Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Read online

  “Hit them all.” She was seated at the status board, and I could see a row of red lights: several other hatches were open. They should have closed automatically when the first alarms sounded.

  We got hit again, this time in front. Greenswallow trembled, and loose pieces of metal rattled around inside the walls like broken teeth.

  “Rob,” she said. “I don’t think it’s working.”

  The baleful lights still glowed across the top of her board.

  It lasted about three minutes.

  When it was over, we hurried back to look at Herman. We were no longer rotating, and gravity had consequently dropped to zero. Selma, gasping, pale, his skin damp, was floating grotesquely over a pallet of ore-sample cannisters. We got him to a couch and applied compresses. His eyes rolled shut, opened, closed again. “Inside,” he said, gently fingering an area just off his sternum. “I think I’ve been chewed up a little.” He raised his head slightly. “What kind of shape are we in?”

  I left Cathie with him. Then I restored power, put on a suit and went outside.

  The hull was a disaster: antennas were down, housings scored, lenses shattered. The lander was gone, ripped from its web. The port cargo area had buckled, and an auxiliary hatch was sprung. On the bow, the magnetic dock was hammered into slag. Travel between the ships was going to be a little tougher.

  Greenswallow looked as if she had been sandblasted. I scraped particles out of her jet nozzles, replaced cable, and bolted down mounts. I caught a glimpse of Amity’s lights, sliding diagonally across the sky. As were the constellations.

  “Cathie,” I said. “I see Mac. But I think we’re tumbling.”

  “Okay.”

  Iseminger was also on board Amity. And, fortunately, Marj Aubuchon, our surgeon. Herman’s voice broke in, thick with effort. “Rob, we got no radio contact with anyone. Any sign of Victor?”

  Ganymede was close enough that its craters lay exposed in harsh solar light. Halfway round the sky, the Pleiades glittered. Tolstoi’s green and red running lights should have been visible among, or near, the six silver stars. But the sky was empty. I stood a long time and looked, wondering how many other navigators on other oceans had sought lost friends in that constellation. What had they called it in antiquity? The rainy Pleiades … . “Only Amity,” I said.

  I tore out some cable and lobbed it in the general direction of Ganymede. Jupiter’s enormous arc was pushing above the maintenance pods, spraying October light across the wreckage. I improvised a couple of antennas, replaced some black boxes, and then decided to correct the tumble, if I could.

  “Try it now,” I said.

  Cathie acknowledged.

  Two of the jets were useless. I went inside for spares, and replaced the faulty units. While I was finishing up, Cathie came back on. “Rob,” she said, “radio’s working, more or less. We have no long-range transmit, though.”

  “Okay. I’m not going to try to do anything about that right now.”

  “Are you almost finished?”

  “Why?”

  “Something occurred to me. Maybe the cloud, whatever that damned thing was that we passed through: maybe it’s U-shaped.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I needed something to worry about.”

  “Maybe you should come back inside.”

  “Soon as I can. How’s the patient doing?”

  “Out,” she said. “He was a little delirious when he was talking to you. Anyhow, I’m worried: I think something’s broken internally. He never got his color back, and he’s beginning to bring up blood. Rob, we need Marj.”

  “You hear anything from Amity yet?”

  “Just a carrier wave.” She did not mention Tolstoi. “How bad is it out there?”

  From where I was tethered, about halfway back on the buckled beam, I could see a crack in the main plates that appeared to run the length of the port tube. I climbed out onto the exhaust assembly, and pointed my flashlight into the combustion chamber. Something glittered where the reflection should have been subdued. I got in and looked: silicon. Sand, and steel, had fused in the white heat of passage. The exhaust was blocked.

  Cathie came back on. “What about it, Rob?” she asked. “Any serious problems?”

  “Cathie,” I said, “Greenswallow’s going to Pluto.”

  Herman thought I was Landolfi: he kept assuring me that everything was going to be okay. His pulse was weak and rapid, and he alternated between sweating and shivering. Cathie had got a blanket under him and buckled him down so he wouldn’t hurt himself. She bunched some pillows under his feet, and held a damp compress to his head.

