“Get’em, boy-o.”
The textured surface grew. He flew toward the dawn line and the small pocks and angles became clearer. Steering rockets murmured at his back. He concentrated on the distance and relative velocities, and upon speeding up the automatic cameras, until he was hovering directly above the vent. He rotated the module to gain a better view and inched closer.
“It’s deeper than I thought. I can see fifty meters in and the mouth is quite wide.”
“Sounds encouraging,” Dave said.
Without waiting for further word, he took the module down to the top of the vent. Blasted stone rose toward him, brown discolored into black where minute traces of gas had been baked away.
His headphones sputtered and crackled. “I’m losing your telemetry,” Len’s voice came.
Nigel brought the module to a dead stop. “Look, Len, I can’t go further in without the rock screening you out.”
“We can’t break contact.”
“Well—”
“Maybe I should move in.”
“No, stay outside the dust. Move sunward and behind me—there’ll still be a cone of good reception.”
“Okay, I’m off.”
“Listen, you guys,” Dave said, “if you’re having trouble with this maybe we should just for—” Nigel switched him off. Minutes were being eaten away.
He rotated the module to get a full set of photographs.
Icarus was a bumpy, round hill that sloped away wherever he looked. Burnished mounds and clefts made a miniature geography, seeming larger than they were as the eye tried to fit them into a familiar perspective. He glanced at the clock. It had been long enough; he flipped a switch and the burr of static returned.
“How’s it going, Len?” he said.
“Hey, having transmission trouble? I lost you there for a minute.”
“Had some thinking to do.”
“Oh. Dave says they’re having second thoughts back there.”
“I guessed as much. But then, they’re not here, are they?”
Len chuckled. “I guess not.”
“How far around are you? Ready for me to go in?” “Almost. Take a few more minutes. What’s it like down there?”
“Pretty bleak. I wonder why Icarus is so close to spherical? I expected something jagged.”
“Can’t be gravitational forces.”
“No, there’s not enough to hold down even gravel— everything is bald, there’s no debris around at all.”
“Maybe solar erosion has rounded the whole asteroid off.”
“I’m going in,” Nigel said abruptly.
“Okay, I guess I can track you from here.”
The rotation of Icarus had brought the left wall closer. He nudged the craft back to center, remembering the first time he had learned in some forgotten science text that the Earth rotated. For weeks he had been convinced that whenever he fell down, it was because the Earth had moved beneath him without his noticing. He had thought it a wonderful fact, that everyone was able to stand up when the Earth was obviously trying to knock them down.
He smiled and took the craft in.
Jaws of stone yawned around him. Random fragments of something like mica glinted from the seared rocks. Nigel stopped about halfway down and tilted his spotlights up to see the underhang of a shelf; it was rough, brownish. He glided toward the vent wall and extended a waldoe claw. Its teeth bit neatly with a dull snap and brought back a few pounds of desiccated rubble. Len called; Nigel answered with monosyllables. He nudged the module downward again, moving carefully in the shadowed silence. He used a carrier pouch on the craft’s skin to store the sample, and added more clawfuls of rock to other pouches.
He was nearly to the bottom before he noticed it.
The pitted floor was a jumble of rocks that rose from pools of ink. Nigel could not make out detail; he turned his spotlights downward.
A deep crack ran down the center of the rough floor. It was perhaps five meters wide and utterly black.
At irregular intervals things protruded from the crack, angular things that were charred and blunted. Some gave sparkling reflections, as though partially fused and melted.
Nigel glided closer.
One of the objects was a long convoluted band of a coppery metal that described an intricate, folded weave of spirals.
He sat in the stillness and looked at it. Time passed. Ten meters away a crumpled form that had been square was jammed in the crack, as though it had been partly forced out by a great wind. There were others; he photographed them.
Len had been calling for some time.
When he was through Nigel pressed a button to transmit and said, “We’re going to have to recalculate, Len. Icarus isn’t a lump of ice or a rock or anything else. I think”—he paused, still not quite believing it—“it has to be a ship.”
