by Gunn, James
The walls themselves were papered with posters and photographs. They were not of Earth but of space and astronomical objects—planets and stars and nebulae and galaxies, and artists’ renderings of spaceships making their way among them.
Jessica felt a tap on the shoulder of her suit.
Jessica turned to face a person in another suit—but not the bearded man an over-active imagination had summoned. Features were not easy to discern in the helmet but she could see that the person had no beard. Then she recognized Cavendish. She started to switch on her suit radio, but Cavendish shook his head and motioned her forward. She pulled herself into the segment ahead and turned to see Cavendish follow. He swung himself around at the door and cycled it shut. After a few moments he eased his helmet loose, waited, and then pulled it off. He motioned Jessica to do the same.
Jessica winced at the odor in the room. Someone had been living there for a long time with little sanitation and less concern for cleanliness. Perhaps the waste-disposal system had malfunctioned. The place stank.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I might ask you the same thing,” Cavendish said. His left eye twitched.
“Someone’s been living here,” Jessica said.
“No doubt about that.”
“It occurred to me maybe we were overlooking the obvious,” Jessica said. “Maybe the sabotage came from the outside. We get so used to being alone up here; we don’t consider other possibilities. Maybe those wild stories about the bearded man aren’t just wild stories.”
“So you came here to check up,” Cavendish said. “It doesn’t make any sense, though, does it? How could anyone avoid discovery when we were living in this place for a year before we dismantled most of it to build the ship?”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense,” Jessica said, “but here it is. Someone has been living here. Anyway, that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?” She looked at Cavendish suspiciously. She had never fully accepted him and his place among them. She knew he had deciphered the original message, and that he had smuggled the information out of SETI and published it in the disguise of a UFO cult book; and she knew that his doubts about alien motives had driven him mad, or, rather, had reinforced his natural paranoia to the point of psychosis. But he was as responsible as anyone for gathering the crew that had built the ship and helping to persuade the Energy Board to allocate resources and let them go.
“I kept looking at the remains of the space station,” Cavendish said, “and there was something wrong with it. I didn’t know what it was until I began to compare its appearance with videos from the past. And then I realized—”
“What?” Jessica prompted, hoping it wasn’t more of his paranoia. But then she remembered how her gaze had been drawn to the station time and again.
“That this part of the station was different. It wasn’t here until a few months ago.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jessica said. “Does it?”
“It makes more sense than the possibility that someone was living here and nobody noticed.”
“Then you think—”
“That this is a space module designed to look like a part of the station, or a part of the station retrofitted to serve as a space module. It could have been an escape vessel in the original plans.”
“You think it could have detached itself when we began arriving in orbit,” Jessica said.
“And hidden itself god-knows-where. Maybe on the other side of the Earth. Maybe a few hundred kilometers away. We weren’t looking for anything or anyone. We thought we were all alone.”
“And then,” Jessica said, “whoever-it-is decided to come back to see what we were up to. We can check it out. It should be easy enough to discover whether this section has jets and fuel tanks and controls. . . . But why did it return now, just as we are about to fuel the ship and test it?”
“Maybe you’ve just said why,” Cavendish said.
“He—or she—but it must be a he. I can’t imagine a woman putting up with this kind of filth,” Jessica said. “He must want to stop us from going.”
“That would fit in with the sabotage,” Cavendish said.
“We’ve got to tell Adrian,” Jessica said.
Cavendish shook his head.
“That’s why you didn’t want me to use the suit radio,” Jessica said, “in case anybody was listening.”
“If Adrian decides to postpone the fueling and the test run until we find out why this has happened and who is behind it, the saboteur will have succeeded,” Cavendish said.
Jessica looked at him, trying to read his expression. All she could see was his left eye twitching. What he said made sense. It all fit together. And yet it was wrong. “We can’t keep this to ourselves,” she said. “That wouldn’t be fair to Adrian or the crew or the mission.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” Cavendish said. “Nothing must delay our project.”
“But we don’t know what other sabotage may already have been accomplished,” Jessica said. “And we don’t know where the person is who occupied this room.”
Cavendish looked at the room with sudden surprise. Jessica followed his gaze. Someone had lived there, someone who worshipped space and the stars, a hermit who had brought his cave with him.
“Nothing must delay the project,” Cavendish repeated, but this time his tone was different. He was pleading now, his eyes fixed on her as if his very existence depended on her answer.
“I don’t agree,” Jessica said. “But I’ll wait until after the fuel is loaded.”
Cavendish’s eye twitched again, and Jessica wondered what she would do in this place isolated from everything and everyone if the unstable personality in front of her should snap. What if he attacked her to prevent her from doing what he clearly thought was against the best interests of the project, or his own? But she showed no signs of her unease. She put on her helmet and as she shoved herself forward, Cavendish moved aside and let her pass.
The antimatter was to be ferried from the nearest orbital converter by a vehicle shaped like an elongated dumbbell, with an engine on one end and a tiny pilot’s saddle and controls on the other. In between, empty racks waited for vessels treated as gingerly as eggs and looking something like them—white and tapered toward the ends—or maybe more like oversized footballs for a game between Titans.
