Chapter 30
Matt knelt over Rudy, trying to awaken him, trying to breathe some semblance of life into him. “Nothing?” asked Antonio.
“Can’t be sure.” Matt didn’t want it to be true. God, he didn’t want that. Rudy dead. Why the hell had they come down here anyway? For a goddam book? He took it, the one Rudy still cradled, and, still on his knees, threw it against the wall.
Antonio was shining his light up the staircase. “We need to get out of here, Matt. There might be more of these things around.”
“Yeah.” He bent over Rudy again, felt for a pulse, for a heartbeat, anything. Finally, he gave up, and they lifted his body.
The serpentine corpse partially blocked the staircase.
They climbed past it, hanging on to Rudy, trying not to touch the thing. Matt found himself thanking God Rudy didn’t weigh more.
They got to the top. And to the end of the snake. When they were past it, they stopped to rest a few moments. Then they stumbled into the supply room. The cable was still in place.
As soon as they put the body down, Antonio turned and started back into the corridor. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Get the books.”
“You can’t go back down there, Antonio,” he said. “Let them go.”
He stopped in the doorway. “What do you think Rudy would have wanted?”
There was something in Antonio’s eyes. Sadness. Contempt. Weariness, maybe. He’d seen how Matt had reacted. Had seen him jump when the serpent appeared. Knew that, instead of playing the heroic role he’d assigned himself, he’d fallen down the stairs, fallen on top of Rudy, anything to get away. “Wait,” said Matt. “You’ll need a hand.”
When the link began working again, he contacted Hutch and gave her the news. She told him she was sorry and had to fight for control of her voice. She was on her way down from the Preston, and when they climbed out of the hole, carrying Rudy’s body, and bringing one of the two books with them—one had gotten lost somewhere, was probably beneath the dead animal—her lander was already visible coming in over the snowfields.
She landed a few meters away and got out. They laid Rudy in the snow, and she knelt beside him. One of the problems with the hard shell the force field throws over the face is that you couldn’t wipe your eyes.
When she’d regained control she stood up. “You guys okay?” she asked.
“We’re good,” said Matt. She carried a rhino gun. “Where’s Jon?”
“In the McAdams. I didn’t have time to pick him up.” She looked down the side of the mountain, gazed at the broken tower, at Antonio. She was trying to say something else. And finally it came: “Was it quick?”
Matt nodded.
Other than that, she didn’t say much. Told Matt and Antonio thanks. Embraced them. Then she suggested they not hang around. They opened the cargo locker and lifted Rudy inside.
When they got back to the McAdams, they froze Rudy’s body and put it in storage. As captain of the ship on which he’d been a passenger, and as a longtime friend, Hutch would perform the memorial service. She’d brought along a captain’s uniform, with no expectation of having to wear it.
During the ceremony she realized how little she actually knew about Rudy. She knew about his passion for stellar investigation, and his longtime desire to find an alien culture with whom it would be possible to communicate. She knew his politics, his contempt for a government that, in his view, had used the endless war against greenhouse gases as an excuse to eliminate funding for the Academy. But the inside personal stuff remained a mystery. She had no idea, for example, whether, despite his start as a seminarian, he had still subscribed to a formal religion, although, judging from various comments over the years, she doubted it. She didn’t know why his wives had bailed on him. He’d been an attractive man, congenial, armed with a sense of humor. During the years she’d been associated with him, there had been occasional women, but he’d never really formed a serious relationship with anyone. At least not that she knew of.
He’d been a decent guy, a good friend, a man she could trust to back her if she needed it. What more mattered?
He had a brother in South Carolina, a sister in Savannah. She’d met the sister, years ago. She wished it were possible to communicate with them, let them know. She’d have to wait until they got home, which meant, until then, his death would be hanging over her head.
When she took her place before the others, when she began to explain why Rudy mattered so much, she was surprised to discover that her voice shook. She had to stop a couple of times. She tried surreptitiously to wipe her eyes, and finally she poured everything out. He’d stood for all the things she believed in. He’d never backed off even though other careers had been so much more lucrative than the Foundation. And in the end, he’d sacrificed everything, a decent married life, the respect of his colleagues, and ultimately life itself, to the idea that humans had a greater destiny than hanging around the house.
Antonio said simply that he’d liked Rudy, that he’d been good company, and that he’d miss him.
Jon expressed his appreciation for Rudy’s support. “Without him,” he said, “we wouldn’t have gotten out here.”
Matt started by saying he’d known Rudy only a short time. He thanked him, surprisingly, for giving him something to live for. And ended by blaming himself for his death. “I took my eyes off the top of the staircase. The steps were so hard to navigate. The thing just came out of nowhere. And I panicked. He was depending on me, and I panicked.”
“I don’t know anybody,” Hutch told him, “who wouldn’t have reacted the same way. Give yourself a break.”
She’d lost people on prior missions. It had started a lifetime ago, on Quraqua, when she’d been perhaps not as quick as she should have been, and Richard Wald had died. There’d been other decisions that had gone wrong. She might have allowed them to haunt her, to drive her to her knees. But she’d done her best at the time. And that was all anyone could reasonably ask. No one had ever died because she’d screwed around.
“It happens,” she told Matt. “If you do these kinds of flights, going places no one’s ever been before, there’s always a risk. We all accept that. You do your best. If something happens, something goes wrong, you have to be able to live with it. And move on.”
Easy to say. She’d remember all her life watching the oversized white serpent slither down into the hole Matt and the others had dug, and her sense of helplessness while she tried to get them on the link—Come on, Matt, answer up, please—the whole time running for the lander, climbing into an e-suit, telling Jon what was happening and why she couldn’t stop to go to the McAdams to pick him up.
Jon took her aside and asked whether they shouldn’t terminate the flight and return home. The tradition at the Academy in such cases had been flexible, which was to say there had been no tradition. In the event of a fatality, sometimes the mission went forward. Sometimes it was terminated. The decision had been left to the survivors. They knew best.
The Academy had suffered relatively few losses over the years. The wall that served as a memorial to those who had died on Academy missions had never come close to using the allotted space. It still stood in its time-honored place, near the Galileo Fountain on the edge of what had been the Academy grounds.
“We’ve made our point,” Jon persisted. “The Locarno works fine. Why bother going farther?”