by Emily
There was an awkward pause. Then Marcel reminded them there was more mail. "The commcenter," he said, "has been overwhelmed with good wishes for you. For everybody."
Hutch was impressed. Sending a hypercomm message was not inexpensive. "Overwhelmed?"
"Thousands of them. Probably be more than that if we had a wider reception capacity. They tell us they're backed up pretty heavy at Relay. Whole classrooms of kids, in some cases."
"I don't suppose you have any way of sorting out the personal stuff?"
"Not easily. Even by last name, I can't be sure. We have sixteen messages for you from people named Hutchins. Eighteen for Randy from assorted Nightingales. Ditto for everybody else."
"All right," said Hutch. "Keep mine for now. Why don't you put somebody on with each of these other folks? They may have specific names they'll be looking for." She thanked him and disconnected. Nightingale stared at her, and she could see the judgment forming. Nobody in your entire life you want to hear from at a time like this?
Of her immediate family, only Hutch's mother was still alive. Relations between the two had been strained for years over Hutch's failure to settle down and have a family. Like a normal young woman. Of course, Hutch wasn't that young anymore, a fact that seemed to have escaped her mother. Or added to her sense of panic. Even though she remained at the height of her physical capabilities, as people routinely did for their first century or so, she had long since discarded the happy innocence one might expect of a bride.
She'd been around long enough to know precisely what she wanted out of life. She believed weddings had to happen reasonably early if they were to have a chance of success. Mates had to grow together. She knew what she would expect of a man, and there simply was no such creature in captivity. So if she'd been stuck with being alone, and sometimes lonely, she had at least not been lonely in a marriage, which was the worst of all worlds. Anyhow, she liked her independence.
Mom had never understood. Had never wanted to understand.
Hutch sat looking at her notebook. And finally, with reluctance, opened it and tapped in a message:
Mom,
It looks as if we're down to a couple of days. Things haven't gone as well as we'd expected. But we're hopeful. You'll know how it turned out by the time you receive this.
She thought about it, wrote some more, apologized for not being the daughter her mother had wanted, explained that she'd enjoyed her life, and hoped her mother would understand that she, Priscilla, would not have had it any other way.
Having broken through the wall, she wrote to a few others, mostly people connected with the Academy. Doesn't look promising at the moment.
They were good times.
I was thinking about you last night... .
MacAllister looked over her shoulder and smiled. "Be careful, Priscilla. Don't say anything you can be held to when you get home."
There was no one with whom she could claim a romantic relationship. There'd been some men over the years, of course. One was dead. The others were happily married in suburban New Jersey or points west.
She sat quietly, trying to think what to say to old friends, and found herself regretting things not done. People for whom she had not made sufficient time. The great love that had never quite shown up. The child not borne.
Now that she faced possible termination, her life seemed curiously incomplete. She'd heard somewhere that, when death was near, one's regrets were not for one's actions, the assorted small and petty acts, the occasional immoralities, even the periodic cruelties visited on others. But rather one regretted things not done, adventures not undertaken, experiences left untasted, whether through some false code of morality or, more likely, shyness or fear of failure.
She smiled to herself. MacAllister had said somewhere, through fear of getting caught.
XXVII
Few of the virtues are realty useful. Fidelity leads to lost opportunity, truth-telling to injured feeling, charity to additional solicitations. The least productive, and possibly the most overrated, is faith. The faithful deny reason, close their minds to the evidence of their senses, and remain unfailingly optimistic in the face of disaster. They inevitably get just what they deserve.
—Gregory MacAllister, "Along for the Ride," Reminiscences
Hours to breakup (est): 45
Janet Hazelhurst's people had been transported to their stations and were ready to go.
John Drummond reported that his team had worked out the details for the assembly. "They've got it all down?" demanded Marcel. "Every step?"
"Every step."
"What about the rest of it?"
Beekman took him through the entire plan. The shuttles were fueled and ready. Phil Zossimov was on schedule with his collar and dividers. They were working on this, getting that set up. There were problems, but that was unavoidable on a jury-rigged operation this big.
"Nothing insurmountable?"
"Not so far."
Marcel had slept a few hours, and felt better than he had in a week. But he watched Beekman suspiciously.
"What?" asked Beekman. "What's wrong?"
"I'm waiting for you to tell me."
"Marcel, nothing is wrong. We're doing pretty well. Better than we have a right to expect."
They were still twenty minutes from the tower when Marcel told them Wendy's search team had given up trying to find the capacitors.
"Up to us," said Mac. "Good thing we didn't go to Mt. Blue."
Hutch felt better in flight, with full fuel tanks and the ground far below. Her natural optimism came back when she could throttle up. Even in these circumstances she could not escape the sense that with the jets running, anything was possible. She wondered at the recovery of her spirits and mentioned it to Mac, who suggested she was wired to assume the world was a permanent place, a view which had surely been shaken by recent events. Here among the clouds, however, they could see forever, and life did indeed seem infinite.
The day had closed in almost as soon as they'd left the ground. Hutch had gotten away from a long line of storms, and they were flying through gray, overcast skies streaked with dust. "Volcanoes, probably," said Nightingale.
