by David Brin
YOU MAY MOVE NOW. READING COMPLETED.
“Thanks.”
NOT THE BEST OF BEGINNINGS.
She knew JonVon didn’t mean the reading. “No, it wasn’t. Oh, he was kind enough, I guess. I liked him enough to go out with him several times before that, after all. But never after… that.”
AND SINCE?
“I’ve had my share. An engineer in college… no, who am I kidding? Not many. Not many at all.”
A CONGRUENCY IS DIFFICULT.
“It’s not a mathematical congruence, you know, JonVon. People don’t look for someone exactly like themselves. Almost the opposite, in fact.”
YOU ARE YOUNG. YOU SEEK AGE?
Saul’s s desert-weathered face came to her, grinning in that lovely distracted way he had, and for a moment she was not sure whether she had recalled it or…yes… “JonVon, you put him in my head.”
IT SEEMED NEEDFUL.
“I’ll be the judge of that. At least let me stage manage my own fantasies!”
OF COURSE.
But the quick vision of that lopsided grin below the dark, seldom-joyful eyes had indeed gotten to her. It seemed an age since she had seen him, taken shelter in those strong enveloping arms, smelled the heady musk of him, talked—
“JonVon! Call him for me.”
I BELIEVE HE HAS AN APPOINTMENT WITH CARL OSBORN. ONE OF THE MECHS I COMMAND WITNESSED HIM PASS BY 1.34 MINUTES AGO.
“Drat! I miss him.” She jerked the foam padding away from her head and grimaced at the imposing banks of equipment: spindly nuclear resonance pickups, looming pancake magnet poles, ranks of digitizers.
“I’m worn out with this everlasting crisis.”
YOU NEED RECREATION.
“You bet.”
A picture leaped into her mind—so graphic, so lurid—silky entwined limbs, and more. She would have turned away if she had ever seen it displayed in mixed company…and yet she found it sensually enticing, pulse-quickening, as if calculated to pry up the hinges of her own special private places.
“JonVon!”
ONLY A SUGGESTION.
The quilted scenes faded, leaving a halo of blue afterimage.
“How did you… know?”
I READ A LOT.
It was, she supposed, a joke.
CARL
Over here!” Carl shouted.
Saul’s silhouette turned at the far end of Tunnel K and waved. The figure kicked off and glided the hundred meters, passing through pools of ivory phosphor radiance.
“Damned chilly,” Saul said as he windmilled to bring his feet around in front of himself. He landed, knees taking the shock.
He’s getting better, Carl reflected. Everybody’s going to have to learn to sweat from now on. “We’re keeping it cold even in the central tunnels now. Me, I’d like to vac all these.”
“It would cut down on our maneuverability enormously.”
“Cut down on the purples, too.”
“I use the inner tunnels every hour or so. If I had to suit up every time”
“I’m going to recommend it anyway.”
“Bethany Oakes has already decided.”
“Yeah, I know.” Every time you confront Lintz with a problem he starts citing decisions by the higher-ups.
Saul seemed reflective. “On the way here Lani and I saw Ingersoll down one of the side passages near Level A. He’s eating native forms, I think. Amazing. He seems harmless, if crazy.”
Carl felt a jab of irritation at the mere mention of Ingersoll. Things are so bad we can’t even catch a madman. But he kept his voice matter-of-fact; diplomacy came first. “Yeah, he’s crazy, but crazy like a fox.”
He shook his head and decided to get right to the point.
“I… Look, I’m going to propose to Oakes that we go retrieve the Newburn.”
“Really? You’ve really located it?”
“Right. It was Lani’s idea, actually. We were just talking, looking at that numerical simulation Virginia did a while back.”
“The one which showed how the Newburn’s solar sail could’ve been shredded by Halley’s plasma tail?”
