He went down a passageway he hadn’t seen before, and he didn’t bother to give it a designation. He opened several empty chambers before finding himself in another hologram. He was on a strip of beach, with sunlight bright on the surf. But everything was frozen. Unlike the images he’d seen elsewhere on the ship, this was a still.
The usual observers’ chairs were there, six to a side. He lowered himself into one.
A vaguely humanoid creature was seated on the sand. It wore no clothing that he could see, but it held a book open in long bronze triple-jointed fingers. Its eyes were gold, and it appeared to be distracted by the volume. It had perhaps just begun to grasp something. Some salient point.
Mountains rose off to his left, and a large structure with towers and catwalks, the whole lined with flags. It looked like the sort of place you took the kids when you were in a resort. Well out, on the horizon, a ship of uncertain design was passing.
He had no idea what significance to draw from the scene. But he watched, glad to be in such peaceful surroundings. When he closed his eyes, he imagined he could hear the surf.
chapter 28
If wishes would carry me over the land,
I would ride with free bridle today,
I would greet every tree with a grasp of my hand,
I would drink of each river, and swim in each bay.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, C. 1855
“TOR?”
Hutch fed the signal into the console, waited for Bill to enhance.
“Sorry,” he said. “There’s not enough.”
She nodded and sank back into her chair.
“He can probably still hear you, though.”
“Tor,” she said, “we’re not receiving you anymore. The range has opened up too much.” The chindi moved smoothly across the overhead screen, a flattened asteroid with a long fiery jet at its rear. “You’ll be losing our signal, too, shortly, if you haven’t already. Just get through the next few days. We’ll be on the other side as quickly as we can.”
“That thing can really gallop,” said Bill. “It’s still pulling ahead of us.”
Even though it was hauling so much mass. “Any change in trajectory?”
“No. It is apparently headed for 97.”
RK335197 was a white class-F, about the dimensions of Procyon. No one had ever been there. It was known to have a planetary system with at least two gas giants, one roughly thirty times the mass of Jupiter. No pictures of either were on file. Seen from Gemini, it was an ordinary star, almost lost in those glittering skies.
“Hutch, the chindi is projecting a gravity field in front.”
“Maybe that explains how you get all that mass moving forward without burning unconscionable amounts of fuel.”
“Yes. It’s falling.”
“What’s the strength of the gravity field?”
“I would estimate it at .7 Earth standard.”
“It’s enough.” Experimenters at home had worked with similar technology. But it was a solution without a problem. Ordinary fusion engines had proved themselves quite capable of reaching jump mode.
Hutch remained on the bridge and watched the range between the two vessels widen. Alyx was sleeping off her painkillers, but Nick stayed with her, holding up both ends of the conversation with his customary reassuring tone. When you were with Nick, you always knew things would turn out okay.
“The chindi,” said Bill, “is approaching jump velocity.”
“Okay.”
“Six minutes.”
Assuming the calculations and estimates were correct.
“We’ll be making our own jump in nineteen minutes.”
She opened a channel and gave Tor the time sequence, hoping he could hear her. She longed for a response, to be reassured that everything was okay. Just to hear his voice, to know that he was properly braced somewhere so he didn’t fall on his head when the chindi went into the sack.
Bill put up pictures of what he thought the 97 worlds would look like. One contrasted Jupiter with the supergiant, a marble against a bowling ball.
Another depicted the bowling ball’s orbit, a wild ellipse that ran through the outer atmosphere of the sun. “Eventually,” said Bill, “it’ll fall in.”
That was encouraging news. It suggested a reason for the chindi’s interest and seemed to confirm the probable destination. “How long’s eventually?” she asked.
“We lack precise figures, Hutch, but the best estimate puts it between 17 and 20 million years.”
“Oh.”
“That must be it, then,” said Nick, with a grin, seeing her face change.
“Error factor of 5 percent.”
“Thanks, Bill.”
“It’s quite all right, Hutch. I’m happy to help.”
Nick leaned forward expectantly.
“One minute,” said Bill.
The big thrusters continued to fire. She thought about Tor lost and alone somewhere in there. Hutch couldn’t entirely put her resentment behind her. And yet it occurred to her that, had Tor hung back and let George and Alyx go over alone, she’d have thought less of him.
SHE WAITED FROM moment to moment to see the chindi vanish in a spray of light.
But it didn’t happen.
“It may be any of a number of things,” said Bill. “All that mass. Different engine architecture. Possibly even a non-Hazeltine jump mode.”
It kept accelerating.
“Do you think it refuels at every stop?” asked Nick.
Hutch didn’t know. She had no experience with anything remotely this massive.
“I hope,” Nick said, “that the thing stops long enough for us to catch it when it gets to 97.”
Bill came back on-screen. “They are still accelerating. Constant rate. Memphis jump in twelve minutes. Proceed?”
“Yes.” To do otherwise would waste a potload of fuel and require her to start the entire process over. “We’ll meet them at 97.”
“It may be that there is validity to Wilbur’s Proposition.”
“Which says…?”
