Why would anyone voluntarily grope around the dark, frozen bowels of a dead moon 400 million miles from Earth, spending two years away from home, only for standard wages? If you’re not an extreme thrill seeker, I can’t tell you.
I’d hoped I’d never have to answer the question, but no bit shield or sociobypass can give complete privacy. People would just answer for me, in my absence from the net, and my foolishness would be confirmed democratically. That’s what happened while I was bound for Callisto on the Ozark. The WyrdNet was buzzing to know why an expectant father like me would bolt to some distant rock, just as I got the news about the baby.
I couldn’t tell them that another woman needed me on Callisto, so I recited a stock joke: I was going just to escape WyrdNet. The general reaction to that is surprise; people don’t know that you’re offline when you’re deep underground. A typical question: “How can you stand being unplugged so long, especially in a dangerous place?” If you weren’t plugged in, you were in a vacuum, alone and ignorant.
I also never tell people that the most beautiful sight in the Solar System is under Callisto base. The cave we call John’s Glen, formed by crystallized urine refuse, is a sight to behold. Sometimes you just can’t tell the truth.
Bart and I returned to Callisto to help our partner Colleen, and as soon as we touched down, we had another reason to revisit those caves.
“Guys, I’ve got bad news,” the base’s Ops Director Trev told us. He was waiting for us outside the airlock. Not a good sign. Colleen was missing, he told us, somewhere down in the caverns.
“Search and rescue,” Bart shouted. “I’ll assemble our gear.”
“Roger that,” I said.
“It’s been too long, Rick.” Trev gave us the particulars, and Bart and I both ran some quick mental calculations.
“She could possibly be alive,” Bart said.
“You’re joking. Listen, fellows, I know you came out all this way and are bored crazy from the trip, and I’m very sorry, but—”
“Bart’s right,” I said. “If she managed to reach one of the P&A caches, there’s a fair chance she’s okay.”
Bart flexed his knees and hit his fists together, his whole body chomping on a bit. I nodded, and he rushed off to assemble our gear. I lingered with Trev, to hear some details.
“No,” he said.
“Trev, it’s Colleen.” To me, just the mention of the name should have had an effect. In a field of mostly men, we tended to pamper the women, even though they were usually made of stronger stuff then we. It’s not that they needed special treatment; it’s that we needed to give it. And it wasn’t just Colleen. One of the engineers was missing too, some guy named Miller.
Trev’s face fell. He’d grown some gray around the temples, which made him tired-looking. “She wasn’t supposed to go down there again. None of you were. We’re officially closing down.”
I swallowed hard. Bart and I had just returned to Callisto for what we heard was a major discovery, only to learn on the way that the operation was dismantling. Colleen made a last-ditch effort to find her diamonds before the entire outpost was decommissioned.
Trev turned his back, looking at a chart on the wall. It was a map of the Devil’s Throat—a natural cavern system that only a handful of living people had visited. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We’re on a skeleton crew as it is.”
“Listen, Trev. This is eating me up. Every second we waste . . .” I couldn’t help but feel that Colleen’s timing was no accident. She knew we were nearing the Jupiter system when she entered the Throat yesterday. It would be like her to milk the eleventh hour preparing for us.
Trev nodded his head in sympathy, but persisted. “There’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t go down there. She said that if she ever got lost in the caverns, no one should come after her.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course she knows we’d rescue her.”
“It sounded more like a warning than anything noble. My answer is no.”
My head grew hot. “Come on, Trev!” I stepped near, almost getting in his face. He stepped back. “I don’t know what went wrong, but I swear, I’m going to find out.”
Trev held up a hand to stop me and rubbed his eyes with his fingers across the bridge of his nose. He shook his head. But then he slowly came closer, leaning to my ear so as not to be recorded by the ubiquitous WyrdNet.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Go.”
“Roger that!” I whispered back.
