Starhawk (A Priscilla Hutchins Novel)

by McDevitt, Jack

  “I’ll try not to, Jake. But I can’t make any promises.”

  “How’s it going? You have word on the Grosvenor yet?”

  “We’re waiting for it now. It should have arrived in the Ross area Tuesday. Let’s hope.”

  “Other than that, how are you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  “Well, I’m still behind a desk.”

  “Those people are idiots. But your time will come, Priscilla. Just hang in.”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, Yoshie called: “Ross is reporting that the Grosvenor came in on schedule, Priscilla. They got the message. So they should be well on their way by now.”

  * * *

  PRISCILLA’S JOURNAL

  I was glad to hear about Alicia. I didn’t think Jake would ever be happy down on the Blue Ridge. But he’s fallen in love, and that’s great. I was seriously worried about him when he left, but he seems to be adapting pretty well. He tells me he still misses life up here, but he sounds perfectly content. I can hear it in his voice. I hope he’s smart enough to hold on to her. She looks good, but she’s a lot younger than he is. So who knows? Well, I guess I should have realized all along that he would find somebody. I’m happy for him. And I don’t want to admit this, but I’m almost jealous.

  Still no explosion from Monika. I guess she was all just talk.

  —January 22, 2196

  Chapter 31

  SHE COULDN’T GET them out of her mind, Quinn with his electric features, his annoyance and frustration written all over them; Martha, the pilot; Esther, the leading lady; Bojing, who’d admitted to the media that he was scared about going so far from home; and Gustav, who’d said that he wanted to devote his life to fighting disease and that he believed researchers could profit by what was being found at Teegarden.

  Quinn and Martha both were married, and both had kids.

  Bojing had lost a sister a year before during a robbery attempt. Esther was an only child. And Gustav—Well, he’d come out of a poor neighborhood, first in his family to go to college, and now he was sitting on another world.

  At the end of the day, she stopped by Frank’s office. He didn’t look happy to see her, but there was nothing unusual about that. “Frank,” she said, “is there any provision to keep the families informed?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The families of Quinn and his people. When we hear something, do we contact the families, let them know what’s going on?”

  “It’s not our responsibility, Priscilla,” he said.

  “Whose is it?”

  “We pass everything to the Academy people. It’s up to them.”

  * * *

  SHE DIDN’T PUSH it. Maybe he was right, and they were better advised to stay out of it.

  Her appetite had gone away, so she passed on the Cockpit for dinner, passed on dinner altogether, and went into a game room. She sat down in front of one of the displays, and chose Destiny, which allows participants to explore the stars, where they discover glittering civilizations, hungry aliens, and hi-tech structures designed to trap interstellars like flies in spiderwebs. But she couldn’t keep her mind on it and shut it down after ten minutes and a close call with a white dwarf, which very nearly sucked her ship out of the sky.

  There were other games: takeover efforts by runaway robots, interstellar wars, experiments gone awry producing dragons that threatened to gobble down New York or Geneva or wherever if you don’t step in with your laser cannon and stop them. But they were all boring futuristic shoot-outs. It was as if the manufacturers, or the players, didn’t recognize the sheer drama in looking down at a stretch of ground that had never been touched by a human foot. How about, she thought, a game in which you play God? Design a new set of rings for Saturn? Or put together a new nebula? Maybe the Butterfly Nebula?

  Well, no, none of that would be very popular. But maybe a game involving rescue missions?

  She was still sitting in front of the screen when Cal called. “Priscilla,” he said, “I was hoping you’d be home this weekend.”

  “No, I’m still at Union, Cal. I won’t be getting back to Princeton for a bit.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You know, I’m discovering how much I miss you.” She sensed a transformation into his alter ego, Mark Klaybold. “This place feels so empty without you.”

  “Cal, I’m sorry.” She almost called him Mark. “There’s just not much we can do about it.”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily true. I’d love to take you to dinner Saturday.”

  “That would be nice. I wish we could manage it.”

  “So we can do it?”

  She wondered if he hadn’t heard her. “Cal,” she said, “I won’t be in town.”

  “No, no.” Across the room, someone cheered. Apparently they’d blown up an alien star cruiser. “Where are you, Priscilla?”

  “In a game room.”

  “Oh. Okay. Anyway, I was thinking of going up there. To the Wheel. I’ve never been in orbit before. And this seems like the perfect time. I’m not involved in the show right now, so—”

  Not a good idea, she thought. She liked Cal, but inviting him up for the weekend had some obvious drawbacks. “Have you looked at the price of shuttle tickets?” she asked.

  “Yes. They aren’t cheap, are they? But you’ve had to spring for them.”

  “I’m part of the organization, Cal. I get a pretty good rate.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, I’m not going to have much time this weekend. My schedule’s loaded. But I’ll be going down for a few days next month. If you want, maybe we can get together then.”

  “Promise?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Absolutely.”

