Ted’s office was lined with pseudwood, deep walnut. Nigel wondered once again why the man hadn’t simply gotten the real thing; it massed only fractionally more.
“I see you out there in the pit a lot,” Ted said conversationally.
Nigel smiled. The preliminary ritual: a touch of how’s- the-weather, and then to business. “I like to get round every day. Sometimes takes them awhile to log in new data.”
Sage nod. “Yeah. They got this habit of refining the radio maps till they’re like Picassos, when all the time guys like you are panting for the raw goods. Difference in styles, I guess.”
Nigel nodded. He had long since accepted the mismatch of interests. “You had something new …?” he prompted.
“Give a look.” Ted flipped on a meter-sized wall screen, tapped in a command. Isis swam into being. The image swelled, shifted to a narrower focus, and centered on a tiny glint of light. Numbers clicked by in a blur at the lower left hand. The glint moved across the pink face of the Isis highlands.
“A satellite.”
“Yeah. In a polar orbit, crossing a little to the east of the Eye’s center. Here’s a closeup.”
An irregular rock, pale gray, with a grid of black clots scattered across the face. “Curious,” Nigel said. “Those spots, they’re not an artifact of the opticals?”
“No, that’s what everybody thought at first—some bug in the program. But they’re there, all right.”
“Artificial.”
“Yeah. A converted asteroid, I guess. And there’s another one.”
“Oh?” The images shifted again. A second dot traced out an equatorial orbit as the screen time-stepped. Close-up: Another chunky gray rock, gridded. “Um. In sum, they can survey every square centimeter of Isis. The minimum needed to give full coverage.”
“Right. We’ve run those orbits backward for nearly a million years. They’ve been stable that long, but if they were put up before that, they’ve had to make course corrections to stay in place.” Ted leaned forward over his desk, fingers laced together. “Got any comments?”
“How is it this wasn’t in the dailies?”
“Look, the techs work faster without the whole crew looking over their shoulder.”
“Um.” Nigel stared at the rough surface of the thing. “Some signs of old cratering, very nearly worn away. Are those scratches there? Perhaps some shock fracturing from old impacts. But the black dots were clearly put in long after that. What’s the mag on those?”
“Here.” The screen filled with black and then backed off to show some surrounding bright, scuffed rock. “Can’t resolve anything. Maybe they’re holes.”
“Tried active probing?”
“No, not yet, but Alex—”
“Don’t.”
“Huh? Why not? Alex says he can probably get a good look-see by tonight. His interferometry can give us twenty, maybe thirty pixels in that patch. Then—”
“You’re daft to tap on someone’s door without knowing who’s inside.”
“Inside? Good grief, Nigel—”
“I urge caution. This is the first piece of technology we’ve seen in Isis space.”
“Sure, but—”
“Let’s study the surface first.”
“Dammit, there’s nothing left down there. The erosion’s so fast. And the crater-count expert, Fraser, says there was an era of heavy meteorite bombardment roughly a million years ago, too. That’s wiped the slate clean of anything that could’ve put up those satellites.”
“No signs of cities?”
“Not yet. There’s damn-all down there, far as the IR and deepscan people can see. That’s why seems to me we should look at what’s been left in orbit. These two satellites are probably the only old stuff around Then, when we understand that, maybe those EM creatures will make more sense, and we can start—”
Nigel looked intently at Ted. “The cratering data, I haven’t looked at that yet. What’s the whole history?”
Ted waved a hand, his mind on something else. “Fraser’s still doping out the crater size versus frequency curves. He has to recalc for the fast erosion, and allow for different epochs.”
“How many epochs of crater making were there?”
“Oh, Fraser says there was the initial period, just like our solar system, but that was ’way back. He’s got that probe data from the moons around the gas giant, and that gives over five billion years ago, when the initial cratering stopped. But then there was this recent epoch, you can see it in the highland terrain on Isis. A lot of junk falling, all over.”
“About a million years ago?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Seems damned strange. After the planets swept their orbits clean of debris, vacuuming up the initial junk from the formation of the whole Ra solar system, there should have been an end to cratering.”
“Well, look, Nigel …” Ted leaned back in his net chair and began toying idly with a pen. “Isis has been moving outward from Ra, forced out by tidal forces, so who knows how that’s going to change bombardment? I mean, this is a whole new ball game here and the old rules of thumb don’t apply.”
“Precisely,” Nigel said in a clipped, introspective way.
“Meaning what?”
