Ordinarily, Bill would have told her the channel was open. This time, a green light blinked on, without comment.
“Tor,” she said, “I don’t know whether you can hear me. I wanted you to know we haven’t given up.”
Time slowed on the bridge. Somebody’s chair creaked. The bleeps and squeals of electronic systems throughout the ship grew audible. The air was thick and warm and heavy.
“But the situation at the moment isn’t good…” She laid it out for him, explained that the chindi had never jumped, that it was slower than light, that it was nevertheless moving so fast they couldn’t come alongside it to take him off. It was too slow to catch. They were making a new attempt to contact whoever was running the chindi. They had an idea how it might be accomplished. It was a long shot, but they weren’t going to give up.
“—I don’t want to hold out false hope,” she said.
A window opened in the navigation screen: ESTIMATED DISTANCE TO CHINDI: 3.6 A.U.’s.
And below it: CHINDI MOVING AT.26C WHEN LAST SEEN BY LONGWORTH.
“This transmission won’t get to you for almost a half hour. You’ll pass us a bit later. About an hour and twenty minutes from the time you receive this. Tor…” Her voice broke, and she stopped.
OBJECTS IN OORT CLOUD PREDOMINANTLY ROCK AND ICE. SOME IRON.
The Phillies sketch smiled down at her. Had the world ever really been that sunlit?
“Tor, we’re asking the crew to help. The aliens.” She sank back in her chair and stared out through the bulkhead into the darkness. “I’m sorry, Tor. I wish there were more we could do.
“You won’t be able to talk to me. You’ll only be in range for an instant. We estimate you’ll pass us at seventy-five thousand kilometers per second.” She thought about trying to lighten the moment, to find something clever to tell him.
Just as well.
“Bill,” she said, “are we still transmitting the package for the chindi?”
“Yes, Hutch.”
“Course and speed still constant?”
“Yes, Hutch.”
“No way it could work,” she told Alyx and Nick.
Alyx nodded. Nick’s jaw muscles worked.
Hutch kept the channel open, talking to him throughout the approach. When the chindi had closed to within 200 million kilometers, she went down to the cargo deck, collected a telescope out of storage, and put on an e-suit. “Tor,” she said, “I’ll be outside when you pass.”
“Hutch.” Bill sounded unhappy. “There’s a danger. If the chindi has collected any loose rock—”
“Bill?”
“Yes, Hutch?”
“I’ll be outside. I won’t fall off.”
She pulled on grip shoes and a set of air tanks and activated the suit. Throughout the process she continued to talk to Tor. But her voice kept going high, and she had to fight down occasional spasms of rage. All your fault, dummy.
“Hutch,” said Bill, “range is 40 million kilometers. Sensors have acquired it. It will pass us in about eight minutes.”
She let herself into the airlock, closed the hatch, and depressurized.
“Hutch, I wish you wouldn’t do this.”
“Don’t worry, Bill.”
Alyx’s voice: “Be careful, Hutch.”
“I will. Bill, open the hatch.” The system hadn’t responded when she touched the press pad. Now it cycled up into the overhead. She stepped outside and gazed at the stars. The Twins weren’t visible, of course. Even their sun was lost out there somewhere.
She stood quietly until Bill interrupted her thoughts. “Hutch,” he said, “chindi range is 4.1 million kilometers. It is fifty seconds away.”
She set the chronometer built into her sleeve. “Where will it pass?”
“Approximately three hundred kilometers off the port side.”
“Get pictures as it goes by.”
“They won’t be very clear. It’s moving too fast.”
“Do the best you can.” She retreated to the portside sensor array, where Tor had thrown his coin into the night. The weight of the sky pressed on her.
“There’s a configuration of four stars in a line two degrees off the stern. The second star is the class-B, the sun in the Gemini system. The chindi will be coming almost directly out of it. Maybe a little to the far side as you look at it.”
“Okay. Thanks.” She raised the telescope.
“Don’t expect to see anything.”
“I know.”
“I mean, even if we were only a hundred meters away, you wouldn’t see anything.”
“Shut up, Bill.”
“I will. But I hope you don’t get pinged while you’re out there. They’ll saddle me with making out the reports.”
She held on to the array, her feet planted on the hull, straining toward the four stars. “I’m outside, Tor,” she said, quietly. “You’re only a few seconds away now. I wish you could talk to me. I wish I could make this easier for you.”
The scopes lined up to try for pictures. A shadow crossed the stars. Not the chindi. This was moving too slowly and in the wrong direction. She didn’t get a good look, simply felt its passage. A piece of the oort cloud. A rock. Possibly a cloud of dust.
“I love you, Tor,” she said. And she imagined she heard a voice on the link, a distant whisper. Then it was gone, and she was left staring out at the stars.
Chapter 32
If you listen closely, you can hear Betelgeuse.
— LINE FROM “HYPERLOVE,”
COMPOSED AND SUNG BY PENELOPE PROPP, 2214
TIME TO GIVE up.
She walked across the hull and climbed back in through the airlock. Nick asked if she was all right, and Alyx was waiting for her when she came up the ramp out of cargo.