“Yeah. I figure the other slot tugs were just plain lucky they didn’t get hit. The cross-tail-induced currents probably blew out Newburn’s tracer beacons, too. Without that sail deployed, finding Newburn was hopeless. So Lani, she says maybe we could try sending tightbeam microwaves and listen for an echo. I used a little sack time and did just that and—bingo! —got a signal back after a week long search.
“Wonderful. And so simple!”
Saul’s surprise was gratifying. At least he didn’t think of it first. “We’re going to need those forty sleepers, at the rate we’re losing people.”
Saul nodded, thinking. “Right… the manpower problem will get worse.”
“We’ve got to do it soon. The Newburn’s drifted pretty far away, more than two million klicks already.”
“I agree, but I still don’t understand. Why get me all the way out here to tell me?”
“I want to line up support first, before telling the Committee. I’m no good at arguing with Oakes.”
“And I am?”
“Right. Also, I want you to go with us as doctor.”
Saul brightened. “Good thinking. Those slots may have suffered damage.”
“Be a good morale booster, too.”
“Exactly what we all need. I’m sure I can make Betty see the advantages, now that the purples are under control. But can the Edmund fly right away?”
“Jeffers says his tritium-finding mechs have already filtered out enough to quarter-fill the short-range tanks, just as a byproduct from tunnel digging. He can top off the fuel we’ll need inside a week.”
“Good! You’ve thought this through.”
Is that supposed to be a compliment? Gee, thanks, Dr. Lintz. We grunts try to do some thinkin’ now and then, we do.
“Let’s see.” Saul rubbed his chin. It’ll take the better part a month to get there. That means we’d have to take some hydroponics modules, and…”
Carl had already figured out the basics, but he had also learned that it was a good idea to let scientists talk for a while before you got on to the hard part, the decisions. Maybe that was what kept them out of the really top positions. If you sat there while they gave their little lectures, usually they’d feel they’d had their say and they wouldn’t make a lot of stupid objections to what was already obvious.
Saul crouched against the wall with the innate insecurity of a ground dweller, always a little uptight about simply hanging on to a handhold above what his senses—no matter how well he trained them into submission—told him was a long drop.
“Sure,” Carl said when Saul had wound down a little. “Point is, what about Oakes?”
“We’ll need a consensus on this plan, of course, which may well take time.”
“Consensus, hell. Every day we wait the Newburn gets further away!”
Saul scratched his head. “Well, some will see the Newburn as a side issue.”
Carl gritted his teeth. “It’s forty lives.”
“True, but even I might be forced to put them on the back burner. The major problem is understanding the Halley lifeforms. If I can finish my current experiments on time—”
“Experiments!” Carl couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “You think they’re more important than forty people?”
“I didn’t say that, Carl! But we’re not out of the woods yet. There are so many diseases! We have to understand how the cometary ecology works when we add a new source of heat. That’s what we hadn’t anticipated, of course. I was speaking on tightbeam with Earth day before yesterday, and Alexandrosov, the head of the Ukrainian Academy, has a theory. Even with the minutes of time delay in the conversation, we got a lot of thinking done. I told him my ideas—preliminary ones, of course—and he saw an analogy—”
“Aw crap,” Carl said harshly.
“What?” Saul blinked.
“You’re talking li
ke this was a damn thesis problem or something.”
“Thesis?” Saul blinked. “Carl. I assure you, an event of this magnitude, with so many implications, is bigger than a mere—”
“Shit, I don’t mean how big a deal it is with your professor friends back Earthside! I mean that you’re using it to make points!”
Saul’s face compressed, reddened. “That’s incredible. I—”
“You keep running tests and making up theories, yakking to your buddies Earthside—and the rest of us are working our butts off to stop this stuff.”
“I don’t need you to—”
“Come off it!”
“I’m sure I don’t know—”
“Life on comets! Discovery of the century! Saul Lintz, the interplanetary Darwin!”
Saul stiffened. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Some of us, we’re starting to wonder.”
