by Ben Bova
“Stop the chatter,” Krebs growled. “Check all systems.”
Grant found that the generator was performing perfectly well, and so were the thrusters. The only damage he could find was the foot restraint that had torn loose.
“The forward infrared camera is not functioning,” Muzorawa reported. “It must have been damaged on impact.”
“Repair or replace,” Krebs said flatly.
Muzorawa nodded. “I’m running a diagnostic now, Captain. If the damage is too severe to be repaired, I’ll go to the backup.”
O’Hara reported no major problems with the ship’s maneuvering systems, although one of the steering vanes had unfolded only partway. The ship had six steering vanes and two backups. Krebs ordered O’Hara to deploy one of the backups and fold the stubborn vane back into the hull.
“Life support?” Krebs asked.
Karlstad said loftily, “All my systems are functioning nominally, Captain. No problems.”
Before Krebs could comment on that, Lane said worriedly, “Captain, I can’t get the vane back. It’s stuck in the half-open position.”
Krebs scowled at her. “Fold the vane on the opposite side of the ship to the same angle and freeze it there. Deploy both backups for maneuvering.”
O’Hara nodded.
“Anything else?” the captain asked.
None of the crew had any other problems to report.
“Very well,” Krebs said. “Take a half-hour break. But no sleeping! I want you awake and alert in case I need you.”
They all disconnected and drifted back toward the food dispenser. Karlstad got there first and grabbed one of the feeding tubes. Grant let O’Hara go ahead of him.
“Going to be a gentleman, are you?” she teased.
Grant muttered, “Uh, yes, I guess so.”
“Thank you, then,” Lane said, taking the other tube.
It still bothered Grant to see her plug the tube into the socket in her neck. He felt a slight ache in his shoulders. Tension, he guessed.
Turning to Muzorawa, bobbing gently beside him, Grant said, “So we’re in the ocean.” It was idle chatter and he knew it.
“The captain handled the entry very well,” Zeb said, his voice low. “When we hit the jet stream on the first mission, half the ship’s power went out.”
“How could that be?” Grant blurted. “It’s all solid state.”
“The generator isn’t solid state,” Muzorawa countered. “One of the deuterium feed lines was knocked loose. We had a devil of a time repairing it.”
Grant was suddenly aghast. “The radiation …”
Muzorawa smiled gently. “The best thing about fusion generators, my friend, is that the radiation is all contained inside the reaction chamber. The deuterium and helium-three that feed into the chamber are not radioactive.”
“Oh,” Grant said, stretching his arms as far as he could in the cramped corner by the dispenser.
“Are you hurt?” O’Hara asked.
“No, just a pain across my shoulders. It’ll go away.”
“I’ve got a headache,” she said, “if that makes you feel any better.”
“Me, too,” said Karlstad. Turning to Muzorawa: “What about you, Zeb? Any complaints?”
The Sudanese said nothing for a moment. Then: “We will all have aches and pains, and they will grow worse as the mission continues.”
“That’s comforting.” Karlstad huffed.
“I believe part of it comes from being linked. We feel the ship’s systems as our own bodily sensations.”
Grant nodded.
“And as the systems wear down,” Muzorawa went on, “we will feel their pain.”
“Yes, I remember,” O’Hara said, nodding.
“So we’ve got more and more pain to look forward to,” Karlstad grumbled.
“Yes.”
“It’s not that bad,” said O’Hara. “It can be handled, really.”
Muzorawa smiled knowingly. “The ship’s machinery may break down, but we will not. Machines have no spirit, no courage, no drive to succeed no matter what the cost.”
“Maybe you feel that way,” said Karlstad. “I certainly don’t.”
“Yes you do, Egon,” O’Hara contradicted. “You just don’t want to admit it. Not even to yourself.”
Karlstad looked uncomfortable for a few seconds. Then he turned to Grant. “Which reminds me,” he whispered. “After this delicious repast, we should take a peek at the medical report.”
