Starfire

by Unknown

  “Okay, Starfire, we’re here.”

  “…opy,” the radio hissed.

  Melinda slowed her descent by pushing against the walls. She drifted into the natural chamber near the end of the shaft and shone her lamp over its walls. “Golly.” It was a hollow on the fault plane, and like the geode explored by Travis and Robin, it was a cave lined with diamonds. “I’m glad I didn’t miss this.”

  “Comin’ at ya,” Travis warned.

  The spike-headed bomb slid out of the shaft. Standing on diamonds, Melinda cushioned its descent.

  They maneuvered the bomb to one side of the irregular cave. They wanted no gamma rays, no prompt neutrons flying up the pipe toward Starfire before the shaft was melted and crushed.

  They sank bolts between clusters of diamonds and strapped the bomb to the rock with steel cables. They fastened electrical connectors to the detonators, connected the detonators to the synchronizer, connected the synchronizer to the cable from the main bus. After an hour of close, patient work, when they were ready to return—

  —the asteroid trembled. The violent shaking went on for half a minute. Travis and Melinda bounced from the walls, collided with each other, ricocheted off the walls again. The soundless tremor stopped abruptly, but it took the astronauts another half a minute to stabilize themselves. Unintelligible voices squawked in their headsets.

  “We must be burning for real,” Travis said. “Like riding on a Roman candle.”

  Chunks of diamonds were bouncing around them, but the steel tub they had implanted in the gravid crystalline uterus was still strapped securely in place.

  “This will get worse, won’t it?” Within the flickering shadows of her helmet Melinda’s eyes were wide.

  “Safe bet.”

  “In that case”—she reached up and plucked a bright gem rolling in the vacuum—“for the memories.”

  Two more quakes rattled the shaft before Travis and Melinda rejoined Spin outside the air lock.

  “Why don’t you look happier?” Travis demanded.

  “There’s a dozen splices in that cable,” Spin said. “If we’d needed any more I would have been tearing out the internal wiring.”

  “We let a lot of cable burn on the surface,” Travis said. “Stupid. Waste not, want not.”

  “Your dad say that?”

  “My ma. More than once or twice.”

  They clambered in through the open outer hatch. Spin hit the buttons to bring the steel door down and seal it behind them.

  “I had some friends in San Francisco,” Melinda said as they waited for the lock to pressurize. “They bought an old house, and they were remodeling, and when they opened the walls to get at the wiring, there wasn’t a piece of wire more than a foot long in there. It was all twisted together, a piece at a time, copper and iron—some of it was even barbed wire, fence wire—because the house was built the year after the earthquake and you couldn’t buy enough good wire anywhere.”

  They pondered that a moment. “Lucky it never burned down,” Spin said.

  The pressure came up, and they pulled off their helmets as the inner hatch opened. Robin was waiting in the corridor. Her expression was sober.

  “Melinda, when you’re out of that thing, Linwood needs your help.”

  “Sure, what’s he need?”

  The ship rattled and shook.

  “Help with the detonation program.”

  “Program? I thought we just pulled the trigger.”

  “He’ll explain.”

  Melinda found Linwood asleep, floating loosely in the webbing of his acceleration couch in PROP. Reluctantly she shook his shoulder. He didn’t respond.

  Dirt was etched into the crevices on his forehead and around his eyes; his white-streaked beard was three days old. His mouth was open, but his breathing was inaudible. She shook him harder.

  His eyes came open, but for a moment he seemed lost.

  “You wanted help with something, Linwood?”

  He turned to Melinda and took another second to recognize her. “Oh, yes. Sorry to bother you with more work,” he whispered. He struggled to free himself from his webbing. “If you would be good enough to call up the seismographic plot…”

  Motioning her ahead of him, he drifted across to NAVCOM. She slid into her seat in front of the computer and brought up the stored graphics.

  He yawned and shook his head. “Now when we detonate the device, it will cut Everest in two,” he said, his voice recovering something of its dry strength. “Our goal is not to accelerate ourselves, but to change the mass, and thus the trajectory, of our piece of the asteroid. To change it with sufficient precision to encounter Mercury, we need to know the relative masses of the two pieces we intend to sever. Moreover, we must relate these variables to Everest’s position.”

  “But we’ve already calculated all tha—”

  “Perhaps, but—”

  A severe tremor rocked Starfire in its hammock of webbing.

  “Yes, that illustrates the point nicely.” Linwood nodded, as if he’d arranged a demonstration. “Everest is ablating. We have no way of knowing in advance precisely how much mass it will lose or where. We must monitor the changes continuously and program the device to detonate within some reasonable interval—say within five minutes of the optimum launch window.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Do you think that’s too much?” he asked anxiously.

  “Too much? No, I wasn’t thinking that,” she said, and sighed. “You’re probably right—we haven’t got the option to steer anything until we dig ourselves out. Where do we get the data?”

  “We shall place gravimeters salvaged from the solar probes at our own position and at that of the device. Their data combined with our own inertial systems will drive the detonation program.”

  “Which we gotta write now—”

  “Which we must now begin to write.”

  “—since we hit perigee in about twenty-four hours.”

