by C. Gockel
The Ship touched the blue ball’s atmosphere. Still moving at star-speed, it plunged in. The Big Picture showed how a cocoon of friction fire enveloped Aeon.
“Sensors say excessive heat at the damage site!” Becca exclaimed, her voice high-pitched. “Aerodynamic drag on the irregularity of the hull there and it’s tripped the boundary layer!”
All eyes turned toward the Big Picture. Unreal but convincing, the pale sheath of plasma knotted, glowing brighter and redder on the starship’s side.
“Structural strain too! The damaged insulation may break—”
Letters and numbers flashed across the bottom of the Big Picture: structural failure, and coordinates, those of the damaged, gouged-out place in the hull. Becca cried out, “It broke off!” Blazing, a chunk of the Ship’s insulation arced away in the airflow around the starship. And at the damage site, red friction bloomed like a flower.
Joel swore. “That heat’ll melt through the pressure hull!”
Alarm tones sounded all over the control center. Every workstation came alive with lights and messages, announcements of loss of structural integrity, loss or drop of atmospheric pressure, breaks in fluid lines. “Crit-one failure!” Becca announced.
“End simulation,” said Bix. The alarms abruptly silenced.
Becca flung herself back in her chair, hands covering her face.
Bix turned to Catharin. He growled, “When are you going to let that ceramics expert out of the recovery room?”
“Today,” Catharin replied. Her heart pounded. That had been a very convincing simulation. “There’s a vid feed into the recovery room. He was watching, and now I imagine he understands the problems we’re facing.”
Catharin felt adrenaline left over from the simulation, plus frustration, plus guilt stewing inside her as she entered the recovery room, next door to the medical laboratory. She concealed the stew, put on her medical manner like an overcoat. “Well, how are you doing?”
His name was Zak. “Fine!” He gestured toward the vid-feed. “That was very exciting. I understand why you need me.” Dark-skinned and wiry, Zak looked like a racial amalgam, like someone from the underclass in a city of twenty-first-century Earth, polished by the intelligence and willpower to climb up and out and reach for the stars.
Zak was the only person from his background now awake. Catharin felt a pang of hopeless conscience for the unasked-for loneliness that she had brought him into. She directed him to the Engineering office with best wishes.
She had a headache. So she took a painkiller and headed for the dining hall for what the mess machines served in lieu of good coffee: a bad substitute, freeze-dried and tasting almost as old as it was. In the dining hall’s doorway she nearly bumped into Lary Siroky-Scheidt, on his way out. He bristled at her and charged off.
Joel was hunched over a plate in the corner of the hall, radiating anger. Catharin brought her coffee to sit beside him. “Don’t tell me you just had a fight with Lary.”
“Okay. I won’t tell you.” He speared a synthetic meatball and glowered at it.
“You shouldn’t let him get to you! Don’t hesitate to put him in his place. Joel, he’s not sick, he’s a hypochondriac.”
Joel sighed bitterly. With a fork, he rearranged the flaccid spaghetti on his plate. “I hate those thrusters. I think we’ll be asking for a propellant specialist next.” He did not meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“For needing somebody else to help you? Joel, I don’t blame you for that.” Before she was more than half aware of it, a startling strong impulse came over her: to ask him to come to her tonight. She wanted to comfort him and for him to make love to her. She wanted to let cold shock waves of tension transmute into warm sexuality.
But Joel was married. His wife was in stasis, oblivious fidelity, on Level Twelve. High tension tends to arouse passion, Catharin thought, shaken by the intensity of her feelings, which only force of will restrained, and not completely. She reached out to massage the back of his neck. By the way his eyebrows and shoulders lifted, that came as a pleasant surprise to Joel. She marveled at the rich chocolate color of his skin.
A bustle of laughter spilled through the dining hall door. People trooped in, a group with Becca in its midst—her repair crew, now including Zak. Becca was introducing Zak all around, asking about his experience and opinions, and generally installing him in the crew. Catharin took her hand back from Joel’s neck.
