Second Chance (6 page)

I switched the monitor to the radar display. “We’ll have to take the long way around the ship, then...”

But Matt interrupted me with a sharp indrawn breath. He winced, clutching his shoulder... and then his eyes went wide and his pedaling faltered.

“What’s wrong?”

“My shoulder hurts!”

We both knew what that meant. Joint pain was one of the symptoms of decompression sickness. “It can’t be the bends. We’re breathing pure oxygen at”—I switched the monitor back to the airlock status display—“almost half an atmosphere.”

But Matt wasn’t looking at the monitor, or at me. He was staring over my shoulder, at the point where the hoses from our masks attached to the wall. “Son of a bitch!” He stopped pedaling, ripped the mask off his face, and punched the big red EMRG REPRESS button.

“What the heck are you doing?” I shouted over the roar of inrushing air.

“Look at the valve!”

I looked where he was pointing, at the valve that controlled the flow of oxygen to our masks.

It was set to MIX. We weren’t breathing pure oxygen, we were breathing the usual mix of oxygen and nitrogen. And we had been for the last hour and a half, with the pressure dropping and the nitrogen seething in our bloodstreams.

“Oh shit.” I had missed one of the hundred and ninety-seven steps in the EVA checklist. No, two of them—I’d failed to switch the valve to OXY, and then I’d failed to check the valve setting. “I... I’m sorry. I don’t know how I missed...”

“I know exactly how you missed it,” Matt said. The rush of air was rapidly fading as the lock pressure came up to standard, his anger rising with it. “You were too busy worrying about who was putting whose cock where.”

“I never...” But no... I couldn’t deny it. I’d been distracted, and it could have killed both of us. I shut up, started again. “You should put your mask back on.” Pure oxygen was standard treatment for the bends.

Matt never took his eye off of me as he re-fitted his mask and ostentatiously switched the valve from MIX to OXY. I immediately tasted the difference in my own mask—the pure oxygen was rich and invigorating, with a slight iron tang. How could I have failed to notice its absence? Matt rubbed his shoulder again, his face taut. He moved to the wall and keyed the intercom. “Tench tench,” he said, his voice echoing dully from beyond the inner hatch. “We’ve had a malf in Gamma hab lock and we’re both suffering possible stage 1 DCS. Have repressurized. Situation stable. Please advise.”

A moment later Nuru’s voice came back. “Oppy oppy, Matt. Stay where you are, and keep the pressure up. I’ll have Kyra and Mari prep for EVA from Gamma sys lock.”

“Oppy oppy,” Matt acknowledged, then cut the connection. He stared at the intercom for a long moment, then shouted “Damnit!” and slammed his palm against the wall. The whole airlock thrummed and he rotated slowly as he rebounded from the force of the blow.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, though it didn’t help anything.

“You’re sorry.” He didn’t even look at me. He just swam back to the monitor and programmed the lock to raise the pressure to an atmosphere and a half.

“Kyra and Mari...”

“They’re not going to make it in time.” Now he did look at me, and I wished he hadn’t. “By the time they get out there they’ll have only half an hour—an hour, tops—to find the hole and patch it. We’ll have to evacuate Gamma work bay.” The vacuum that would ruin all the organics and volatiles in the bay—almost one-third of the ship—couldn’t have been any harder or colder than his face just then. “You’ve screwed us all.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Matt’s eyes were icy above the mask. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

“What the heck’s
that
supposed to mean?”

He started to respond, then cut himself off, waving a hand in front of his face. “No. Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“What did you mean by that?” I demanded.

“Never. Mind.” Our eyes locked for a long cold moment.

In the end I was the one who had to look away. I’d screwed up; he had every right to be upset.

We stewed in silence for half an hour, floating in enforced idleness—any exertion could make the bends worse—and watching the work bay pressure graph fall, slowly and steadily. At least I wasn’t in any pain.

“How’s the shoulder?” I asked at last, unable to stand the silence any longer.

Matt flexed and stretched it. “Better,” he admitted. “I think I’ll be okay.”

The silence wore on.

“Matt...”

