The Ophiuchi Hotline (13 page)

“Just a minute. I’ll do it.” She heard him muttering to himself, then a cry of triumph. “There. They’re all reading zero. Did that do it?”

“I’ll know in a minute. Now we’ve got to think fast. Neither of us wants to fall into the thing. You’re going to have to move the ship a little farther out. Vejay said the gravity field of a hole is very weak at just a small distance, but it increases sharply the closer you get to it. I’ll be all right. But you have to save the ship so we can get back and—”

“It’s too late for that. I didn’t have time to tell you, but the pilot talked to Poseidon before I gassed him. They know we’ve taken over. They’ll be waiting for us. It’s no good, Lilo.” She could hear him choking. Oh, God. Vejay and Niobe and Cass, waiting outside on the chance Lilo and Cathay would return in control of the tug…

“Cathay, we talked about that. They know what to do. If they’re suspected of anything, they’ll hole up with Cass and wait it out. We’ve
got
to get away now, so we can come back with some weapons we can
use.
”

“You’re right. We—”

Everything seemed to happen at once. There was a bright flash behind Lilo. She started to turn, thought better of it. It had to be Vaffa impacting the hole, being condensed by the awful gravity into degenerate matter, releasing all the energy stored in the atoms of his body as raw radiation.

That was bad enough, but ahead of her the tug was moving. A thin spear of light shot from it, angled away from her, and the engines continued to burn.

Jupiter had swallowed up the sky. It was beautiful. Even knowing it would be her death, Lilo had to admit that. And she preferred it to the hole, though her death would not be as quick.

From the time two hours earlier when the tug’s auto-pilot
had performed its preset maneuver (the details, the endless details; how could she have thought of them all?), Lilo had been overcome with a paralyzing lethargy, a certainty of death. Not that she hadn’t struggled against it; she and Cathay had talked over every possible chance of escape. But when the background of stars began to swing around her in a direction she could account for in only one way, she knew her fate was sealed. She had missed the hole, but not by enough.

Vaffa had missed it, too, but by an even smaller margin. His body had come close enough to be compressed into a speck too small to see except for the light of its annihilation. It lasted only a second, then dispersed into space.

Lilo had not come that close. A hole could be a dangerous thing, though not so much from the danger of falling into it. That was very unlikely, since it was so tiny and the space she floated in was so vast. But a near-miss could be fatal. The strength of the gravity field changed sharply as one neared the hole. If Lilo had fallen into a close, hyperbolic orbit around it, the tidal strains induced by the hole’s gravity attracting different parts of her body with varying strength would have torn her apart. Or if she came close enough, as Vaffa had done, the gravity could collapse her body to a pinheadsized mass of neutronium.

She had been lucky, in a way, but not lucky enough. She would remain far enough away from it to stay alive, but she was definitely in a slow orbit around it.

She had discussed it calmly with Cathay. He was going to try getting her with the scooter until she told him what she had seen when the tug boosted. The acceleration had torn the fragile scooter from its moorings and it had come apart. Then he wanted to move the tug in close, but that was out of the question. Even a superbly skilled pilot would not have dared to get that close to the hole.

In a way, Cathay was suffering worse than she was. He still had choices to make, things to do, and none of them was easy. Lilo spelled it out to him with the detached
brutality of one whose fate is certain.

“You can’t go back to Poseidon; not now. They’ll be waiting for you. You have to hope that Cass and the others are okay. You have to go to Saturn. Go to the coordinates I told you, and sit tight. Broadcast on the frequency I gave you. Parameter is not likely to have moved far from the lab, even in a year. I’m out there, somewhere. You have to find me, and Parameter. They’ll help you. You have the tug. You can get weapons somehow. Then come back for the children. Come back, Cathay.”

“I will. But I don’t want to leave. I can’t leave you here.”

“You have to. I don’t want you listening in when…when the end comes. I don’t want that.” She felt the panic just below the surface, and made her voice as hard as possible. “Now
go.
You did everything you could.”

