The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  “Okay,” said Carson. “What else?”

  “Water. Frank, you take care of that.” She told him where to find containers, and then turned to Maggie. “Cargo area divides into three sections. There’s a washroom at the rear. We’ll expand that, and use the other two sections as living quarters. See what you can do in the way of furnishings. Oh, and if you can get us a supply of towels, soap, dishes, that would help.” She glanced around the cabin. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Carson.

  “The bridge. We have to tie into the ship’s communication system. Back here, we won’t know what’s going on.”

  “We’ll need the Flickinger belts, too,” said Carson.

  “Right. We’ve got six in storage. I’ll bring them back. You guys should take a few minutes and make a list of what we need. Try not to miss anything.” She opened the hatch and climbed out. The air seemed less cold than it had.

  She went only a few steps before she smelled something burning. “We’ve got a fire somewhere,” she told the link. That brought everyone boiling out of the shuttle.

  It was coming from one of the ducts. They traced it to the food processors, and minutes later they were all on the scene. One of the units had overheated and burned out its wiring. They tried to shut it down, but the override didn’t work, and they ended by disconnecting it.

  The temperature was now near freezing, and no one had anything heavier than a light jacket. They were thoroughly chilled when they returned to Alpha.

  “I’ll go with you to the bridge,” said Carson. “I don’t think anybody should go anywhere alone anymore.”

  That made sense to Hutch, but before she could reply, Janet held up her watch, and pointed out the window. “It’s still dark,” she said.

  It was by then almost 7:00 A.M., GMT. Ship’s time. The lights should have brightened in their simulation of the day-night cycle.

  Hutch took care of her technical chores first, ensuring that she had full control of Winckelmann’s communication systems. For good measure, she also connected routine shipboard controls. She wondered how long her circuits would last after the starship froze over. It occurred to her that Wink might suffer a complete communications blackout. Maybe, if that happened, she could launch Alpha at noon April fourth, on the assumption that Valkyrie would be in the area. But that was risky: if the rescuers failed to arrive, there would be no guarantee they could reconnect with the ship’s air supply. Furthermore, she wondered whether the shuttle bay doors would respond when the time came.

  She consulted the computer:

  Q. AT CURRENT RATE OF HEAT LOSS, AT WHAT TEMPERATURE, AND AT WHAT TIME, WILL SHUTTLE LAUNCH DOORS BECOME INOPERABLE?

  A. AT 284 DEGREES CENTIGRADE. 031903Z.

  “Uh-oh,” said Janet. “The nineteenth? Wasn’t that last week?”

  “I think we can write off the computer,” said Hutch.

  Daylight arrived at 1010 sharp. It snapped on, bright, intense, noon at sea. They were spread out through the ship, foraging what they could, and they greeted the sudden illumination with cynical cheers.

  They set themselves up as comfortably as conditions allowed. They disengaged chairs and tables from the main cabin, found three divans, and anchored them in their living quarters. They even mounted a few prints. Maggie put a crystal dolphin on one of the tables, and Janet tried to rescue the occasional plants that were scattered around the ship. But it was much too late for them.

  As a safety precaution, Hutch shut down all unnecessary systems. The rings no longer turned, and their simulated gravity ceased. Everything had to be bolted down. Drinks were taken through straws, and the shower was an adventure.

  On Monday the 28th, the fourth day after the collision, they received a reply from Nok. Hutch read it, and then handed it around:

  RECEIVED YOUR 03/241541Z and 03/241611Z. UNFORTUNATELY WE HAVE NO SHIP TO SEND. HAVE PLACED YOUR REQUEST ON GENL BROADCAST TO NEAREST VESSEL, SURVEY SHIP ASHLEY TEE, CURRENTLY IN HYPER. ESTIMATED ARRIVAL TIME BETA PAC APR 11 RPT APR 11. GOOD LUCK.

  “My God,” said Janet, “that’s two weeks. What happened to the Valkyrie?”

