“What?”
Barbary clenched her fists around the handhold.
It has to come back! she thought. It has to!
“It has to be responding,” Thea said, with equal desperation.
“It isn’t. It’s still accelerating.”
After a long silence, during which Barbary was afraid to sneak a look inside the launch chamber, Thea said, “You’re right.”
In the intense quiet, Barbary could hear her own heart pounding. She bit her lip.
“I’m going to the control chamber,” the vice president said. “The military attaché will have to know what’s happened. He’ll be able to deal with the logistics of destroying the probe.”
Barbary froze. The vice president’s chair buzzed toward her. If she jumped out in front of him and asked him not to shoot Mickey —
He would probably laugh at her.
If his bodyguards did not shoot her for jumping out at him.
She hid in a nearby corridor till he, his bodyguards, and Thea and Yukiko entered the elevator, still arguing.
After they were out of sight, Barbary entered the launch chamber. Heather’s raft sat on its tracks, waiting to go out again. Barbary floated to it, opened its door, and slid into the seat.
She stared at the controls. She thought she remembered what Heather had done, but she was not certain. She was not even sure she could figure out in which direction to go to find the alien ship, and Mick’s raft. Away from the sun, she guessed. But there was an awful lot of nothing out there, and rafts were awfully small.
Heather said the computer could drive the raft
She turned it on.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Do you know where the raft with the transmitter is?”
“Yes.”
“I want to go there.”
“Please wait.”
The kaleidoscope patterns appeared. Barbary gritted her teeth. Computers were supposed to know everything instantly.
But if it knew the location of Mick’s raft, why was it making her wait? The only reason she could think of was that it was reporting her.
She slapped the switch that turned off the computer. She did not know if that would keep it from reporting her — if that was what it was doing — but it was the only thing she could think of. She would have to find Mick herself. She pulled down the door and sealed it and tried to remember what control Heather had used first.
“Open up!”
Barbary started at the muffled voice and the rap on the transparent roof.
Heather stared in at her. She looked furious.
Barbary opened the hatch.
“Move over!”
“Heather, they’re going to shoot Thea’s contraption, and Mick’s inside it. I have to stop them.”
“Move over!”
Barbary obeyed.
Heather swung in, slammed the hatch shut, and fastened her seat belt.
“Your computer told me part of it, and I figured out the rest.” She took over the controls.
“Thea tried to make her camera come back, but it wouldn’t.”
“Mick probably knocked loose some of the connections.”
Their raft slid into the airlock. The hatch closed.
“I just hope I got here soon enough to get us out,” Heather said. “I bet they’ll freeze all the hatches in about two seconds, if they haven’t already.”
The outer door slid open.
Heather made a sound of triumph and slammed on the power. The acceleration pushed them both back into their seats.
With the raft accelerating and the station growing smaller behind them, Heather glared at Barbary.
“Now,” she said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“There wasn’t time,” Barbary said.
“Oh.” Heather’s scowl softened. “That’s a good point.”
Barbary squinted into starry space. “How do you know where to go?”
“It’s not that hard. From where the station is now, and the direction and speed the ship’s approaching, it has to be lined up with Betelgeuse, if Atlantis is directly behind us.”
Barbary tried to imagine the geometry of the arrangement Heather described, with all the elements moving independently of one another, and came to the conclusion that it was hard, even if Heather was so used to it that she didn’t know it.
She peered into the blackness, unable to make out anything but the bright multicolored points of stars.
Heather drew a piece of equipment from the control panel.
It looked like a face mask attached to a corrugated rubber pipe. Heather fiddled with a control.
“Here,” she said, and pushed the mask toward Barbary. “You can focus with this knob if you need to.”
The image of the alien ship floated before her, a sharp, clear three-dimensional miniature, a jumble of spheres and cylinders, panels, struts’ and irregularities, some with the hard-edged gleam of metal, some with the softer gloss of plastic, some with a rough and organic appearance, like tree bark. But for all Barbary knew, alien plastic looked like tree bark and their trees looked like steel. If they had trees, or plastic, or steel.
“Can you make it show Mick’s raft?”
“That’s harder,” Heather said, “since I don’t know what course Thea used. But I’ll try.” She bent over the mask, fiddling.
“Hey, Barbary,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Were you really going to come out here all by yourself?”
“I guess so. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“That was brave.”
“Dumb, though,” Barbary said. She never would have remembered the right controls, and she would have headed off in the wrong direction. “I guess you would have had to come out and get me and Mick both.”
“Still, it was brave.”
“Did you find Mick yet?” Barbary asked, embarrassed.
“Uh-uh, not yet.”
“Can we use his transmitter?”
Heather glanced up, frowning.
“We could,” she said, “but we can’t, if you see what I mean. We’d have to use the computer, and if we turn it on it would probably lock our controls and take us home. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”
“Okay,” Barbary said. “How long before we catch up to him, do you think?”
“It sort of depends on how fast the raft went out and how rapidly it was accelerating. Which I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been too fast, or it would use up all its fuel before it got to the ship. Then it wouldn’t be able to maneuver, so it would just fly by very fast. Without much time to take pictures. So it has to be going slowly, instead. Anyway, we ought to catch up within a couple of hours. I don’t want us to run out of fuel — and I don’t want to get going so fast that we go right past without seeing Mick.”
Chapter Twelve
The raft hummed through silent space. Barbary kept expecting the stars to change, to appear to grow closer as the raft traveled toward them. But the stars were so distant that she would have to travel for years and years before even a few of them looked any closer or appeared to move, and even then they would still be an enormous distance away.
“Heather?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for coming with me,” she said.
“Hey,” Heather said, her cheerfulness touched with bravado. “What are sisters for?”
A red light on the control panel blinked on.
“Uh-oh,” Heather said.
“What is it?”
“Radio transmission. Somebody from the station calling us. With orders to come back, probably.”
They stared at the light. Heather reached for the radio headset.
Barbary grabbed Heather’s hand. “If you answer them, they’ll just try to persuade us to turn around.”
“But we ought to at least tell them that it’s us out here,” Heather said.
“They probably already know. If they don’t, maybe we ought to wait until they figure it out.”
“Yoshi will be worried,” Heather said sadly, “when he comes home, and he can’t find us.”