He looked at me.

“You told them it was a malf. You didn’t say it was me who messed up.” I swallowed, to relieve the pressure in my ears. “Thank you.”

Matt sighed. “I didn’t want to make your life any more hellish than it already is.” Then he turned in the air so he could look me square in the eye. “Listen, Charlie,” he said. It was the first time anyone in the crew had called me “Charlie” since the first day of training, when Kyra had noticed that everyone but Bob and I had four-letter names and we changed them for solidarity. “I shouldn’t tell you this...”

Just then the intercom burst into life. “Tench tench,” came Nuru’s voice, breathy with exertion and excitement. “Leak is stabilized. I repeat, leak is stabilized. Kyra and Mari, abort emergency prebreathe protocol; I still need you to go outside to complete the repairs, but no sense rushing things. Matt and Chaz, report status.”

Matt keyed the microphone. “DCS symptoms resolved, situation stable. We will continue at one point five atmospheres for four hours.”

“Oppy oppy.”

Matt blew out a breath in relief, then keyed the mike again. “How’d you fix the leak?”

“Bobb managed to unbolt the whole damn section from the hull. There’s crap floating all over, but we found the hole and patched it.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” I said.

-o0o-

Everything was set aside for the next couple of days as we finished cleaning up from the meteoroid strike. Kyra and Mari completed their spacewalk without incident, welding a patch onto the hull to complete Bobb’s temporary repair of the fingertip-sized hole. The rock that had made it had been smaller than a grain of sand, and had evaporated on impact. Meanwhile, the rest of us labored to put all the equipment back the way it had been before the strike.

I couldn’t get Matt to admit what he’d been about to say. Whatever it was, though, I was convinced it was tied into whatever was making me such a pariah.

And I
was
a pariah. I wasn’t certain whether it had gotten worse, or whether I was just noticing it more, or whether I was becoming increasingly paranoid, but it was clear to me now that everyone was giving me a wide berth. Conversations stopped when I drifted near. People refused to meet my eyes, or—even worse—I looked up from my work and discovered they were silently watching me. I wondered if Matt had quietly spread the word about my error in the airlock, but that didn’t seem like him.

It couldn’t be racism... could it? But no, even Nuru was avoiding meeting my eyes.

Whatever the cause, there seemed to be little I could do about it other than to be as unobtrusive as possible. Whenever I considered confronting Nuru or Mari about the crew’s behavior, I balked—surely complaining about the situation would make it even worse. So once the ship had returned to normal, I retreated to the communications problem I’d been working on before the impact.

My database searches led nowhere. The merged data just stopped forty-seven years after launch; the three original databases were simply gone, with no clue as to what had happened to them. When I asked Bobb to look into the situation, as I’d been about to do at the moment of the meteoroid strike, he begged off—too busy with recovery and maintenance operations. No one else had Bobb’s expertise in ship systems, and in any case they were all even less willing to give me any of their time than he was.

At least Bobb had offered an excuse. Mari simply waved me away whenever I tried to talk with her.

I spent a lot of time alone. The airlock was less appealing than it had been, so I started taking extra shifts in the greenhouse, the rotating transparent tube full of plants that turned our waste products into food and oxygen. No one liked working there, necessary though it was to our continued existence, because it stank of sewage and the CO
2
-heavy air led to lethargy and headaches. But it was quiet and peaceful—a perfect place to contemplate the life of Jesus. And the stink was easier to take than the looks I got in the work and habitation bays.

It was while I was in the greenhouse, pinching back the soybeans, that I realized I was going about the communications problem all wrong.

At a certain point in the plants’ life cycle, it was necessary to pinch off the growing stem end to encourage them to put more of their energy into beans rather than leaves and tendrils, a painstaking and tedious job because of the crowded conditions. I was ducking my head back and forth as I reached through the tangled vines, trying to see if I’d missed any wayward sprouts, when the shifting image reminded me of something I should have known all along.