Alien devices shaped like giant moths were circling the sun, soaking up solar radiation, transforming it into high-energy gamma rays by means of alien-designed “magic crystals” constructed of “strange matter,” and beaming them back to receivers in synchronous orbit. The receivers produced the antimatter from the gamma rays. One receiver had been diverted to storing its output in magnetic containers that Adrian, and a team of theoretical physicists and ingenious engineers, had constructed from the alien designs found in the appendices of Cavendish’s book.
Would they work? Well, they—or devices similar to them—worked in orbit to store antimatter until it could be converted into energy beamed down to Earth. But vehicles had to ascend from the spaceship’s near-Earth orbit to synchronous orbit, gingerly detach the magnetic vessels and place them with equal care into the clamps prepared for them, and bring them back to the ship’s lower orbit. And there the vessels had to be removed and placed in new racks aboard the ship, fastened to devices that would allow them to be tapped, one by one, for their alien contents and fed, a small stream of ions at a time, into the magnetically shielded engine.
Jessica thought about all these things as she maneuvered the first ferry to dock with the receiver. A sleep period had passed since she had discovered the space-hermit’s lair. Nights and days had no meaning in orbit, but for convenience most of the workers slept at the same time, with only monitors on duty. Jessica had not slept much, and when she had awakened she had avoided Adrian. It was easy to do in the bustle and suspense of fueling. Her skill in piloting and zero-gravity maneuvers was generally acknowledged, and she had volunteered. The thought that every
thing depended on her—everything they had dreamed and worked for—made her stomach churn, but the thought of not volunteering was even worse. And the thought of what her crewmates would think if she didn’t volunteer.
The thought she finally settled on was that she would rather be handling the job than leaving it to someone less likely to pull it off without blowing up themselves and the ship, and maybe a few hundred thousand acres of home-world accidentally beneath at the moment of explosion. The orbital receiver was a maze of receptors and reflectors with an enigmatic spherical structure in the middle. The lethal eggs were racked outside the sphere where they had been deposited automatically once they had been filled with the most destructive substance in the universe.
She remembered what her mother had told her when she graduated from college and went out into the world on her own. “I have learned only two things in my life,” her mother said, “and it’s all I have to pass along to you.” And then she said, “Nothing’s easy” and “everything takes twice as long as it’s supposed to.” Her mother had been right more times than Jessica could remember, and now she would have looked at the business of transferring the antimatter containers and nodded. It wasn’t easy and she suspected that it would take twice as long as it was supposed to.
As she flipped the switches that held the first magnetic bottle to the converter rack, she thought about Cavendish’s aliens. She called them “Cavendish’s aliens,” because Peter’s book had started it all. His cult book would have been considered a work of imagination, or psychosis, if anyone considered it at all, but Adrian had stumbled upon it and thought the designs might work. And they had. They had produced antimatter generators and a spaceship that might even prove capable of interstellar travel. And the spaceship might even take them to—what? Adventure? New worlds? The aliens who had sent the designs? Their hearts’ desires?
Did Cavendish’s aliens really exist, and if they existed would they be generous patrons distributing their largess to rational creatures wherever they existed? Or was there something dangerous, something explosive, at their core? Like the antimatter containers themselves, did they require delicate handling?
One by one Jessica brought the magnetic bottles to the ferry and snapped them gingerly into place until the broomstick was full. Then she maneuvered her cargo out of the converter maze into open space and waited until the spaceship arrived at a point when a slowing of her speed could lower her orbit to a near-Earth rendezvous. There she assisted with the unloading and storage of the eggs, fueled the ferry, and headed back to the converter. Not once but three times. Her mother was right. It took twice as long as it was supposed to, but, at last, the eggs were stored, she and the ship and the crew had survived, and the ship was ready for its test voyage.
Except for one thing. The crew. Who would go and who would stay behind? “Adrian wants to see you,” Frances said as soon as Jessica removed her suit.
Adrian waited for her in the tiny conference room located between the living quarters and the control room. It doubled as a mess hall. Everything that wasn’t a metal, load-bearing wall was made of lightweight plastic: tables, stools, clamps to hold trays and utensils, and vertical clamps for bottles. The room smelled of meals recently warmed in the microwaves that lined the walls, and over-riding that, of human effluvia that only registered when crewmembers came in from work outside.
But Cavendish was there, too, strapped onto a stool, looking paranoid and defiant at the same time.
Adrian studied her face. Jessica could feel him trying to gauge her trustworthiness.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“What?”
“About the vehicle disguised as living quarters on the old station?”
“Peter argued that I shouldn’t tell anyone,” Jessica said forthrightly, “that it would only delay the test flight. I didn’t like it, but I allowed myself to be persuaded. It looks like that was a mistake.”
“Peter says it was the other way around, that you tried to persuade him.”
