Flight of Exiles e-2

by Ben Bova

  Dan said, “But our children will.”

  Val’s children, Larry thought bitterly.

  “All right,” he said aloud. “It seems there’s no way around it, and therefore we don’t need to decide about heading elsewhere. Not right now at least.” He turned to the chief medic. “Will you please start the procedure for reviving an astronaut team? It looks like we’re going to be sending groups of people down to the planet’s surface.”

  The meditech nodded.

  The meeting broke up soon afterward. As people got up from their seats and headed for the doors, Larry went straight to Val.

  “You didn’t tell me about your father’s notes,” he said.

  She was standing by the table, looking very serious and even more beautiful than he had ever known before.

  “It happened just as I said.” Her voice was strained, as if she was trying to keep any emotion out of it. “I went to the desk to write a letter to Dan, to tell him what I’d told you, and found father’s handwritten notes in the drawer.”

  “You haven’t changed your mind… about last night.”

  She looked away from him. “No. I’m not going to be the reason for you and Dan to hurt each other. I simply refuse.”

  “But what’s this about you doing astronomical work? I didn’t know…”

  “There are lots of things about me that you don’t know,” Val said. “But I know all about you and Dan. Both of you think the other one deliberately tried to kill Father. Well, if someone else started to work in the observatory, what’s to stop the would-be killer—if there is one—from attacking him?”

  Realization dawned on Larry, together with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You mean that if you’re the one working in the observatory…”

  “Neither you nor Dan will hurt me. There, it sounds silly and terrible at the same time, doesn’t it? But if you’re both convinced that one of you is a murderer, then the only person who can continue the astronomical work has to be me.”

  “But… suppose there is a murderer, and it’s neither one of us? Suppose it’s somebody else?”

  Valery didn’t hesitate an instant. “If that happens, then maybe you two idiots can work together to find out who the real madman is!”

  She turned and headed for the door. From the set of her slim shoulders, the stubborn toss of her golden hair, Larry could see quite clearly that she didn’t want him to try walking with her.

  He sagged back against the table, feeling utterly drained. The whole world is falling apart… everything’s breaking up and there’s nothing I can do —

  Then a thought struck him. Dan had said that they’d have to get fresh deuterium for the reactors from the water on the planet. That meant sending a complex load of equipment down to the surface, together with people trained to run it. It means Dan will have to go down to the surface of the planet. The dangerous, maybe deadly surface.

  Larry almost smiled.

  11

  Guido Estelella was an astronaut, the only man on ship—asleep or awake—who had experience in piloting rocket craft from orbit down to the surface of a planet and back up again. He hadn’t been one of the political prisoners, back when the ship had been an orbital jail, a place of exile for Earth’s scientists. He had been a free man, an astronaut by training. It was his joy.

  But the same Earth government that made prisoners of thousands of scientists and sent them into orbital exile with their families had also cut space flight down to almost nothing. Orbital flights, mostly to repair communications and weather satellites; a few flights to the Moon each year, bringing workers to the factories there. That was all. No more Mars flights. No further exploration of the solar system. Earth could not afford it.

  So when the prisoners coaxed Earth’s government into letting them drive their orbiting prison out toward the stars, Estelella volunteered to join them.

  “After all,” he said, “it’s my namesake, isn’t it?”

  So he went to the stars, frozen in cryosleep for nearly fifty years, to be awakened when he was needed. Now he was awake and working.

  And most unhappy.

  Guido Estelella stood in an insulated pressure suit on the surface of the new world. Everyone else called it Major, a contraction from “Alpha Centauri’s major Planet.” But in his own mind, Estelella called it Femina: a woman, a certain kind of woman—beautiful, selfish, treacherous, hot-tempered, dangerous.

  He always felt tired here. Maybe it was the high gravity, putting an extra load on his muscles. Maybe it was just the constant fear.

