Lifeline (31 page)

Chapter 44

ORBITECH 1—Day 47

The specter of Tim Drury stood glaring down at Brahms as he cowered beneath the blankets on his bunk. Instead of rattling chains, Drury bore the shackles of his own obesity, towering over the acting director as if to smother him.

“You didn’t have to kill me,” Drury said. “You didn’t have to kill any of us.” His voice felt like the cold of space.

Brahms woke in a sweat, shivering, though he knew the temperature in his quarters remained a constant 70 degrees. He blinked and forced his eyes to adjust to the dimness, half expecting to see a bulky phantom with blazing eyes in the corner.

Brahms had had the nightmare several times before, and he forced his rational mind to combat the knee-jerk primitive fear. He felt angry at his psychological weakness—he was haunted by a guilty conscience! He recognized that, and he could live with it. He had chosen his actions; he had to face the consequences. No excuses.

He had acted swiftly, decisively. He had chosen the RIF before it was too late to do any good.

But now, other factors—unexpected factors—had changed their situation. The wall-kelp from the
Aguinaldo,
the lifeline to the
Kibalchich,
the “yo-yo” down to
Clavius Base
, and now the Soviet sleepfreeze technology—all provided less drastic means to help them survive.

Brahms had made the wrong choice.

He stood up and climbed off the bunk. The clock flashed 3:17 A.M. He got up anyway. Brahms didn’t need to raise the illumination to sidestep the molded furniture, to find his closet and remove a soft, single-weave robe. Made on
Orbitech 1,
of course.

He kept kicking himself, damning himself. He had acted too soon. Brahms realized how the people on
Orbitech 1
were growing more and more dissatisfied with the memory of the RIF, even though Ombalal had ostensibly been responsible.

Brahms had been wrong. All those people out the airlock, ultimately for no benefit.

Their efficiency ranking had been too low. And now Brahms had proven
himself
inefficient
.
At the moment of greatest crisis, he had made the wrong decision—a disastrous decision—and forced it upon the others. While still cowed by shock after the murder of Ombalal, the colonists had caused no serious trouble. Now, though, they were beginning to think of other paths Ombalal—Brahms!—should have taken, options to be tried first.

In his daily broadcast to the colony at large, Brahms continued to emphasize the gravity of their situation—how the wall-kelp was helping, but they could not depend on it too much; how their plight still remained grim. But Brahms knew he was just blowing smoke to keep them distracted. The words sounded hollow. He could only maintain a façade of fear in the face of success for so long.

“To continue our policy to pursue every means of improving our chances for survival, I have directed a team of seven experts in biology, electronics engineering, and cryogenics to go to the
Kibalchich.
Apparently, nearly a dozen of the Soviet sleepfreeze chambers are empty. They will dismantle the chambers and ferry them back here to
Orbitech 1,
so our people can learn how the Russians have done it.

“We hope to receive every cooperation from Dr. Anna Tripolk, the Soviet researcher who helped develop the process.”

Brahms worked the stereotank controls himself, freezing the image for a moment while he glanced down at the script he had prepared. The people watching would see only a second of motionless silence on his face; few would suspect any interruption at all.

“These times are too desperate for petty national boundaries. We need the sleepfreeze process. It appears that we can now see a light at the end of our tunnel. But we cannot allow ourselves to grow complacent. Thank you for all your efforts on our behalf.”

In the daily routine, Brahms also tried to make amends, or at least concessions. He listened to Allen Terachyk’s complaints about the ranking system, about the mistakes the Efficiency Study might make. Brahms had scanned back over the case of Sigat Harhoosma, the man Terachyk had pointed out. Brahms considered that maybe the man did need a little more slack, some more opportunities to prove his worth.

So Brahms had chosen him to assist Karen Langelier in her Jump, though many of the other engineers had heftier credentials. He wanted to give Harhoosma a chance to earn more points, to improve his position. He was making every attempt to be fair.

Even in the most brutal decisions, Brahms insisted on being fair and just. It was the only anchor he had.

But at night, Tim Drury continued to haunt him in his nightmares. Brahms could not fool his own conscience with rhetoric.

Tim Drury had been an adequate manager. His crime had been an underactive metabolism. Brahms had watched him eat—he took no more than his own share. He also exercised. But his genes had determined that he would be obese, and he had died for that.

It was only now that he realized that, of all the division leaders, Tim Drury had perhaps been the most worthy to remain alive. Something had not shown up properly on the scores from the Efficiency Study—some factor had not been accounted for. How does one measure ultimate loyalty?

Drury was dead. Arnando had turned traitor and was now dead. McLaris had turned traitor and was still alive, now trying to worm his way back. Only Allen Terachyk remained with Brahms.

