After a two hour battle, the asteroid field began to thin. A huge asteroid appeared in Origin’s path, and she yawed to miss it. A smaller rock was hidden behind the asteroid and traveling at an angle through the field. It appeared on Claire’s display for only a millisecond. Neither she nor the ship could respond fast enough to avoid it, and engine E-3 was knocked off. The extreme force sent the ship into a wobbling, high-speed spin. Claire and David blacked out. Not enough blood was getting to their brains because of centrifugal force.
▼
More space rocks hit Origin as it spun crazily. The last impact before they left the asteroid field slowed the spin enough for them to regain consciousness. Only sensor arrays on sides one and three were working and only engine E-4 was on line.
David immediately applied thrust to try to stop the spin as he marginally regained consciousness. With great effort, he said, “Claire!” It was hard to talk because the ship was still spinning and he was experiencing eight gs.
His display showed she had commanded the same thrust nozzle at the same time. The engine responded, and Origin’s spin began to slow.
She said, “I’m okay. Who’s going to fly the ship?”
“You fly. I’ll do a preliminary damage survey and restore pressurization.”
“My ship.”
“Stop the spin and go to zero g.” David said.
“Roger. Be a careful Buni.”
David’s couch and control panel had automatically swiveled to reduce the effects of high g loads. It was positioned over a corner of his compartment, and the centrifugal force was still too high for him to move. All he could do was wait.
He checked the status of the ship on his control panel. Only his maneuvering control compartment, the cabin, and some of the storerooms surrounding the cabin were depressurized. Origin had lost a lot of fuel, but it was not losing any more. There was no response from the six sensor arrays on sides two and four and no response from engines E-1, E-2, or E-3.
After Claire stopped the spin, David took a hand searchlight, grab handles that could be stuck on walls, and a tether from his storage lockers. One locker had a hole in the door. Inside, a stack of patches had holes in the first two. The meteoroid that had penetrated the ship was about one inch in diameter and was embedded in the third patch. He sandwiched that patch with the embedded space rock between the two damaged patches and put them at the bottom of the stack. Then he took eight patches and four plugs from the compartment.
David noted the location of the hole in the overhead of his compartment and the hole in the cabin wall on his way out.
The passageway he took through the storage area in the middle sphere appeared to be undamaged. He surveyed the area between the middle and outer spheres. They appeared to be undamaged except for the holes made by the meteoroid.
He explored the exit passageways from the ship. One of the five passageways was blocked. One passageway was completely open and he had to grab a broken edge to keep from being lost to space. That scared him. He would have been millions of miles from the nearest planet, and the chances of Claire finding him would have been slim.
Handholds were built into the edge of the steps in the passageway, and some remained in place. David secured one end of a tether to his spacesuit and the other to two step handholds. Then he gently floated into space and used the powerful beam of his searchlight to look at side four. He saw ruined fuel tanks visible through gaping holes in the ship and that engine E-3 was missing. He shook his head soberly as he surveyed the damage.
The other three passageways were clear, and David inspected sides one, two, and three. Side three was undamaged, and three engines were in place with no visible damage. Side one appeared to be worn but undamaged, and side two had moderate damage. Where he should have seen engine E-3 mounted at points on sides one and two, only stars and the blackness of space were visible.
On the way back into the ship, David plugged and patched the holes in the outer and middle spheres, the cabin, and in his maneuvering compartment. The repairs passed pressurization tests, and using engine E-4, Claire put Origin back on course for M9.
They helped each other take off their space suits. Afterward, David held his exhausted wife quietly in his arms and said, “How about a well-deserved nap?”
“I need sleep and a shower,” she said. “I don’t know which to do first.”
“Take a nap. You can have a shower and I’ll give you a moisturizing massage with warmed lotion after you wake up.”
“Perfect,” she said, then fell into bed and was asleep almost instantly.
▼
After a long nap and a shower, she stretched out on the medical examination table that did double duty as a massage table. Her right buttock and the back of her right shoulder were bruised where she had slammed into the wall on the way to rescue David. He could not massage her bruises, but she smiled when he gently kissed them instead.
Claire gave David a physical examination after her massage to make sure he had not suffered any permanent physical harm from decompression. He passed the tests with amorous colors.
Later, during a dinner with an entre of chicken cordon bleu, David said, “I want to put the ship in orbit around one of M9’s moons. I’ll use the reflected light from the planet to do a detailed damage assessment. Maybe I can fix something.”
“If you can’t?”
“We’ve lost a lot of fuel. There’s enough to finish our mission and land on four-b. We can use our emergency refueling system to make fuel there. But with only one engine, we can’t launch with enough fuel to get back to Earth. Our best hope is for me to find a way to get another engine online.”
“If you can’t get another engine going, we’ll be stuck on four-b for life?”
“Yep. You can have all the babies you want, the more the merrier,” he said. “The big problem will be mating when they reach sexual maturity.”
