Farside

by Ben Bova

  “It’s not much,” he’d said as he showed her in, “but it’s home. For now.”

  Trudy had worn her best dress, a sleeveless short-skirted thing of buttercup yellow, and she’d spent nearly an hour trying to make her hair look decent. McClintock was wearing a casual sweater, coppery red, and neatly pressed slacks.

  With a wily grin he said, “I smuggled some wine from California in with the latest supply delivery. Would you like some?”

  Dinner was wonderful. The food was quite ordinary, but Carter was a good conversationalist and kept her laughing with stories about his family Earthside. She wound up in his arms on the sofa, her heart pounding so strongly she thought he’d hear it or maybe even feel it as he held her close.

  “I…” she had to take a breath before she could continue, “I haven’t had much experience, Carter. With men, I mean.”

  “Neither have I,” he whispered. “With men, that is.”

  She giggled and he began to undress her.

  Yes, Trudy thought, there really is an advantage to being one of the few women at Farside.

  “Starting retroburn in ten seconds.”

  Winston’s voice broke into her reverie. Trudy blinked away the happy memory of her night with Carter McClintock and looked down past the edge of the hopper’s gridwork decking.

  And there was the telescope, a big fat tube standing slightly tilted in the middle of Crater Mendeleev like the stumpy old-fashioned smokestack of an ocean freighter. At its base Trudy could see the hump of rubble where the robots had built the underground shelter for visiting humans.

  The flight controller’s voice from Farside said crisply, “Copy retroburn.”

  Suddenly weight returned as the hopper’s rocket engine fired silently. Trudy swallowed, then held her breath as the ground came rushing up to meet them. Miraculously their descent slowed, became almost dreamlike, until she felt the landing pads touch down with a gentle thump.

  “We’re down,” Winston said.

  “Copy your landing,” said the flight controller, a heartbeat later. “Right on time. Good job.”

  “Thank Isaac Newton,” Winston wisecracked.

  Then he turned to Trudy. “Come on, girl. Time to go to work.”

  They spent the rest of the day checking out the telescope’s controls and the electronic links back to Farside. We could have done this remotely, Trudy thought as she ran through the diagnostics on the console inside the cramped underground shelter that the robots had built. No need for a person to come out here. After all, what’s important is how the controls work at Farside.

  But Professor Uhlrich had insisted that an astronomer should go to the telescope site and check out everything in situ. Since Uhlrich could not go himself and Trudy was the only other optical astronomer at Farside as yet, she got elected.

  “It’s a shame we had to drag you out there,” she said to Winston as she bent over the console, her eyes on the display screens. Both of them were still in their cumbersome space suits, although they had both removed their helmets inside the pressurized safety of the underground shelter.

  “Glad to help out,” Winston said. “They can get along without me at Cyclops for a day.”

  It was strictly routine work, but Trudy felt excited to be doing it. This is the first time the telescope’s been operated. I’m at the cutting edge, she told herself. This is something I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren about. Then she laughed inwardly. Yeah, tell them how boring the cutting edge can be.

  But when she put the telescope’s imagery on the console’s center screen her breath caught in her throat.

  “That’s Andromeda, isn’t it?” she heard Winston ask, in an awed whisper.

  “M31, the Andromeda Galaxy,” Trudy confirmed.

  It was magnificent, a giant spiral of billions of stars, its gracefully sweeping arms aglow with the bluish light of newborn stars.

  “I’ve never seen it so clear,” said Winston.

  The telescope’s “first light” image was truly beautiful, Trudy thought. This ought to please the professor.

  “Let’s zoom in,” she murmured, turning a dial on the console.

  “Holy god, I can see individual stars!” Winston sounded awed, and Trudy felt thrilled at his reaction.

  “Good resolution,” she said. “That’s sort of what our own Milky Way looks like, if we could see it from outside.”

  “Maybe we will someday,” said Winston.

  “Maybe we will,” Trudy agreed. “Someday.”