It was not until she noticed a faint pressure on her back that she began to wonder
how
she was going to die.

The pressure built with incredible rapidity. She was slicing straight into Jupiter’s atmosphere, like a meteor, but the suit was going to protect her. An orange glow built up around her, became so bright that she could see nothing else. Her spinning motion stopped as aerodynamic forces stabilized her with her back to the planet, arms and legs pulled out in front of her by the drag. The deceleration built up steeply, but she knew she could take a tremendous amount with the suit lung feeding oxygen into her blood.

The suit became rigid. Now the tugging sensations at her feet and hands were gone. The only sensation of motion was the feeling that her belly was trying to meet her backbone. The skin on her face was drawn tightly to the sides, and her breasts were trying to find new homes in her armpits.

She had no way of knowing how long it went on. There must have been a blackout in there, though she did not recall going under or waking up. But the pressure had stopped. She had reached terminal velocity for the upper atmosphere, and was now falling under
the pull of gravity, almost weightless. She looked around for the hole, which should have been visible as it sucked in the surrounding gases. Then she remembered that the atmosphere would not have slowed the hole at all; it would be halfway through the planet by now. So it would definitely be Jupiter that killed her.

The air was clear, with towering clouds rising around her. From time to time she felt sharp surges of acceleration as the winds caught her and moved her sideways.

It was a timeless thing, the falling. At first she had followed old habits, speculating on how long it would take her to reach the dark clouds below, what the temperature outside her suit field might be, at what point the density of the gases might cause her to float instead of fall. But she became content just to observe. It was a staggering sight. If she had to die, she could do worse than meet death in such surroundings, alone.

That didn’t last. She reached the cloud layer and visibility dropped to zero. There was nothing to see but the silvery hand she held in front of her face to assure herself she had not already died. She wondered if it would be possible to die and not know it.

It began to annoy her that her mind would not stop working. With nothing to do and nothing to see, she began speculating again. What would kill her? Would she survive it all, and live until her oxygen supply ran out? That should be an easy death, gradually losing consciousness and never waking up.

She remembered the exhaust valve on her suit, the metal flower below her collarbone through which waste gas and heat was pumped from her body. It was made from a very tough alloy, but it could heat up, jam, melt—any of a number of things. Death would be quicker that way, and possibly more painful. But there was nothing she could do about it. She felt a momentary regret that she would not make it to the layer of hot liquid hydrogen. That would have been something to see.

Later, more soberly, she realized it would probably be as dull as this lousy cloud layer she was passing through.

But now she burst out of the cloud layer. A vast, dim
space lay open beneath her. At that, it was still much brighter than she would have expected from the thickness of the cloud layer above.

For some reason, her fear returned then with paralyzing intensity. There was nothing she could do to prevent it. Some part of her mind had taken another look at her situation, concluded she had no hope of surviving, and did not want to accept it.

She suffered another blackout, or an episode of insanity. The clouds were much closer now, a blend of red and violet shapes fringed with bright sparks—(
white, with fluffy gray bottoms
)—tumbling and boiling like a cauldron of electric eels.

There were some yellow shapes just visible, darting from the cloud bank below her—(
above me, floating in a blue sky
)—into the clearer air, then back into obscurity. They were almost certainly alive. She wondered if they were Invaders, or members of the intelligent Jovian race, or simply animals.

