Barbary (18 page)

“How about an ocean?”

“I never saw that, either.”

“Oh.”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“That’s all right. I’ve talked to other people about it, and
I’ve seen pictures and tapes. But I can’t figure out what it would be like to
see it myself.”

“You know, Heather,” Barbary said, “an awful lot of people
talk about going to the mountains, or going to the ocean, but hardly anybody
ever did it. Not anybody I knew, anyway.”

“But they could have gone if they wanted.”

“Yeah. They could have.”

“I usually don’t care. But sometimes I wish I could go see
the mountains or the ocean, or blue sky.”

“Your sky is prettier.”

“I bet a blue one would be easier to find a raft in.”
Heather raised her head from the scanner. She looked exhausted. She had dark
circles under her eyes. Barbary felt afraid for her.

“Want me to look?” Barbary asked.

“I’ll do it a while longer, then it’ll be your turn,”
Heather said. She stretched, and hunched and relaxed her shoulders a couple of
times. “I don’t suppose you brought along any sandwiches or anything, did you?”

“No,” Barbary said. “I didn’t even think of it.”

“Oh, well. There are some rations in the survival ball. But
they’re pretty boring. Probably we should wait till we’re really hungry before
we use them.”

Barbary thought she would get sick if she tried to eat. She
felt empty and scared.

Heather bent over the scanner once more. “Hey! Look at
this!”

Barbary peered into the scanner.

“I just see stars.”

“Keep looking.” Heather touched the blink control.

In the center of the picture, one of the bright points
jumped.

“Is that Mick?”

“Has to be,” Heather said.

Barbary flashed the control again; again the image jumped.

“Now zoom in.”

Barbary did so. The raft appeared. The airless distance of
space transmitted details sharp and clear, but all she could find was the
silver and plastic shape of the raft, and the shadows of Thea’s contraption
inside. Nothing moved.

“There it is!” she said. She magnified it even more. “I
don’t see Mick, though.”

“Let me look.”

Heather teased the scanner controls.

“Can you see him?”

“Umm… no,” Heather said. “I can’t. But there’s a lot of
stuff in there. He’d practically have to sit on top of it for me to find him.”

“He’s probably sitting
under
it,” Barbary said.
“Yowling. Or growling like a wildcat.”

Heather laughed. “I bet you’re right.”

Barbary felt both overjoyed and, terrified. Heather had
found Mick — but Barbary would not be able to stop worrying till she saw for
herself that he was all right.

“Where is he?” she asked. “Right in front of us?” “No, he’s
kind of over to the side.” Heather pointed. “Thea must have planned to circle
all the way around the alien ship, then follow it as far as she could. I’m
going to have to turn us pretty hard. Are you strapped in?”

“Uh-huh. How long will it take to get there?”

“A couple of hours, maybe. I’m just guessing, though.”

“How do we get him when we get there?”

“We can’t. There’s no safe way to open a raft in space
unless everybody inside is in a space suit or a survival ball, and Mick
couldn’t get in one by himself. So we’ll stick out our claws and grab his raft
and turn us both around, and go back.”

“Oh,” Barbary said. She had been hoping there was some way
of getting from one raft to another. But at least she would be able to look
inside and see Mick.

“Hang on.”

The raft plunged into free fall as Heather cut the
acceleration. Barbary flung her hands out before her, for it really did feel as
if she were falling. The steering rocket flared on, the stars swung, and the
rocket on the other side counteracted their spin. Now, Barbary knew, they were
traveling in the same direction as before, but Heather had turned the raft a
few degrees to the left.

Heather applied some thrust to the raft. The new
acceleration would add to their previous velocity, changing their direction and
speed so they would be heading more nearly toward Mickey.

Getting to the right spot in space took a lot of care and
calculation. It would have been much easier if they could have flown the raft
like an airplane, or like a spaceship in a movie, banking into turns and
swooshing
from place to place. But in a vacuum, without any air, ships could not bank
into turns or
swoosh.

“I don’t want to kill any more velocity than I have to,”
Heather said. “It takes too much fuel. So I’ll probably have to correct our
course a bunch of times. But for now we’re sort of heading for where Mick ought
to be when we get there.”

