by David Brin
Saul shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”
Ould-Harrad seemed not to hear him. His gaze was distant. “Earth is too far away, too confused in its instructions. I need a committee to help me decide how to deal with a dire emergency, Dr. Lintz. I am asking you if you are willing to please be a member.
“Of course. I’ll help any way I can. But what is all this about?”
“There has been a mutiny,” Ould-Harrad told him concisely, his lower lip trembling with emotion. “A band of fanatics has taken over the Edmund Halley. They seized Ensign Kearns when he discovered their plans and—”
The man hid his eyes. “They threw him out of the ship naked, onto the snow! They… they are demanding sleep slots and tritium, or they will blow up all the supplies in the polar warehouse tents.”
Saul stared. “But what do they think they can accomplish?”
The African spacer blinked, he shook himself, and at last met Saul’s eyes.
“They have computed a carom shot past Jupiter. The mutineers actually believe that they can steal the Edmund and make it all the way back to Earth alive.
“In the process, of course, they seem hardly to care if they doom the rest of us to certain death.”
VIRGINIA
She sped through Tunnel E, pulling a gray wool sweater over her jumpsuit. It was cold.
Too damned cold, even for her. All the mission crew were “warms”—people who had minimal vascular-seizure response. Virginia’s capillaries did not greatly contract when cooled, which meant she felt comfortable when most ordinary people—“freezers” —would be jittery with chill. The major disadvantage was that “warms” lost heat faster and needed more food. The flip side of that was freedom from fat— “warms” seldom needed to diet.
But now Carl had set the air temperature so low that even the “warms” were chilly. Virginia didn’t know if that really suppressed the algae growth, but it certainly depressed her.
She came into the warmer core bay of Central with relief. The big monitoring screens brimmed with shifting patterns of yellow-green. She read them at a glance—the Bio people were holding their own against the gunk, and the purple forms had eased off. Good. Not that they were the main problem any longer.
Saul was conferring with Ould-Harrad. The big man towered over Saul’s wiry frame, hands on hips, head shaking slowly in solemn disagreement. Saul’s mouth was twisted into a grim, bloodless curve she had never seen before. She snagged a handhold. swerved nimbly, and coasted to a stop beside them.
“I ran the simulation you asked for,” she blurted.
“Good, good.” Saul seemed grateful to turn away from Ould-Harrad. “And?”
“I can disable most of their controls if I can get three mechs aboard Edmund. Then I’ll need five minutes to use them.”
Saul brightened. “Excellent! They’ll be paying attention to loading the sleep slots they demanded, being sure we aren’t slipping them inadequate supplies and so on. Preparations for the Newburn rescue weren’t complete when Ensign Kearns discovered their intentions. So they need more gear before they can leave.”
“Those bastards!” Virginia spat out. “Pushing poor Kearns out the lock—murder! If the mission mainframe hadn’t already been transferred Halleyside, I could get into their control systems and vac them all!”
Saul nodded. “Ferocious, but apt. Alas, they’re on manual controls, hard to override. Still, consider—they haven’t got enough food and air aboard for the entire return flight. They’ve got to be damned sure we give them enough slots to make it back. There are fourteen of them, they say. Now, if we can find a way to distract them, to give Virginia an opening—”
“No,” Ould-Harrad said flatly. “There is little chance of approaching for more than a few moments with mechs. You heard Linbarger.”
“They’ve got to allow mechs close to Edmund when we deliver those sleep slots,” she answered.
Ould-Harrad frowned. “They will watch the machines closely. Surely they will not miscount the number returning to Halley and let three remain.”
Virginia shook her head. “I can do it while they’re loading the sleep slots into the receiving bay. The cables we’ll cut are near that lock.”
Ould-Harrad pursed his lips. “Your numerical simulation—it was complete? You yourself attempted to guide the mechs to the cables and then destroy them?”