Bart had his metallic silver-skinned pressure suit, a Reynolds, and I had my mustard-yellow-and-black Armstrong. Colleen’s was designer metallic green and magenta, a gift from a manufacturer I was under contract not to name. We helped each other put on the equipment, pants first, tops, then air cyclers, power packs, and spare kits. Then boots, gloves, and finally helmets. Even Bart’s narrow skull became spherical when he put his helmet on, and with his deep acne scars, he looked like the pocked moon we were on.
We checked each other’s systems. I’ve never been anywhere where the need for redundant equipment was as great as the caverns of Callisto. On this trip, Bart was my ultimate redundancy. It felt strange without our third. Colleen was the best damn cavernaut that ever was.
We checked our com channels and synchronized slew-up algorithms. By tradition, we exchanged a silent thumbs-up, the standard signal for dead radio situations. Then a “let’s roll” with wheeling fists.
The airlock filled with cold water melted from a frozen subsurface lake. When it was full, the hatch on the top opened, and Bart started up the short ladder. The liquid airlock served to rinse dust from the suits upon return and to reveal any air leaks in our suits. If there’s a leak, you’ll see bubbles. I followed Bart over the top of the airlock and down the outer ramp. Our suits steamed as they quickly dried.
I threw the switch on a post by the ramp, and the lights came on. There was a brief flicker that most would not have noticed, but Bart and I exchanged looks. Probably corrosion in the switch from the occasional vapor vented from the bowels of this moon. If this was not our last trip down, we’d have replaced the switch immediately.
The Devil’s Throat was now hit by a floodlight—a doctor’s light peering into a patient’s mouth. The throat image was pretty obvious when the cavern was discovered, and the inevitable names given by the exploration team stuck. We were operating inside a dangerous, if not malevolent, body.
Off the narrow ramp and into the Devil’s Throat, we passed a hanging outcropping called the Epiglottis. This was not a true stalactite, but we called it that. We were cavernauts, not geologists. Our job was to get the geologists into the cave, install their gear, and get them out safely. We left the science to them.
“Pressure check,” Bart said over the radio. “I’m at point three one atmospheres and change.”
“Point two niner niner,” I said, miffed that Bart preempted my lead. This was his way of asserting himself. It didn’t matter, really; our search and recovery plan was a good one, and Bart knew that a little breach of protocol was okay once in a while. Bart, Colleen and I were well oiled, and Bart knew just how far he could get under my skin without endangering us. My tendency was to let him, and when I thought about it, I had probably been trying to show Colleen that I was taking the higher ground.
It’s a little complicated, but while I was officially the Team Lead, I deferred to Colleen as the expert and almost always yielded procedural decisions to her. Bart knew this and respected me for it.
“Okay, Chief,” he said. Sensing tension, he’d backed off.
We rounded the Epiglottis, leaving behind the last traces of the holographic, wireless WyrdNet, that “web of synchronicity and reciprocity” named from some Norse weaving myth. Here was blessed solitude, quiet like the muting of a sound system that had blared static at full volume. No more inquiries for status, subtle warnings, transaction updates, confirmations of messages blocked, and other electronic leeches. And no more belated messages from my pregnant Sharron.
A personal theory of mine. Something happened to people when virtual computers were invented. Other than a terminus and the occasional plexer, they had no hardware at all. It became easier for people to accept a system as part of themselves when it was not intrusive. This caused a shift in focus away from the physical body. People became more interested in the spirit, or the mind, or the community. Things like tanning salons and fad diets were replaced by philanthropy on AngelWeb, and infoleaks from Mensanet. Throughput addiction became an acceptable lifestyle. You were old-fashioned if you didn’t flash on a holoweb, and you were antisocial if you unplugged.
Something about the startling information silence down here made me feel we might hear Colleen at any moment, calling for help. She wasn’t dead, not yet. I knew I wasn’t in denial, but that’s the rub, isn’t it?
From the Epiglottis, we had installed a fixed line that branched through the most heavily traveled passages. Originally it was wired for lights, but the acidity of the occasional venting caused the system to fail more often than it was worth. A complicated pattern of weak tides from Jupiter and the other large moons kept some little fires burning at Callisto’s core.
