Launch (12 page)

The other three passageways were clear, and
David inspected sides one, two, and three. Side three was undamaged, and three
engines were in place with no visible damage. Side one appeared to be worn but
undamaged, and side two had moderate damage. Where he should have seen engine
E-3 mounted at points on sides one and two, only stars and the blackness of
space were visible.

On the way back into the ship, David plugged
and patched the holes in the outer and middle spheres, the cabin, and in his
maneuvering compartment. The repairs passed pressurization tests, and using
engine E-4, Claire put
Origin
back on course for M9.

They helped each other take off their space
suits. Afterward, David held his exhausted wife quietly in his arms and said, “How
about a well-deserved nap?”

“I need sleep and a shower,” she said. “I don’t
know which to do first.”

“Take a nap. You can have a shower and I’ll
give you a moisturizing massage with warmed lotion after you wake up.”

“Perfect,” she said, then fell into bed and was
asleep almost instantly.

▼

After a long nap and a shower, she stretched
out on the medical examination table that did double duty as a massage table.
Her right buttock and the back of her right shoulder were bruised where she had
slammed into the wall on the way to rescue David. He could not massage her
bruises, but she smiled when he gently kissed them instead.

Claire gave David a physical examination after
her massage to make sure he had not suffered any permanent physical harm from
decompression. He passed the tests with amorous colors.

Later, during a dinner with an entre of chicken
cordon bleu, David said, “I want to put the ship in orbit around one of M9’s
moons. I’ll use the reflected light from the planet to do a detailed damage
assessment. Maybe I can fix something.”

“If you can’t?”

“We’ve lost a lot of fuel. There’s enough to
finish our mission and land on four-b. We can use our emergency refueling
system to make fuel there. But with only one engine, we can’t launch with
enough fuel to get back to Earth. Our best hope is for me to find a way to get
another engine online.”

 “If you can’t get another engine going, we’ll
be stuck on four-b for life?”

“Yep. You can have all the babies you want, the
more the merrier,” he said. “The big problem will be mating when they reach
sexual maturity.”

“I think you need to fix an engine,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“You were so quiet when we were flying through
the asteroids. I knew you were breathing and your heart was beating, but I
didn’t know if you were going to be a turnip or a carrot.”

He laughed. “I thought it would be risky to
interrupt your concentration. It would have been fun to try dodging asteroids,
but you were doing a superb job. The best thing I could do was butt out.”

Several days of ship time later, Claire
challenged David to combat using the simulator function of their maneuvering
consoles. She had an ulterior motive. She wanted to see if his decompression
experience had affected him mentally. Claire flew her best, but he beat her two
contests out of three and made love to her afterward. She went to sleep happy
that he was alive, healthy, and in her bed, where he belonged.

▼

Claire put
Origin
into orbit around one
of M9’s moons. It would be a reference point that could help her find David if
he was separated from the ship during his spacewalk.

He put on his spacesuit, knee pads with
adhesive surfaces, a complete tool belt, and a jet pack. She grinned and said
he looked like a space-hardware store.

With Claire in her spacesuit and belted into
her maneuvering console, he went outside to begin assessing the damage to the
ship and said, “Oh!”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “M9 is so beautiful. You
should come out for a look after I get back.”

She rotated the ship as he instructed so he
could examine it in the light coming from M9 and from his portable searchlight.
A hole in E-1 made the engine useless. Engine E-2’s fuel line was broken. Side
four and its sensor arrays were ruined. The surface of side one was worn due to
the impact of atomic particles on the first leg of the trip. But it appeared to
be good for at least another leg.

After David’s survey, Claire went outside for a
look at M9. It was an enormous blue ball framed by varicolored rings and a vast
astronomical display of brilliant stars in the pitch blackness of space. Her
view from an open door was much more spectacular than the images on the video
monitors.

She exclaimed, “Oh, wow! You’re right. This is
incredible! Thank you for sharing it with me.”

Over the next several days, David replaced the
damaged fuel line on engine E-2 with an undamaged line from E-1. He also
repaired two of the sensor arrays on side two.

They left orbit and tested the ship. Eight of
their twelve sensor arrays and two of their four engines worked. Due to the
missing fuel and engine,
Origin
was light, and the two working engines
made it fast and maneuverable.

Claire rewarded David with an extra special
massage.

On the way back to M4a and M4b, Cougar Flight surveyed
smaller moons that had been bypassed on the outbound journey. With that done,
the only remaining tasks were to finish the survey of M4a and to refuel on M4b.

David showed Claire a map of M4a. The part of
the planet that had been surveyed by the satellite before it had disappeared
was colored green. The rest of the planet was covered with wild patterns in a
variety of colors. He told her that the patterns were random flight paths
designed by their computers.

Claire flew the first pattern over M4a.
Origin
appeared from over the radar horizon with the starship zigzagging and
squiggling so the path of the ship was unpredictable from one fraction of a
second to the next before it disappeared over the horizon. David came in from a
different direction with another unpredictable flight path and disappeared in a
different direction over the horizon. They continued taking turns coming and
going in unpredictable patterns.

Finally, only a few areas were left in the
radar coverage area. The radar’s computer may have planned ambushes to blow the
starship out of space, but such planning would have been futile: the M4a
satellite had covered those areas before it was shot down.

It had been a long workday, but Cougar Flight
was done with Minor-four-a. The ship’s computers sorted and integrated all of
the new data with the old to provide a complete, coherent survey for the
planet.

Claire and David had dinner on the way to M4b,
and then slept together in orbit around the planet.

After breakfast, they reviewed the data
gathered by the satellite that had been orbiting since their first visit. One
surface probe revealed vegetation resembling ferns and trees and creatures that
resembled lizards and snakes. Another probe that went into a lake transmitted
images of more fish-like creatures and a fleeting image of a large shadow back
to the satellite.

