Gift From The Stars (14 page)

“It’s not going to work,” Adrian said. “We’re going ahead on schedule.”

“The test flight?”

Jessica saw Cavendish’s body tense. At that moment she understood what was going on, but there was no way to prove it within the time available.

Adrian nodded. “The only decision we have to make is who is going with us.”

A sleep-time later the entire crew, all awake at the same period for a change, scattered throughout the ship making last-minute checks of operations and systems that already had been checked many times before. Obsessive-compulsive behavior became normal, as the entire project, and the lives of those aboard, depended upon every part performing perfectly, except for the crew, whose inevitable mistakes had to be anticipated. And there were some alien-design functions built into the ship that Adrian and a few others thought they understood, but no one could be certain until the ship moved. That made everybody nervous, particularly Cavendish, who buried himself in computer readouts and simulations.

Finally, however, everything was declared as ready as it was likely to get, and Adrian assembled the crew in the largest of the three dormitories, the one for single men; the two smaller for single women and for couples. Contemporary mores mixed genders as if ignoring their differences could eliminate them, and the builders of the star ship expected growing fraternization. Eventually the largest dormitory might be turned over to the couples. But the designers—mostly Adrian—had decided that a certain amount of privacy, limited though it was by the spaceship volume and its necessary functions, would be a healthy preface.

Even the largest dormitory was crowded by the 212 people who had
volunteered to construct the ship. One had been killed, one had been injured so seriously that she could not continue, and one had come down with multiple sclerosis. The conquest of space exacted casualties.

Some of the crewmembers sat on the edge of bunks, an arm or a leg wrapped around a tubular support. Others anchored themselves to the wall by the hand-holds placed at regular intervals, and others simply floated, at ease in free fall, in mid-air. Jessica was one of them.

Adrian was just inside the oval bulkhead, whose entrance could be sealed automatically in case of a meteor strike or other accident. Most of the construction crew could see him, but all could hear. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “that we are prepared to take a momentous step. Our job here is done, and our next challenge lies ahead. Not all of you signed on for that part of the adventure, and those of you who choose not to stay aboard for the test flight may wait in the remains of the old space station.”

“I understand,” he said, “that a new living facility has been added recently.”

Jessica could feel Adrian’s glance, but she was looking at Cavendish, clinging to the support of a nearby bunk. Cavendish was looking hard at Adrian as if forcing himself not to betray himself by looking at her. Then Jessica looked away to see Frances studying them both. Frances knew that Cavendish was avoiding looking at either of them. But Jessica wondered how much Frances knew and whom she believed. Adrian trusted Frances’s judgment. Even though Frances reduced everything to familiar scenarios, she had been partnered with Adrian for twenty-five years, and they had brought this whole thing off, just the two of them. So what Frances believed counted.

Jessica thought back to her own beginnings. She had grown up secure and happy in a supportive California family, free to go where she wanted, to surfing or the tennis court or off to college, never doubting that she had a place to return to and people who loved her, no matter what, until the quake of ’21 hit and her family was in the middle of it. The Energy Board could solve or ameliorate most human problems, but it couldn’t control the natural processes of the Earth. Jessica never knew whether her family was killed when their house collapsed or by the tsunami that washed everything out to sea.

In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the recruiters for the Energy Board had looked like a new family, and she had reached out to them blindly. She had accepted one harmless assignment after another, mere bureaucratic information gathering, unaware that she had been identified by the agents working for William Makepeace. Even when she
received the assignment of feigning an affiliation with a group of space enthusiasts, it seemed like only another way to gather information, and simulating a relationship with a man she had never met, and never heard of, seemed innocent enough. She was part of a family, and family did no wrong.

And then when she met Frances and later Adrian she discovered that life was not so simple. Life demanded choices between options that seemed equally attractive. Nobody knew how choices would turn out, so it was a matter of weighing facts and the logic that connected them. Ultimately, though, it boiled down to temperament: either you were conservative, like Makepeace, valuing what he possessed and what those around him possessed, which formed a seamless wall of covenants, and you were apprehensive of the change that might endanger those possessions; or you were adventurous, willing to try something new even if it cost you everything, enraptured by a dream and pursuing it past the point of pragmatic reality, hitching your wagon, literally, to a star.

That was why she had abandoned the family she knew for the dream she had only barely understood—that and the attraction of the man who owned the dream, or was owned by it, the unprepossessing Adrian Mast, whose soul was illuminated by his belief in humanity’s future in space.

“So,” he was saying, “we will test ourselves and our ship today. Nobody will hold it against anyone who wishes to leave. In fact, we will make it easy. There will be no guard on the exit hatch, and the monitors will be turned off. Those who choose to leave will be given an opportunity to rejoin the ship after the test run, or they may return to Earth on the next shuttle. Are there any questions?”

Cavendish looked as if he wanted to speak but remained silent.

“All right, then,” Adrian said, “the test will begin in two hours. And may good fortune be with us on our maiden voyage.”