Dropping his head on a fist, Joel said in a rueful voice, “I feel old and creaky. But she’s bright and bouncy as a kid who hasn’t learned what it means to hit a limit.”
“She’s hardly a kid, she’s a woman,” Catharin retorted. In the same breath, a perception shift came to Catharin, and she saw Becca in a new light: the engineer of a damaged ship, with a repair crew in orbit around her like planets around their star. “Joel, you know, terraforming isn’t the same issue that it would have been in the original plan. Lary’s role has changed significantly, and not in a way that pleases him.”
“Yeah, but how did we get back to Lary?”
“He expected—and reasonably so—to be called upon to mastermind the making of a new world, starting with a rudimentary ecosystem and a primeval atmosphere. Everyone and everything would have depended on his expertise. Instead, we’ll accommodate ourselves to the green world that we’ve found.”
“So he’s a disappointed hypochondriac?”
Catharin had read Lary’s biography in the records to which, as medical officer, she had access. He had been a precocious child: a genius, far ahead of his age group in school, a bright and busy, stellar, red-haired kid. “He’s a jealous hypochondriac. Where do you suppose he went?”
Joel snorted. “Not where I wish he would! He holes up in his cubicle when he isn’t making other people miserable.”
“I’m going to go make a house call.” Her prescription would be attention. It was worth a try.
At the door of Lary’s cubicle, Catharin tapped without getting a response. “Lary, I need to talk with you.”
He admitted her in with a sour and defensive expression. The workstation in the tiny, neat room displayed a blue sphere ringed with information icons. There were orange markings on the sphere, features of some special interest to Lary.
“Are you running a study of the blue planet on your own time?”
“No, I’m playing tic-tac-toe,” he said with sarcasm.
Catharin said, “Your tests have been coming out in the normal range, but I realized I should give the results extra attention. That’s because you are a Martian. There hasn’t been genetic drift—Mars hasn’t been colonized long enough for that—but there may be slight congenital effects that I should take into account,” she improvised. “So come to the lab—tomorrow, oh-nine-hundred, would you?”
“You could have sent a message,” Lary pointed out.
“I also wanted to ask you in private to cook something. I, for one, have had it with the mess machines. Can you make them do anything that tastes like chocolate?”
The edges of his face and of his stance softened. “I might.”
A circle of luminescence flickered in front of the star shield. As the starship’s magnetosphere hit the charged particles in space, funneling the ions back into the engine’s fuel reservoir, it created the starship-glow effect. Crowned with faint fire, spinning through space in stately silence, Aeon approached Planet Blue on a parabolic curve. Within there was frantic activity. Work crews hurried from place to place, banging out repairs, conferring in strained or tired, loud voices.
When the Ship was still hundreds of thousands of miles away from the double planet, a shuttle lifted out of the transport level lock near the north pole. The shuttle flew south toward the Ship’s equator, high, so the Ship spun away beneath it. The shuttle veered toward the scar on the equator.
The Big Picture generated an image from the expedition for those in the control center. At the Life Systems station, Catharin watched intermittently. On her own screen she had a s
egment of the Checklist pulled up. With dogged determination, she was turning it green for go, one section at a time.
Catharin’s nerves sang with tension. The repair was not an overtly dangerous job for Joel and Becca, who would stay in the relative safety of the shuttle. But things could go wrong. The way the Intelligence depicted it on the Big Picture, the shuttle looked improbable and frail against the strange stars.
One sidebar of her Intelligence screen displayed medical telemetry from the expedition. Becca and Joel both registered elevated heart rates—Becca’s higher, a fugue to Joel’s. She, not Joel, was sending two men and a woman into the depths of the ripped outer hull of the Ship. While Joel flew the shuttle, Becca reviewed the game plan with the repair crew, including Zak. Becca’s motions were graceful and assured, and she sounded confident, Tennessee accent at a minimum. The rapid canter of her heart was not outwardly evident.
