Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  So Tod drove into that nest of wires very carefully.

  Adding to his concerns was the string of cargo pods Flycatcher was towing: three lumpy oblongs having the same approximate size and mass as the liquid methane containers that Ouroboros had brought home. Becher's string contained nothing so exotic as refined gas—just provisions and medical supplies, cylinders of rocket fuel, new equipment and replacement parts, a Gyrfalcon Class 4 shuttle packed in shrinkwrap for the personal use of the Titan Base manager, four units of prefabricated executive housing, and assorted private inventory, plus water ballast to fill out the weight. Clean water always found a use in the outer planets.

  Only ten centimeters separated the tug's grapple arm from the connection. Now came the tricky part. Becher couldn't just unsnap the coupling on the methane tanks and hook up his own string. It wasn't like they were in orbit, with everybody just freefalling happily along. No, the sail was under constant acceleration, and so was Flycatcher. The minute he released that tanker string, it would start heading north real fast. It would still be plunging toward Earth at a measurable fraction of lightspeed—and not accelerating, which was good—but the string would be a thousand kilometers in back of Becher by the time he was ready to start dealing with it, catching it, and taking it in.

  That kind of distance in a straight line was one thing when you were moving at 259 klicks per second. But a thousand—no, even a hundred—kilometers, when it had a significant deviation, with the load moving somewhere off on its own vector, heading for the good Lord only knew where—that would be something else again.

  Add to the problem that this whole shebang was already picking up additional speed as the sail, the cargo, and Flycatcher herself started into a whipping loop around Earth. By the time the sail had made the turn and was ready to head back for Saturn, they would have added ten or fifteen more klicks of velocity. If he fumbled and dropped the tanker string now, he would probably never recover it. Not on the amount of hydrogen fuel he had in his reservoirs. At the speed everyone was going out here, Becher did not have enough leeway to go catch the string and still apply the vectoring thrust that would guide the heavy-laden tankers into a secondary loop around the Moon, turning them for final braking and entry into a stable Earth orbit.

  No. Tod Becher wanted to keep both hands on the merchandise, the incoming as well as the outgoing, at all times. That was why Flycatcher's skeletal frame had been designed with three separate grapples spaced around a vanadium-titanium towing collar: one to hold the tankers, one to retain the outbound cargo, and one to hold onto the stub end of the sail. For a minute or two, while the transfer was being made, the only thing holding this circus together would be Becher, hauling two sets of freight, holding onto a silver spinnaker that wanted to fly away, and himself boosting like the devil to compensate for the added load on all that thin Mylar and taut cabling.

  Towing assignments just didn't get any better than this.

  At 261 kilometers per second now, Tod worked the levers and servos on the grapple controls. The number one claw hooked into the anchor point of the sail module. The tanker string unhitched and was caught on the number two claw, which then hauled it to the offset position fifty meters around the tugboat's towing ring, clearing the sail's band for hooking on the outbound string. The number three, which was strained to the point of deforming its metal talons, slid the outbound cargo pods forward to the hitch point. The claw shook, like it had palsy—and then released.

  "God damn it!" Becher swore, but he did so under his breath and never took his eyes off the jumbled view of cargo, connectors, and claws that was arrayed in front of his bubble. Well, he did move one eye just a twitch, watching the tumbling cargo pods drift back along Flycatcher's fat hull. He wanted to make sure they didn't bang into anything vital—like tanks filled with supercooled liquid methane—as they went. Still, all this time his hands moved smoothly, professionally, from one lever to the next, trying to stabilize the various loads.

  Except nothing was working. Claws that were clamped down remained frozen in position. The one that had opened wasn't functioning at all; instead, it just snatched back and forth mindlessly. Obviously the control box at its junction point had gone fluky and wasn't responding to the signals from Tod's board.

  Well, when all else fails, report in. It was time for Becher to dump his problems in the lap of higher authority. And anyway, he had a free hand for it now. He thumbed his throat mike and began transmitting.

