“I have to try. Let me keep talking to him, maybe I can get through to him.”
“It’s all we can do. As we approach I’m going to bring us right alongside. It may help if he sees our ship and knows you’re with him wherever he goes. Talk to him, Jan.”
About what? But the words came spilling out. She began with their earliest days together, in the displaced persons’ camp at Husvik. She spoke of their schooling, the flower festival in Punta Arenas, summer evenings that lasted forever. Then there was their joint decision to take jobs on the Global Minerals’ platform, the application to move to the Outer System, their plan to work on the Saturn orbital weather station.
Through all of it Sebastian answered not a word. When the two ships were racing side by side, Jan could see the dark dot of his helmet in the Mayfly’s tiny cabin. So near and yet so far away. And as Jupiter loomed large in the sky ahead, she realized that all her talk of “their” plans and “their” actions was delusion. She had proposed. She had persuaded; Sebastian had merely gone along. So why did he refuse to go along now, when she needed to persuade him as never before?
She knew why. Her thinking had not been quite accurate. The interest in the cloud patterns of the outer planets had never been hers. It had always been Sebastian’s, and his alone. That had brought them out to Ganymede. That drove them now toward Jupiter.
Their trajectory was not as Jan had expected. They were flying side by side, but rather than following a path that would graze by the planet, the two ships were arrowing right toward the center of Jupiter’s banded disk. She realized that Sebastian had never said he wanted to make a flyby. He wanted to “go to the clouds.” If they did not change course they would plunge deep into the atmosphere on a path of no return.
Through all her talking, Paul had sat quietly. She was still talking, with a sense of futility and with no response from Sebastian, when Paul said, “Ah! At last. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
He manipulated the controls so fast that she could not follow what he did; but suddenly they were in free-fall.
“What’s going on?”
“He’s out of volatiles. I told you, Ganymede Ground Control doesn’t like crew members joyriding too far, so they’re stingy with reaction mass. The Mayfly has no more drive capability.”
“Does that make any difference?”
“A huge difference. While we were both accelerating, nobody could leave either ship without being left behind in space. Now I can go over to his ship and bring Sebastian here. Then we turn around and go home. We still have plenty of reaction mass.”
He said it casually, as though this was a routine operation that he did every day.
Jan said, “Suppose he won’t come?”
“I wasn’t proposing to give him an option.” Paul studied the sky ahead. “We have plenty of time. Let’s take ten minutes.”
“Why?” To Jan’s eye, Jupiter seemed awfully close.
“To be sure that you know how to fly this ship—just in case.”
“Paul, I’m the reason that Sebastian came to Ganymede. I must be the one who goes to him.”
“How many spacewalks have you done? That’s what I thought. And these scooters are designed to practically fly themselves. Let me squeeze past you. We have to change seats.”
The move was tricky, but within less than five minutes Jan was facing the bank of controls. After that … Maybe it was the sight of Jupiter, swelling ahead; maybe it was fatigue or nerves; maybe Paul was an optimist. For whatever reason, it seemed far longer than five minutes before Jan felt confident enough to say, “All right. I can handle simple maneuvers.”
“Good. If I don’t come back—”
“Don’t say that.” They had their suit helmets closed, and Jan stared at his face through the hard transparent visor. “You come back, Paul Marr. Do you hear?”
Then she had to say the hardest words ever. She gripped his arm, hard. “Whatever happens to Sebastian, don’t risk your own life. You come back with Sebastian or without him, but you come back to me.”
“I’ll come back, and I’ll have Sebastian with me. Remember, I still need to get a portrait of you that I’m satisfied with.” He turned away and opened the hatch. He left it wide open as he left, and Jan had a clear view of Sebastian’s ship as Paul floated off toward it. The distance separating them was no more than fifteen meters. Surely she could have made that jump herself.
But Paul possessed information that Jan lacked. He used his suit’s controls to bring him close alongside the Mayfly, and gestured to Sebastian to open its hatch. When that produced no result—it seemed to Jan that Sebastian was not even aware of Paul’s presence—he moved backward along the ship’s hull, and ran his glove in a certain pattern over selected points.