“Well… no, I don’t know the Edmund’s systems that well. I let JonVon do it. I’ve been upgrading his mech control and—”
“Then we cannot be sure, you see?” His eyebrows lifted into semicircles above dark eyes, the irises swimming in whites which showed a fine tracery of red veins. “JonVon is not practiced in the direct handling of mechs. Simulations are always easier than real operations. I.”
“Carl could do it,” she said rapidly. “Get him here, have him try my simulation.”
Ould-Harrad’s mouth puckered into an expression of polite disbelief. Then he sighed, nodded, and began speaking spacer quick-talk into a throat mike.
Virginia turned to Saul. “How much time?”
“They’ve given us two hours.”
“That’s crazy! They can’t expect us—”
“They know we can move the spare sleep slots if we start right away.”
“But that appeal to `fellow normals’ offering free passage Earthside. If anyone responds, Linbarger’ll have to wait for them to board.”
Saul smiled wanly, his eyes seeming to remember desperate situations long ago. “A fevered mind thinks all the world can turn on a dime. Besides, they are calling every one of us, ah, normals on thee comm. To demand that we go with them, drop everything, leave immediately—providing we are well, of course.”
“They called you?”
“Oh yes. I was among the first—a doctor, and therefore valuable. They have no shame. I wondered why they demanded to see me on camera—until they abruptly broke off, and I realized.” He chuckled and wiped his nose with a ratty handkerchief.
“Your… flu, or whatever it is.” Virginia felt an irrational irritation at this. “That doesn’t mean you’re really sick.”
Saul grinned sardonically. “To them it does. You know, it is like the plays of Elizabethan times, including Shakespeare. If a character coughs in the first act, you may be sure he has the pox and will die by the third.”
“They’re crazy!”
“Merely because they would not take me?” He laughed. “I must commend their taste, really. Despite my profession, I’ve never truly loved ill people, not in their gritty reality. All their crankiness, their tsuris. I preferred them as abstractions, as problems in genetic art.”
Virginia had to answer his smile. He was incredible—joking in his mild, self-rebuking, almost elfin way, in the middle of a crisis.
Ould-Harrad finished his checking with the tunnel and surface teams. “I doubt it will matter overly, but Carl is coming.”
“Good,” Virginia said. She felt soothed by Saul’s calm, ironic manner.
Well, at least this means he isn’t going to risk his neck going after the Newburn, she thought. Then she felt immediate shame. It also probably means the Newburn crew will drift on and die.
She struggled to think. “I… I still believe my simulation shows it can be done.”
“Can, perhaps,” Ould-Harrad said. “Should—that is another matter.”
“We must do something,” Saul said sharply. “Forget the Newburn for a moment, or that we’ll need the Edmund seventy years from now. Our immediate problem is that nearly all the hydroponics.”
“Yes, yes.” Ould-Harrad raised a hand tiredly. “But one wonders if perhaps giving fourteen people a chance at returning might be worth it.”
Saul rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “We can’t assume the diseases will win! Look.”
Virginia watched him launch into the same explanation he had given her last night, about promising approaches to curing the plagues.
He’s wonderful, and I really shouldn�
��t carp, she thought. But Saul can be pretty tedious when he switches over to pedant mode.
Feeling the warmth of the big room seep into her muscles, she let herself relax. The wall weather was impressive here, with so much area to use. It was a windswept beach, mid-morning. Beyond the scrolling data screens she watched a blast of wind sweep in from the north, whipping pennants on a distant bathhouse straight out from their staffs. The sky grew dense, purple. Cumulus clouds, moments ago mere puffballs, thickened and boiled, filmy edges haloing dark centers.
Purely by accident, the running program was providing a pathetic fallacy. A simulated storm in the midst of a real crisis. If this were an entertainment—such as they had had daily until the troubles started—there would be sound, even smell and pressure modulations. The choppy ocean rippled and rose, sweeping cloud shadows raced across it. Great icy drops battered the beach, as big as hailstones. A cliff of somber air rolled in, unraveling skeins like yarn, spitting yellow lightning. As if waiting for this signal, tiny speckled sand crabs scuttled from their holes and scurried toward the frothing sea. Lightning flashed again and again—as if God were taking photographs, she thought, bemused, transfixed by the silent rage that curled and spat and sped across the walls. She wished she could hear the mutter of departing thunder, the hiss of rain on dunes.
