Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “I never set out to do harm. But science comes first, not medicine.”

  “How did you get where you are without studying medicine?”

  “I did study medicine. Check my molecules.”

  Having finished the transmission, she did, summoning the specifications of the biological activity of his newly minted molecules to the screen. “All right, I admit it. You seem to know what to do for therapeutic purposes. You have a better sense for the molecular level than I do.” She faced him, crossing her arms. “Look, Joe, you happen to resemble a hero to some, and this kind of humanitarian work—however involuntary—will add to that impression. For God’s sake, do try to act more like one.”

  “You’re the one bucking for hero,” he said, unmoved. “I don’t care.”

  “At least act less like a willful child prodigy. You are too old for that.”

  “Keep your opinions to yourself. I don’t want ‘em. And get out of my way. I need to use the telcon.”

  She stayed put, thinlipped, and said, “This is not your toy.”

  They locked eyes, locked wills, and neither one flinched.

  Suddenly Eddy flung the door open so wildly that it banged against the wall. “Fredrik’s gone! He’s not in his quarters!”

  “Damn!” Catharin gasped. “Go outside. Take a two-way. Look for him, for footprints. Call back if he’s left the dome, or if you see him leaving. But don’t get near him, Eddy.”

  Eddy stood rooted to the spot. “I can’t leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be with her,” said Joe.

  “Oh, thank you!” Eddy left at a run.

  Catharin said to Joe in an intense voice, “You want a fight. Stay out of this. I can take care of myself.”

  “He’s out of his mind and he hates you,” Joe reminded her.

  “He was calmer today.” She hesitated, then nodded. “Let me go first; let me do the talking. Stay back unless you’re needed. We’ll start in the mess hall. Let’s go.”

  The base had corridors arrayed like spokes of a wheel along wedgeshaped sections. Joe stared up at one of the ceiling hatches above the corridor, uneasily guessing that the dome was laced with maintenance crawlspaces. Catharin followed Joe’s gaze. “It’s too tight a fit for him up there.”

  Finding no sign of Hoffmann in the mess hall, they hurried down a short flight of stairs, into a large basement section—the quartermaster’s office and supply room—and back up to the sleeping quarters on the first floor. Hoffmann’s bunk room door stood ajar. “Did you lock it after you took him lunch?”

  Catharin checked the pocket of her lab coat, pulled out a small flat metal bar, and flushed bright pink. Joe took the bar from her and examined it. He fit it into aligned slots in the door and jamb. Once fitted in, the bar simply and effectively secured the door against being opened from the inside. Nor could it be shaken out. “Nice system if you remember to activate it.”

  “I’ve got too damn much on my mind,” Catharin said bitterly.

  They cut through the communal shower into another corridor. Catharin started opening doors. The small rooms held cots made and unmade, pictures tacked to the walls: Earth landscapes, smiling families. One of the rooms was a mess of jumbled clothes, dirty gear, shoes, used plates, and even machine parts strewn over the floor and both cots.

  “Who’s the pair of pigs?” Joe asked.

  “Alvin made this mess single-handedly. Nobody else can stand to room with him.”

  Another room with two cots, one of which had a silver flute on the bedclothes and pictures of airplanes stuck on the cabinet doors on that side, had to be Becca Fisher’s room.

  The next door revealed a single immaculate cot with a mauve blanket. A distinctive fragrance hung on the air. As personal effects went, expensive perfume had been a good way to maximize value and minimize bulk, and this particular perfume was Maya London’s. Trust Maya to have a private room. Joe remembered her overtures, designed to lead him to this very place. But he was having more fun hunting a schizophrenic with Catharin.

  Catharin paused, shrugged, then opened the door of another single-occupant bunk room. The cot was made with a royal blue blanket. On a thin ledge in front of a small square window rested a small potted plant. She muttered, “I’m glad he wasn’t hiding here.” This was Catharin’s own private room. Joe didn’t blame her for not wanting to find that Hoffman had invaded it.