  “That’s not going to help much. Raising his legs, I mean.”

  She looked at me, momentarily puzzled. “Oh,” she said. “Not enough gravity.”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, Rob.” Her eyes swept the cases and cannisters, all neatly tagged, silicates from Pasiphae, sulfur from Himalia, assorted carbon compounds from Callisto. We had evidence now that Io had formed elsewhere in the solar system, and been well along in middle age when it was captured. We’d all but eliminated the possibility that life existed in Jupiter’s atmosphere. We understood why rings formed around gas giants, and we had a new clue to the cause of terrestrial ice ages. And I could see that Cathie was thinking about trading lives to satisfy the curiosity of a few academics. “We don’t belong out here,” she said, softly. “Not in these primitive shells.”

  I said nothing.

  “I got a question for you,” she continued. “We’re not going to find Tolstoi, right?”

  “Is that your question?”

  “No. I wish it were. But the LGD can’t see them. That means they’re just not there.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she shook her head impatiently. “And we can’t steer this thing. Can Amity carry six people?”

  “It might have to.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “Food and water would be tight. Especially since we’re running out of time, and wouldn’t be able to transfer much over. If any. So we’d all be a little thinner when we got back. But yes, I think we could survive.”

  We stared at one another, and then she turned away. I became conscious of the ship: the throb of power deep in her bulkheads (power now permanently bridled by conditions in the combustion chambers), the soft amber glow of the navigation lamps in the cockpit.

  McGuire’s nasal voice, from Amity, broke the uneasy silence. “Herman, you okay?”

  Cathie looked at me, and I nodded. “Mac,” she said, “this is Perth. Herman’s hurt. We need Marj.”

  “Okay,” he said. “How bad?”

  “We don’t know. Internal injuries, looks like. He appears to be in shock.”

  We heard him talking to someone else. Then he came back. “We’re on our way. I’ll put Marj on in a minute; maybe she can help from here. How’s the ship?”

  “Not good: the dock’s gone, and the engine might as well be.”

  He asked me to be specific. “If we try a burn, the rear end’ll fall off.”

  McGuire delivered a soft, venomous epithet. And then: “Do what you can for Herman. Marj’ll be right here.”

  Cathie was looking at me strangely. “He’s worried,” she said.

  “Yes. He’s in charge now … .”

  “Rob, you say you think we’ll be okay. What’s the problem?”

  “We might,” I said, “run a little short of air.”

  Greenswallow continued her plunge toward Jupiter at a steadily increasing rate and a sharp angle of approach: we would pass within about 60,000 kilometers, and then drop completely out of the plane of the solar system. We appeared to be heading in the general direction of the Southern Cross.

  Cathie worked on Herman. His breathing steadied, and he slipped in and out of his delirium. We sat beside him, not talking much. After awhile, Cathie asked, “What happens now?”

  “In a few hours,” I said, “we’ll reach our insertion point. By then, we have to be ready to change course.�
�� She frowned, and I shrugged. “That’s it,” I said. “It’s all the time we have to get over to Amity. If we don’t make the insertion on time, Amity won’t have the fuel to throw a U-turn later.”

  “Rob, how are we going to get Herman over there?”

  That was an uncomfortable question. The prospect of jamming him down into a suit was less than appealing, but there was no other way. “We’ll just have to float him over,” I said. “Marj won’t like it much.”

  “Neither will Herman.”

  “You wanted a little high drama,” I said, unnecessarily. “The next show should be a barnburner.”

  Her mouth tightened, and she turned away from me.

  One of the TV cameras had picked up the approach of Amity. Some of her lights were out, and she too looked a bit bent. The Athena is a homely vessel in the best of times, whale-shaped and snub-nosed, with a midship flare that suggests middle-age spread. But I was glad to see her.

  Cathie snuffled at the monitor, and blew her nose. “Your Program’s dead, Rob.” Her eyes blazed momentarily, like a dying fire into which one has flung a few drops of water. “We’re leaving three of our people out here; and if you’re right about the air, we’ll get home with a shipload of defectives, or worse. Won’t that look good on the six o’clock news?” She gazed vacantly at Amity’s image. “I’d hoped,” she said, “that if things went well, Victor would have lived to see a ship carry his fusion engine. And maybe his name, as well. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Not ever.”

