He was so excited he started to pull off the bedsheet covering him and swing his legs off the bed. But he hesitated in mid-motion. Try to stand up and fall on your face; set your recuperation back a week or more.
He swung his cast-covered leg back onto the bed and turned to the telephone on the night table.
“Vincente Zworkyn,” he commanded the phone.
Almost immediately he heard Zworkyn’s recorded voice. “I’m not available at the moment. Please leave your name and I’ll get back—”
Tómas snapped, “Phone, locate Mr. Zworkyn. Wherever he is, find him. Emergency! Top priority!”
The robot waiter trundled up to their table with three desserts on its flat top. As it began to place them on the table where Raven, Alicia and Zworkyn were sitting, Zworkyn’s phone vibrated in his pocket.
Frowning, the engineer muttered, “I instructed the phone not to interrupt us.”
The phone buzzed again, softly but insistently.
“Damn,” Zworkyn muttered, tugging the phone from his pocket.
He could see the excitement on Tómas’s face even in the phone’s tiny screen.
Before Zworkyn could say a word, Tómas gushed, “We can do it! We can find one of Uranus’s runaway moons! Maybe more than one!”
With a glance at his two dinner companions, Zworkyn said, “I’m in the middle of dinner—”
“We use the Schmidts at Farside,” Tómas went on, undeterred. “We figure out the moonlets’ exit velocities and search at the distance they’d be after a couple of million years!”
“That’s a needle in a haystack approach.”
“No, it’s the way to find the escaped moons,” Tómas insisted. “It’ll work, I know it will!”
Zworkyn looked up at Alicia and Raven again as he said, “All right. All right. Calm down. I’ll come over and see you first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll start in on the math. We can estimate the exit velocity of the moons pretty well.…”
“Get some sleep, Tómas. I want you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow morning.”
“Yes. Sure. Of course.”
“Goodnight, partner.”
“Goodnight, Vincente.”
Zworkyn clicked the phone off. “Scientists,” he muttered. “They’re all a little crazy.”
Alicia smiled at him. Raven did not.
ABBOTT
Gordon Abbott could feel his brows knitting into a frown as he asked the image on his office’s wall screen, “Use the Schmidt telescopes?”
“Yes!” replied Tómas Gomez eagerly. “The wide-field Schmidts. They can cover the whole sky in a couple of sweeps!”
“Not Big Eye.”
Gomez shook his head. “We won’t need Big Eye until we’ve located one of the escaped moons.”
Abbott couldn’t help noticing that Gomez didn’t wince at all when he shook his head. The lad’s recuperation is progressing nicely, he thought.
Practically quivering with excitement, Gomez said, “We don’t need to have tracking data for the runaway moons. We just estimate how far they’ve traveled since they left Uranus orbit and scan the sky until we find one!”
“Ingenious,” Abbott muttered.
“Can you get us time on the Schmidts at Farside?”
Nodding unconsciously, Abbott replied, “I believe that’s possible. In fact, you can scan the sweeps they’ve already made at that distance. You might find what you’re looking for that way.”
“Wonderful! How soon—”
Breaking into a reluctant grin, Abbott interrupted, “I’ll call Farside today. The director there is an old friend of mine.”
“Great!”
Abbott’s wall screen went blank. He stared at it for several long moments, thinking that it had been a long time since he’d felt as excited as Gomez about a sky survey. Ah youth, he said to himself. I just hope he actually finds the damned moon. It’d be a major breakthrough. Fine feather in the lad’s cap.
The Reverend Kyle Umber was far from joyful as he sat alone in his sumptuous office.
I’m a figurehead, he told himself for the hundredth time. A bloated, pompous, self-important figurehead; all display and no real power. Evan Waxman controls this habitat and he’s turned it into a center for narcotics and lord knows what else.
And I let him do it! I sat back and let him handle the habitat’s day-to-day administration. He’s taken control of everything. Everything I’ve worked for, hoped for, prayed for—it’s all in his hands now.
He looked out from his desk, slowly scanning the trappings of authority and command that surrounded him. All make-believe, he told himself. A narcotic to keep me quietly sedated while Evan turns Haven into a drug manufacturing center and God knows what else.
His eyes focused on a faded picture in an old wooden frame hanging on the wall to one side of his desk. It showed a soldier carrying a wounded comrade across his shoulders, slogging painfully through jungle underbrush.
He heard the words of a long-dead political leader: “…no matter how long, or hard, or painful the journey may be…”
He whispered to himself, “Every journey begins with a single step.”
Slowly, Kyle Umber pushed himself to his feet. “The journey begins now,” he told himself.
But as he stood there behind his handsome desk, he realized that he had no idea of what his next step would be.
Then he remembered that Sergeant Jacobi had promised to send the surveillance camera footage of the attack on Tómas Gomez to him. He leaned over and told the phone to contact Jacobi.
The security chief sat rigidly in his desk chair as he watched Sergeant Jacobi’s lean, pinched face on the wall screen.
“He’s pushing for something,” Jacobi was saying. “He keeps asking me for the footage of the attack on Dr. Gomez.”
The chief felt puzzled. “You’ve gone over the footage of the attack. Is there anything in it that can identify the attackers?”
“Nope. I personally reviewed every millimeter of the footage. It’s clean.”
With an exasperated sigh, the chief said, “Let him see it, then. He won’t be able to meddle with our investigation.”
Jacobi nodded. “Yes, sir.” A split-second’s hesitation, then, “About my promotion…”
“All in good time, Sergeant,” said the chief. “All in good time.”
THE FORCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
When in trouble or in doubt, Kyle Umber recited silently to himself, run in circles, scream and shout.
He smiled bitterly at the old bit of doggerel as he walked slowly along Haven’s central passageway. Doors lined both sides of the broad corridor, men and women strode purposefully along its plastic floor paneling.
Well, I’m walking in circles all right, he said to himself. He had traversed the kilometers-long passageway more than once since he’d started pacing its circular length earlier in the morning.
Everyone he met smiled and said hello to the founder of the community. Umber smiled back, with only his lips, and nodded benedictions to them.
But his mind was far away from this refuge in space. As Haven glided smoothly in orbit around Uranus, Kyle Umber was thinking of his younger days back on Earth and how he got the inspiration for developing the habitat and offering it as a refuge for Earth’s forgotten, downtrodden people.