Terachyk did his best, but he did not seem to support his director as enthusiastically as he should. At times, Brahms caught him looking sidelong, a veil of accusation lifting from his eyes before Brahms could challenge him.

Tim Drury had only wanted to play checkers with everybody.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Brahms whispered. He slipped on his robe, listening to the soft rustle in his dim quarters.

He opened the door, startling the two armed watcher bodyguards outside. They looked at him, raising their eyebrows in question. Both seemed tense, afraid, and uncomfortable.

“Something wrong, Mr. Brahms?” the woman, Winkowski, asked.

“I need to go for a walk. Follow me.”

But he merely went halfway down the corridor until he reached Tim Drury’s old quarters. He unsealed the door using the pass code he knew.

The Filipino boy, Ramis, had lived in these rooms for the few days he had stayed on
Orbitech 1,
but he had been merely a guest there. The presence of Tim Drury still hung in the quarters.

The two watchers remained discreetly outside as Brahms walked into the darkened cabin, activated one reading-light panel, and stood in the glow. He looked around the dimness and found the metal-topped courtesy table. Tim Drury had painted a red-and-black checkerboard on its surface, making the lines himself.

Brahms leaned over and ran a hand across the pattern. It showed faint, jittery imprecisions, but that gave it charm. He turned around slowly and felt under the table surface for the small storage compartment. He opened it and removed the packet of red and black magnetic checker disks.

The guards outside watched, but Brahms got up and closed the door on them. This was none of their business.

Brahms spread out the pieces on the board, red and black, and looked down at them. He glanced up again, uneasy, as if he sensed Tim Drury’s presence there, neither approving nor disapproving.

Brahms stared down at the pieces, then moved one red disk diagonally. He waited, squeezed his eyes shut, and got up. He went to the other side of the table and moved a black piece.

“I’ll play for you, my friend,” he said to the empty room.

Brahms proceeded to play checkers with himself deep into the night, making kings and sacrificing them. He lost track of how many games he won. And lost.

***

Chapter 45

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 50

Gray cliff walls jutted up against the black sky, miles from where Clancy stood. Behind him, Rutherford Crater closed together, offering a sight not unlike the view from Clavius, but an order of magnitude smaller. Razor-sharp black shadows and intense splashes of sunlight made the landscape look like a high-contrast photograph.

With his chin, Clancy kicked up the coordinates on his helmet. Soft red numbers glowed on his visor: minus 61 degrees latitude, minus 8 degrees longitude. Right on the spot. He felt as if he were standing in the middle of a giant bull’s-eye with somebody else playing at target practice.

He remembered his revelation as an undergraduate, when he had first discovered that Newton’s laws of physics required corrections when applied to orbits—either because of
a planet’s oblate nature, or from its rotational wobbling, or from inhomogeneities in the planetary density. In fact, it seemed a miracle that Newton’s laws worked at all.

The thought haunted him now. The test projectile from
Orbitech 1
was due to hit the lunar surface soon, and its orbit was well within the error bars.

Error bars.

The universe in practice was never so obliging as theory wanted it to be. Clancy flipped open his radio link.

“Hey, Shen.” He chided himself under his breath and tried again, using her first name. “Wiay, let’s move up onto the wall.”

“We’ve got a half hour.” Wiay Shen clumped into view, leaving slowly settling dust clouds behind her as she walked. Her footprints would remain there for centuries. “And we’re ten miles from the impact point, so we’re plenty safe.”

“We’re nine point seven miles away, if our radar fix is correct. And the impact point is only an approximation, anyway. Let’s go.”

“What’s the hurry, Cliff?”

Silence. Then Clancy spoke in a measured voice. “I said, let’s move it.”

“Okay, you’re the boss.”

Clancy swung himself around in the big suit and made his way up the rocky incline, putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to fall asleep just because moving took so long. He frowned at himself for being so impatient.

They left the six-pack below them at the base of the crater wall. Shen helped him negotiate the jumbled terrain, pointing out cuts in the rock that he missed. They circumvented boulders that looked larger than
Orbitech 2
would ever be. For a moment Clancy longed to be back up in space, at the L-4 construction site, watching his crew welding girders, sealing habitats, putting together the largest closed environment ever made by man. If the “yo-yo” really worked as Clancy imagined it would, they might be able to go back there—someday.

They reached an outcrop of lava rock jutting hundreds of yards straight up. Turning, Clancy looked down onto the crater bed, now two hundred yards below them. Pieces of ancient ejecta lay where they had fallen after the impact millions of years before. Clancy knocked loose a small rock and watched it roll down the slope in slow motion and silence. Now he had left his mark here as well. Little actions had such permanent consequences.

They paused to catch their breath, when Shen spoke. “Are you all right, Cliff?”

“Fine.”

“You galloped like a mountain goat coming up here.”

