Gibraltar Earth

by Michael McCollum

  #

  Dan Landon moved through vacuum toward the airlock that the salvage crew had grafted to the side of the Ruptured Whale. This morning, the lock had looked like an oversize garbage can carelessly cast aside by some giant junkman. No longer. As he pulled himself hand over hand along the guideline, he was greeted by a curving surface consisting of hexagonal sections of superconducting mesh anchored to the underlying structure and interconnected with thick cables.

  As he reached the airlock, Landon rotated his body to gaze at the bright star that was New Eden. Near the half-moon shape of the planet was the bright star that marked Magellan’s position. His ship had ended her sweeps of the late stargate’s position – ended them in failure. Save the gravity wave, now approaching half-a-light-year in diameter, there was no sign that local space had been turned inside out. Her separate mission completed, the big survey ship had returned to the Whale and now hovered some twenty kilometers distant, ready to evacuate the salvage crew should the Broa appear.

  He entered the airlock boots first. As soon as he was inside, he anchored himself against the barrel of the pressure wall and levered the outer door closed with his upper body. The airlock was a makeshift affair with none of the power controls that were normal for such installations. Once the hatch was dogged down, he twisted the valve that bled air from the ship’s interior into the lock chamber. He was buffeted by a miniature storm as his suit drooped around him. When the wind had died to inaudibility, he pressed a gloved hand against the inner door that had been held closed by tons of pressure. With air in the lock, the door swung easily inward.

  Landon pulled himself out of the lock to find Laura Dresser hovering in front of him. Her mouth was moving, but only the barest hint of sound came through his helmet. He commanded the suit’s computer to activate the outside pickup, something that was almost never done in a vacuum suit. Her voice sounded tinny in his earphones as he caught the end of her sentence.

  “— Speak with you!”

  “Can it wait until I get out of my suit?” he asked, his words transmitted by a small speaker mounted flush to his chest.

  He noted with professional interest the inner struggle apparent in Laura’s expression. She was like many engineers; expert in her field, but nonetheless missing something that allows people to interact well with others.

  “Certainly it can wait that long,” she finally muttered, signaling that her rough social graces had won the struggle.

  “Very good,” he replied. He pulled himself to the suiting cubicle, hooked into one of the waiting frames, then spoke the code word that would release the hinged backpack and swing it out of the way. He extracted his arms from the sleeves, pushed off the rigid chest structure, and slid backwards through the open rear hatch, nearly doubling over in the process.

  Like most people, Landon wore a waste control and telemetry belt under his suit, and nothing else. He noted the distracted interest Laura showed in his nearly nude form as he slipped into a one-piece shipsuit. Another thing he noted was the smell, much of which was coming from him. Among the Whale’s other shortcomings, it lacked washing facilities. No one aboard had had a bath in three weeks. He wondered what they would all smell like by the time they got to Earth.

  Finally, he turned to her and asked, “What can I do for you?”

  Two hours later, he was still listening.

  #

  Chapter Eighteen

  Laura Dresser was suspended like a spider in its web as she watched the readouts that detailed the health of the stardrive and its fusion generator. There were five members of the salvage crew in the compartment they had chosen for a control room. Each was encased in a vacuum suit and suspended like Laura, facing outward, with the back of their helmets nearly touching. The arrangement meant that none of them could see the others. She did not need to see her fellows. She could follow their progress by the comments on the command circuit.

  They were in suits despite the fact that the compartment was pressurized. The Whale was about to be subjected to a number of stresses for which it had not been designed. It was possible that one or more of their 200 patches might give way when the stardrive was activated, returning the interior to vacuum.

  “Engineer, how is it going?” Dan Landon’s voice asked abruptly as she worked her way through the pre-start checklist on one of her auxiliary screens. In addition to the captain’s voice, the command circuit carried the breathing of ten other people. The sound was like that of a subdued hurricane.

  “Ready for power in a few minutes, Captain.”

  “Give me some warning before you bring the generator on line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Landon went on to question Ensign Grimes, who was in communication with Magellan. The survey ship would trail them at a safe distance as they moved toward their jump point, ready to render assistance if needed. After they jumped superlight, the Whale would be on her own for the six days to Sol. If the stardrive failed after that, they would likely never be found in the trackless vacuum between the stars.

  “Ready now, Captain,” Laura said a few minutes later as she stared at the screen and wished that someone would invent a way that old-fashioned eyeglasses could be worn in a vacuum suit. In truth, someone probably had once upon a time. That solution had been lost in the passage of years.

  “Bring the fusion generators to power.”

  Laura did so, watching her screens for any sign of instability in the generator’s output. “We have minimum drive power, Captain.”

  “Very good, Engineer. Stand by.” Landon switched to the general suit circuit and announced, “Attention All Hands. We will begin maneuvering in two minutes. Make sure you are strapped down securely. Two minute warning and counting. Stand by!”

  “Commander Heinrich reports that he is ready for chase duty,” Grimes reported.

  “Acknowledge the report, Ensign. Tell him we will be bringing our field to power in ninety seconds. Suggest that he do likewise.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  Laura watched the chronometer that seemed to be hanging a meter in front of her faceplate. The glowing apparition was part of the head-up display of her helmet. It slowly counted down toward zero.

