Starfire

by Unknown

  Melinda stared at Travis. The rest of the crew stared at her, seeing a rare sight: Melinda slowly turning the color of a brick. Spin was so fascinated he left a sphere of barbecue sauce he’d just squeezed out of its package tumbling in space above the smoked turkey he was intending to smear it on.

  “No bet.” Her laugh was low and dry. “Okay, ya got the drop on me, cowboy.”

  Travis kept watching her. “Very few people without professional training would’ve shown enough interest in the spectrographic data to make a sensible guess,” he said.

  Her color deepened further, to claret. “Back off. I’ll survive without the patronizing remarks.”

  “Hell with that. I’m sayin’, since you and me are the EVA team to the surface, I’m delighted to find I’m going down there with somebody who’s interested.”

  Into the silence, Robin said quietly, “I was going to bring the EVA up myself, you guys. Houston is being a little pissy about it because of our consumables loss. They just officially put EVA on contingency, pending a reassess after our burn to inclination tomorrow.”

  Travis munched on his wet-cardboard veal for a second. “Yeah. Or maybe we could save even more consumables by goin’ home right now.” Goddam it, he had let it slip out: the anger, the want. He focused his attention on the curious color of his broccoli.

  “There are a few other reasons for being out here,” Robin said. She was studying him, as she had been studying him throughout his little joust with Melinda.

  “Dumb remark,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”

  She let it go at that.

  “Mission control, Houston. A full day for the Starfire crew, getting a bite of chow now before nearing the end of their wake period and heading into their sleep period preparatory to tomorrow’s maneuver to inclination…

  The evening summer sun came in low through the live oaks, projecting copper shafts through the blue smoke that drifted toward the river from the chimneys of whitewashed cement-block ovens. Inside the long ovens, slabs of beef and pork and goat ribs, slathered in thick vinegary sauce, baked over oak and mesquite coals. The smoke was sweet incense…

  Deep in the darkness of Starfire, Travis was half asleep, half awake, wrapped in his sleep restraint like a butterfly in a cocoon.

  In the final days before he and the rest of the crew had ridden the shuttle from Kennedy to Archimedes Station, there had been bon voyage parties. He’d gone to a couple of backyard barbecues in Houston—Linwood’s was the most congenial, even if the Doc still insisted upon addressing him as “Professor Hill.” And his mother had thrown a barbecue bash of her own, out on the ranch. Not terribly convenient to NASA, but very convenient to the state capital. A couple of hundred good friends of Edna May Kreuger Hill and her brother, Albert, were chatting and laughing, rattling the ice in their tall glasses, roaming the wide springy lawn beneath the crooked oaks and cedars, already well fortified for the fund-raising pitch that would come after dinner. Travis, the supposed guest of honor, kept inside himself, smiling and mumbling and sipping sparkling water with a chunk of lime in it and watched them crowding to the patio tables like cows to a water tank, guzzling champagne and feeding on toast and caviar and mounds of oysters and prawns and cracked crawdads arranged upon an ice sculpture of Pegasus, which had been hacked out by the hired chef with a chain saw twenty minutes before the party began. This Austin catering service did its share of cowboy-and-astronaut affairs—Pegasus was in their repertoire.

  For his going-away party there were an astonishing number of people Travis did not know—ranchers and bankers and various political hangers-on. But real people came too: Sam and Bonnie, and Don and Doris and Ruben from the Asteroid Resource Center, even Irenie Su with her slick new boyfriend, whom she’d met at her new job in the state senate—which she’d found when it became clear that Travis would not be interrupting his training in Houston for frequent visits to Austin. Oh, and Uncle Al sent his congratulations and regrets, declining to make a personal appearance, which was discreet of him.

