Infinity Beach (30 page)

They finished dinner, somewhat at less leisure than they’d begun, and went across to the pilot’s room. Kim took some of the hot bread with her.

Solly removed a wall panel marked
AUTO OFF
. “Ham,” he said, “I’ll check with you periodically. Try to locate the problem and eliminate it.”

“Yes, Solly. I am endeavoring to do that.”

His fingers touched a pumpkin-colored handle and moved it forward. A row of orange lamps came on. “The pilot finally gets to earn his pay,” he told Kim.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked.

“We relax.” He gestured toward the navigation console, which was built into a desk. “If you see any red lights and I’m not here, call me.”

“If something happened, wouldn’t the Klaxons sound?”

“Maybe. If we’ve got a virus in the system, everything becomes unreliable.” He must have seen the doubt in her face. “But don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. The ship is pretty much still automated. It’ll still produce hot water, prepare the food, recharge the power cells. The only difference now is that we’re going to have to punch some buttons to make things happen.” He paused, considering their situation. “If there’s a variance between actual conditions and prescribed conditions, the ship may not notice. Which means we might have to turn up the thermostat once in a while. Piece of cake, other than the inconvenience.”

Kim took a long time to ask the question that really bothered her. “Solly,” she said, “do you think it’s possible—?” She hesitated.

“—That—?”

“—The virus came from the
device
?”

“No,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly. “It’s a glitch in the programming, Kim.” He hesitated. “It happens.”

Kim studiously avoided bringing the subject up again. That evening they wandered down to the rec room and watched, but did not participate in,
Party of Five
, a light comedy in which the lead characters discover they are living next door to a group marriage with two husbands and three wives.

Party of Five
did not get many laughs, and Kim spent most of her time thinking how cavernous the ship felt. Solly tried to look relaxed, but he kept laughing at the wrong parts.

Before they went to bed, he reactivated the AI, but did not return control of the systems to it. “Ham, have you been making progress with the virus?”

The windows opened out onto an ocean. In the distance, Kim could see a whale spouting.

“Ham?” said Solly. “Answer up.”

He glanced sidewise at her and tried again. The AI had always responded within seconds.

Kim got up, put her hands in her pockets, and turned away from the seascape. “It sounds as if it’s down altogether,” she said.

“Apparently.”

“Ever know it to happen before?”

“Never. But this is also the first time I’ve had to shut down an AI. Maybe it has that kind of effect.”

“Ham,” she said. “Are you there?”

They went up to the pilot’s room and Solly sat down at the console and initiated a diagnostic. “This’ll take a few minutes,” he said.

The windows opened onto the same seascape, although the whale was gone.

“When we get back,” she said suddenly, “you aren’t going to walk away from me, are you?”

“No.” Solly put an arm around her. “I love you, Kim.”

He gathered her in and they kissed.

“Kim—” he said.

“Yes—?”

“Will you marry me?”

It came without warning. “Yeah,” she said, carefully keeping her voice level. “I think I’d like to do that.”

The diagnostic chimed. It showed no problem. Everything was fine.

“That can’t be,” said Solly. “I mean, we can’t even raise the AI.”

Solly broke out the captain’s best stock that evening to celebrate their engagement. They made love to candlelight and soft music, starting in the briefing room, where the windows were full-length and provided a glorious view from the top of Mount Morghani, pausing once on the third-floor landing, and continuing with unabated zeal into the bedroom.

Even though they were alone on the ship, Kim always took care to close the bedroom door. On this occasion, however, Solly carried her in and tumbled her among the sheets, and so the door remained open.

The night went on and on, with occasional downtime for him during which they talked of the future. And then Solly came for her again, and she delightedly gave herself to him.

He was inexhaustible that night. Even with a body that was effectively twenty years old, he seemed to be performing above and beyond the call. But she stayed with him and there came a moment when he was lying with his head toward the foot of the bed and he brought her down atop him, turning her on her back, spread-eagling her.

She luxuriated in the sensation of his body beneath hers, his lips against the nape of her neck, his hands exploring her. The illumination in the ship had dimmed to nighttime levels, which meant the passageway behind her was dark save for the soft glow of the security lights.