  For six weeks now, Guido had been flying a small landing craft down to the ground from the main ship, which was now orbiting five hundred kilometers above the planet’s equator. At least twice each week he carried men and equipment down to the small base camp they had made by the shore of one of Femina’s landlocked seas. The rest of the time he trained youngsters to fly the landing craft. There had been one wreck, killing two men and a girl. There had been several very close calls. Guido had aged more in the past six weeks than he did in his fifty years of cryosleep. Far more.

  At the moment he was standing halfway between the stubby, winged landing rocket and the sprawl of equipment and plastic bubble tents that made up the base camp. A strong wind was whipping the green water of the sea into whitecaps, but inside his pressure suit, Guido felt the wind only as a faint screeching sound, muffled by his earphones. What was bothering him wasn’t the wind, but the ugly brownish-yellow cloud that it was carrying toward them from the sea horizon.

  “Ship to camp,” a girl’s voice crackled in his earphones. “We’ve confirmed that there’s a new volcano active on the far coast of your sea, and the prevailing wind is bringing the fallout in your direction.”

  Guido nodded unhappily inside his helmet. He clicked a button on his waistband panel.

  “I think we’d better get the shuttle up and out of here before that cloud arrives.”

  “Take off early? But we’re not ready.” It was Dan Christopher’s voice, coming from the camp, much stronger than the ship’s transmission.

  Guido began to head toward the shuttle craft. “The last time I saw a cloud like that, it brought with it a lightning storm that kept us grounded for two days. And the rain had such a high sulfur content and so many stones in it that we had to resurface the entire top of the shuttle. The heat shield, even the pilot’s bubble were pitted and etched. I don’t want to get caught on the ground like that again.”

  “But you can’t take all of us with you. Some of us will have to stay here during the storm. And the equipment…”

  “My first responsibility is for the shuttle. Your equipment is • protected, and you can sit out the storm in the underground shelter.” He reached the shuttle’s hatch, popped open the access panel, and pressed the stud inside. The hatch cracked open and the ladder unfolded at his feet.

  “Wait,” Dan’s voice responded. “I’ll send out as many people as we can. How many do you have room for?”

  “Four. Unless you want to remove some of the cargo we packed aboard this morning.”

  “The deuterium? No chance. It’s worth a helluva lot more than any of us.”

  Guido looked at the sea. It was frothing heavily now, steep breakers building up and dumping their energy on the sandy shore. The grass and trees were swaying in the mounting wind. The cloud was closer, spreading, blotting out the sunshine arid the golden sky.

  “I can wait about ten minutes,” he said.

  Inside the main bubble tent of the camp, Dan frowned and glared at the radio set. The main tent was a hodgepodge of radio equipment, viewscreens, cooking units, tables, crated supplies, folding tables and chairs, and five busy people.

  Dan could hear the wind’s growing anger outside. One of the girls seated at an analysis workbench glanced up at the roof of their transparent bubble: the plastic was rippling in the wind, making an odd kind of crinkling noise that they’d never heard before. It had taken them days to get accustomed to thin
gs like wind, and the noises that an open world makes. Now it was starting to sound frightening.

  “Nancy, Tania, Vic…you three get into suits right away and get to the ship. Ross, you and I are going to stay. Vic, bring the latest tank of deuterium with you.”

  “But it’s less than half full,” Vic argued.

  Dan waved him down. “I know, but we’d better get it shipboard. No telling how bad this storm can get; might damage the equipment. The deuterium’s far too valuable to risk.”

  Vic nodded.

  “Get into a suit,” Dan said. “Ross and I will hang on here.”

  Ross Cranston glanced sharply at Dan, but said nothing. He didn’t like being second-best to a meter-tall tank of stainless steel, even though he knew that the deuterium gas inside it was more important to the ship than any computer operator.

  The two girls and Vic were suited up in a few minutes, moving slowly in the heavy gravity. Vic hefted the tank by its handles, his knees giving slightly under its weight.

