Just Add Water
Aug. 1st, 2004 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMonths went by before anyone noticed, because ocean shipping avoided the Splash Zones. The shaped chunks of Moon rock weren't quite meteors; they'd been dropped from a dead stop at 100 kilometers, by the rotating orbital cables for which they served as counterweights. Still, that's a long way to fall, and you don't want to be anywhere near when one comes down.
When boats started to disappear, and the alvins sent back disturbing pictures from the sea floor, I paid a visit to the Thanh and Company ballast mine in western Oceanus Procellarum. One of their rocks was doubtless at the other end of the cable that flung my moonliner on its way.
It was all automated: boulders robotically strip-mined, sandblasted into crude entry vehicles and loaded onto the electromagnetic mass driver that shot them toward Earth, untouched by human hands. There was a staff of twelve in a spartan pressure vessel.
I bothered everybody and waved the photos and sonar maps in their faces. This is the kind of thing you can't do on the phone; they might not put the right guy on the line. Finally, the assistant maintenance tech for the mine bots started talking.
"Didn't want to rock the boat," he said. "Come outside and I'll show you."
In cross-section it looked tubular, full of blobs and veins. It was sliced in two, the glassy, frozen surface gleaming in the soft trench lighting. There were more on the other wall of the trench; those had shriveled in the lunar sunlight, and left hollows in the rock in inverse image. There was a suggestion of branching limbs, bulbous protrusions, antennae.
The resulting tunnels were ten to twenty meters wide.
"The bots uncovered these within the past... half a year or so," I said.
"Yes."
"How big do they get?"
"Who knows?"
They were dead, that was clear. Sliced into pieces. But inside them... frozen eggs?
"How old are these rocks?"
"Not so old. 1.3... 1.4 billion years."
"Volcanic flows, right?... The Moon would already have been airless and dead."
He nodded. "Who knows how they got here? Somebody put them here? Damned if I can figure it out."
Silently, we took the service elevator back to our crawler and climbed in, as robots drove silently by. I raised my eyes to Earth, a crescent now, low in the black sky. What were we in for?
When boats started to disappear, and the alvins sent back disturbing pictures from the sea floor, I paid a visit to the Thanh and Company ballast mine in western Oceanus Procellarum. One of their rocks was doubtless at the other end of the cable that flung my moonliner on its way.
It was all automated: boulders robotically strip-mined, sandblasted into crude entry vehicles and loaded onto the electromagnetic mass driver that shot them toward Earth, untouched by human hands. There was a staff of twelve in a spartan pressure vessel.
I bothered everybody and waved the photos and sonar maps in their faces. This is the kind of thing you can't do on the phone; they might not put the right guy on the line. Finally, the assistant maintenance tech for the mine bots started talking.
"Didn't want to rock the boat," he said. "Come outside and I'll show you."
In cross-section it looked tubular, full of blobs and veins. It was sliced in two, the glassy, frozen surface gleaming in the soft trench lighting. There were more on the other wall of the trench; those had shriveled in the lunar sunlight, and left hollows in the rock in inverse image. There was a suggestion of branching limbs, bulbous protrusions, antennae.
The resulting tunnels were ten to twenty meters wide.
"The bots uncovered these within the past... half a year or so," I said.
"Yes."
"How big do they get?"
"Who knows?"
They were dead, that was clear. Sliced into pieces. But inside them... frozen eggs?
"How old are these rocks?"
"Not so old. 1.3... 1.4 billion years."
"Volcanic flows, right?... The Moon would already have been airless and dead."
He nodded. "Who knows how they got here? Somebody put them here? Damned if I can figure it out."
Silently, we took the service elevator back to our crawler and climbed in, as robots drove silently by. I raised my eyes to Earth, a crescent now, low in the black sky. What were we in for?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-01 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-02 05:16 am (UTC)For some reason I end up writing a lot about Clarke on this journal. He's not my most favorite science-fiction writer, by any means, but he seems to get me to write essays.
Rock Eggs
Date: 2004-08-02 05:09 pm (UTC)