by Unknown
“What’s to keep us from assuming they’re all dead?” Another woman.
“Uh, well, all deep-space communications have been affected by this flare, this unusual solar activity…” The planner paused, floundering.
Stith helped out. “They have their own warning systems. We have every confidence that Starfire is sitting it out in the shelter of Everest.”
A man: “How long can they afford to wait?”
“They have ample supplies of consumables, that is, air, food, water. And we are constantly computing and updating likely return trajectories in preparation for reacquiring signal,” said Stith.
A snarl of objections arose. One voice cut through, from a young woman with spiky black hair. “A question for Colonel Giles.” It was the first question anyone had directed to Jimmy; nobody seemed to know why he was there. “Harriet Richards of NPV, Colonel Giles. Word is you know the cause of the engine failure.”
Within seconds, the auditorium fell silent.
“We have identified the cause, yes,” said Jimmy. “The cause appears to have been, we are virtually certain of this, a misinterpretation by the ship’s computers of signals from sensors in the radiative cooling system—”
Stridently, Richards broke in. “That’s in the handout, sir, for those of my colleagues who bother to read it. My question—I mean you identified the cause, you located it almost before it happened, I believe. You are a software expert, originally you were on this crew. If you were on it now, maybe they wouldn’t be in trouble. Why aren’t you on it?”
Jimmy blinked. “Well, I would say that that is a question of balancing contin…Uh, NASA has to do what it thinks—”
“Why did you get bumped?” she demanded.
Stith glared at Crease, the back-up commander, who quickly fingered his microphone. “Each member of the Starfire crew was chosen after extensive test and review,” he said. “On every mission many other astronauts stand by, fully capable. I don’t see that this type of Monday morning quarterbacking is of use.”
“Mr. Administrator…!”
“Mr. Stith, sir!”
West of Kitt Peak the sun was about to set; Venus was a shimmering lamp on the horizon. The northeast horizon was even now glowing with the lights of greater Tucson.
Two astronomers walked to their cars in the parking lot of the solar telescope. To the north, the desert sky was hung with veils of pale green light.
The younger of the two paused at the door of his car to study the aurora borealis. “Beautiful. Ever seen it this far south?”
The older man shook his head. He looked to the west, to Venus, squinting against the blaze of the sinking sun. “They’re right about there now. Just above the horizon.”
“How long can they live in that?”
“In it? Oh, they couldn’t do that.”
Mission control was quiet, its screens a silent jumble of static. At every post there was a controller, but otherwise the place was empty—there were no hangers-on, no one in the big room who didn’t have to be there. The glassed-in booth behind the consoles with its rows of comfortable seats, dependably filled to capacity with VIPs on days of big launches, was deserted now.
Except for Jimmy Giles, who stood back in the shadows, watching the bright senseless screens through the glass. Had he been a day or two earlier, had he found the glitch before it disabled them…Jimmy refused to succumb to despair, that sin against the Holy Spirit, but only the slenderest of reeds supported his faith: in times past, Robin had been at her best when all seemed lost. Indeed, she was famous for it. Of the off-duty exploits that had endeared her to the media, one incident stood out amidst her race-car driving and gambling sprees and general hell raising, the time she had disappeared on a solo cross-country ski trip out of Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada and showed up a week later with a half-starved, three-quarters-frozen family of four in tow.
Robin did not go to places like Tahoe for the scenery; something in her put off direct confrontations with the landscape. From the window of her suite twenty stories up in the hotel she could appreciate the ice-littered blue lake and its ring of snowy mountains—she wasn’t tempted to get any closer, and she rarely went sailing anymore, even in summer—but the action she wanted was right downstairs, in the gilt and plush of the casino. It was one way to spend a Christmas vacation, between marriages.