The Mayfly hatch opened. Paul approached it slowly, easing his way along the hull. Jan saw Sebastian turn in his cramped seat, a puzzled look on his face.
“Emergency opening,” Paul said to Sebastian, and Jan added, “This is for your own good. We’re going to take you home.”
“Home?” The moon face showed a spark of interest, then settled back into indifference. “I can’t go home until I finish my job.”
“Sebastian, you’re imagining things. There is no ‘job’ that has to be done. Your job will be out on the Saturn orbiting weather station. Let Paul help you. He’ll bring you over to our ship, and we can all go back to Ganymede.”
To her surprise and huge relief, he nodded and said, “All right.” And to Paul, hovering outside the Mayfly cabin, “This is a tight fit. Help me.”
He reached out his left hand, and Jan saw Paul take it in both of his. Then she saw Sebastian’s right hand move upward, fast. He had his body braced in his seat, and he used that leverage to slam the hatch down. Its sharp edge smashed onto Paul’s forearms, just above the wrists. Jan heard a crunch of breaking bones, and Paul’s cry of agony over his suit radio.
The hatch sprang wide. Sebastian leaned out and pushed. Paul spun away, turning end over end. Jan could not tell if the tough material of the suit had been punctured, but his arms hung uselessly in front of him.
“Emergency opening, emergency closing,” Sebastian said calmly. “You don’t seem to understand, Jan. When a man has a job to do, he must do it. He cannot allow anyone to stop him.”
He closed the hatch. “Don’t bother me anymore with talking. We can talk when I’ve finished my task.”
The Mayfly and the Flyboy scooter moved on, side by side, but Paul was spiraling away from both with the momentum provided by Sebastian’s push.
Was he still alive? Jan sat rigid, until she heard harsh, pained breathing and the words, “Can’t—use hands. Can’t work suit controls.”
“It’s all right, Paul. I’m here. I’m coming to get you.”
If she was smart or lucky. She knew how to make large-scale maneuvers, but this called for delicacy. She edged the scooter slowly forward, then sideways. How was she going to bring Paul inside, when he could do nothing to help himself?
There would be no painless way to do it. The rotation of Paul’s body about its center of mass must be stopped. The only way she knew to cancel that rotation was by impact with the Flyboy. Already he must be suffering terribly, and she was going to make it worse.
“I’m sorry, Paul.” She felt like crying as the ship traveled the last twenty meters. The agony was her own, deep in her guts, as his shattered arms smacked into the edge of the scooter’s open hatch. He groaned at new and intolerable pain. But the collision had slowed his body’s rotation. She leaned across the seat, and at last she could reach out and pull him in.
She inspected his suit. The forearms showed deep cuts in the tough material, but they did not run all the way. Paul was going to be all right; rapid re-set and growth hormones would fix him, once they were back on Ganymede. He had to be all right.
She had a bizarre thought as she closed the hatch. Captain Kondo was going to kill her when he learned what she had done to his first offi
cer. She repressed a hysterical laugh and looked outside the ship. Where was Sebastian?
While she had been occupied with Paul, the Mayfly had moved ahead of them. Free-falling under gravity it was heading for the exact center of Jupiter’s disk. The planet had swelled to fill the sky.
Jan set the scooter’s drive, hard enough to catch up with Sebastian’s ship but not enough to add crucifying weight to the pain in Paul’s arms. As she did so, a warning buzz sounded through the cabin.
“You can’t do that, Jan.” Paul was nursing his forearms, holding them across his chest. “That’s the autopilot. Trying to take over. Means we’re on a collision course.”
“With Sebastian’s ship?”
“With Jupiter.” Paul found the strength to nod his head forward, toward the giant planet. “Stop the override. You’ve got to give control to the autopilot.”
