In the Ocean of Night Read Free Page A

some. Maybe, oh, a tenth of a gauss.”
    “Uh oh. I’d better tell them.”
    “Right.” His stomach clenched slightly.
Here we go,
he thought.
    The black coin grew; he slipped the module further away from the edge of the disk, for safety margin. A quick burst of the steering jets slowed him. He studied the irregular rim of Icarus through the small telescope, but the blazing white sun washed out any detail. He felt his heart thumping sluggishly in the closeness of his suit.
    A click, some static. “This is Dave Fowles at Houston, Nigel, patching through
Dragon.
Congratulations on your visual acquisition. We want to verify this magnetic field strength—can you transmit the automatic log?”
    “Roger,” Nigel said. Conversations with Houston lagged; the time delay was several seconds, even at the light-speed of radio waves. He flipped switches; there was a sharp beep. “Done.”
    The edge of the disk rushed at him. “I’m going around it, Len. Might lose you for a while.”
    “Okay.”
    He swept over the sharp twilight line and into full sunlight. Below was a burnt cinder of a world. Small bumps and shallow valleys threw low shadows and everywhere the rock was a brownish black. Its highly elliptical orbit had grilled Icarus as though on a spit, taking it yearly twice as close to the sun as Mercury.
    Nigel matched velocities with the tumbling rock and activated a series of automatic experiments. Panel lights winked and a low rhythm of activity sounded through the cramped cabin. Icarus turned slowly in the arc light-white sun, looking bleak and rough… and not at all like the bearer of death to millions of people.
    “Can you hear me, Nigel?” Len said.
    “Right.”
    “I’m out of your radio shadow now. What’s she look like?”
    “Stony, maybe some nickel-iron. No signs of snow or conglomerate structures.”
    “No wonder, it’s been baked for billions of years.” “Then where did the cometary tail come from? Why the Flare?”
    “An outcropping of ice got exposed, or maybe a vent opened to the surface—you know what they told us. Whatever the stuff was, maybe it’s all been evaporated by now. Been two years, that should be enough.”
    “Looks like it’s rotating—ummm, let me check— about every two hours.”
    “Uh huh,” Len said. “That cinches it.”
    “Anything less than solid rock couldn’t support that much centrifugal force, right?”
    “That’s what they say. Maybe Icarus is the nucleus of a used-up comet and maybe not—it’s rock, and that’s all we care about right now.”
    Nigel’s mouth tasted bitter; he drank some water, sloshing it between his teeth.
    “It’s knocking on one kilometer across, roughly spherical, not much surface detail,” he said slowly. “No clear cratering, but there are some shallow circular depressions. I don’t know, it could be that the cycle of heating and cooling as it passes near the sun is an effective erosion mechanism.”
    He said all this automatically, trying to ignore the slight depression he felt. Nigel had hoped Icarus would turn out to be an icy conglomerate instead of a rock, even though he knew the indirect evidence was heavily against it. Along with a few of the astrophysicists, he hoped the Flare Tail of 2017—a bright orange coma twenty million miles long that twisted and danced and lit the night sky of Earth for three months—had signaled the end of Icarus. No telescope, including the orbiting Skylab X tube, had been able to penetrate the cloud of dust and gas that billowed out and obscured the spot where the asteroid Icarus had been. One school of thought held that a rocky shell had been eroded by the eternal fine spray of particles from the sun—the solar wind—and a remaining core of ice had suddenly boiled away, making the Flare Tail. Thus, no core remained. But a majority of astronomers felt it unlikely that ice should be at the center of Icarus; probably, most of the rocky asteroid was left somewhere in the dust