(
The ground beneath me was soft, yielding. I grabbed a handful of it; it trickled through my fingers. Sand. I writhed deeper into it, trying to bury myself. A breeze cooled my body, and blew the soft white clouds past me in the blue sky. A yellow shape darted from one of the clouds
)—and back into the cloud bank again. They were getting closer. Her detached calm had returned to her now, and she wondered if they would try to eat her. It made her eyes hurt to try to look at them—

(
Left, right, receding from me, then
…Ouch!
My eyes crossed, and my head started to hurt. I buried my face in my hands, welcoming the hurting grit I rubbed over my face. I rolled in the sand, over and over, hard beneath me, wetness, sliding
)—it was rising, coming directly at her. Her eyes could not define its shape. In the center of it, if it could be said to have a center, was a hole, and in the middle of the hole was a tree—(
a tree
)—and the feeling of sand in her mouth, water—(
rushing over me, rolling me, pulling, in my mouth and nose
)—salt and sand and a roaring noise. Disorientation, time
running sidewise, nausea building in the pit of her stomach—

I stood up in the surf and swayed drunkenly, naked, soaking wet, dizzy. I took a step and fell over as the ground lurched. On hands and knees, I vomited into the foamy water. I began to crawl, dazed, my whole attention focused on the wet strands of hair dangling down in front of me, swaying back and forth. I saw my hands grip the sand, and they might have belonged to someone else.

The sun was setting. It was the most glorious thing Lilo had ever seen.

She huddled under a clump of windblown shrubbery, hugging her legs close to her. The wind was coming off the sea, and it was cold. Her teeth chattered. It was possible that she would freeze to death before the night was over, and she had no idea of what to do about it.

It was impossible for her to recall when she had decided that she was not dead, that this was not the afterlife. For many hours she had sprawled in the sand, insensible, her mind overloaded with too many impossible things. Rational awareness had returned only gradually, cautiously, ready to retreat at any moment.

The cold had helped. Awareness of discomfort had forced her to marshal her wits, to crawl into the thin shelter of the tree, to draw her body into compactness to combat the chill.

Looking out over the ocean with the sun setting behind her, it had come to her that she knew where she was. Stars came out one by one and flickered weakly. So they
did
twinkle, it wasn’t a fairy tale for kids.

Night fell, and after many hours of shivering and growing hunger, something rose over the water. It was Luna.

She was sitting on the continent of North America, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The land was flat. Lilo had been walking south along
the beach for several hours. Once she had gone inland a few hundred meters, but the ground was soft and wet and clouds of insects rose to torment her. Her skin was dotted with welts.

Thus far she had no real plan except to keep moving. She hoped to find some sort of shelter, and possibly plants that she could eat. She had studied some green berries and a type of brown seaweed, tasted both, and moved on. It would take a lot more hunger to drive her to that. The idea of trapping and eating animals was one she was avoiding. All the meats she had ever eaten came from mutated plants. She had not yet considered that she might not be able to catch anything. Part of her mind could not stop thinking that this was a disneyland beneath the Lunar surface. It would be easy to believe that, except for the constant heaviness she felt. Her ankles and calves were throbbing from the gravity and the constant sliding of the sand underfoot.

The beach narrowed to a point; the north arm of a large bay lay to the west. She sank down on the sand and looked across to the land on the other side. It was too far to swim, so she had to decide if she should retrace her steps or strike out along the inside of the bay. There was no way to tell from where she sat if it really was a bay, or if she was on an island.

It was a shock to realize how tired she was. Her head was spinning, and she felt overheated. The sand felt very good as she stretched out on it and rolled over on her side to shield her face from the sun. In minutes, she was asleep.

Lilo woke to pain such as she had never known.

She came to her feet screaming, feeling that she was on fire, frantic to put it out. But touching herself only brought more pain.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. The few times she had hurt herself the pain had been easily controllable; help had been as near as the first-aid terminal on every corner. When the pain had gone on for fifteen minutes and gave no sign of abating, she became hysterical
and ran blindly down the beach until she fell.

After a while she noticed something. It hurt just as badly as before, but it could be lived with. She sat up, wiped the tears away, and examined herself. She was cherry-red from her ankles to her shoulders. She had received first-degree radiation burns all over her backside.

It had not occurred to her that this could happen on Earth. The atmosphere was supposed to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, or else how could life survive? Never had she needed to think about the possible harmful effects of sunlight. The only times she had encountered it, she had been either in a suit or beneath screening plastic in a public solarium.