All right, then. Accept it. Today it is five years since I, Larry Chao, lost the Earth. There. He had thought the words. Five years ago, he had configured the Ring of Charon as a gravity laser and fired it. Five years ago he pressed a button and awoke the slumbering alien invaders, who in turn stole Earth and set to work tearing apart the surviving worlds of the Solar System. It was of microscopic consolation to Larry that he had then played a major part in stopping that destruction and preventing the Solar System’s complete disassembly.
Five years of a loss immeasurable, to all people for the rest of time.
Never mind. Let it go. Do not let it engulf you. Larry picked up his tools and set to work again. The half-machine, half-animal alien claw was dead, its chiton-plastic skin drying up, turning brown, flaking off. The fierce pincers lay still and useless in front of him.
He was alone in the workshop. On this day, of all days, no one had the heart to do any work. Any number of remembrances and ceremonies were being held in or on every one of the half-wrecked worlds of the Solar System. Solemn figures were no doubt standing at attention on the Lunar surface right now, staring at Earthpoint, the blank spot in the sky where once the Earth had shone, where now there was nothing but an Earth-mass black hole, far too small to see.
But Larry knew he was not welcome at such events, not really. Few murderers, even those who killed unintentionally, were invited to memorial services for their victims.
Others might recall the mother world, speaking wistfully of the cool breezes, the tang of salt air, the wonder of walking unprotected under an open sky. Such could not be for him. To attend would be to rob the others of their chance to mourn undisturbed.
He picked up the probe and set back to work on the claw, for there was nothing else he could do, down here inside the corpse of the enemy. The Lunar Wheel had been a living thing, after all. Larry had helped to kill it, too. And Lucian Dreyfuss. His blood was on Larry’s hands as well. They had never found his body. No doubt it was still down there, somewhere.
No. Do not think about that. Do not think of those days. Every human being tried at some time to forget those days. Forgetting was a vital survival skill.
Focus on the work. Try not to think. The claw. Finish the claw. Then go on to the sensory-cluster carapace. Study them well, seek out the hidden answers.
He had spent much of the last years in this place, sifting through the world-girdling wreckage of the Lunar Wheel, picking over the corpse of the half-creature half-machine.
It was dreary work, arduous, painstaking, endless, and Larry welcomed it. There were always tests to run, data to examine, debris to test. There was always a task at hand, a job that offered him escape from the churning knots in his heart. Work was his penance, his act of contrition.
Besides, somewhere inside the unimaginably huge Wheel, there had to be some sort of clue. There had to be. A scrap of data code, a bit of information that had not been scrambled in the final battle. The search teams would find something, sooner or later. And he would be on hand to help analyze it, decode it, take it apart, find the clue, the answer.
He longed for a whisper in his ear that could tell him how to find the Earth again.
Find the Earth. That was the only act of penance that would do any good whatsoever.
Assuming, of course, the Earth was still alive when they found her.
He applied the logic probe to the claw again, and this time it jerked spasmodically and threw itself off the table.
Sometime after midnight, when it was no longer Abduction Day, Larry started to feel a bit better. He was still too keyed up to sleep, to rest, but somehow his mind was clear again. He could see his way forward. He could look up from his meaningless tests and meticulous fiddlings and see more than his own failures. He could think on the things he had actually accomplished since then. He put his things away, tidied up the workbench, and walked out into the dark vastness of the main hangar. He paused by the entrance and slapped a wall switch, and light swelled up to fill the hangar, a cathedral of gleaming walls and shining equipment—with a small and rather scrappy-looking vehicle dead in the middle of it.
She didn’t look like much, but then a lot of the great pioneering craft of the past hadn’t either. The Wright Flyer, Armstrong’s own Eagle, the Demeter, even the Terra Nova. None of them were ever beautiful, except to engineers. Larry Chao would be more than content if the Graviton were ranked with those names. She was the reason Larry had come back to the Moon.
But she still didn’t look like much. She looked like something cobbled together out of spares and optimism, as well she might. Her lull and superstructure came from a surplus asteroid mining ship, her lift rockets were off an old cargo ship, and no one even knew what ship half her old flight hardware came from. Nor was it entirely comforting to know that no one knew exactly how she worked. But that was one of the drawbacks to blackbox engineering.
The Graviton was a short, squat cylinder sitting on four landing docks. She was battleship grey, and as disreputable-looking a hulk as you could ask for.
But she was also the first gravitic-powered ship ever, riding a beam of gravity power controlled by the Ring of Charon. Her rocket engines were intended to do no more than get her well away from a planet before the gravitic system took over. Mission rules were very clear on that—the gravity-beam system was not to be activated until he ship was at least a million kilometers from any planet. It seemed highly doubtful that there were any other Charonians out there who night be roused by a gravity beam—but no one on the Graviton earn, least of all Larry, wanted to take any chances.
The Graviton’s propulsion system used enough hardware taken from dead Charonians that one or two wags had suggested that she be christened the Graverobber, but it might be years, if not decades, before humans could build their own g-beam hardware. The Charonians had used gravity-beam systems to propel asteroid-sized bodies around the Solar System at incredible velocities, and there were plenty of dead Charonians about from which to take equipment.
Even Larry, an expert on gravities technology, was not certain how some of the Charonian hardware worked. It was enough, for now, that it did work, and had worked in the unpiloted test flights. The Graviton had taken the gravity beam from the Ring of Charon and accelerated up to fifty gravities—while retaining a standard Lunar gravity field inside the main cabin. They were nearly ready for test flights with humans aboard.
Larry looked up at the ugly little ship. It wasn’t going to help get the Earth back. But at least it was work, and valuable work. Somehow, just looking at her made him feel better. He blinked, yawned and stretched. He didn’t feel exactly rested, but he had the feel of being sharp, of being ready. Sleepless nights did that to him now and then. He had had plenty of chances to find that out in the past few years. He felt like working.
Larry stepped to the data display system and checked the work log. He was scheduled to do the modifications to the wave-coupler resonance chamber next. Might as well get on with it. Larry returned to his workshop, collected his tools, and went aboard the little ship. He set to work on the job, happy to be doing something worthwhile. He barely noticed as the rest of the work team came in.