  Catharin pulled a slim two-way out of her pocket and called Eddy. He’d seen so sign of Hoffmann outside of the dome or in the Penthouse.

  The planetology lab in the dome’s next wedge was crammed with looming equipment. A rustle made Joe and Catharin whirl to face a solitary female technician. “No, I haven’t seen Fredrik. I thought he was locked up,” Sheryn said. Her wrists bore bandages from the bungled suicide attempt.

  “He got out. Go into Aaron’s office.” They’d just checked Manhattan’s narrow, tidy office. Hoffmann hadn’t been in there. Bar the door,” Catharin told Sheryn. “Stay until everyone comes back.”

  The girl hastily complied.

  To Joe, Catharin said, “He’s got a streak of misogyny. Not violent, not up to now. But she’d be no match for him.”

  “And you would?”

  “Maybe I can talk to him. If not, my astronaut training included some hand-to-hand. But it would have been stupid for me to set out alone. Yes, I admit that.”

  As they went up the ramp to the conference room, Catharin said, “You had a big advantage in surprise the other day. He’s paramilitary, and might be a match for both of us put together. Do not threaten him. Let me talk.”

  “Hold on. What do you mean paramilitary? I thought this guy was an electrical engineer.”

  “Yes, and a captain in the Home Guard.”

  “What?”

  “Shhh!”

  “Don’t you know about the Guard? Did you ever see them in action?” Joe asked urgently.

  “Of course not.”

  “Vigilantes. Christ almighty, that’s bad.”

  Catharin raised an eyebrow. Then she buzzed Manhattan’s office from the nearest intercom to verify that Sheryn was safe there.

  Sheryn’s voice sounded scared. “I saw him through the window in Aaron’s office. I think he’s following you.”

  Galvanized, Joe inspected the console by the head chair. “Here’s a masterlock switch. Hit it and you lock all the doors electronically. You can let yourself out of any of the doors, but nobody gets in.”

  She frowned. “We can’t just hole up.”

  “He’s dangerous.”

  “He didn’t seem volatile when I saw him earlier today, just miserable.”

  “Watch out the way we came. I’ll be right back.” Joe explored the short hallway on the far side of the conference room. The hall ended in yet another door of the generic type, barrable inside or out, that opened onto the observation deck, the other half of the apex of Unity Base. A breezeway with handrail went from the deck back to an outside door of the conference room.

  Joe left the door to the observation deck ajar, the bar perched in the door slot, then circled back to Catharin via the breezeway. “I say we trap him.”

  She shook her head. “His calculating intelligence is unimpaired. He won’t fall for it.”

  “You thought you could talk him into acting reasonable. Can you do the opposite?”

  “Why?”

  Joe outlined a plan. To his surprise, she agreed to it. Then Joe armed himself with the conference room’s fire extinguisher and stationed himself outside of the breezeway door. They waited, not for long.

  Hoffmann came with barely audible, slow steps.

  Catharin was sitting at the conference room table, writing on a piece of paper they’d found there. The slight scratch of chair feet on the floor meant that she had stood up, with the table between her and Hoffmann. “Hello, Fredrik. What brings you here?”

  “I’m looking for you.”

  Risking a peek into the room, Joe was appalled to see that Hoffmann held a long
piece of pipe, a wicked weapon.

  “Why are you looking for me, Fredrik?”

  Hoffmann was only too willing to explain what was on his mind, with a speech so mumbled and bizarre that Joe strained to follow the words or the logic. Hoffmann thought the Base population had been wiped out by an alien virus. And that Catharin was responsible for it. Listening to the repetitious and badly connected words, Joe broke into a sweat. If Hoffmann threatened to attack Catharin, he’d intervene, and he’d be tackling a maniac.

  Catharin went along with the flow of Hoffmann’s demented ideas, in a calm and persuasive voice. “Of course the base is empty. Everyone has gone up, one by one, to the Ship. The specialists on the Ship know how to cure the disease, and make everyone feel well again. How are you feeling, Fredrik? Would you like to go Upstairs too? The shuttle is coming right back down. You can see it land if you go out on the observation deck.”