  * * *

  SHE’D HAD ENOUGH of the games. She wandered over to the Cockpit and ordered a barbarossa. The news channels were showing pictures of Quinn and his people. They looked okay. Almost content, actually. Which meant the pictures weren’t recent.

  On one of the talk shows, Miles Conover and his gal pal Ivy sat around discussing current topics with assorted guests, and she got a surprise. One of the guests was Michelle Worth, the reporter who’d challenged Governor McGruder.

  “—Are you saying that the death of Captain Miller could have been avoided?” Ivy was asking. The question was directed at Michelle.

  The reporter shook her head. “I’m not saying that. I am saying that there’s no provision for taking action when things go wrong. Ivy, look at what’s going on now at Teegarden. People are stuck out there with no supplies, and they had to wait three days for the Grosvenor even to get the news that they were in trouble. Three days to start the rescue effort. It’s shameful. Suppose those people were running out of air. Like Miller. Look at the attitude you get from the bosses: Well, you guys just hang on, we’ll be there in a week or two. Why isn’t there somebody at the Wheel ready to go?”

  “That’s simple enough,” said the other guest, whom Priscilla did not recognize. “It costs money. You try to buy an interstellar recently?” He was blond, overweight, and liked to roll his eyes.

  “All right,” said Michelle. “But there’s more to the story. You know who Priscilla Hutchins is, right?”

  Priscilla’s hair rose.

  “She’s the pilot,” said Conover, “who brought back some of those kids.”

  “Right. I have it from a reliable source that Hutchins tried to leave for Teegarden a couple of days ago. When news of the problem first came in. You know what happened?”

  “I have no idea,” said Conover.

  “She was stopped by the bureaucrats. From what I understand, they have an established procedure, and she wasn’t following the procedure. So the people at Teegarden will have to wait a few extra days with no food.”

  G
reat, she thought. That’s going to enhance my situation around here.

  * * *

  HER DRINK ARRIVED. She tried it, and her link chimed. “Priscilla? This is Morgan White.”

  The supervisor at Operations. “Hello, Morgan. Anything wrong?”

  “No. I just got word about something, though. Thought you should know, if you haven’t heard already. When they went through the Baumbachner, the results weren’t so good. The techs are saying that there’s a good chance if you’d activated the drive, it would either have exploded, or made the jump and exploded the next time you tried to use it.”

  * * *

  “YEAH, PRISCILLA,” FRANK said, with a smile playing on his lips. “I heard about the Baumbachner an hour ago.”

  “I wanted to say thanks.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve been right all along. We should have an emergency vehicle. They’re trying to fix the Bomb now, but I still don’t trust it. We need an emergency vehicle, but we just don’t have the funds for it. And this is why we need to stay within the system. Okay?”

  * * *

  PRISCILLA WAS TASKED with composing a reaction to the news reports. She put together a statement which, when Frank and Patricia had finished tinkering with it, pointed out that the Grosvenor was proceeding to the rescue and was expected to arrive in the Teegarden system in about three and a half days. It added that the Baumbachner had not been permitted to proceed earlier because it was no longer capable of interstellar flight. “An attempt to take it to the Teegarden system,” someone added, “would have done nothing more than kill the pilot.” It also noted that the ship was being refitted and would be maintained as an emergency vehicle. Priscilla had been instructed not to mention the fact that the actual rescue was still probably five days away. The pundits brought that issue up on the talk shows, however, and the WSA was beginning to take another beating when they caught a break: Mickey Alvin, then at the peak of his comic career, got involved in a bar fight and was arrested early that evening. That became the next day’s main story.

  Priscilla got back to her apartment just in time to watch Alvin being hauled off in cuffs. They followed with a picture of the captain of the Grosvenor, Easy Barnicle, who was wearing his no-nonsense face and assuring everyone they’d get to Teegarden in record time.

  She wanted to throw something at the screen. Priscilla thought of herself as cool and even-tempered. But that night she was angry with the world. With herself, most of all, for neglecting the maintenance of the Baumbachner. With Frank, who didn’t even understand how she’d felt; with Easy Barnicle, who was doing what she could have done if the system worked decently, and with the people on the talk shows, who were beginning to picture her as a comic figure. “Lucky she didn’t blow herself up,” Ivy said.

  Quinn and Martha, and Esther Comides—that name rolled off her tongue for some reason—and Gustav Lisak and Bojing Chou. She’d never met any of them, but she felt as if she knew them.

  What was it Frank had told her? We almost never have any emergencies.

  * * *

  “PRISCILLA,” SAID FRANK, “we’re all set to go with the platform tours. I’ve sent you the details. We want to get the program up and running as soon as possible. Think you can manage that?”

  “How soon did you have in mind?”

