“Wait, hold on,” Pancho said. “Slow down and tell me what this’s all about.”
But Holly rattled right on, “Panch, you’ve been wondering what you want to do. This is it! Go out and find comets, maybe even out past Neptune. Alter their orbits so they fall into the Belt or the Earth/Moon region, wherever they’re needed. Mine ’em for their water. It’ll work! You can get rich and I can beat Eberly with this!”
Pancho looked over at Wanamaker, who shrugged elaborately. “I got my hands full with this mission, Holly,” she said to the image on her screen. “Can’t this wait ’til we get back?”
Holly kept on babbling.
Wanamaker chuckled. “She won’t hear you for another six seconds or so, and even then I doubt that she’ll pay any attention.”
“Damn,” Pancho muttered. “She’s spoutin’ like a runaway rocket.”
“She’s got the bit between her teeth, that’s for certain,” Wanamaker said.
“Since when are you talkin’ like a cowboy, Jake?”
Eying the comm screen, Wanamaker said, “She reminds me of somebody.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“You,” he said.
It took a bit of manipulation, but at last Gaeta saw Habib’s list of questions glowing on the left side of his visor. Feeling a trifle foolish about talking to a computer, he took a breath, then checked to make certain that his communications line was plugged into the computer’s comm receptacle. The controllers back in the habitat can hear me talk to the computer, he reasoned. They can eavesdrop. But he turned off the incoming audio on the channel that connected him to the control center. Let ’em listen, Gaeta said to himself, but I don’t want them yammering in my ear while I’m talking to the machine.
Once he was properly connected to the central computer, Gaeta asked, “Is the uplink antenna functioning properly?”
The computer’s synthesized voice answered flatly:
Uplink antenna deactivated.
“Deactivated?” Gaeta blurted. “Why?”
No response from the computer.
Gaeta grumbled under his breath and peered at Habib’s list of questions. They were arranged like a logic tree: if the computers says this your next question should be that. But there wasn’t any question about the uplink antenna being deactivated.
“Was there a command to deactivate the uplink antenna?” he asked.
No.
He started to ask why again, but figured the computer wouldn’t answer that one. Instead, Gaeta thought for a few moments, trying to frame a question the coño computer would reply to.
“For what reason was the uplink antenna deactivated?”
Conflict of commands.
Ah, Gaeta thought, now we’re getting somewhere. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the yellow comm light start blinking again. The guys at the comm center want to get into the chatter. He ignored it.
“Display conflicting commands,” he said to the computer.
He waited, but the computer stayed silent.
Most of the controllers had left their consoles and were gathered around Habib. As he listened to Gaeta’s attempt to talk to the central computer, he could feel the heat of their bodies clustering around him.
“He’s cut off his link with us,” said one of the controllers.
“I can see that,” Habib muttered.
“But he won’t hear any instruction we send to him.”
With gritted teeth, Habib replied, “We’ll just have to wait until he sees fit to listen to us again.”
“Display conflicting commands,” Gaeta’s voice came through his console speaker.
Habib shook his head. “That’s too general,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “The program can’t handle that kind of input.”
Sure enough, nothing but star-born static hissed through the speaker grill.
Habib leaned on the communications switch. “Talk to me, Gaeta,” he urged. “Open your comm link and talk to me, dammit!”
No one spoke, no one even breathed, it seemed to Habib. The speaker remained silent except for the faint background crackling of interference coming from the cold and distant stars.
Timoshenko tapped out the access code on the security panel set into the bulkhead beside the airlock hatch. He knew that this would send a warning signal to the safety supervisor; no one was supposed to go outside by themselves. All outside excursions had to be cleared by the safety department beforehand.
He grunted to himself as the airlock’s inner hatch swung open. Safety regulations are only as good as the people using them, he thought. I know all the rules and all the codes. And I know how to get around them.
He fingered the remote controller he’d attached to the belt of his hard suit. I know all the commands for the radiation shielding system, too. I can shut the system down with the touch of a button.
The inner hatch closed and sealed itself. Timoshenko stood inside the airlock and waited for it to pump down so that he could open the outer hatch and step into nothingness.
28 May 2096: Dialogue
Gaeta opened the comm channel to the control center. “You hear what’s going down?” he asked, feeling annoyed at the computer’s obtuseness, at his own inability to make the damned bucket of chips talk to him, at the fact that he was sitting on the roof of a dead rover in the middle of nowhere with a storm coming up while the rest of them were safe at their desks.
And then there was the excruciating time lag between his questions and their responses.
Habib’s voice at last said, “Your last question was too general for the master program to handle. We’re sending you a more specific set of questions.”
“Okay,” Gaeta said, nodding inside his helmet. The storm of black snow was noticeably closer. Moving faster than the higher clouds, he saw.
He realized it was getting cold. Can’t be, he told himself. The suit’s heating system could cook a rhinoceros. You’re letting your nerves get to you. Still, sitting on Alpha’s roof with nothing to do but look at the icy landscape around him, Gaeta felt chilled.
At last a new list of questions flashed on his helmet display. Gaeta squinted at them. This is like talking to a two-year-old, he grumbled. Then he saw that, at the end of the list, they had written in boldface, IMPORTANT! DO NOT CUT OFF COMM LINK WITH CONTROL CENTER. IMPORTANT!
“Got your questions,” he said. “And if you want me to keep the comm link open, don’t clutter it up with a lot of chatter. Right?”
No use waiting for them to answer, Gaeta thought. I can put those twelve seconds to better work.
“Computer, display all commands to the uplink antenna.”
Date, 25 December 095057 hours: Activate uplink antenna.
Date, 25 December 095109 hours: Abort data uplink.
Date, 29 December 142819 hours: Deactivate telemetry uplink.
Gaeta could hear muttering and people breathing back at the command center. But they stayed fairly silent as he scanned the new list of questions.
“Display command to deactivate uplink antenna,” he read aloud.
No response from the computer. Gaeta went to the next question.
“Display decision tree for antenna deactivation.”
A jabber of electronic noise burst from Gaeta’s helmet speakers. “Wait! Stop!” he hollered.
The noise stopped, like turning off a light switch.
Habib held his thumb down on the keypad that turned off the outgoing messages link. The engineers crowded behind him were all talking at once, all their suggestions and ideas frothing together into an incomprehensible babble.