Singing:
"Ruby, Ruby
"Ruby, Ruby
"Ruby will you be mine?"
Cranston was humming that old, old, Dion and the Belmonts song again -- singing it mindlessly as he sat at his console and studied the ooze that was all around us. He was looking for a way down. If he did it wrong, we would either get crushed by grinding blocks, or frozen deep inside a block and come out some eternity later. No, I didn't mind. Besides Ruby was on my mind, too.
Ruby will you be mine?
The "Ruby" we both want is Rubyzin. Twenty years ago Rubyzin had never been heard of. Now, half the civilized world wants to plop down money for some. Rubyzin... the Peace Maker, the Date Maker, the Deal Maker. It's a lot of things to a lot of people. And to us... those of us crewing the Pink Passion... floating like a piece of egg shell in a high pressure eggbeater... it is the Billionaire Maker. If we can bring out a half a pound of Rubyzin, we will pay for our trip here from Titan. If we bring out a pound, our investors will be ecstatic. The Pink Passion's hold can carry two hundred pounds.
"Where are you?" you, the reader, may ask?
We, the crew of the Pink Passion, are in the Ooze Zone of Neptune -- that layer of the planet's atmosphere that lies between the gaseous part above -- where the hydrogen and helium act like gas, and the methane, ammonia and water act like clouds -- and the solid part below -- where the pressure is so crushing even the hydrogen and helium are solid. In between is the Ooze Zone -- where we can find Rubyzin... if we are lucky... and get ground into a flattened piece of ex-spaceship, or become a future fossil by getting locked into a miles-across iceberg, if we don't keep our wits about us! Yeah, it's OK if Cranston sings that stupid song mindlessly and endlessly.
"Neptune!" you may exclaim, "Why Neptune? Everyone knows that Rubyzin is found in deep in Jupiter, and that the Earth and Mars governments have invested billions in Rubyzin Extraction Inc. (REI) to mine Rubyzin 'safely and economically.'"
Yeah! And given it monopoly privileges as well! Those bastards! There are hundreds of ideas floating around Titan Colony about how to mine Rubyzin, and hundreds of people willing to give those ideas a try. But there are a dozen fast patrol boats circling the planet, and state-of-the-art surveillance backs them up. These days you don't sneeze in the vicinity of Jupiter without an REI license. The trouble is the "safely and economically" part. REI is trying to mine Rubyzin using robot probes, but figuring out how to dodge around in the lower Ooze Zone is still beyond robot navigating ability. Scientists still haven't found a good way to describe turbulent flow, and without that, no robot is going to figure out Ooze. So, REI's Rubyzin output is low -- way below what the Solar System demand is. We want to fix that.
Believe me, we looked hard at sneaking in to Jupiter! The planet is a big place! And the Ooze Layer should be thick and well-veined with Rubyzin. But we looked at the Rubyzin market and listened to a lot of scuttlebutt around the bars in Titan Colony. Word on the street is the Jupiter Patrol is effective -- a lot of people have been trying to sneak in, and a lot of people have been getting caught. So many, that about half the Rubyzin REI puts on the market is confiscated. (Of course, REI denies that.)
So, we looked for an alternative. Saturn might have provided, but the Titan Colony government made a deal-with-the-devil, so there's a Saturn Patrol, as well. We decided... why not? Lets go for the far end of the line before people start thinking seriously about it. The far end of the gas giant line is Neptune. And that's why we are here.
It took some serious convincing to get financing for this boat. A lot of scientists argued that Uranus and Neptune won't have Rubyzin. They say the atmospheres are too thin, too cold and too icy at the bottom. They say if there is anything resembling Rubyzin created, it will be of poor quality. Of course, they say this without actually being here. And the counter argument is: have you seen the street price of Rubyzin these days? As I said earlier, if we extract just two pounds of it, everyone is happy, happy, happy!
Not only were we doing this on Neptune instead of Jupiter, we were doing this with a different style of ship as well. The Earth ships probing Jupiter were designed by Earth's best submarine engineers. The bottom of Earth's ocean seemed a lot like Ooze to the people of Earth, so when REI said, "We're hiring the brightest and best to design our ships." submarine engineers were the logical choice. But, Ooze and ocean have a lot of differences, and we thought that starting from a submarine design was a bad choice. We looked at the conditions and thought, "This thick goo is a lot like what bacteria experience. We should base our design on scaled-up bacteria, not pressured-up subs." The result: we are using cilia and flagella equivalents for propulsion, not propellers. We are finding these work real well in thick, murky fluids filled with lots of random obstructions. As a bonus, we have filled the flagella with sensors (we have one fore and one aft), and those are real effective at telling us about conditions one to ten meters around the ship. We can sense veins of minerals with them, and we can sense trouble, such as when the crack we are in is about to freeze up. And with the aft flagella, we can move out quickly!
But, while we are doing better than those REI fools on Jupiter, we still have to stay on our toes. Even with our better equipment, this environment is not friendly to us.
Which brings us to where we are now: floating in the upper layers of Ooze and deciding if we want to go deeper.
"The ship is checking out. Are we ready for deeper?" I say. I'm Frank Manly, the pilot.
"We've still got broken cilia." says John Korliss, our propulsion engineer.
"How many?" I ask.
"Three."
"Three out of one hundred? I think we've got plenty of safety margin. Let's go."
"... all right. But if we lose two more, five total, we turn back. I'll keep working on fixing the broken ones."
"There's a crack directly below us that looks optimal." reported Jack Cracker. He's our "weatherman." He reads the ooze and tells us where to go on the large scale. I, as pilot, decide where to go on the small scale.
