Heart of the Comet

by MadMaxAU

  “I’ve done a parasite inventory, and have found that more than three-quarters of the ambient pathogenic organisms have already gone extinct! It is time to release a new challenge.”

  Saul sighed. “You’re the boss.” Actually, the entire bio committee was supposed to pass on immune challenges. But reminding Akio would only offend him. The procedure was routine, anyway.

  Still, Saul’s nose already itched in unhappy anticipation.

  He reached over to the bio-library console and punched out a rapid code. A page of data appeared in space before a black backdrop.

  Saul nodded at the glowing green lettering. “There is a lovely array of nasty bugs at your disposal, Doctor. With what plague do you wish to infect your patients? We have chicken pox, fox pox, attenuated measles . . . .

  “Nothing so drastic.” Matsudo waved. “At least not so soon.”

  “No? Well, then there’s impetigo, athlete’s foot. . . :’

  “Amaterasu! Heaven forfend, Saul! In this dampness? Before the comet-tunnel habitats have been set up and the big dehumidifiers are working? You know how the navy feels about fungus aboard a spaceship. Cruz would have our—”

  He stopped abruptly and grinned lopsidedly. “Ha ha. Very funny, Saul. You are pulling my leg, of course.”

  Saul had known Matsudo casually, from scientific conferences and by reputation, for many years. But the man was still somewhat of an enigma to him. For instance, why had he volunteered to come on this mission? Of all the types who would sign up to leave Earth, spend seventy-three years of a seventy-eight-year mission in slot sleep, and return to a world grown alien and strange, which category applied to Akio? Was he an idealist, following Captain Miguel Cruz’s dream of what the mission might mean to mankind? Or was he an exile, like so many on this expedition?

  Perhaps, like me, he’s a little of both.

  Matsudo ran a hand through his lustrous black hair, as thick as any youth’s. “Just pick me out a head-cold virus, will you be so kind, Saul? Something that will challenge the crew enough to keep up their antibody production and T cell counts. They needn’t even notice it, for all I care.”

  Saul spoke a chain of letters aloud, and a new page appeared. “The customer’s always right,” he ruminated aloud. “And you’re in luck! We seem to have eighty varieties of head cold on sale.”

  “Surprise me;” Matsudo said. But then he frowned and held up both hands. “No! On second thought, let me choose! I don’t want any of your experimental monsters loose right now, no matter what you say about the wonders of symbiosis!”

  Saul pushed off to one side as Akio bent forward to peer at the list of available diseases, muttering softly to himself. Obviously, Matsudo had left his contact lenses out again.

  He’s about three decimeters taller than his grandfather, Saul thought. And yet he’s suspicious of change. A scientist, and yet he’s too conservative to get a corneal implant that would let him see without aid.

  What ever happened to the innovative, future-hungry Japanese of so long ago?

  For that matter, what had happened to Israel, his own homeland? How could the descendants of the Negev pioneers, the most potent warriors in two centuries, slowly decline into superstition and cultism? What had turned clear-eyed Sabras into cowed sheep who let the Levite and Salawite fanatics just walk in and take over?

  The mysteries were part of a greater one that still amazed Saul, how courage seemed to be leaking away from humanity, even as the Hell Century was ending and better times appeared near at last.

  It wasn’t a calming train of thought. Biological science was in just as bad shape. The bright hopes offered by Simon Percell and the genetic engineers of the early part of the century had nearly collapsed in a series of scandals more than a decade ago, leaving only a stolid pharmaceutical industry and a few mavericks such as Saul to carry on.

  Earth was rapidly becoming unpleasant for mavericks—one of the reasons he was on this mission. Exile through space and time certainly beat some of the alternatives he had seen coming.

  “We will use rhinovirus TR-3-APZX-471,” Matsudo announced, apparently satisfied with his selection. “Do you concur, Saul? “

  Saul already felt a sneeze coming on. “A naive little varietal, but I’m sure you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind,” he grumped. “As official keeper of small animals, I’ll have an incubated vial of the nasty buggers in your in-box by tomorrow morning.” He touched a key and the glowing inventory disappeared.

