The Aftermath (7 page)

“Sure!” said Angie, brightening a little.

“Trouble is,” Theo went on, “we've been busting along at a pretty high delta vee. Dad goosed the main engines before he split.”

“So we're accelerating too much for another ore ship or a miner to reach us?” Pauline asked.

“I've shut down the main engine,” Theo repeated. “We're not accelerating anymore, just coasting. But still, we're spitting along damn fast. I don't know if one of the rock rats could catch up to us, even if they wanted to.”

His mother didn't flinch at his minor vulgarity. She's just as scared as Angie, Theo thought, but she hides it better.

“Eight years,” Angie repeated, in a whisper.

Theo nodded. He knew their hydrogen fuel wouldn't last anywhere near that long. The reactor would shut down and the ship would lose all its electrical power well before then. They'd freeze and choke to death when the heaters and air recyclers shut down.

“Well then,” their mother said, as brightly as she could manage, “once the antennas are working again we can call for assistance. With
Chrysalis
gone, there must be a lot of rock rats stranded out here in the Belt calling back toward Earth for help.”

“Guess so,” Theo said.

“So fixing the antennas is our first priority,” Pauline continued. “Thee, what can we do to help you?”

He glanced at Angie and thought, Keep out of my way. But to his mother he said, “I don't know yet. I've got some studying to do.”

For the next two days Theo stayed mostly in his own compartment studying the tutorials and maintenance videos about the antennas. He saw that he would have to go outside to assess the damage that the attacker's laser beams did. The maintenance robots could be helpful, but only if he could program them with exact instructions.

He was stretched out on his bunk, so intent on the maintenance video that he didn't hear the scratching on his privacy partition.

“Thee? You in there?” Angie's voice.

He yanked the plug out of his ear and looked up. His sister inched the accordion-fold partition back a sliver. “Can I come in?”

“
May
I come in,” he corrected.

Angie pushed the partition wide open. “May I. All right. Satisfied?”

“Come on in,” he said, swinging his stockinged feet to the tiled deck. He clicked the remote and the instruction vid disappeared from the screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.

Angie sat in the spindly little desk chair, her fists clenched on her knees.

“How's it going?” she asked.

“Okay. I'm learning a lot about how the antennas work. I'll have to go outside and check the damage. Prob'ly tomorrow.”

“You want me to go with you? You know, like backup?”

He started to say that she'd be more trouble than help, but bit back the reply and answered instead, “You could be a big help by monitoring me from the control pod.”

Angie's eyes widened eagerly. “I could do that,” she said.

“Okay. Good. I'll tell Mom.”

“Thee?”

“What?”

“She cries.”

“Who? Mom?” A blast of something close to panic jolted through him.

Nodding, fighting back tears herself, Angie said, “At night. After we go to bed. I can hear her in her compartment. She tries to muffle it but I can hear her crying.”

Theo couldn't believe his mother was afraid of anything. “It's about Dad, I bet. She's crying about Dad.”

“You don't really think he ran away from us, do you?”

“What else? We're here and he's not.”

“But Mom says he did it to protect us. To draw the attack ship away from us.”

A thousand thoughts raced through Theo's mind, all jumbled up, blurring together.

“Thee, you don't really think he abandoned us, do you?”

He shook his head. “It doesn't matter what I think. Dad's prob'ly dead.”

“No!”

“Most likely. But we're alive, and I intend to keep us that way.”

*   *   *

Victor Zacharias was alive, but starving.

The pod in which he was coasting sunward carried only a minifridge's worth of packaged food: mostly sandwiches and preserved fruits. He had been living on one sandwich and one piece of fruit per twenty-four hours. His stomach rumbled hollowly.

As the pod sailed silently through the dark emptiness he had plenty of time to think. And plan.

The pod had an emergency transponder that could beam out a distress signal. But it was a notoriously weak signal, Victor knew, and bound to be swamped by the comm chatter that would be sweeping over the area where
Chrysalis
once orbited Ceres. It was bitterly ironic, he thought: There must be whole fleets of rescue and salvage ships heading for Ceres, a regular armada of vessels and people. But they wouldn't be looking for a small, weak-voiced pod hurtling inward from the Belt, thousands of kilometers from the asteroid.

How can I get them to notice me? Victor asked himself. He pondered that question through the long, lonely hours he spent in the command chair, staring at his useless instruments and sensors. He dreamed about it when he cranked the reclining chair back and willed himself to sleep. He worried that the nanobatteries powering the pod's systems would run dry, but then he realized he'd starve to death long before that happened.

At first he thought his hunger would be a sharp prod that would make him think. After a week he realized that starvation dulled the mind. No brilliant ideas surfaced; all he could think of was food.

He wished he had the mental discipline of a Buddhist monk, capable of submerging himself into deep meditation. Victor's mind was not so trained. He wanted an idea, a plan, a scheme. He wanted action, not the oblivion of Nirvana.

He wanted, above all, to get back to Pauline and the children. With a shake of his head he reminded himself, They're not children anymore. Angela's ready for marriage. Theo is a man in every way except experience.

And still the pod drifted, like a leaf caught in a tide, like a manmade asteroid sweeping along in its mindless orbit.

Feeling weaker each day, Victor forced himself to check and recheck every item of equipment in the pod. Every piece of hardware, every computer program, every system. There's got to be something here that I can use as a tool, something that I can use to get noticed, to get rescued.

Again and again he checked his inventory. There was a communications laser built into the pod's outer hull, but lasers were strictly for line-of-sight communications. Radio waves spread out like ripples on a pond, but the tight beam of a laser was good for communications only if it was pointed directly at the ship you wanted to communicate with.