  The controls worked perfectly. The telescope moved ponderously in response to Trudy’s computerized commands. She knew the “first light” views the telescope was seeing were being relayed back to Farside. Uhlrich had already made a connection with Selene University’s public relations department to broadcast the images all across Earth.

  The cutting edge isn’t boring after all, she told herself. My grandkids will be just as excited about this as I am.

  It took a real effort for her to shut down the console and turn control of the telescope over to Uhlrich, at his Farside office.

  “Time to go,” Winston said as he put his bubble helmet on.

  Trudy twisted her helmet in its neck ring until it clicked shut and, with some reluctance, followed Winston out through the shelter’s airlock and onto the surface where the hopper waited.

  After a dozen paces, though, Winston suddenly began to stagger.

  Trudy grabbed for his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can’t … breathe…”

  In her helmet speakers she could hear Winston gasping. “Can’t…”

  He collapsed. Trudy couldn’t hold him and he sank slowly to his knees, then fell facedown onto the dusty bare ground.

  COLLAPSE

  Her gloved hands shaking, Trudy punched the Farside frequency on the keypad built into her suit’s left forearm and yelled, “Emergency! Emergency!”

  It took two heartbeats—an eternity—before the flight controller’s voice snapped, “What’s wrong?”

  “Win … he’s down! Collapsed!”

  The woman’s voice took on an edge of tension. “Where are you? What happened?”

  “We’re outside, between the shelter and the hopper. I don’t think he’s breathing!”

  “Can you get him back inside the shelter?”

  “I’ll try.”

  It wasn’t easy dragging Winston’s inert body across the dusty ground to the airlock set into the mound of rubble that served as shielding for the shelter. Trudy was awash with perspiration as she tugged him inside the airlock, then banged the control panel to close the outer hatch. It slid shut with painful slowness.

  As the airlock cycled, pumping air into the steel-walled chamber, Grant Simpson’s voice came through Trudy’s speakers:

  “What happened, Trudy?”

  “I don’t know! We were going back to the hopper when Win said he couldn’t breathe and then he keeled over. I think he’s dead!”

  His voice calm and even, Grant instructed her, “Get him inside the shelter, then take off his helmet. It might be a glitch in his suit’s air supply.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’ll come out in a hopper, with Dr. Kapstein. You just sit tight.”

  “Okay.”

  The airlock’s inner hatch sighed open and Trudy hauled Winston’s body inside the low-ceilinged, narrow shelter. Fumbling in the suit’s gloves, she tried to remove his helmet, then ripped her gloves off and finally got the helmet unlatched. Winston’s eyes gazed sightlessly at her.

  “He’s dead,” Trudy sobbed. “He’s dead.”

  No reply from Farside. Suddenly Trudy felt totally alone, impossibly far from help, abandoned in the middle of a stark airless nowhere.

  “Are you all right?” the flight controller’s voice asked sharply.

  “Yes. I think so,” Trudy replied, glad to have someone to talk to.

  “Grant’s gone out to the hopper. He’ll be with you in less than an hour.”

&nbs
p; Nodding inside her helmet, Trudy said, “That’s good.” In a frightened little girl’s voice.

  Then she noticed that it was getting difficult for her to breathe. Nonsense! she snapped at herself. It’s your imagination.

  Still, she unfastened her helmet and lifted it off her head. Then she took a deep breath. The canned air of the shelter felt wonderfully good.

  It was the longest forty minutes of Trudy’s life, alone in the cramped shelter with Winston’s dead body. His eyes kept staring, and when she touched his face it felt cold. She sat on the springy little wheeled chair by the console, awkward in the space suit, and tried to avoid looking at Winston’s body—but she couldn’t help herself.

  You can’t be dead, she pleaded with him. We’ve got good air in here, take a breath, move your arms—stop staring at me!

  But Winston did not move, did not breathe, did not blink his unfocused eyes.

  Stay calm, Trudy told herself. Stay calm, calm, calm.

