Polaris (27 page)

As I climbed, the antigrav field took hold of my hips and legs again,
and my weight went away. I grabbed a tread, got onto it, and tried to catch my breath. I now had access to the underside of the aircraft. It hadn't been pretty, but I was there.

Each of the pods had an access panel. What I would have liked to do was open both panels and reconnect the control leads to the terminals. The forward pod was within easy reach. But the one toward the tail would be impossible to get to because the tread didn't extend that far. And I couldn't just float back there because of the wind. Nor would my tether have been long enough.

It was getting progressively harder to breathe. A darkness was beginning to gather around the edges of my vision. I took the key from my pocket, handling it carefully so the wind didn't blow it away, and punched the purple button. Both panels opened.

In the forward compartment, I could see the loose cable. It was simple enough: I hung on to a strut with one hand and reconnected it. (I'd brought the wire cutters in case I had to splice.) There was nothing I could do about the rear pod.

When it was done I closed the panels.

We were still going up, of course. We passed through another cloud, and for the moment I couldn't see anything except cumulus.

When we cleared I climbed back into the cabin, fell into my seat, and pulled the door shut. “I've only got one light,” he said.

“That's because you've only got one pod,” I replied. “It should be enough.”

He hit the button and the status lamp glowed green and we got some weight back. The rate of ascent began to slow. The rear of the skimmer went up, and the nose dipped. That figured since the tail still weighed nothing. Gradually we nosed over and continued to rise more slowly until we hit apogee. Then we began to fall.

“Okay.” I reset the black box to zero.

“What are you doing?” he asked. We were looking straight down at the ocean.

“Preventing a crash. If we jiggle it a bit on the way down, turn it on, turn it off, we won't hit too hard.”

“We're going to crash again?” he asked.

“Probably,” I told him. “But the air's going to feel better.”

We drifted down the sky. Alex clapped a shaky hand on my shoulder and told me I'd performed like a trouper. Made him proud.

The Patrol appeared and moved alongside. The bay got closer, but only slowly. We were descending like a leaf, while the Patrol encouraged us and told us to keep at it. My heart settled back inside my ribs, and color returned to Alex's cheeks.

Alex tried to manage things to keep us out of the water, but the position the aircraft was in prevented any kind of maneuver except up and down. Forty minutes after we'd begun to fall, we hit the surface. But unlike last time we slipped gently into the waves. It was nice and gradual, and the people in the rescue vehicle actually cheered.

We have solved every major scientific problem except the one that matters most. We still die too soon. I propose to set a worldwide goal that a child, born before this decade has ended, may look forward to a life span counted in centuries.

—Juan Carillo
Counsel General, Aberwehl Union, 4417 C.E.

I can tell you that your perspective changes on a lot of things once you get the idea that somebody's out to kill you. It's bad enough, I suppose, if you're caught up in a war, and they want to take you out because you're wearing the wrong uniform. But when the situation comes down to where you're a personal first-name up-close target, you just don't sleep so well anymore.

I was scared. I wouldn't admit it, especially since Alex was describing me to everybody he knew as a daredevil. “You should have seen her climbing around out there,” he told Fenn. And Windy. And one of the guys I was dating. And probably every client within range. And everybody else who touched base with us over the next couple of days. “She was outstanding.”

Oh, yes.

In any case, that was how, for the second time in two weeks, we went into the ocean. Well, into Goodheart Bay, actually. But that's a technical point.

We came out of it okay. Rescue pulled us from the water. The power went off in the new skimmer, and it headed for the same neighborhood
where the other one was. We filled out another round of forms, answered more questions, probably made the patrol's list of people to look out for. One of the Rescue guys suggested that next time we drive over water, if we'd let them know in advance they'd keep a unit ready.

