“The new orbit?” asked Nkuhlu. “You can’t mean that the pieces stayed in a group, on an identical course.”
Beynac’s hand chopped air. “No, no, of course not. However, the tracks must have been closely similar. And off in the Oort Cloud—yes, the comets there are many, but how far apart, in that huge volume! The pieces would seldom be much perturbed, the massive one least. Gradually, true, their cluster would disintegrate. Doubtless a comet changed the orbit of this piece drastically. Now its perihelion is scarcely more than it was in the beginning.
“That cannot have happened very long ago, a few millions of years perhaps, because the present orbit is unstable. The encounter was most likely near the former perihelion. Closest to the sun, the density of comets is a bit higher. This suggests the major body is not at its most distant from us. We may be able to compute backward through time and get an idea of where to search for it—”
Beynac lifted his palms and threw back his head. “But plenty of lecture!” he laughed. “My academic habits took me over. I will find you educational practical experience, my friend.”
That may have been among the factors which, weeks later, joined to destroy him. Unlike most ofthe others, it was not random. Shorthanded, under-equipped, his research needed whatever help he could marshal. He and Ilitu were not able to handle the drilling, digging, and collecting that it demanded. Their time in the field went mainly to general exploration, search for promising sites. In their laboratory aboard Sacajawea, they prepared samples for examination, studied them, built piecemeal a knowledge of the asteroid and its story. Once in a while they exercised in the centrifuge, washed, ate, or slept.
Doctrine required that a man who could singly bring the vessel home be always shipside. This meant either Rydberg or Kainp. Actually, it oftenest meant both, the former working to heighten the skill of the latter. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were free.
The arrangement had been planned at the outset. Beynac welcomed such an opportunity for his son, now when Fireball’s leaders were beginning to see what advantages might lie in having a few Lunarian pilots. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were experienced rock-jacks. They had acquitted themselves well in operations on stony bodies and treacherous comet ice.
They were technicians, not scientists or engineers. But probably no one could have foreseen the danger. Our sole sureness is that every fresh venture into the universe will meet with surprises,
Never before had humans walked on anything quite like the fracture plane across this cosmic shard. About ten kilometers long and twenty wide, it gashed transversely near the middle of the rough cylindroid. Around it was rock, lighter material that had overlain the primordial core and stuck to it through the sundering crash or, immediately afterward, fell back in a half-molten hail. Dark and rough reached that surface. Meteoritic strikes to wear it down and crater it had been rare in those realms where the fragment wandered. The plain of the plane stoo’d forth stark amidst this stonescape, its sheen faintly grayed by dust, its pockmarks few and wide-scattered.
On the Orionward edge of that scar reared the peak Beynac had seen from space. The collision must also have formed it, a freakishness of forces at this special point. Maybe a shock wave focused by a density interface had hurled liquefied metal upward in a fountain that congealed as it climbed. The height was not a mountain but a spire, swart, outlandishly twisted and gnarled, a sheer 1500 meters from the rubble at its base to the top, which hooked forth like an eagle’s beak over the flat ground of the fracture.
At its back, rock wasteland lay in tiers and jumbles. When you fared yonder afoot, you saw a strip that was barely thirty meters wide between the jagged horizons to left and right but that lost itself in murkiness for more than a hundred kilometers ahead. Standing benaath the spire and gazing in the Other direction, you saw the plain, well-nigh featureless, bordered by stars on either side and by a riven escarpment opposite you, twenty kilometers away. Above loomed a dark that at night was crowded with constellations, glowingly cloven by the Milky Way, haunted by nebulae and sister galaxies. Then the sun tumbled aloft, shrunken to a point but still intolerably fierce, radiant more than five hundred times full Moonlight on Earth. The visible stars became few, but the spindle of Sacajawea, in her companion orbit, might gleam among them. Weight likewise gave a faint sense of not being altogether lost from manhome. It was ghostly at the ends of the asteroid, but here, close to the ccntroid of a ferrous mass, it exceeded a tenth