by Unknown
20
“Mission control, Houston. This afternoon at UT twenty hours DSN established positive contact with the crew of Starfire. Continued interference from solar activity plus a round-trip signal delay of some five minutes creates…that is, there are some communications difficulties, however commander reports all aboard are well. The ship is station-keeping in the shadow of asteroid 2021 XA. There is a functional problem with one heat-transfer unit but that looks to be repaired shortly. There is some concern about potential return trajectories and our mission planning staff here is at work on possible alternatives…”
Whatever Houston was busying itself with, Starfire knew nothing of it.
Fast work in space is impossible; every maneuver takes thought. Without Earth’s gravity to keep things grounded, every twist of a wrench or heft of a tool produces as much force on the worker as on the workpiece, pushing them apart. A spacesuit can’t be worn at normal atmospheric pressure or it would be a rigid balloon; even at its most flexible it is a mass of cloth and metal to be dragged around, fogged up, sweated and shivered in, farted and pissed in, sometimes cursed at.
Robin had rigged the crew module to eliminate time lost in prebreathing for EVA. Inside the ship, just as inside the suits, the atmosphere was now pure oxygen at low pressure. Until they got used to it the fear of sparks made them nervous every time they flipped a switch. That didn’t last. Strangely, humans manage to accustom themselves to any danger that remains constant.
They rejoined each other for dinner. Linwood had not slept for thirty-eight hours, had not taken time to shave, had barely taken time to eat. He pushed syrupy fruit cocktail into his mouth with weary desperation. The bags under his eyes and the white stubble on the jaw he normally kept so meticulously smooth made him look older than his years. It was not his dirtiness and fatigue that discouraged him; it was the nature of his job.
“It now appears we will be unable to complete the reassembly of the unit in less than seventy-two hours,” he announced. “That estimate allows four hours rest in every twenty-four for myself. It’s unlikely I can do with less.”
The four other faces in the wardroom were as glum as his.
“Good-bye, Venus,” Melinda muttered.
“Assuming seventy-two hours, where would that put us in terms of MFS propellant?” Robin asked.
“Well, we’re not going to make Earth on a straight trajectory,” Melinda answered.
“Stripped?”
Melinda said, “Say we dump all the excess mass—about fifty thousand kg of solar satellites, reactors and all, and maybe another ten thousand kg with all the drilling gear and everything—we still come up short of delta-vees. In seventy-two hours our velocity relative to Earth is going to be approaching seventy kilometers per second.” She sighed, a short, angry expulsion of breath. “Easier to keep on going to Jupiter.”
“We’d get hungry before then,” Robin said. Hungry. Thirsty. Out of air. Individually freeze-dried.
“Mercury’s out?” Spin asked. “Isn’t it pretty massive? For its size?”
“In seventy-two hours Mercury will still be on the wrong side of the sun”—Melinda was patient; Spin always had flown by the seat of his pants and always would—“and when it rises, it’ll be behind us.”
“I been thinkin’”—Travis spoke as if the thought had only recently occurred to him—“what if we went right on around? Came up on Mercury from behind?”
“I haven’t actually run that scenario.” Melinda still managed to control herself, but this time the effort showed. “I haven’t run it, seeing as how we would melt first.”
“Uh, what I had in mind—”
“You propose rounding the sun in the shadow of Everest?” Robin asked.
He nodded. “If we can stay a couple of kilometers from the surface of the rock we’ll be in the shadow cone, even at perigee.”
“We’ll also be inside the corona. Temperatures in the mill…” Melinda caught herself too late. “Scratch that, temperature isn’t heat.”
He nodded. “We’ll be flyin’ through a very hot, very thin plasma, but we’ll be ninety-nine percent shielded if we stay out of direct sunlight.”
Melinda, her face aflame with embarrassment, said, “But Everest is going to burn.”
“There will be outgassing. The surface will ablate, maybe as much as twenty or thirty meters—we’ve calculated that. Still be lots of mountain left.”