Tor had stood casually at the exact spot where she’d been and had lobbed his dollar at the universe.
She thought about the coin, and the array of scopes turning to try to pick up the chindi, and the shadowy object that had passed nearby. And the sketch depicting her as a young goddess gazing down on Icepack.
And always there would be Hutchins in the on-deck circle. A Philly. (Was that the way they would have said it? Was the female version a filly?) Much more realistic, that version of herself. Closer to the real Hutchins. Hutchins with a smile, vulnerable, looking a little at sea about what to do with the four bats. No, hardly wielding them. Supporting. Hanging on for dear life as she had always hung on when things got tough.
Nick looked at her encouragingly as they filed onto the bridge. We’ll get through it. She tried to look as if she was in command of her own emotions, and called up Bill. “Did we get the pictures?”
“First one coming on-screen now.”
It was blurred.
“I’ve had to do some enhancement.”
The chindi took shape. It seemed elongated, stretched to the rear, longer and sleeker than she remembered.
“There has been no reply from its command structure,” he added unnecessarily.
“Okay, Bill.”
“But I would call your attention to something.” He magnified the image, focusing on the area around the exit hatch.
There was a figure. Smeared, but unquestionably Tor! He was standing with his hand raised.
Waving.
Letting her know he’d been listening.
Someone squeezed her shoulder. Hutch fought back tears and eased into her chair. It was impossible to make out the face, to be sure even that it was a male. But she knew the yellow pullover shirt and the frumpy brown slacks.
Tor’s clock showed that he had seventeen minutes left. Plus six hours on the tanks.
Her mind kept returning to Tor tossing the dollar off the hull, to the batting circle, and to something else. The object that had drifted by while she was outside.
“Just a rock,” Bill said when she told him about it.
A comet waiting to be born.
Swing four bats so one seems lighter.
My God. There was a
way. But she didn’t have enough time.
“What’s wrong, Hutch?” Nick was getting her a glass of water. Did she look that beaten down?
Greenwater.
Linear momentum is never lost during a hyperspace transit.
And the conversation with Tor.
“The momentum of the coin is preserved. It gets transferred to the Memphis. So the ship is traveling that much faster when it makes the jump back into standard space.”
“By a dollar.”
“Yes.”
“How much does that come to?”
She wiped her eyes and looked again at the clock. The power cell was all but dead. He was on his tanks. She calculated what they would have to do. What would be needed. It would take a half day. No less than that. No way it could be less.
She put herself in his place, riding into the night, waiting for the air to run out. She didn’t think she’d put up with that. More likely, she’d turn off the suit. Get it over with.
“We might have been able to do it,” she whispered to Bill. Her voice shook.
“Do what?” he asked gently.
She didn’t reply, but Bill knew what she was saying. He appeared beside her, wearing a dark jacket and tie.
“The Greenwater Effect,” she said.
He gazed steadily at her.
“I needed to think of it sooner.” The bridge was blurry. “We can’t get it done in six hours.”
“What’s the Greenwater Effect?” asked Nick.
But Bill was holding something back. “What?” she asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“He has more than six hours.”
“How do you mean?” He was wrong. She was sure of it. She’d done the calculation herself. Set the clock herself.
“Hutch, the chindi has been moving at a quarter light speed. Think about it.”
Nick was staring at her with a quizzical expression, asking her to explain.
Relativity! In terms of traveling through space, the superluminals are slow. Hutch wasn’t accustomed to thinking in relativistic terms.
“Yes,” she said. Time was running more slowly on the chindi. “I never thought—”
“That’s correct, Hutch.”
“How much time do we have?”
“The temporal differential at their velocity is roughly 3 percent.”
“Forty-five minutes a day. Three days to accelerate. So make that maybe twenty minutes each. He’d been out here…”
“It comes to about four more hours, Hutch.”
“You knew this all along.”
“Yes.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me.”
“I saw no reason to. It would only have caused additional pain.”
“All right. Tell me if this works.”
“Go ahead.”
The superluminals could get up to about.027c, roughly one-tenth what she needed to match the chindi. “If we found a rock ten times our mass, would the Longworth be able to haul it up to half delta-vee?”
“Yes. I see no reason why not. But not within the specified time.”
“It would take more than ten hours?”
“Yes.”
“How much more?”
“Well outside your parameters. He’d be dead before we could get there.”
“How about the media ship, the McCarver? It only carries a handful of people, right?”
“Its capacity is listed at five plus the captain.”
“How does its mass compare with ours?”
“It is 43 percent.”
Okay. Maybe there was a chance yet. “Could the Longworth get a rock that was ten times their mass up to half delta-vee? In ten hours?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Now add the McCarver’s mass to the rock. Can it still be done?”
She saw understanding dawn in Bill’s eyes. That was another effective trick he’d mastered. “I make it eight hours, fifteen minutes, with a fudge factor of about 6 percent.”
“Would somebody,” asked Alyx, “please tell me what we’re talking about?”
“A rescue, love,” said Hutch. “Bill, we need a channel open. Quick.”
