by Zach Hughes
"A queen from the first," David said, chuckling fondly.
"The way that little girl could wrap people around her finger she should have become a politician," Ruth said with fondness.
Jump. Jump. Jump. Rest. Recharge.
David gave Ruth basic lessons in ship's operation and navigation. When she was on watch, Ruth's duty was mainly a matter of monitoring the instruments and the computer.
"If you can tell when something is going wrong, that's all you need to know," he told her. "Then you call me."
Ruth's curiosity wasn't satisfied with that, of course. She spent time studying the manuals and impressed David anew with her ability to collect and collate information.
It was a lovely trip. They hadn't spent time together in many years.
They remembered, they found that their taste in books and films was surprisingly alike, their politics straight down the conservative line, their taste in wine and food quite similar. It was difficult to get a good debate going because they thought so much alike. The only way David could get a rise out of his sister was to offer to make her life more comfortable, or more luxurious.
"Damn it, Ruth, I've got more money than I'll ever spend. Use it. Take a trip."
"I take one trip each year," she said.
"An excursion trip with a bunch of old maid schoolteachers."
"But that's what I am, an old maid schoolteacher."
"I'm sorry," he said.
"No reason to be. It has been my choice." She smiled, touched his hand.
"Why have you never married?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Because I never found a girl as pretty as Sheba?"
She laughed.
"Or you," he said. "Never found a woman I could talk to the way I talk to you."
She was thoughtful for a few moments. "Well, old Dave, you may have put your finger on it. I kept looking for a man like you back in my salad days when I was considering an alliance, marital or otherwise. Could it be that the Webster twins are slightly warped?" She asked the question wryly, but a memory had burned its way through a sheath of deliberate forgetfulness. She was fifteen and she'd just been kissed by a boy named John Form, a rather handsome boy who had put his tongue into her mouth. She'd gone to her brother in puzzlement, for at the time it seemed distasteful and rather unsanitary, that tonguey kiss.
"Well, that's the way it's done, Sis," David had said. "It's called deep kissing."
"I don't like it," she'd said. "Do you?"
He had grinned and winked.
"Uggh."
"Maybe John Form didn't know how to do it right," he had suggested.
On impulse, he had pulled Ruth to him. "Let your lips part slightly." Shehad let her lips open. And a burst of sunlight glowed inside her as his mouth covered hers and his tongue sought hers and engendered response.
She had tried to hide her shameful reaction and apparently she'd been successful. She'd said, "Well, that's about the way John did it."
David was talking. She picked up his teasing line of thought again as he said, "If so, it's your fault."
"Pooh."
"For being the way you are. Caring, thoughtful, wise—"
"Wise? My God, that makes me sound ancient."
"—rather nice looking—"
"You say that only because we look so much alike."
"Comfortable."
"Ah, that's it. You're just too damned lazy to court a woman."
He grinned. "Could be."
It was not, by any means, the only time their talk had approached what would have been flirtation had they not been brother and sister. Now, decades after he had demonstrated the art of deep kissing to her, she asked herself, "Does he realize? Did he, too, feel a sun burst inside him with that kiss when we were fifteen?"
The Fran Webster blinked back into normal space at a distance of parsecs from the nearest star. "Oh, my God," Ruth said, as she looked edge on at the Milky Way. "Oh, dear God, how beautiful."
The fiery heart of the galaxy was a dazzling globe of diamonds, the bulge of it protruding on either side of the disc, the thinner disc stretching on and back from the ship's position.
"Now I do envy you," she said. "For having seen this before."
"But I haven't," he said. "This is my first time outside the galaxy, too."
He patted her on the shoulder. "No one I'd rather share it with."
"Thank you. Thank you for this."
"My pleasure."
"Can we just stay here for a while?"
"Sure. We have charge for another jump, but we can wait until the generator is full again."
She toyed with the optics, zooming in on the nearest stars so that she could appreciate the distance, then coming back, back, until once again the enthralling spectacle was spread out before her.
"Come along," David said.
"Where?"
"Out there," he said, pointing at the optic viewer.
"Yes. Yes," she whispered, thinking that he was merely being mystic, or poetic, but he took her hand and led her to the central lock, helped her climb into a shimmering E.V.A. suit. She shivered in anticipation and some fear as the inner hatch closed and she leapt convulsively when, with a wild hissing, the air evacuated from the lock and the other hatch opened to—space, darkness, cold that she could not feel but could imagine. She was incapable of movement. She made no effort to resist as David pulled her toward him, locked an umbilical to the suit and to his, stepped out into the void pulling her with him.
She screamed.
"That hurt my ears," he said, his voice perfectly reproduced by the suit's communicator.
"Take me in," she gasped, having difficulty breathing. They were drifting away from the ship, weightless. She felt helpless. She squirmed and reached out. The reaction to her sudden motion sent them spinning, together, to the end of the cords. They jerked to a stop.
"Ruth!"