Robin spent her nights at the tables and an occasional afternoon on the slopes of the big downhill resorts. Her outlook was social, and she had no trouble making new friends, indoors and out. But too much fun can be like too much triple chocolate torte; someone told her there were long bare ridges in Carson Pass, not much more than half an hour’s drive south of the lake, flat and open to the sky, a crosscountry skier’s paradise, if all that skier wanted to do was stretch her legs in a hard all-out run for the horizon, strictly by herself. She rented a set of funny shoes and skinny skis, put her lunch and a few prudent odds and ends in a day pack, and went south on a warm Wednesday morning, as last week’s accumulated snow fell from the branches of the ponderosas in fat wet dollops on the road in front of her.
She parked her Porsche near the wind-carved ridge line and set out under a bright sun. She didn’t do any hard running; instead she spent two strenuous hours attempting to master the unfamiliar skis, which she could not seem to turn in the deep snow without falling over or twisting her toes out of the bindings, the heels being unattached. But she got plenty of exercise anyway, far more than she could get sliding down a hard-packed slope in the middle of a crowd of college kids and suburban dentists.
By the time she finished her lunch, seated on a folded space blanket, the sky had clouded over. If any hint of an earlier sunny day turned to disaster entered her mind, it did so only subconsciously; one cannot take every change in the weather as an omen. She was only a couple of miles from her car, and she headed back unhurriedly. Meanwhile, the landscape of twisted glacial valleys to the west slowly whited out; soon snow was falling in lazy thick flakes and the visibility was down to perhaps a quarter of a mile. Her deep tracks were blurred with new snow but still plain, and even if she should lose them, she only needed to follow the ridge to find the highway. She heard a man shout, his voice curiously flat, all its strength and resonance absorbed by the falling snow, its desperation plain. He shouted repeatedly. Then she heard other, feebler voices.
They were in an alder-choked draw well down the slope, the man and woman in their late thirties, sleekly dressed in fashionable cross-country gear, by the look of them not accustomed to much exertion. The two children, a twelve-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, were equally brightly dressed and even more obviously overweight. The man had fallen into a stream, sat down in it apparently, for he was soaked to his armpits. Panicking when snow started to fall, the family had tried to ski out without stopping to build a fire to dry the man. Now he was shivering uncontrollably, his strength wasted. The snow was coming thicker, the wind rising, the temperature dropping fast.
Within seconds Robin knew where she would be spending the night. A hundred meters downslope there was a stand of dwarfed and twisted aspens; they struggled to the place, she and the wife supporting the man between them. Among their joint supplies were plastic ground cloths, rubber pads, the space blanket. The pads and blanket went onto the snow, the tarps were hung against the wind on upright skis. Robin made them strip the man and wrap him with their own clothed bodies while she gathered wood. She hastened the fire along by using what paper she could find in her pockets and pack, even her rental contracts. She had to work like a demon to keep ahead of the fire, scavenging the aspen trees of their dry lower branches.
The man stopped shivering, but his clothes, hung on crossed skis, weren’t getting much drier: the fire was melting the falling snow almost as fast as it steamed away the moisture. Robin told the boy to keep the fire going while she turned her efforts to more lasting shelter. It took her an hour to dig a cave in the nearest snow bank. They got the man and his wife inside and moved th
e fire. Robin dug another cave for herself and the children. It was dark now, well below freezing; only the wind spared them, coming in gusts but never developing into a steady gale. It was the last bit of luck they had for a long time.
Sierra skiers have learned to expect storms that last a couple of days, separated by two or three days of sparkling weather. But on so fine a scale no weather pattern can be regarded as typical. Robin and her charges were caught in a series of Pacific storms that piled into the mountains one after the other without ceasing, dumping many feet of snow on the ridges, closing the passes even to plows, grounding aircraft. Robin had left word of her destination with the hotel, but searchers had to wait a day for the least break in the weather. They found the remains of the first night’s camp three days after they started looking, and the note that said “We went that way.”
