Starbridge (7 page)

"Compared to this stuff, history and physics are wildly exciting. Maybe I ought to go study for a while to wake myself up," Mahree said. She tried unsuccessfully to smother a yawn, then burst into shrill giggles when the others reflexively copied her. "Sekhmet has the right idea," she added, stroking the cat, who lay sprawled over half the flimsies, asleep.

The animal began purring.
Wish I could be that relaxed,
Mahree thought confusedly, feeling tears suddenly threaten. She blinked furiously.
What's
wrong with me? A moment ago I could barely stop laughing, and now I'm
ready to cry.

"We all need sleep," Rob admitted. "The tension is getting to everyone.

Evelyn Maitland came to me yesterday and asked to be put back into hibernation. She said that if we screwed this up, she didn't want anyone blaming her!"

"I had a dream last night," Mahree said haltingly, not looking up as she rubbed Sekhmet's jawline. The purr grew louder, more rasping. "I dreamed we got there, and somehow we'd made a terrible error and recorded the transmissions
backward,
and that was why we hadn't recognized them. It was all a mistake and

39

we'd just ended up on Earth. But there weren't any people there anymore. It was deserted . . . lifeless."

Nobody said anything for nearly a minute. Mahree glanced up to find them all staring at her, but then none of them except Rob would meet her eyes.

Her stomach turned over, and she bit her lip, reddening with embarrassment.

Yoki finally broke the silence. "Honey, why don't you get some sleep? We've all got the creeps, and that's natural enough in this situation, right, Rob?"

"Sure," he said, reaching over to drape Sekhmet over his shoulder. "I'll walk you back to your cabin."

When they reached the relative privacy of the corridor, Mahree burst out,

"Dammit, I shouldn't have said that! Now everyone's going to think I can't take it, that I'm losing it!"

Rob slung his free arm over her rigid shoulders. "No, they're not. You've held up better than any of us." He chuckled ruefully. "Just this morning I forgot I'd left my mirror on and nearly panicked when I came out of the head and caught a glimpse of myself. For a second my heart felt like it was coming straight out of my chest--then I felt like a jackass."

Mahree smiled wanly. "You're only saying that to cheer me up, but thanks anyway."

"No, I'm not. Last night I'd probably have had nightmares too, but I self-prescribed a sedative, and slept like the dead. No wonder I'm so groggy today. Over half the crew has asked for them, at least once."

"Really?" Mahree began to feel better. She was suddenly conscious of the warm weight of Rob's arm across her shoulders, the closeness of his body.

She felt herself blushing again.

"Here we are," he said a moment later, stopping before her little cabin.

"Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. Now I want you to march yourself straight to bed. No studying, no nothing, understand?" He gave her a mock-severe glance.

"Yes, Doctor," she said meekly.

He put two fingers under her chin and tipped her face up, his dark eyes studying her intently. Mahree caught her breath as their gazes locked.
He's
going to kiss me,
she thought for a dizzy moment, then her common sense reasserted itself like a dash of icy water.
No, of course he's not.

"Your color isn't good," he said, studying her. "And I don't 40

like the looks of those circles under your eyes. Seriously, do you need something to help you sleep?"

She swallowed. "No, I'll be fine." Even after he dropped his hand, Mahree found that she couldn't look away, that her eyes seemed determined to memorize the details of his face. The roughness beginning to darken his chin and jaw, the new lines etched around his eyes and mouth, the finger-combed dark curls. She felt a sudden, nearly irresistible urge to raise her hand and smooth his hair into place.

Stop it,
she ordered herself, turning away with a jerk, abruptly afraid that he'd noticed--but his voice was unchanged. "Okay, if you're sure," he said. "

'Night Mahree."

"Good night," she said, letting the door slide shut behind her. She leaned against the wall until her heartbeat slowed and her stomach steadied, then took a deep breath, feeling drained.
The green beans,
she thought suddenly, I
forgot to remind him that we have to rig the climbing strings tomorrow.

Quickly she left her cabin and headed back down the corridor toward his, her steps taking her along automatically. She was halfway there when she heard it: a woman's low, throaty murmuring, then a man's voice.