It was too much for Universal, Alex's insurance company, which informed him he was henceforth
persona non grata.
Me, I went down to Broughton Arms to buy a scrambler. I gave them my link, and they ran the record. When it cleared, I picked up a small nickel thirty-volt Benson. It was efficient-looking, shaped, of course, like a pistol, capable (according to the manual) of putting somebody on the ground for a half hour or so by knocking out his circuitry.

Scramblers could, of course, be manufactured to resemble comm links or compacts or virtually any other kind of metal object. But my philosophy is that if someone has a weapon pointed at him, he should know about it.

Fenn lectured us again. “I wish you'd stop the nonsense,” he told us. “Either stay home, where you're safe. Or clear out altogether until we settle this matter. Don't you have anything planned that would get you away from here for a while?”

Actually we did. But eventually we'd have to come back. And there was no reason to believe that Fenn would be any closer to a solution in six days or six months. The problem the police have is that there are almost no crimes. So when one happens, they're more or less at a loss. I doubt they can resolve anything unless they happen to be in the neighborhood when the lawbreaking happens, or the perpetrator makes the mistake of bragging to the wrong people. Or does something equally stupid.

“I have a couple of specialists,” he continued, “who aren't doing a great deal at the moment. It might be prudent if I assigned them to look after you. But you'd have to abide by their judgment.”

Alex made a face. “You mean bodyguards.”

“Yes.”

“That's really not necessary. We'll be fine.”

Speak for yourself, big fella. Fenn looked at me. Personally, I'd have
felt more comfortable with a cop at my side. But I took Alex's lead. “It's okay,” I said. “I'll be careful.”

Fenn shook his head. “I can't force you to accept them.”

“We haven't been in a situation,” Alex said, “where having a bodyguard would have changed anything.” We were all sitting in the Rainbow office. “Has the investigation been making any progress?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Did the exhumation order for Crisp go through?”

“Yes. I told you it would.”

“Are they going to dig him up?”

“No. They didn't even take it to a hearing. They told us the case was closed a quarter century ago.”

I took to reading and watching everything I could find about the
Polaris
and the people who had ridden her on that last mission.

Nancy White was possibly best known for her fireside forays into the natural world. Her living room (or the set, whichever it actually was) looked extraordinarily cozy, comfortable, snug. White customarily sat in an oversized armchair, in the soft glow of an antique lamp on a side table. She was usually sipping a drink and talking to the viewer in a tone that implied we were all good friends, enjoying an evening together. There was inevitably a storm beating at the window, sometimes thunder and lightning, sometimes heavy snow. But it added to the warmth and good feeling inside.

This was a living room, she liked to remind us in one of her signature comments, that looked out on the cosmos.
“Like your own.”
She specialized in drawing parallels between natural processes and the human condition. Nothing is forever, not even a black hole. Springtime on Qamara, a world with (as she put it) too much ellipse in its orbit, was brief and quickly buried beneath a years-long winter, but the flowers were all the more valued for that reason.

Early in each of the White conversations, we leave the living room and sail among galaxies, or watch the fierce harridans of Dellaconda glide through the valleys of that distant world, or plunge into the fiery interior of Regulus, or soar through the churning atmosphere of a newly born
world. If there was a recurrent theme, it was the significance of the moment. Life is not forever. Take the cup and drink. Seize the day. Enjoy the jelly donut.

One of her more moving shows used the ancient outstation Chai Pong as its central symbol. During the golden days of the Kang Republic, twenty-six hundred years ago, several successive heads of state engineered a major push into the Veiled Lady. The Kang set themselves an ultimate goal of mapping the nebula, a task that would take centuries, even for an exploration fleet many times the size of the forty-plus ships they had available. But they made the commitment and devoted their wealth and energy to the enterprise. They built outstations (one of which was Chai Pong) and established bases and for centuries they moved among those far suns, discovering and recording living worlds, including the one at Delta Karpis. In a show recorded exactly one year before the
Polaris
departure, she observed that the Kang had established an outstation, since lost, somewhere in the Delta Kay region. (It was the Kang who initially found the incoming white dwarf and predicted the eventual collision.)