“But Sebastian.” The Mayfly was still in sight. “If we don’t go after him …”
Paul said nothing. After a long, miserable moment, Jan abandoned manual control. Immediately, the scooter fired its attitude control jets to turn them tangential to their previous path. A fraction of a second later, the main engines came on at maximum thrust.
The sudden weight was painful, even for Jan. For Paul it had to be indescribable. He said nothing, but as she turned she saw his white face behind the visor and the sweat on his forehead.
“Paul, I’m returning to manual.”
“Not unless you want to—kill both of us.” He spoke with difficulty, through hard-clenched teeth. “Trust the autopilot, Jan. It knows. Going to be touch and go, either way. We left it late.”
Glancing to the right she could see what he meant. The engines were thrusting them sideways, at two or three gees, but the ship was still falling toward Jupiter. There was infinite detail in those cloud layers—detail that Sebastian loved so much, and understood better than anyone else in the System; but entry into them meant death.
She looked up to the screen, changing its field of view to scan behind the scooter. A solitary red dot blinked its message. The Mayfly was still in free-fall, and already it had attained the outermost wisps of the Jovian atmosphere.
“Paul, we can’t just leave him there.”
“We have to—unless you know a way to change the laws of dynamics.” Paul straightened in his seat, groaning as the bones of his forearms grated to a new position. “You did your best, Jan, your very best. Everything that you possibly could do, you did. He wouldn’t let you save him. He didn’t want you to save him.”
“But why, Paul? What does he think he’s doing?”
It was a question for which Jan did not expect an answer; perhaps it would never have an answer. Their scooter, still descending, was racing along through the outermost layers of the atmosphere. A whistle of air sounded on the hull. Behind them, the view across the horizon revealed a tiny flicker of red, dropping into the towering mass of a thunderhead. Jan, forgetting their own situation, could not take her eyes off that point of light.
It fell and fell and fell; and then, suddenly, the Mayfly’s beacon signal was gone.
Jan caught her breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the control displays showed that the Flyboy scooter was dangerously low. Drag on the ship was hindering the effectiveness of the engines in pulling them out of their descent.
“Paul.” She reached out, then had enough sense not to touch him. He had curled his body into its most comfortable position. “Paul, if we don’t make it I just want you to know. You couldn’t save Sebastian, but you saved me in all kinds of ways.”
“We’ll make it.” He was studying the control panel and the horizon ahead. “We’re holding our own in altitude. But I didn’t save you. You saved yourself.”
Jan felt warm all over. She pushed what she wanted to say into the back of her mind. It would keep. Instead she said, “If we’re going to make it, you need help. Tell me how to place a call for a medical vessel.”
As she followed his directions for an emergency call she saw that he was right. The scooter was slowly lifting away from Jupiter. She and Paul had begun a long journey, all the way around the body of the planet on a high swingby that would at last take them back toward Ganymede.
And then there would be a longer journey, one that three months ago she could not have imagined: a life without Sebastian. He was gone, gone forever. Life went on.
33
The last conversation that Alex remembered was short and simple.
As Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr rushed out, he said to Milly Wu, “What now?”
She shrugged. “We do what Bat said. We wait for him to show up.”
Alex wandered out into Sebastian Birch’s living room and flopped down on an easy chair. Perhaps it was sheer physical fatigue and lack of sleep, but he was filled with a sense of failure. He had been asked by Bat, with that strange urgency in his voice, to find and guard Sebastian Birch. It was not Alex’s fault that Birch had vanished, yet it felt like his fault.
Milly Wu sat down in a chair opposite. She shook her head but did not speak. Alex closed his tired eyes and tried to relax.
After what seemed like no more than a few minutes, someone gripped his upper arm. He looked up, expecting to see Milly. Magrit Knudsen was standing over him. Confused and still dopey with fatigue, he sat upright and stared around him. Milly Wu had vanished.
“Where the devil did you spring from?”