“We’ve got no prop,” said Spin, and his words came close to ending the discussion. Flying even a few meters closer to the sun, Everest would be spinning deeper in the sun’s whirlpool of gravity, traveling faster; to stay in its shadow Starfire would constantly have to overtake the asteroid, and the scant remaining propellant in the maneuvering system could not provide the necessary difference in velocity.
“So that’s that,” said Robin. “The sooner we leave Everest, the better.”
“No,” Travis said abruptly, a little too loudly. “Scuse me, I think it’s too soon—”
“Maybe you should drop it,” Robin suggested.
“I’m droppin’ it. I agree—without prop we can’t stay in the shadow.”
“Okay, then—”
“We can bury the ship.”
For a moment the only movements in the room were nervous adjustments of clothing—suppressed but obvious attempts to sidle away from Travis—efforts made faintly comic by lack of weight.
In the lengthening silence Linwood was the first to speak. “One or two questions occur to me.” He let them all wait while he arranged his words. “I do not include mere matters of scale, for example that Starfire is almost one hundred meters in length, with a wing-tip diameter of some thirty meters—or that for thermal protection it must be buried at least thirty meters beneath the surface, by your estimate, Professor Hill, with perhaps twice that depth being more prudent—”
“Thanks for not burdenin’ us with the inconsequentials, Doc,” Travis muttered.
“—because these matters may be resolved by calculation. For example, do we have enough available mechanical energy and physical labor to do the job in the time remaining? This is a matter of calculation. I should suppose we would have to bury the ship soon after we cross the orbit of Mercury, which is, I believe…”
“A week from now,” said Melinda. “Give or take a few hours.”
“Yes, thank you. During that period we would be well advised to continue work on the heat-transfer coupling, so that we will be prepared to launch from Everest after rounding the sun. All these are matters of calculation.” He paused again; they did not interrupt his silence. “Let us suppose the calculations are favorable; then my question is simple enough,” he said at last, weariness reducing his voice to a whisper. “Do we have the courage to try it? Oh, it’s a desperate course, even if we are lucky. Still, if the numbers are with us, logic tells me it’s our only hope.”
They gaped at him.
He went on. “I’ll put it as bluntly as I can. Do we have the good will to work together, all of us? Are we willing to get ourselves out of this fix—or die trying?”
Melinda began to cry. And when Travis tried to speak, he found to his shock that his throat was tight and his own eyes were brimming with tears.
Travis and Spin were laboring in constricted icy darkness, floating at odd angles in the deep shaft. In slow motion Spin swung a cage of steel strutwork toward Travis. “Grab this.”
The steel cage housed a laser interferometer, an exquisite instrument of science and artistry; Travis grappled with it and steered it, cables trailing, out of the shaft. He watched it fly slowly away, dwindling to blackness among the barely visible stars at the top of the shaft. The experiments Travis and Melinda had buried here in frozen gravel, forty meters below the surface—buried to preserve them when Everest buzzed the sun—were so much jetsam for the moment. Perhaps they could be redeployed, circumstances permitting…
“I made a horse’s ass of myself,” Travis said.
“Guys cry som
etimes. Like when they lose a game.”
“No, he made me feel like a kid again. Like my dad sayin’, ‘Got the guts, son?’”
Spin grunted. “Your dad say that a lot?”
“Once. Maybe twice. That’s all it takes to make an impression—when you’re a kid.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you?” Travis drew a deep lungful of recharged oxygen. “You’re so damn quiet, Spin. So cool.”
“Hell with that. Typical Travis Hill asshole remark.” Spin stopped what he was doing and glared at Travis, holding himself back. “You know why I don’t like you, cowboy?” Spin’s sudden vehemence, his unexpected loquacity, put Travis on guard. “It’s not that you’re a fucking know-it-all. It’s not that you’re a tin-plate hero, or that you bumped a guy we were all getting along with pretty good.”
“No?” Travis coughed. “Then I guess it’s because I got us into this.”
“This?” Spin’s hand lamp flickered over the slick surface of the eerie pit. He laughed. “Don’t take too much credit.”
