Worlds in Chaos (66 page)

54

The ellipse carried them out past what had been the Moon’s orbit, into regions of space that were cleaner. However, being intended for short missions, the shuttle was not equipped with solar panels or a long-life power source, and use of the sampling instruments and external imagers had to be limited. The craft had evidently sustained some damage during the lift up from the surface, for nothing could be picked up on radar. Neither could a signal be received from any surviving ship or other source that might be out there. This naturally raised the question of how they could be sure that
any
of the communications equipment was functioning properly—in particular, the beacon that was supposed to provide a signal for the
Osiris
. As time continued to drag by, the more sinister but obvious question raised itself of whether the
Osiris
’s failure to materialize might be due not to any malfunction of the shuttle’s equipment, but the fact that the
Osiris
was no longer out there at all.

As nerves grew frayed, and fears worked on by the mind acquired the substance of virtual certainties, Keene was the one who had to bear the brunt. It wasn’t simply that something that the others, now relieved from the pressures of just staying alive, were beginning to see as a Mad Hatter scheme from the beginning, had been his conception. With the change in circumstances and environment, roles had altered, and he had become the leader that all of them recognized now. Keene had acknowledged Charlie’s seniority within JPL. Mitch had accepted Cavan in Washington as the natural commander of the force mobilized to go to Vandenberg, and then assumed the dominant part himself when the situation changed from political intervention to virtual combat. Now they had returned to the world of technology and space engineering; and the natural person to take charge in it was Keene.

He did his best to reassure them, telling them to put themselves in the position of the Kronians aboard the
Osiris
: the only representatives of their culture to be within hundreds of millions of miles of what had happened. “Imagine you’re all scientists, like Charlie,” he appealed to the others. “You’re in a unique position to record close-up and take back records of events that nobody alive will ever see again. Priceless data and information. What are you going to do—just head off home and ignore it? Of course you’re not. But you wouldn’t exactly want a ringside seat, either. You’d pull back to a safer distance. They’re out there somewhere. We’re on a long, eccentric orbit. It’ll take some time, sure. But they’re there.”

“But even supposing they are, what’s to make
them
think that
we’re
still here?” Legermount persisted. Legermount had been restless and brooding now that the action was over. Cool, competent, and given to few words when there were demanding things to be done—the ideal second to someone like Mitch—he was affected the most by the passivity of being shut up, waiting for something that was beyond their control to happen.

Which brought them back to the original point: How did they know the beacon was working?

“It’s still a good point,” Cavan agreed.

Keene wasn’t sure if any of them had the expertise to do very much if it wasn’t, and he doubted if the ship carried the full range of parts that might be needed anyway; but it quickly became clear that not even knowing if they had a chance would drive everyone slowly crazy. He and Jason talked about rigging up a simple transmitter-receiver that they could launch on a tether and communicate with by wire to test the ship’s receivers and see if a beacon signal was being emitted. But Robin, looking livelier now, his arm strapped comfortably and doing well, reverted to his habit of spotting the obvious that had been missed. “Couldn’t somebody be let out and just do it in a suit?”

Of course, that was the way to do it. And with Joe resigning himself to the position of driver and galley steward in this operation, the natural choice of who should go fell upon Keene.

Joe helped Keene put on one of the three EVA suits that the shuttle carried as a normal complement, and Keene squeezed into the narrow entry space inside the main hatch, which was fitted with an inner door to serve the double function of acting as a lock. Joe pressured the chamber down and opened the hatch from the flight deck. Keene rechecked the tether attached to his harness, its mounting, and the straps holding the test set that he would use in addition to the suit radio. Then he shoved himself through, orienting to align the gas thruster on his backpack. Moments later he was coasting away, turning to watch the distance steadily increasing between him and the vessel, apparently motionless in space. It looked a lot more scarred and battle-weary than he had imagined.

“Hello, Joe? This is Lan, testing. Anybody there? . . . Lan Keene to ship. Hello, Joe, are you reading? . . .” Nothing. He flipped on the portable unit that he had brought and tried the first frequency they had set. “Jason, are you reading? . . . Come in, ship. This is Lan, out on the line.” Silence. He tried the other frequencies, ship standby, and emergency bands. Still the same. Worried now, Keene raised the forearm carrying the suit controls and switched to the wire circuit. “Joe, can you hear me?”

“
Nice and loud, Lan. How are we doing
?”

“Not good. I’ve been trying you and Jason on all the channels. You didn’t get anything?”

“
Negative. . . .”
There was a pause.
“Jason says he was tuned all the while. Not a thing
.”

“I don’t like this, Joe.”

“
Me neither. Have you tried the beacon yet?
”

“I’m just about to now.” Keene looked down and switched the portable unit to receive mode. He realized then that his chest was pounding. His breathing was shaky in his helmet, the clothes next to his body clammy with perspiration; his mouth and throat had gone dry. In the next few seconds he might find out that they were all destined to die out here. He selected one of the Kronians’ homing settings and plugged an audio decode connection into one of the suit circuit’s external jacks. . . . And a moment later, he was shouting out aloud in a relief that was almost crushing.

“YEAH! . . . OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL SHIP! I COULD MARRY YOU, YOU BATTERED PIECE OF BEAT-UP JUNK!”