It was no way to talk to a superior cabinet officer three levels and more above you, but Magrit Knudsen didn’t react. “Bat called me,” she said. “You know, when that man stopped working for me I thought there would be no more midnight crises and alarms. I should have known better. How did he drag you in? Don’t bother to answer that. Are you awake?”
“Yes.” The rush of adrenaline after he recognized Magrit Knudsen made his statement true.
“Then come on. He wants you there for what may be the finish. We have to go up a level. That’s where the others are.”
Alex rose to his feet and followed her, out of the apartment and up a flight of stairs. She led him into what was clearly some kind of facility control center. The room was dominated by a three-dimensional display as big as any that Alex had ever seen. It showed an image of a section of Jupiter’s clouded outer layers under extreme magnification. Alex could make out individual pixels in the vortices and cloud banks.
Bat was seated on the floor, immobile and staring at the display. On his left, doll-sized compared with his bulk, sat Milly Wu. Behind Bat, hovering nervously over him with hands clasped together like a praying mantis, stood Ligon’s chief scientist, Bengt Suomi.
Magrit Knudsen walked forward and said, “Any success?”
Bat did not move or speak. It was Suomi who answered, “Just the opposite, I’m afraid. We had close contact until a couple of minutes ago. Then something happened between the ships, and now they are diverging.”
Alex walked forward to stand next to Milly Wu. Now he could see in the display what the others were staring at so intently: two bright points of light stood out against the face of Jupiter. As he watched, they moved infinitesimally farther apart.
Milly Wu glanced at Alex and said softly, “Birch’s ship is on the right. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr have been chasing him. They spent hours in close contact, but now they’re separating. Looks as if they’ve lost him.”
Hours? Alex wondered how long he had been asleep and out of things. Bengt Suomi said suddenly, and with a tremor in his voice, “Range-rate data show that Birch’s ship is still descending. He’s going down, all the way—there’s no possibility he can pull out of it now. The scooter still has a chance. Its tangential velocity component may take it clear of Jupiter. Even so—”
“Even so,” Bat said, “the people in the scooter will die. Sebastian Birch will die. And very soon we will all die.”
We will all die. Alex felt the shiver of a second adrenaline rush through his whole body. What was Bat talking about? The man’s reputatio
n was for understatement, not wild exaggeration. Sebastian Birch was surely going to die—his craft continued to plummet straight downward. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr’s ship might not be able to alter course in time to escape. But all die?—including Bat? Including Alex himself?
Alex glanced from face to face. He said, “I don’t understand.” He was ignored. Bengt Suomi’s dark-browed glare, Bat’s stoic gaze, Milly Wu and Magrit Knudsen’s wide-eyed stares; they told him nothing. He turned back to the display, just in time to see the speck of light representing Sebastian Birch’s ship wink out and vanish.
Bat said, “Birch is dead. His ship and signal relay have burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere. I bid you all farewell. We begin to die—now.”
Alex’s chest tightened. The whole room seemed to move into a state of suspended animation as everyone took in a deep breath and held it. The moment lengthened. It became seconds—half a minute—a whole minute.
Finally, Bengt Suomi gave the high-pitched, tittering laugh of a man who never laughed. Bat exhaled hugely and said, “Except that we are not dead. We are not dying. We are alive, and I was terribly wrong. I built a city of speculation upon a shallow bank of improbability, which now has crumbled and collapsed. I offer my sincere apologies.”
“Apologies? Apologies that we are alive?” Suomi gave a nervous shuffle, like a little dance. “No, I’m the one who was wrong. Some mistake in my group’s experiments, something in our data. According to our calculations, the catalytic reaction and phase change should have begun instantaneously. The estimated expansion rate was many kilometers a second. We should have observed visible effects as soon as Birch’s ship lost hull integrity. We must repeat the work at once and find out where we were in error.”
Alex burst out, “What the hell is this all about? Dead, not dead. Who were you talking about? It doesn’t make sense.”
Magrit Knudsen added, “Really, Bat. You’ve outdone yourself. You warn of the coming apocalypse, you drag us out of bed—and all for nothing.”
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