“To whom?”
“To Tor.”
“You have it,” he said.
The light came on, but she thought a moment before saying anything. Don’t put any ideas into his head. “Tor,” she said, “we have an idea that might still work. Better than the other one. Hang on.”
SHE TALKED WITH Yurkiewicz on the Longworth and with Yuri Brownstein on the McCarver. No one could tell her why her idea wasn’t feasible, but when she’d finished explaining, Brownstein looked pained. “What happens to us when it’s over?” he asked. “We’re adrift with no way I can see of ever getting back to port.”
“Nobody’s going to leave anybody adrift. As soon as I know you’re willing to help, I’ll forward a message to the Academy. Let them know what else we need.”
Brownstein was a small, bullet-headed man who never smiled. “Hell, Hutch,” he said, “it’s a crazy idea, and we could be stuck like that for weeks. I’d like to top off my tanks first.” He meant scooping off some hydrogen from one of the Twins.
“We don’t have time,” she said. “What’s your fuel look like?”
“About 80 percent.”
“That’s enough. How about you, John?”
“A little less. Seventy-three. It should be sufficient. Although we’re probably going to end up adrift out there, too.”
Brownstein looked like a man whose pocket was being picked. “Damn it all, Hutch, we’re going to a lot of trouble for this guy. How’d he get stuck over there in the first place?”
“You don’t want to hear it, Yuri. Right now let’s concentrate on bailing him out. And we’ll be doing it under spectacular circumstances. You’ll both be heroes.”
Yurkiewicz’s gaze hardened. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
“It’s just the game for us,” said Brownstein. “UNN to the rescue.”
“What worries me,” said Yurkiewicz, “is that none of these engines are designed for the kind of strain we’re about to put on them. What happens if they blow?”
“Party’s over,” said Hutch. “But the Academy will accept liability for any damages.”
“Does that,” he continued, “include funeral expenses?”
Hutch resisted the temptation to point out she had just the man on board the Memphis.
Yurkiewicz looked at her skeptically. Like Matt Brawley he was an independent, hired because he was available and in the right place at the right time. “You have the authority to speak for the Academy?”
Did she? Not likely. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll put it in writing if you like.”
He considered it. “Yes,” he said. “That might be a good idea.”
“Meantime, we need to get this show on the road. I don’t need to remind you gentlemen that time is of the essence.”
Brownstein informed her he was already warming up his engines.
“Come to think of it,” said Yurkiewicz, “there might be a problem. The Professor and his people are at the Retreat. I can’t leave them there.”
“Take him with you,” said Hutch.
“You haven’t seen him there yet. I don’t think he’s going to want to leave.”
“Tell him it’s his chance to see the chindi up close. Maybe the only one he’s going to get.”
“I HAVE A likely candidate,” said Bill. “It’s not ideal. There’s a bit more mass than we would wish, but it has the advantage of being nearby.”
“We can make it work, then?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Why maybe? What’s the hitch?”
“In theory, it should be fine. But I’m not aware that the theory has been tested.”
But that wasn’t the problem, and they both knew it. “What else?”
“I have no way to measure the precise mass of the rock. I need that information to calculate the velocity at which we should enter the sa
ck, and the time we will spend there. Those factors will determine the ship’s velocity on reemergence into sublight space.”
“Can’t you make an estimate based on fuel expenditure when we begin to accelerate the thing?”
“Yes. But keep in mind that three ships are involved, and the method, even with one, is not precise. A small inexactitude can bring us out at a velocity that will lead to serious consequences.”
“Okay. We’ll just have to do the best we can. Forward the coordinates to the other ships, and let’s get over there.” She got on the allcom and informed her passengers they were moving out. “One hour twelve minutes to destination,” she said.
She sent a message to the Academy, personal to Virgil, detailing precisely what she was going to do and explaining the position the ships were going to be in afterward. “We’ll need substantial help,” she said, “and we’ll need it as quickly as you can get it out here to us.” She then detailed the method the Academy would have to use to recover the ships and the people. Sylvia wasn’t going to like it very much, but she’d like losing another member of the Contact Society even less.
Next she would need cable. Superluminals always carried a fair amount of spare cable, which was used primarily to secure cargo and supplies in flight. Some of the Memphis’s supply, however, had gone over to the chindi. The Longworth, though, should have plenty.
“Will it be strong enough?” she asked Bill.
“I’ll give you a design for the web,” he said. “If you put it together properly, the web should be reasonably strong. We will be able to accelerate within acceptable limits.”
The AI supplied detailed images of the asteroid. It was long, misshapen, swollen at either end, a dogbone. The surface was choppy and broken, slashed by ridges, pounded by rocks.
Dogbone was smaller than the Memphis, but it was five times as massive. It was tumbling slowly, moving in an orbit that would circle the central luminary every fifty thousand years or so.
They went down to the cargo bay, spread out Bill’s plans, collected the cable, and began putting it together. While they were in the middle of the effort, Mogambo came on the circuit, asking to speak with her. Very important. Was she alone?
Hutch withdrew to a workroom.
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