His voice penetrated the haze of panic.
"I want you to look."
He turned her.
The galaxy was one vast, misty jewel over her head, hanging there, but not heavy, ethereal, so beautiful that she felt only awe, not fear.
She turned her head. The ship's hull was a metal wall behind her, seen dimly by the glow of the galaxy. Beyond was—nothing, a nothing so deep, so complete that she had to stare at it for a long, long time before she could see the dimmest little points of light, lights that were, she told herself, other galaxies as large as, larger, brighter than the glowing dream of beauty that hung over her head.
"My God, David."
"Yes."
"Still want to go in?"
"No, not just yet." She giggled. "I'm going to have to change clothes, but not yet." In her moments of sheer panic she had wet herself, but she felt no shame.
"You can feel it when you're out here," he said.
"That, sir, is exactly the kind of imprecise statement for which I would reprimand one of my students."
"Pardon me all to hell."
"But I understand exactly what you mean."
During a long silence she listened to her own breathing, her own heart pounding, let her eyes close partially to dim the glory of the massed stars.
"Time to go," David said.
"All right."
She matched his movements, pulling herself toward the ship along the thin cord that was all that prevented her from drifting away into the endlessness of the intergalactic void. Then they were in the lock and airwas hissing in.
Out of the suit, she kissed him on the cheek. "I think that is the nicest gift anyone has ever given me," she said. "Thank you."
CHAPTER FOUR
The Fran Webster rested in solitude in a black sac seven parsecs inward from Rimfire's extragalactic route, having left total emptiness at the point where Dan Webster's Mule had made a left turn over a year ago.
David had checked the last inward pointing permanent beacon left by Rimfire, but no messages had been entered into the beacon's storage chambers. Now David sat
on the control bridge with his feet propped up on the console, hands behind his head, staring at the optic viewer. A few widely spaced stars made faint dots in the blackness. Ahead, if he set the optics for maximum magnification, was the thickening glow of the dense areas far away, so far that measurements in thousands of parsecs were beyond the grasp of the mind.
Ruth came into the control room in a ship's uni-suit, something that she'd sworn never to wear. The tailored shorts showed her long, smooth, pale legs. The loose top hinted at the tipped cone shape of her breasts. The garment was revealing, but comfortable. She was brushing her sable-brown hair and her eyes were swollen from sleep.
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"No hurry," David said. "We're still charging."
Ruth studied the viewscreen. "You think of the galaxy as being made up of billions of stars," she said, "and then when you see it it's all nothingness, dark, hollow nothingness."
Her comment made David realize that he'd been feeling a bit intimidated by the vast, barren spaces that spread away on all sides. He had taken readings on all of the visible stars and it was going to take weeks of feeling his way along with the optics to reach the nearest one because out here on the edge of nowhere there were no close stellarneighbors.
Ruth punched up coffee with cream, asked David if he wanted a cup, made it for him, and delivered it. A soft tone sounded and the computer messaged that the blink generator was now fully charged.
"All dressed up and no place to go," David said.
"There," Ruth said, pointing to a dim group of stars that were as bright as any on the view-screen.
David raised an eyebrow in question.
"Ever go shopping with Mama?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Or to a museum? She always turned to the right. Rules of the road. Keep to the right. Slower traffic keep to the right. In a shop she'd turn to the right and make a circle to the left. Same way in a museum or a shopping mall."
"And what about Dad?"
"Remember how Mama always navigated for him when we were in the groundcar? She kept the maps in the passenger side storage. She watched for signs."
David laughed. "Mama," he said, imitating his father's tones of irritation, "my job is to watch out for the other idiots. Your job is to watch the signs and tell me when to turn."
"Right," Ruth said. "So they're sitting here beside the last blink beacon wondering which way to go, where to begin. The visible stars form sort of a crescent out there in front of them. The distances seem about the same."
"A few light-years difference between that little grouping off at ten o'clock low and those at three o'clock."
"So it's six of one and half a dozen of the other if your intent is to check them for planetary systems, right?"
"Right."
"There," Ruth said, pointing to the group of faint stars at three o'clock.
"There it shall be," David said, punching in orders for the ship'ssystems to look as far into the emptiness as possible. When the optics had verified that nothing solid blocked a straight line extending into the darkness for a few Tigian astronomical units the ship jumped and David initiated the search process again. The actual movement of the ship was instantaneous, the preparation was not, although it took several of the small jumps to deplete the generator of power.
David began to include the Seeker in the search pattern when the distance to the near star fell below one light-year. There was, of course, nothing to be detected. The first star in the grouping was a loner, barren.
The next sun was over twenty light-years away, and that was a close grouping for the rim area. He went back to the routine of jump, search, charge, jump, search, jump.
They swam in the small pool together. In recent years the styles in feminine swimwear had trended again toward the skimpy. David determined that he had one hell-of-a-fine-shaped sister. He looked at her with appreciation for beauty, with pride because she was of his blood, with renewed curiosity as to why there didn't seem to be a single man on Tigian II with eyes to see and persistence to break through his sister's penchant for living alone.