  They split up the program and worked separately, across the corridor from each other. Two hours passed in concentrated labor, amid continual tremors. Then Melinda said, “Linwood, this doesn’t look to be unmanageable. Why don’t we take a break?” Getting no answer, she peered more closely into his cubicle. He was asleep.

  She left her post and swam down to the wardroom.

  Robin and Travis had recently returned from placing gravimeters outside the ship. They were hungrily shoving peas w/mushrooms into their mouths.

  “Linwood’s been working too hard,” Melinda announced. “He won’t hit the sack, but he keeps nodding off anyway.”

  The others peered at her. Robin swallowed a mouthful of peas, with effort. “You have something in mind?”

  “Dr. Deveraux, this is the commander. Report to the wardroom on the double. Mandatory briefing.”

  Linwood stirred and opened his eyes. His confusion lasted longer this time—the dreams had been getting more vivid, and this one had been particularly rich and persuasive. He had been trudging the sand with Jeri as the sun came up in the Gulf, brighter and brighter, the reflection of it piercing his eyes with a dagger of light across the water.

  From the clocks on his console he realized he’d been asleep for five hours. They must have been waiting for him to wake up, watching him on the comm.

  “Now, Linwood,” the tinny speaker insisted.

  His heart began to pound. He pushed himself into the corridor and downward toward the wardroom.

  As he emerged head downward through the ceiling, the first thing that met his eye was a smeared lump he recognized as a cake—a symbolic cake, anyway—floating in space in front of him. It bore a crude picture, a mushroom cloud, a flock of five-pointed stars, sketched out with something like icing.

  “Who fabricated that?” he growled.

  “Actually the design program was quite complex,” Melinda began, in her best Linwoodese.

  “Three weeks of cupcake rations stuck together,” he interrupted, “and that looks like�
�”

  “Toothpaste,” Spin said. “Your regular, your peppermint, and your whatever you call that blue goo.”

  Linwood righted himself, avoiding the drifting cake. “You could be joking,” he muttered. “But somehow I think not…”

  Melinda launched herself at him and planted a fat kiss on his cheek. Robin and Spin and Travis applauded raucously.

  “Yes, well,” Linwood said, flustered. “Is there to be a briefing? Perhaps I might add a few items to the agenda…”

  “Are you kidding, Linwood?” Travis was aghast. “This is a party. Here, have a drink. You’re a big orange man, I believe?” He thrust a plastic bottle into Linwood’s hand. “Look, we even made decorations.”

  A strip of paper towels in one corner bore the legend “Goodbye Sun, Hello Earth.” Over the screen of the big monitor more towels had been taped, with a movie-style title drawn in colored marker pens: Flash Deveraux and the Rocketeers of the Lost Diamond Asteroid. Chapter One.

  “So you have.” He sucked at his orange drink. “What are we celebrating?”

  Travis, at a loss, shrugged. “Sort of a pre-device-ignition party, I guess.”

  “Really, this is premature,” Linwood said stiffly.

  “You mean it might not work?” Spin asked, wide-eyed.

  Linwood was offended. “As I have said repeatedly, there is no question of its not…” They watched solemnly, cheeks quivering, as he got it. “I mean…I meant to say, this has not been anyone’s personal project.” His voice softened. “We’re together.”

  “And we’ll stay together,” Robin said fervently.

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Melinda.

  “Salud,” said Travis, and he and Melinda gleefully thunked their plastic bottles together so hard they both rebounded and ricocheted from the walls.

  While everyone was laughing Linwood eyed the drifting cake. “Do you suppose if I dug into that from underneath I could salvage some of my personal cupcake ration?”

  The party ended an hour later, a bit awkwardly, with everyone fake drunk on fatigue and silliness. Linwood, whose eyes kept closing in the middle of his long sentences, said he wanted to go back to work. Melinda insisted that the program was almost complete, that what remained was routine work, that the optimum time to detonate the bomb would fall beyond perigee, somewhere within a window that was still a full day away. Robin finally ordered Linwood to his bunk, firmly enough that he took her seriously.

  Travis volunteered for cleanup, and Melinda offered to join him. Robin glanced at Spin, who was already sleeping where he floated. “Calder, wake up,” Robin barked. He did so instantly. “You’re hitting the sack, now. And so am I.” They left the wardroom without looking back.

  There was not all that much mess to clean up. Travis and Melinda did what had to be done and turned down the lights.

  “Well…”

  “Yep.”

  She turned to go and found he had her by the ankle. She rolled and floated perpendicular to him. His right hand was around her ankle, the wrist with its bracelet of sparkling diamonds exposed beneath the soiled cuff of his jacket. He looked at her, and the green eyes in the shadowed face might have been saying anything, but she knew what they were saying.

  “Hey, cowboy, you be holdin’ on to my foot.”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s the matter, the shoelace got you stumped?”

  His face wrinkled up and he started to laugh, without a sound.

  When the last of their clothes came off, the diamonds spilled from her pockets and went tumbling through the half-light, pouring spectral webs of rainbow over their bodies.

  “I’ve never done this,” he said.

  “Tell me another tall one.”

  “I mean, like this.”

