A milk run, she thought. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the crater—something we could do ourselves. She had talked Clancy into doing it, looking for another excuse to get him alone. It should have been a piece of cake—watch the weavewire harness impact, scoop it up, and get back to Clavius Base within an hour.
Her eyes lit on the six-pack a hundred yards away.
She’d better start moving. She took the distance at a lope. Once the electric motor started, she backed the six-pack to within a few yards of Clancy.
Clancy moaned into his suit radio. At least it was some sound. The ones hurt really bad didn’t make any noise. Shen bent over him and pressed her helmet against his. She could not make out his garbled words.
She bent to pick him up and looked for a place to hold on. Clancy was a full foot taller and outweighed her by eighty pounds. Once the space suit was thrown in, she was dealing with a hundred fifty pound differential in normal gravity. Even though he only weighed about fifty pounds on the Moon, inertia still made a difference.
Shen got her hands under his armpits and pulled him off the ground. It seemed as if she were tugging him through thick jelly. “I thought you were slim and trim, Cliffy!” She coughed with the effort and staggered to her feet, trying to balance Clancy’s bulk without jarring him too much.
Carrying him in her arms, she felt like an absurd parody of an old Frankenstein movie—a petite female monster hauling a big lunk of a victim. She felt her suit straining to combat her exertion and keep her internal environment regulated.
Clancy’s suit continued its constricting motions. The sedatives seemed to have taken effect—his blood pressure was down, as well as his respiration rate. At least he was stabilizing.
Shen gingerly placed Clancy on the six-pack’s flatbed and secured him there with a cable. She didn’t plan to follow the speed-limit signs on the way back to the base, and she certainly didn’t want her cargo to fall overboard.
She scrambled to the operator’s console, keeping an eye on Clancy as she started the engine. She moved the six-pack forward and started for the steep pass through the crater wall.
Only fifteen minutes had passed since the canister from Orbitech 1 had landed. Shen had a fix on its location, but that was far in the back of her mind as she pushed the vehicle to its limits toward Clavius Base.
Duncan McLaris absently tapped a dual-end pen on his desk. One end contained carbon ink for writing on paper surfaces; the other was a magnetic scribe for use on a flatscreen. Tomkins’s once-cluttered office looked organized; it gleamed. McLaris had removed and stored the stacks of computer readouts and pictures of radio telescopes. The noise from the pen’s tapping bounced through the room.
McLaris focused his mind on a single topic—a burning question to which he already knew the answer. And the answer made him feel sick inside.
In the excitement following Clancy’s proposal of the yo-yo, and Brahms’s agreement to try, no one else seemed worried about the most important question of all—who would risk their lives in the attempt? Who would have to go to Orbitech 1?
Part of the answer was obvious—Tomkins and many of the others were so immersed in their work that they didn’t want to be disturbed. But others, especially Clancy’s engineers, ached for a chance to get off the “Rock.” It would indeed be an experience of a lifetime.
But who really would get the most out of being sent? Clancy himself was the first obvious choice, since it was his invention—if he wanted to go. Someone else in his crew would go next. But yet … they couldn’t send just engineers; they needed someone who would make the event meaningful, an emissary—someone who could make this joining of the colonies truly memorable. Someone to make speeches and give good holotank footage.
McLaris stopped tapping his dual-end pen and bent it between his fingers.
He knew who else should go—someone who had ties back on Orbitech 1 … someone who had the vision to pull the separate colonies together and ensure the survival of the colonists.
Someone who needed to face up to the fact that he had stolen and destroyed the last regular means for the colonies to visit each other.
McLaris’s pen broke in half. He looked at the two pieces, bewildered, thinking how foolish it would be to try and put them back together again.
Once the six-pack climbed through the pass, Rutherford Crater sloped down to the monotonous plain where Clavius Base lay. Shen pushed the vehicle to its full speed, driving without relying on its inertial navigation system to find her way back. She turned on the emergency beacon, and she knew Clavius would be standing by with help when she got in. But until she came within line of sight of a receiver, she couldn’t depend on anybody else.
Clancy’s suit diagnostics were tied in to the six-pack through a light fiber; Shen kept his vital signs flashed on the vehicle’s heads-up display across the front screen. The numbers shimmered in a ghostly image from the holographic projection. Looking at Clancy’s life signs, she didn’t want to think about ghosts.
Two other six-packs appeared as dots across the plain, growing in size as they raced toward her. What good are they supposed to do? she wondered. I’m already trucking as fast as I can. She ignored their radio calls and drove on, not slowing down for fear of cutting Clancy’s time.
The low mounds and transmitting towers of the base showed up on the flat pan of the crater floor. Wide tracks from the other six-packs looked like the marks of a giant doodlebug around the center of the settlement. Not until she pulled up to the main airlock at Clavius Base did she allow anyone to help her—and then only to carry Clancy into the clinic.
Shen didn’t leave his side as they cycled through the big doors. Three medics hauled Clancy’s bulk between them, pushing her aside.
As he was carried away, Clancy mumbled something unintelligible. If those are his last words, Shen thought, he damn well better be saying how much he loves me.
Chapter 46
ORBITECH 1—Day 50
Harhoosma’s lab space would not be private enough. Other people, other listeners, were dangerous things to have nearby.
Allen Terachyk recalled the lesson shown by Linda Arnando’s mistake: privacy could no longer be assumed on Orbitech 1 unless one took elaborate precautions beforehand. Terachyk wanted no eavesdroppers, no way for sharp ears to hear his words and report them back to Brahms.
He entered the vacuum welders’ zero-G lab space without announcing himself. The smell of feed chemicals and raw materials hung in the air. Smoke floated near the burns; without gravity, it could not rise to the ventilator filters. Large fans on either side of the room kept the air stirred. On the wall, a cheery red sign reminded them that Orbitech 1 considered “Safety First!”
Three men and one woman floated at the far wall of the chamber, pressed against a transparent shield with their hands thrust into gloves that extended to a vacuum chamber outside. In the cold and microgravity of space, they tested welding techniques, different filler metals or base alloys. The welders did not need to worry about heated metals absorbing oxygen or nitrogen in the vacuum, which would have made a weld brittle and weak.
Other workers practiced simple zero-G welding at several modules, spraying argon or helium shielding onto the metal, trying new flux compositions that would not separate in the weightless environment. Some of the operations hissed and sputtered with plasma arcs and molten metal; others used silent electrical-resistance welding, while the workers chatted in forced conversation.