If there hadn't been the underlying worry about his parents, David would have been content to jump, search, jump, charge for an indefinite period. Being a businessman, he'd never taken time for exploration, and it was rather exciting to take those baby-step jumps into unknown space, to see a star growing in brightness and size on the screen, and to wonder if this one had a family, if this one had spawned a water world. He didn't really need the money that would come to the discoverer of a habitable planet, but he wouldn't refuse it. It might be neat to have a world named for you. Webster. Hell of a name for a world. Imagine having to live on a world called that. "Well, I'm from Webster. It's out there in the rim worlds. No glow from the Milky Way at night. Dark as pitch when there's no moon."
When the Fran Webster was just over half a light-year from the star, the Seeker communicated to the computer that it was getting a signal. A
gong rang softly, raising David's hair, for that warning gong was a demand from the computer for immediate attention. That particular gong could mean only something out of the ordinary and in space surprises were usually unpleasant. "By the way, David, we're about to crunch prowon into a drifting asteroid." Or, "Oh, it seems that we've developed a little leak in the hull and all of our atmosphere is bleeding off into the big empty." Or, "There's an urgent blink message coming in."
David and Ruth were eating when the gong gonged. Ruth's eyes went wide as David leapt into action, his face tense.
"I'll be damned," he said, after he'd taken a couple of seconds to assess the situation.
"David, please," Ruth said, "I have a low threshold of terror."
"It's them," he said. "They're close. The signal from their black box is quite strong."
"Thank God," she said, coming to stand beside him.
His fingers flew, giving commands to the computer. Minute analysis showed that the source of the signal was moving—or that it had been moving when the signal was being originated. For two hours the communications bank blinked and chuckled and determined that the source had been moving in an arc around the near star. Another minute measurement told David that the signal had been shaped by a solid mass in the background.
"Orbital path," David said, asking questions of the computer, nodding.
"Projecting the movement shows this." The computer displayed a diagram of a planetary body orbiting the sun. And then the signal disappeared.
"What happened?" Ruth asked, frightened.
"Don't know." He ordered a careful scan. Just over twelve hours later the signal came again. During the period of silence the source had moved along the predicted arc.
"They've landed," David said. "They're on a body that is orbiting the sun. The orbit is in the life zone area."
"Which means?"
"Life as we know it requires free water. Not water locked up in rockmasses. Not water frozen permanently in ice or heated forever into steam.
Free water. To have free water you have to have a temperature zone that is below boiling and above freezing. The life zone. That area where the energy put out by a planet's sun is confined to a very narrow range. If you have water, chances are you have free oxygen. You can have a lot of other stuff that prevents the planet from being habitable. The odds against having a planet at just the right position in relationship to its sun are literally astronomical, and then you multiple those odds to cover the possible—and very probable—existence of toxic gases and such. That's why a good world is the rarest and most valuable thing in the galaxy."
"Mama and Papa may have found a habitable planet?"
"Well, it's a little early to guess. We know that the ship is on an orbiting body—or was when this signal was sent."
"Yes, I have to keep reminding myself that we're listening to the past."
"We'll just have to move in and see what's going on."
From the time that they first detected the signal from the black box on Old Folks it lasted onl
y seventy-two hours counting the time when the rotation of the body from which the signal originated halted their reception while the transmitter was carried to the opposite side of the planet. With each reemergence of the signal it weakened. It became undetectable at a time when the source was on the side of the body facing them, so it wasn't just a matter of the transmitter being carried behind the bulk of the planetary body again.
"Punch up the Seeker data Josh gave us," David ordered, as he searched for the signal.
"Got it," Ruth said.
"What does it say about the duration of the signal?"
Ruth read quickly, then summarized. "The atomic battery is good for at least twenty years. The box can withstand almost anything except being sucked down into a sun. It's shielded from heat and radiation."
"And, I assume, the cold of space wouldn't bother it."
"Apparently not," Ruth said after scanning. "I'd say that's taken for granted because they don't mention cold temperatures specifically. If a ship lost power and air, it would soon become as cold as space, so the box must have been built to operate under such conditions."
"Any clue as to why it would operate for a while and then stop?"
"Let me read it all again," she said. Then, after a few minutes. "No hint as to what might have happened, David. Whoever wrote this apparently believed that the box is almost indestructible."
"It's beginning to sound to me as if Dad just blinked off and away,"
David said.
"But something had to activate the signal," Ruth said.
"Maybe it was just a rough landing," David said.
"Once activated, the signal can be turned off only by an X&A
technician."
"But if he bumped the ship in landing hard enough to set off the signal but not badly enough to do any real damage, it would seem to us that the signal had been turned off if and when he simply blinked away out of range." He sighed. "Well, we'll go have a look at Dad's planet, anyhow."