  Bonnie, heartbreaking with her flaming blond tresses, wearing a lacy white dress virtually transparent when the orange setting sun was behind her, carefully avoided him, staying close at her husband’s, his brother’s, elbow. But he caught her throwing icy blue looks from across the lawn, full of hurt and confusion. He averted his gaze as quickly as she did. It was hard to look her in the eye, she still wondering how she could have misread him so badly and he with no way to explain it to her.

  To Travis’s surprise his skinny kid brother appeared, looking intensely uncomfortable, with his wife at his side. Brother Jim’s internship was completed and he was back in Austin, making waves at the university hospital. Manuela was as coolly charming as ever, a Castilian queen in a long gown of something black and clingy, her glossy black hair elegantly braided with pearls; Jim, with his gaunt beak thrusting from a penguin suit of white tie and tails, looked exactly like what he was—a bright young surgeon climbing as fast as he could.

  “Sorry we can’t stay, Trav”—Jim’s first words, skipping hello—“big charity fund raiser in town, Manuela’s on the board, but we did want to wish you the best.”

  “Hey! Pleased to see you, Manuela. Jim. Real nice surprise.”

  “In any event I would not have missed seeing you before you left,” Manuela said in her rich contralto.

  “Manuela, you honor me.”

  “Say, this is the big one for you,” Jim said jovially. His mind was already back in his car, heading into town.

  “Could be the last one,” Travis said. “Except for the kids on the crew, most of us could be too hot to go back up.”

  “Five years from now—maybe less—that will all change,” the young doctor pronounced; the remark had evidently triggered a programmed response. “The progress we’re making with customized smart antibodies, we’ll be able to go in and clean out radiation-damaged cells, aging cells, tumors, you name it.”

  “They always said I was ahead of my time,” Travis remarked. He got a knowing smile from Manuela, although Jim didn’t see the joke.

  “Mark my words, it’s going to be a new world. Listen, we must run.”

  “Not without saying hello to your mother,” Manuela prompted.

  “Yes, of course.” Mother was already approaching. If Manuela was an Iberian queen, Edna May was the empress of India, in raw silk and yellow diamonds. Jim couldn’t suppress his wince. He could barely tolerate Edna May’s condescension to his wife, whose family had been Texans before Texas was a state—or even, briefly, a nation.

  Manuela never gave a sign that she noticed Edna May’s attitude, accepting her sugary compliments as heartfelt—like tonight’s, “My, but aren’t you just the loveliest thing, and don’t you have just the right kind of hair to do that clever business with pearls?”

  Travis watched that exchange and sucked his soda water. He couldn’t really blame Jim for staying away from the family as much as he did.

  What was significant about the party was not so much that Jim and Manuela came—Manuela had put Jim up to it, a fact Travis fully appreciated—but that none of the astronauts came except Robin. Which was okay, because at his insistence, in a minor confrontation with his ma, his invitations to his mates had been strictly informal, over the phone, made at the last minute. And Austin really was a long way from Houston.

  Robin actually made the trip. She showed up to meet Edna May. Slim and athletic in a bold print dress, she was not competing for royal rank; both women knew what Edna May had done to put Travis on Starfire’s crew, and presumably Robin felt this was an opportunity she couldn’t refuse, to gain insight into her wild-card crew member. After making the introductions, Travis made himself scarce, but he managed to lurk close enough to hear the gist of their conversation. To his surprise, it seemed to be about roses. Where did Robin find time to know a damn thing about roses?

  Despite the minor point of contact, it was one of the briefer social encounters Travis had witnessed. If asked, he would have confes
sed himself simply amazed at how much social life seemed to be centered in the hill country tonight, for after about five minutes Robin, just like his brother Jim, moved on to a pressing prior engagement. Meanwhile Travis watched and smiled and wondered what, besides certain emotional and financial debts for which amends must be made, was connecting him to all these people…

  12

  “Mission control, at MET one day twenty-two hours fifteen minutes. After a successful burn this morning to match the three-degree inclination of the asteroid with respect to Earth’s orbital plane, the crew now looks forward to obtaining good visuals of 2021 XA on Starfire’s imaging systems…”

  The solar astronomers on Kitt Peak, since obtaining their spectacularly successful pictures of Starfire’s launch against the sun, had taken a personal interest in Starfire. For the third morning they were listening to the audio feed from NASA as they worked, when something on the image of the solar disk seized their attention.

