"I'm glad you're not running things," said Kellie.
MacAllister agreed. "There'd be a lot more direct action," he assured them.
"So," said Nightingale, unable to let it go, "the great atheist defends theology."
MacAllister shrugged. "Not theology," he said. "Belief."
The conversation reminded Hutch, if she needed reminding, how frightened she was. She worried about how she'd respond if the rescue plan didn't work.
Nightingale studied her, and that dark gaze seemed to penetrate her soul. He reached over and touched her wrist. "It's okay," he said. "Whatever happens, we're in it together."
NOTEBOOKS OF KANDALL NIGHTINGALE
It's good to be in the lander. Even though it can't get us out of here, at least we've regained a sense of minimal control over what's happening. I can't explain it, but being relegated to walking around in the woods for several days left me feeling absolutely powerless. Maybe things haven't changed a whole lot, but it's nice to be able to take off, and to look down on the real estate. It makes me feel human again.
On the other hand, maybe it's just a result of feeling safe from the local wildlife.
— December 5 or thereabout
Guided by Wendy, Hutch set down on an island to wait for the midday tide to recede. They were about fifteen klicks west of the tower.
"How long?" asked Mac.
"Make yourself comfortable," she said. "It'll be a few hours."
"That's a lot of wasted time, Hutch. Why don't we just go in and get started?"
"We'd get washed away. Be patient."
He stared out the window at the vast inland sea. "Patience requires time, Priscilla," he said.
"Gunther." Janet the welder was unhappy. "I've just been asked a question I don't know how to answer."
"Go ahead," said Beekman.
"All the shafts look the same. We've got teams spread out along 420 kilometers of the assembly, every eighty klicks."
"Where the braces are," said Beekman.
"Right. And we are going to free a single shaft and the asteroid from the rest of the construct."
"Okay. What's the problem?"
"To do that, we have to cut the shaft free from the braces. We have five braces to deal with, plus the configuration where the assembly joins the asteroid, which is a plate. My question to you is this: We do not want to extract the central shaft because it involves too much cutting and manipulation. By far, the easiest course is to cut and remove one of the outer shafts."
"And?"
"How can we be sure that each team works to free the same shaft? The thing's too long. The shafts are all identical. There's no way I can see to distinguish them."
"Oh." Beekman apparently hadn't thought about it either. "I suppose we could send a shuttle out. Mark the damned thing."
"You mean wait while a shuttle paints a stripe down one of them?
That'll take too long. We don't have that kind of time. Or, I suspect, that much marker."
Beekman frowned. She wondered whether other issues like this would come up, things no one had foreseen. "What about a hammer?" she suggested.
"What would we do with a hammer?"
"Rap on the shaft. Give each team a sonocap from Medical. Let them listen for it. I'd think the vibrations would carry, even over eighty klicks."
He made a face suggesting he didn't think much of the idea. "I'm not versed in sonics," he said. "But the shafts are connected at the braces. So they'd all vibrate. The amplitude would be different, I suppose, but I wouldn't feel confident with that kind of approach."
"What then?"
He took a deep breath. Exhaled.
Several members of her team were waiting below in the area they'd newly designated O Deck for the Outsiders. "Let me get back to you."
He was back in five minutes. "All right," he said. A detail of the assembly blinked onto one of her screens. "The shafts are regularly spaced. Eight on the perimeter. Six on the inner arc. One in the center."
The detail rotated, illustrating.
"If you look straight through it, there's only one position in which five shafts line up. We'll use one of the outer shafts from that position."
"Which one?"
"That's easy enough. One end of the assembly is pointed directly at the center of Deepsix. Have someone stand on top of the assembly. The shaft at the top that matches up will be the Alpha shaft. The one we use."
"How do we determine the top of the assembly?"
"Easy. Reckon from the planet. From the north pole. North is the top."
"Are we sure everyone will be able to find the north pole?"
"They won't have to. Instruct the pilot to align the shuttle so that the north pole equates to topside." His brow wrinkled. "I can't see any reason why it won't work."
"That's good, Gunther," she said.
He laughed. "That's why they pay me the big money." He thought about it some more. "Arrange things so all the teams make the mark at the same time. Don't forget the assembly's moving."
Beekman had just finished describing his solution to Marcel when his screen lit up. It was Mark Bentley, a fellow planetologist whose specialty was gas-giant cores. He was currently director of Moonbase's Farside Observatory, and a longtime close friend. In his spare time, Bentley was an accomplished amateur actor.
He looked unhappy. "I wouldn't want you to misunderstand, Gunny," he said. "But we're sacrificing everything we came here for."
Beekman knew that. A substantial number of the experiments weren't even running. Specialists had been pulled off their assignments and put on the rescue operation. Worst of all, Wendy was on the wrong side of Deepsix, her view of developing events limited to what she could see through her satellites. The mission was turning into a fiasco. "I know," he said. "What would you have me do?"
"Call it off."
Beekman was shocked. "What?"
"Gunny, I'd like to see those people out of there as much as anybody. But the scoop is a long shot at best." He was quiet for a minute, apparently thinking how he was going to defend the indefensible. "Can I be honest?"
"You always have been."
"The chance to watch this thing close up, it's too much to let get away. Gunny, the truth is, it's worth a few lives, if that's what it takes."
Beekman was surprised at his own reaction: Bentley was not necessarily wrong. From one point of view.
"Let it go," he continued. "You know what's going to happen: Something'll go wrong, the operation won't work, they'll all die anyhow, and we'll be left looking like idiots because we came all the way out here and got nothing."
"Mark, what would you have me do? We can't just write them off."
Bentley was quiet for a long minute. He knew. He understood it was not an easy decision. "I think they've been written off. By events. Somebody needs to point that out to Marcel."
Beekman felt a terrible weariness creeping up his insides.
"I'm not the only person here who feels this way, Gunny. It's not just me." He held out his hands. "Look, if there were a decent chance
of getting them off, I'd say go ahead. I wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd be willing to go along with it. But this isn't a decent chance. It's a gesture. And that's all it is. It's being done so when we go back, Clairveau can say he did everything he could. You know as well as I do that you can't make this work."
"I think we can," he said.
Bentley continued as if he hadn't spoken. "We won't have another opportunity like this. Not in our lifetimes. Maybe not in the lifetime of the species."
Beekman didn't know what was right.
"How the hell are we going to explain this when we go home?" demanded Bentley. "No we didn't save them, and no we didn't see the event. We were there, but we were busy."