Global positioning and NORAN were also useless down there. Suit telemetry worked, at close range. Everything has to be carried, and everything can fail. During the worst incident, each of us had a light fail at nearly the same time. We had spare lights, but Colleen invented a rule on the spot: Always stay arm’s length from the line. That way you could find it in the dark and follow it out. We also started using chemical Glo-Boyz.
The lights had failed due to corrosion, in particular because the rubber seals were not durable. They were artificial rubber, made on Mars from human fingernails and body oils extracted from laundry. We switched to real rubber, even though it was more expensive.
I ran my glove along the fixed line, and it vibrated up my arm. All the lines were coded. They were made of braided nanotubes, coated with some kind of highly reflective plastic. This coating was ribbed so that if you rubbed it the wrong way, it vibrated in your hand. If you ran your hand along it in the direction of the cavern exit, it did not stick like that. Every ten meters there were waffle ridges on the line, alternating from smooth to rough. Rough sections every hundred meters and finer ridges every ten marked the distance. In total darkness, you could tell where you were and stumble your way out.
There was no signal from Colleen or Miller. Any telemetry in the line would register on my console, so clearly they were not on the main line.
My shadow from Bart’s light bobbed on the brown rock wall that curved away to the right. The line branched at Left Lung, and we headed down Line 1 at a pretty good clip. The other path was a shortcut to a lift we’d made, but it was for lowering equipment, not people. The last glow from the lamp above the Epiglottis vanished, so that the cavern was sculpted only by our lights. The fissure slanted steeply left, but you could lean a hand on the smooth wall and walk more or less upright.
We were both silent. Colleen would sometimes hum old show tunes or talk her batteries to death. Callisto was her rebound relationship. Her marriage had torn her up—I know, because I trained with her in the underwater caves of Florida during that time—and she needed something impossibly difficult to get her mind off her ex. She found it here.
“Where do you think she is?” Bart said.
“Probably in the Bowels.”
We approached the first cache of air with hope. Though we were getting no line or radio telemetry, there was a chance she was there. The bottles appeared in our lights, but there was no one there. The cache was untouched, reducing the chances that Colleen and Miller were alive.
We jumped from Line 1 to Line 2, trying not to think about her. This was a shortcut to the Bowels, which we also called Devil’s Anus to make the geologists think it was really dangerous. We didn’t want to have to rescue them.
I began the climb over the Gallstone. Bart waited until I was safe on top. It wouldn’t do if I fell on top of him; one accident needn’t become two. There wasn’t room on top for both of us, so I continued under Pinched Nerve.
There were many such tight spots, but this one had a nasty dip in the middle of it, so you really had to work it. Those of us who were experienced had techniques. Mine was to make sure I entered the dip with my right elbow. Then I’d swivel my right hip, roll halfway in, scuffle my right leg through, and then roll back to my original attitude. If I was carrying an extra air bottle, I’d strap it on my left side so it wouldn’t get in the way. All the work was with the right side; the left stayed limp.
Previously, two men had died here, Ron and Kanuit. Ron got stuck, and Kanuit was trapped behind him.
“I’m through.”
“Okay,” said Bart. “I’m in.”
While I waited, I recorded an audio log entry on our progress. Bart caught up and we drifted in microgravity down Gallstone on a rope ladder. When I got to the bottom, I held the ladder for Bart.
“Hey, look at that!” he said, aiming his wrist light at the ground.
A glint caught my eye, and there sat an object, covered with ice, but clearly artificial. About the size and shape of a bread loaf. I picked it up.
“Termite.”
A termite was a boring robot, made to cut through soil and ice and send back telemetry. Useful to get around hard objects that were impractical to bore through. They were named termites because actual termites had discovered the largest diamond mines on Earth.
“Looks like this one was digging for diamonds and found water.” Bart took it from me to have a closer look. “Doesn’t look damaged, but it’s out of power. It must have bored all the way through the lake, and then through the bottom.”
It seemed to me too much a coincidence that it was so close to the trail, until I recalled Colleen’s fascination with diamonds. Her helmet faceplate was a slenter of some kind, and her corneas had diamond coatings. I also knew her pain in giving up the rock on her ring finger. I wouldn’t put it past her to place this termite where we would find it, maybe as a sign that she had found what she was looking for.