Grant couldn’t help turning to look at Krebs, floating in the middle of the bridge, linked to the entire ship. He couldn’t see her face, but her limbs looked relaxed, as if she were floating in the sun-warmed waters off some tranquil tropical beach.
Muzorawa looked puzzled. Grant explained, “Egon queried the station’s medical computer about the captain.”
Muzorawa’s expression flashed to disapproval, almost anger. “That was not wise, my friend.”
Pulling the tube from his neck, Karlstad replied, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
He ducked through the hatch to their sleeping quarters, with Muzorawa close behind him.
“Wait for me,” O’Hara hissed.
Grant said, “Finish your meal, Lane. You won’t miss anything.”
Zeb and Egon were sitting together on the end of Karlstad’s berth, hunched over his palmcomp. Grant floated up to the overhead and held himself there with a hand against the metal ceiling.
“You actually hacked into Dr. Krebs’s personal medical file?” Muzorawa whispered.
Karlstad nodded. “I’m the life-support specialist on this mission, remember. Rank hath its privileges.”
They dared not put the file on the wallscreen of their common area; Krebs could tap into that through the ship’s main computer. So Grant squinted at the tiny, green-glowing display of Karlstad’s palmcomp, hardly aware that O’Hara floated in and joined him up by the ceiling without saying a word.
“I don’t see anything unusual here,” Muzorawa muttered.
O’Hara whispered, “This is prying into her personal affairs. It’s an invasion of her privacy, Egon.”
His head still bent over the palmcomp, Karlstad answered, “She could get us all killed, Lainie. That supersedes her right to privacy, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But her medical report is fine,” Muzorawa said. “She’s fully recovered from her injuries from the first mission. ‘Fit for duty.’ It says so right there.” He pointed to the glowing green screen.
“Wait,” Karlstad whispered impatiently. “Here’s the psychology material.”
“It’s normal.”
“Boringly normal,” Karlstad agreed, sounding disappointed. “It’s almost as if—hold it! What’s this?”
Grant saw the words buried in a paragraph so filled with jargon it was barely understandable: as a result of these physical trauma, the subject is afflicted with moderate visual agnosia.
“Visual agnosia?” Grant asked aloud. “What’s that?”
“Keep your voice down!” Karlstad snapped.
“But what is it?” O’Hara echoed.
“I think I know. I’ll have to look it up to be certain.”
Muzorawa said, “You can’t access the ship’s references without the risk of the captain finding out what you’re doing.”
“And you can’t query the station’s computer again,” Grant added.
“Why not?” Karlstad demanded.
“Because you’ll get caught!”
Karlstad shut down his palmcomp. Grant pushed down from the overhead and settled on the deck, followed by O’Hara.
“Listen to me,” Karlstad whispered urgently. “We may have a crazy woman running this ship. We ought to know what this condition of hers is all about. We have that right!”
Muzorawa said, “It doesn’t matter. Now that we are in the ocean we are truly out of contact with the station.”
“Unless we trail out the antenna,” said O’Hara. “It’s five kilometers long. At our present cruisi
ng depth we could use it to contact the station.”
“Krebs would find out,” Grant warned.
“Not if we do it when she’s asleep,” countered Karlstad.
“If she goes to sleep before we start descending deeper,” O’Hara said.
“Lane, do you agree with Egon?” Muzorawa asked.
She frowned, trying to put her emotions into words. “I’m not certain. She does behave peculiarly, don’t you think?”
Grant wanted to argue against it, but instead he asked Muzorawa, “Zeb, what do you think? Should we take the chance and query the station’s medical computer again?”
For a long moment Muzorawa remained silent, obviously weighing the pros and cons of the matter. At last he said gravely, “Yes, I’m afraid we must take the risk. The psychologists may have reported her fit for duty, but the stresses of the mission might aggravate her condition—whatever it is.”
“We have a right to know,” Karlstad repeated.
“Yes,” Muzorawa agreed. “Probably it’s nothing and we are being foolish. But we should know, even if for no other reason than our own peace of mind.”