At first, Robin’s strategy had been to do things by the book: stay put, build a signal fire, keep warm. Although the man, whose name was Doug, had escaped serious injury, the toes on his right foot were numb, possibly frostbitten, and it didn’t seem wise to try for the road. But the break in the weather lasted hardly more than an hour, and no one saw the smoke from the fire. By the time the next break in the weather rolled around, they had eaten the last scraps of their bygone picnics, and Robin knew they could not afford to wait any longer. In three hours they got a mile before the weather closed in again. They could hear a distant airplane engine somewhere far behind them. Dinner was bark tea, brewed in the tin ice bucket that Robin had stuck into her pack the morning she’d left the hotel, along with adhesive tape and matches and bouillon cubes she picked up at the ski rental shop, making an impromptu survival kit; the bouillon had lasted a day.
Doug was a San Jose contractor who’d only recently come into a little money and decided to take up a stylish new sport. He and his wife, Mary, and little Hank and Amy stored plenty of extra energy in their fat, but they were on the edge of panic the whole time. Robin kept them going on her knowledge of what it would really take to kill them—how easy it was to freeze, how hard it was to starve. She told a lot of astronaut stories to keep their courage up; she wheedled and growled and shamelessly flattered them and kept them moving down the long ridges. All five of them were amateurs floundering on narrow, awkward skis that readily sank edgewise, bringing them to their knees in fluffy new powder, but she kept them going in a straight line, more or less, that after three more nights—again immobilized by falling snow—and one long last desperate day under skies cloudless at last, brought them stumbling onto the buried highway eight miles below the summit, moments before a roaring plow almost ran them over.
All this happened long before Jimmy met Robin. She didn’t mind telling him about it, and when he asked her if she’d ever had doubts about whether she was going to be able to pull the family through, she said no, never. She told him a secret. “Everybody has a fantasy, don’t they? Starring themselves as hero. I got mine from reading Mutiny on the Bounty, but I have to admit I didn’t much sympathy with the mutineers—but Bligh! He brought the ones who stayed loyal most of the way across the Pacific in an open boat, more than three thousand miles. He was a son of a bitch, but he saved their lives. When I was a kid, I daydreamed about doing something like that—except being a nicer person, of course. And that was my chance.”
Jimmy stood in the darkness and stared at the blowing electronic snow on the screens in mission control, a sign of Starfire’s isolation. He remembered Taylor Stith’s last words at the press conference: “We have a number of solid options remaining. We haven’t given up on Starfire, ladies and gentlemen.” But in truth, Houston had no options at all. Starfire was adrift on the emptiest ocean of them all.
Linwood was banging on the pipes again, this time assisted by a fidgety Travis. Both men were wearing pressure suits reserved for work on the radioactive structures of the ship—bright yellow suits lined with lead. Linwood’s wrench, and his other more specialized tools, were of titanium; ordinary steel tools were dangerous near the engine’s immense superconducting magnets, liable to fly out of an astronaut’s grip at critical moments.
Repeated queries to Starfire’s computers had given contradictory reports on the plumbing that connected the reactor’s lithium cooling blanket to the radiator wings. Linwood had concluded that the computer was untrustworthy: the heat pipes through which the highly corrosive—and by now highly radioactive—metal flowed would have to be inspected at first hand. For each of the three wings, the crucial plumbing had to be flushed, the lithium shunted to reservoirs, the key valves disconnected.
For Linwood and Travis this was the second IVA of the day, and they’d spent most of the previous day in the same predicament; for although the core of the fusion reactor was no bigger than the standard soccer ball whose geometry it mimicked, getting anywhere near it meant threading a maze of pipes and struts and electrical buses and coils and magnets and cylinders of lasing glass. The work took tedious hours…
“If it starts to falter give it a quarter turn and maybe more, but wait, okay?”
“We are within half an hour of the limit on this IVA, Professor Hill—”
“Call me Travis, Doc, why don’tcha?”
“I suggest we temporarily abandon the effort to reassemble this junction in favor of continuing diagnostic procedures.”