Saul glowered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You weren’t Mr. Popular in the scientific world when you signed on for this cruise, were you?”
“I was the last living figure identified with the origin of the Percells, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“Right.” Carl felt a sudden hot embarrassment, remembering who and what this man represented. But he could not keep his resentment in check. “The Israel you knew wiped out, family dead, career finished—you were on the ropes.”
Saul spoke in separated syllables. “So nu?”
“So you ship out. Why not take this ride—it’ll return you when your past is old, forgotten, right?”
Saul said with surprising mildness, “I didn’t think I’d return and still don’t.”
Carl rode over this pause in the momentum. “But! Along comes alien life, and then the green gunk, the purples—bonanza! You’re famous—by accident, really. Anybody could’ve analyzed that ice and found microbes. But to understand it—that’s the big game. That’s where Saul Lintz will make his mark, show that he’s not just lucky. No, he’s a first-class scientist. And he can work on all the new stuff by himself. Study it hard. Squirt it Earthside when he likes. Every biologist back there is waiting for a speck of data about the first alien life, and the only person he can get it from is—ta-daah! —Saul Lintz!”
Carl finished, puffing, his breath spurting cotton clouds in the cold air. Saul regarded him silently, his face lined and more than middle-aged in the harsh phosphorescent glare. A long silence passed between them and Carl calmed down, began to regret … But it was too late.
Saul poked at the caked sealant. “This wasn’t why you called me out here. You asked me to volunteer for the Newburn rescue. Very well. I volunteer. I don’t have to eat any of this chazerei”
He cast off awkwardly, heading back toward Central. As he coasted, still looking back at Carl, hip words game in the chilled quiet: “It’s really Virginia, isn’t it?”
And Carl knew that it was.
He came into the Rec and Lounge cylinder with a sour, tired weight pulling him down. The grav wheel had been one of the last items transferred from the Edmund. It was always depressing coming in from near-zero G into a centrifugal G field, for several reasons. Even in a big wheel, there were Coriolis forces that set your reflexes off, induced a mild veering nausea. After a day in near-zero, where the slightest tug was important, you couldn’t walk without feeling the misaligned forces. Halley’s spin always pushed you slightly to the left.
But the worst of it was the simplest: you had been an eagle, and were now a groundhog.
So Carl was not in a warm mood when he met the Ortho. The man’s name, Linbarger, was stenciled on his crew over-alls.
“Don’t sit there,” he said as Carl eased into a recliner.
“Huh? Why not?”
“Got a friend coming.”
“Plenty of room.”
“Not for some there isn’t.”
Carl put down his drink. “You’re just out of the slots, so I’ll take that as a sign of the drugs not wearing off yet.”
Linbarger had all the slot symptoms. He was a thin stub end of a man, all skin and bones and no meat. The slots gradually used up your stored fat because the body was still running, only at an exponentially reduced level. But Linbarger must have been thin to start with. His head was long and narrow, set on a chicken neck with a knotty Adam’s apple. His face was all nose and cheekbones. His watery gray eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw round and hard.
“My friend, he’s just been unslotted, too. And I’d just as soon neither of us sat next to a Percell.”
“Oh, really?” Carl said with mock concern.
“So clear off.”
Linbarger wasn’t awakened for the rendezvous, so he’s not mentally adjusted from Earthside ideas, Carl thought. Okay, I’ll allow for that. Some. “Look, things are tough enough around here without you being a jackass.”
Linbarger rose and knotted his fists. “Don t breathe on me, Percell, or I’ll—”
“Oh, it’s my bad breath? Sorry, I didn’t bring any mouthwash from Earthside.”
“You know what I mean. It’s the damned germs you’re carrying.”
Carl snorted derisively. “The microbes are in the ice, not in us.”
Linbarger’s face took on a sour, cynical cast. “I’ve been out of the slots three days, reviewing what’s happened—and you can’t fool me. Normal people have died twice as often as you Percells.”