Barbary tried to figure out how that worked. It sounded
suspiciously like a math word problem, which she had never been very good at.
She had never seen the point of figuring out when two trains would pass each
other when the only trains left were tourist attractions that she had never
ridden anyway. But being able to figure out in her head how to meet another
raft in space would be useful. She wished she had paid more attention to word
problems in school, and she wondered if it was too late for her to learn how to
do what Heather could do.

“Hey, Heather — Heather!”

Heather jerked up from the scanner, blinking and confused.

“Huh? What? I’m awake!” She stopped, abashed.

“No, you’re not,” Barbary said. “You fell asleep sitting up!
Heather... look... maybe…” With a shock, she realized how much danger she and
Mick had put Heather in,

“Oh, no!” Heather said. “Don’t even say it! We’re not
turning around and going back like we just came out here to make trouble and
then lost our nerve!”

Barbary hunched in her seat. She felt miserable. “I’m afraid
you’re going to get sick,” she said.

“I’m okay! I’m just a little tired!” Heather snapped. Her
expression softened. “Look,” she said. “I don’t have to do anything for a
while. I could take a nap, and you could keep an eye on the scanner. I’ll set
it so the image of Mick’s raft will get closer and closer to the center till we
intercept it. If it goes past the center of the focus, wake me up to correct
the course.” She showed Barbary the faint band of color outlining a square in
the center of the scanner. The other raft lay at the left edge of the screen;
it moved, almost imperceptibly, centerward.

“That sounds easy enough,” Barbary said.

Heather grinned. “It’s a lot easier than trying to sleep in
a raft, that’s for sure.” She squirmed around, trying to get comfortable.

“Lie down crosswise and put your head in my lap,” Barbary
said. “I’ll try not to bonk you with the scanner.”

“Okay.”

Barbary took off her jacket and tucked it around Heather’s
shoulders. Heather curled up under it, hiding her eyes from the light of the
control panel. Her position still did not look very comfortable, but within a
few minutes she was fast asleep.

Barbary looked around.

Far behind her, spinning, lit from behind, the station grew
smaller. The earth and the moon each showed only a slender crescent of light,
for Barbary was on their night sides. The raft’s automatic shield hid the sun
and prevented it from blinding her.

Even in the observation bubble of the transport ship, she
had never felt so alone and so remote. Beauty surrounded her, a beauty too
distant and too enormous for her ever to reach or comprehend. She gazed out at
the stars for a very long time, till she realized how long she had been
staring. She quickly grabbed the scanner. To her relief, the other raft still
lay within the field, halfway to the center of the focus.

Barbary increased the magnification, but that sent the raft
all the way off the screen. If she moved the focus, she might not get it back
to the place where Heather had aimed it. That also meant she could not use the
scanner to find the alien ship, to see if it was doing anything threatening or
even simply different.

Heather slept on. The radio receiver’s light never flickered
from its brilliant red. Trying to keep her attention on the scanner, Barbary
forced herself to remain calm. But worry raced through her mind. She began to
wonder if perhaps the aliens, and not the space station, might be trying to
call the raft: to tell her they understood, everything was all right; to tell
her they did not understand, please try to explain more clearly; or to tell her
they understood, but they did not believe her and did not trust her and did not
care anyway, and were going to shoot both rafts with death-rays.

She put on the headset and turned on the radio and the
transmitter.

“This is the second raft calling, in case you didn’t hear us
before.” She whispered, trying not to wake Heather. “We’re coming out to rescue
the first raft so it won’t bother you. It’s a mistake that it’s out here, and
we’re really sorry. We’re trying to fix things.” She turned off the
transmitter, leaving the channel open for just a moment.

“Barbary!” Yoshi said. “Is Heather all right?”

“You two turn around and —”

The vice president’s voice faded as Barbary cut the power to
the radio without replying. She would have liked to reassure Yoshi, but she was
afraid to get into a fight with any of the adults, especially Yoshi, or Jeanne
if she were there, which she probably was. Jeanne or Yoshi could say things
that would make her want to turn around and go back, so they would not be so
disappointed with her.