  “Can you manage it?” Dan asked anxiously. “Yeah.” Vic’s voice was muffled by his helmet. The three of them cycled through the airlock and started trudging heavily through the wind-blown sand and grit toward the sleek little shuttle rocket. Dan watched them through the tent’s transparent plastic. The two girls each grabbed a handle of the tank and helped Vic to carry it.

  Turning, Dan saw that Ross was already at the hatch to the underground shelter.

  “I’m going to suit up and make a last check of the refining equipment,” Dan told him. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the wind, even though Ross was only a few meters away.

  Ross nodded, visibly unhappy.

  “Stay by the radio while I’m outside,” Dan said as he reached for one of the two remaining pressure suits hanging stiffly by the airlock.

  Ross frowned, but nodded again.

  He’s scared, Dan said to himself. Scared of the storm, and scared that I might get hurt and need him to come out and help me.

  Neither of them had been on the ground when the first storm had struck, several weeks ago. Two people had been badly hurt when the wind toppled their communications antenna squarely onto the main tent. After that, the underground shelter was dug and the antenna was moved away from the rest of the camp. By the time Dan had his suit zipped up, the shuttle’s rocket engines had roared to life, out-howling even the mounting fury of the storm. Dan reached for his helmet and held it in both hands as he watched the shuttle trundle forward on its landing wheels, then gather speed and scream past the tent toward the beach. Its image shimmered and grew hazy in the heat from its own exhaust, but, squinting, Dan made out the delta-shaped craft as its nose lifted from the ground. It rolled along on its rear wheels for a moment longer, then it seemed to shoot almost straight upward, angling into the sky like a white arrowhead against the gathering darkness of the clouds.

  In less than a minute the rolling thunder of the rocket’s takeoff had rumbled away, leaving only the keening of the wind and the flapping of the tent’s supposedly tearproof plastic.

  As he put the helmet on, Dan thought, There’s a big difference between seeing storms on videotapes and really being in one.

  He checked the suit radio. “I’m going out now, Ross.”

  “Okay.”

  Dan turned to see Ross through the helmet’s faceplate. The computerman looked scared and sullen.

  “If you go down into the shelter, tell me before you leave the radio. I don’t want to be stuck alone out there.”

  “I will.”

  Dan nodded and opened the inner airlock hatch. While the airlock was busy sealing itself and pumping out the good breathable air, Dan was trying to calm himself.

  He wasn’t frightened, he was excited; happy, really. He knew that was dangerous. If you’re scared, like Ross, you don’t take chances. But Dan was soaring high, spaced out on the excitement of being on the surface of a planet, the planet, the new world, facing its dangers unafraid. The storm, the wind, the crashing of the sea, the tossing golden trees, the dust and sand that was blowing through the air in ever-thickening clouds—it was wild and free. Not like the ship. Not like the quiet, orderly world where everything went according to schedule and there was absolutely no difference between one day and the next. This was life!

  The airlock lights turned green. Dan clumped heavily to the outer hatch and turned its control wheel. It moved slowly, slowly, then the hatch popped open and a gust of grit-filled air puffed into the airlock.

  Dan had to lean hard against the hatch to get it to swing open wide enough for him to go outside. Already his muscles felt strained. The high gravity made everything feel heavier than it should: the suit weighed down on him, the hatch opened grudgingly. It was an effort to lift one booted foot off the floor of the airlock and place it on the sandy soil outside.

  The wind caught Dan by surprise. He had heard it long enough, but now he felt it as physical force. Even inside the suit he could feel the wind buffeting him, trying to push him down.

  He grinned.

  Turning his back to the wind, he began trudging along the edge of the circular tent, heading for the once-gleaming jumble of metal shapes that was the refinery.

  It gleamed no longer. Many weeks of being exposed to this corrosive atmosphere had dulled its exterior finish, and the storms and rains had etched and pitted the metal. But the insides still work. Dan told himself as he looked along the length of pipes that led down to the sea. Take in sea water, extract the deuterium, then return what’s left—about 99.97 percent of it. We don’t want much from you, Dan said silently to the sea. Just three hundredths of a percent. Enough to live on.