“So?” Carl had heard something about that from Virginia, but in the confusion and long hours of these last two weeks it had meant nothing. Just another piece of data.
“You Percells are using this to take over the expedition.” Linbarger announced it as a known fact. Heads turned at other tables. Carl noticed Lani Nguyen get up, concern knitting her face, and start toward them, but another Ortho put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
“That’s what you think?”
“We all do—those of us normal people who have come out of the slots. We know it. You can’t pull the wool—”
“Spare me.” Carl said, lifting his hands. There was no such plot—who the hell had time to think about such things? —but how could he convince Linbarger of that?
Across the curve of the cylinder he saw Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad. He called, “Sully!”
The black man approached, compensating for the Coriolis twist with an easy stride, a drink in his hand.
“I was hoping you could straighten this guy out,” Carl said. “He’s going around saying that it’s us, the Percells, who’re.”
“I know,” Ould-Harrad said abruptly.
Carl nodded, relieved. Ould-Harrad hadn’t been out of the slots for long. He had been called up for service when Major Lopez had sickened in hours and been slotted. Ould-Harrad wasn’t working in the tunnels all day; he would have time to keep on top of this political crap. Carl could turn all this over to him.
But then Ould-Harrad looked uncomfortable, his broad face converging on an unwelcome topic by lowering the thick eyebrows and pulling the wide mouth up into an expression of sorrowful, vexed concern. “I believe you people should pay attention to what Linbarger says. He points out difficult facts.”
“But he’s warping them, making.”
“The source hardly matters. Consider the implications.”
Carl was stunned. “What… what implications?”
“We need more protection against the diseases.”
Carl said, “Well, of course we do, but—”
“No. You do not understand. We do—we normal people. Especially.”
“Oh… So it’s going to be that way?”
Ould-Harrad looked at Carl grimly, ignoring Linbarger’s eager nodding. “Heaven forfend, it already is that way. Unless normal people feel they are protected against these diseases by isolation, by more care—then they can see only one outcome.”
“What?”
“You Percells will come to run the entire expedition. There will not be enough other people alive to oppose you.” The
African spoke with a calm earnestness, free of aggression and all the more striking because of his powerful frame. He had the impressive calm of those whose strong religious convictions inform their every word.
“That…we don’t intend that,” Carl finished lamely.
“No matter.” The brown eyes held sadness. “Many believe that is what will happen.”
“Look, I called you over to quiet down this guy, this Linbarger. I—”
“It’s not for the likes of you to shut me up,” Linbarger said hotly. “If you think you can, I’d be glad to—”
“No, no,” Ould-Harrad said sternly, raising a hand toward Linbarger. “Please be quiet now.”
“But he—”
“Please.” Ould-Harrad silenced Linbarger with his ministerial presence.
Carl thought hotly, It might be fun to bash Linbarger around a little. Bad for him, but good therapy for me. Better than all this talk, anyway.
He said, “I certainly didn’t think you’d back up Linbarger! These guys are using hypochondria to get back into the slots. And all this Ortho nonsense.”
“You see?” Ould-Harrad said. “You have your own name for us.”
“So? You call us Percells.”
“We need no special name. We are the normal people—the human race.”
“And we’re not?”
“I… I did not say that.”
“You intended it! You probably think we don’t have souls.”
The black man shook his head mournfully. “That issue is in the hands of the omnipotent. The point remains that we are different.”
“Yeah, and you’ve got renegade Arcists and worn-out Zionists and Salawites—” Carl noticed Ould-Harrad wince. “But you all stick up for each other around us, huh?”
Ould-Harrad said mildly, “We must struggle to balance the viewpoints of all.”
Carl had never been good with words, did not have the easy, oily skills of an administrator, and he had no magic way to get through to Linbarger, or to Ould-Harrad. All this endless talk! He gritted his teeth in irritation, stood, and left without another word.