Jessica looked at Frances and then at Adrian and finally at all the faces with whom she had grown familiar over the past few years. She realized that what she had chosen was a new family, but a family all the same, and the possibilities were great that this day she would lose this one, too—and life itself.

The engine started smoothly, almost imperceptibly. Louder than the whisper of the exhaust were the exhalations of breaths within the control room. Jessica hadn’t realized until then that waiting for the moment of truth had been like waiting for the dentist’s explorer to touch an
exposed nerve or reaching the point on the roller coaster ride where it hesitates at its apex before plunging into space. She looked at Adrian, who was strapped into the pedestal chair next to her. He glanced at her and grinned. It was an expression at least as much of relief as joy.

Two other crewmembers in the control room monitored the engine-room gauges and the remote sensors, but otherwise it was Jessica and Adrian. Frances had complained of a headache and gone to the unmarried women’s dormitory to lie down, but Jessica thought it was because she didn’t wish to risk being space-sick in front of Adrian when the ship began to move.

Jessica looked at Adrian again. He nodded. She edged the ship out of orbit with the manual controls, careful not to approach the remains of the space station where members of the crew, as yet unspecified, had absented themselves, or to point the ship’s exhaust in that direction. The antimatter should be completely annihilated in the magnetic-bottle reaction chamber, but no one knew if the design was perfect or if it had been perfectly translated into metal and strange metal. In the world where matter met antimatter , nothing less than perfection sufficed.

Jessica had not slept well the previous night. In fact, she did not remember sleeping at all. But now she felt alert, alive, exhilarated, as if she had set out to kill a dragon but had captured it instead and tamed it and rode it, wings flapping, into the sky. The ship that they had put together piece by piece and part by part, that had seemed as if it would never be complete or if complete would never function as intended, was an entity, by some gestalt magic turned into a living creature. Even the feeling of weight was different, pressing them into their seats, giving reality to what had seemed like airy insubstantiality.

The control room was silent as people concentrated upon their tasks, but a murmur came from the corridor. It was a sound like the well-bred approval of a Wimbledon point well-played, and Jessica realized that the crew, at stations throughout the ship, had broken into relieved conversation. “We’re off to see the universe,” she said to Adrian.

He nodded and grinned, as if he did not trust himself to speak.

As soon as the ship had cleared near-Earth orbit, Jessica accessed the next preprogrammed maneuver. Their velocity would gradually accelerate until the ship reached an orbit beyond that of the moon, which would be, by that time, on the other side of the Earth.

“I’m going to check on Frances,” Jessica said.

“I should have thought of that,” Adrian said.

Jessica made her way to the single women’s dormitory, adjusting to the realignment of walls and floors under acceleration pressure. She
missed the freedom of weightlessness, but that loss was balanced by the exhilaration of motion.

The dormitory was empty.

Jessica felt a flash of hope that Frances had, somehow, slipped away to join those who had absented themselves from this test run, but recognized the folly of that thought. Frances could not have left and would not have left, and Jessica did not want her to leave. The competition between them was nothing compared to their friendship.

Jessica found Frances in the single men’s dormitory. She was standing in front of an open locker. Frances turned to look at Jessica as she entered. “I thought it was time to check on the absentees,” Frances said.

“Adrian said—”

“Leaders can afford to be magnanimous only if they have skeptical lieutenants,” Frances said. “We’re launched on an adventure, and in every adventure scenario there’s a weak character who is going to endanger everybody, and the quest itself.”

“I always thought you had me picked for that role.”

Frances shook her head. “That was always a possibility, but it’s either the one you don’t expect or the one you know is going to break, like Conway’s brother in
Lost Horizon
. In this case, it was most likely to be someone who wasn’t on the test flight.”

“And how did you figure out who that was?”

“I turned the monitors back on. Nine people left the ship: Cavendish and eight of the people who were with him from the start, back at the abandoned Kennedy Space Center.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“That was clear after his accusation. The accuser is either unwisely ignored or is trying to shift suspicion from himself.”

“Or trying to convince himself that his treachery belongs to someone else,” Jessica said.

“That, too. But this pretty much clinches it,” Frances said. She pulled an object from the open locker and held it, dangling, from her hand.

Jessica stared at it, trying to decipher what it was. Then it came into focus: it was a latex mask, like a man’s skin slipped intact from his head. There was a bald head mottled with spots of age, a tanned and aged face, and a long, white beard. . . .

“The bearded man,” she said. “And the locker?”

“Peter’s,” Frances said.

From over the public address speakers Adrian’s voice said, “I thought you’d all like to know: I’ve started the next programmed flight sequence.”

Jessica knew what that meant. The ship was launched on a course for Mars. One of the tragedies of manned spaceflight was that the energy behind space exploration had dwindled before humanity had an opportunity to investigate any of the planets, even the nearer ones, and on their maiden test flight Adrian hoped to rekindle the popular imagination with a flyby.

The information about Cavendish may have come too late.