Rob's voice.

Mahree stopped in mid-stride, then cautiously tiptoed to the intersection and peered down the left corridor. She was just in time to see Yoki palm open the door to her cabin and disappear inside. Rob was only a half step behind her.

The door slid shut. Mahree heard the privacy lock activate with a small, distinct
snick.

41

Dear Diary: I
hate
him. I
hate
her. I don't want to talk about it!!!

"Pi, of course," said Jerry decisively. The Communications Chief and Mahree sat hunched over a table in the galley, the terminal on, but nearly obscured by printout flimsies. "That's comparatively easy for the computer to render with a holosketch. We can carry it out to fifteen or twenty places, so they can use that to cross-check their translation of our numbers."

"Pi was certainly the first concept I came up with," Mahree said. "But then I thought of a couple of others. 'Star,' 'planet,' 'moon'--we can demonstrate all of them by presenting a schematic of their own solar system."

"Of course!" Jerry's broad features creased into a grin. "And, more than that, we can probably do 'asteroid,' 'comet,' and maybe 'ring.' "

"Right. And those lead to 'orbit,' and 'year.' They're more abstract, but the computer should be able to illustrate them using a sequence of images."

"Another constant is the speed of light. But first we'll have to figure out their units of measurement."

Mahree nodded. "That brings us back to numbers. But we can
41

42

illustrate them with dots. You know, one dot beside the numeral one, two dots beside the numeral two, and so forth."

"I already thought of that," Jerry said, fumbling through flimsies to produce a sketch. "This what you meant?"

"Yeah, and we can just keep working our way up all the way to scientific notation."

"Providing
their system has visual scanners."

"Ours does, so why shouldn't theirs?"

"Don't forget, Mahree, that all we've gotten from them so far are radio waves.

On Earth they produced radio waves from television broadcasts that escaped into space long before they had computers that were past the punch-card stage."

"I never thought of that." Mahree tapped her pen against her front teeth. "Can we represent going from the very
large
to the very
smalll
Show a star, then focus in on increasingly smaller portions of it until we depict a hydrogen atom? Then show the star converting that to helium?"

"Possible. I'll see what the computer can come up with as a representation.

But probably before we do that, we ought to try the periodic table."

"We could do 'solar system' and 'galaxy,' " Mahree suggested a few minutes later. "Depending, of course, on how advanced their astronomical sciences are."

"They may know more about the universe than we do. We ought to think about chemical laws, also. Like PV = nRT . . . the equation for the perfect-gas law."

"What's that?" asked Rob Gable. The doctor had entered the galley so quietly the two at the table hadn't noticed him. "Something that results after consuming too many helpings of Ramon's refried beans?"

Mahree felt her cheeks grow hot at the sight of him, and struggled to regain her composure. "Very funny, Rob."

Jerry snorted disgustedly. "We're trying to get some serious work done here, Doc, so unless you want to help, keep it zipped. Remember your basic chemistry? The perfect-gas law is the equation of state for an ideal gas. It combines Boyle's law, Charles' law, and Avogadro's principle. Or don't you medical geniuses have to study that anymore?"

Rob ignored the jibe as he bent over to study the list they'd been compiling.

"Are these your constants?"

"So far," Jerry said. "You got any ideas?"

43

"Give me ten minutes with one of them using the 'scope in the infirmary, and I might be able to give you some. DNA, RNA, maybe. Amino acids . . ."He thought for a moment. "If they have physical bodies that are even remotely like ours, then we can use those similarities. 'Eyes,' or 'legs,' for instance."

"I sure as hell
hope
they have physical bodies," Jerry growled. "How could we discover any common frame of reference with beings made out of pure energy?"

"Good question," Rob admitted.

"How much longer?" Mahree asked. She didn't have to specify what she was asking about.

"We should be entering System X in about thirty-six hours. We'd better get busy and finish this," Jerry said, frowning down at their list. He stared at the scribbled figures and sketches for nearly a minute, swore under his breath, then dug at his eyes. "Damn. I can't even think anymore. If I could only get eight peaceful hours in the sack first, I
know
my brain would start functioning again!"