  Hutch slumped into her seat. “Maybe they canceled the run. They do that if there’s no reason for a flight. Maybe it needs maintenance. Who knows? What difference does it make?”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  During my entire career, which has embraced a number of notable successes (if I may be allowed the indulgence), along with some spectacular failures, I know of no single event that has so frustrated me as being sealed inside Winckelmann and its shuttle craft, within a few million kilometers of an archeological puzzle of overwhelming dimension. And being able to do absolutely nothing about it.

  My companions share my concern, although they are distracted by life and death issues. I’m scared too. But I’d still like to get a look at the Football. What is that thing? Incidentally, I should record here that I’m glad we have Hutchins along. She is something of a jerk. But I know she’ll pull us out of this. If it can be done.

  —Margaret Tufu’s Journals, dated March 29, 2203

  Published posthumously by

  Hartley & Co., London (2219)

  (Edited and annotated by Janet Allegri)

  19.

  On board NCA Winckelmann. Tuesday, March 29; 1218 hours.

  “We’re going to have to come up with something else.”

  Ship’s temperature had dropped to -30°C. Electronics systems had begun to fail. Water lines had long since frozen. Hutch, concerned that a hatch somewhere might freeze and cut them off from other parts of the ship, left everything open.

  Janet found an auto-kitchen on C deck and carried it back to Alpha. It was capable of making sandwiches, coffee, and snacks. They also commandeered a refrigerator.

  The day after the bad news had come from Nok, Wink’s lights went out. Hutch thought she could restore them, but saw no point in making the effort. So they huddled in their warm, illuminated cocoon, in the belly of the dark ship.

  And they worried about the air supply. They were still breathing from the ship’s tanks, and tapping the ship’s power. But the loss of the lights had shown them the future. Any time now, the voltage that drove the recyclers would fail, or the pumps would freeze, or any other of a dozen misfortunes would shut down the oxygen supply. Then they would have to switch to the onboard tanks, and from that time they would have one week left. Plus roughly twenty-four hours with the Flickinger belts. The Ashley Tee was due, at best, in thirteen days. Which meant that if the ship’s air supply failed any time within the next five days, they would not make it.

  A green light glowed on her status board, confirming the flow of air from the Wink into the shuttle. If it stopped, when it stopped, the lamp would blink off and an alarm would sound.

  She looked out into the darkness. Illumination from the shuttle windows etched the decks. “Not much fun, is it?” asked George, breaking a long silence.

  She shook her head. “Not much.”

  “We’ll be okay.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s always hard when you can’t do anything except sit and wait.”

  Several minutes later, the remaining convector quietly died.

  The Football was no longer easy to see at zero mag. It was a small patch of night with indefinite boundaries, an empty place among the stars. A well in a city of light. Its radio pulse played across a monitor that Maggie had set up. Carson sat watching it intently. A second screen displayed telemetry. He was absentmindedly scooping cereal out of a bowl in his lap. Beside him, Maggie dozed.

  Hutch and George played chess, the board balanced on a water container. Janet was dividing her attention between a book and the game. (She would play the winner.) George munched a chocolate cookie. They had adjusted reasonably well to the lack of amenities. The shuttle had almost come to feel like home.

  Exercise was of course feasible only outside in the bay. They could still walk through the ship protected by the Flickinger energy f
ields, but that would stop when they lost the external air hookup, because it would then become impossible to refill the breathers without draining the shuttle’s supply.

  They didn’t talk much about the dangers of the situation. But in the pointedly irrelevant conversations that had become the order of the day, Hutch noted a tendency to lower the voice and speak in hushed tones, the way one does in church. The fiction that escape was only a matter of time was maintained.

  And they continued to speculate about the Football. They had tracked the signal source to the center of the object.

  “It has to be an antenna,” said George, stabbing the air with a rook. “And a standard radio transmission would have to be intended for someone in this system.” He set the piece down to support the queen’s bishop pawn, which was under pressure. It was early yet, but the game was turning against him already. As usual. “I wonder whether anyone’s listening?”