  “If you could start the tours a week from Monday, that would be good. What we’d like you to do is to conduct them three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Mornings would be best. Probably about ten. Take everybody around the platform, let them see the dome, get a look at Operations. If possible, it would be a good idea to show them the inside of a ship. We could use the Bomb for that. And do whatever else you think might be good. We’ll run them for a couple of months, see how they go, then make an evaluation.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Good. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  * * *

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  The prime objective of any bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival and proliferation. Whatever its stated function may be, whether ensuring the democratic operations of a nation or arranging the periodic pickup of the trash, nothing matters so much as its own continuity. It is the first consideration in time of crisis and the ultimate goal of whatever strategy is devised. Protect the organization. Those who are engaged in this immoderate pursuit are seldom conscious of any other reality. They believe they are performing their assigned tasks for the welfare of those who are theoretically being served. And when they win through, and the bureaucracy lives to engage another day, they feel they have done all that can reasonably be expected. They walk away with their consciences clear.

  —Roger Casik, Organizational Orgasm, 2177

  Chapter 32

  TRANSMISSIONS FROM QUINN and his people continued to come in, sometimes as cool analyses, sometimes in frustrated bursts. Priscilla studied their faces, weary, scared, angry, lost, knowing that when these images originated, relief was still several days away.

  It was easy enough to see that they felt a need to talk with the outside world, to reassure themselves that they weren’t alone. They ran out of water the day after they exhausted the food supply. But there was plenty of ice on the ground. They debated whether it was safe. The consensus was that it was unlikely any local microbe would be capable of doing damage to them. “We should be all right since we’re not part of the biosystem,” Quinn said. They boiled the water nonetheless, and of course still couldn’t be sure. But they knew what the likely outcome would be if they didn’t do something.

  “Hang on,” Frank told them while they watched the images. “The Grosvenor is coming.”

  Yes indeed. On their way.

  Priscilla would eventually look back on the experience as a time when she might easily have taken to drinking. The media beat the drums and posted countdowns. Two days until the Grosvenor could be expected to surface insystem. One day. And then, finally, they were there.

  But it became necessary to explain again that the ship was still almost three days away from the Teegarden world.

  Patricia showed up on Jack Kelly’s show. “We try to be there when we’re needed,” she told the host.

  Kelly looked skeptical. “But they’ve been out there with no food for, what, five or six days? And your guy is just now getting into the system. Why’d it take so long?”

  She smiled pleasantly, as if Kelly just didn’t understand reality. “It’s a long way to Teegarden’s Star. Twelve light-years, and I know twelve anythings doesn’t sound like much. But it’s an enormous distance. Jack, you have a son who’s what, about eleven?”

  “Jerry? He’s ten, Patricia.”

  “Okay. If, after you went home tonight, you were looking at that star through a telescope and it exploded, you wouldn’t see anything different. In fact, he’d be out of college before you’d see the blast.” Her voice softened. “The men and women who do the exploring, Jack, who carry out the missions, have a lot of courage. And they know how risky it is. How far they are from help. As I’ve said, we do everything possible. But there are limits to what we can do.”

  * * *

  THE GROSVENOR WAS due to arrive at the shelter Wednesday, January 27, six days after the shelter ran out of food. Unfortunately, there was no way for anyone to know for certain it had arrived because of the delay in transmissions.

  On that day, however, while the media tracked a virtual rescue they hoped was taking place, Priscilla got a call from Michelle Worth. Her defenses immediately went up.

  Michelle smiled at her out of the display. “You look happy,” she said. “It must feel good to know the rescue mission’s almost done.”

  “I hope so,” said Priscilla. “Where are you?”

  “Durham, North Carolina.”

  “That your home?”

  “It is now. The studio’s located here. And yo
u’ve an open invitation to visit next time you’re in the area.”

  “Thanks, Michelle. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to do an interview.”

  “Now?”

  “If you don’t mind. The equipment’s all set.”

  Priscilla hesitated. “I’m not sure what I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that? Is it okay with you if we get started?”

  “I’m kind of busy, Michelle.”

  “This won’t take long. Or, if you like, I can get back to you when you’re free.”

  No easy way out. “Well,” she said. “Let’s do it now. But I’d like to keep it short, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is this going to be live?” She didn’t know why she asked the question. It wouldn’t make any difference whether it was live or not.

  “No,” she said. “We were hoping to run it in about an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Priscilla. Just look directly into the screen. Yes, that’s it. That’s fine. If you’re ready, we’ll start.”

  “All right.”

  “Priscilla, welcome to the show. I wanted to ask you about the people stranded at Teegarden. Everybody knows it takes days to pass messages from one star system to another. You tried to save time by going to the rescue as soon as you got word of the problem out there. But the bureaucrats stopped you. I wonder if you wanted to comment on that?”

  “The bureaucrats stopped me?”

  She laughed. “You must be a bit frustrated, aren’t you? I mean, the assumption is that the Grosvenor got there today, or will get there before the day’s over. Or maybe tomorrow or Friday. But you could have been there two days ago.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Priscilla hesitated. She didn’t want to admit that the Baumbachner would have blown up if she’d tried to make the jump with it. Of course maybe Michelle already knew that. “They didn’t want me taking the ship because it wasn’t equipped for interstellar travel. I didn’t know that. My boss saved me a lot of wasted time.”