“I mean I proposed this mi—”
“This isn’t your asteroid. This isn’t your ship. Maybe the mission was your idea; okay, it was a good idea. We would have been happy to do it without you.”
For several moments they worked in silence, disassembling the delicate instruments, sending them out the shaft.
“The reason I never liked you, cowboy, is ’cause you don’t need anybody. Not just us—if you don’t want to be a team player, that’s your business. I get the feeling you don’t need anybody on the ground, either.”
“And you do?”
“I wouldn’t mind letting my mom set eyes on me one more time,” Spin murmured sadly.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Help me here.” They disconnected heavy cables from a massive cylinder the size of a milk can—a radioisotope thermal generator, a container of hot fissioning plutonium 238 which had been intended to power the buried experiments for a century or two. “Watch the fins—okay. Let’s heave it.” Gently they sent it floating out the shaft.
For a long time after that, Spin ignored Travis’s discomfort and said nothing else. When the pit was finally empty and they began placing the charges, Travis said, “That’s bullshit. About me not needing anybody.”
Spin sighed. “Quit trying so hard, will you?”
In the tangled guts of Starfire’s fusion reactor, Linwood and Melinda were curled around the third heat-transfer assembly.
“A little more and then we can go down and left. Let’s go down,” he said.
“The main thing is to—I got to squeeze it in between the three-sixty and the little dingy…”
“Go forward and left.”
“Watch it, Linwood!” A bracket sprang free and sailed away. Melinda lunged and caught it, quick as a fish, a split second later banging her shoulder painfully into the strut-work. When she handed him the curved bit of metal, she looked through the glass of his helmet and saw the clenched anguish around his closed eyes. “You all right?”
“Oh yes.” His eyes opened. “That was a nice catch.”
She watched his face. “We’re pushing you too hard.”
“Thank you for a fine sentiment, Melinda,” he said quietly. “But it really is all or nothing.”
She nodded. “I understand. I’m saying that we don’t have to get this thing patched by day after tomorrow. We’ve already established that.”
“There are so many other things to be done.”
“They’ll get done; there’s time.”
His gaze faltered; he looked down at the shiny piece of plumbing he held in his yellow glove. “Let’s close this up before we quit. Then perhaps I’ll take a nap.”
Spin and Travis were out of the experiment shaft. With the pulse drill they were drilling a ring of new shafts around it, a ring thirty-five meters in diameter—a little more than Starfire’s diameter from wing tip to wing tip. These new shafts were narrow, not much wider than the fiery beam that bored through them, and they reached deep into the icy rock. Once the drill was positioned, each bore went quickly, but each subsequent repositioning of the drill, followed by a repositioning of the astronauts, was exhausting and did not go quickly at all.
“Spin, Travis, come in now. Your clocks are winding down.” Robin’s voice was a thin thread of meaning in the static.
Wearily they flew back to Starfire. The ship’s bright metal was lit only by the stars; no longer a proud predator, it was now a shy pilot fish swimming nervously in the shadow of Everest.
Shed of their MMUs, safe inside the air lock waiting for the pressure to come up, Travis and Spin still avoided each other’s eyes.
“Okay, we’re at twenty-six kp,” Robin said, her voice loud in the earphones of their Snoopy hats. “You can unsuit.”
They helped each other out of the soiled and worn suits. “Well, hell,” Spin said. “You’re okay, Travis. For a middle-aged guy.”
“What?”
“I was trying to shake you up.”
Travis looked at him, surprised. “Why?”
“Whether you feel like it or not, you’re part of the team, man. Time you admitted it to yourself. Pull on this, will you?”
Travis lifted the top half of Spin’s suit over his head as the inner air lock door swung open.
Spin said, “What Melinda sees in you, I don’t know.”
21
What she had seen in him at first was a challenge, another big smart guy to be put in his place, a hero to be knocked off his pedestal. The way he’d muscled his way onto their crew with his money and his connections and his media charm, just casually brushing aside their teammate who’d been in his way…
Not that she’d really liked Jimmy Giles all that well as a person. He was a sufferer and a preacher, a solemn prig who knew how to save the world and was eager to tell you. Melinda wasn’t a Bible reader, but a line she’d heard in Sunday school at age ten or so had stuck in her head—it was such an odd figure of speech—about not trying to pluck the mote out of somebody else’s eye until you’d cast the beam out of your own. Imagine going around with a two-by-four through your head. Anyway, Jimmy was a Bible reader, he probably knew that verse, he should have taken the advice.