Humans had been using multiple small radio receivers to achieve the effect of a single giant dish—a technique known as “long-baseline interferometry”—for almost a century. It was really just an extended version of the way that two eyes can give a better picture of a three-dimensional object than just one, and the farther apart the eyes the more pronounced the 3-D effect.

We already had a flock of satellites spread across Tau Ceti system. Though their radio dishes were smaller than the big dish on
Cassiopeia
, if I pointed two or more of them at Earth and combined the signals together I might be able to pick Earth’s signal from the Sun’s background noise. And the information I gained from the exercise might be helpful in figuring out what was broken in
Cassie
’s receivers.

Over the next few days I researched interferometric techniques, found a useful set of subroutines in the ship’s software library, and reserved time on five satellites. I was being extremely cautious—I didn’t want to antagonize anyone with my use of satellite or computer resources.

When my reserved time arrived, the five satellites swiveled themselves to focus on Earth and kept up this scrutiny for a full eight hours. Post-processing took another two hours. During this time I floated among the tomatoes and zucchinis in the greenhouse, trying to distract myself with pruning and pollinating but actually accomplishing little more than plant-assisted nail-chewing. When my watch chimed, I rushed eagerly to Delta work bay, where the monitor revealed...

Nothing.

The interpolated data of the five satellites did not show any signal from Earth at all.

I checked and rechecked my procedures, verified that I was using the subroutines properly, made sure that the data was not corrupt. Everything seemed nominal. But when I checked the timestamps on the data, I discovered that the satellites’ realtime clocks were not properly synchronized; they varied from each other by as much as an hour and a half.

Accurate timestamps were critical to interferometry. The data was useless. And with the satellites scattered all over the system, as much as seven light-hours away, it might not be possible to synchronize them now.

Maybe there was a way. But even as I looked into the problem, my frustration grew. Bad enough that no one on the ship would talk to me, now even the machines were being uncooperative...

“Are you almost finished with the main processor array?”

I looked up from the monitor. It was Mari, floating with one foot hooked into a restraint and her arms folded across her flat chest. She’d grown her hair out, but it didn’t make her look any more like a woman. Even thinking of her as “she” made my head hurt.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” she continued, “but your reservation ran out over three hours ago.”

“This is important,” I said. My teeth clenched on the words.

“Well, the rest of us have important data to process too...”

“And why is
your
important data always more important than
my
important data?” Matt and Nuru, working at their own stations at the other end of the work bay, turned at the sound of my voice. “I’ve tried hard. I’ve been cooperative. I’ve learned your procedures, followed your rules, listened to your stupid-oopid doubled slang for months now, and all I’ve gotten in return is the silent treatment!” The anger and frustration I’d been building up for weeks came pouring out. “What about
me
?”

Mari was backpedaling away, clumsily beating the air with her hands as she tried to get away from my tirade.

“I didn’t mean to die! I didn’t ask to be vived without training! All I wanted was a little patience, a little compassion... but you...
all
of you!” I swiveled in place, taking in Nuru and Matt—and Bobb and Kyra, who had just arrived as well, drawn from adjacent modules by my shouting—with a broad sweep of my arm. “You’ve all treated me like... like dirt, and I’m tired of it!”

“Chaz...” Nuru began, but I cut her off.

“No more explanations,” I said. “No more recriminations. I just want a little...” I was choking up. “... A little respect...”

They were all staring at me. I couldn’t blame them—I was ranting, self-centered, over-emotional...

Oh dear Jesus. They’d never take me seriously now.

I opened my mouth to explain... but I could barely breathe past the swollen lump that had appeared where my tonsils used to be.

Eyes stinging, I struggled out of the restraint at my work station and launched myself past a startled Mari and Bobb... up to the systems bay and through the lock there into the greenhouse.

I floated among the peas and peppers, curled in a ball and shaking with pent-up tears that would not come. The air here was foul and heavy. My life stank like sewage.

Once I had thought that being selected for the
Cassiopeia
crew was the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. How had it come to this?

A long time later, I heard the lock from Delta open. “Chaz?” Matt’s voice. I didn’t even grunt. The greenhouse wasn’t that big; if he really wanted to find me, he’d find me.