BOOK FIVE
THE ENGINEER
THE HOSPITAL
Vincente Zworkyn lay on the hospital bed glaring down at his left leg. It was covered by a plastic bandage from just above the knee down to the ankle. It didn’t hurt much, but it itched maddeningly.
Damned fool, he told himself. Damned stupid, overeager, moronic idiot. Jetbike racing. At your age. Trying to show the youngsters that you’re just as good as they are. Reckless irresponsible asshole.
His hospital billet was screened off for privacy, but his team had squeezed in to visit him and offer their apologies for the accident. The four young men and one woman crowded around his bed, all looking as sheepish as children who had been caught raiding the cookie jar.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Zworkyn told them, trying to smile despite his foul mood. “I should have known better.”
It had seemed like a good idea, a bit of fun to break the monotony of their dedicated work. A race around the circular passageway of the Haven II habitat on jetbikes borrowed from the recreation center on the older wheel. Zworkyn had sped into the lead as they zoomed along the kilometers-long passageway, past teams of robots working on the construction details. Fun to feel the wind in your face and know you were ahead of the kids.
But it only took one discarded hammer lying on the passageway’s flooring to flip Zworkyn’s bike into the air and send him flying ass over teakettle into a newly installed section of paneling, badly bruising his back and breaking his kneecap and the slender fibula below it.
The hospital’s medical staff had welcomed him with barely hidden glee: they seldom got to deal with such interesting fractures.
Now he lay on the hospital bed, waiting for the stem cell injections to repair his bones. He felt little pain: even his injured back was quickly healing, thanks to modern electrotherapy.
But his leg itched. Zworkyn imagined he could feel the microscopic stem cells knitting his broken bones together. No, the chief of surgery explained to him, gently, patiently. The itching was psychosomatic. Had to be.
His team mumbled apologies and good wishes and shuffled out of his narrow space. Alone now, he glared at the bandaged leg, wishing that he could reach down and scratch the damned itch.
His bedside phone buzzed.
“Yes?”
“Professor Abbott wishes to visit with you,” the phone replied.
“He’s here?”
“He’s in the waiting room.”
“Send him in!” Maybe, Zworkyn thought, Abbott could get his mind off the insidious itch.
Zworkyn raised the bed to a sitting position as Abbott pushed through the curtains that surrounded his narrow berth.
“Well, well,” said Abbott, extending his hand. “How are you doing, Vince?”
Zworkyn made a grin. “Not too bad. They tell me I ought to be out of here tomorrow.”
Pulling up the enclosure’s only chair to the edge of the hospital bed, Abbott said, as he sat down, “Really? That’s remarkable.”
“Stem cells.”
“Ah.”
“How’s everything in the uninjured world?”
Abbott tilted his head slightly. “Your people and my people are working together rather nicely. They’ve been scanning images we’ve gotten from the sub, trying to reconstruct the city down there.”
“So? Have they come up with anything?”
“It’s a hard slog, I’m afraid,” Abbott said, unconsciously tugging at one end of his moustache. “The city’s been thoroughly flattened. It’s almost as though some angry god smashed it all with a superhuman hammer.”
Zworkyn nodded.
“And the dating is all out of whack,” Abbott went on. “Uranus was smashed by a sizeable planetoidal object back during the time of the Late Bombardment, some four billion years ago. Yet all the radioactive dating we’re getting from the city’s remains are much younger. Much younger. Something’s badly out of whack.”
Almost smiling, Zworkyn muttered, “That’s what makes science interesting, don’t you think? The unanswered questions.”
Fingering his moustache again, Abbott replied, “I wish it wasn’t so damned interesting! I want to find out what happened down there.”
With a heartfelt sigh, Zworkyn agreed, “So do I, Gordon. So do I.”
Raven tried to suppress a frown as she looked at Noel Dacco’s grinning face on the viewscreen of the boutique’s computer.
“A date?” she asked. “You want to take me to dinner?”
“I find you very attractive,” Dacco replied.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Noel. I’m practically engaged to Tómas Gomez.”
Dacco’s smile didn’t diminish by as much as a millimeter. “Practically?” he asked.
“He loves me.”
“And you love him?”
Raven’s breath caught in her throat. Then she answered, “Yes, I do.”
Waggling a finger at her, Dacco said, “You had to think about it.”
“I love him,” Raven said, more firmly.
“Wouldn’t you like to have a fling with me? It doesn’t have to mean anything. Just fun. One last fling before you tie the knot with Tómas.”
Raven shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”
Dacco’s smile evaporated. He said, “From what Waxman tells me, you weren’t so reserved before you came here. And you’ve slept with him often enough.”
“That’s over!” Raven snapped.
“Really?”
“Really.”
With a careless shrug, Dacco said, “Okay. You can’t blame a man for trying. You’re a very delectable dish. But you already know that.”
With a hand that trembled slightly, Raven tapped the screen’s OFF button. That’s not the end of it, she told herself. Waxman’s pointing him at me, like a hunter unleashing his dog to chase down a rabbit.
Well, I’m no rabbit, she thought. And wished it were true.
THE LATE BOMBARDMENT
Vincente Zworkyn lay back on his bed in his darkened compartment, his eyes closed as he tried to will himself to sleep.
But in his mind he saw the Late Bombardment.
Some four billion years ago, back in the early days of the solar system’s existence, countless chunks of rock and ice hurtled through the newly formed planets, blasting out continent-sized craters whenever they smashed into a fledgling world.
Zworkyn saw the turmoil, the havoc, the mayhem as thousands, millions of worldlets zoomed through the young solar system.
Four billion years ago, he said to himself. The craters that those cataclysmic collisions gouged out of the young Earth’s red-hot crust were erased in time, smoothed away by four billion years of weathering: wind and rain and continental drift. But the young Moon, airless and waterless, kept the evidence across its cratered surface. When human explorers reached the Moon, they dated the craters that blanketed its bleak surface.
Four billion years ago, Zworkyn repeated to himself. While the Earth and Moon were being pummeled, Uranus was hit by a truly massive planetoid, smashed so hard that the planet was knocked over sidewise, its poles pointing to the Sun, unlike any other world in the solar system.
That cataclysm scrubbed Uranus clean of all life. All life. Down to amoebas and even microscopic chains of DNA. Not just the city we’re exploring. All life. Destroyed.
Zworkyn stared at the darkened ceiling above him, clean and white. He listened to the monitors clicking and chugging away behind him at the head of his bed.