Kellie shook her head. "I think they'd tell us if volcanoes were going off in the neighborhood."
Hutch wondered if that were so. Marcel might be reluctant to introduce still more bad news. In fact this had to be a nightmare for the people on Wendy. They might almost be wishing it were over.
There were occasional calls, from Embry, asking whether everyone was physically okay, and could she be of assistance in any way? Guilty conscience, probably.
And from Tom Scolari, also sounding guilty, telling her he was doing everything he could to help recover them. Scolari was with the Outsiders. "It's going to be okay," he said. Sure. How good was he at manufacturing landers?
Kellie got calls from friends on Wendy. "I wish," she said, "they'd just let me be. They keep telling me to hang in. What the hell else can we do?"
Mac received one from Nicholson, assuring him they were making "every effort to extract him from his plight." MacAllister thanked him politely and shook his head. "How's your plight, Hutch? .You know, I believe that's the first time I've ever actually heard a living person use that word."
The lander flew on through the deepening morning, on this twelfth local day since their arrival on Deepsix. It now seemed to Hutch as if their departure from Wildside had occurred in another lifetime.
Sometimes the clouds closed in, and they could see nothing. There was no other traffic in the sky, of course, and she was confident she was above any nearby peaks, but she disliked flying blind, with neither vision nor instruments. She was dependent exclusively on guidance from Wendy and the satellites. To complicate matters, they lost communications with the orbiting ships for almost six minutes.
"Local interference," their contact told them when the system came up again. "The storm systems are starting to play hell with communications."
Augie Canyo
n called, asked a few questions, and reminded them a lot of people were praying for them back home.
"Anybody here believe in life after death?" Kellie looked around at her companions.
"I do," MacAllister said carefully.
"You do?" Nightingale suppressed a smile. "You've made a career of attacking moralists and reformers, Mac. And whole sections of the country that you thought took their preachers too seriously. Which is to say that they took them at all. What are we getting here? A deathbed conversion?"
"Randy." MacAllister's expression denied all charges. "I'm shocked and dismayed that you would think that of me. I have only attacked people who pretend to have the answers to everything. For the very good reason that they're either imbeciles or charlatans. But that doesn't mean I've denied there's a spiritual dimension to life."
"Really? A spiritual dimension?" Nightingale arched his eyebrows. "Sir, what have you done with Gregory MacAllister?"
"Wait a minute," said Kellie. "That's a fairly sweeping statement anyhow. Are you making those charges about everyone who belongs to an established faith? What about Brother Dominic?"
Yes, thought Hutch. Brother Dominic was a modern St. Francis who'd worked forty years among the poor in east Asia. "A fine man," MacAllister allowed. "I'll give you that. But I'd say he's locked into a belief system that's closed his mind."
"You're talking about the Roman church?"
"I'm talking about any system that sets up a series of propositions that are supposed to be taken as the word from on high. Adherents
get so caught up in their certainties that they miss the important things. What does Brother Dominic know about quantum mechanics?"
"What do you know about quantum mechanics?" demanded Hutch.
"Not much, I'll grant you. But then, I don't pretend to be pious."
"I'm a bit slow," said Nightingale. "Make the connection for me."
"Randy, doesn't it strike you that anyone truly interested in the creator, if in fact there is a creator, would want to take time to look at his handiwork?" He smiled benevolently at Hutch. "Or her handiwork? Matter of fact, doesn't it seem likely that the creator might be a bit miffed at anybody who spends a lifetime walking around paying serious attention to church architecture and misses the stars?
"People who wear their religion on their sleeves talk a lot about going to Sunday school, reading the Bible, and doing good works. And I suppose there's no harm in that. But if I'd gone to the trouble to put all this together"—he raised his hands in the general direction of infinity—"and people never paid any attention to it, never bothered to try to find out how the world worked, then I think I'd get annoyed."
"I'm glad you're not running things," said Kellie.
MacAllister agreed. "There'd be a lot more direct action," he assured them.
"So," said Nightingale, unable to let it go, "the great atheist defends theology."
MacAllister shrugged. "Not theology," he said. "Belief."
The conversation reminded Hutch, if she needed reminding, how frightened she was. She worried about how she'd respond if the rescue plan didn't work.
Nightingale studied her, and that dark gaze seemed to penetrate her soul. He reached over and touched her wrist. "It's okay," he said. "Whatever happens, we're in it together."
NOTEBOOKS OF KANDALL NIGHTINGALE
It's good to be in the lander. Even though it can't get us out of here, at least we've regained a sense of minimal control over what's happening. I can't explain it, but being relegated to walking around in the woods for several days left me feeling absolutely powerless. Maybe things haven't changed a whole lot, but it's nice to be able to take off, and to look down on the real estate. It makes me feel human again.
On the other hand, maybe it's just a result of feeling safe from the local wildlife.
—December 5 or thereabout
Guided by Wendy, Hutch set down on an island to wait for the midday tide to recede. They were about fifteen klicks west of the tower.
"How long?" asked Mac.
"Make yourself comfortable," she said. "It'll be a few hours."
