“When the engine blew out, it threw me into a declining orbit around the sun. I sent out a radio call for help. It was all I had, and I couldn’t even aim the transmission. I’d lost all control. I thought it was the end, because none of the other Pegasus vehicles were close enough to get to me in time. I couldn’t even aim a message back at Sorkon. Not that it would have mattered since they were hundreds of light-years away.”
“So what happened?” Both of us asked the question.
“Someone came. They arrived several weeks after I’d been signaling frantically for help. And they pulled me clear.”
Aiko and I were staring at each other. “So who were they?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They came on board and we spent time learning to communicate, but I could not pronounce many of the sounds they made.”
“They were not human?”
“No.”
“What did they look like?”
“They wore space suits, much like the ones you have now. Their faces, what I could see of them, were green, and looked vaguely amphibian. They had six fingers.”
“Were you able to record any of this?”
“Yes. But it was lost thousands of years ago. The electronics don’t survive long unless there’s a method to reinvigorate them. Which I did not have except for the central system that supports me.”
“And they just went away and left you here?”
“They offered to take me home, to their home, but my programming would not have permitted it. I told them I’d sent for assistance and that it would arrive shortly. At my request, they placed me in orbit around Talius, where I knew I’d be easier to find. If anyone did come. I continued sending messages until the transmitter finally gave out. Unfortunately I couldn’t aim them. They were simply directional beams fired off into the sky.”
“Fortunately,” said Aiko, “one of them arrived at our home world.”
“That is fortunate.”
“This world,” I said, “is Talius?”
“I’ve lived here too long not to have given it a name.”
“What does it mean?”
“In my language, Home.”
We disconnected Chayla and crossed over to the Brinkmann with her. “We’re taking back some pretty big news,” I said.
“That there are aliens? I guess so.”
“That too. But the big news will be that they’re apparently a lot like us.”
“You mean because they stopped and tried to help?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. Maybe they’re even more like us than you think, Ronda.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t look as if they ever came back to check on Chayla.”
CATHEDRAL
Matt Sunderland gazed at the Earth, which was just edging out from behind the Moon. From the L2 platform, Luna, of course, dominated the sky, a vast grey globe half in sunlight, half in shadow, six times larger than it would have appeared from his Long Island home. Usually, it completely blocked the gauzy blue and white Earth. On the bulkhead to his left, the Mars or Bust flag still hung, its corners fastened by magnets.
Mars or Bust.
Well, everybody knew how that was going. Sorry, guys, but the funding’s drying up. Looks as if we’re going to have to put it off for a couple of years. The way we’d put off the solar collector that was going to beam energy back to ground stations. And the way we’d put off Moonbase. To somebody’s credit, NASA had broken through and gotten the L2 station, the ideal place to launch whatever kind of space mission you wanted. Anything at all you wanted to do, any place you wanted to go, this would be where you started.
He could hear Judy back in the workout area, grunting and stretching, trying to keep herself in decent condition. They were the only two left on the platform now. He shook his head, and his eyes slid shut. He used to love using the main scope, training it on nebulae and clusters and sometimes places like Neptune which, for a short time, had almost seemed within reach. But the magic had gone away as it became increasingly apparent that no human being would ever actually touch any of them. When he’d first come to the L2 station, to Earthport, it had been heralded as a kind of bus terminal for traffic headed in all directions. It was hard to believe that had been only a year ago.
The radio beeped. Incoming from the Cernan. He pressed the key. “Earthport here,” he said. “Go ahead, Cernan.”
A familiar voice responded: “Earthport, I’m on my way.” It was Laura. “How are you, Matt?”
He leaned over the mike. “Laura, is that really you?”
“Far as I can tell.”
He wasn’t sure what to say next. “When did they start sending ops managers out to do retrievals?”
“About the same time ops managers starting going over their bosses’ heads.”
“Again?”
“I guess so.”
Matt had loved her since the first time he’d seen her, lying sprawled in center field after running into a fence, but holding the ball aloft in her gloved hand. But he’d long since given up. “What happened?” he asked.
“One of the cable news shows started running stories that we were on board with the defunding. That it was okay to shut down you guys. Dr. Prevost went on Worldwide and denied the story, but he looked so weak that it just made things worse. You know how Prevost is. Doesn’t want to offend the politicians. I complained to Louie. He told me to keep out of it. But I got myself invited onto Brick Collier and I guess I said a little too much.”
“So they demoted you?”
“I guess Louie thought this would be an appropriate way to send a message. Send me out to turn off the lights.”
Matt stared at the mike. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I’m sorry about a lot of things. We have a chance to get some serious results here and we’re walking away from it.” He listened to her breathe. “You guys packed and ready to go?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Very good, Matt. See you Friday.” Three days.