  Matsudo lifted himself easily in the one-eighth G of the Edmund’s laboratory wheel, and sat on the counter. He sighed, and Saul could tell that his friend was about to go philosophical on him. Over the long journey from Earth they had exchanged chess games and views of the world, and never budged each other on any issue at all.

  “It’s not much like back when we were in Medical school, is it, Saul? You in Haifa and me in Tokyo? We were brought up to hate pathogens—the infectious viruses and bacteria and prions—to want only to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Now, we culture and use them. They are our tools.”

  Saul nodded. Today half a physician’s job involved careful application of those very horrors, serving them up judiciously to create challenges.

  “Exercise the patient’s immune system, and let him do the rest,” Saul said, nodding. “It’s a better way, Akio. I only wish you’d see that my cyanutes are part of the same progression.”

  Matsudo rolled his eyes. He and Saul had been over this many times.

  “Again, I regret that I cannot agree. In one case we teach the body to be strong and reject that which is foreign. But you coax it to accept an interloper, forever!”

  “Perhaps half of the cells in a human body are guest life forms, Akio . . . gut bacteria, follicle cleaners. They help us; we help them.”

  Matsudo waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Most of what you call you, is not! I have heard it before. I know you see us not as individuals, Saul, but as great, synergistic hives of cooperating species.” There was a biting edge to Matsudo’s voice that Saul did not remember having heard before. Exaggeration was not Matsudo’s usual style.

  “Akio . . .

  Matsudo hurried on, though. “And what it you to right Saul’ All of those organisms that share our bodies with us grew into symbiosis over millions of years. That is entirely different from throwing gene-tailored monsters into such a delicate balance on purpose!”

  Matsudo flushed slightly. Saul considered trying to explain one more time—that the cyanutes were descended from creatures that had lived peacefully in man for aeons. But of course, he knew how Akio would answer. After all the changes that had been made, the ‘nutes were a new species, as different from their natural cousins as men were from apes.

  “Saul, the Movement to Restore and Reflect teaches us that we must think carefully before we interfere with nature The Hell Century has shown how dangerous it can be to meddle where we don’t understand.

  Glancing up at the microscope screen, where his tiny test subject was still being run through its paces, Saul saw that the animal was still throbbing near the needle—harried but well.

  “I . . . “ He shook his head and went silent. Saul had an idea what was bothering his friend.

  “There’s still no sign of the Newburn yet, is there?”

  Matsudo shook his head, his gaze on the floor. “Captain Cruz and his officers are still looking. Perhaps when the comet has calmed down some more, when the coma and ion tail are less noisy . . . Fortunately, there were only forty people aboard that one. If it had been one of the other slot tugs, the Sekanina, or the Whipple, or the Delsemme-” He shrugged.

  Saul nodded. No wonder Matsudo was irritable. More than three hundred men and women had been shipped from Earth five years ahead of Edmund—along with most of the expedition’s massive equipment—chilled down to near freezing aboard four slender robot freighters, riding sunlight behind gossamer sails a thousand kilom
eters across.

  Only the “founder” team took the fast, energetically expensive track aboard the old Edmund Halley. They exhausted almost the last of their propellant to match the comet’s furious retrograde orbit. Whey they arrived the first task awaiting the torch ship’s crew was to recover the huge cylinders containing the deep sleeping majority of the mission crew.

  There were disadvantages to each style of travel-torch ship or slot tug. Much of the Edmund staff had to take long turns enduring the boredom and cramped living of more than a year in space. As well, they shared the recently evident dangers of setting up the base.

  On the other hand, they had some control over their fate. It was not their lot to coast for years in near-frozen sleep, relying on someone else to catch up, capture their slim barge, and finally awaken them.