“Given mass beyond approximately two hundred thousand tons, the power requirements for Hazeltine propulsion increase dramatically. I need not point out that the asteroid exceeds that limit. I would add that the Proposition has never been tested, and is disputed by many.”
“What would be the practical effect?”
“They’d need a considerably higher power input than we do, far more than would be proportional to their size. I can do the calculations if you like.”
“Please.”
She sent another transmission to Tor. Cancel my last message. No jump for chindi on schedule. We now think it may take longer because of the added mass. No need to worry.
“Hutch, we have incoming from the Longworth. Professor Mogambo.”
But it wasn’t Mogambo. A young blond aide appeared. “One moment, Captain,” she said. The delay was down to less than a minute. “I’ll let him know you’re on the circuit.”
Nick smiled. “He’s reminding you who’s in charge.”
There’d been a time when Hutch had no patience with such games. But that was long ago. She wondered what it said about her character that she’d learned to tolerate arrogance on a fairly wide scale.
The blonde walked off and Hutch was left looking at a communication station. Eventually Mogambo strolled onstage, apparently in the middle of a conversation with someone she couldn’t see. He held up a hand, begging her patience while the conversation continued. Finally, he turned to her and activated the sound. “Sorry, Hutch,” he said. “We’ve gotten busy.” He was looking down at her from a wide overhead screen. She switched him to the navigational auxiliary at her right hand. “Has it worked?” he asked.
“You’re asking me whether Tor took a wrench to the chindi’s engines?”
After the delay: “Well, not precisely. But I wanted him to show some ingenuity. I’m sure if I were over there, I’d find a way to slow it down.”
Or blow i
t up. “It’s not a practical option, Doctor.”
He nodded. “You may be right, Hutch. It’s hard to know what we should do in this circumstance, isn’t it?” He gazed out of the screen at her. “I know you’re concerned about your passenger. And I hope we succeed in getting him off. But if we lose the artifact…” He squeezed his eyes shut, and she was startled to see a tear start from his left eye. He tried surreptitiously to wipe it away, but knew he’d been caught. “Thanks, Hutch,” he said. “I know you’ll do what you can.”
“Hutch,” said Bill, “two minutes to jump. The chindi is now passing .01c.” One percent of light-speed.
“Not good,” said Hutch.
Nick held up his hands. Whoa. Let’s not get excited. Everything’s going to be fine. “Why isn’t it good?” he asked.
“It’s now moving faster than we can.”
“How do you mean? We can travel between Earth and Alpha Centauri in twenty minutes.”
“Not exactly. But, in any case, Nick, we don’t move very quickly. We jump into a subway in one place and jump out at another. But where flights through normal space are concerned, we aren’t very fast.”
“You’re telling me we can’t catch up to it if we have to?”
“You got it.”
“Then, even if the chindi started cruising now, we couldn’t get Tor out?”
“Correct.”
“Hutch,” said Bill, “if the Wilbur proposition is correct, and my estimates of chindi mass are accurate, it will require a velocity of .02773c to make its jump.”
That would be moving along. Almost three times its current velocity. “Okay, Bill,” she said.
Nick frowned. The hearty confidence of the first few hours was gone. “I guess,” he said, “there’s a lot to be said for Wilbur.”
They were down to thirty seconds. Hutch went back to Tor. “We’re about to make our jump, Tor. It looks as if it might take another day or so before the chindi follows. Got that? Another day or so. The ship’s massive. Operates differently from the way we do. You just have to ride it out. So you won’t hear from us again until you’re on the other side. We’ll be waiting for you.”
TOR HEARD THE transmission as he was getting ready to retire for the night. It was annoying because it meant at least an extra day before they could get him out of this tomb.
The pocket dome had changed in some subtle way. It wasn’t simply that he was alone in it, that George was dead and Alyx gone. But the interior itself had grown smaller, unbending, more oppressive. Whereas it had once been noisy and cheerful and optimistic, it now seemed that any sound he might make could attract unwelcome attention. The passageways and the endless chambers spread out around him (and when he dared to think of it, for more than a hundred levels below him), and overwhelmed him with their sheer emptiness. He no longer thought of them as Main Street and Barbara Street, as Third or Eleventh. They were alien again, empty, silent, dark. And identical. It struck him that the only differentiated feature they’d discovered in the entire complex—and they’d walked, it seemed, countless kilometers—was the Ditch.
Although Tor was stranded in an environment in which there were no nights or days, his metabolism kept track for him. That first evening, he had braced his makeshift bed against the rear wall and retired into it, turned off the lights, and lay looking up into the dark. In all that vast place, it seemed to him nothing moved.
Later, he woke with a sense that something had disturbed him.
He switched on the light and lay in its soft glow, trying to fathom what had caught his attention. There was no noise. Nothing moved in the dark chamber that constituted the world outside the dome. Everything inside remained where he had left it. The status lamp glowed cheerfully, indicating the power level was where it was supposed to be.
Must have been his imagination.
He rolled over and pressed a palm against the wall, then against the deck. The vibrations had stopped. The engines were off, at last, and the chindi, finally, had gone into cruise mode.