  “Someone must be,” said Janet. “Somebody would have to come out here once in a while to do the maintenance.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t need maintenance,” said Hutch. She sailed into a line of pawns with a black bishop. Sacrifice. George could not see the point. “Don’t underestimate an unknown technology,” she continued.

  Carson picked up the cereal bowl and tilted it so that it lay at the same angle as the Football. “Hutch,” he said. “Was there a blip of any kind when we went through the object? Did it seem to notice we were there?”

  “Don’t know. I wasn’t recording the signal. I couldn’t see any reason to at the time.”

  Janet grinned politely at George, and shook her head. “Resign,” she said.

  “Why is it so big?” asked Hutch.

  “Maybe it’s more than a relay,” George suggested.

  “What else could it be?”

  “A telescope, maybe. Something like the Tindle. But bigger.”

  “A lot bigger,” said Carson. “With a telescope that size, you could see someone strike a match across the Void.”

  “Your move,” said Hutch, smiling.

  George pushed back from the board, shrugged, and pushed over his king.

  “If it were a telescope,” said Janet, “it would have to be solid, right? We were doing, what? Fifty thousand klicks? We’d have disintegrated.”

  “Depends,” said Carson, “on how it’s made.”

  Janet set up the pieces, and turned the board to give Hutch black. “Something else,” she said. “Assume you had a bowl that big. How would you turn it?”

  “What?”

  “If it’s a telescope, how would you turn it? I would think that any attempt to move it would wreck it.”

  “Maybe you don’t turn it,” said George. “Maybe it was preset to observe something that doesn’t move much. Very little apparent motion.”

  “I can’t imagine how the thing would hold together.” The voice was Maggie’s.

  “I thought you were asleep.” Carson’s smile was almost paternal. “If it’s a telescope, and if it’s permanently aimed, what do you suppose it’s looking at?” He cleared his screen, and directed the question to the computer.

  Maggie got up and stretched.

  Janet, who was a decent match for Hutch, opened as she always did, with c4, the English Game. Hutch wondered how it happened that a woman who was so aggressive, so careless of her own safety, would become enamored of an opening that was deliberate, methodical, and cautious.

  “Nothing,” said Carson. “There’s nothing at all in its line of sight.”

  “It’s been there a long time,” said Maggie. “Back it up to about 10,000 B.C. and take a look.”

  George picked up Janet’s book. It was a historical novel, set immediately after the collapse of the U.S. He paged through.

  Carson got a result, and smiled. “The Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s interesting.”

  “Why?” asked George.

  “Closest extragalactic object,” said Hutch.

  “Hard to believe,” said Janet, “that anyone would build that kind of monster to look at one astronomical target. It seems like overkill.”

  George frowned. “I thought the nearest galaxy was Andromeda.”

  “Andromeda’s the nearest big one,” said Hutch. “It’s two million light-years out. But the Magellanic Clouds—there are two of them—are only about a tenth as far.”

  Maggie rubbed her eyes. “I’m more interested in what’s at this end. You said there’s an oxygen world in the biozone. What does it look like?”

  “We don’t have much detail,” said Hutch. “The sensors are pretty badly skewed. Temperatures are earthlike. There are water oceans. It’s got life. But it’s putting out no ECM. And that’s about all we know for certain.”

  Janet opened her mouth to say something, but the lights in the room dimmed. They did not quite go out.

  Hutch peered into the cockpit. The warm green glow of the oxygen lamp still burned. “We’re okay,” she said.

  Moments later, they came back up.

  No one was sleeping well. Everyone tossed and turned, and made pointless trips to the washroom, and read late into the night. They had three divans to stretch out in. That created problems. At first the men had insisted they would sleep on the deck. Hutch, feeling the weight of tradition, refused the divan, and declared her intention of sleeping up front in the pilot’s chair; Janet and Maggie announced they would accept no special consideration. Eventually, they agreed to a schedule. Everybody would get a divan three nights out of five, and spend the other two in the cockpit.