  Joe started to edge quietly along the breezeway, in order to slam and bar the observation deck door in Hoffmann’s face while Catharin hit the masterlock and shut the inner corridor door behind him.

  But Hoffmann’s warped reality was not quite plastic enough to be so susceptible to suggestion—or else he was too fixated on Catharin. His voice rose, and now Joe could make out the words all too clearly. “You were the astronaut, changed the Ship’s course, brought us here, for a reason, to kill everybody!”

  “No, I—”

  “Bitch, your plan worked! They’re all dead!”

  Joe swallowed nervous bile and stepped into the room just as Catharin said, “You’re imagining things, and you can join your fantasies in hell!” Reacting to the razory condescension in her voice, Hoffmann lunged at her. Catharin bolted with a clatter into the rigged hallway. Hoffmann pounded after her with the pipe poised for a blow.

  Joe sprang to the head chair and hit the masterlock. The doors closed with a hiss behind Hoffmann’s heels.

  Joe heard the observation deck door slam. Don’t forget to bar that one! he thought wildly. At a dead run, Joe circled to the observation deck. He found Catharin leaning against the deck door as if her strength could help the bar keep it shut. Hoffmann bellowed and pounded on the other side. Joe checked the locker bar. “It’ll hold.” The contents of the sealed corridor would stay there for a while. “You move fast.”

  “I’ve never moved so fast in my life. I just wanted to provoke him into coming after me. I think he meant to kill me.” Her fair-skinned face had gone chalk-pale.

  “You played him right,” said Joe, making himself sound calm.

  They ran back to the conference room via the breezeway. Catharin called Eddy and Sheryn, informing both that the coast was clear. Then she called the river party.

  Feeling claustrophobic, Joe opened the room’s window shutters while Catharin made her call. It was late in the day by the clock, but there was plenty of daylight, the cloud-hidden sun only halfway across the sky.

  Catharin spoke to Manhattan, making a crisp report of what had happened with Hoffmann, without mentioning that she had let him escape from his room.

  “Why didn’t you call the river earlier?” Joe asked after she signed off.

  “He seemed so tractable at lunch. Badly confused, but tractable. Besides, I didn’t want to scare him off. I didn’t think it would be this bad.” The words came out short, sharp, defensive. “And I screwed up. I wanted to fix the mess on my own.”

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” said Joe. Seeing her jaw clench and her eyes narrow, he held up his hands. “I ought to know; pride is one of my specialties. I’d have done the same. I won’t tell anybody how he got out,” said Joe.

  She gave him a surprised and grateful look. Then She turned back to the telcon and rang up the Ship. No diplomacy here—she pulled the rank of chief medical officer on them. Hoffmann had to go to the Ship. She did not have the capability to treat full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. And his continued presence in the base constituted reckless endangerment of everyone there, which blatantly violated mission protocol.

  Hoffmann’s transfer to the Ship could be accomplished within the parameters of subquarantine procedure as specified in the Book, and anyone whose business it might be to set up subquarantine procedures was to be consulted, immediately, gotten up out of bed if necessary. She signed off to let the authorities on the Ship digest that.

  The two of them waited in the conference room for reinforcements from the river. Neither wished to leave the maniac unguarded, and the electronic lock seemed more vulnerable than the bar. Hoffmann was an electrical engineer, however demented.

  Hoffmann pounded on the walls with the pipe, making a din. He raved.

  “If I heard things like that said about me I’d blow a gasket,” Joe said.

  “It’s not music to my ears.” She folded up in a chair, arms wrapped around her knees, shaking visibly. “My God, what a mistake. It was inexcusable for me to forget to bar the door to his quarters. And then to go after him on my own. Even with you helping me. I could have been killed, and you too.” She shook her head. “You’re so right about pride.”

  Hoffmann subsided into moans and mumblings.

  “What you did,” Catharin said, staring at the floor, “was not what I meant by ‘act like a hero’ but more than close enough. And you really wanted a fight.”

  “Not for long. I’ve got too much sense to tangle with a maniac.”