  I had not allowed myself to think about the oxygen problem we were going to face. The Athenas recycle their air supply: the converters in a single ship can maintain a crew of three, or even four, indefinitely. But six?

  I was not looking forward to the ride home.

  A few minutes later, a tiny figure detached itself from the shadow of the Athena and started across: Marj Aubuchon on a maintenance sled. McGuire’s voice erupted from the ship’s speakers. “Rob, we’ve taken a long look at your engines, and we agree with your assessment. The damage complicates things.” Mac had a talent for understatement. It derived, not from a sophisticated sense of humor, bur from a genuine conviction of his own inferiority. He preferred to solve problems by denying their existence. He was the only one of the original nine who could have been accurately described as passive: other people’s opinions carried great weight with him. His prime value to the mission was his grasp of Athena systems. But he’d been a reluctant crewman, a man who periodically reminded us that he wanted only to retire to his farm in Indiana. He wouldn’t have been along at all except that one guy died and somebody else came down with an unexpected (but thoroughly earned) disease. Now, with Selma incapacitated and Landolfi gone, McGuire was in command. It must have been disconcerting for him. “We’ve got about five hours,” he continued. “Don’t let Marj get involved in major surgery. She’s already been complaining to me that it doesn’t sound as if it’ll be possible to move him. We have no alternative. She knows that, but you know how she is. Okay?”

  One of the monitors had picked him up. He looked rumpled, and nervous. Not an attitude to elicit confidence. “Mac,” said Cathie, “we may kill him trying to get him over there.”

  “You’ll kill him if you don’t,” he snapped. “Get your personal stuff together, and bring it with you. You won’t be going back.”

  “What about trying to transfer some food?” I asked.

  “We can’t dock,” he said. “And there isn’t time to float it across.”

  “Mac,” said Cathie, “is Amity going to be able to support six people?” I listened to McGuire breathing. He turned away to issue some trivial instructions to Iseminger. When he came back he said, simply and tonelessly, “Probably not.” And then, coldbloodedly (I thought), “How’s Herman doing?”

  Maybe it was my imagination. Certainly there was nothing malicious in his tone, but Cathie caught it too, and turned sharply round. “McGuire is a son-of-a-bitch,” she hissed. I don’t know whether Mac heard it.

  Marjorie Aubuchon was short, blond, and irritable. When I relayed McGuire’s concerns about time, she said, “God knows, that’s all I’ve heard for the last half-hour.” She observed that McGuire was a jerk, and bent over Herman. The blood was pink and frothy on his lips. After a few minutes she said, to no one in particular, “Probably a punctured lung.” She waved Cathie over, and began filling a hypo; I went for a walk.

  At sea, there’s a long tradition of sentiment between mariners and their ships. Enlisted men identify with them, engineers baby them, and captains go down with them. No similar attitude has developed in space flight. We’ve never had an Endeavour, or a Golden Hind. Always, off Earth, it has been the mission, rather than the ship. Friendship VII and Apollo XI were far more than vehicles. I’m not sure why that is; maybe it reflects Cathie’s view that travel between the worlds is still in its Kon-Tiki phase: the voyage itself is of such epic proportions that everything else is overwhelmed.

  But I’d lived almost three years on Greenswallow. It was a long time to be confined to her narrow spaces. Nevertheless, she was shield and provider against that enormous abyss, and I discovered (while standing in the doorway of my cabin) a previously unfelt affection for her.

