Cold as Ice Read Online Free PDF

arms. A cloud of stars rapidly resolved to points, then went spilling off the edge of the field of view until only one yellow dwarf burned at the center. The zoom continued, homing in on a bright fleck of light snuggled close to its parent star. That grew in turn, finally to display a visible disk on which continents formed dark, clotted smudges on a grey-blue background.
    "I picked a close target—M31, two million light-years—for media impact. Then I set up a computer scan for a Sol type. That planet is about the same distance from its primary as Earth is from the sun. Spectroscopic analysis says we're looking at a high-oxygen atmosphere. That's water, too, in the blue areas. Think there's anybody up there, staring back this way?"
    "If there is, I hope he gets better observing time than we will as soon as people see that picture. Here. Put yourself around the outside of this." David Lammerman was carrying two containers of soup in his left hand. He held one out to Camille.
    She took it reluctantly. He was always trying to feed her. He had the best of intentions, but when she was working she could never develop any interest in food. Everyone told her that she was over-thin, that she needed to build herself up. It was futile to explain to all of them that her skinny blond fragility was as illusive as her childlike appearance, that she had never been sick in her life, that her body was as tough and durable as steel wire—though David, surely, had other evidence of that.
    "Once they see this image, the honeymoon's over," he went on. He squeezed into the chair at Camille's side. Two meters tall and powerfully built, he outmassed her by a factor of three. He emptied his pint of soup in three quick gulps, while she hid hers from him behind a monitor. He at once retrieved it, opened the top, and handed it back.
    "Too good?" she took a dutiful sip. "The images, I mean . . . not the soup."
    "Far too good. As soon as they realize that everything's up and running, we'll be squeezed out of the schedule. All of our time will go to some grey eminence who hasn't had an idea in her head for fifty years."
    He didn't want or need a reply. He and Camille had grumbled through it all before. It was the age-old complaint of aspiring young astronomers. You did the dog work, the years of repairing, cleaning, and calibrating the instruments, while planning observational programs to tackle the most fundamental problems of astronomy; and as soon as everything was perfect, your elders and supposed betters came in, commandeered the prime observing time, and dribbled it away on out-of-date and discredited theories.
    At twenty-four, David Lammerman was good, and he knew it. He was impatient. He was not consoled by the thought that his turn would come someday. And at twenty-seven, Camille Hamilton was beginning to wonder if hers ever would. She had already been at DOS Center two years longer than David, and he knew her powers even if no one else seemed to.
    "Quit, then." She could read his mind, peering at him over the top of the soup carton. "I'll take your observing time."
    "I'll bet you would. You try to do that already." He smiled at her and rubbed his hand through his bushy mop of tight-curled blond hair. Camille noticed how handsome and healthy he looked. Healthy in mind and body. She knew both, better than she was ready to admit to anyone.
    There was irony in that thought. During three years of working together, often around the clock and always sharing the same cramped living quarters—and after the first three months, the same bed—she and David had never once had a real argument. They told each other everything. She would have trusted him with anything that she owned, including her life. But she was not ready to make a commitment.
    David couldn't understand that. She didn't understand it herself. Was it because of Tim Kaiser, David Lammerman's predecessor at DOS Center? She and Tim had been lovers, too, for a little while. But the tensions