Polaris (26 page)

“It has been the scientific grail for millennia,”
he said.
“Barcroft thought he'd solved it at the City on the Crag two centuries ago, about the time it was getting attacked by the Mutes. He was killed, and the lab destroyed. Nobody knows how close he might have been.”
His eyes clouded.
“Stupidity is always expensive.”
He stared past me, focusing on something I could not see. Then he shrugged.
“In the last millennium, Torchesky might have found a way to persuade the body to continue to manufacture ioline, and there was even talk that a few immortals were actually created. That they're still alive out there somewhere, hiding
themselves from the rest of us. Legend, of course. The work was taking place in a politically unstable climate. A lot of people were frightened by what they heard he was doing. There was theological turmoil. Eventually he and his work were seized by a pious mob, and that was the last anyone ever heard of it. Or him.

“There've been other reports of breakthroughs, maybe valid, maybe not. But unfortunately nothing that's made an impact.”

“Are you close?” I asked again.

“Yes,”
he said.
“It's imminent.”

Imminent.
The word kept popping up.

It was time to go home.

We loaded up on sandwiches and coffee, checked out, and went up to the roof. It was another cold, overcast day, no sun, and maybe snow coming. We retrieved the skimmer and climbed in. Alex took the driver's seat. “Louise,” he said, “take us home.”

A sudden gust blew in off the ocean. There were only three other vehicles parked up there, which gives you an idea how busy the hotel was.

“Louise? Answer up, please.”

Nothing.

The AI lamp was dark. “She's down,” I said.

Alex shifted his weight impatiently. He didn't have a lot of tolerance for glitches. Moreover, when one occurred, he always concluded it was somebody's fault. And, of course, never his. “Brand-new vehicle,” he said, “and trouble already.”

He tried the toggle, but there was no sign of activity. “Probably a loose connection,” I said.

He grumbled. “You always claim these things don't go down.” He switched over to manual and turned on the engine. “We'll have to drive.” He extracted the yoke and engaged the pods. That always feels good, when nine-tenths of your weight drains off. There's another project that's been going on for a long time: trying to find a way to reduce antigrav engines to something you could wear, say, on your belt. If you could walk around all day feeling the way you do in a skimmer . . . But that's another one of those things that I doubt we'll ever see.

“We should take it back to them tomorrow,” he said. “Get her repaired.” That, of course, would be my job.

He checked the screens for other traffic, touched the vertical thrusters, and we lifted off. I made a show of pulling on my harness to make sure I was securely belted. He grinned at me and told me to hang on. We swung around, passed over the edge of the roof, and turned south. The core thrusters fired, and we began to accelerate.

A couple of kids were walking on the beach. And somebody in the downtown park was flying a kite. Otherwise, Walpurgis might have been deserted.

If you had to drive, this was the kind of area you wanted to be in. There was nothing else in the sky, save a lone vehicle coming from the west. We soared out over the marshlands, which dominate the land immediately south of the city. A few klicks out, we passed into a gray haze. The sensors showed no traffic ahead, but I knew Alex didn't like driving when he couldn't see. So he took us higher, and we emerged into sunlight at about two thousand meters. A few minutes later, the clouds broke up and we glided out over Goodheart Bay. There were a few boats, and I thought I saw a long tentacle rise out of the water and slide back in.

I told Alex, and commented they better stay alert.

Alex enjoyed driving. He didn't get to do it often. But I think it made his testosterone surge.

The bay is big, 150 klicks before we'd hit land again, and Alex didn't seem disposed to talk, so I closed my eyes and let my head slip back. I was almost asleep when I realized my hair was rising.

“Something wrong,” I told him.

“What? You're not feeling well?”

“Zero gee.” That wasn't a good sign. “We've lost all weight.”

He looked at the instrument panel. “You're right. How's that possible?”

“I don't know. What'd you do?”

“Nothing. Are we going down?”

“
Up.
We're going
up.
”

I know everybody reading this rides his or her skimmer around and never thinks much about the mechanics of it. As I always did prior to the incident I'm about to describe. The vehicles are usually equipped with
two to four antigrav pods. The standard setting for them is .11 gee. You switch them on, eighty-nine percent of the weight cancels out, and you can lift off and go where you want. The way it works is that the pods create an antigrav envelope around the skimmer. The dimensions and arrangement of the envelope differ from one vehicle to another, but it's designed for economy: The envelope is no larger than necessary to ensure that the entire aircraft, wings, tail assembly, whatever, is enclosed. If you could see it, it would resemble a tube.

The pods can be dangerous, so to change the setting you have to open a black box located in the central panel and do it manually. Alex looked down at it. He didn't like black boxes. But he pulled the lid up, pressed the control square, and waited for the gravity to come back.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

We were still going up.

I took a shot at it and got the same lack of result. “It's not working,” I said. Alex made a face that told me that wasn't exactly news. I pried the face off the unit and pulled a couple centimeters of cable out of the system. “It's been disconnected.”

“You mean deliberately?”

I thought about it. “Hard to see how it could happen on its own.”

The skimmer was a dual, which is to say it had two antigrav units, both mounted beneath the aircraft, one just forward of the cockpit, one toward the rear between the cabin and the tail. The control cable, which I held in my hand, divided in two and linked into both pods. When I tugged again on the individual strands, there was still no tension. “It's been disconnected at both ends,” I said. “Or cut.”

“Can we fix it?”

“Not without getting under the skimmer.”