And there was something going on between Jimmy and Robin, she hated to think what; it gave her the queasy feeling she got whenever she tried to imagine her parents having sex. Or worse, her mother having sex with anyone but her father.
So Jimmy was no great loss in himself, if you wanted Melinda’s opinion. Still, what got her steamed was Travis’s attitude, or what she’d supposed his attitude to be, that he could just push his way onto their team.
But when he got on, he’d stayed out of their way, he hadn’t messed with them, he hadn’t tried to hog the limelight, he hadn’t seemed to care about anything but his big fat asteroid. Being part of their team didn’t seem to matter to him. And that was worse.
He wouldn’t fight. Challenge him on the facts, and he’d answer—and usually be right, dammit—but it wasn’t a contest. Challenge him physically, in space—this was the only guy who ever bailed out of orbit and lived to tell the tale—and he’d fuck up, get stuff backwards, crash into things, and laugh about it. Oh, he cared enough to be embarrassed, but not enough to be humiliated. So you couldn’t beat him at that, either.
And the wisecracks. Melinda loved to get in the last word; she frankly savored the “gotcha” when the other guy was left standing there with his mouth open. With Travis around, half the time it was her with her mouth open. And he didn’t care about that, either. He didn’t rub it in, and when you’d zing him he’d just laugh again, as if to say, “Hey look, isn’t that great? She did it again, she got in the last word”—which made her feel like a kid.
He’d even topped her at crying, not one of her specialties, but an area she had thought off limits to men.
She could have been punching a bag full of Styrofoam. Her frustration had been building t
hroughout the year’s training on Earth—especially because so much of what there was to learn about the asteroid was taught by Travis himself—and it finally peaked when they landed on Everest. She’d set him up to make an ass of himself with his little flags, and he’d obliged. But he’d looked good doing it.
When the frustration finally peaked, it vanished. She was astonished to find herself feeling differently about him. She realized that she’d devoted a disproportionate amount of attention to this man, this hard, scarred, green-eyed man with the cool ways and the hole through his core.
Feisty Melinda, always spying, always listening, always lurking with her creeper-peeper, did not lack empathy; she had been quick to realize, even before he let the mask slip, that Travis’s apparent not caring was rooted in profound despair, some devastation more sere than Jimmy Giles’s wet guilt, and perhaps more honest.
Was she the only one to see it? Spin couldn’t, Robin didn’t have a handle on Travis at all, and Linwood never talked about other people. But Melinda knew: Travis cared, all right. He wanted Linwood’s respect, he wanted Spin’s friendship, he wanted Robin’s commendation. He wanted to do his job, do it right, be technically and socially competent, be acknowledged for it. Enthusiasms and ambitions welled up errantly from whatever part of his soul, of himself, that he was trying to excise.
But Melinda, or so it seemed to her, was irrelevant to his goals. From her he wanted nothing.
In the darkness of the sleep compartment clockwise from Melinda’s, Spin was trying to coax his weary muscles to relax. That exchange with Travis had set him to worrying an old ache: he was thinking about his father, long gone from the family and now dead as well, a fat little middle manager at General Electric who’d had Spin pumped full of growth hormones before he was old enough to understand what was going on, much less have a say in it. For fifteen years, ever since he’d found out why he was so tall, Spin had been secretly convinced he was some kind of freak of science. Although his mother and his coaches and subsequently teams of NASA doctors had assured him that his reflexes owed nothing to artificial growth factor, that they were his own genetic legacy, he had not trusted any of them. Through no fault of his own, life had cast him in the role of the fastest android on Earth, he thought, and he had studied the part assiduously. He’d been good at it, handling aircraft and spacecraft as if he were a thinking extension of the hardware.