He answered her with silence for a few seconds. “I didn’t think I was moving that fast. Just in a hurry, that’s all.”

Over the radio he heard her breath stop as she prepared to say something. “Clifford Clancy, are you worried about the weavewire harness hitting us?”

Clancy nodded to himself, which of course she couldn’t see behind the polarized golden visor. “It’s
Orbitech 1
I’m worried about. We’re so close to
Clavius Base
—what if some celestial mechanic desperate to earn ‘efficiency points’ miscalculates the orbit, trying to plant the harness too close, and misses? Imagine a kilometer per second projectile hitting us.”

“The
Aguinaldo
didn’t have any problem. The wall-kelp package they sent us was right on the money.”

“They hit Longomontanus. They couldn’t have missed that with their eyes closed. This is different. No one can be this accurate—not with a ballistic trajectory.”

“So, what’s the chance of the weavewire package hitting us standing here? Pretty darned small, I’ll bet. My grandma once told me about how paranoid people on Earth were when Skylab burned up in the atmosphere. And we laughed at how ridiculous they all were. We have a better chance of killing ourselves by falling up here.”

“Well, Skylab wasn’t aimed right at us,” Clancy muttered, but said nothing more. Shen had a point—the terrain was rugged where they were standing, and the canister shot from
Orbitech 1
couldn’t be too far off. But standing still and waiting in the middle of the crater for the canister to hit would be a lot tougher on the nerves than trying to find it after it landed. He cleared his throat. “We’ll have a better view up here, that’s all. We can see where the package hits.”

“Oh, give me a break, Cliffy. I won’t tell anyone you’re chicken. Now I’ll have something to hang over you. You’re going to have to ask me out or I’ll tattle.”

Thanks a lot,
he thought, not sure if she was joking. He decided to ignore it. “We’re already here, so let’s stay put. As soon as the canister lands we’ll get back down.”

“Fair enough.” Shen twisted a backpack off her shoulders, looking graceful in her bulky suit. He realized it was just his imagination filling in details. Rummaging through the pack, Shen withdrew a tripod and set it up, extending the telescopic legs to their full length.

Clancy followed her lead, but he had trouble slipping his own backpack off over his air bottles. When he finally broke out the charge-coupled diode, Shen was ready to mount the detector.

“Ready with the CCD?”

Clancy grunted. “As soon as it’s calibrated.” He ran the CCD through a self-test. With its enclosed iris slowly shutting out the light, the solid-state device verified sensing a light change down to a single photon.

Satisfied, Clancy pushed to his feet and handed the CCD to Shen. Since the Moon had no atmosphere, the harness streaking to impact would make no trail across the black backdrop of stars. But the CCD could find it.

They worked in silence setting up the detector, finishing with plenty of time to spare, according to the digital clock on Clancy’s heads-up display. Once Clancy ensured that the CCD’s view angle covered the entire crater floor, he positioned himself out of the detector’s field of view. Shen joined him, lounging back against the outcropping. They waited for the smooth ocean of rock and dust on the crater floor to be marred by another impact.

After some minutes Shen broke the silence. “You really think it’ll work—the yo-yo, I mean?”

Clancy chewed on the question as he continued to scan the crater floor. “If everything cooperates.”

“You mean, like
Orbitech 1?”

“How about celestial mechanics itself? We’ve got a lot of ‘ifs’ that have to be satisfied—
if
our part of the harness gets here;
if
we
can finish the yo-yo;
if
the
weavewire is really strong enough;
if Orbitech 1
can land the wire and reel it back in.…”

Shen’s comment filled the inside of his helmet. “All we have to do is attach the weavewire to the harness and let
Orbitech 1
pull the yo-yo up. I thought this had all been worked out by the Clavius and Orbitech eggheads.”

Clancy smiled to himself. Shen believed her practical experience as an engineer placed her far apart from the wild-eyed celestial mechanics.

“Well,
Orbitech 1
can reel out a few hundred thousand miles of weavewire in a precise orbit, exact enough to land on the Moon—but even if the wire has a locator beacon on it, can you imagine how tough it’s going to be to find that sucker falling out of the sky? And remember, we won’t have much time to connect it, either—probably only an hour or so. Dr. Rockland and I were arguing this morning about what the speed of sound in the weavewire is.”

She turned toward him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“That’s how fast one end of the wire knows what the other end is doing, which tells us how early
Orbitech 1
has to start reeling it in. Rockland thinks sound would propagate mechanically through the fiber, which means they would have to start reeling it back almost a day before the end even gets here. But I think because of the binding potential and the chemical bonds in the weavewire, a signal will travel almost at
c
—probably a third the speed of light.

“You certainly know how to throw a wet towel on a hot idea, Cliffy.” Shen sounded disappointed.