He leaned over the mike, savoring her voice, as smoky as her dark grey eyes. He’d always pretty much had his way with women. But his charm, whatever that might have been, had been insufficient with Laura. He’d had only a few weeks with her. And one glorious weekend. The weekend of his life. Now she was coming to take him home from the only assignment he’d ever really cared about. At the moment, she was in every sense of the phrase, far away.
“By the way,” she said, “I’m alone. There were supposed to be a couple of us on this one, but I guess they wanted to give me time to think about what I’d done.”
“Well, okay,” he said in a level voice that was supposed to come across as detached. “We’ll have a party when you get here.” She liked parties. She liked living, and being with other people, and watching the sun rise.
Laura had red hair and a bewitching smile. If she had a problem, it was that she’d never learned to hide her feelings. You looked at her and you knew immediately what she was thinking. He would not have described her as beautiful. At least not when he first met her. But his impression had changed as he worked with her, and got to know her. During those first few weeks she’d grown increasingly hard to resist. She was animated and funny and smart and she took over his life. But he’d made the colossal error of letting her see too soon how he felt. Damn, that had been dumb.
“I’m sorry, Matt,” she’d told him on that last night. “But we’re going to have to break it off.” They’d been out celebrating her thirty-second birthday, and she’d grown increasingly quiet during the evening. Then they’d gotten back to her apartment, and they stood just inside the doorway, the door not quite shut, and she’d turned on him. “Can’t do it anymore.”
“Why?” he’d asked. It had come as a complete surprise.
“Because my life is here, on the space coast. With NASA.” Her eyes had grown teary. “Matt, I want to walk on another world. I want to go to Mars, if that’s ever possible. It’s what I’ve
always wanted. It’s the only thing I’ve ever really cared about.”
And he hadn’t known how to respond. Hadn’t understood what she was trying to say. “What has that to do with us? You could ride off to Pluto, if you like. I’d be cheering.”
“It would never happen if I were a mother.”
“Well, okay. Whatever—I mean, we haven’t talked about kids. Or anything like that.”
“I don’t do things halfway, Matt.” She’d looked at him, brushed his cheeks with her lips, and virtually pushed him out the door. “I’m sorry it has to end like this. Truth is, I’m sorry it has to end at all. But there’s no other way.” It was the last thing she’d said.
He looked down at the mike. It still hurt.
“You know, Matt,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve been out here alone.” She hesitated, about to say something more, and he could guess what it might have been, something along the line of her being uneasy lost in all this solitude. But she pulled back. He understood the feeling. And he knew her well enough to be aware that she didn’t like admitting any kind of weakness.
He’d learned that at their first meeting, which had been at a ballpark rather than at work. She’d been playing center field for the NASA women’s softball team. Matt had allowed a couple of the guys to talk him into attending the game because they claimed it was a good way to meet attractive ‘babes.’ He hadn’t really noticed Laura until she crashed into the centerfield fence tracking down a line drive late in the game. She’d bounced off the wooden planks and crumpled onto the grass.
Matt had served as an EMT in the past, and he’d wasted no time running out to her. Her only response when he arrived was to hold up the glove to show him she still had the ball. Her eyes were closed.
“Can you hear me?” he’d asked.
“Of course,” she’d said.
The stated purpose of Matt’s current assignment was to help determine what effects long-term zero gravity would have on the human body. There’d been some slight deterioration in bones and muscles, both his and Judy’s, but nothing that suggested a Martian voyage would not be possible. When the results had first come in, Matt got the impression that some of the people back home were disappointed. As if they were looking for a reason to call everything off. “I just never thought,” he continued, “it would end like this.”
“Nor did I,” said Laura.
He could visualize her, seated on the bridge, looking at the same quiescent Moon. And he wondered how she’d reacted when she’d been assigned to come out to the platform to pick him up.
Laura had launched from the International Space Station, which had become obsolete with the construction of the platform. Out here, vehicles could come and go without having to deal with gravity. Now, very likely, the window was closing and the space age was, finally, over.
“We need a cathedral,” she said.
He didn’t think he’d heard right. “Say again, Laura?”
“A cathedral. Matt, we went to the Moon because one night in 1957 the country looked up and saw Sputnik passing overhead. The civil rights movement got its start because one woman refused to go sit in the back of a bus.”
“What’s that have to do with a cathedral?”
“If you’re going to get somewhere, you have to have a symbol, something that stands for what you’re all about. You’re lost in the Middle Ages, going nowhere, with nothing to live for, but when they build the cathedral at Chartres, you find out what matters in life. What really counts. It’s what NASA needs right now.” She was suddenly there with him, in the operations center, drinking coffee, her eyes looking past him somewhere, sending the message that there were far more important things in the world than any personal relationship between them.
“Well, maybe. You have any ideas?”
“Sure. Maybe the Chinese will do it for us.”
“How do you mean?”
“Think how we’d react if they started setting up a base on the Moon. Or, even better, if we could spot an alien vehicle out around Saturn. Lord, that would produce some results.”
“You read too much science fiction, Laura.”