“Fresh water shark?” Claire asked.

“Maybe another Nessie,” David said.

She grinned. “Maybe the same one.”

“Now that would be weird.”

It was not Earth, but it was close enough to
make them yearn for home.

Claire landed on a flat, rocky surface next to
a river. Then she applied more down thrust to see if the surface could support
the weight of the ship after it had been refueled. A big crack appeared in
adjacent rocks, the ship began to tilt, and she snatched
Origin
back
into the air.

She tried again at a junction of a river
flowing into a lake. Dense forest surrounded the area and a rocky hill was off
to one side. The surface held, and she lifted off again to circle and take
another look.

“Looks good to me,” she said.

“Me too,” he agreed. “Very scenic.”

“Do you want the landing?”

David smiled. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Your ship,” she said.

“My ship.”

David landed on the same spot and shut down the
engine. He extended a refueling pipe from the emergency processing system and
dropped an intake float into the river. Water was pumped into the ship’s high
speed separators, which removed heavy water. That would be further processed to
make fuel for the
Origin
. The ship hummed and the intake pipe throbbed, and
then a long stream of ordinary water was ejected into the lake.

Later Claire and David ate their first meal on
another planet. The main dish was creamed chipped beef on toast.

“This feels odd,” David said with a straight
face.

“What’s odd about it?” Claire asked. “It’s just
like being in our quarters at NASA.”

“That’s what’s odd. We don’t have to worry
about being slammed into another asteroid field.”

“That’s not funny,” she said. “We were almost
killed.”

“No gallows humor?”

“Not where you’re concerned. I love you.”

“And I love you. We’ll put safety first here
with no jokes. And speaking of safety, something like tigers or even a T-rex
could be on this planet. We’ll be safer if we explore together, so we can watch
each other’s backs, and we should carry our pistols.”

“Pistols against tigers or a T-rex?”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a rocket
propelled grenade. But you had an almost perfect score on the pistol range. If
we run into something big, aim for an eye.”

Claire nodded. “Okay, but I don’t want to shoot
anything unless there’s no alternative.”

▼

The next morning, Claire and David put on
airtight surface-exploration suits that were lighter and more comfortable than
spacesuits. Ambient air, filtered and sterilized by a lightweight backpack unit,
allowed them to breathe comfortably and stay outside longer than they could
have with heavy air tanks.

The air was cool, and they were comfortable in
their suits as they inspected the damage on side four. “I’m stunned,” she said.
“It’s amazing the ship stays together.”

They passed creatures that resembled snakes and
lizards warming themselves nearby on rocks. The animals did not react, and Claire
pointed that out as evidence that there may not be larger land predators.

With bags of specimen containers, Cougar Flight
set about the task of collecting samples of everything they could fit into a
container. Air, water, rocks, dirt, and plants were easy enough, and Claire used
her quick hands to catch a collection of insects. David used the fishing line
from his survival pack and put his catches into large specimen containers. When
something very strong caught the line and pulled him off balance, he released
the line to keep from being pulled into the lake.

Claire did not see any evidence of seeds,
birds, or flowers. All of the plants reproduced with what appeared to be
spores. She thought biological development on M4b might be hundreds of millions
of years behind Earth.

As the ship refueled, days of discovery
continued. Nights were a tranquil time of unhurried dinners, quiet
conversations, and sleeping together. Though Claire and David were almost one
thousand five hundred trillion miles from Earth, they agreed that it was like a
vacation.

▼

One morning, Claire found a snake on the rocks
near the ship that had died trying to devour a large lizard. She managed to fit
both into one large specimen container, and then she went down to a rocky beach
to rinse off the slime. Her gloves were in the water when she saw an enormous
shadow coming up from the murky depth. She slipped when she jumped back, and a
giant turtle-like animal with rows of sharp teeth lunged out of the water. Claire
scrambled away, but not before claws ripped her surface-exploration suit and
gashed her left calf. Snapping teeth came perilously close as she got to her
feet and ran.

She took refuge on top of nearby rocks. The turtle
followed and tried to climb, but it did not get far before it fell back. It
kept trying, and she was wondering how she could get away without shooting it
when David showed up with a long, stout stick. He smacked the creature’s head
to get its attention. It turned with a loud snap of teeth and followed him as
he jogged along a bank beside the lake. He slowed to let the turtle get close,
and then dodged to its side and jammed the stick underneath the shell. Then David
levered one side up and flipped the creature over and into the lake.

Back in the ship, he put antibiotic ointment on
Claire’s calf and said, “Oh, the shame of it. Cougar was run down by a turtle.”

She laughed.

Claire patched her surface-exploration suit to
make it airtight again. Taking precautions to prevent further contamination and
staying alert for the creature she dubbed “Smiley,” they carried on as before.

David used the ship’s tools to engrave
“
Starship
Origin
–
July 2302”
on one of
Origin
’s repair patches and fused it to a rock face near the ship. He
and Claire stood beside it and waved to a sensor array to record the first
visit of humans to Minor-four-b.

▼

Claire flew the first leg of the flight back to
Earth. With only two engines, one on the topmost point of the ship and one near
the surface, she made a tricky tilting launch. She flew toward Minor and David
dumped two years of accumulated waste to be incinerated by the star. That lightened
the ship, and then Claire used the star’s heat to sterilize the outside
surfaces of
Origin
.

She began acceleration in a direction slightly
off the straight line to Earth. That would prevent a devastating collision if
the ship could not slow down or change direction after it reached near light
speed.

The satellites that Cougar Flight left behind
shut themselves down. A minuscule amount of power kept a microscopic computer
online. For the next ten thousand years or so, each satellite would
intermittently turn on a receiver and listen for a command.