Cruise mode? But hazeltines always feed off the main engines. You don’t shut them down before a jump. What was going on?
He opened a channel on his commlink. Hutch was gone, but there was a chance that Mogambo had arrived in the neighborhood. “Longworth,” he said, “are you out there anywhere?”
The silence rolled back.
“Anybody…?”
HE’D BROUGHT A sketch pad, which he set up outside the chamber. And he began finally to try to capture the essence of the situation. The rock and the metal doors. The sense of absolutely nothing out beyond the fading light. As if one could walk down the corridor and stroll into oblivion.
Yes, he thought, capturing the shadows.
And the unimaginable mass that held the darkness together.
And George’s ghost, caught here forever.
He listened, imagining he could hear distant footsteps.
He worked until he got hungry. Then he went inside and ate too much. Two chicken sandwiches, and some donut holes.
Before he went back out, he changed the power cell.
THE FLIGHT TO RK335197 ran a little more than three days. It was a quiet time. Alyx joined them on the bridge, and that became the place where all three hung out, except during meals. Mission control was empty now, a place of echoes and shadows. There were no more games and no more sims. Nobody had much appetite, and even Nick found it difficult to remain cheerful. It wasn’t that they feared for Tor—everyone was convinced that the chindi would arrive more or less on schedule and they’d have no trouble mounting a rescue—but the loss of George had taken the heart out of them.
There’d been a time when Hutch would have blamed herself for the series of catastrophes. But she’d learned that there were limits to what she could do. If people wouldn’t listen…
Still it seemed as if she might have made a stronger case, maybe even called George’s bluff to take over the Memphis.
They’d lost Preach and his passengers on the Condor, they’d lost Kurt on the Wendy, they’d lost Pete and Herman on Paradise, and they’d lost George on the chindi. Was it worth it?
To the people who write the history books, and probably to the species as a whole, the answer was yes. The discoveries that would come out of this were going to be far-reaching. The human race would never again look at the stars in quite the same way. But she, personally, would gladly have returned it all, wrapped it up and sent it on its way, if by so doing she could have Preach and George and the others back.
During the nights, she wandered through the Memphis, padding quietly between her quarters and the bridge, where Bill maintained a discreet silence.
The others were adrift, too. She heard them sometimes in the small hours, Nick looking for a place to read that was less confining than his compartment, or maybe less lonely, where there was a chance of meeting someone. And Alyx, who could be heard occasionally crying in the early morning hours.
MOGAMBO WAS A tower of frustration. The Longworth was just approaching the Twins, and the fox, as he thought of the giant vessel, was on the run. He told Hutch that he’d considered changing course, making directly for 97, but he wanted to see the Retreat, which at least wasn’t going anywhere. He directed her to inform him as soon as she’d established the object’s presence, and he would come immediately.
“But don’t put anybody else aboard it,” he said sternly. “Rescue your man, but otherwise leave it. It’s too valuable to have people running around inside.”
She also received a long message from Sylvia Virgil, congratulating her on the various discoveries, and exhorting her to protect her passengers. (Remaining passengers, she thought.) “They’re not used to the dangers of field work, and we don’t want to lose any more of them. Not after everything that’s gone on already. People would start to think we can’t take care of our clients.”
She reminded her that Mogambo would take over the operation on his arrival. Hutch should do everything in her power to assist him. And she f
inished by assuring her that she would not be forgotten when all this was over.
That was precisely what worried Hutch most at the moment.
Virgil informed her, almost by the way, that their discoveries had ignited a worldwide sensation. Included in the transmission were a number of panels, news shows, and commentaries, discussing the discoveries and their impact. The director included an intercept package from the chindi net, which was the term given by the media to the series of stealth world-to-world relays. Some were believed to date back a few centuries although they were live signals. Everyone, she said, had been overwhelmed by the pictures from a place with no known name, which contained hauntingly beautiful images of a crystal city, gleaming in sunlight, built into the crags overlooking a misty sea. The prominent CBY analyst Creighton Wolford was proclaiming that humans, after several false starts, would finally have to give up their quaint notion that they were at the center of the universe. Tiras Fleming thought we would find technological marvels inside the chindi. (They were using the term, which appealed, it seemed, to everyone’s instincts for a foray into the supernatural.) It was likely, he thought, that any living civilization we encountered would be far older than we, perhaps by millions of years. Chindi technology, according to the New York Times, would be applied to the way everyone lived. Within a few years, it went on, we would not recognize our civilization.
The Kassel Report noted claims from inside sources that no one had been found on board the chindi, but that the mission had already learned how to operate its engines and that it was bringing the giant ship back to Earth orbit. Nobody believed official denials. Virgil herself looked suspicious. “There’s nothing to this story, right? Please send assurances.”
A rumor had gotten loose that something terrifying had been found on board the chindi, and that a second mission, composed of military units, had been sent out to attack the alien ship with nuclear missiles.
Some politicians were promising that the chindi would not be allowed near Earth. Others were assuring everyone there was nothing to worry about.
Chindi Page 43