“I think you need to fix an engine,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“You were so quiet when we were flying through the asteroids. I knew you were breathing and your heart was beating, but I didn’t know if you were going to be a turnip or a carrot.”
He laughed. “I thought it would be risky to interrupt your concentration. It would have been fun to try dodging asteroids, but you were doing a superb job. The best thing I could do was butt out.”
Several days of ship time later, Claire challenged David to combat using the simulator function of their maneuvering consoles. She had an ulterior motive. She wanted to see if his decompression experience had affected him mentally. Claire flew her best, but he beat her two contests out of three and made love to her afterward. She went to sleep happy that he was alive, healthy, and in her bed, where he belonged.
▼
Claire put Origin into orbit around one of M9’s moons. It would be a reference point that could help her find David if he was separated from the ship during his spacewalk.
He put on his spacesuit, knee pads with adhesive surfaces, a complete tool belt, and a jet pack. She grinned and said he looked like a space-hardware store.
With Claire in her spacesuit and belted into her maneuvering console, he went outside to begin assessing the damage to the ship and said, “Oh!”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “M9 is so beautiful. You should come out for a look after I get back.”
She rotated the ship as he instructed so he could examine it in the light coming from M9 and from his portable searchlight. A hole in E-1 made the engine useless. Engine E-2’s fuel line was broken. Side four and its sensor arrays were ruined. The surface of side one was worn due to the impact of atomic particles on the first leg of the trip. But it appeared to be good for at least another leg.
After David’s survey, Claire went outside for a look at M9. It was an enormous blue ball framed by varicolored rings and a vast astronomical display of brilliant stars in the pitch blackness of space. Her view from an open door was much more
spectacular than the images on the video monitors.
She exclaimed, “Oh, wow! You’re right. This is incredible! Thank you for sharing it with me.”
Over the next several days, David replaced the damaged fuel line on engine E-2 with an undamaged line from E-1. He also repaired two of the sensor arrays on side two.
They left orbit and tested the ship. Eight of their twelve sensor arrays and two of their four engines worked. Due to the missing fuel and engine, Origin was light, and the two working engines made it fast and maneuverable.
Claire rewarded David with an extra special massage.
Chapter 25
On the way back to M4a and M4b, Cougar Flight surveyed smaller moons that had been bypassed on the outbound journey. With that done, the only remaining tasks were to finish the survey of M4a and to refuel on M4b.
David showed Claire a map of M4a. The part of the planet that had been surveyed by the satellite before it had disappeared was colored green. The rest of the planet was covered with wild patterns in a variety of colors. He told her that the patterns were random flight paths designed by their computers.
Claire flew the first pattern over M4a. Origin appeared from over the radar horizon with the starship zigzagging and squiggling so the path of the ship was unpredictable from one fraction of a second to the next before it disappeared over the horizon. David came in from a different direction with another unpredictable flight path and disappeared in a different direction over the horizon. They continued taking turns coming and going in unpredictable patterns.
Finally, only a few areas were left in the radar coverage area. The radar’s computer may have planned ambushes to blow the starship out of space, but such planning would have been futile: the M4a satellite had covered those areas before it was shot down.
It had been a long workday, but Cougar Flight was done with Minor-four-a. The ship’s computers sorted and integrated all of the new data with the old to provide a complete, coherent survey for the planet.
Claire and David had dinner on the way to M4b, and then slept together in orbit around the planet.
After breakfast, they reviewed the data gathered by the satellite that had been orbiting since their first visit. One surface probe revealed vegetation resembling ferns and trees and creatures that resembled lizards and snakes. Another probe that went into a lake transmitted images of more fish-like creatures and a fleeting image of a large shadow back to the satellite.
“Fresh water shark?” Claire asked.
“Maybe another Nessie,” David said.
She grinned. “Maybe the same one.”
“Now that would be weird.”
It was not Earth, but it was close enough to make them yearn for home.
Claire landed on a flat, rocky surface next to a river. Then she applied more down thrust to see if the surface could support the weight of the ship after it had been refueled. A big crack appeared in adjacent rocks, the ship began to tilt, and she snatched Origin back into the air.
She tried again at a junction of a river flowing into a lake. Dense forest surrounded the area and a rocky hill was off to one side. The surface held, and she lifted off again to circle and take another look.
“Looks good to me,” she said.
“Me too,” he agreed. “Very scenic.”
“Do you want the landing?”
David smiled. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Your ship,” she said.
“My ship.”
David landed on the same spot and shut down the engine. He extended a refueling pipe from the emergency processing system and dropped an intake float into the river. Water was pumped into the ship’s high speed separators, which removed heavy water. That would be further processed to make fuel for the Origin. The ship hummed and the intake pipe throbbed, and then a long stream of ordinary water was ejected into the lake.
Later Claire and David ate their first meal on another planet. The main dish was creamed chipped beef on toast.
“This feels odd,” David said with a straight face.
“What’s odd about it?” Claire asked. “It’s just like being in our quarters at NASA.”