“So I see,” Jessica said. “If that’s what he has told you, then one of us is lying. Either he talked me into not reporting it so that he could report it first and cast doubt on my loyalty to the project, which raises questions about his motivation, or I tried to conceal information that might be critical to its success. Who are you going to believe?”
Adrian steadied himself on the edge of the table to keep from floating away. “A difficult question. Peter has been involved in this project even before Frances and I—”
“And I was a Makepeace agent before I converted,” Jessica said. “Maybe Makepeace planted me on the project. On the other hand, I’ve been a valuable member of the crew, and I’ve just retrieved and stored three loads of fuel.” And I’m tired as hell, she could have added, and my nerves are ready to snap from tension. And you’ve got me here answering foolish questions.
Jessica had a foot hooked under a chair and didn’t have to steady herself. She shook her head; the movement made her shoulders rotate.
“And Peter has been programming the computer,” Adrian said. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he continued, postponing any decision. That was his major flaw. “There can’t be any strangers among us, no bearded men, no ancient astronauts. Why should there be evidence of one?”
“There are stories—” Cavendish began.
“Space legends,” Adrian said. “You get a bunch of people together under stress, and stories get started, myths get created and repeated until they lose their origins, people begin to believe in them.”
“But the room—” Cavendish said.
“I’ve checked the computer records,” Adrian said. “No astronaut is unaccounted for.”
“Records can be doctored,” Cavendish said darkly. “NASA wouldn’t have wanted it known that they left an astronaut in orbit.”
“No way they could have kept it secret,” Adrian said.
“Then someone else has been living there,” Jessica said.
“Peter said he followed you,” Adrian said.
Jessica looked at Peter. Cavendish looked away.
“And he said you seemed to know where you were going.”
“I had a hunch,” Jessica said. “A sense of wrongness. If you saw it, you’d realize I couldn’t live in such a mess. It would have to be someone who can sneak away without being noticed.” She thought a moment. “Peter’s assignment, programming the computer, leaves him unsupervised. He wouldn’t be missed.”
“And you’ve been working alone out on the hull,” Adrian reminded her.
Jessica shook her head again. “The results of my seam checking are available on the computer. But if the room isn’t evidence of a bearded astronaut left behind when the station was abandoned, someone else has been living there. Or it’s a set-up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s a puzzle,” Jessica said. “Put in place to slow us down. To give someone else time for—”
“What?” Adrian prompted.
“I don’t know,” Jessica said.
“It’s not going to work,” Adrian said. “We’re going ahead on schedule.”
“The test flight?”
Jessica saw Cavendish’s body tense. At that moment she understood what was going on, but there was no way to prove it within the time available.
Adrian nodded. “The only decision we have to make is who is going with us.”
A sleep-time later the entire crew, all awake at the same period for a change, scattered throughout the ship making last-minute checks of operations and systems that already had been checked many times before. Obsessive-compulsive behavior became normal, as the entire project, and the lives of those aboard, depended upon every part performing perfectly, except for the crew, whose inevitable mistakes had to be anticipated. And there were some alien-design functions built into the ship that Adrian and a few others thought they understood, but no one could be certain until the ship moved. That made everybody nervous, particularly Ca
vendish, who buried himself in computer readouts and simulations.
Finally, however, everything was declared as ready as it was likely to get, and Adrian assembled the crew in the largest of the three dormitories, the one for single men; the two smaller for single women and for couples. Contemporary mores mixed genders as if ignoring their differences could eliminate them, and the builders of the star ship expected growing fraternization. Eventually the largest dormitory might be turned over to the couples. But the designers—mostly Adrian—had decided that a certain amount of privacy, limited though it was by the spaceship volume and its necessary functions, would be a healthy preface.
Even the largest dormitory was crowded by the 212 people who had volunteered to construct the ship. One had been killed, one had been injured so seriously that she could not continue, and one had come down with multiple sclerosis. The conquest of space exacted casualties.
Some of the crewmembers sat on the edge of bunks, an arm or a leg wrapped around a tubular support. Others anchored themselves to the wall by the hand-holds placed at regular intervals, and others simply floated, at ease in free fall, in mid-air. Jessica was one of them.
Adrian was just inside the oval bulkhead, whose entrance could be sealed automatically in case of a meteor strike or other accident. Most of the construction crew could see him, but all could hear. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “that we are prepared to take a momentous step. Our job here is done, and our next challenge lies ahead. Not all of you signed on for that part of the adventure, and those of you who choose not to stay aboard for the test flight may wait in the remains of the old space station.”
“I understand,” he said, “that a new living facility has been added recently.”
Jessica could feel Adrian’s glance, but she was looking at Cavendish, clinging to the support of a nearby bunk. Cavendish was looking hard at Adrian as if forcing himself not to betray himself by looking at her. Then Jessica looked away to see Frances studying them both. Frances knew that Cavendish was avoiding looking at either of them. But Jessica wondered how much Frances knew and whom she believed. Adrian trusted Frances’s judgment. Even though Frances reduced everything to familiar scenarios, she had been partnered with Adrian for twenty-five years, and they had brought this whole thing off, just the two of them. So what Frances believed counted.