  A few clothes were scattered round the room, a shirt was hung over my terminal, and two pictures were mounted on the plastic wall. One was a Casnavan print of a covered bridge in New Hampshire; the other was a telecopy of an editorial cartoon that had appeared in the Washington Post. The biggest human problem we had, of course, was sheer boredom. And Cathie had tried to capture the dimensions of the difficulty by showing crewmembers filling the long days on the outbound journey with bridge. (“It would be nice,” Cathie’s narrator had said at one point, “if we could take everybody out to an Italian restaurant now and then.”) The Post cartoon had appeared several days later: it depicted four astronauts holding cards. (We could recognize Selma, Landolfi, and Marj. The fourth, whose back was turned, was exceedingly feminine, and appeared to be Esther Crowley.) An enormous bloodshot eye is looking in through one window; a tentacle and a UFO are visible through another. The “Selma” character, his glasses characteristically down on his nose, is examining his hand, and delivering the caption: Dummy looks out the window and checks the alien.

  I packed the New Hampshire bridge, and left the cartoon. If someone comes by, in 20 million years or so, he might need a laugh. I went up to the cockpit with my bag.

  McGuire checked with me to see how we were progressing. “Fine,” I told him. I was still sitting there four hours later when Cathie appeared behind me.

  “Rob,” she said, “we’re ready to move him.” She smiled wearily. “Marj says he should be okay if we can get him over there without breaking anything else.”

  We cut the spin on the inner module to about point-oh-five. Then we lifted Herman onto a stretcher, and carried him carefully down to the airlock.

  Cathie stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Her fine-boned cheeks were pale, and her eyes seemed focused far away. These, I thought, were her first moments to herself, unhampered by other duties. The impact of events was taking hold.

  Marj called McGuire and told him we were starting over, and that she would need a sizable pair of shears when we got there to cut Herman’s suit open. “Please have them ready,” she said. “We may be in a hurry.”

  I had laid out his suit earlier: we pulled it up over his legs. That was easy, but the rest of it was slow, frustrating work. “We need a special kind of unit for this,” Marj said. “Probably a large bag, without arms or legs. If we’re ever dumb enough to do anything like this again, I’ll recommend it.”

  McGuire urged us to hurry.

  Once or twice, Cathie’s eyes met mine. Something passed between us, but I was too distracted to define it. Then we were securing his helmet, and adjusting the oxygen mixture.

  “I think we’re okay,” Marj observed, her hand pressed against Selma’s chest. “Let’s get him over there … .”

 
I opened the inner airlock, and pulled my own helmet into place. Then we guided Herman in, and secured him to Greenswallow’s maintenance sled. (The sled was little more than a toolshed with jet nozzles.) I recovered my bag and stowed it on board.

  “I’d better get my stuff,” Cathie said. “You can get Herman over all right?”

  “Of course,” said Marj. “Amity’s sled is secured outside the lock. Use that.”

  She hesitated in the open hatchway, raised her left hand, and spread the fingers wide. Her eyes grew very round, and she formed two syllables that I was desperately slow to understand: in fact, I don’t think I translated the gesture, the word, until we were halfway across to Amity, and the lock was irrevocably closed behind us.

  “Good-bye.”

  Cathie’s green eyes sparkled with barely controlled emotion across a dozen or so monitors. Her black hair, which had been tied back earlier, now framed her angular features and fell to her shoulders. It was precisely in that partial state of disarray that tends to be most appealing. She looked as if she’d been crying, but her jaw was set, and she stood erect. Beneath the gray tunic, her breast rose and fell.

  “What the hell are you doing, Perth?” demanded McGuire. He looked tired, almost ill. He’d gained weight since we’d left the Cape, his hair had whitened and retreated, his flesh had grown blotchy, and he’d developed jowls. The contrast with his dapper image in the mission photo was sobering. “Get moving!” he said, striving to keep his voice from rising. “We’re not going to make our burn!”

  “I’m staying where I am,” she said. “I couldn’t make it over there now anyway. I wouldn’t even have time to put on the suit.”

  McGuire’s puffy eyelids slid slowly closed. “Why?” he asked.

  She looked out of the cluster of screens, a segmented Cathie, a group-Cathie. “Your ship won’t support six people, Mac.”

  “Dammit!” His voice was a harsh rasp. “It would have just meant we’d cut down activity. Sleep a lot.” He waved a hand in front of his eyes, as though his vision were blurred. “Cathie, we’ve lost you. There’s no way we can get you back!”