  “All right, thirty seconds,” Landon reported. “Begin the automated countdown.”

  A computer generated voice echoed through Laura’s helmet. When the display reached zero, she released the Whale’s computer to follow its preprogrammed flight plan. The effect was immediate. Her external speaker picked up a woeful moan from the ship as the beams took the stress of the building drive field. The empty space in front of the ship suddenly curved more steeply while that behind flattened by the same minuscule amount. Smoothly, silently, the Ruptured Whale fell in the direction of curvature. In effect, the ship slid down the slope of the small invisible hill that its drive generator had created. As the ship moved, so did the localized curvature of space, and like a dog chasing its own tail, the ship followed.

  Laura did not need to watch her instruments to know that they were accelerating. Her body gave her the necessary clues. For the first time in weeks, her stomach settled down against her backbone as her toes slid deeper into her armored boots. As weight swept over her, she felt a momentary bliss as the interior fabric of the suit scratched several irritating itches. The relief was short lived, however. The new arrangement of forces conspired to set off a completely new rash of prickling.

  “So far we are nominal for flight plan,” Technician Gonzalvo reported after a few seconds of powered flight.

  “Accelerate to one gravity!” Landon ordered.

  “Yes, Captain,” Laura replied as she keyed in the change. She suddenly felt very heavy as the Whale curved space around it sufficient to drive it forward at a velocity that grew by 10 meters per second each second.

  She smiled inside her helmet. Score one for the engineers! The old derelict flew ... after a fashion. She felt pleased with herself for having won a small victory, but tried to control the emotion.
After all, the real test of her skill and that of her team would come in two days. It would take that long for the two starships to pull away from the New Eden sun to a distance where they could attempt the transition to superlight.

  #

  Dan Landon was out of his suit for the first time in a week, sponging himself off with a damp cloth and wishing it were a shower bag with jet spray controls. He was in a compartment that had once been devoted to quarters for the ship’s alien crew. The damage here was surprisingly light. In fact, had it not been for the misfortune of having one of the maintenance hatches blown away, coupled with the unexplained opening of virtually every pressure door throughout the ship, Harlan Frees might have found dozens of survivors aboard the Whale when first he boarded. As it was, those members of the crew who had survived the Broan attack had all been killed by explosive decompression just moments before Landon had won his battle with their tormentor. When the technicians first reported that fact, Dan had felt a momentary twinge of conscience for not having acted sooner. So many deaths coming so near salvation was the stuff of Greek tragedy.

  It had been twenty hours since the Whale shook itself free of its parking orbit and began the long climb out of the New Eden system. Another twenty hours would see them en route to Sol (or a plasma cloud slowly expanding across a million cubic kilometers of space).

  Dan was taking advantage of the hours under acceleration to continue exploring his command. He noted the various alien devices attached to the bulkheads. Some were obviously functional, while others appeared to be decorative. One in particular caught his eye. In front of him was a hexagonal frame inside which was a picture that might well have been an abstract painting. Then again, he decided, it might be either a landscape or portrait, but one painted in pigments to which the human eye was not sensitive. The painting was typical of the alien craft’s furnishings and fixtures – a strange mixture of the familiar and the odd.

  If it were indeed a piece of artwork, it had at least performed one of the functions of art. It had triggered more questions than it answered. He liked to think that humanity would find kindred spirits among a race that painted pictures. In truth, of course, he had no way of knowing. The artist might have been engaged in a mating ritual, or relaying a message, or possibly just wanted to break up the dull grayness of the bulkhead. Perhaps the picture was a signal to the others aboard that this particular section belonged to the beetle things.

  Dan used the water bottle to soak the sponge again. From what he had seen of the beetle corpses, they had not been handsome beings. Then again, he doubted they would have found humans attractive, either.

  The next best thing to having a live alien to question was to know what they had stored in the ship’s computer. A team of specialists had been working for more than two weeks on understanding the alien ship’s brain. The team was finally making some progress. They could not read the information they had extracted from the alien computer, of course, but they could do an analysis on how the information had been stored inside the memory banks of the machine.

  Curiously, nearly sixty percent of the data bank’s memory had proven to be empty, with the unused portion divided among several large gaps. The pattern suggested that there had once been information stored in these sections, but that it had been erased. Whether the hypothetical erasures had been the result of battle damage or of normal computer operation, the specialists had, as yet, been unable to say.

  #

  “All Hands! Stand by for superlight velocity in ten minutes. Secure for jump and report status. T minus ten minutes and counting!”

  “Ten minute warning complete, Captain.”

  “Very well, Ensign,” Dan Landon replied. “Engineer, how are your generators?”

  “Fusion is nominal, Captain,” Laura Dresser responded. “Stardrive is on-line and functional. Standing by for jump order.”

  Again, they were suspended from their webs in the control room as all through the ship other vacuum suited figures hurried to secure their equipment for jump. Landon let his gaze sweep the readouts in front of him that showed his ship ready for stardrive. He wondered which of them were lying to him.