Her head was thrown back in ecstasy and she was groaning and sighing, partly because she was inclined to do so, partly because she knew it inflamed him. Her line of vision went through the open door into the corridor.

And she saw something move.

It was a glimmer, a shadow, something at the far edge of awareness. Yet it was there.

She was immediately trying to get Solly to stop. But he was at full throttle.

Something was taking shape back there.

A pair of eyes. From the darkness near the top of the doorway, just outside in the corridor.

Suddenly she was back in Kane’s villa, terrified in the cool emotionless gaze of the thing in that
other
passageway. Solly’s hands were still holding her, playing with her. She pulled them away and rolled off onto the floor and, without taking her eyes from the apparition, got Solly to understand something was wrong and began feeling around for a weapon. The best she could find was a shoe.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, startled.

The eyes were the same emerald color, but flecked with gold. Vertical irises. Cat’s eyes. Cool, dispassionate, surgical. Very much like the thing in Kane’s villa. But she saw no madness here. Only malevolence.

The eyes were disembodied.

They floated a few centimeters from the ceiling.

Solly was staring down at her but she held a hand against his back, trying to get him to stay still. She found the remote, which was on a side table, and touched it. The lights came on.

Solly looked at her. Looked out into the passageway.

It was empty.

“Kim?” Solly looked down at her. “What’s wrong?”

She was weak, unable to move. “It was outside the room.”

“Outside?
What
was outside?” He padded into the corridor and looked both ways. “Nothing here,” he said. “What did you think you saw?”

She tried to describe it but it just came out sounding hallucinatory.

“All right,” he said, when she’d compared it to the thing in the lake. “Let’s find out.”

She got into her clothes and Solly pulled on a pair of
shorts and detached a lampstand to use as a weapon. Then they examined each room on the third floor, Solly doing the actual search while Kim stayed in the corridor to ensure that nothing got behind them.

He looked in closets and cabinets and behind beds. They moved with deliberation, and Kim was pleased to see that, despite the absurdity of her claim, he took her seriously rather than simply trying to argue what he must have thought: that she’d been seeing things.

They went down to the second floor and repeated the process, and then finally they searched the bottom of the ship. Long windows allowed them to see into all of the storage areas and the launch bay. He even climbed down into the lander through the open cockpit. The lander itself was attached to the
Hammersmith
’s underside. They inspected the areas given over to the recycling systems, water tanks, and cargo. They looked in the engine room. When they were finished he turned to her. “Kim, there’s no place left to hide.”

It didn’t matter. “I saw it,” she said. It was impossible, and she wanted to put it aside, wanted desperately to believe it was an illusion. A
dream
. A result of the wine she’d drunk earlier in the evening. But she’d been wide awake. Solly had seen to that.

“It was there,” she said. “It vanished when I put on the lights.”

“Like a reflection would have done.”

“Yes.”

“But it wasn’t a reflection.”

“No. It wasn’t. Couldn’t have been.”

There was egress to interior wiring and systems compartments through several access panels. But it would have required time to remove and then replace them. He looked at them, and they were locked down tight.

“I saw it.”

“I believe you.”

They went back up to their room, walking softly along the carpeted floors, and turned out the lights, returning the ship’s illumination to what it had been. Kim looked into the
semidarkness, studied the row of tiny security lamps which came on automatically when the ship dimmed down for nighttime running. There was nothing that could have fooled her into thinking she’d seen a pair of eyes.

The most frightening aspect was the thing’s resemblance to the earlier apparition. She wondered if it had somehow contrived to follow her out here.

She’d brushed aside the experience in the Severin Valley, locked it in a remote corner of her mind, and convinced herself it had been a trick of the light, or a product of an over-supply of oxygen.

Now she was confronted by it again. And for the first time in her adult life, she questioned her worldview, her assumption that the universe was rational. That it was governed by self-consistent laws. That there was no place for the supernatural.

“You all right, Kim?” He was standing over her, pulling on his clothes, obviously worried.

“I’m fine,” she said.

There was another, more likely, possibility.

She sat down at the console and replayed the visuals from Solly’s helmet imager, stopping the display when the ripples appeared, on the hull and in the air lock.