"No offense, Jerry, but I'm detecting unmistakable signs of exhaustion and stress in your behavior," Rob said dryly. "And the last thing we need when we meet these folks is a cranky communications expert, right?"

"Yeah," Jerry admitted reluctantly. "You're prescribing a dose of sleep?''

"Absolutely." Rob watched as the communications tech pushed himself up, then gave him a gentle shove toward the door. "Joan told me it will probably take at least forty-eight hours until we even know which world we're heading for. Get some rest."

"See you later, Jerry," Mahree called. "I'll try and come up with a few more concepts, then start some of the basic programming."

"Thanks, kid," Jerry told her. "You keep working your tail off like this, we'll have to make Raoul cut you in for a share of the profits."

Mahree didn't look up as Rob sank into the seat opposite her. Sekhmet, who had followed her master into the galley, meowed plaintively and the girl leaned over to pick her up. "How are
you
doing today, kiddo?" Rob asked, eyeing her worriedly.

"Fine," she said, hoping he wouldn't notice how puffy her eyes were.

"How did you sleep?"

44

"Okay," she lied.

"You sure? I sense that something's wrong."

"I'm fine, honest. Just jumpy because we're almost there, I guess." Steeling herself, she met his gaze. When she saw the genuine concern on his face, she had to struggle not to blurt out her feelings. She gave herself a stern mental shake. "Are we stil receiving many transmissions?"

"No, they seem to have peaked last night. Now they're slacking off. Joan told me there were only two this past hour." He frowned. "I hope these people are still there when we reach them. We got that first signal pretty far out . . .

they've had decades to destroy themselves, or be swept by a planet-wide plague."

"Jerry predicted this," Mahree said. "Or at least he mentioned that it might happen, if their technological development followed a similar path to Earth's."

"How so?"

"Well, the first radio waves strong enough to escape from Earth and head out into space were generated in the mid-1900s. They've been traveling for about 300 years now."

"Yeah, which means they're now nearly a hundred parsecs-- approximately 300 light-years--from Earth's solar system. I follow you."

"Good. The thing to remember, though, is that if we were on a ship heading to Earth and set our frequencies to pick up those old broadcasts, we'd receive the maximum number of transmissions at a distance of about 250

light-years from Earth. Then, the closer to the planet we got, the fewer we'd receive."

Rob frowned. "That doesn't make sense."

"Yeah, it does, the way Jerry explained it. It's because Earth's technology kept getting more sophisticated. Before the millennium, Earth was the

'dirtiest' radio source in its solar system. It put out far more radio waves than Sol or Jupiter. But as human- technology improved, it got 'cleaner,' although a fair amount of stuff still escapes."

"What do you mean, improved?"

"Their aim at satellites grew "more precise, and they began using technology like buried cables. When they reached that level, they didn't

'lose' nearly so many radio waves by beaming them out into the ionosphere--

unintentionally, of course."

"I see." Rob was impressed. "So the reduction in 45

transmissions we're experiencing might mean that 'System X's technology and ours have something in common."

"It's possible. The closer we get, the 'cleaner' this planet appears as a radio source. Seems to me there's a good chance that's the result of recent technological advances."

The doctor ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. "Wait a minute. That first signal we received was 57 light-years away from System X.

If what Jerry's guessing is true, then their technology has advanced much faster than ours did, comparatively."

"Maybe they're smarter than we are."

Rob grimaced. " 'Maybe,' 'perhaps,' 'possibly'--dammit, I want to
know!"

"We'll find out soon enough," Mahree said, looking down at Sekhmet, who was butting her arm and buzzing for attention.

"Yeah, and being impatient won't make the hours pass any faster. As long as they're still there, I guess I can wait," Rob conceded. "But it would be terrible to find that we'd missed these people by as little as fifty years."

"Have you talked to Uncle Raoul about how we're going to handle this? I mean, if we do find somebody."

"He asked my advice. I don't know whether he'll follow it."