  “That spot has fissioned since yesterday. There must be a dozen little ones now.”

  “Well, that’s not so odd.”

  “I think we’re getting a flare right now,” the younger man said, excited. “Look there.”

  They watched through their welders’ glasses as the black spots heaved out bright flame, persisting for several seconds.

  “We’re supposed to be in a minimum!” said the young man.

  “It’s all statistical, you know,” said the elder. “That flare wasn’t much, as they go. Some activity here and there isn’t all that strange.”

  “You don’t think we’re growing a complex magnetic region here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just wait and see, shall we?”

  Aboard Starfire, the sun already seemed a little closer, a little brighter.

  Travis locked off his spectroscope eyepiece. The asteroid was demonstrably there, a speckled blotch enhanced in the computer-processed display, but not yet directly accessible to the human senses. After tapping his observations into his notepad, Travis wriggled out of the cramped work space into the corridor and headed for the exercise room. It was a little pie-wedge corner of the deck just below the wardroom, thickly padded and equipped with isometric gadgets to which each astronaut owed an hour of torture a day. Without exercise—which was much less pleasant in space than on the ground—you’d get back to Earth with the muscle tone of a sponge.

  He slipped into the gym, shed his jacket, and harnessed himself to the treadmill with the rubber bungee cords that substituted for gravity and forced him to support his own mass. He set his watch and started to walk, pushing against the friction of the treadmill’s rubber belt.

  It hurt. All your bodily fluids rapidly redistribute themselves in microgee, your legs get skinny and your face puffs up, and your blood doesn’t feed your extremities quite so readily. Without good circulation the acids that cause muscle soreness build up rapidly and don’t disperse. You live with that for the duration, exercise or not. And during exercise there’s the constant irritation of sweat, which doesn’t fall away but tends to pool in cupfuls in the middle of your chest, on top of your head, under your arms, in your groin.

  But Travis had that little masochistic trick of his. He embraced the discomfort, entered the pain, went for the personal hair-shirt record.

  Two days out, and what had been clear enough on the ground was now a pressing fact of life. Thing was, Travis wasn’t one of them. They knew it, he knew it, and the way they all dealt with it had a long tradition: they were polite to him, and he kept out of their way. No jokes, no camaraderie, no backslapping. Starfire was their ship. Travis was a mission specialist.

  Travis knew it was to his advantage, in the beginning, to maintain the separation, to play the quiet tourist. The resentment that came his way because he had bounced their teammate—Giles had been a mission specialist too, but over time he’d become one of them—was delicately balanced by the clinging aura of Travis’s once-upon-a-time astronaut heroics. And Travis figured that anything that made him more human made him less of a hero, more open to their resentment.

  Beneath the mythical cowboy hero he presented to the world, beneath the cool manipulator the world was able to see, there was a Travis he had not figured out how to reveal. An existentialist, maybe…yet he lacked the central article of existentialist faith, the notion that nothing mattered except his own values. Yes, he accepted personal responsibility for the situation in which he found himself, but he was enthralled by—there must be a better phrase for it, he thought—he was enthralled by a sense of destiny. A destiny somewhere out there beyond the last sunset…

  He never put it to himself that he had a destiny. What he had was a job to do, people to pay off—the making of amends, as it was phrased in some circles. But when that job was done, there was nothing he could put his finger on. In reality, maybe there was nothing at all. Maybe destiny was nothing at all.

  He glanced up to see Linwood Deveraux floating into the gym.

  “Doc,” he muttered—the minimal acknowledgment, if not quite so minimal as Linwood’s grunt in reply.

