The Aftermath gt-16

by Ben Bova

  Spit in my hat, he groused to himself, I’m gonna have to make it up from scratch.

  By dinner time of the second day he was thoroughly angry.

  “How could Dad let us sail out here without the proper materials to repair the antennas?” he grumbled into his bowl of soup.

  “Are you sure—” Angie began.

  “I’m sure!” Theo snapped. “The stuff isn’t there. Never was. He let us cruise through the Belt without the material we need to repair the antennas. Our main antennas, for crying out loud!”

  Pauline kept her face from showing any emotion. “You’ll have to produce the antenna spray from the materials we have on board, then, Theo. That’s what your father would do, I suppose.”

  He glared at her. “No. Dad would just wave a magic wand and the antennas would fix themselves.”

  “Theo.”

  “Or more likely the antennas wouldn’t dare get damaged long’s Dad’s in charge.”

  His mother drew in a long breath. Then she said, “Theo, the antennas did get damaged while your father was on board. Now it’s up to you to repair them.”

  He stared down into his unfinished soup. “Yeah. It’s up to me.”

  COLUMBUS, OHIO.

  COSETI HEADQUARTERS

  Even after more than three quarters of a century, the headquarters of the Columbus Optical Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence was hardly imposing. It consisted of a lovingly preserved but unpretentious wooden frame house, a much newer brick two-story building for offices and workshops, and the Kingsley Observatory, which housed beneath its metal dome a sturdy two-meter Schmidt reflector telescope.

  The homes adjacent to COSETI headquarters had long been demolished after being inundated time and again by the Scioto River, which had overflowed much of Columbus in the greenhouse floods. Now the headquarters grounds were surrounded by a low earthen levee, almost like the long mysterious mounds that the original Native Americans had built in the region a thousand years earlier.

  Jillian Hatcher was bubbling with excitement. She bent over the desk of the observatory’s director, a small, slim blonde woman filled with the energy and exhilaration of discovery.

  “It’s real!” she shouted, tapping the computer screen on her boss’s desk. “I found it! I found it!”

  She practically danced around the small, cluttered office. Dwight Franklin smiled at her. Although he contained his excitement as best as he could, he too felt a thrill shuddering along his spine. “After all these years,” he murmured.

  Franklin had a square, chunky build. His thinning hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. Sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he looked more like a clerk or an accountant than a world-renowned astronomer.

  “The pulses are regular!” Jillian said, dancing back to his desk. “It’s a message! A message from an extraterrestrial civilization!”

  “Looks intriguing, I’ve got to admit,” said Franklin. “Where in the sky—”

  “The region of Sagittarius!” she crowed. “The heart of the Milky Way!”

  “And it’s fixed in its position? It’s not a satellite or a spacecraft?”

  Jillian’s beaming face faded a little. “I haven’t tracked it yet.”

  Franklin got up from his creaking desk chair. “Let’s see if we can get a firm fix on it.”

  She sank into silence and followed him out into the chill November night. Clouds were building up along the western horizon but most of the sky was clear as crystal. Orion and the Bull sparkled above them. Jillian picked out the Pleiades cluster and bright Aldebaran.

  The observatory was freezing cold with the dome open but they walked past the silent framework of the Schmidt telescope and into the tiny control room. It was heated, and Jillian was grateful for that.

  Half an hour later her excitement had evaporated like a shallow pan of water over a hot fire.

  Franklin looked up from the computer screen, a fatherly look of sympathy on his face.

  “It’s a spacecraft, I’m afraid.”

  “Are you sure?” Jillian asked, desperate. “Positive?”

  He gestured toward the display. “See for yourself. It’s out in the Asteroid Belt, and it’s definitely moving.”

  “It’s not a star.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

  “No.”

  Jillian felt like crying. But then a new thought popped into her head. “So why is a spacecraft out in the Belt sending pulsed laser messages toward Earth? What’s he trying to say?”

  ORE SHIP SYRACUSE:

  THE WORKSHOP

  The workshop smelled of machine oil and dust. The overhead lamps bathed the big chamber in glareless, shadowless light. Theo sat at a long workbench in one corner where shelves of chemical compounds were stacked high on both sides of him. He was bent over an ordinary optical microscope, feeling frustrated and cranky, when his sister came through the open hatch that led back to the family’s living quarters.

  He didn’t hear her enter, nor the soft footfalls of her slippered feet as she approached his workbench. He was studying the jiggling Brownian motion of the metallic chips that he had mixed into a sample of liquid plastic. Although the instructions in the maintenance videos had been quite specific, Theo found that the supplies his father had stored were far short of what he needed to repair the ship’s antennas. He was trying to make do with what was available in the storage bays. And it wasn’t going well.

  “Thee?” Angie called timidly.

  Her voice startled him. He jerked up straight on the stool he was sitting on.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Angie said.

  “I’m not scared,” he snapped. “You just surprised me, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t come in for lunch,” his sister said. “And now it’s almost dinner time.”

  “Okay. Okay. Tell Mom I’ll be there.” But he turned back to the microscope.

  “How’s it going?” Angie asked.

  “Lousy.”