We continued on the line. Everything looked different from the reverse angle. The shadows made the formations look completely different. In effect, Colleen and Bart and I had memorized the tunnels twice, once as they appeared going down, and once as they appeared going out.
A distant booming sound froze us in our tracks. We felt it through our boots. Though this moon wasn’t quite geologically dead, it was comatose. There weren’t quakes.
“That felt like an explosion.”
I shook my head, exaggerating the motion as one does to be understood in an environment suit. “No one should be blasting while we’re down here.”
“It felt like it came from above.”
“Impossible.”
“I should think.”
There was no more sound or vibration, so we continued on. This was the Esophagus, and it was by far the easiest traverse at this depth. Three thousand meters below the Alchemetrix water and oxygen extractor, several thousand from the geo station, the Esophagus was wide and flat, a stroll through a black gullet of a canyon. Alchemetrix sat on an underground layer of ice, typical of this moon. Unlike most moons out here, Callisto was not well differentiated into geologic layers. It was a frozen stew.
“What say we switch places?”
“No, thanks.” I wondered why Bart had asked. Was he bucking for the lead?
“Okay, Chief. Just thought you might be getting tired.” That rankled me, partly because of the way he said it, but mostly because he said it.
The Esophagus narrowed to a V. We straddled it for about fifty meters, until it ended in a sharply pocked wall. It’s to climb for.
“Still want to go first?” He really sounded like he wanted to lead this time.
I hooked my right arm around the line and found a foothold. “Yes,” I said, not wanting to give up the lead, if only because he kept mentioning it.
I stepped up and found handholds. I’d been on Earth for a while and had built my muscles back up. Callisto’s gravity was as feeble as a baby tugging on your finger.
A baby. For a moment, my thoughts were again whisked away to Sharron. Her baby was due any day, and it was hard to forget that, even under the circumstances. As I lifted my foot, my arm whacked against one of my spare air bottles, and my wrist computer went out.
“Uh-oh.”
“Console?”
“Yeah. The LED, at least.”
There was no way to repair the console down here so I switched to my spare, a semi-integrated computer in my left chest pocket. I clipped it to a ring and turned it on. It blinked, and a shaking-hands icon verified that it had connected to my internal computer via radio. I left the broken console in place—I’ve seen them get whacked a second time and come back to life.
Bart bent backward to look up at me. “Want to call the mission?” Was that a sneer in his voice?
“No.”
“Protocol?” asked Bart. Was he challenging me to breach Colleen’s rules? I got the feeling that Bart was somehow pitting me against her. Without her there, would I follow her protocol or assert my own judgment?
“We lose one more vital, we abort. Or did you have a better idea?”
“No, no. Of course not.” So Bart was not about to deny her, either. Either of us bucking protocol would have implicitly excluded her as part of the team. We were still a team of three; neither of us had given up on her yet.
We scooted on our butts about ten meters to Fatboy’s Lap. Bart cleared his throat and all but insisted on taking the lead. This was about the third time he’d asked to go first, so there had to be a pretty good reason for it. Colleen had always gone along with me being in charge, but now I gathered that Bart had been jealous.
Everyone loved Colleen. Dark auburn hair, widely set eyes that scrunched when she smiled, handsome square chin, strong body proportioned for hard work. She had a hit-and-run friendliness that made you feel briefly cared for, and then you’d have to work hard to get her to notice you were even alive. Like me, Bart got past that, into her inner sanctum. What did he have to prove now?
“What is this with you taking the lead?” I said.
“I’m thinking to check the Sinuses, instead of the Bowels.”
“Is there something about all this that you’re not telling me?”
“You know, Chief, there just might be.”
With that tart remark, I wasn’t about to let him go in front. If he had something to say, he’d damn well better say it. He didn’t, so I led on, striking up a harmless conversation.
“What did you think of The Men and the Mirror ?” I said.
“Is that a movie?”