The repair crew suited up as they floated at various angles in the shuttle as it approached the damaged area, which bore an eerie resemblance to a small mountain range on the Ship’s surface. The spacecraft descended sharply, and hovered—tricky piloting for Joel: he had to track the spin of the Ship exactly. As Becca and the repair crew viewed the on-the-spot visuals being gathered by the shuttle, the world called Blue inched up from the horizon of the Ship.
There had been no world like that one at home. Thousands of years and light-years from Earth and its familiar solar system, the Ship was the only known world left in the universe, and it was damaged. From the shuttle-borne camera’s point of view, the stars and cloud-laced Planet Blue wheeled beyond the terrible scar on the Ship.
Catharin jumped at an unexpected loud comment. “I tell you, we’re leaping before we look.” At his station, Lary continued, “I admit that Green looks like an oasis. But nobody can be bothered to think about Blue!”
The repair team emerged from the shuttle’s airlock into its cargo bay, exposed to space under wide-open clamshell doors. The team snapped on tethers that looked frail as spiderwebs. Maneuvering packs lined one side of the bay like a neat row of beetles, ready to go. Each team member wormed into a pack and tested its controls.
Becca’s voice came on the link. “Catharin—I’m looking out through the cargo bay window. Planet Blue’s visible above the bay.”
“We’ve got it on the Big Picture.”
“The white clouds are hurricanes. Hurricanes like lace all over it! Isn’t that a sight?”
Lary muttered, “Scenery! Is that all she thinks it is?”
Catharin let her temper vent in a long sigh. “Well, Lary—what do you think?”
“It has those pretty hurricanes because it rotates rapidly. The winds stay pumped up. Storms never cease. Do you realize the significance of that?”
Catharin had a distinct urge not to scratch Lary’s itch for attention. But as attention was what she herself had prescribed for him, she found no good reason not to. “No, Lary, I do not.”
The repair team released tethers and steered themselves, with jets from their maneuvering packs, away from the shuttle. Like small space tugs, two of the three pushed equipment that bulked larger than their packs. Crew and equipment disappeared into the depths of the damaged area. Inside the deep gouge, they secured themselves with pitons, like mountain climbers, against the centrifugal force that would have made them slide right back out again. Catharin was relieved to hear the all-secured report.
Unasked, Lary sent a transmission to Catharin’s workstation. Imaging the worlds Green and Blue, it appeared in a window, which overlaid some of her Checklist data. “Look at those planets. They should tend toward spin-lock. Remember how Luna always kept the same face toward Earth? It was much smaller, so it got spin-locked first. Many more hundreds of millions of years and Earth will keep one face toward Luna too. But two planets of the same mass, like Blue and Green, should exert tidal effects on each other to an equal degree. Therefore, any initial difference in the rate they spin around their respective axes should tend to disappear over time. But the sea world rotates six point five times as fast as the other one. Blue has an eight-hour day, for God’s sake, and Green a fifty-two hour one.”
The repair crew started to work. Catharin checked the sidebar. Zak had a nice steady heartbeat. He was a pro: doing his work, he didn’t worry about where he was. “That’s interesting, Lary.”
“Interesting? It’s impossible!”
A picture from the gouge came in, transmitted from the crewwoman’s helmet-mounted camera. Her colleagues moved around in their bulky suits like spelunkers on the moons of Saturn. The beams from headlamps built into all three of the spacesuits splashed on the contours of the disruption in the thick ceramic hide of the starship. Distracted, Catharin snapped, “Lary, it doesn’t matter if Blue ought to be impossible. It’s right there!”
“It’s not possible if the two planets formed at the same time and if there’s been enough time for life to evolve on one,” Lary amended. “If a double planet like this had this same separation at their formation, they should spin-lock in a few hundreds of millions of years at this separation. The tidal forces they exert on each other are huge. If, on the other hand, there’s been time for life on one of them to evolve to the level of vascular plants like the trees we expect to find on Green, then that says the system has existed for a few billion years. It doesn’t add up.” He added, “Even a doctor ought to know that much planetary science.”