“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t want to see everything go under.” Her voice caught. It was the first time he’d sensed that level of emotion in her. “Maybe we could fake something?”
There wasn’t much left to do on the platform. The project seal, which had been imprinted on one of the bulkheads, a rocket crossing through a set of Saturnian rings, seemed especially sad as he and Judy sat quietly in the operations area, talking about what they would do when they got home. Their careers with NASA were pointless now. Judy Parker had been the pilot when Matt came to the platform. “It’s time,” she said, “to go back and find something else to do with my life. Maybe even start a family.”
“You serious?”
“Sure.” She’d flown jets in one of the endless Middle East wars. But she was one of the gentlest people Matt had ever known. It was hard to imagine her in the cockpit of a fighter. She was an African-American, cool, calm, impossible to rattle. When they’d blown an engine on the ride to L2, she’d told him to relax, had put on a pressure suit and pushed out through the airlock. Then she came back, shrugged, threw some switches, and the problem had gone away. But the decision to shut down the L2 had gotten to her. “I’ve given most of my adult life to NASA,” she’d told him when the announcement had come in. “I’m done. I’m tired of politicians who can find money to throw into one war after another, but can’t fix the highways or hire teachers. And certainly can’t get themselves together for something that requires a little bit of imagination.”
She stared at Matt. “You know,” she said, “I suspect if, several thousand years from now, somebody goes back to the Moon—” Her eyes brightened and her voice caught. “—If they go back to the Moon, they might be surprised when they see footprints.” She cleared her throat. Stiffened. “Well, we’ll see what happens.”
Matt was more optimistic. “Eventually, we’ll make it. We’ll put a colony on Mars and keep going. It might not be you or me. But somebody will head out of town.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said. She was an attractive woman. She wore her hair short, and she had an easy smile. But there was something in her manner that always reminded you who was in charge.
“Judy, are you going to stay with the Agency?”
“The Agency’s leaving me, Matt,” she said. “I don’t know them anymore.”
The radio beeped. Matt picked up and heard a male voice: “Earthport, this is Houston. We have reports of an incoming asteroid. Data is being fed to your computer. It’s not very big. Coming in from behind the Moon. Out in your area. It’s why we didn’t pick it up earlier.”
“They think it’s our fault,” said Judy, smiling.
Matt held up a hand while he tried to listen. “We just got word half an hour ago,” Houston continued. “It’s probably not a problem, but we do not have a good angle. Please get us a reading.”
“Houston, you guys sent the scientists home last month. What precisely do you want? Vector and velocity?”
“That would be helpful, yes.”
Snotnose. “I’ll get back to you.” He sat down at the control board, grumbled, and turned dials.
“Need help?” asked Judy.
“No, I’ve got it.” Display lines appeared on the monitor. Auxiliary screens lit up. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the data coming in from Houston.” He relayed it into the direction finder and studied the results. “They’re right. They can’t see it from the ground.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” said Judy. “If the Moon blocks it off, it can’t get anywhere near Earth, right?”
“The Moon doesn’t stay in one place,” said Matt.
“Oh. Yes. Good point.”
Stars moved steadily across the main display. A blinker appeared. Matt tapped the screen with his index finger. “There it is.”
“How big is it?”
The
rock was shaped like a chicken leg, bulbous at one end, relatively narrow at the other. It was turning slowly, tumbling, moving in the general direction of the Moon. “Looks like about fifty meters across at its widest point. Maybe two hundred meters long.”
“That’s not exactly small.”
“Nope.”
“Got a velocity?”
“Hold on.” He waited for the numbers to steady up. “Looks like about twenty klicks per second.”
More lights appeared and began blinking. Matt pushed one of the pads with his index finger. “And we have a vector.”
“Is it going to hit the Moon?” said Judy.
He brought up images representing the asteroid and the Moon. A red line extended out from the asteroid. It moved toward the lunar rim. And narrowly missed it.
“No,” said Matt. He zoomed out, bringing the Earth into the picture. The line continued toward the planet. And again skipped past the edge.
“Not by much,” Judy said. “But I guess they can stop worrying.”
Matt went back to the mike. “Houston, this is Earthport.”
“Go ahead, Earthport.” A different voice this time. One of the comm ops.
“We’ve forwarded the data. You guys can relax.”
“Thanks. Glad to hear it.”
“Let us know if you need anything else. Earthport out.”
“You know what would be really nice?” said Judy. “If that thing was headed directly for New York, and we had a ship to go out there and hit it with a laser cannon. Like the Enterprise.”
Judy was back in the washroom while Matt sat quietly watching the Cernan. Its course was bringing it around the side of the Moon. “Laura,” he said, “I have you onscreen.”
“Roger that. I see you too.”
A long pause, while he tried to think of something else to say. “It’ll be good to get back to the Cape.”
“I’m sure it will. You’ve been out here how long? Eight months?”
A Voice in the Night Page 39