  Linwood strapped himself to the wall at right angles to Travis and proceeded to yank rhythmically at a spring-loaded chest pull—pumping iron over Travis’s head. The two men went on for some minutes, the silence between them broken only by occasional groans escaping through clenched teeth.

  Travis liked Linwood better than the others, although he was not sure why. He liked them all well enough, but there was something about Linwood. The Doc was very difficult to talk to; he took everything you said to him literally, and he thought about his answers. So a “Howya’ doin’?” didn’t get an automatic “Great, and you?” It got a considered response about what was on Linwood’s mind. Sometimes that response was a joke, but it took someone on Linwood’s wavelength, or a person who’d known him a long time, to realize it was a joke.

  “Doc…I was wonderin’…if you’ve given any thought…to the name of this rock.”

  Silence for several seconds, broken at last. “No.”

  “Yeah. I hear the IAU wants to call it…Horace…I got a cousin named Horace…Why’d they name an asteroid Horace?”

  Linwood thought about that while he tugged on his springs. “Horus—H-O-R-U-S—was the Egyptian hawk-headed god…a manifestation of the sun…Therefore an appropriate name for an Apollo object. However…I believe that name is already taken.” Linwood paused, thinking a bit more. “Or perhaps you were joking.”

  “I was thinking we could call it Everest.”

  Linwood said nothing. He probably wouldn’t say anything until Travis asked him another question.

  Travis didn’t want to ask him another question. Especially not another fake question. (His cousin Horace, indeed.) He was wondering if Linwood would get interested. “Roughly the same size…about the highest mountain peak anybody’s tried to climb.”

  Linwood was quiet a long time, pulling on his springs, the sweat collecting on his sinewy chest. Then he said, “You’ve always been a climber, Professor Hill?”

  Aha, the Doc’s turn for a joke. “You mean, have I always been a politicking, video-milking, hand-shaking, arm-twisting overachiever?”

  “Did I say all that?”

  “Doc, you don’t say much of anything. But when you do, you make your point.”

  Linwood stopped working the chest pull and stowed it against the wall with Velcro flaps. He pulled a cloth towel from a dispenser and carefully began toweling the pooled sweat from his body; the wet towel would go into the Automated Laundry Device, which would recycle both the sweat and the wash water back into consumables.

  Meanwhile Travis kept marching. He’d made a joke. Linwood had made a joke. Time to drop it. Perversely, Travis didn’t want to drop it. “How long have I been officially part of this team, Doc? Year and what, couple of weeks?”

  “Since a year ago last May.”

  “Yeah. Met your grandkids at the beach.” He blew globules of sweat off his lip. “They were diggin’
somethin’ out of the sand, ugliest thing I ever saw, a clam or somethin’…asked me if I thought it was an alien.”

  “Oh?” Linwood was interested at last. Probably the mention of his grandsons. “And what did you tell them?”

  “Can’t remember, exactly…Do remember thinkin’ some of the stuff on the beach is probably weirder…than anything we’ll ever run into out here.”

  “I disagree, Professor Hill,” Linwood said firmly. “As the twentieth-century biologist J. B. S. Haldane noted, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine—”

  “Right, it is stranger than—”

  “—we can imagine,” Linwood finished, with determination.

  “Yep,” said Travis. He could kick himself for interrupting, even if everybody knew the hoary quote. Hell, Travis had used it himself, on that guy Cartwright on that video show—thought it might goose him a little, Haldane being a notorious commie. Which cut no ice with the Doc, one way or the other.

  Travis changed the subject. “Wearin’ myself out…fifteen more seconds, break my personal best—seventeen thousand eight hundred kilometers in ten minutes…little help from orbital mechanics…”—blowing sweat and blowing his cool; why was he trying so hard with this guy?—“Goin’ for the four-minute light-year”—the Lone Ranger act getting too hard to maintain?

  For fifteen more seconds Travis trundled in silence, except for his panting. Linwood continued to towel himself with great care and precision.