We have been shaking out the ship for a month now in the upper ooze, the part that is sandy in consistency. We've been here a long time. We had scheduled two weeks for shakeout at this level, and then expected to progress downward and shakeout again for a week in a crack at the level where the lumps are between house-size and city-block-size. We figured we could float in the fairly permanent upwells at that level, and that Rubyzin would be close enough to that level that we could detect it, and plan how to mine it.
The problem that has kept us here an extra two weeks is getting through the car-to-truck size boulder level. We have found the upwelling at the upwelling spots is moving too fast and when we try to "speed" down in one of those upwellings, the trash floating in the upwelling current "dings" the ship, and we get damage -- like the cilia damage Korliss is talking about. We're pretty sure that lower down the larger sizes of the trash and slower speed of the upwelling will work in our favor. We just have to get there! The pressure on us to move down is not just simple crew frustration, either. This ship costs millions a day to run, and we crew members supplied only a fraction of those millions (yeah, we put our money where our mouth was, and so did some really rich other people). We also have limited supplies. We need to solve this problem soon, or there will be a lot of unhappy people when we come back.
Yesterday, we talked about and agreed to try a different approach: instead of trying to burrow our way down through an upcurrent, we are doing to make our own downcurrent. We are going to use the explorer probes to spread out a net and calm the air around us into an unnaturally large chunk -- something house-size. That should then sink like a rock, through the car-and-truck zone. Below that, it will still be small enough for us to break apart, which we will do when we get to the house-size zone, and off we go.
"Spreading out the net..." I announce.
A few minutes later I announce, "... We have a house-size ice block around us, and we are moving down." There are cheers over the intercom.
There's no piloting to do while we fall, so for the next hour Ned Hansley takes the lead. He's science, and he tells us what instruments to run and what parameters to measure as we go down. He's a kid in a candy shop at times like these. Korliss gets all three cilia fixed, too.
As we hit the house zone we crack open our boulder and sail into the upwell that Cracker found earlier. It's smooth as silk. Well... in truth the ship is rocking and rolling so much that many of you reading would get seasick. But it feels like silk to us because in this part of the world feeling like you're on a roller coaster is a lot safer than feeling like your on a sofa. It means you're in a fluid upwelling, not locked in a boulder headed down.
The really good news was Hansley announcing three minutes later. "Houston, we have pay dirt! I have traces of Ruby showing up on the scanners."
"What, so high?" is the response of all of us. We figured "the ruby" would be down another three kilometers, at least.
"It's parts per billion, but it's here." Hansley replied. Yeah, we'd still have to go a lot lower for something extractable, but it was there to extract!!
"So, down the crack? Into the Womb of Ruby?" I ask Cracker.
"There's gold in them thar cracks... but be careful. It's death-on-a-stick, too."
"Careful is my middle name... but I never use it." I say, and I head the ship down.
The next eighteen hours were something of a blur. I was kept very busy coordinating with Cracker. He'd point me towards the most active parts of the crack system, and away from the parts he thought were dying and becoming rock, and I kept us going down, down, down. While we kept the ship mobile, Korliss and Hansley scanned for Rubyzin.
We got into the kilometer across zone, and mineral veins started showing up in the blocks we were passing by. These blocks were long-lived enough that the freezing-melting process had started some distilling, but these veins were small, soft, and not of Rubyzin. We needed to go deeper....
In the tens-of-kilometers-across zone, the blocks were hard enough to do some serious grinding -- they were more rocky than muddy. I had to be careful that I didn't put the ship in the grinding areas as well as the freezing up areas. On the other hand, the upwelling fluids were actually a bit more fluid than those above, so as long as I chose right, movement was easier. The cilia part of our propulsion system really came into its own at this level. I could use the cilia to crawl along a boulder surface, and their sensors were really good for warning about upcoming crush spots.
About Hour Six, I was getting tired. I'd been doing some serious navigating for a long time now. Then Hansley announced, "I think we're right over the top of something useful." and I was no longer tired.
"But... We can't take this crack any longer." announced Cracker, "It's getting quiet.... Try heading 270 for 500 meters...."
And so it went. We maneuvered around sideways, and sank, and maneuvered around sideways and sank. It was fun, but I was getting even more tired.
But when Hour Twelve rolled by, Hansley said, "Launch a mining probe." Hot Dog! We were where we needed to be! A vein of Rubyzin was within 100 meters of the ship. Still, as much as I wanted to watch that miner probe do it's thing, I told Cracker he had the helm, and I took a break. I fell asleep over a sandwich in the galley. Three hours later, Korliss woke me up with a big shit-eating grin on his face.
"Time for you to take us up." He said that with a look that said "YES!"
"How much did we get?" I asked, still bleary-eyed.
"We won't know for a while, but a lot. The probe filled up on pay dirt."
"Filled up? On one run?" I said.
Korliss' grin somehow got bigger, "Yeah."
The next three hours were incredibly happy. We rode upcurrents up, which meant we were moving at a blistering pace (comparatively), and we really didn't have to do much tricky navigating except to be sure that we stayed in the mainstream of the upcurrent. After we broke into the air zone, it was easy to find our way to the base station.
At the station I slept the sleep of the dead, we all did. Another eighteen hours passed before we got the word on what we had brought up: nine point seven pounds of medium-grade Rubyzin. It was Rubyzin, but, it was different from Jupiter Rubyzin. It had a blue tint rather than a red tint. Would it be worth as much, more, less? We wouldn't know for sure until someone made cream of it, but our best guess was, "just as good."