The tone was coming through clear and strong in his helmet. It was the sweetest music he had ever listened to.

“
Lan? . . . We’re okay?
” Joe’s voice inquired, sounding a little unsure.

Keene nodded to himself, feeling drops of perspiration run off his head. “We’re okay, Joe. The receivers might be out, but the beacon’s singing. We’re getting out of here, Joe. They’re going to be coming for us.”

“
Yeah, well, that’s great.
” Joe didn’t seem fully to have absorbed it yet. “
Lan, don’t do that to me again.
”

They reeled him back in, still ecstatic and intoxicated by the sight of the stars, and for a few minutes with the weight of what had befallen Earth actually gone from his mind. It was only when he was almost at the hatch and about to guide himself in that his thoughts went back to the radar display he had watched at Vandenberg of the blip closing in toward the
Osiris
. The connection had been lost before they’d had a chance to be sure that the unharmed craft really
was
the Boxcar as Keene had assumed. If he was wrong, then none of the Kronians would ever have arrived at the
Osiris
to tell their story of Keene’s last-moment change of plan; and whether the shuttle was transmitting a signal or not wouldn’t make very much difference, since with Idorf and his ship long ago seized, nobody would be looking for it.

The grim set that the thought imparted to Keene’s face must still have been in evidence when he emerged through the inner door into the cabin, and Jason helped him off with his helmet.

“What’s the matter, Lan?” Vicki asked. “Joe said everything was all right. You look as if there’s bad news.”

Keene looked around at their apprehensive faces, the silent pleas to be reassured. He couldn’t dump this latest doubt on them now, he decided. But neither could he lie to them. There had to be some bad news.

“I didn’t realize how much you all stank,” he told them instead.

They turned off all the unessential electronics, wound the environmental control and air recirculation down to minimum, and made do with just the dim emergency light in the cabin. Keene surreptitiously increased a little the carbon dioxide level that the monitors would set to. It would relieve the load on the system and make people drowsy, passing the time more easily, lowering their oxygen consumption, and making them less likely to vent their anxiety in querulousness. All the same, Legermount tossed and fidgeted until it seemed he would start dismantling the ship with his hands, just to find something to occupy himself. Reynolds was just the opposite, calm and accepting in his belief that all was in the hands of a higher, wiser power.

Mitch and Cavan talked idly about military affairs and the old days, not realizing how much it sometimes affected the others, and wondered what the future might be for their line of business on Kronia. Dash revealed a literary bent and began composing a detailed account of all he could recall, at first using any scrap of paper that came to hand, later getting Keene’s okay to transfer to an on-board laptop whose drain wouldn’t make a lot of difference to anything. When Dash wasn’t writing, Jason and Joe would take the laptop forward to the flight-deck seats and play chess. Colby went off into long excursions of thought that resulted in few revelations, returning periodically to use the laptop for notes of his own that he was compiling, or to quiz Keene about workings of the ship that aroused his curiosity. He also attempted to entertain Robin with a variety of coin, card, and pocket-item tricks, none of which would work. Colby’s explanation was that he’d never realized how much they depended on gravity.

Vicki and Alicia talked about science, history, life in America and in Poland, and personal reminiscences involving Keene and Cavan. Charlie and Cynthia continued getting to know one another, making an effort to forget the lives that were gone and swapping stories about Kronia as if deliberately rejecting any possibility that they might not be on the threshold of new lives about to begin. Charlie was also intrigued by Robin’s novel thoughts on such things as planetary evolution and biological origins, and they talked about the Venus encounter, the Joktanian discoveries of humans who had lived beneath a sky dominated by Saturn, and the science that would have to be rewritten.

“I was just starting to get to know a planetary scientist in Houston when . . . you know, it happened,” Robin said. “His name was Salio. He said the whole time scale that all the books teach was much too long—that it had been invented that way to justify theories that don’t hold up anyway. Everything happens much more quickly. It’s all going to have to be rethought. Is that what you think?”

“Well, I never thought about it much at all until the last few days,” Charlie answered. “But you saw how it happened: new oceans starting to open up, mountain chains lifting while we watched! And it must have gotten even worse after Athena closed in and we lost track. But the information that we’ve got will be keeping scientists busy for years. You saw how those lava sheets were pouring up out of the rifts in those last images?”

“Yes.” Robin shuddered at having to remember.

“I’ve been thinking about them ever since. There were huge electrical discharges going on between Athena and Earth all the time the sheets were spreading. I figure
that’s
what could have caused the magnetic stripe patterns on the old sea beds. The conventional line is that they were written over millions of years by unexplained reversals in the Earth’s field. Well, maybe it didn’t take millions of years at all. Maybe it was just days!”

Vicki was listening, looking skeptical. “Could it have cooled quickly enough in that short a time?” she asked dubiously.

“We don’t know what was going on down there under all that cloud,” Charlie pointed out. “Hundreds of feet of ocean had been boiled into the atmosphere. Suppose that under the smoke cover it precipitated out again as ice. Maybe that could cool a surface skin sufficiently to retain magnetism. I don’t know. I haven’t analyzed the numbers yet.”