The color drained out of his face, and he looked down at Goodheart Bay, which was beginning to look pretty small. “Chase,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

We were passing three thousand meters, going up like a cork in a lake. “Lower your flaps,” I said. “And kick in the thrusters.”

He complied. We accelerated, and the rate of climb slowed. But it wasn't going to be nearly enough.

He got on the radio and punched in the Air Rescue frequency. “Code White,” he said. “Code White. This is AVY 4467. We are in uncontrolled ascent. Request assistance.”

A woman's voice responded.
“AVY 4467. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
I wondered if it was the same person we'd talked to last time we got in trouble.
“Be as specific as you can.”

“I thought I just did that.” Alex's temper surfaced. “The pods are on full, and I can't cut them back. We are stuck at zero gee. Going up.”

“AVY 4467, there is a manual control for the pods, usually located between the front seats. Open the—”

“Rescue, I've tried that. It doesn't work.”

“Understood. Wait one.”

Alex looked out at the sky, looked at me, looked at the black box. “We'll be okay,” he said. I think he was reassuring himself.

We rose into a cumulus cloud, passed through, and came out the top.

“Four four six seven, this is Rescue. Assistance is on the way. ETA approximately thirteen minutes.”

We didn't have thirteen minutes, and we both knew it. We passed through four thousand meters. The numbers on the altimeter were blurring.

“Rescue, that will probably be too late.”

“It's our nearest aircraft. Hang on. We'll get to you.”

“Chase,” he said, “help.”

Suddenly I was in charge. The only thing I could think of was
We could jump.
Get outside the bubble and the ascent would stop quickly enough. “I don't see an easy way, Alex.”

Lines creased his face. “Air's getting thinner.”

Skimmers are not designed for high-altitude flight. They have several vents, and if the oxygen gets scarce outside, the people inside are going to feel it. My head was beginning to hurt, and there was already pressure in my chest. “Breathe faster,” I said. “It'll help.”

I looked around the cabin. There was a time that these things carried
parachutes or glide belts, but accidents were so infrequent that more people died from experimenting with the escape gear than from crashes, so it was eventually decided that it was safer in an emergency for ordinary citizens to ride the aircraft down. But that assumed the aircraft was
going
down.

“How about,” he suggested, “we shut off the pods?”

“We don't have that option,” I said. “They're on and disconnected, so they're going to stay on.”

We cleared five thousand meters.

“Well,” he said, “if you've an idea, this would be a good time.” He was speaking more deliberately by then, inhaling and exhaling with every couple of words.

“You have any cable in this buggy?” I was climbing into the backseat, to get access to the cargo compartment. “Something we can use for a tether?”

“I don't think so.”

I made a show of looking around, but I knew there was nothing like that.

“Okay,” I told him. “Shut down the thrusters and take off your shirt.”

“I don't think we ought to be joking around.”

“Do it, Alex.” He complied while I opened the cargo compartment and found the tool box. I took out a pair of shears, a wire cutter, and the key. The key, of course, was a remote that would open panels on the bottom of the aircraft.

“What are you going to do?”

I pulled off my blouse. “I'm going to try to give you back control of the pods. Or at least one of them.” He handed me his shirt, and I used the shears to cut it and my blouse into strips.

He demanded to know how I intended to do that. But we were a trifle short of time, and I was in no mood to go into a long explanation. “Watch and learn,” I said.

I slipped the key into a pocket. Then I climbed back into my seat and tied the cloth strips into a line. I looped one end around my waist and tied the other end to my seat anchor. “Wish me luck.” I opened the door, and the wind roared through the cabin. It was frigid.

Alex was horrified. “Are you crazy? You can't go out there.”

“It's safe, Alex.” We were both shouting to get over the wind. “It's zero gee out to a couple meters from the hull. All I have to do is not drift too far away.” Or get blown off. “But I need you to keep us as steady as you can. Use the verticals if you have to, and hang on to the yoke. Okay?”

“No!” He pushed back in his seat. “I can't let you do that.”

I was halfway out the door. “It's not as dangerous as it looks,” I yelled at him. And damned sure less dangerous than doing nothing.

“No! You stay here.
I'll
go.”

We both knew he didn't mean it. In his defense, I'd argue that he thought he did, but I couldn't see Alex climbing outside an aircraft under any circumstances. Even on the ground I don't think he'd have tried it. Moreover, he didn't know what to do.

“It's okay,” I said. “I can handle it.”

“You sure?”

“Of course. Now, listen: When the pods reactivate, these two lamps'll go on. But don't do anything until I'm back inside.” I was trying to hold the door open against the wind. “If anything goes wrong—”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” He'd have no way out.

One section of the tether was midnight blue, composed of strips of the most expensive blouse I owned. I sighed and climbed out the door. The wind howled. I wasn't really prepared for it, I guess. It caught me and ripped me off the fuselage and tossed me partially outside the envelope. My weight came back and my lower limbs felt like a bag of bricks. The skimmer was still going up, and it dragged me behind it. I suddenly became aware that I was dangling several thousand meters in the air.

I hadn't thought things out very well. The tether was wrapped around my waist instead of under my arms, and when it snapped tight it knocked the wind out of me. I needed a minute to recoup. Then I began to haul myself back up the line, hand over hand. The drag was horrific, but I'd been smart enough (or lucky enough) to make the tether no longer than I had to. Had I been tossed completely outside the bubble, I'd not have been able to do it.