Tomkins thought for a moment. “The Moon is still a big place for it to land.”
Shen turned toward Tomkins, but her gold-coated visor blocked off any view of her face. “You didn’t see how close that first harness hit where it was supposed to. Dead on. It’ll get here.”
“Then everything should go as planned.” He sensed some other worry in her. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
“Yes, it should, shouldn’t it?”
Tomkins started to reply, but he kept quiet. Shen’s sarcastic tone left him puzzled. It seemed out of place, especially on such an important occasion. He could understand her feelings for Clancy and her concern for his safety. Yet the sense he was getting was more than just “my lover is leaving.”
Tomkins sighed. Much as he had disliked his years in management, they had left him with a few rudimentary processes for dealing with human problems.
He asked softly, “Did I miss something about the journey? I was under the impression that the yo-yo was straightforward—once the weavewire hook arrives, it’ll be attached to the hook already in place. It’s a thousand times less complicated than building and piloting a spacecraft.”
He heard Shen snort at him. He hated these helmets—he could not see her expression. He continued, “Well, a constant tenth of a G acceleration isn’t going to harm them, either. So what’s up?”
The six-pack bounced over a rock Shen didn’t bother to avoid, jarring Tomkins. The vehicle seemed to have sped up during his conversation, and the textured ground flowed along beside them. They began to climb the side of the crater wall. He heard a long sigh over the helmet speakers.
“Dr. Tomkins, I know you wanted to stay out of the details once you let McLaris take over the base administration, stuff, but—” She paused. “Well, I’m surprised you kept yourself so completely in the dark. Four days from now, McLaris and Cliff will be zipping along at more than two thousand miles an hour straight toward Orbitech 1, with nothing to stop them but a couple of revamped engines from a crashed shuttle. They won’t have any gravity to slow them down, no weavewire pulling in the opposite direction to halt their progress. If those engines don’t fire exactly when they’re supposed to, and for exactly as long as they need to, the Phoenix will smash into Orbitech 1 like a meteor. I’d have to be crazy not to be worried.”
Tomkins looked straight ahead without seeing the outside view. He hadn’t even noticed that Shen had stopped the six-pack. She lifted one of her legs over the seat and eased out onto the lunar surface. Tomkins followed her, planting his feet on sturdy ground with a clear memory of Clancy’s fall a few weeks before. Two miles away and a thousand feet below their level, Tomkins could see the activity in the center of the crater, where the skyhook would hit.
Below, McLaris and Clancy would be strapping themselves into the compartment where they’d remain for the next several days, if all went well.
It had been so easy to hand over the operation of Clavius Base to McLaris. He had been so efficient, so methodical in his work. Shen was perfectly right—Tomkins had divorced himself entirely of management responsibility. He had not even taken time to review what was happening on the base. McLaris took care of everything while Tomkins was wrapped up in the radio telescope—his true love. He prayed he wouldn’t have to give that up.
Shen stood on an outcrop jutting from the crater wall. Tomkins joined her. The Phoenix looked alone and unhindered out on the flat plain, like a hitchhiker waiting for a ride. Once the hook fell out of the sky, the crew would have to scramble to hook it up before their time ran out. The old patched hull of the Miranda looked contorted by its airtight welds and grafted metal plates. While Clancy’s engineers had begun to restore the manufacturing facilities on the Moon, they had not yet rebuilt the industrial facilities enough that they could construct a new vessel.
With the salvaged hull of the crashed shuttle, and extra materials dismantled from unnecessary equipment on Clavius Base, they had turned the Miranda into a completely new kind of vehicle, a true phoenix. The rocket engines had been removed and mounted on top, test fired once to make certain they could provide braking thrust. The thing looked like a bastardized hodgepodge of leftover parts.
Which it was.
Now that Tomkins was in line of sight of the operation, a voice crackled in his helmet. “We have a visual on the skyhook, everybody. It matches the radar echo. Give us five minutes and we’ll have you linked up and ready to go.”
Clancy’s voice came over the Phoenix’s radio. “Just stay clear of that weavewire. I don’t want anyone getting sliced up.”
“Everything’s under control out here, Clifford. You two just make sure you’re strapped in. You’ll be in for quite a yank when that cable starts hauling.”
Tomkins and Shen watched the scene without speaking. Though they couldn’t see it themselves, they learned that the tiny package had indeed struck the far side of the crater. A specially modified six-pack racer sped across the floor to retrieve it. Tomkins realized ironically that no one would ever be able to see the fine thread tying the colonies together.
Tomkins waved a hand to the yo-yo assembly below. “When Duncan explained this trip, I naturally thought everything was well known—very little risk and all that. I guess it’s a naïve way for theoreticians to view the world—just assume that things are ‘engineering problems.’”
Shen let out a short laugh. “‘Engineering problems’ can really screw you up bad if your survival depends on everything working just right.” She continued with vehemence: “Once Cliff got it through people’s head that it didn’t matter how fast the yo-yo was pulled up, everyone bought it. Escape velocity doesn’t mean beans when you’ve got a constant force pulling you up.”
Excited voices filled the radio. The six-pack racer returned to the Phoenix, and suited figures scrambled over the top. Tomkins wished he had some sort of binoculars, but the curved faceplate would have made them useless.
Once the hook was attached, the figures jumped back down to the crater floor and rolled away in their six-pack. The vehicle wheeled a safe distance away, then turned and waited.
“We don’t really know how long it’s going to take,” Shen said. “It should be soon now.”
“Clavius Base and Orbitech 1, we are ready to go!” Duncan McLaris’s voice broadcast. Since the sound speed in the monomolecular strand approached the speed of light, as Clancy had predicted, once Orbitech 1 started reeling in the weavewire, the Phoenix would start moving.
“See ya later, Cliffy!” Shen broadcast.
Before he could reply, the Phoenix suddenly jerked up, hauled off the surface of the Moon in a puff of lunar dust. The modified hull of the Miranda pulled away. From this distance, it looked to Tomkins like it was levitating. The yo-yo shot up into the black soup of stars at an angle to the horizon.
Clancy’s voice came over the radio. “We’re off! The acceleration is less than lunar normal, so we don’t feel too bad. But boy, we are getting a sight you would not believe!”
Whoops from a dozen different microphones filled Tomkins’s helmet. Down on the crater floor, where dust still settled to the surface, he could see tiny figures outside the six-pack making superhuman leaps in the lunar gravity.
The Phoenix ascended into the deep blackness. Shen stood staring down at the launch site.
“If you bend over like this, you can see better!” Tomkins said to Shen, bending backward as she had shown him. “Are you still worried?”