Grant suddenly got a different idea. “We could ask her,” he blurted.
“What?”
“Ask her about her condition,” Grant said.
Karlstad groaned at the thought. Muzorawa shook his head. O’Hara said, “I don’t think that would be the thing to do, not at all.”
COMMUNICATIONS
Back on duty, Grant kept one eye on O’Hara’s navigation plot. Zheng He was cruising fifteen hundred meters beneath the point where the atmospheric density equaled the density of water on Earth’s surface. The communications antenna was more than three times longer. As long as Krebs didn’t order them to go deeper, they could unspool the fiber-optic cable and contact the station.
When Krebs slept. She showed no indication of doing so. They cruised through the ocean, checking all the ship’s systems, Muzorawa standing glassy-eyed at his console while the sensors poured an unending stream of data into the computers—and sights, sounds, all sorts of sensory impressions directly into his nervous system.
The power and propulsion systems were working so smoothly that Grant almost felt bored, standing at his console. His legs ached now, and a vague, dull pain nagged at him, behind his eyes, barely on the threshold of consciousness, just enough to be bothersome. He tapped into Zeb’s sensor data, intending to peek at the incoming data for only a few moments.
Instantly he was awed by the flow of sensations that enveloped him. He could see through the water clearly, see the swirl of manna trickling from above, and—far in the distance—thicker streams of the organic particles sifting downward into the darker depths. The water flowed past him smoothly, as if he were gliding through the ocean like a fish. And the ocean was warm; Grant felt a steady glow of heat rising from the bottomless depths.
There were no creatures in this sea, he realized. No fish, no fronds of plants. We’ve got to go deeper for that. Dr. Wo said they detected the moving objects more than ten kilometers below the surface, and even then they were so far away—
“She’s asleep.”
Grant snapped his attention back to the bridge. He had to blink several times, get his perspective adjusted. I’m in this ship, he told himself, consciously disconnecting from the sensors’ data stream.
Turning, Grant saw that Krebs had actually left the bridge. The optic fibers that linked her to the ship’s systems were tucked back in their storage locker in the overhead.
“She finally left the bridge,” Karlstad said softly, furtively, “after almost fifty hours straight on duty.”
“She took a couple of naps,” O’Hara said.
“Run out the antenna,” Karlstad told her. “Quick, while we’ve got the chance.”
Muzorawa said, “Grant, it might be wise if you go to the hatch and keep an eye on her. Warn us if she gets out of her bunk.”
“I’ll have to disconnect,” Grant complained.
“I’ll monitor your systems,” Muzorawa said.
With even more reluctance than usual, Grant disconnected while O’Hara spooled out the antenna and powered up the microwave transceiver.
“Oooh, there’s a great lot of incoming messages waiting for us,” she said. Then, her expression turning puzzled: “No, wait. It’s only one message, but they’ve been repeating it over and over again.”
“Never mind the incoming crap,” Karlstad snapped. “Link me to the medical computer.”
Grant hovered by the hatch, one eye on Krebs’s berth, the other on the wallscreen that began showing blocks of medical jargon. Krebs’s bunk was shuttered off by its privacy screen. The captain was resting, alone, disconnected from the ship for the first time since they’d left the station.
He wondered about Krebs, what drove her. Nearly killed in the first deep mission, here she was back in the Jovian ocean, staying linked to the ship far longer than she had to, longer than she ought to. Is she surrendering to the emotional power of the linkage? Grant asked himself. But if she did, how could she disconnect herself voluntarily after so many hours of being linked? She must be tough, he thought; a lot stronger than I am.
“So that’s it!”
Karlstad’s exclamation made Grant turn to the bridge. The three of them were still at their consoles, and the wallscreen was covered with medical terms.
“Visual agnosia,” said Karlstad, “means she doesn’t recognize things visually. Her visual sense is impaired.”
“You mean she can’t recognize faces?” O’Hara asked.
