They stopped at the opened door to the operations room. Chaney held the lantern high to inspect the vehicle: the hatch was open and the hull of the craft covered by dust; the concrete cradle seemed dirty with age.
He asked suddenly: “How much did I report, Katrina? Did I tell them about you? Your family? Did I tell them about that family on the railroad tracks? What did I say?”
“Nothing.” She wouldn’t look up at him.
“What?”
“You reported nothing.”
He thought her voice was strained. “I had to say something. Gilbert Seabrooke will demand something.”
“Brian—” She stopped, swallowed hard, and then began again. “You reported nothing, Mr. Chaney. You did not return from your probe. We knew you were lost to us when the vehicle failed to return at sixty-one seconds: you were wholly lost to us.”
Brian Chaney very carefully put the lantern down and then turned her around and pulled her head up. He wanted to see her face, wanted to see why she was lying. Her eyes were wet with threatened tears but there was no lie there.
Stiffly: “Why not, Katrina?”
“We have no power, Mr. Chaney. The vehicle is helpless, immobile.”
Chaney swung his head to stare at the TDV and as quickly swung back to the woman. He wasn’t aware that he was holding her in a painful grip.
“The engineers can pull me back.”
“No. They can do nothing for you: they lost you when that device stopped tracking, when the computer went silent, when the power failed here and you overshot the failure date. They lost you; they lost the vehicle.” She pulled away from his hard grasp, and her wavering gaze fell. “You didn’t come back to the laboratory, Mr. Chaney. No one saw you again after the launch; no one saw you again until you appeared here, today.”
Almost shouting: “Stop calling me Mr. Chaney!”
“I am… I am terribly sorry. You were as lost to us as Major Moresby. We thought…”
He turned his back on the woman and deliberately walked into the operations room. Brian Chaney climbed up on the polywater tank and thrust a leg through the open hatch of the TDV. He didn’t bother to undress or remove the heavy boots. Wriggling downward through the hatch, he slammed it shut over his head and looked for the blinking green light. There was none. Chaney stretched out full length on the web sling and thrust his heels against the kickbar at the bottom. No red light answered him.
He knew panic.
He fought against that and waited for his nerves to rest, waited for a stolid placidity to return. The memory of his first test came back: he’d thought then the vehicle was like a cramped tomb, and he thought so now. Lying on the webbed sling for the first time — and waiting for something spectacular to happen — he had felt an ache in his legs and had stretched them out to relieve the ache. His feet had struck the kickbar, sending him back to the beginning before the engineers were ready; they had been angry with him. And an hour later, in the lecture room, everyone heard and saw the results of his act: the vehicle kicked backward as he thrust out his feet, the sound struck his eardrums and the lights dimmed. The astonished engineers left the room on the run, and Gilbert Seabrooke proposed a new study program to be submitted to Indic. The TDV sucked power from its present, not its past.
Chaney reached up to snug the hatch. It was snug. The light that should have been blinking green stayed dark. Chaney jut the heavy boots against the bar and pushed. The red light stayed dark. He pushed again, then kicked at the bar. After a moment he twisted around to peer through the plastic bubble into the room. It was dimly lit by the lantern resting on the floor.
He shouted: “Goddammit, go!” And kicked again.
The room was dimly lit by lantern light.
He walked slowly along the corridor in the feeble light of the lantern, walked woodenly in shock tinged with fear. The failure of the vehicle to move under his prodding had stunned him. He wished desperately for Katrina, wished she was standing by with a word or a gesture he might seize for a crutch, but she wasn’t visible in the corridor. She had left him while he struggled with the vehicle, perhaps to return to the briefing room, perhaps to go outside, perhaps to retire to whatever sort of shelter she shared with her son and daughter. He was alone, fighting panic. The door to the engineering laboratory was standing open, as was the door to the storeroom, but she wasn’t waiting for him in either place. Chaney listened for her but heard nothing, and went on after the smallest pause. The dusty corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit.
He thought the sign on the door was a bitter mockery — one of the many visited on him since he’d sailed for Israel a century or two ago. He regretted the day he had read and translated those scrolls — but at the same time he wished desperately he knew the identity of that scribe who had amused himself and his fellows by creating the Eschatos document. A single name would be enough: an Amos or a Malachi or an Ibycus.
He would hoist a glass of water from the Nabataean cistern and salute the unknown genius for his wit and wisdom, for his mockery. He would shout to the freshly scrubbed sky: “Here, damn your eyes, Ibycus! Here, for the lohg-dead dragons and the ruptured fence and the ice on the rivers. Here, for my head of gold, my breast of silver, my legs of iron and my feet of clay. My feet of clay, Ibycus!” And he would hurl the glass at the lifeless TDV.
Chaney turned the keys in the locks and pushed out into the chill night air. The darkness surprised him; he hadn’t realized he’d spent so many bittersweet hours inside with Katrina. The parking lot was empty but for the cart and his discarded rifle. Katrina’s children hadn’t waited for him, and he was aware of a small hurt.
He stepped away from the building and then turned back to look at it: a massive white concrete temple in the moonlight. The barbaric legions had failed to bring it down, despite the damage caused elsewhere on the station.
The sky was the second surprise: he had seen it by day and marveled, but at night it was shockingly beautiful. The stars were bright and hard as carefully polished gems, and there were a hundred or a thousand more than he’d ever seen before; he had never known a sky like that in his lifetime. The entire eastern rim of the heavens was lighted by a rising moon of remarkable brilliance.
Chaney stood alone in the center of the parking lot searching the face of the moon, searching out the Sea of Vapors and the pit known as Bode’s Crater. The pulsating laser there caught his eye and held it. That one thing had not changed — that one monument not destroyed. The brilliant mote still flashed on the rim of Bode’s Crater, marking the place where two astronauts had fallen in the Seventies, marking their grave and their memorial. One of them had been black. Brian Chaney thought himself lucky: he had air to breathe but those men had none.
He said aloud: “You weren’t so damned clever, Ibycus! You missed that one — your prophets didn’t show you the new sign in the sky.”
Chaney sat down in the tilted cart and stretched out his legs for balance. The rifle was an unpleasant lump under his spine and he threw it aside to be rid of it. In a little while he leaned backward and rested against the bed of the cart. The whole of the southeast sky was before him. Chaney thought he should go looking for Katrina, for Arthur and Kathryn, and a place to sleep. Perhaps he would do that after a while, but not now, not now.
The stray thought came that the engineers had been right about one thing: the polywater tank hadn’t leaked.
Elwood Station was at peace.