She glanced behind the raft. The science station was a
bright turning toy, part lit, part shadowed, spinning between the more distant
crescents of the earth and the moon.

Before her, space lay beautiful but still. Somehow the stars
reminded her of snow early in the morning, before dawn, in a quiet, windless
winter. She peered into the scanner to reassure herself that the other raft was
still there. She squinted, searching for any sign of Mick. But his raft drifted
onward, showing no signs of life.

She yawned, then shook her head to wake herself up. She
could not go to sleep, though Heather’s steady breathing in the silence of the
little ship had a hypnotic effect. She yawned again. She pinched herself, hard.

A glimmer of light on metal caught her gaze.

Off to the left, far away but as clear as a close-up model,
Mick’s raft crept along. Now that she had found it, Barbary did not understand
how she could have failed to see it for so long. She could tell it was in
motion; she could tell her own raft was approaching it, slowly and at a
tangent. In the scanner, the image had touched the outer edge of the focus
square.

She started to touch Heather’s shoulder, but decided against
waking her yet. They still had quite a way to go before their raft intercepted
Mick’s, and Heather needed the rest.

Still careful not to change the direction of the scanner,
Barbary increased the magnification. Now she could see part of the raft in the
center of the frame. But the transparent roof had not yet come into view.
Barbary stared at the image, willing it to move faster so she could look
inside. It crept onto the screen, appearing to move sideways because of its
orientation and because she was approaching it from behind and to one side. She
wished she could see its front. Often, when Mick had ridden in a car, he
crouched up front looking through the windshield. But she supposed he would
have trouble crouching on the dashboard of a raft, without any gravity.

Something glided through the picture.

Her heart pounding with excitement, Barbary bent closer over
the scanner.

“Mick,” she whispered, “hey, come past again, okay?” The
portion of the image taken up by transparent raft roof increased. She held her
breath.

As if he knew she was coming after him, Mick brought himself
up short against the plastic and peered directly at her. He opened his mouth
wide. If they had not been separated by the vacuum of space, she would have
heard his plaintive yowl.

“Okay,” she said, laughing with relief. “I’m coming to get
you, you dumb cat.” The scanner grew foggy. She had come so close to crying
that she had misted up the mask. She sat up and reached into it to rub away the
condensation with her sleeve. She glanced outside to check the position of
Mick’s raft.

To her shock, it — and Mick, looking at her — lay no more
than twenty meters away. She was gaining on it.

“Heather!” she cried.

She pushed the scanner out of the way and pulled her jacket
off Heather’s shoulders. She shook her, but Heather remained sound asleep.

“Heather, come on!”

Barbary did not intend to come this far and lose Mick. She
did not know if they could turn around and come back for him if they passed his
raft. She jammed her hands into the grasps of the claw controls. She reached
out; the grapples extended from beneath the raft. She opened her fingers and
closed them; the claws followed her motion.

The distance between the rafts diminished to ten meters,
then to five.

Barbary reminded herself again and again that the key to
doing anything in space was to do it calmly and smoothly. She did not feel
calm. She felt terrified and ignorant. Sweat rolled into her eyes. She could
not take her hands from the grasps, and she was afraid to take her gaze off the
other raft long enough to lean down and rub her forehead on her sleeve.

“Heather!”

Even if Heather woke now, there was no time for her to take
over the controls. As her raft approached Mick’s, so much faster than it had
seemed to be moving when they were far away, Barbary grabbed for it.

As she clenched her fingers in the grappler controls, the
two rafts came together with a tremendous, wrenching clang. Barbary gasped,
fearing she had rammed hard enough to breach the hull of Mick’s raft or her
own. The ships began a slow tumble. Around them, the stars spun. Barbary
squeezed her eyes tight shut. That was even worse. She opened her eyes again.
The claws kept the two vehicles clamped tight together. She could no longer see
Mick, for he was underneath her. But as the reverberations of the crash faded,
she heard, transmitted through the hulls, Mick’s angry, objecting howl.