  Despite the limited fare, there was a tendency to overeat. They stayed closer to the shuttle now, rarely going out for walks. The long unlit passageways of the starship had an unsettling effect.

  Hutch learned that Janet had been a peace activist during the Arab Wars, had picketed the World Council regularly, and had been jailed in New York and Baghdad. “In New York, we whitewashed the cells,” she said, “and the cops got irritated. We had good P.R. NewsNet was always there next morning to take pictures. Eventually, they had to do something. Didn’t look good having all these straight A types getting locked up. People got excited a lot easier in those days.”

  Hutch came to realize that Frank Carson, for all his bravado, and his considerable accomplishments, was unsure of himself. He needed the approval of those around him, and he was not entirely comfortable in his role as mission director. She sensed that he was relieved that the crisis had come on shipboard, in Hutch’s area of responsibility. For that reason, perhaps, he was especially sympathetic to her, whom he perceived as having, to some degree, failed. Hutch found it difficult to mask her annoyance. She questioned her own competence, but didn’t care to have others participating in the exercise. Furthermore, her tolerance for sympathy was low.

  George was drawing closer to her. Periodically, while he joked about the lack of privacy or the advantages of celibacy (“Keeps the mind clear”), Hutch detected passion in his eyes. Her own emotions churned. She loved being near him, but it was frustrating that they could be alone only if they took walks together. Which was to say, advertised that there was something going on.

  Maggie made no secret of her reservations regarding male intellectual capacities. “They’re okay when they’re alone,” she might say, “but put a woman in the room and their IQ drops thirty points.” She masked these comments as light banter, but everyone suspected there was a wound that had not healed. No one took offense.

  At 1106 GMT, Thursday, March 31, precisely one week after the collision, the alarm sounded. Hutch unbuckled, but Carson pushed her back. “Relax. I’ve got it.” And he floated forward to the instrument panel.

  No one said anything. They could hear him up there, could hear the play of electronics. “Air pressure’s down,” he said. “We’re not getting much.”

  “Let’s go take a look,” said Hutch.

  The line that connected Alpha with the starship’s pumps had cracked. A stream of vapor fountained out, turned to crystals, and floated awa
y.

  “I would have thought,” said Carson, “that everything in a shuttle bay would be impervious to the cold.”

  “There are limits,” Hutch told him. “This place isn’t supposed to be constantly frozen.” The decks, and the equipment, were covered with frost. When she flashed her light around, the beam filled with fine white particles. Hutch examined the line. “We’ve got a couple of spares. We’ll replace it.”

  It was now -77°C.

  They got up a bridge game that night, taking turns sitting out. It lasted longer than usual, and when it was over no one wanted to sleep.

  Hutch had one of the divans. It was more comfortable than the web-chair up front, but she still had to tie herself down to avoid floating off.

  “Eventually,” George said, “we’ll all sit around at the Mogambo and reminisce about this.” He didn’t explain what the Mogambo was.

  “I hope so,” she said. The lights were out.

  “Wait and see,” he said. “The day will come when you’d do anything to be able to come back here and relive this night.”

  The remark surprised her. It was out of character. “I don’t think so,” she said. She thought he wanted to say more, but was leaving her to fill in the blanks. Their third occupant was Maggie. No dummy she: Hutch knew she would have liked to shrink into her blankets. Damn. “Goodnight, George,” she said, and whispered, too low for anyone to hear, “maybe.”

  The line to the pumps gave way again the following morning just as she was getting up. Carson was in the cockpit waiting for her.

  They went out into the bay, carrying lamps, and removed the line a second time, with a view to putting in another replacement. While they were working on it, Hutch became uneasy. “Something else is wrong,” she said.

  “What?” asked Carson.

  It took a minute. “Power’s off.”

  The electronic murmur that normally filled the starship was gone.

  “Hey.” George’s voice came from the shuttle. “We got red lights in here.”