“No, the book we read on the Ozark.” The Ozark was originally named after some place in the Midwest, but the joke was that the Ozark was an ark from Oz, carrying assorted munchkins, witches, flying monkeys, and tin men like us.
“Was that on textnet?”
“No,” I said. “Dead tree. Your initials were in the back of it.” Paper books will always be on spaceships. There’s nothing worse than amp rationing, and no entertainment for days on end. By tradition, we signed the books we read, like carving our initials in a real tree.
“The Men and the Mirror ? I never read it. That was probably Bill McKinney. He reads a lot and has my initials. What was it about?”
“Nineteen-thirties science-fiction stories by some guy named Rocklynne. Dated, but wild ideas. This space detective chases a brilliant criminal to a new moon or something in each story. They invariably get trapped in some landscape feature or alien artifact. There’s no way out, and they’ll both die, unless they work together.”
“I suppose they get out together, and then the criminal escapes until the next episode.”
“Of course,” I said.
“What made you think of that now?”
“The caves, I guess.”
“Right,” said Bart. “Well, since I’m following you, I must be the good guy.”
So much for conversation. Bart was being competitive, and this was no time for that.
I hesitated. For a breath or two I could have sworn I smelled something funny. “Like licking an envelope,” I told Bart.
“I’ve never licked an envelope.”
“Wedding invitations,” I explained, cringing. We never did officially tie the knot.
“Does it taste like glue?”
“I guess so. Any glue in these suits?”
“Maybe in the lamination.”
The smell did not return, so we marched on, my thoughts wandering to the wedding. Sharron had wanted a picture-perfect event, and I went along with it. Imagine seeing your veiled bride approaching you at the altar during rehearsal—the fifth rehearsal—and you’re growing suspicious with her every step. Something is wrong. Your best man leans over and whispers, “She hired a Hollywood bride.” The veil is lifted at the proper moment, and you see your fiancé’s “stunt double.”
A Hollywood bride is a stand-in, just for show. Brides hire them when they are insecure with their looks or want a trophy version of themselves to appear in the wedding photos. I loved Sharron, but her neurosis got me spooked, and I called a halt to the wedding. We were already shacked up, so I didn’t have anything to lose.
We slid down Nixon’s Nose. The left line went up some vertical pipes called the Sinuses that led straight up to the Throat. The line to the right led to the labyrinth we called the Bowels. We reached the entrance to the Bowels and paused by the broad opening for a map check. We didn’t need a map under normal circumstances, but when your telemetric breadcrumbs are malfing, it could save your life.
“We follow the main into the Bowels. We come back through Cats and Dogs, swinging by the Sinus, in case they tried to get out that way.”
I expected an argument, but he said, “Roger that.”
Bart took the oxygen sensor from his side pocket. “I’m going to check you for leaks.” He was thinking of the glue I’d smelled. It was possible that some contaminant was leaking into the rebreather. He ran the probe carefully around the Opack and my seals—neck, wrists, boots, hoses. Then a once-over of the whole suit. I didn’t have a fartometer, or we’d have used that. (You break a vial of noxious gas inside your suit, and the coating on the outside of the pressure suit turns blue at the site of any leaks. The fartometer was based on those UV indicator creams that turn your skin blue when it starts to sunburn.)
“All good.”
We checked the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs were coded magnetic buttons built onto the main lines or snapped onto secondary lines. They worked independently of the active telemetry. When you passed near them, your console recorded your position, and the crumbs recorded your passage. It wasn’t a very good system, but it was the best one that would work. The breadcrumbs didn’t need power—they were just what they sounded like—markers with unique signatures. The consoles did all the work, and they were easier to maintain. Unless they were down, like mine.
The breadcrumbs showed that Colleen and Miller, the engineer, had gone down this way yesterday, but had not come up.
We spooled out to a precipice for a look. Our lights shone across toward the cliff, revealing only the charcoal-shaded wall beyond. Sometimes if you covered your lights you could see a faint orange glow from down below. It always faded a few seconds after the lights were doused. A geologist thought they came from fluorescing diamonds. We doused, looking for any lights giving away someone’s position. We never turn lights off. The more times you switch them on and off, the more likely the switch is to fail and stay off forever. We saw no lights.