"That's a lot of wasted time, Hutch. Why don't we just go in and get started?"
"We'd get washed away. Be patient."
He stared out the window at the vast inland sea. "Patience requires time, Priscilla," he said.
"Gunther." Janet the welder was unhappy. "I've just been asked a question I don't know how to answer."
"Go ahead," said Beekman.
"All the shafts look the same. We've got teams spread out along 420 kilometers of the assembly, every eighty klicks."
"Where the braces are," said Beekman.
"Right. And we are going to free a single shaft and the asteroid from the rest of the construct."
"Okay. What's the problem?"
"To do that, we have to cut the shaft free from the braces. We have five braces to deal with, plus the configuration where the assembly joins the asteroid, which is a plate. My question to you is this: We do not want to extract the central shaft because it involves too much cutting and manipulation. By far, the easiest course is to cut and remove one of the outer shafts."
"And?"
"How can we be sure that each team works to free the same shaft? The thing's too long. The shafts are all identical. There's no way I can see to distinguish them."
"Oh." Beekman apparently hadn't thought about it either. "I suppose we could send a shuttle out. Mark the damned thing."
"You mean wait while a shuttle paints a stripe down one of them?
That'll take too long. We don't have that kind of time. Or, I suspect, that much marker."
Beekman frowned. She wondered whether other issues like this would come up, things no one had foreseen. "What about a hammer?" she suggested.
"What would we do with a hammer?"
"Rap on the shaft. Give each team a sonocap from Medical. Let them listen for it. I'd think the vibrations would carry, even over eighty klicks."
He made a face suggesting he didn't think much of the idea. "I'm not versed in sonics," he said. "But the shafts are connected at the braces. So they'd all vibrate. The amplitude would be different, I suppose, but I wouldn't feel confident with that kind of approach."
"What then?"
He took a deep breath. Exhaled.
Several members of her team were waiting below in the area they'd newly designated O Deck for the Outsiders. "Let me get back to you."
He was back in five minutes. "All right," he said. A detail of the assembly blinked onto one of her screens. "The shafts are regularly spaced. Eight on the perimeter. Six on the inner arc. One in the center."
The detail rotated, illustrating.
"If you look straight through it, there's only one position in which five shafts line up. We'll use one of the outer shafts from that position."
"Which one?"
"That's easy enough. One end of the assembly is pointed directly at the center of Deepsix. Have someone stand on top of the assembly. The shaft at the top that matches up will be the Alpha shaft. The one we use."
"How do we determine the top of the assembly?"
"Easy. Reckon from the planet. From the north pole. North is the top."
"Are we sure everyone will be able to find the north pole?"
"They won't have to. Instruct the pilot to align the shuttle so that the north pole equates to topside." His brow wrinkled. "I can't see any reason why it won't work."
"That's good, Gunther," she said.
He laughed. "That's why they pay me the big money." He thought about it some more. "Arrange things so all the teams make the mark at the same time. Don't forget the assembly's moving."
Beekman had just finished describing his solution to Marcel when his screen lit up. It was Mark Bentley, a fellow planetologist whose specialty was gas-giant cores. He was currently director of Moonbase's Farside Observatory, and a longtime close friend. In his spare time, Bentley was an accomplished amateur actor.
He look
ed unhappy. "I wouldn't want you to misunderstand, Gunny," he said. "But we're sacrificing everything we came here for."
Beekman knew that. A substantial number of the experiments weren't even running. Specialists had been pulled off their assignments and put on the rescue operation. Worst of all, Wendy was on the wrong side of Deepsix, her view of developing events limited to what she could see through her satellites. The mission was turning into a fiasco. "I know," he said. "What would you have me do?"
"Call it off."
Beekman was shocked. "What?"
"Gunny, I'd like to see those people out of there as much as anybody. But the scoop is a long shot at best." He was quiet for a minute, apparently thinking how he was going to defend the indefensible. "Can I be honest?"
"You always have been."
"The chance to watch this thing close up, it's too much to let get away. Gunny, the truth is, it's worth a few lives, if that's what it takes."
Beekman was surprised at his own reaction: Bentley was not necessarily wrong. From one point of view.
"Let it go," he continued. "You know what's going to happen: Something'll go wrong, the operation won't work, they'll all die anyhow, and we'll be left looking like idiots because we came all the way out here and got nothing."
"Mark, what would you have me do? We can't just write them off."
Bentley was quiet for a long minute. He knew. He understood it was not an easy decision. "I think they've been written off. By events. Somebody needs to point that out to Marcel."
Beekman felt a terrible weariness creeping up his insides.
"I'm not the only person here who feels this way, Gunny. It's not just me." He held out his hands. "Look, if there were a decent chance
of getting them off, I'd say go ahead. I wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd be willing to go along with it. But this isn't a decent chance. It's a gesture. And that's all it is. It's being done so when we go back, Clairveau can say he did everything he could. You know as well as I do that you can't make this work."
"I think we can," he said.
Bentley continued as if he hadn't spoken. "We won't have another opportunity like this. Not in our lifetimes. Maybe not in the lifetime of the species."