  “Really?”

  He looked up at her. “Really. Lousy. I don’t have the electrolyte I need. And the polymer filler is so old and goddamn gooey I don’t think it’ll be workable.”

  “Theo, I really—”

  “Go tell Mom about the language.”

  “It’s not that.” Angie took a breath, then went on, “Is it really going to take eight years for us to get back to Ceres?”

  He heard the stress in her voice. “Unless I can figure out a way to shorten it.”

  “Eight years?” she whimpered.

  Trying to fight down the anger rising inside him, Theo said, “Yes. Eight years, seven months and four clays.”

  “You don’t have to be so happy about it!”

  “I’m not happy, Angie.”

  “You’re gloating! You don’t care how long it takes. You don’t care about me at all!”

  “I told you I’m trying to figure out a way to shorten it,” Theo protested. “What more can I do, for Christopher Columbus’s sake?”

  She plopped herself down on the bench beside him. “Eight years! I’ll be an old woman by the time we get back.”

  “If we get back,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t have said it but there it was.

  “If?”

  “There’s a good chance we’ll die on this bucket. The recyclers might wear out, the fusion reactor could fail, our hydrogen fuel is going to run out—”

  Angie clapped her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear it! You’re just being spiteful!”

  “It’s the truth, Angie.”

  “No,” she said. “We’ll live. We’re not going to die here. If something breaks down we’ll fix it.”

  “If we can.”

  “And you’ll find a way to get us back to Ceres quicker, too, won’t you? You’re just teasing me, trying to make me cry.”

  “Angie, I’m just telling you the facts.”

  �
��I can’t sit here for eight years, Theo! I’ll be twenty-six years old by then! Twenty-six! All the guys my age will already be married.”

  Suddenly Theo understood what was really bothering her.

  “Angie,” he asked, “that bozo you dated when we were docked at Chrysalis last year—”

  “He’s not a bozo! His name is Leif Haldeman.”

  “How serious are you about him?”

  She blinked several times before murmuring, “I love him, Theo.”

  “Have you been to bed with him?”

  Her cheeks flamed. “That’s none of your business!”

  “Does Mom know? Or Dad?”

  “There’s nothing for them to know. I love Leif and he loves me. We were going to tell Mom and Dad about it when we got back to Ceres.”

  “He was living on Chrysalis?”

  “He was looking for a job with one of the rock rats. He’s a mining engineer.”

  Feeling totally miserable, Theo said softly, “Angie, if he was still on Chrysalis when we were approaching Ceres…”

  Angie’s eyes went wide as she realized what her brother was trying to tell her. “You think he was killed?”

  “I don’t think anybody aboard Chrysalis survived, Angie.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He probably found a berth on one of the mining ships. He was probably out in the Belt somewhere when Chrysalis was attacked.”

  “I hope so,” said Theo.

  “He had to be!”

  “I hope so,” he repeated.

  * * *

  Victor was roused from a troubled sleep by a beeping noise. Any sound at all aboard the cramped little pod was alarming. The muted hum of the air fans and the constant buzz of the electronics had long since faded into an unnoticed background. But a new sound—a ping, a beep, a creak—meant danger.

  Instantly awake, Victor swiftly scanned the control board. No red lights, all systems functioning nominally.

  The beeping sounded again, and Victor saw a yellow light flashing in a corner of the control panel.

  The comm laser, he realized. What’s wrong— His breath caught in his throat. That’s the message light! Wiping sleep from his eyes with the heel of one hand, he punched up the communications system on his main screen.

  TORCH SHIP ELSINORE. The yellow letters blazed on the otherwise dark screen. His mind raced. Elsinore was one of the vessels in orbit around Ceres when the attack started.

  Victor pounded on the comm key. “Elsinore, this is Syracuse. What’s left of it, anyway.”

  A woman’s voice replied, “We have you in sight. Will rendezvous with you in twenty minutes. Be prepared to come aboard.”

  Victor wanted to kiss her, whoever she was. But then he remembered, “I don’t have a suit. I can’t go EVA.”

  Several heartbeats’ silence. Then a man’s voice answered, “Very well, we will send a shuttlecraft and mate to your airlock.”

  “Thank you,” Victor said fervently. He had never felt so grateful in his life. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  * * *

  After dinner Theo was so tired that all he wanted was to crawl into his bunk and sleep. But as he got up from the galley’s narrow table, Angie said, “Thee, isn’t there anything I can do to help you?”

  He looked down at his sister. Was she asking out of a sense of duty, or because their mother had told her to? She looked sincere.

  “I mean,” Angie went on, “I just sit around here all day with nothing to do but keep the kitchen appliances in working order.”

  “You’re helping me work out our diets,” Pauline said, from the sink where she was scraping dishes and putting them into the microwave dishwasher. Instead of using precious water, the dishwasher blasted everything clean with pulses of high-power microwaves. Theo wondered if it wouldn’t be better to wash the dishes with recycled water than use the fusion reactor’s dwindling fuel supply to power the microwave cleaner.

  “Mom, that’s nothing more than busywork,” Angie said. “I want to do something useful.”