We returned to the main line, Bart winding his jump line onto the spool by hand. Since the early days of space flight, there had been many attempts to make self-winding tethers. They all jam up pretty much every time.
We continued toward the enormous room known as Cats and Dogs. This mess of a boulder field just didn’t lend itself to the body motif. So “Cats and Dogs.” Hundreds of roughly rectangular boulders stood scattered on the floor like miniature skyscrapers that had been knocked over by Godzilla. The main ran through the middle, to an edge, and then over a scramble to the base of the Sinuses.
A beep and a flash of my readout stopped my feet and jump-started my heart. “Telemetry?” All I got was the alert, not the data.
“I read it!” Bart said. “It’s a suit transponder!”
“Colleen?”
“Can’t tell. It’s dropping packets. But it’s moving! Colleen, is that you?”
No answer.
“I’ve got a fix.” Bart moved around me.
“Lead the way,” I said, though he had already started. If Bart was that pegged about it, maybe the best thing was to give him some slack.
He raked his primary light around and checked the reflective lines that stretched and sagged into the gloom. He led us past the jumble of Cats and Dogs and onto a pitted area that tilted steeply to the right. As I followed, I could see him checking his heads-up display. “She’s making a beeline for the air cache at Anklebone.”
“Are you sure it’s her?”
“No, but whoever it is, is sucking CO2.”
“I see her!” I cried, shining my light across a boulder field. “Near the cache!”
In microgravity, we could bound over this rock pile, but if you get overconfident, you can get stuck or wreck your equipment. We saw a suited figure moving erratically at the edge of our lights.
“Hurry—she needs help!”
We watched in horror as the figure began pulling at her gloves, as if to take them off. Quickly giving that up, she fell to her knees and struggled with her helmet release.
“Don’t do that!” we both shouted into our helmet mikes.
Forfeiting caution, Bart jumped onto a boulder and then another. I followed, leaping from rock to rock, trying to watch our comrade at the same time. Our lights bounced about madly. Surely Colleen would see them and sit calmly until we caught up.
Instead she yanked the collar release all the way left and pulled the helmet off. She fell behind a rock. Bart was hopping and swearing, and I could not keep up.
Bart stooped over. “It’s not her,” he said. “It’s Miller.”
I rounded the boulder to see Miller twitch and then stop, his helmet lying on the ground next to him.
I had a flashback to an image from my cave diving with Colleen. There were a couple of curious accidents where some guys, with plenty of air, had gotten lost and panicked, probably when their lights gave out. They’d swum into some muddy corner and torn off all their scuba gear, as if it was the equipment that was killing them. One of the victims was nearly naked.
“He’s dead,” Bart said, checking the engineer’s console.
“Look, his light is still working. All he had to do was make it to the cache—it’s right over there.”
“He never trained like we did. Once he ran out of air, he lost it.”
Leaving Miller, we checked the cache. Untouched. My heart was sinking deeper into this place, and for the first time, Callisto felt wretched to me. This was the second untouched air cache. The chances of Colleen being alive were decreasing.
“Miller wouldn’t go anywhere without Colleen,” I said. “Something happened to her, and he left her to get help.”
“Let’s find her. Mind if I lead?”
“Be my guest,” I said. At the moment, his hope was greater than mine.
He took off, not in the direction Miller had come from, but along a waffled wall called Six Pack.
“Bart, don’t you think it’s time to clear the air?”
“Okay,” he said. “You first. Have you ever slept with her?”
“Of course not!”
“I know, you’re a happily married man,” he said, knowing full well I wasn’t technically married. “But admit it, you did have a little thing going.”
Son of a bitch. Why the hell was he distracting us? The best thing to do was to roll with it. “I admit,” I said, “that we flirted some. The truth is, I think she saw me as safe, because I wasn’t chasing her.”
“You never did it.”
“Certainly not. What about you? On Mars, maybe?”
“I wish.”
“Oh, really?”