  “I’m on my way, Trudy.” Grant’s voice crackled from the shelter’s console. “Hang on, I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Trudy had never been so grateful for the sound of a human voice in her life.

  “How’s Win?” Grant asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  There was no doubt of it in Trudy’s mind. “I’m sure.”

  “I’ve got Dr. Kapstein with me. She’s upchucking in her helmet.”

  Trudy supposed that Grant said that to lighten her tension, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

  “The doctor’s coming out here for nothing,” she said to Grant. “There’s nothing anybody can do for him.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Grant kept talking to her and she felt enormously grateful for it. Something to do, someone to talk with, so she didn’t have to sit in this coffin of a buried shelter and stare at Winston’s dead body.

  “We’re entering descent mode,” Grant said.

  Trudy glanced at the clock on the console. Less than forty-five minutes had elapsed.

  “You made it quick.”

  “High-g burn. But the doc still got the heaves when we went weightless.”

  “She really threw up?”

  “Inside her helmet, yeah. Pretty messy.”

  Trudy couldn’t see outside the shelter and the hopper’s landing was soundless in the lunar vacuum, but suddenly she heard the airlock pumps chugging. They’re here! She jumped to her feet.

  The airlock hatch slid open and two space-suited figures clomped in. One of them pushed past Trudy and staggered to the shelter’s minuscule lavatory, nearly tripping over Winston’s body.

  As the lav door slid shut with a heavy thump, Trudy turned and saw Grant Simpson lifting the tinted bubble helmet from his head. His hair and beard looked matted with perspiration, but his sad, dark eyes seemed filled with concern.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Trudy nodded tightly. “I’m okay. But Win…”

  Grant dropped to his knees beside the lifeless body. “His suit hasn’t decompressed. But he’s dead all right.”

  A retching, gargling noise came from the lav, followed by heartfelt cursing.

  Grant broke into a grim smile. “The doc isn’t much of a flier.”

  Thinking how her own stomach had gone queasy on the flight to Mendeleev, Trudy said, “Zero g can get to you.”

  “Yeah. You’d think that a doctor would’ve popped an anti-nausea pill—”

  The lavatory door slid open and a very unhappy Ida Kapstein stepped into the room, still encased in her bulky space suit, minus the helmet. She looked slightly green. The shelter suddenly felt unbearably crowded.

  Glancing down at Winston’s body, Dr. Kapstein said, “So now we’ve got to fly him back to Farside. Just what I need, another good bout of vomiting.”

  INQUEST

  “But what did he die of?” Professor Uhlrich demanded.

  He was sitting behind his desk, as usual, his fingertips brushing against the desktop. Grant and Dr. Kapstein sat side by side at the table abutting his desk; Trudy sat opposite Grant, wondering where Carter McClintock might be.

  “Asphyxiation,” said Dr. Kapstein.

  Uhlrich’s brows knitted in a puzzled frown. “Asphyxiation? You mean he had no air to breathe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he was in a space suit, wasn’t he?”

  Grant said, “I checked him out before he left with Dr. Yost. His suit was working fine.”

  “Then how could he die of asphyxiation?” Uhlrich demanded.

  Trudy volunteered, “He said he was having difficulty breathing when we left the shelter and headed back to the hopper.”

  “His suit’s air tank was about half full when I got to him,” Grant said. “The suit didn’t decompress, there was air in it.”

  “This makes no sense,” said Uhlrich.

  “I’ve got Aichi and Zacharias checking out his suit,” Grant said. “There weren’t any obvious signs of a defect, but if anything’s wrong with the suit, they’ll find it.”

  “And if they find anything wrong it will be your fault that he died. You checked his suit, you say.”

  Grant’s darkly bearded face settled into a scowl. “The suit checked out fine,” he repeated sullenly.

  “I don’t like mysteries,” Uhlrich muttered. “Especially when they involve the death of one of my staff.”