  "Consolidated Services Control, this is Flycatcher. Do you read—over?"

  Garble and static answered him.

  "Shit!" he howled. It was a fine day for profanity. "The radio too?"

  Nothing was working right.

  At this point a light on his control board told him the whole of the bad news. Flycatcher's main engine had also acquired a mind of its own. Somewhere in the nest of exposed piping and heat sinks below the main combustion chamber, a feathering vane or the relay circuits that governed it had decided to turn over. Without instructions from Becher, the ship's thrust suddenly kicked sideways. He could think of no possibilities for realigning it, other than vectoring all the other control vanes against it. Then the resulting skewed thrust would eventually burn through the lightsail's film and tear this lashup apart.

  He tried it anyway.

  Nothing happened. The engine continued firing at the wrong angle. Tod was helpless at the controls of ten million tons of misbehaving machinery.

  Brute force quickly overcame spring-tensioned delicacy. Firing at right angles, Flycatcher pushed left, into the spinning spokes of the guy wires. One by one they first caught on the tugboat's blunt nose, then wrapped themselves around the main hull. The hair-thin, braided cables scored, then compressed, and finally cracked the control bubble Tod Becher had been sitting under.

  By that time, however, he had retreated into the safety of the hull and slammed the connecting hatch behind him.

  Now, clutching the handholds in the ship's tiny airlock, Becher had time to consider his fate. He was blind to the outside universe in here, of course, but he had a fix on the ship's last position, and there was a notepad strapped to the thigh of his jumpsuit. By his present calculations, one of three eventualities—all equally unpleasant—would soon be rudely thrust upon him.

  First and most immediate, Flycatcher's off-angle thrust would push the sail and herself into the Earth's atmosphere before they had completed the primary loop. Burn-up would take about ten seconds, delayed in Tod's case by the combined insulation of the tugboat's hull and the enveloping layers of Mylar film and steel cable. He could avoid that fate if he could turn the main engine off—but the only way to do that was go back out into the bubble, breathe vacuum, and work about six protectively locked-out controls at the same time. Not possible.

  As he was figuring all this, the notepad suddenly started creeping up Tod's thigh against the fabric pull of his coverall. He shortened his fingers' reach to keep on punching numbers, then found he had to stretch his arm to reach the pad. In the tugboat's weightless domain, which was still being jarred by the random accelerations of the collision, his inner ear had been unable at first to perceive any "down," a sense of collective direction. But after a second the drift became clear. He was being pushed back against the steel bulkhead.

  Was that the Earth's gravity field he was entering? No, at the present speed, still in freefall, he would never feel the incidental clutch of his home planet's gravity again.

  Then what—?

  Of course. When Flycatcher became entangled in the lightsail's rigging lines, they would have imparted the Mylar disk's spin to her hull. What he was feeling was old-fashioned angular momentum. Eventually it was going to pin him to the airlock's wall like a sock stuck inside a dryer drum.

  Oh well, it couldn't be helped… Becher wedged the notepad against his hip and resumed his chain of calculations.

  His second fate, and a little more delayed, was that the crumpled sail and its cocooned passenger would miss
the Earth, but the tugboat's thrust—which by now must be pinwheeling all over the sky—would move them laterally into a collision with the Moon. The result for Tod would be instantaneous, despite the cushioning potential of the square miles of aluminized film bundling him. Sudden decelerations from 275 kilometers per second were simply notsurvivable. He only hoped that Luna Colony's facilities on Near Side were widely enough spaced, or lucky enough, not to fall directly beneath his point of arrival.

  Idly Becher wondered if twelve million cubic meters of liquid methane would explode on impact. Even in the absence of oxygen, he supposed, the kinetic energy would likely transform its mass into… something. An atomic fusion, perhaps?

  Alternatively, if the methane survived and regasified under decompression, would its constituent molecule be light enough to reach lunar escape velocity at partial pressure? Or would the gas hang in the valleys of the Moon's highlands and seep down into its deepest craters, creating a new atmosphere for the colony?