Nodding vigorously, Karlstad said, “That’s why she looks so funny at you. She can’t tell who she’s looking at until you say something to her. Then she recognizes your voice.”
“That’s strange,” Muzorawa said.
Scrolling through the medical dictionary display, Karlstad said, “It’s rare, but there’s a considerable history on it.”
“What causes it?”
“Often it’s physical trauma to the brain, the visual cortex. A cerebral hemorrhage, for instance.”
“A stroke?”
“Or a physical blow to the head,” Karlstad added.
“But she’s had neither,” Muzorawa pointed out.
Karlstad said, “True, but she was badly injured in the first mission.”
“No head injuries, if I recall rightly,” said O’Hara.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Karlstad sounded disappointed.
Grant spoke up. “What about living in this high-pressure environment? Could that cause injury to the brain?”
“The earliest experiments did cause some nerve damage,” Karlstad said. “That’s why we raise the pressure slowly, give the body time to adjust.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happened to Dr. Krebs?” O’Hara asked.
“Obviously,” said Karlstad.
“Then what do we do about it, do you think?” she wondered aloud.
“Nothing,” Muzorawa said, “Nothing at all?”
“Krebs has adjusted to her problem. It hasn’t interfered with her work, has it?”
“No,” O’Hara said slowly, “I suppose it hasn’t.”
“Not yet,” Karlstad said.
“The medical board approved her for this mission,” Muzorawa pointed out. “The psychologists did not object.”
Karlstad looked unconvinced. “She’s a walking time bomb,” he muttered.
“I disagree,” Muzorawa said.
“She could get us all killed.”
Muzorawa’s expression was utterly serious. “Egon-all of you—I think our best course of action is to watch Dr. Krebs carefully. If she shows signs of disability, if she begins to behave erratically, then we will have to decide what should be done. At present, she’s performing quite normally.”
“Staying linked to the ship for nearly fifty hours is normal?” Karlstad challenged.
“Did she perform her duties well?” Muzorawa shot back. “Have we accomplished our mission goals
so far?”
The two men were glaring at each other, Grant saw: Karlstad with his usual haughty, almost sneering expression; Muzorawa stolid and determined.
O’Hara broke the deadlock. “I’d better take a peek at this message the station’s been beaming to us all this time.”
Muzorawa said, “Good idea.” Karlstad nodded.
The medical dictionary’s text vanished from the wallscreen. In its place the blue-and-white symbol of the International Astronautical Authority appeared, quickly replaced by the scowling face of a man in a gray tunic, sitting at what appeared to be a workstation aboard a spacecraft.
Grant twitched with surprise. He knew that face. It was Ellis Beech, the New Morality official who had recruited him to spy on Dr. Wo.
Beech’s dark eyes were steady and calm, his long narrow face looked composed, almost indifferent. Yet to Grant there seemed to be something seething beneath that impassive cool exterior, something unrelenting, implacable.
“Dr. Krebs, I am the chairman of the IAA inspection team approaching the station. You have previously been ordered by Dr. Wo to abort your mission and return to Station Gold. He gave that order at my insistence. Now I personally order you to return to the station. In the name of the IAA, I order you to abort your mission and return at once! We know that the message you sent with the data capsule is a deliberate falsehood. You are still able to maintain communications contact with the station. Return at once or you will be stripped of your position at Station Gold and your professorship in Heidelberg will be forfeited. Abort your mission and return immediately!”
Grant stared at Beech’s icy image on the wallscreen. How could he be chairman of the IAA team? he wondered, his mind spinning. The New Morality must have taken control of the inspection team. Maybe they’ve taken over the entire IAA!
Karlstad also stared at the wallscreen, mouth hanging open in shock.
“They found out about your tapping the medical computer,” Muzorawa said softly. It wasn’t an accusation, merely a statement of lamentable fact.
“That they did,” O’Hara agreed sadly.
Karlstad closed his mouth, shrugged, then said, “Okay, so they found out. What do we do about it?”
“I don’t know,” said Muzorawa. “This is an awful situation.”
