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"What went wrong?"
"I'm not sure. The Girls wanted a grazing orbit. Instead the moon dropped straight in. But so what?"
Skatholtz made no answer.
It was hard to think. The deep knowledge of giant fusion pulse-jets and Uranus's atmosphere and interstellar war hadn't been in his head until now. It let him understand the history tape, but when he tried to think with the new data it came out all jumbled. Damn Skatholtz anyway: Why should Corbell tell him anything? But the problem fascinated him. The RNA carried that fascination... and Corbell knew it... and couldn't bring himself to care.
"Let's see. Jupiter puts out more heat than it gets from the sun.
That's heat left over from when the planet fell in on itself out of the original dust cloud, four billion years ago-my years. So the planet could hold heat and leak it out for a long, long time. But the energies should be the same no matter what angle the moon fell at."
"This impact, would it cause fusion? Would Jupiter bum?"
"Jupiter's too small to burn like a star. Not enough mass, not enough pressure. But yeah, there'd be a hell of a lot of pressure in the shock wave ahead of Ganymede. And heat."
"Difficult to add up?"
"What?"
Skatholtz said, "The numbers of the heat made by a grazing fall should be simple. They knew the mass of Ganymede and the height of the fall. The Girls could add up just how much hotter Jupiter would become to warm the world just enough. But. The heat made by fusion is too complicated to add. The Girls made their numbers simple with the grazing orbit. Would the heat added be great?"
Corbell was nodding. "Look: The center of Jupiter is compressed hydrogen, really compressed, to where it acts like a metal. Ganymede drops straight in. The fusion goes on in the shock wave, and it adds, it builds up: The continuous fusion explosion makes the shock wave greater and greater. The heat has been leaking out ever since."
"I can't picture this, Corbell. Does it make sense to you?"
"Yeah. They lost a moon, and it killed them. Uranus was on its way into interplanetary space. The Girls couldn't bring it back in time. Their territory was too hot. They tried to take Boy territory."
Corbell became aware that the show had ended. New memories settling in his brain still dizzied him. But he felt like Jaybee Corbel. His personality seemed intact.
Skatholtz said, "Then the new moonlike object is Uranus. Some Girls must have survived. What can we do? We don't have spacecraft. We can't build them fast enough. Corbell, could we use your landing craft?"
"No fuel." Corbell laughed suddenly. "What would you do with a spacecraft? Ram Uranus? Or learn to fly it?"
"You're hiding something."
"I don't believe in your Girls. If they survived this long, they would have done something long ago." Uranus's arrival was too dramatically fortuitous. Such a coincidence had to be explained away; and Corbell had thought of an explanation. Well... try misdirection. "Could they have held out in the Himalayas? There's life in some of the high valleys. They'd be a long time building industry there."
"Your place names mean nothing." Skatholtz helped him stand up. "Can you point out this Himalayas place on a picture of the world? There was one downstairs."
Chapter EIGHT: DIAL AT RANDOM
I
The stairway was a long diagonal across the building's glass face. The ba
Skatholtz and Krayhayft spat Boyish at each other. Corbell caught some of the exchange: Skatholtz telling the tale as it had come from Corbell, Krayhayft checking it against "tales" memorized over several hundred years of life. There was something Italian in the way their hands jumped and their mouths spat syllables; but their faces were blank. Scared, Corbell thought. The "tales" matched too well.
Corbell tried to set his thoughts in order. He'd been given far too much to assimilate all at once.
Girls could have survived this long. Peerssa had found pockets of life in isolated places. But they would have acted! Unbelievable, that Corbell could have returned just in time for their million-year delayed vengeance.
He had to escape. It had been urgent. It was more urgent now. Could Boys slide down a ba
"They were fools," Krayhayft was saying. "They should have chosen several smaller moons to drop one by one."
"You're the fool," Corbell snapped, surprising himself. "It would have taken too long to bring Uranus back each time. It would have fouled up too many orbits. We're talking about a planet ten times as big as the world!"
"So big that the Girls lost track of its path," Krayhayft sneered.
Skatholtz was saying, "The dance of Jupiter's moons is very complex-"
While Corbell was saying, "You arrogant ball-less idiot-"
Casual, contemptuous, Krayhayft's backhand swipe caught him under the jaw and lifted him and flung him back on the steps. "The bottled memory has given you too much of the Girls' view," Krayhayft said.
"And whose fault is that?"
Skatholtz pulled Corbell to his feet. His elbow hurt furiously, but he thought he hadn't broken anything, and that was fiercely important now. Still, it was just as well he hadn't tried the ba
They waited for the leaders to descend. One was young, two or three Jupiter years old by Corbell's estimate. He burst into speech as if he wanted to get it over with: "Gording is still loose. He has not used a prilatsil. The thread he took was mine. He must have brushed against me and taken it from my belt. I didn't notice."
"Where is he?" Skatholtz demanded.
"He went north and east, until we lost his track. Toward the edge of Parhalding."
"It may be he doesn't know about the-" something Corbell couldn't catch. "Search the streets but not the buildings. That way he ca
The younger Boy ran, eager to be gone.
What was a tchiple? A bubble-car? How did the Boys know whether Gording had used a "phone booth"?
"You must retrace our path," Skatholtz told the other Boy. "Warn all you meet that a dikt is loose. Gording must not return to the Ditka Place." He wheeled suddenly and barked, "You are staring, Corbell. Do we fascinate you?"
"Very much. Couldn't Gording use a prilatsil without your knowing?"
"No." Skatholtz smiled. He pointed at the wall map. "That is a picture of the world, isn't it? An old one, made when ice still covered this land."
"Yes. Can I use your spear?"
That was sheer bravado; he wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that Skatholtz handed Corbell his spear. The younger Boys were gone, but Skatholtz and Krayhayft betrayed no obvious tension. Corbell pointed with the haft. "These are the Himalayas, mountains. There are valleys high up, where it is cooler. From orbit I saw green things growing there. Further north, here on the Sea of Okhotsk, energy is being used for industry. It may be only machines left ru
"It could be Girls. Would it be too hot for them? No, the pole is near enough. But you don't think so, Corbel."
"No. Why would they wait so long? How would they build spaceships?"
"We don't know how spaceships are built." Skatholtz looked through the broken picture window, toward where the new planet would appear at dark. "If Uranus is falling free, we can do nothing. If the Girls are guiding it... what will they do? Smash the world? Make it cold again and take back their land? You knew Girls, Corbell."