  Would the men and women aboard Newburn drift forever? If Cruz and his team never found the tug, might they be picked up by someone else, in some faraway age? What might they awaken to, after such a long trip down the river of time?

  “It is going to be a long eighty years, Saul.” Matsudo shook his head pensively, looking at the picture wall, vivid with Halley’s Comet in its full glory against a backdrop of stars. The plasma and dust tails glittered like flapping banners, like plankton in a phosphorescent sea. “It is a long time until we see home again.”

  Saul smiled, hiding his own misgivings for his friend’s sake. “We’ll sleep through most of it, ‘Kio. And when we do get home, we’ll be rich and famous.”

  Matsudo snorted at the thought, but he acknowledged Saul’s intent with a smile. Irony was the common trait that made them friends, in spite of all their differences.

  A bell chimed and Saul looked up as the probe’s needle withdrew from the watery, saline bead. The subject cyanute floated gray and limp now. The last test had been to prove that the creatures could still easily be killed, if ever the need arose.

  A creator’s prerogative? he wondered. Or are my shoulders stooped imperceptibly under one more tiny guilt?

  Scavengers were already nosing up to the microscopic corpse. Saul reached over and turned the microscope off.

  VIRGINIA

  The place smelled of rank, unwashed man.

  Virginia’s nose wrinkled when she entered the workout gym for her mandatory exercise period.

  We’re strange creatures. Mammals evolve odors that make males aggressive, and all of us nervous around one another, and then we pack a whole crowd of people together into a tin crate for a year or more, and ask them to make nice.

  Actually, Virginia did not mind the smell all that much. She did not even mind men.

  They just aren’t the reason I accepted exile into the twenty-second century. riding a speck of stardust and ice out into the Big Night.

  Virginia had her own motives. For her, volunteering for Project Halley had little to do with herding comets for harvest.

  She stripped down to her shorts and mounted a bicycle ergometer, attaching the bio-monitor straps. Virginia pushed the pedals, accelerating until the readout showed she was fulfilling Dr. van Zoon’s orders.

  The workout gym was located in the Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel, where most of the crew snoozed through their sleep periods under weight. Virginia understood the need to let blood and bones feel the Old Pull now and then to keep them in shape. But these thrice-weekly sessions with straps, pulleys, and ergometers struck her as truly burnt logic.

  She had considered monkeying with the med center’s data flow, inserting simulated feedback from all these exercise machines. She could do it, too. Virginia wasn’t modest about her competence in Data Intelligence. Lefty d’Amaria might be head of the department, but she was the best.

  Oh, well, I guess I need this, she thought as she pushed down on the pedals. Sweat began popping out, glistening on her olive skin.

  Normally, she took pride in keeping a taut physique. Back home in Hawaii, she had surfed nearly every other day. But now it seemed she had to shake off a lassitude that still hung over her after a year’s chilled sleep. Until three weeks ago she had been suspended, life functions barely ticking over at just above freezing. Perhaps it was a lingering laziness from the slot drugs that had made her so reluctant to come down to the gym.

  Well, as long as I’m here, let’s do it right.

  She bore down hard and pretended she was pedaling across the Lanai-Maui bridge. The omnipresent rumble of the gravity wheel faded into an imagined background of roaring wind and water. Virginia pictured that the door in front of her might let her out, blinking, into yellow sunshine and the rich scent of pineapple.

  Her muscles felt warm and stretched after the workout. And it was good to spend some time after showering just brushing her long black hair. Stepping back into her drab pullover was reminder enough, though. Maui lay a hundred million miles from here.

  You made your choice, girl. There are things to accomplish out here . . . things more important to you even than remaining in the Land of the Golden People.

  She decided to take a brisk walk around the gravity wheel before returning to the freefall portion of the shi[. Virginia strode long-legged in the direction opposite to the wheel’s spin.

  It seemed nobody was about. Dr. Marguerite van Zoon wasn’t chivying the spacers to visit the gym these days. Those poor folk were sweating quite enough right now, and were exempt from the Walloon physician’s obsession with exercise.

