10

Down!

“We all agree that your plan is mad,”’ Chief Engineer Anjin announced. “The real question that troubles us is whether it’s just crazy enough to be right.”

“Living inside the Sun?” said the Second Officer. “Impossible!”

Tam erased some figures from her pad, then asked, “Can you think of a better place to hide?”

“Not where we wouldn’t still have to worry about a neutrino glow, Skipper. But just the same, I’ll believe you when we’re down in there in one piece and still breathing.”

“Doing it,” Tam continued, “need not violate any physical laws. We would have to enforce a clearly defined regime on our presence and make sure it doesn’t fail for a moment.”

Anjin said, “You mean we’d have to walk through fire without touching the flames.”

“Essentially, that’s it,” Tam said, “and we will have the means to do it.”

Sargenti-Peterson was transforming itself by the hour, so great was the pressure for swift adaptations. The ship-comet had approached the Sun at nearly sixty kilometers per second before turning its engines against its own flight path. Inside, Tam and her crew were probing the laws of orbital mechanics. The more they shaved their forward velocity, the more the Sun tightened its gravitational tether, yanking them down through the corona and flinging them forward. Confined to an ever-tightening Sim orbit, their angular momentum picked up, and they found themselves covering so much more of the Sun’s surface that convection cells of superheated gas, whose “cloud tops” were sometimes as wide as the Earth, raced beneath their feet in only a few seconds. By the time they dipped beneath the membrane of glowing pink gas known as the chromosphere, they would be flying at nearly five hundred kilometers per second. They had left the driving to Isaac Newton, under whose rules the act of slowing down caused Sargenti-Peterson to speed up.

Now a faint atmosphere of protons and electrons was striking the comet’s bow with a force sufficient to cause further slowing—which, if uncontrolled, threatened to drag the ship-comet to depths where the solar gases were twenty-five times denser than iron. A hundred meters behind the point bow, magnetic lenses had appeared. Farther astern, something resembling a ring of jet engine intakes had erupted through the comet’s natural surface and begun to take shape with extraordinary speed.

The constantly expanding population of robots could accomplish whatever they were told to, but they were only as good as their instructions. Tam had come to regard them as the comet’s immune cells: only as capable as the body that governed them. From now on, she decreed, survival would be a never-ending struggle to evolve new technologies, often at very short notice.

It sounded impossible, but Tam and most of her colleagues had been called impossible long before the Intruders had made IQ boosters necessary. It was one reason for Tam’s group having left Earth in the first place—which was just as well for Earth. Only the impossible could be counted on to accomplish the impossible.