“Heck, if I don’t put it back together now, I won’t know where everything goes.”
“I assure you—”
“You wouldn’t want any leftover bolts lying around in your fusion engine, would you?”
“—I know where everything goes,” Linwood finished. After a pause, he added, “I suppose you were joking.”
“Doc.” Before Travis could shake his head he had to withdraw it from inside a mass of shiny pipes so oddly entwined they suggested the freeze-dried intestines of a giant alien. “Okay, we’ll finish this later. Number three next?”
“An excellent deduction.”
“Oh? Oh, you mean it’s the only one left.” Travis carefully freed a wrist strap from a protruding U-bolt. “Why don’t you climb around over there first? I have this tendency to tangle myself in the plumbing.”
The heat-transfer couplings to two of the radiators had shown themselves to be in good condition; one had been fully reassembled. But the third still needed inspection, and making a start on it would be the last work they would do that day.
In NAVCOM, Melinda was putting orbital graphics on her screen; Robin, hovering in the corridor, peered over her shoulder. “Could be bad news.”
“What do you mean, could be? How long do we have?”
“If we can launch within twelve hours, we can still do the whole mission—retroburn, launch the satellites, burn for Venus. Beyond twelve hours, it’s gonna be hard to put those satellites in tight solar orbit. We’ll be going too fast.”
“We’ll give that to mission control when the UHF stops making like frying rice. Could be the attitude control systems on the satellites can salvage something for them, even if we’re already headed for Venus.”
“That window’s not too wide either.”
“How wide?”
Melinda turned to look at Robin’s anxious face. “Robin, if we don’t burn in fifteen hours, we’re sailing right past Venus.”
“I guess we have to start counting our delta-vees.”
Melinda nodded. “Even getting home is gonna be challenging.”
Not even the comm systems were free of the static that plagued all attempts to communicate. “You guys”—noise interrupted Melinda—“down there? What’s taking so long?”
“Next time call Roto-Rooter,” Travis said.
“Calling Roto-Rooter-one. RR-one, come in please.”
Travis looked at Linwood. “Hard to get the last word in with that woman.”
“I heard tha…” Static intervened.
“I think she heard that.”
“Melinda, please tell the commander that we will make a full report within a few minutes. We are re
turning to the crew module.”
“Copy you are coming in, Linwood.”
Travis, like a curious bird sensing a worm, cocked his head at Linwood. He hadn’t known they were that close to a diagnosis. “What’s the answer, Doc?”
“It is evident that one or more downstream filters in the number three transfer system have been corroded, possibly during emergency shutdown. In principle, the situation is easily remedied.”
“Great.”
“Unfortunately, it will take time.”
“Yeah? How much time?”
“Perhaps forty-eight hours.”
The four of them hung in midair in the wardroom, trading deadlines. In the midst of their conversation a quick hiss of the verniers nudged them momentarily sideways—on the flight deck, Spin had fired thrusters to prevent the ship from drifting out of Everest’s shadow into the full rush of the solar wind.
“Priority is to repair the heat-transfer couplings, no matter what else,” said Robin. “We’ll worry about the solar satellites later. We may have to take them home with us and try again later.”
“What of the gravity boost from Venus?” Linwood asked.
“We will have to wait to assess until you pronounce the MFS reliable. We have lots of delta-vees stored. Obviously, the longer we fall toward the sun, the more of ’em we eat up.”
Linwood nodded slowly. “In that event it seems we had better go back to work tonight. Can you help me, Professor Hill?”
“Sure, Doc.”
“It’s my turn,” said Melinda. “I need a change of scene.”
“Hey,” Travis protested, “I’m already familiarized—”
“I agree, Melinda,” said Robin, interrupting him. “You’re going to encounter fatigue, Linwood. We can’t help that—you’re indispensable. But at least the people helping you can be fresh.”
Travis suspected he was being tested. He kept his mouth shut.