From the distance a large dog came running, gouging the sand, snapping at the crabs. Mist gathered in wispy pale knots. She yearned to feel the cleansing rain plaster her clothes to her skin, drench her, shape her hair into a tight slick cap. Even in my best sense-sim with JonVon, I can’t completely escape. I’d trade it all for a ticket home right now.
She recognized the longing: to be away from here. To breathe salty air, feel gritty sand, smell the lashing wind. And once she had felt it, she knew how to put it away, turn back to the present. If she had not been able to do that, she would never have made crew. But these Ortho fools are risking the mission for their fantasy of escape.
Carl arrived, red-brown stubble at his chin but showing no fatigue. He drifted to a webbing that served as furniture in low gravity. “I had a mech retrieve Kearns. He’s a frozen statue.”
Virginia said, “Is there any… ?”
“No chance. His cells are ruptured.” Carl sighed, his hand brushing at his face as if to dispel all this as a bad dream. He visibly took control of himself and said with a deliberately calm flatness, “I clamped down security on the surface locks, in case anybody tries to join them.”
“Ah. good,” Ould-Harrad said.
Carl said, “I put Jeffers and some mechs out of sight of the Edmund, armed with lasers.”
“For what purpose?” Ould-Harrad asked coolly.
“Insurance. In case they try something else.” Carl studied Ould-Harrad expectantly. “What’re you going to do?”
“I wish a quick check of Virginia’s simulation,” Ould-Harrad said.
Carl nodded and swung over to a work console. He tapped into the sequence and time-stepped through it, oblivious to their nervous attention. They waited expectantly until he unhooked, replacing the helmet.
“Won’t work,” Carl said.
“Why not?” Virginia demanded. “I spent—”
“Mechs aren’t fast enough in close-up work:”
“JonVon got them to do it!”
“JonVon is swell for minimizing moves, sure. But it doesn’t allow for safety factors or slips. There’re always some in close-quarter work.”
“I could correct, introduce stochastic—”
“Not with the clock ticking,” Saul agreed reluctantly. “If a mech finds some leftover box in the way, it’ll consult JonVon and there’ll be a pause. There simply isn’t enough time.”
Virginia blinked, feeling hurt that Saul so quickly took Carl’s side. “I still—”
“That settles matters,” Ould-Harrad said. “God and Fate act together. We must let them go.”
“We can’t,” Saul said. “The hydroponics, the Newburn, the—”
“I know. There is much equipment we would miss,” Ould-Harrad said. “Perhaps, indeed, the lack will speed our doom. But we have no choice. I will not condone any attack on the Edmund.”
“That’s… crazy!” Virginia blurted.
Ould-Harrad’s face was impassive, distant. “When one faces death, what matters is honor. I will not harm others.”
Saul and Carl shared a look of disbelief and frustration. Virginia thought Ould-Harrad won’t oppose an Ortho rebellion, but if Percells tried it…
“How about if we disable her?” Carl asked casually, leaning back with his hands behind his head, stretching.
He’s given up the Newburn. And deliberately showing nothing about how he feels.
“You heard Linbarger,” Ould-Harrad explained patiently. “If we show any signs of bringing devices out, anything that can be used as a weapon.”
“Yeah, they’ll use the big lasers on it. Sure. But they can’t shoot you if you’re already inside the ship.”
Ould-Harrad said, “As I said, any approach.”
Saul broke in, “I think I see… send them a Trojan horse, correct?”
Carl grinned. “Right. Inside the sleep slots they’re demanding.”
Ould-Harrad’s eyes widened, showing red veins. “A bomb? It could damage anything, hurt people, there would be no control—”
“No bomb.” Carl grimaced. “A real Trojan horse—put men inside.”
