Still no trace of Alpha.
“Perhaps,” suggested one of the engineers, “it blundered into one of the seas and sank.”
“Blundered?” Urbain roared. “Blundered? Alpha is not blind. Not stupid. She has more computing power in her central processor than you have in your head!”
The man scurried away from Urbain’s red-hot wrath.
It was the youngest of the planetary physicists, a sweet-faced woman with more nerve than her colleagues, who approached him next.
“With the stereo imagery we’ll be getting,” she said, “and resolution down to the one-meter level, we ought to be able to detect Alpha’s tracks.”
“Her tracks?” Urbain picked up his head from the imagery he had been studying.
The young woman, standing in front of the console where Urbain was sitting, licked her lips nervously and explained, “We know where she landed. We can scan that region to see if we can find the tracks the beast’s treads left as she moved off on her own.”
“And follow the tracks until we locate her!” Urbain finished for her, so excited by the idea that he overlooked her calling his Alpha a “beast.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right,” she said.
Urbain jumped to his feet. For a moment the young geophysicist thought he was going to grab her and kiss her. Instead, he started shouting orders to the rest of the staff.
As the young woman returned to the planetary physics group, huddled in a corner of the mission control center, one of her fellow scientists raised his hand above his head, palm out. She recognized the gesture from old videos and smilingly gave him a high five.
31 January 2096: Morning
Holly said, “I can’t stay long. I’ve got to write a speech for tonight’s newscast.”
Manny Gaeta shook his head. “I’d rather have a tooth pulled than stand up in public and give a speech.”
She shrugged. “I’m a political candidate now. I’ve gotta make speeches.”
Holly, Gaeta, Kris Cardenas, Tavalera, Pancho, Jake Wanamaker and Nadia Wunderly stood in front of Gaeta’s excursion suit, which loomed over them like a mammoth, inert robot, its pitted surface dimly reflecting the strip lights running overhead. Gaeta and Tavalera had rolled the suit from its storage locker to this workroom, then set it up on its feet, using the power winches hanging from the steel beams up near the ceiling.
Wunderly felt an almost dizzying swirl of emotions washing over her: excitement, apprehension, sheer awe at the size and massiveness of the suit. I’m going to climb into that thing and fly through the B ring in it, she told herself. My sweet lord! Me! I’m going to do it.
The little group had gathered in the same high-ceilinged workshop where Gaeta and his technicians had checked out the suit months earlier for his stunt flight through the rings. Instead of the row of electronics consoles that Gaeta’s tech team had lined against one of the bare walls, though, now there was only a pair of folding tables where Tavalera had spread out a pair of fabric-thin roll-up computers; the keyboards he had taped to the tabletops, the display screens to the wall.
“Well, here it is,” Gaeta said, patting one of the suit’s cermet arms. Turning to Wunderly, he asked, “You want to see what it’s like inside?”
Wunderly nodded wordlessly, her eyes riveted to the thick glassteel visor of the helmet towering above her.
“Is Timoshenko coming or not?” Pancho asked.
“Not,” said Holly. “He’s flatly refused to have anything to do with this mission. Says he’s got his hands full with maintenance for the solar mirrors.”
“He’s having problems with the solar mirrors?” Wanamaker asked.
“Nothing major,” said Holly. “It’s more likely an excuse for steering clear of us.”
“Those mirrors are important,” Wanamaker said. “There’s no such thing as a minor problem with them.”
“I guess,” Holly replied.
“Come on, Nadia,” Gaeta said, taking her gently by the arm. “You climb in through the hatch in back.”
“A trapdoor?” Pancho blurted. “You mean like a kid’s jammies?”
Gaeta threw her a sour look as they all walked around the bulky suit like tourists circling a monumental statue.
Pecking at the remote controller he held, Gaeta made the hatch in the rear of the suit pop open. Looking at the rim of the hatch and then at Wunderly’s stubby figure, he muttered, “I can see we’re gonna need at least one additional piece of equipment.”
“A step stool,” Pancho said.
Wanamaker cupped his hands together. “Come on, Nadia. Upsy-daisy.”
Looking slightly uncertain, Wunderly lifted her left foot as high as she could and rested it in Wanamaker’s interlaced hands. Leaning on his broad shoulder with one hand, she reached for the hatch’s edge as Wanamaker boosted her. While Gaeta watched grimly, she scrabbled her way in through the hatch. Good thing I’ve lost so much weight, she thought.
“It’s dark in here,” she said, her voice slightly muffled, even in her own ears.
Gaeta answered, “We haven’t powered it up yet. Hang five.” And he trotted back to the computers on the tables by the wall.
Crouching inside the dark suit Wunderly smelled faint odors of machine oil and old plastic and stale human sweat. From the light of the workshop spilling through the open hatch she could see that there were dark wells where she presumed her legs would go and, above her, the headpiece with its transparent visor, like a distant window or skylight. It seemed a long way above her.
Suddenly an array of lights sprang up and the suit seemed to stir into life. She heard air fans whirr and saw that the lights were from panels of gauges and miniature display screens.
“Can you hear me, Nadia?” Gaeta’s voice came through speakers set up in the helmet section.
“Yes,” she called. “But I think I’m going to be too short to get my head up into the helmet.”
She heard Gaeta chuckle softly. “Put your feet into the leg wells. There’s notches in them, like a ladder. Find a level that’s comfortable for you, and then straighten up until your head’s at the level of the visor. There’s an adjustable fold-down seat behind you; you can set it to the level of your butt.”
“I can sit?”
“If you want to.”
It took several minutes of adjustments and a few bangs of her shins and elbows, but at last Wunderly wriggled her head up into the helmet section. She could see Kris and Holly and the others standing on the floor below her. They looked like pygmies; she felt like a giant.
“Hello there, Earthlings,” she said, and saw them wince and grab at their ears.
“Lower the volume on your audio output,” Gaeta told her. “Audio panel’s on your right, lit in pastel blue.”
Wunderly found the panel and nudged its control slide along the thin wedge that indicated volume.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“Much better,” Pancho yelled. Her voice was muffled by the suit’s insulation.
For the next quarter hour Gaeta talked Wunderly through the suit’s controls, constantly admonishing, “Don’t touch anything. Not yet. Look, but don’t touch.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said caustically after half a dozen such warnings. He acts as if I’m some stupid kid in here, she thought.
At last Gaeta said, “Okay. You know where the arm controls are?”
“One in each sleeve,” Wunderly recited, “and the override control is on the master panel right in front of my chest.”
“Okay. See if you can move the grippers on your right hand.”
Wunderly felt for the controls inside the sleeve while she peered down at the display panel just below her chin. There, she thought, that’s the grippers. The screen showed all green lights. Gingerly, she flexed the fingers of her right hand.