Miguel was away from the Life Systems station. Of late he had been spending long hours at the yeast vats, which were the nucleus of the Ship’s food-producing capability. Catharin suddenly missed Miguel: he was easy to work with, as unobtrusive as competent. And, she realized, Miguel had been serving as a buffer between herself and Lary. Unbuffered, Lary was every bit as irritating as Joel had been trying to tell her all along.
The repair crew’s communications had static in them, but Becca’s voice—high, sharp—pierced the fuzz. She made sure the crew knew exactly what she wanted—and what she would settle for if the ideal proved undoable. Catharin said, “Perhaps planetary science needs better theories.”
Sounding scornful, Lary retorted, “Suppose you saw somebody, oh, start growing younger instead of older, sprout wings, or something equally ridiculous. Would you decide medicine was wrong? Or look for an answer?”
She turned toward him and used her coolest professional tone. “I’ve never seen anything like that in a patient, and I do not worry about the real or imagined conditions of people who are not my patients. I haven’t the time and energy to waste on conditions that are no business of mine to understand, or heal.”
They were spraying foam insulation, appearing as a white wiggling noodle in the picture. The mobile blob that was Zak wielded the stream of foam with quick, steady movements.
Lary fumed. Knowing how truly crucial this part of the expedition was, Catharin mentally told Lary and his worries to go jump into that world-wide ocean that was Blue.
Before she expected it, the audio link filled with directions for the shuttle’s retrieval of the crew. Becca dictated a work log in a precise, decisive tone. “The repair crew flooded the deepest part of the breach in the Ship’s ceramic insulating hull with insulating foam. It hardened in the vacuum and bonded to the ceramic satisfactorily. We’ve still got an irregularity in the Ship’s surface where the meteoroid impact rumpled up the ceramic—there’s no way to sand it down with the means at hand—but the inner pressure hull is no longer exposed to space. The ceramic layer is now reattached to the pressure hull, greatly reducing the chance that it will break off during final braking.” She paraphrased for Catharin’s benefit: “The patient’s gonna live.”
The crew reemerged from the now shallower, partially filled-in hole, rappelling out toward the shuttle’s welcoming bay. The airlock cycling that brought everyone safe inside seemed interminable; Becca came in last. Joel lifted the shuttle up, swiftly curving toward rendezvous with the transport level airlock. Catharin sagged slightly, sheer relief leac
hing out some of her posture.
Inside the shuttle, the backpacks of spacesuits popped open and swung wide like cabinet doors. The users of the suits emerged, a jumble of arms and legs and torsos.
“Also, though of course it isn’t a discrepancy of the same order of magnitude, plate tectonic theory can’t explain the orogeny. Mountains, that is.”
“Blue has mountains?” Distracted, Catharin was confused.
“Chains of seamounts, some of which are taller than the ocean is deep. They’re visible as barren islands.”
“Lary, look. They got the spider back.”
Lying in Becca’s hand, it did look like a spider, a dead one, folded up. Becca produced a slim screwdriver, with which she aimed a tap at tiny robot’s abdomen. It unfolded its legs and beeped. Becca laughed in delight.
Catharin heard Lary mutter, “What a ship of fools!”
He was doing his level best to throw ice water on this moment, at least insofar as Catharin was concerned. She held her temper in by sheer force. “Really, Lary, how bad is it to colonize Planet Green without understanding just why Blue is exactly the way it is? At least it’s a moon, for which we ought to be grateful.”
Lary answered, “Sure. And our descendants can go for generations not understanding Blue. How about a nice myth to explain what it’s doing up there in the sky? A colorful, unscientific myth. Is that what you want?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Myth will be needed, to symbolize what Blue means to the human spirit,” said a quiet voice, consonants blurred by a Spanish accent. Miguel had returned from the yeast vats. “It is a religious matter. But myth is not science.” Miguel took the sharp look Catharin gave him for a question, and answered, “Yes, Catharin, I do feel that it is important to explain Blue scientifically.” Lary, surprised at reinforcement for his position, opened his mouth and shut it again. Miguel looked over Catharin’s shoulder. “Did the repair go well?”