That's pretty hot stuff."

"I think that's force correlations"

He took a deep breath. "As if it mattered. What we need is a good politician. Somebody to take a stand against planetary wrecks."

"Look," she said. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We've got a database on these people."

"I know," he said. "Tasker's on Wendy, and he'll talk, but that's the problem. He talks forever."

"We can edit if we have to. Listen, Augie, we're here and we have to make the best of it. This isn't the assignment I'd have chosen either. But there's going to be a lot more interest in this than you think."

"Why would that be?"

"Because worlds don't crash into each other every day." She was frowning, maybe regretting not the assignment, but her partner. "Because there are ruins on Deepsix."

"But no sign of a civilization. Do you think anybody's going to care that a pile of stones goes down with everything else?"

"Augie, who built the pile?"

"I doubt that the people they're sending down there are going to have time to find out."

She smiled benignly. "That's exactly my point. Look, forget Wendy. This is a world that's been racked up. Ice age for three thousand years. No sign of cities. That means if anybody's left, it's savages. Savages are relentlessly dull. But vanished civilizations? That's news. The people we want to interview are on the ground, poking around the tower. Not in the starship. Figure out where to go with that side of the story, and we're in business."