The thing she’d seen was connected with the saddle. The object had not been a bomb; it had been a
transport
.

If that were so, she wondered whether she and Solly could even talk to each other without being overheard. Had the celestials mastered enough of the language to eavesdrop?

She told Solly what she thought.

“Okay,” Solly said. “We’ll proceed on the assumption we’ve got an intruder. That would explain what’s happening to Ham as well.”

“There is
this
,” she told him. “At least it won’t try to murder us in our sleep.”

“I don’t want to be downbeat on this, but why not?”

“Because it wants to follow us home.”

“Kim, I hate to point this out.” He lowered his voice. “The course is already set. If it were to get us out of the way,
all it would have to do is sit tight and ride old Ham into port.”

They were sitting on the bed, staring out into the corridor, which now seemed like strange territory, a passageway from another world. “No,” she said. “It probably doesn’t know what leg of the trip we’re on. It’ll want us functioning until we get home. Until it can be sure.”

“I hope.”

In the morning, they searched the vessel again, all three floors, the engine room, the lander, and every other space they could think of. Solly removed the various access panels and peered back among the cables and circuits. They found nothing. “It’s hard to believe there’s anything on board that shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Reluctantly, she said what they both must have been thinking: “Maybe we shouldn’t go home.”

They were sitting in the wingback chairs in the briefing room. It was late afternoon; both were exhausted from the long hunt and its accompanying frustrations. “Kim,” said Solly, “we can interrupt the flight anytime and call for help. But then what do we do? If it could get aboard without our seeing it, it’ll do the same to any rescue ship.” He rubbed his eyes. “We’ve done everything we can to ensure there’s no intruder. So either we go home, or we sit out here somewhere until the food runs out.”

During the search, Kim had sensed that he was becoming skeptical of her story. In full-daylight mode, the
Hammersmith
’s rooms and corridors seemed less threatening and the danger more remote. The choices, should they determine they actually had an intruder, were stark. Best to write the incident off as the result of dim lighting, heated passions,
and too much alcohol. “Look,” he said, “at worst, all we have to do is maintain control of hypercomm, don’t let it transmit anything, and we don’t have to worry. No matter what else happens.”

“Are we sure we can do that?”

“I can take a wrench to it if I have to.”

The return trip remained somber. Kim kept their bedroom door closed, for whatever good that might do. It was, she complained to Solly, like sleeping in a haunted house. The days passed without incident, but Kim knew the thing was there, drifting through coils and corridors, just outside the range of vision. Occasionally, she caught glimpses of it, the eyes sometimes formed of light from a lamp, of steam from a shower. There were movements in the dark, the sense of a cold current brushing her ankle, the sound of whispering in the bulkheads. Even the murmur of the ship’s electronics occasionally sounded malevolent.

If Solly picked any of this up, he said nothing.

Unavoidably, the sex became infrequent. When it did occur, it was distracted, stealthy, hurried, as though there were others in the ship who might happen on them at any moment.

The spontaneity drained away. During what she had already begun to think of as the good old days, encounters might begin and eventually be consummated anywhere in the ship. Now, wherever they might start, they concluded behind the closed doors of their sleeping compartment. After Kim had put on the light and inspected it.

She felt exposed and vulnerable when they were both asleep. But when she broached the subject to Solly he looked so dismayed that she did not push for a watchstanding system.

He must be thinking of her as a frightened child, wondering what sort of relationship he’d got himself into. But she
felt
like a frightened child. Were their places reversed, had it been Solly who was seeing things in empty corridors,
she
would certainly be rethinking the relationship. She feared
she might lose him over this, and that might be the worst of it. But she couldn’t help herself. There was a hazard, and Solly didn’t entirely believe her.

She grew resentful, of Solly, and of her own fears. And she acquired an unrelenting hatred for the
thing
that had taken up residence with them. She waited, and literally
prayed
, for it to show itself in some substantive way.

Solly’s efforts to get the AI back online produced no discernible results. Occasionally there were nonsense voice responses, asserting that passengers should prepare for acceleration, or that the food preparation system was suffering from an overload and needed a new conduction unit. It suggested course changes and adjustments in mission parameters and wished them good morning at all hours.