“That’s what’s odd. We don’t have to worry about being slammed into another asteroid field.”
“That’s not funny,” she said. “We were almost killed.”
“No gallows humor?”
“Not where you’re concerned. I love you.”
“And I love you. We’ll put safety first here with no jokes. And speaking of safety, something like tigers or even a T-rex could be on this planet. We’ll be safer if we explore together, so we can watch each other’s backs, and we should carry our pistols.”
“Pistols against tigers or a T-rex?”
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a rocket propelled grenade. But you had an almost perfect score on the pistol range. If we run into something big, aim for an eye.”
Claire nodded. “Okay, but I don’t want to shoot anything unless there’s no alternative.”
▼
The next morning, Claire and David put on airtight surface-exploration suits that were lighter and more comfortable than spacesuits. Ambient air, filtered and sterilized by a lightweight backpack unit, allowed them to breathe comfortably and stay outside longer than they could have with heavy air tanks.
The air was cool, and they were comfortable in their suits as they inspected the damage on side four. “I’m stunned,” she said. “It’s amazing the ship stays together.”
They passed creatures that resembled snakes and lizards warming themselves nearby on rocks. The animals did not react, and Claire pointed that out as evidence that there may not be larger land predators.
With bags of specimen containers, Cougar Flight set about the task of collecting samples of everything they could fit into a container. Air, water, rocks, dirt, and plants were easy enough, and Claire used her quick hands to catch a collection of insects. David used the fishing line from his survival pack and put his catches into large specimen containers. When something very strong caught the line and pulled him off balance, he released the line to keep from being pulled into the lake.
Claire did not see any evidence of seeds, birds, or flowers. All of the plants reproduced with what appeared to be spores. She thought biological development on M4b might be hundreds of millions of years behind Earth.
As the ship refueled, days of discovery continued. Nights were a tranquil time of unhurried dinners, quiet conversations, and sleeping together. Though Claire and David were almost one thousand five hundred trillion miles from Earth, they agreed that it was like a vacation.
▼
One morning, Claire found a snake on the rocks near the ship that had died trying to devour a large lizard. She managed to fit both into one large specimen container, and then she went down to a rocky beach to rinse off the slime. Her gloves were in the water when she saw an enormous shadow coming up from the murky depth. She slipped when she jumped back, and a giant turtle-like animal with rows of sharp teeth lunged out of the water. Claire scrambled away, but not before claws ripped her surface-exploration suit and gashed her left calf. Snapping teeth came perilously close as she got to her feet and ran.
She took refuge on top of nearby rocks. The turtle followed and tried to climb, but it did not get far before it fell back. It kept trying, and she was wondering how she could get away without shooting it when David showed up with a long, stout stick. He smacked the creature’s head to get its attention. It turned with a loud snap of teeth and followed him as he jogged along a bank beside the lake. He slowed to let the turtle get close, and then dodged to its side and jammed the stick underneath the shell. Then David levered one side up and flipped the creature over and into the lake.
Back in the ship, he put antibiotic ointment on Claire’s calf and said, “Oh, the shame of it. Cougar was run down by a turtle.”
She laughed.
Claire patched her surface-exploration suit to make it airtight again. Taking p
recautions to prevent further contamination and staying alert for the creature she dubbed “Smiley,” they carried on as before.
David used the ship’s tools to engrave “Starship Origin–July 2302” on one of Origin’s repair patches and fused it to a rock face near the ship. He and Claire stood beside it and waved to a sensor array to record the first visit of humans to Minor-four-b.
▼
Claire flew the first leg of the flight back to Earth. With only two engines, one on the topmost point of the ship and one near the surface, she made a tricky tilting launch. She flew toward Minor and David dumped two years of accumulated waste to be incinerated by the star. That lightened the ship, and then Claire used the star’s heat to sterilize the outside surfaces of Origin.
She began acceleration in a direction slightly off the straight line to Earth. That would prevent a devastating collision if the ship could not slow down or change direction after it reached near light speed.
The satellites that Cougar Flight left behind shut themselves down. A minuscule amount of power kept a microscopic computer online. For the next ten thousand years or so, each satellite would intermittently turn on a receiver and listen for a command.
Part 3 Earth
Chapter 26
On Thursday, July 4, 2553, the Sun rose above the Sierra Nevada mountain range on a gorgeous day in California.
Just before 10:00 a.m., David precisely balanced Origin on edge as it descended over the Pacific Ocean toward the starship’s landing pad at Vandenberg. Even with only two engines, the noise outside the ship was deafening, and no one was in sight. He rotated the starship to hover from engine E-2 and landed exactly 503 Earth years after launch.
Cougar Flight took off their spacesuits and put on their freshly laundered NASA jumpsuits. After the shut-down checklist had been completed, David lifted the safety cover over the master power switch and looked at Claire. She nodded and smiled, and he flipped the switch to the ground power mode.
Launch Page 11