  Becher would like to have looked up the molecular weight of CH on the ship's computer—but that system reported through his main control board, too, and was now exposed to vacuum. The one good result of this inconvenience was that the effort of trying to work out the gas pressures on his little notepad quickly solved problem number one. By the time he determined he didn't know enough about Avogadro Numbers to reach a satisfactory answer, Becher realized the broken lightsailer must already have passed around the Earth without burning up. That left him alternative two. Or number three.

  The third and most prolonged of his fates was perhaps the scariest. The sunjammer and the trapped tugboat would simply continue outward on the sail's return course. But without the controls and guy wires to bend its path, the crumpled wreck would never be able to make the turn at Saturn. Instead, it and he would fly onward into darkness. His current speed was well above the sun's escape velocity of three-point-nine-nine kilometers per second at this distance. So Tod Becher—or at least his mummified body—would be the first human being to break the sun's grasp and reach the stars.

  But then, he could always hope that, before then, the spin imparted from the sail would crush him to a paste against this bulkhead.

  277.312 km/s

  277.384 km/s

  277.465 km/s

  277.531 km/s

  Traffic Control Platform 12, in Lunar Orbit, March 21, 19:16 UT

  "What the hell is that?" Wilkins Jenning yelled. He was yelling to himself, of course, because for the past twenty-two minutes every electrical system on his platform had been out—radio, radar, cyber, you name it—everything except the artificially dumb systems that ran his life support. Thank God the cyber-circuit boys hadn't gotten around to smartening up a simple feedback loop. Still, it didn't take an Einstein to guess that the relief ship was un-fucking-likely to lift in time to take him off for his end-of-shift at the old double-zero. In another dozen hours, this pod was going to become stuffy and cold.

  But just because he was scared, alone, and likely to die, that didn't mean Wilkins Jenning had lost all sense of professionalism. If he couldn't see with his usual electromagnetic senses, he still had eyes, didn't he? And he still had the ten-power optical scope that controllers like him sometimes used to read registration numbers off the hulls of pilots who were either too stupid to use their radios or too careless to stay out of each other's orbits. And nobody was going to have the time on landing to change a registry number painted in letters three meters high on his hull and engraved half a centimeter deep into his ship's main spar before the TCP cop had a chance to call it into the Luna Colony municipal court. Heightened perception was the lawman's first line of defense.

  Jenning swung his little telescope toward the big, bright star he had seen off to the west. Two seconds ago, it had been just a fourth-magnitude glimmer tucked under the arm of a darkly shadowed new Earth. One second later it was showing an angular diameter of a full degree of arc—twice the size of the Moon seen from Earth as Jenning remembered it. Now it was coming straight down on top of him, and even at this acute angle it was blazing like a polished hubcap in full sunlight.

  Just for the record, it had no registration numbers he could read. Traffic Central hadn't logged any incoming vessels on that course—at least not on his watch. Besides that, Wilkins Jenning had never heard of any vessel so big. And nothing that moved so fast, either.

  Whatever it was, from its approach angle the thing was clearly not making for a parking orbit. And if it was going to brake for landing, it had better start firing soon, and hard.

  It no longer appeared to be coming straight at him. Instead, the object opened a detectable lateral gap between its own vector and the zenith above Platform 12. The gap quickly widened until the alien ship was actually passing by Jenning's position. He almost broke his neck trying to follow it down on the telescope's swivel mounting.

  As near as he could tell, it was going down somewhere in the extreme northern highlands. Well away from any inhabited tracts—and thank you, God, for such small favors as this.

  Jenning still had his scope on the vehicle—well, sometimes a degree or two behind it, as fast as it was moving—when the thing augered in. The effect was immediate. One instant a streaking silver blur, the next a dome of violet-white light, rising out of the jagged terrain just over his horizon, like the top of his mother's bread dough rising out of the mixing bowl. For two or three seconds the arc of plasma held against the velvet black sky, then slowly dissipated, sinking in on itself.