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate—”

“Incoming! Look!” Shen’s shout rang through his helmet. Clancy spotted the light flashing on the CCD unit. Across the crater floor a thin line plowed across the lunar dirt. It looked like a giant mole racing just under the surface, creating a tunnel miles long.

Shen read from the CCD, picking off impact coordinates from the matrix of light-sensitive diodes. “Impact point: nine point six nine two three miles; preliminary velocity parameters indicate it was moving at one point oh oh four klicks. That’s pretty darned close for government work, huh, Cliffy?”

Clancy was floored. The impact was well within even theoretical error, much less experimental bounds. “Got the final location?” He gathered up his backpack to tear down the sensor.

“Roger dodger over and out.” He heard a click as Shen switched to the open channels. She turned to find the relay transmitter on top of the crater and spoke. “
Clavius Base
, we’ve got our Christmas present. Going to pick up the package and we’ll come on home.”

Clavius Base
acknowledged them, and Shen started talking to Clancy again. “I think
Orbitech 1
has nailed down the delivery system, wouldn’t you say?”

“Let’s get this stuff packed and go after the harness.”

“Right.” Shen bumped up against his buttocks. He felt the pressure through all the thick padding. It didn’t go away.

Clancy turned and noticed that she was patting him with her hand. He flinched and decided to ignore the exchange, not sure how else to react. Thank God she had at least picked one of the most private spots in the solar system.

Once the CCD and tripod were packed, Clancy led the way down the crater wall. Dust floated behind him, kicked up by his feet as he scrambled down the rocky incline. The dust drifted reluctantly back to the surface. The other jumbled debris looked frozen, delicately balanced.

His thoughts turned to Shen. If things were different—if he weren’t in charge of the whole blasted construction crew—he might work up enough courage to see whether her blatant flirtation meant something, or she was just being brash—Was she getting even for all the good-natured but rough comments most women construction engineers endured on the male-dominated crew.

He felt a surge of emotion from deep inside, a need to explain to her, to hold her and experience all the things he had been holding back for the past year … but he knew it could never happen. His position as construction boss demanded unwavering obedience, and if she were to take advantage of his authority.… Best to leave things be and not make a move, much as he wanted to.

He stepped over a section covered with loose gravel and turned to check on Shen. He felt his feet start to slide as the ejecta debris, undisturbed for centuries, broke loose and flowed under him. He waved his arms, trying to keep his balance on the steep wall.

Clancy managed to twist his body and cover his helmet with his padded arms as he fell. He bounced against rocks on his way down. Screams came over his suit radio. Clancy slammed into a boulder and heard a
crack!

Shen’s shouts in the ear speakers seemed drowned in static as he lost consciousness.

Wiay Shen watched in horror as Clancy tumbled down the rocky slope. His space suit slammed off boulders, leaving tiny gravel slides where he struck. Clancy rolled end over end as if falling underwater; he kept his arms wrapped around his helmet.

It took Shen a full three seconds to react. When she realized the screaming came from her own mouth, she silenced herself and started scrambling down the incline after Clancy. The sluggish suit and the low gravity made her effort exaggerated and slow.

Clancy came to rest by the base of the crater wall two hundred yards below, the top half of his suit hidden by a boulder. He lay a hundred yards from the six-pack.

Shen bounced down the steep grade, taking long, careful jumps. She couldn’t see Clancy moving. “Cliff, can you hear me? Clifford!”

She reached the boulder, knelt by Clancy’s body, and ran a gloved hand over his space suit. It was still pressurized—at least he hadn’t popped a leak. She felt a rush of relief at the discovery. The only sound she could hear was her breathing.

“Cliff, say something, you klutz!” The joking tone seemed limp.

She shook her hands out and wriggled them underneath Clancy’s body. If his neck was broken, she shouldn’t try to move him … but if he was dying, it wouldn’t matter anyway. With a grunt, she rolled his body over.
How could anybody be hurt through all that padding?
she wondered. Through his helmet, she could see that his head hung to one side. She scanned the vitals on his chest-monitor unit:

BLOOD PRESSURE: 163/80

TEMPERATURE: 99.6

RESPIRATION RATE: 93

Shen couldn’t tell if he had been injured. She made a quick decision to give him a sedative. She punched the emergency code into his chest unit, fumbling to hit the right buttons with her thick-gloved fingers. She swore at the red light that started blinking. She tried a second time, making sure to enter the medical override code correctly. This time the light burned a steady green.

Clancy’s suit began to pulsate as the lower part constricted, then expanded around his legs. Based on the old-fashioned “G-suit,” the movement prevented blood from pooling at the lower part of his body due to inactivity. A tiny needle on the inside of his suit pricked Clancy’s neck, injecting a sedative. It also withdrew a small amount of blood, so the automated diagnostics could make a white-cell count and a blood-sugar test.