There was a long silence as they studied each other. Virginia could read Ould-Harrad’s puzzled reluctance—plainly, the man had decided to accept Linbarger’s demands and simply let the expedition make do for the next seventy years. His pan-equatorial stoicism had won out.
Carl, though, was almost jaunty, certain his plan would work. Saul pensively ran over the many possibilities for error and disaster—but he licked his lips in unconscious anticipation, tempted, almost amused at this sudden hope.
And what do I think? Virginia realized that she had bristled at Ould-Harrad’s assumption that Linbarger had to be accommodated. She had studied the charts the mutineers had broadcast. Edmund had just enough fuel to arc outward in something called a Byrnes maneuver: loop through a close gravitational swing by Jupiter, reach Earth in a high-velocity pass, and attempt an aerobraking rendezvous. But the window for that trick was closing fast, with only a few days remaining.
Is Ould-Harrad play-acting?Could he be planning to duck across to the Edmund at the last minute, go back with them?
“I do not know…” Ould-Harrad began meditatively.
“Think it through,” Saul cut in. “I see one major problem.”
Carl frowned. “That equipment is vital. There’ll be plenty of volunteers.”
“That I do not doubt. But a sleep slot is narrow and shallow. You could not get in with a spacesuit on.”
“So what? I…” Carl’s voice trailed off.
“Yes. The obvious defense for them is to vent the sleep slots in space, to be sure no one is inside.”
Carl bit his lip, thinking. Virginia was acutely conscious of seconds trickling away. She liked Carl’s plan, not least because it would give them something to bargain with. If Linbarger took off, the expedition would have to construct their own biosphere without many vital portions. It was one thing to grow a few seeds under lamps and quite another to start up an entire interconnected ecosystem from scratch. Like starting off juggling with eight balls. Of all the ways there are to die out here, I had not considered simple starvation.
Irritated, Carl spat out a curt, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
A long, agitated silence. Moments falling into an abyss.
Virginia had a technique for dealing with problems under time pressure. When she was first doing detailed simulations Earthside, she had evolved programs so vast that they had to be booked days or weeks ahead of time on huge mainframes. If your program went awry, you could stop it in midcourse. Then there were a few minutes when the system would do housekeeping calculations for distant users. You c
ould hold on to your reserved time, still run your simulation if you figured out the difficulty and managed to fix it in that brief interval.
Under pressure like that, it was easy to clutch up. So she had developed a way of letting her mind back off the problem, float, allowing intuition to poke through the tight anxiety. Focus outside the moment, let the surface mind relax…
Idly she noticed that on the walls the storm had built to a sullen, roiling rage. Wind blew streamers of foam from the steep waves, and huge raindrops pelted the slender grasses on the inshore dunes, crushing them. The dog had vanished, the crabs milled aimlessly beneath the hammering, incessant drops. The heavy air churned, looking too thick to even breathe—
“Wait,” she said. “I’ve thought of something.”
CARL
Slots, he realized, were a lot like coffins. That’s what had always bothered him about them.
He had a small flashlight with him, thank God. He could see the grainy sheen three inches from his face, feel the soft padding around him. The trapped tightness, the constriction, the cold… In the dark it would have been worse. Much worse. He didn’t mind the empty yawning black of open space, free and infinite. This cramped coffin was different.
Carl had felt the gentle tug of acceleration a minute ago and now counted seconds, ticking off the estimated time it would take the five mechs to maneuver across to the Edmund.
There. A gentle nudge forward, pushing him against the grey covering plate. His nose brushed it and a faint torque spun him clockwise.
That would be the deceleration, then a docking turn. Going into the aft hold, almost certainly.
A dull clank. Fitting onto the auto conveyor, probably. The mechs would decouple then …
Five ringing spangs. Good.
Now… if Virginia’s idea was right…
Scraping, close by. A mech grappler caught—clunk—on the hatch’s manual release handle. He could see the inner knob rotate. He braced himself, took a deep breath …