  “I hear they’ve run it in WETF. Results nominal.” She was trying to make him laugh again, but tears were pooling in her eyes.

  Later they crept into their own sleeping compartments. Everyone around them snored energetically. They watched each other awhile, peeking from their sleep restraints across the dark corridor. Finally her shining eyes closed, and Travis allowed his gaze to drift to the white quilted padding of the wall.

  Damnedest thing…across the textured canvas a little black ant was crawling. An ant, for God’s sake.

  25

  “Mission control, Houston. Asteroid 2021 XA has passed behind the sun. There has been no further communication with the crew of Starfire…”

  The dreams came swarming just ahead of consciousness. Travis knew where he was, wrapped in nylon in a steel tube in a black pit, so by a trick of half-sleepy logic he was convinced that his dream of Earth was real. His mother and Bonnie were in the rose garden. His mother lifted her shears to the stem beneath a hard scarlet bud.

  “Not yet,” said Bonnie. “It’s just opening.”

  “It will open on the wall.”

  “You mean in the glass.”

  “Of course.”

  The blades severed the stem, leaving a clear green drop to ooze from the stump. Travis laughed in his sleep. His mother was so dramatic.

  Taylor Stith arrived, tugging at his blood-colored wool tie and straightening the lapels of his tweed jacket, to announce that he was ready to go to work.

  “We didn’t expect you until next week,” said Bonnie.

  “The roses are wilted already. I don’t have anything to do this week,” Stith explained.

  “When it gets dark he can clean up after Riptide,” said Sam. “He’ll have to put on a different uniform.”

  Travis was not happy about Sam casually making dispositions for his horse. He reached out of his sleep restraint and rapped on the glass doors to get their attention, but they ignored him.

  Then the sun rose. Bonnie took all the clothes off her glowing body as quickly as she could, but it was too late: everyone shriveled and burned away. Only Travis could watch, by letting the sun eat his eyes, eating as it was eaten with lizard tongues of flame, seething with granules of fire like a pot of boiling oatmeal. Something crawled over it, an ant on a quilt—Everest, rolling in crazed desperation, but not fast enough. Everest flickered and vanished. Only the textured fire remained.

  “Linwood is dead.”

  He looked away from the fiery quilt to see Melinda’s face a few centimeters away.

  “What?”

  “He died in his sleep.” She was close, sweating, her oily hair clinging to her head, every freckle brown against blue white skin. “She found him…Robin, I mean.”

  Travis peered at her. She really was real.

  “His heart, she thinks. Could you…?”

  He struggled with the Velcro tabs of his sleep restraint and pulled himself out of it, wearing only his shorts.

  Robin was at Linwood’s side. His face was composed, his eyes half open, downcast, looking thoughtfully at nothing. Travis touched the cool eyelids, but while they gave a little under his touch, they did not move.

  “He’s been dead several hours,” Robin said.

  “We need to get him home,” Travis said. Too loud; it sounded crazy.

  But Robin understood. “Yes. Would you help Spin? Cargo bay one would be best.”

  He looked at her, gaunt, apologetic. “I haven’t done this. I—I forgot where we keep the bags.”

  “I’ll show you, Travis.”

  The ship vibrated all the time now, a hum in the wires transmitted from the withering asteroid, burning steadily as a coal.

  They did the quick version of the prebreathe, compensating by pumping up the pressure in their suits. In the inflated suits they were as awkward and roly-poly as marshmallow men. The stark beams of their helmet lamps cut through the ice-swarming darkness. They eased themselves down the tethers to the open bay, carrying their near weightless burden.

  The cargo bay doors were open, the bay empty but for the MMUs. They waited while the ship trembled through another quake—the glowing coal throwing off unseen sparks. Then they guided Linwood’s body into an empty equipmen
t locker and closed the lid.

  They floated above it for a moment. “He was a Christian,” Spin said. “Some kind of Protestant.”

  “I don’t have a goddam thing to say,” Travis rasped.

  “We can talk about it later,” Spin said.

  “Damned old son of a bitch.”

  Robin was at the air lock to let them in.

  “Where’s Melinda?” he demanded, pulling off his helmet.

  “She’s busy, Travis. She’s got a program to write.”

  The men shucked their suits and crawled inside. Robin sealed the inner hatch solidly behind them.

  Everest shuddered again. Starfire swayed in its cradle.

  They had nothing to say to each other and not much to do but wait. Robin and Spin stayed together and kept on going, drifting naturally toward the flight deck.

  Travis drifted to the wardroom. His head and his heart were full, but he had no way to express the swelling pain; the thought of writing or dictating anything at this moment struck him as repellent.

  There were movies and books on file. He could have improved his Texican Spanish or tried to learn French or Russian or Japanese. He could have played chess with the ship. Instead he dug out the chip Melinda had been assembling in her spare time, her video documentary of the mission.

  The opening scene on the chip was file stuff, hardly as daring as Melinda’s own camera work. There on the stage of JSC 2 the original Starfire five were sitting behind long tables draped in blue felt—Robin, Spin, Melinda, Linwood, and Jimmy Giles, whom he’d never met—fielding questions from the press.