  Theo was impressed. Angie had never shown a desire to be useful before. Their parents had always raised Angie to be a little queen, he thought, lording it over him while Mom pampered her. Maybe her telling me about her boyfriend is bringing us closer together, he thought. But then a different voice in his head sneered, Or maybe she just wants to stay close to you to make sure you don’t tell Mom about her love life.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Thee!” Angie demanded. “What can I do to help you?”

  He blinked, then grinned. “Well…” he started, drawing out the word, “most of what I’m doing in the workshop is dogwork chemistry: mixing things and seeing if the mixtures have the conductivity I need for repainting the antennas…”

  “I could help you do that, couldn’t I?” Angie asked. “I mean, you could tell me what to do and I could do it.”

  Slowly he nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Good!” Angela seemed genuinely pleased. “Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the workshop with you.”

  Theo glanced at his mother, still by the sink. She was smiling. Did Mom get Angie to do this? he wondered. With a mental shrug, he said to himself, doesn’t matter. Maybe Mom talked Angie into it, or maybe Angie’s growing up and trying to take some responsibilities. Or maybe she just wants to keep an eye on me now that I know about her boyfriend. Whichever, it’s okay.

  If my spoiled brat sister actually lets me tell her what to do in the workshop, he added.

  TORCH SHIP ELSINORE

  It’s a freaking floating palace, Victor thought as the two uniformed crew members—one man and one woman—led him through the carpeted corridors and spacious lounges of the Elsinore.

  The lounges were empty and quiet, the corridors nearly so. The crew seemed to far outnumber the passengers.

  The same two crew members had flown a shuttlecraft and plucked Victor from the command pod that had been his home for nearly two weeks. They had delivered him to Elsinore’s small but well-stocked infirmary, where a pair of medics—again, one woman and one man—checked him thoroughly and pronounced him physically fit, except for slight dehydration.

  Now they walked him through the ship.

  “Where are we going?” Victor asked at last, as they climbed a carpeted staircase.

  “To meet the man who diverted our ship to pick you up,” said the crewman walking on Victor’s right side.

  “The captain? I’d certainly like to thank him.”

  “Not the captain,” replied the woman on his left.

  “Who then?”

  They reached the top of the stairs. Another lounge, with fabric-covered walls and muted music purring softly from overhead speakers. Two people were sitting at one of the little round tables; the lounge was otherwise empty except for the human bartender standing behind the bar. The man at the table rose to his feet like the Sun climbing above the horizon: a huge mountain of a man with wild red shaggy hair and beard and a mug of what had to be beer in one ham-sized hand.

  Victor recognized him immediately: George Ambrose, chairman of the ruling council at Ceres. Big George, the rock rats’ leader. A brightly attractive woman was sitting at the table with George. She too looked familiar to Victor but he couldn’t quite place her. She appeared to be young, with bountiful blonde hair framing her pretty, smiling, cheerleader’s face.

  “You’re Victor Zacharias?” Big George asked in a surprisingly sweet tenor voice. He was not smiling, however. If anything, he looked grimly angry.

  Victor extended his hand and Big George engulfed it in his massive paw.

  “We’ve met before,” Victor said, “but it was in a crowd at a party aboard Chrysalis; I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  “Chrysalis,” George muttered, plunking himself down on his chair; it groaned beneath his weight.

  Victor turned to the woman.

  “I’m Edith Elgin,” she said, still smiling as she raised her hand toward him.

  “Edie Elgin. The ne
ws anchor,” Victor said, recognizing her at last. “But I thought you lived in Selene.”

  “I came out here to do a story on the war in the Belt,” she said, her smile fading.

  “And walked into a fookin’ massacre,” Big George growled.

  A moment of awkward silence. Then George hollered over to the bartender, “We’ve got a thirsty man here!” Turning to Victor he added, “I guess maybe you want a drink, too, eh?”

  Despite himself, Victor grinned. He asked the barman for a glass of red wine. Edith Elgin shook her head when the barman offered to refill her glass of soda.

  “I want to thank you for picking me up,” Victor said. “I didn’t think anybody—”

  “Got a message from some astronomers Earthside,” George interrupted. “They saw your laser signal. Thought they’d found fookin’ little green men, at first. Big disappointment to them.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” Victor said. He picked up his stemmed wine glass and took a long, slow, delicious sip. “You weren’t aboard Chrysalis” he asked Big George, “when… when it happened?”

  George swung his red-maned head. “I was here on Elsinore, chattin’ up our visitor.”

  “What happened to you?” Edith Elgin asked Victor. “How did you get into this mess?”

  Victor began to speak, but the words caught in his throat. “My family… they’re still out there…”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know!” Victor groaned. “The ship was heading outward…”

  “Syracuse?” she asked.

  For the first time in his adult life Victor had to struggle to hold back tears. He nodded at the two of them and managed to choke out, “He attacked us. For no reason! I separated the pod, drew him away. My wife… two children… they’re out there, drifting outward.”

  Edith Elgin looked up at George Ambrose. “We’ve got to find them.”

  Big George sat unmoving, like an implacable mountain. At last he said, “How can we find ’em when we don’t know where they are?”