“Never,” he said. “At least I’m not so secretive about it. Hell, I even joined a sculpture club, just to get close to her. That was Philadelphia, not Mars. Next to caving, sculpting is the most consuming thing she does.”
“And here I thought you had a fling with her.”
We laughed like net spuds drinking fruit beer and lamenting a girl neither had won. It drew us closer, except that with heavy suits, in the dark, and in a vacuum, we were really very far apart.
Bart stopped. He was shining his plasma onto the far wall, over the boulder field. “I thought I saw something shiny,” he said, sweeping the light in a switchback pattern. The high wall leered over us with a prow like the nose of an Easter Island stone god.
“Shiny like what?” I was thinking diamonds.
Theory has it that the core of Jupiter is a moon-sized diamond, and that an ancient meteor smashed some fragments loose. A diamond ring formed around Jupiter, the shards colliding and breaking each other up. In an atmosphere, the surfaces of diamonds bond with gas molecules, capping them off. But in a vacuum, the surfaces had nothing to bond to, except when they bumped into each other. Slowly turning diamond shards recrystallized, bit by bit, until they looked like flat, spiraling snowflakes the size of dinner plates. Or so say the computers.
Something changed, and the diamond necklace unclasped, sliding to the outer moons. Great barbed diamonds spun like whirlpools, snowing onto Callisto, to be there entombed for millions of years. The whole theory could be proven by finding diamonds that showed traces of the snowflake structure. Then we’d learn about Jupiter’s inner structure. Callisto would be the easiest place to find them, since its minerals have not settled.
I wrote a poem about it. The Great Red Spot was a bleeding wound where Jupiter’s treasure was cut from his heart. Callisto stole Jupiter’s diamond necklace before he could reclaim it. She swallowed it, then spurned the old boy, turning her back forever. That’s why her orbit is locked—to avoid his gaze.
Romance aside, these theoretical diamonds would be hot items. Nanomite and Alchemetrix long ago perfected the technique of manufacturing diamond and nanotube structures, using gas solvents to intercalate the molecular planes into any shape. Colleen called such diamonds slenters, after some old term for fake jewels made from Coke bottles. But on paper, the space elevator fell like the Tower of Babel. The carbon nanotubes couldn’t be woven strong enough.
Enter Schwarzites, nanostructures with negatively curved surfaces. Where nanotubes made of carbon-60 were built of hexagons, the theoretical Schwarzites could also have some heptagons and pentagons interlinked. These made the structures much stronger, breaking up the symmetry that invited clean cleavage. It also caused the surfaces to curve themselves into pretty little beads. Among the applications of such knotted lattices were molecular chain links, woven together with traditional nanotubes. This type of “diamond necklace” could loop from the Earth to a space station, forming a viable space elevator.
No one could make Schwarzites, but they could occur naturally, possibly as a result of the Jupiter diamond robbery, with a fair chance that some were stashed on Callisto. That’s what Colleen was after.
I was all for it, but someone else had to figure out how to make it all work. My role was to find the raw materials and bring them home without too many people getting killed.
“There it is!” Bart said. He was holding his beam fixed on the nearer wall.
I added my light to his. From a crack in the ceiling, a trickle of something dark and shiny broadened, following paths of least resistance, all leading down. On a vertical slab was the area Bart focused on—a slick of liquid, some evaporating off, some refreezing, and some tiptoeing through those sleeping cats and lazy dogs.
“Water,” said Bart. “The water and oxygen plant is not far from here. This is melt-off.”
“It’s too cold to melt.” Then a thought struck me. “Colleen said that if anything happened to her, no one should come after her. I thought she was just looking out for us, but what if there was some other reason for the warning?”
Bart flailed his arm at a rock, thought better of it, and slapped his thigh instead. “Great!” he said. “Just great. A warning like that, and you don’t even think to tell me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Damn it!” He hit his leg again and turned to face me. His helmet light shone directly in my eyes so it hurt. “You should have told me! We’re in serious trouble, Chief.”
He looked around again, shining his light first down the tunnel, then up at the dripping wall again. “Come on!” he said, taking off down the tunnel to the Bowels.