  "Shit!" Wilkins Jenning breathed. "An alien spacecraft crash-lands on the Moon, and I'm the only one to see it. Except I can't tell anybody because I'm stuck up here without a radio."

  He took his eye away from the scope and glanced around his control board, hoping that the interference might have cleared some and he'd have his communications back. But wherever he looked, either with the eye that had been fixed to the ocular or with the one that had been open and passively observing alongside it, all he could see was the afterimage of that same purple glare. His eyes didn't hurt, but the image wasn't fading away, either.

  "Shit! An alien spacecraft crashes on the Moon, and I'm the only one to see it, and now I'm blind! Shit!"

  Chapter 17

  Low Rent District

  Drift

  Drift

  Drag

  Drag

  Orbital Slot 43-D at 605 Kilometers, March 21, 19:14 UT

  The EverRest Cryotorium, No. 2034/HH in the National Astronautics and Space Administration's Registry of Inert Platforms, had been falling in toward the planet for five years now. Everyone knew the orbit was decaying, but no one gave much of a damn.

  The operating company had gotten its fees in advance, and with the structure amortized over a mere fifteen years, they were long gone. In their final correspondence, the EverRest Corporation assured the survivors of "absent friends and loved ones" that internal systems and basic hull integrity would preserve the cryo-environment at an optimum 200° Kelvin for centuries yet to come. Should future generations wish to visit with their ancestors, the managing director noted, the platform's hatch covers would respond to a little pressure from a No. 14 Snapple™.

  No one wished to visit.

  Of the cryotorium's twenty-four permanent residents, only one had living heirs who might care that the repose of a "still-loved one" would soon be interrupted by a flaming reentry. This person, who was also the last of EverRest's "associates" to "join the crew," was Alexis Rump-Goddy. She had technically "succumbed" to a meningeal carcinoma in her seventieth year and, being heir herself to the massive Goddy-Baldwin fortune, had placed the whole of it in escrow to pay for her eventual revival, treatment, and continued life as soon as the cure for her cancer should be discovered, tested, and successfully applied to 100,000 prior cases. Alexis' heirs had been actively involved in trying to break this trust for the past thirty years. So, had they known about the impending tragedy, not one of them would have given a cent to recover and re-orbit the Ever-Rest pla
tform. In fact, its imminent loss was about to simplify their legal position greatly.

  Not all of the EverRest's inhabitants had been as trustful of bankers, lawyers, and the securities markets as Ms. Rump-Goddy. These others, in "signing on," had converted their assets into bearer bonds, negotiable Swiss paper, and gem-quality stones. They were clearly hoping that the science of subatomic manipulation would not overtake the latter any more quickly than the tidal forces of economics would erode the former. For the repose of these assets, the EverRest Corporation had provided titanium-clad, asbestos-lined vaults built into the base of each of the platform's twenty-four cryogenic "sleep cases."

  These modern-day Pharaohs, wrapped in the chill embrace of liquid gases, had tried to provide for their afterlife as thoughtfully, comfortably, and completely as any resident of the Valley of the Kings. Unfortunately, they made the same mistakes. Advertising their sequestered wealth—or letting the EverRest Corporation advertise it for them through its brochures and video promotions—only encouraged the scoundrels who believed that the living should have a share in what the dead, or the "merely absent," wanted to keep to themselves. Within six months of the EverRest Corporation's demise, adventurers who knew how to wield a Snapple™ had matched orbits with the platform, entered it, and plundered each of the twenty-four "Star Vaults."

  In Ms. Rump-Goddy's case, all the thieves discovered were some identity cards and the stuffed and mounted hides of Tippi, Nippi, and Baby Popo—three of her favorite cats. According to the lady's dying wish, they were supposed to follow her into "cryosleep" in their own deepfreeze compartments. Evidently legal complications with the trust document had reversed her aspirations in this one instance. Such also are the revenges of the living upon the dead.