  A shriek of metal against metal made him jump in sudden fear. From inside the helmet, he couldn’t see what was happening. He had to turn around and lean his whole body backward to look up.

  One of the solar battery panels—the collection of silicon-based cells that converted sunlight into electricity—had ripped loose from the roof of the refinery’s storage tower. Now it was sliding along the bulbous metal domes of the separation equipment, banging, screeching… It blew free and sailed like a jagged enormous leaf into the wind, pinwheeling as it disappeared into the dust clouds that were blowing everywhere.

  “Never worked right anyway!” Dan yelled. The solar batteries had been badly eroded by the sulfur-rich air. Dan had been forced to fly a small generator down from the ship to provide electricity for the base camp.

  Everything else on this side of the equipment complex looked tight and safe. Even if the other solar panels rip off, that’s no problem. Unless they tear into the tent.

  Dan’s legs were starting to tremble with exertion. He forced himself to plod around the side of the big refinery. As he turned the corner, the wind caught him head-on and nearly toppled him backward. Leaning heavily into the wind, he trudged on.

  It was getting very dark now. And the wind was screaming insanely. Dust clouds made it hard to see any distance at all.

  Lightning flashed. Dan heard it crackle in his earphones as it flickered out over the sea, brightening the whole scene for an eyeblink’s time. It sent a jolt of irrational fear through him.

  Then came the boom of the thunder, distant but menacing. Dan moved on.

  He couldn’t see the radio antenna in the darkness and dust. Then another flash of lightning and there it was, swaying like a gigantic, leafless, branchless tree. But it held firm. The new anchor pins were doing their job.

  A sudden gust of wind actually lifted one of Dan’s boots off the ground. He swayed for a moment, fought hard for balance, then planted the foot back on the ground.

  “Ross?” he called into his helmet microphone.

  No answer.

  “Ross! Are you there? I’m coming in… be back in a minute.”

  Silence. Only the crackling of lightning static in his earphones. He’s gone back into the shelter, Dan realized.

  Bending into the wind, Dan clumped forward slowly. It was painful,
each step. Another horrible tearing sound, and he saw out of the corner of his eye another of the solar panels flipping off madly, hitting the ground with one corner and bouncing along like a child’s runaway toy.

  Then a more ominous sound. A groaning, gut-wrenching sound, like the earth itself being pulled apart. Dan looked up at the metal domes and towers alongside him, but couldn’t see any cause for the…

  It moaned again. And fainter, the sound of—flapping. Something soft, something plastic… the tent!

  Dan pushed himself madly along the side of the refinery, trying to get to the side where the tent stood. If it still stood. He stumbled and fell face forward, but hardly stopped at all. He crawled on all fours for a few paces, then painfully pushed himself to his feet again. The wind was getting intolerable.

  Grabbing hold of a projecting ladder-rung from the metal tower he stood next to, swaying in the howling insanity of the wind, Dan rested for a moment, then pushed on. He rounded the corner and saw what the groaning noise was.

  The tent was collapsed and flapping on the ground like some monstrous dying pterodactyl. Dan couldn’t see the airlock, couldn’t tell if Ross had made it to the underground shelter before the collapse. If he hadn’t, he was dead inside there.

  Only one thing was certain. There was no way for Dan to get inside to safety.

  The storm howled triumphantly.

  In the ship’s observation center, at the zero-gravity hub, the only sound was the faintest whispering of the air-circulating fans.

  Larry hovered weightlessly at the transparent wall of the big plastiglass blister, staring out at the massive curving bulk of the golden planet below. A huge yellow-brown smear was staining one section of the planet’s surface: the storm.

  He touched the plastiglass wall with his fingertips, anchoring himself lightly in place. There was a wall phone within arm’s reach, but he didn’t want to use it, didn’t want to hear what was happening.