“We need somebody who knows what he’s doing,” Solly grumbled, but he never stopped trying.

Without Ham, he had to get his hands dirty on occasion. He found himself performing routine duties such as managing power flow adjustments. Because some systems had gone down with the AI, he wasn’t necessarily alerted when malfunctions happened, nor was there a system to tell him the nature of the problem. So when internal communications crashed, he needed several hours and a lot of crawling around on hands and knees to locate and replace a faulty relay. Self-test procedures run regularly by the jump engines developed an aberration that periodically set Klaxons sounding throughout the ship. He couldn’t figure that one out at all and simply shut the alarms down, hoping the engines wouldn’t develop a fatal flaw in the meantime.

Solly commented that he was learning a lot this trip.

Kim helped wherever she could, which wasn’t often. Electronics was not her forte, but she asked questions and she too was learning.

The closest they came to a serious problem arose during the third week when the Klaxons sounded one night at three
A.M.
, signaling that the oxygen–nitrogen mix was exceeding parameters. Solly didn’t know what to do about that, and the
alarms continued sporadically during the next few hours, warning of a deteriorating condition. He growled that for all they knew the problem was with the alarm system rather than life support, but he continued working on it, replacing every part he could reach until finally the clamor stopped.

Kim’s normal high spirits never returned. She no longer wandered through the ship on her own, but rather stayed close to Solly. She read more extensively than ever before, mostly books and articles in her specialty, but also novels and histories and even Simon Westcott, the classic second century philosopher who’d tried to explain how consciousness had developed in a mechanistic universe.

Occasionally, when she was alone, she caught herself speaking to the visitor. “I know you’re there,” she told it, keeping her voice down so Solly wouldn’t overhear.

“Why don’t you show yourself?”

Toward the end of the voyage, the debate went underground, where it simmered like a waste-disposal system occasionally leaking noxious fumes. There was simply nothing more to say. During the last three weeks, Kim saw nothing out of the ordinary. She tried to talk herself into dismissing the apparition, or at least into locking it away in a corner of her mind where it could cause no disruption, much as she had the earlier experience at Remorse. But
then
she’d been able to get away from the Severin Valley. Now she was bolted in with the thing.

So there’d been an uneasy moratorium, a studied avoidance of the subject. Conversation necessarily became guarded rather than informative, ceremonial rather than intimate. It was like having a rhinoceros on board, whose presence no one wanted to recognize.

On the last day, however, as they approached jump status, Solly broached the subject. “I’m sorry the flight turned out the way it did,” he said.

His tone suggested he wasn’t holding her aberration against her. “It’s not your fault,” she said, carefully restraining the anger that began to stir.

“We need to decide whether we’re going to report the incident.”

Translation: Do you want to admit to having a hallucination?

They were both in the pilot’s room. Everything was in order, and the clock was counting down. Solly was waiting for the status lamps to light, after which he would push the
EXECUTE
key, and they would leap across into their own universe.

“Got a question,” Kim said, casually.

“Go ahead.”

“When we use the hypercomm transmitter, how do we know it’s in use?”

His jaw tightened. “Could you rephrase that, Kim? How could I
not
know I’m using it?”

She tried again. “When we’re communicating via hypercomm, does something light up on the status board?”

“Right here.” He pointed at a pair of lamps atop the communication console. “
Orange
means Ham’s begun the operation, that a channel is being opened, and
green
means it’s okay to talk.”

“Can you test it?”

“Test what?”

“Test the system. See if it works.”

“Kim, why?” He looked puzzled.

“Humor me, Solly. Please.”

Ordinarily he would simply have asked Ham to open the channel. Now it was necessary to pull the control board across his lap, consult his manual, press some keys.

“Well?” she asked.

“That’s odd.”

No lights.

“Problem?”

“The status lamps should have lit up,” he said.

“So as things are now, if someone were transmitting, we wouldn’t know.”

He checked the bulbs. Both were scorched. “How’d you guess?”

She shrugged. “It seemed like a possibility.”

He went back to the utility locker and returned with fresh lamps. “This has to do with the intruder, right?”