  Trudy thought the professor looked as if he felt personally betrayed. By whom? she wondered. Grant?

  “You must find out what happened,” Uhlrich went on. “We cannot have an unsolved death on our hands. The university is going to demand an investigation.”

  Dr. Kapstein said, “I’ve conferred with the top people at Selene’s hospital. They’ve examined the body by video link and agreed with my finding of asphyxiation, tentatively.”

  “Tentatively? What do you mean—”

  “They want to do an autopsy, of course,” said Kapstein. “I’m having the body shipped to Selene on the next lobber flight.”

  Uhlrich turned from the doctor to Grant, but said nothing.

  Grant abruptly pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Well, we’re not going to learn any more sitting here and talking. I’m going down to the maintenance center and see what Zach and Toshio have found.”

  He headed for the door. Uhlrich started to say something, but snapped his mouth shut, staring at Grant’s back. He sure doesn’t look like he’s blind, Trudy thought.

  Dr. Kapstein rose ponderously from her chair, as well. “If there’s nothing more…” she murmured.

  Uhlrich waved a hand at her. Trudy watched them both leave the office, then started to stand up, too.

  “Please wait, Dr. Yost,” said Uhlrich. “Sit down, please.”

  She waited for several moments. Uhlrich said nothing, merely stared blankly ahead.

  Trying to break the silence, she asked, “Um, shouldn’t Mr. McClintock be involved in this? I mean, he’s your assistant, after all, and—”

  “Mr. McClintock,” said Uhlrich, “is here in an advisory position only. He is not involved in the administration of this facility.”

  “Oh,” Trudy said, confused. “I thought … that is…”

  Uhlrich glared at her, but then his expression softened.

  “Have you given any thought,” the professor asked, in a calmer, softer voice, “to putting the Mendeleev telescope to use?”

  “Put it to use?”

  Uhlrich called out, “Computer, Mendeleev imagery on screen.” The smart screen facing Trudy lit up with the telescope’s view of the Andromeda spiral, covering the entire wall.

  “The ‘first light’ images you obtained were very good,” Uhlrich said, obviously pleased. “Excellent, in fact.”

  “How can you…” Trudy caught herself before she went any farther.

  “How can I see the images with my blind eyes?” Uhlrich actually smiled. “I had some of the computer specialists at
Selene develop a program that transfers visual data into tactile. I see with my fingertips, Dr. Yost. I brush my fingertips across my special tactile screen and pictures form in my visual cortex.”

  “That’s…” Trudy searched for a word. “That’s wonderful.”

  “It serves its purpose.”

  Trudy didn’t know what to say.

  But Uhlrich did. “Now. We have the Mendeleev telescope up and running. There is no sense letting it sit there doing nothing. I want you to develop a research agenda for it. How can we best use it while we are waiting for the other two telescopes to be completed?”

  “It’s a very powerful instrument,” Trudy said.

  “Yes. I think we should begin imaging Sirius C as swiftly as we can. That could produce favorable publicity for Farside and get the media’s attention off this unfortunate accident.”

  “I suppose,” Trudy said hesitantly.

  “The single telescope won’t be able to yield much detail about the planet,” Uhlrich went on, “but we can refine the estimates of its size and perhaps even get some rough spectroscopic data. Finding water on the planet would be a significant step. Or free oxygen.”

  Uhlrich hunched forward, clasping his hands together and talking earnestly, eagerly about how they might use the Mendeleev telescope.

  He isn’t concerned about Winston’s death, Trudy realized. Except for how it affects his plans. He doesn’t really care a rat’s ass about Win.

  MAINTENANCE CENTER

  Grant was mildly surprised to see Carter McClintock at the maintenance center. He looked out of place, dressed in a carefully tailored white long-sleeved shirt and neatly pressed gray slacks. Toshio Aichi and Delos Zacharias were wearing their usual tan coveralls, rumpled and faded. Grant himself was in a comfortable pullover and large-pocketed cargo pants.