Macroscope

“But why didn’t he come to us directly?” Beatryx wanted to know. “If he was close enough to get into Afra’s purse—”

“Schön is devious,” Ivo said. But the explanation sounded insufficient, even to him. What other little surprises did the genius have in store for them?

Neptune had grown monstrously by the time the ship braked down to something resembling orbital velocity. The planet’s disk was fifteen times the apparent diameter of Luna from Earth, and its roiling atmospheric layers were horrendously evident. The great bands of color hardly showed now; instead there was a three-dimensional mélange of cloud and gas and turbulence suggesting a photograph of a complex of hurricanes. The spectators were still too far removed to perceive the actual motion, and could contemplate at leisure the awesome extent of the frozen detail.

Ivo felt as though he were peering into a cauldron of layered oils recently disturbed by heating. He had a vision of Brad’s basin perched on a furnace — and suppressed it, shocked at himself. Gray-blue bubbles a thousand miles across seemed to rise through the pooled, heavy gases, while slipstreams of turbulence trailed at the edges. In one place the recent passage of a bubble had left a beautifully defined cutaway section of gaseous strata, yellow layered on green on pink and black. In another, masses of whitish substance — hydrogen snow — were depressing the seeming ocean beneath, ballooning downward in a ponderous inversion. He was reminded of hot wax flowing into cool water.

No, there would be no landing in that.

Afra had retreated to the bowels of Joseph to supervise the maneuvering. They had cut inside Triton’s retrograde orbit and were overhauling the moon at a rate that was rapid in miles per hour but seemed slow because of the immensity of the scale. The thirty-one-thousand-mile disk of Neptune dwarfed everything, and its rainbow hues rendered its satellite drab.

Yet baby Triton had its share of intrigue. Only a tenth the diameter of Neptune, it was still one and a half times the span of Luna, and three and a half times Luna’s mass. Triton, mass considered, was the true giant of the moons of the Solar system, though there were others with a larger diameter. It expanded until its disk was the size of that of the mighty Neptune, then larger, and it was as though the two were sister planets. But where Neptune was stormy and bright, Triton was still and dark, from this angle. Its surface was tunelessly rigid.

“Rigid ridges,” Ivo murmured, half expecting Afra to say “What?” But she was not at hand.

There were craters: mighty broken rings of rock, shadowed in the middle, some pocked by smaller craters within. There were mountains: overlapping wrinkles across the surface. There was a brief atmosphere hazing the planetary outlines. And there were oceans.

“Must be some compound of oxygen and nitrogen,” Groton said. “Water is out of the question.” Intrigued, he had Ivo focus the macroscope on it and code in a spectroscopic analysis. “Atmosphere is mostly neon and nitrogen,” Groton said as he studied the result. “With a little oxygen and trace argon. The ocean is a liquefied compound of—”

Then they spied the object in space.

“Alert!” Groton snapped into the intercom. “We’re overhauling something, and I don’t mean Triton.”

“A ship?” Afra’s voice came back. “Schön?”

Ivo centered the small finder-telescope upon it. The thing leaped into focus: a fragment of matter about forty miles in diameter. “Too big,” he a

“I see it!” Afra cried. “We have it on Joseph’s screen now. We — that thing is in orbit!”

“Not around Neptune,” Groton protested. “It’s heading in toward the planet. Couldn’t—” He paused to take in his breath. “A moon of a moon? I don’t believe it.”

But it had to be believed. Due observation and analysis showed that it was a satellite of Triton, orbiting at about ten thousand miles distance with its broad side facing its primary. Its direction was “normal” — opposite to that of retrograde Triton. Its composition: H2O.

It was a solid mass of ice, so cold that its surface would be harder than steel — and at the edges it was translucent. The light of stars shone through it, separating into prismatic (though very faint) flashes of color, a constant peripheral display.

“What a beauty!” Afra exclaimed. “Whatever shall we name it?”

“Schön,” Groton said succinctly.

Ivo waited for Afra to object, but there was no reply from the intercom. Presumably she was waiting for him to object. The implications—

“This,” said Groton, “is a break. We won’t have to set up an orbit; one is waiting here for us.”

“But we have to land on Triton,” Ivo protested. “Schön couldn’t possibly provide the gravity we need. Schön-moon, I mean.” He had been made edgily aware of the unsatisfied curiosity about Schön-person that continued to nag at the others’ minds.

“No question there. But we can’t simply settle down with the macroscope on Joseph’s nose. We’re geared for space; a landing would crush us.”

“But if the ship stood up under ten G’s, and this is only a quarter G—”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. The ten G’s were steady and uniform; the drop would be another matter. The effect of it would be many times ten G.”

“Oh.” At least Groton wasn’t superior about his knowledge. “But if the ship can’t land, and we can’t stay in free-fall—”

“Planetary module. We’ll get down all right. It will actually be easier to shuttle back and forth, and we won’t have to risk the macroscope on land. Just so long as we don’t lose Joseph in the sky after we desert him. But with an object as big and bright as Schön to zero in on, we won’t have a problem. We’ll be able to spot that in the sky without a telescope, any time.”

The reasoning evidently appealed to Afra, because they were already phasing in on Schön. The block of ice seemed to drift closer, and the pits and bumps of its frigid surface magnified. The moonlet filled the screen, until it seemed as though they were coming in for a landing on a snowbound arctic plane — except that there was no discernible gravity.

Gently Afra closed with it, guiding the ship in by means of the tiny chemical stabilizer jets set in the sides. Ivo wondered what would happen when they came to rest, since the macroscope housing bulged well beyond the girth of Joseph — then remembered that with so little attraction there would be no particular stress. Actually, they were closer to synchronous orbit than to a “landing,” and it would be wise to tie the ship down.

At fifty miles an hour, relative velocity, they approached, coming up underneath the moonlet; then twenty, and down to five. Schön seemed near enough to touch and the sense of being underneath it had dissolved; it was now like drifting down in a blimp. Finally, at barely one mile an hour, they covered the last few feet and jolted into contact. They were down.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” Groton suggested as the two women came forward. “The recondensing water vapor will anchor the ship as it cools, and that won’t be long at all. We have no responsibilities, for the moment.”

They went out upon the surface, and it was like flying. It was a vacation from reality. The trace vapors generated by the leaking warmth of their suits buoyed them up, away from the cold surface, and they had to use their gas jets to control their motion. A single push, and Ivo sailed along at a ten-foot elevation, feeling both powerful and insecure. To have a physical landscape so close, yet not to be bound by it…