“I don’t like what’s happening, Solly.” She was suddenly desperately weary, anxious to see real sunlight again, and a real ocean. The virtual expanses of
Hammersmith
’s projection system just didn’t cut it. No matter how vast the stretches of sea and beach might appear, she always knew she was inside a chamber. “When do you expect we’ll be docking?” she asked.

“About six in the morning.”

It was not quite ten
A.M.
, and they were just a few minutes from the jump. “Twenty hours?” she asked. “That seems kind of long.”

“It’s because of the time differential in hyperflight,” he said. “We never know quite where we’ll materialize. So we want to be well away from Greenway.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Check your harness.”

She could hear power gathering in the jump engines. Solly activated the external sensors and telescopes. She sat back, but kept an eye on the hypercomm lamps.

As they clicked down to one minute, Solly sighed. “You really expect something to happen, don’t you?”

“I think something just did,” she said. “In any case, to answer your question: Yes, I think we should contact Matt as soon as we’re able. I want to tell him what’s going on.”

“So what are you going to say? That you think there’s something on board that shouldn’t be here?”

“That’s right.”

He grew somber. “If you do that, we may not get home anytime within the foreseeable future. You’ll scare them out of their socks, and we’ll spend the next few years on old
Hammersmith
.”

“I don’t know what else to do, Solly,” she said.

The clock ran down to zero and he pressed the key.

A wave of vertigo passed behind her eyes. But she tried to control her breathing and think of other things. Like how
good it had been with Solly, despite the problems. Like the fact that Emily’s body was downstairs and somebody was going to pay up for that.

The sensation passed quickly and the windows lit up with familiar constellations. Greenway and its moons appeared on one of the auxiliary screens.

“Transition complete,” he said.

Kim nodded and kept her eyes on the hypercomm lamps.

Solly opened a channel to Sky Harbor. “This is
Hammersmith
. Approaching on manual. Computer out. Request assistance.”

While they waited for the signal to reach Greenway, and for the controllers to respond, Solly looked over his instruments. “Everything seems normal,” he said.

Kim couldn’t sort her feelings out. She wanted the problem to go away, wanted to get home with her discovery, wanted to enjoy her accomplishment. But she also wanted to be proved
right
, for Solly to see that the apparition had substance. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate that to herself as well. She wanted an apology from
somebody
.

“
Hammersmith
, this is Sky Harbor.” A female voice. “We’ve been expecting you. Patrol will escort you in.” They gave Solly a course and speed.

“That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

He brought the ship around to the prescribed heading and fired the mains. A blip appeared on the long-range navigation screen. “That’ll be our escort,” he said.

“How far are they?”

“Several hours.”

Something caught Kim’s attention. A movement, a shift in the light. She looked around the pilot’s room. Nothing seemed changed.

“Problem?” Solly asked.

“Don’t know.” She reached over and touched the hypercomm lamps. They were
warm
. “I think they’re out again,” she said.

He frowned and tried them for himself. And then scowled.
He removed the orange lamp and held it up to his eyes. “They sure are.”

“Is there any other way to know whether we’re transmitting?”

“Yes.” He punched a button. “Patrol,
Hammersmith
. Do you read?”

“
Hammersmith
, this is Patrol one-one. Affirmative. Do you require assistance?” Male voice this time, Bondolay accent. Lots of
r
’s.

“Are we showing a hypercomm transmission?”

“Wait one.” He sounded as if he were being patient. Kim wiped her mouth while she waited for the response, which seemed to take an interminably long time. Then the voice was back:
“Hammersmith,”
he said, “that is affirmative.” He sounded puzzled. How could
Hammersmith
be transmitting and the pilot not know? “Is there a problem?”

“Computer is down,” Solly said, climbing out of his chair. “And we’re having some other minor malfunctions.” He signed off and left the pilot’s room in a dead run. Minutes later he was back, his face pale. “You were right, Kim,” he said. “There
is
something in the works and the son of a bitch is trying to talk to the folks at home.”

“The first thing it’ll do,” she said, “is tell them where Greenway is. Turn off the transmitter.”

“I just did.”

“Good.”

He opened the channel again. “Patrol, this is
Hammersmith
. Has the subspace transmission ceased?”

“Negative.” The voice paused. “
Hammersmith
, what is your situation?”