  “Grimes, get me Magellan.”

  After a moment, the ensign reported. “Commander Heinrich on the line, sir.”

  “Scott, are you ready to jump?”

  “Ready, Captain. We’ll wait five minutes after you go superlight to observe, then we will follow you.”

  “Right. See you back home in six days.”

  “Yes, sir. We will be looking for you. Good luck!”

  “Luck to you as well, Magellan. Landon out.”

  The voyage to Sol would take six days and would be made in utter isolation. So far, no one had ever invented a method for detecting a ship traveling faster than light and it was doubtful that anyone ever would. Once the Ruptured Whale departed New Eden, she would be totally on her own, wrapped in a private dark universe. Magellan would stick around for five minutes to make sure that the Whale did not fall out of superlight the same instant she went in – or to monitor the debris cloud if the ship exploded. However, once either ship transitioned successfully to superlight, there would be no contact.

  The great danger, of course, was if their drive broke down en route. The distance between the stars is too vast for the human mind to comprehend, let alone for humanity’s small fleet of starships to search. If the Whale fell out of superlight, they would starve to death or suffocate long before anyone could possibly find them.

  “Final check. Have all stations report status.”

  “All stations! Report status.”

  The reports began flowing into the control room. Dan Landon listened carefully as each station reported that they were secured and ready for superlight. He noted that their voices carried overtones of repressed excitement, but no more tension than was to be expected. He smiled. They were a good crew. If anyone survived the next few minutes, they had a damned good chance of making it home.

  “All stations report ready to jump, Captain,” Grimes reported to him.

  “Engineer, begin your final pre-jump check of the stardrive.”

  “Stardrive is nominal, Captain.”

  “Very well. Stand by. Two minute warning.”

  “All hands. Two minutes to superlight. Stand by.”

  Landon watched the digits of his suit chronometer click down toward 00:01:00. At the one-minute mark, he ordered Laura Dresser to place the stardrive in automatic mode. A computer-generated voice began to echo softly in his earphones, counting down the seconds. As it always did, the countdown sent shivers up his spine. His eyes scanned the readouts continuously now, his gauntletted hand poised over the kill button. Then came the surge of adrenaline as the final seconds ticked off...

  “Five ... four ... three ... two ... one...”

  Dan Landon took a deep breath and held it as the mechanical voice finished.

  “Zero. Energize!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dr. Bendagar, Professor Rheinhardt, the project’s chief exobiologist, Lisa Arden, and Mark Rykand all sat in the transient lounge aboard Equatorial Station and watched the Earth periodically appear in the viewport in front of them. They were en route to the Tangier Conference, traveling incognito. All wore tourist-type clothes, which is to say, they dressed normally.

  “Feels good to get a solid deck underfoot again, doesn’t it?” Rheinhardt asked. The biologist made no secret of his dislike for microgravity. He had lost twenty pounds since the project’s inception and was looking forward to meals that had never seen the inside of an autokitchen. If he could only arrange to see his wife while he was aground, things would be perfect.

  “I don’t know,” Lisa responded. “I kind of like floating through life.” There was one definite benefit to microgravity in her opinion. This was the first time in weeks that she had to wear her bra.

  Raoul Bendagar sighed, “I agree with Ben. Man was not intended to swim everywhere he goes. Besides, it will be good to breat
he fresh air again.”

  The others looked at where he lay sprawled in a pneumatic couch. It had been the better part of a year since the scientist had breathed anything but ship’s atmosphere. He had missed his opportunity to set foot on New Eden and since the starship’s return to Sol, had not left PoleStar.

  Lisa was also looking forward to breathing molecules not tainted by the numerous smells that accumulated in a closed environment. There was one smell in particular that she would not miss. She had long since gotten sufficiently used to Sar-Say’s body odor that she no longer made any conscious note of it. Still, it was good to breathe air not clouded by Eau de Taff. She suspected Sar-Say felt the same about her body odor.

  Official invitations to the Tangier Conference had gone out the week before. Most of the attendees were from the universities and think tanks that had been let in on some part of the secret. A dozen scientists aboard PoleStar had also been directed to attend. As a precaution against accident, and to make them less conspicuous, they were traveling to the conference by three different routes. Mark Rykand had had to pull strings in order to get himself assigned to Lisa Arden’s group.

  Sar-Say, of course, had not been invited. Not only was there no way to get him to the conference without people noticing, the biologists still weren’t positive that the risk of infection was zero. There had been long technical arguments about whether the caution involved was protecting humanity from Sar-Say, or vice versa.

  Whichever it was, everyone returning to Earth from PoleStar had been given a very thorough physical examination. One who had shown signs of an incipient runny nose had been refused permission to leave the station. Whatever disease he had contracted would have to run its course before he could again enter Earth’s biosphere.

  “Here comes our ship,” Lisa said, pointing overhead to where a dart shaped craft highlighted by flashing attitude jets was growing slowly larger against the backdrop of the spinning Earth. As they watched, the Earth again slid out of sight on the right of the port, to be replaced by the black of space. The ship was noticeably larger the next time the Earth was in view. “Perhaps we should get to the loading lock.”