I could make the laser swing around in a circle, Victor thought. That might catch some ship someplace. But he knew that was a tactic of desperation. The chances of his pencil-thin laser beam reaching another ship's receiving sensor were little better than the chances of being struck by lightning out here in the middle of empty space.

Yet that night he dreamed of a star shining in the soft night sky of Earth. The star pulsated. Shepherds gathered in the desert and marveled at it.

When he woke he thought he must be getting irrational. “Next thing you know you'll be dreaming about Santa Claus,” he growled at himself.

He fought off sleep but eventually it overpowered him. And he dreamed again of the star blinking in the cloudless sky of a desert on Earth. Blinking. Blinking.

Victor awoke with a new sense of purpose. The first thing I've got to do is modify the laser, he told himself. Get its pulses down into the petasecond range. The shorter the pulses, the more power in each pulse. Each pulse will carry megawatts worth of power, plenty bright enough to see on Earth. There must be thousands of astronomers looking at the stars each night. They'll have to notice me!

But first I've got to modify the laser.

*   *   *

Theo was soaking in a hot shower after long hours in his space suit, working outside on the slagged antennas. Whoever their attacker was, he had done a thorough job of destroying the antennas: long ugly gashes sliced through the metallic monolayer that had been sprayed along
Syracuse
's curving outer hull and gutted the fusion engine's propellant tanks beneath them.

He let the steaming water relax his cramped and aching muscles. Neither Mom nor Angie tried to hurry him out of the shower. What the hell, he rationalized, the water's recycled. We're not losing any of it: it just goes into the purifiers and back to the holding tank. He remembered when he was a kid, maybe seven years old, and he'd taken a pair of welder's goggles into the shower with him and pretended he was swimming underwater on Earth, like the vids he'd seen. After three-quarters of an hour Dad got sore, he recalled, but Mom laughed when Dad told her about it.

I can repair the antennas, Theo told himself. I know what to do and how to go about it. The maintenance robots can do most of the outside work, all I've got to do is program them and feed them the right materials. Tomorrow I'll go through the logistics files and find what I need.

But the next morning he found that the monomolecular spray that made up the antennas was not listed in the logistics files. Theo spent the next two days searching through the stores in the ship's storage bays. No antenna spray.

Spit in my hat, he groused to himself, I'm gonna have to make it up from scratch.

By dinner time of the second day he was thoroughly angry.

“How could Dad let us sail out here without the proper materials to repair the antennas?” he grumbled into his bowl of soup.

“Are you sure—” Angie began.

“I'm sure!” Theo snapped. “The stuff isn't there. Never was. He let us cruise through the Belt without the material we need to repair the antennas. Our main antennas, for crying out loud!”

Pauline kept her face from showing any emotion. “You'll have to produce the antenna spray from the materials we have on board, then, Theo. That's what your father would do, I suppose.”

He glared at her. “No. Dad would just wave a magic wand and the antennas would fix themselves.”

“Theo.”

“Or more likely the antennas wouldn't dare get damaged long's Dad's in charge.”

His mother drew in a long breath. Then she said, “Theo, the antennas did get damaged while your father was on board. Now it's up to you to repair them.”

He stared down into his unfinished soup. “Yeah. It's up to me.”

COLUMBUS, OHIO: COSETI HEADQUARTERS

Even after more than three quarters of a century, the headquarters of the Columbus Optical Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence was hardly imposing. It consisted of a lovingly preserved but unpretentious wooden frame house, a much newer brick two-story building for offices and workshops, and the Kingsley Observatory, which housed beneath its metal dome a sturdy two-meter Schmidt reflector telescope.

The homes adjacent to COSETI headquarters had long been demolished after being inundated time and again by the Scioto River, which had overflowed much of Columbus in the greenhouse floods. Now the headquarters grounds were surrounded by a low earthen levee, almost like the long mysterious mounds that the original Native Americans had built in the region a thousand years earlier.

Jillian Hatcher was bubbling with excitement. She bent over the desk of the observatory's director, a small, slim blonde woman filled with the energy and exhilaration of discovery.

“It's real!” she shouted, tapping the computer screen on her boss's desk. “I found it! I found it!”

She practically danced around the small, cluttered office.

Dwight Franklin smiled at her. Although he contained his excitement as best as he could, he too felt a thrill shuddering along his spine. “After all these years,” he murmured.

Franklin had a square, chunky build. His thinning hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. Sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he looked more like a clerk or an accountant than a world-renowned astronomer.

“The pulses are regular!” Jillian said, dancing back to his desk. “It's a message! A message from an extraterrestrial civilization!”

“Looks intriguing, I've got to admit,” said Franklin. “Where in the sky—”

“The region of Sagittarius!” she crowed. “The heart of the Milky Way!”

“And it's fixed in its position? It's not a satellite or a spacecraft?”

Jillian's beaming face faded a little. “I haven't tracked it yet.”

Franklin got up from his creaking desk chair. “Let's see if we can get a firm fix on it.”

She sank into silence and followed him out into the chill November night. Clouds were building up along the western horizon but most of the sky was clear as crystal. Orion and the Bull sparkled above them. Jillian picked out the Pleiades cluster and bright Aldebaran.

The observatory was freezing cold with the dome open but they walked past the silent framework of the Schmidt telescope and into the tiny control room. It was heated, and Jillian was grateful for that.

Half an hour later her excitement had evaporated like a shallow pan of water over a hot fire.

Franklin looked up from the computer screen, a fatherly look of sympathy on his face.

“It's a spacecraft, I'm afraid.”

“Are you sure?” Jillian asked, desperate. “Positive?”

He gestured toward the display. “See for yourself. It's out in the Asteroid Belt, and it's definitely moving.”

“It's not a star.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“No.”

Jillian felt like crying. But then a new thought popped into her head. “So why is a spacecraft out in the Belt sending pulsed laser messages toward Earth? What's he trying to say?”