  She nodded. “I’ve never heard of schizophrenia developing so fast. But there’s so much I don’t know. I’m no psychiatrist.” Wearily, she rubbed her forehead. “Who needs alien viruses? We brought our own maladies! God—it is all so complicated. And frightening.”

  Joe looked up through the skylight, saw a rift in the gray clouded sky, a streak of not quite Earthsky blue. “The best way not to let bad feelings eat you is exorcise ‘em with exercise,” he said. “Not that it’d do much for somebody that far gone.” He thumbed Hoffmann’s direction.

  She looked at him over her wrapped arms. “What’s eating you?”

  He started to turn away.

  “Please?”

  “Not your business.”

  “My fault, maybe?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why not?” She shrugged wearily. Hoffmann’s accusations, irrational or not, must ring in her ears.

  “Not your fault,” he said grudgingly. “Leaving Earth. That’s what’s eating me, if you have to know.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Let’s say I made an enemy.”

  “Just one?”

  “The wrong one. Somebody who decided to ruin me and was in a position to do it.” Even telling a highly edited version of the truth twisted his gut with remembered bile.

  She looked interested.

  Joe said, “He’d have made sure I couldn’t do my work, not the work I wanted to do, not with the resources I needed. Like it or not, that kind of freedom is important to me.”

  Catharin nodded. “That figures.”

  “I had my mind on science, not politics.”

  “That I can believe.”

  “My mistake.” As he thought about the predicament he’d found himself in at the apex of his career, anger swelled up inside of him. Joe found himself shaking with the fury that he had felt before he had to leave Earth, remembered but not felt since stasis, until now. With an effort, Joe contained the anger. There had been enough raving and ranting in this room tonight.

  “You’re not telling all.”

  “Do I have to?”

  She shook her head. “My business stops at the point where I can be reasonably certain you won’t crack up.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “You’ve scared me,” she answered. “With your temper. With no convincing reason for leaving Earth. And walking away from the others today.”

  Joe marveled at the fury he had just felt like a black wave. It had passed swiftly, but left him feeling closer in mood and memory to Earth than any time since stasis. “You could say I was being
myself a little more than usual, today. I’ve always gone off by myself. Gone to swim for miles in a pool or across a lake, when there was a clean one. Sometimes I go—went—walking in the city. For hours.”

  Hoffmann raved again. Catharin cringed. When the raving subsided, she said, more or less evenly, “I think I understand. Just remember it’s not as safe here.”

  With a short laugh, he said, “I don’t mean up and down the power towers, or in the residential islands. I walked in undertowns.”

  “Undertowns? Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Undertown LA, London, Manhattan. I wouldn’t have taken any of those for a new surname, either. Not after having seen the underbelly of those cities at night. That’s how I saw the Home Guard in action a few times,” he added.

  “At night?” she echoed, incredulous.

  He shrugged. “People in undertowns don’t recognize scientists. And that’s the whole point. I like to be alone. It was easier to find a crowd to be alone in than a wilderness.”

  “You must have led a charmed life. You could have gotten killed.”

  “I did land in the emergency room twice. But I’d had practice taking care of myself in the neighborhood where I grew up. Wasn’t the best district in Toronto.”

  “One more question. You changed your name. So did many in the Vanguard. But I don’t believe that you share their dreams. So—?”

  “The city of Toronto meant something to me.” Being young and brilliant and in love, to be exact. But that was then. This was a thousand years later Ship time, and longer than that for Earth.

  She jumped up. “I’ll be right back.” Joe got to listen to Hoffmann’s ravings alone for a few minutes, and did his own brooding. He hadn’t thought he’d end up like this on the other side of the stars. He hadn’t done much thinking at all, just blindly scrabbled his way out of the trap that had been sprung on him on Earth.

  It hadn’t been pleasant to be in that trap. Joe felt a bizarre impulse to let Hoffmann out of his. But Hoffmann would use freedom to hurt people; Hoffmann belonged in a cage.

  Catharin returned with a flash wand, which she handed Joe.