  Virginia’s journey around the rim hallway took her past one of the spoke ladders and beyond, to the part of the wheel dedicated to laboratories. The doors were all closed, so she couldn’t tell if the Biological Sciences section was being used right now. She paused by the door, her hand hesitating, half-raised toward the buzzer.

  Oh come on, Ginnie. It’s not as if Saul Lintz will bite you. Why all these little-girl heart palpitations?

  All she knew was that the man held a fascination for her, more than she had felt toward anyone in years. Was it his worldly experience? Or the expression in his eyes—perseverance and quiet strength?

  Since she had been unslotted, she had hoped he would say something, make some first move. It was frustrating to realize, at last, that he simply assumed she saw him as a father figure. That left Virginia wondering if she should attempt an overture herself.

  Her hesitation over the buzzer lasted until she felt ridiculous.

  It would seem so contrived to barge in on him now. What would I say?

  Later there’ll be opportunity to arrange something more casual. After all, what we have plenty of is time.

  At least that would do for an excuse. Oh, if only she understood people half as well as she did machines! She swiveled and left without disturbing the buzzer.

  As she walked down the rim corridor, she noticed all the ways in which the Edmund Halley had aged over the past year. The corridors no longer shone. Buff, color-coordinated wall panels had warped and even buckled in places. The old girl had not started this mission exactly in the blush of youth, and no space vessel of her size had ever been required to accelerate so far, for so long. The strain showed.

  Virginia thought she was past surprise, but as she approached another of the spoke ladders, she stopped and stared.

  Oh, it can’t be this bad!

  An air vent dripped onto the gently curved hallway. Patchy, dark green growth discolored the floor where Coriolis effects had pushed a small puddle against the wall.

  Virginia’s generous lips pursed in disgust as she stepped gingerly past the moldy infestation and climbed a damp ladder toward the hub, making a mental note to report this to maintenance. It was hard to believe she was the first to discover it.

  The rungs pressed against her body as she surrendered angular momentum to the rotating wheel. The spoke passageway was dim and dank and all too smelly. Only half the phosphor panels in this tunnel were working, making the ascent seem a bit like a trip through a city sewer.

  It’s a good thing the Halley habitats will be ready soon, she thought. This creaky bar
ge needs a long overhaul.

  There would be little enough for the four hundred members of the expedition to do during three-quarters of a century . . . investigating the mysteries of a major cometary nucleus . . . testing the sublimation control panels and the big Nudge Flingers . . . another busy time in thirty years or so as Halley neared its farthest reach from the sun, when Virginia would help calculate parameters for the all important Grand Maneuver . . . then the long fall toward Jupiter and finally, home.

  For most of the intervening time, nearly everybody would be asleep, accumulating Earthside pay in nearly dreamless slot state.

  That was when the small, rotating watch shifts would slowly refurbish poor Edmund.

  Seven decades ought to be time enough. It had better be. Come Halley’s next fiery plunge into the inner solar system, this old bucket has to be good enough shape to take us home again.

  Climbing hand over hand, Virginia felt her weight seep away into the ladder as she approached the grumbling bearings, where the null gravity of space resumed. The four spoke tunnels came together in a small, rotating, octagonal room.

  Just before reaching the hub, however, she blinked in stunned surprise at a small lubricant leak, spraying fine, greasy vapor into the passage.

  I know most of Edmund’s spacers have been called away to work on Halley Core. Still, there’s no excuse for this! We’re going to need the wheel for a long time to come!

  “Disgusting,” she muttered aloud. “Simply disgusting.”

  That was when a voice spoke from beyond the faint, oily jet.

  “I agree, Virginia.”

  She glanced up quickly A slightly paunchy man in a gray shipsuit floated by one of the two exits, his broad, Slavic mouth pouting in a sour expression. A wool cap was pulled down over sparse brown hair flecked with gray. His arms were long and powerful- looking, all the more so since he had no legs.