Locating another technological species had not been their stated mission. They simply wanted to know what was out there. The habitable worlds were too far to establish settlements, even had the Kang been of a mind to make the effort. But the point that White stressed was that in all those years, amid all those missions, no living civilization was ever discovered.

“It has always been argued that placing ourselves at the center of creation is an act of supreme arrogance,”
she said from the Chai Pong control room.
“But in a very real sense, it is nonetheless true that humans are central to the scheme of things. Cosmologists tell us that we cannot ask
why
the universe exists. We cannot ask about its meaning. These are misleading questions, they say. It exists, and that is the sum of all we know on the subject.”
She stops at this point and lifts a cup to her lips.
“Maybe, in a narrow sense, they're right. But in a broader context, we can argue that all the workings of the cosmos seem designed to produce a conscious entity. To produce something that can detach itself from the rest of the universe, stand back, and appreciate the vault of stars. Birds and reptiles are not impressed by majesty. If we were not here, the great sweep of the heavens would be of no consequence.”

In the end the Kang, exhausted in spirit and treasure, abandoned their outstations, gave up, and went home.

Chai Pong orbited a rocky world in the Karaloma system. The platform, the world, and the system had been all but forgotten.
“Given enough time,”
White said,
“it's what happens to us all.”

Alex had a combination den and workroom at the back of the house. He'd covered the walls with pictures of the
Polaris
passengers, all in settings that emphasized their humanitarian contributions. Warren Mendoza looking down a line of injured patients in a surgical hut on Komar during one of its endless guerrilla wars. Chek Boland helping give out coffee and sandwiches at St. Aubrey's in a poor section of a terrestrial city. Garth Urquhart landing with a relief unit in a famine-stricken village in South Khitai. Nancy White helping rescue workers in flood-ravaged and disease-ridden Bakul, also in South Khitai. A middle-aged Martin Klassner sitting behind a set of drums for the Differentials, a group of scientists with, maybe, musical talent, in one of a series of fund-raising events for survivors of a civil war on Domino. And, of course, there was the celebrated picture of Tom Dunninger, gazing at sunset across the West Chibong Cemetery.

It was supposed to be a day off. I'd gone in to conduct some minor piece of business. Alex, seeing that I was staring at the walls, stopped what he was doing. “It's common to all of them, isn't it?” he asked.

“You mean that they were all humanitarians?”

“They were all true believers.”

“I suppose you could put it that way. It strikes me that the people who make the contributions are always true believers.”

“That may be,” he said. “But somewhere in the mix, people need to be pragmatic.” I asked what he was suggesting, but he just shrugged and denied any deep significance. “I do have a surprise for you, though,” he said.

After what we'd been through, I thought I was about to get a bonus or a raise or hazardous duty pay. So it came as something of a disappointment when he handed me a headband. “Jacob,” he said, “show her.”

I was in a dining room, seated, facing the head table. It was a big room, and I saw the logo of the Al Bakur Hotel.

“Never heard of it,” I told Alex.

“It was torn down,” he said. “Forty years ago.”

The attendees numbered about three hundred. There was a constant buzz of conversation, and the clink of silverware and glass, and I smelled lemon and cherries in the air.

A chime sounded and a heavyset middle-aged woman seated at the center of the head table stood and waited for the room to quiet. When she had everyone's attention, she welcomed the audience, told them how pleased she was to see the turnout, and asked the organization's secretary to read the minutes of the previous meeting.

Alex leaned in my direction. “We don't need to see this,” he said. The speaker and the diners accelerated and blurred. He stopped it a couple of times, shook his head, and finally arrived at the place he wanted.

“. . . featured speaker for the evening,”
the heavyset woman was saying,
“Professor Warren Mendoza.”

“This is 1355,” said Alex, as applause broke out.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”
A relatively young and slim Mendoza rose and took his place behind the lectern. The
Polaris
was still ten years away.
“It's my pleasure to be here with you this evening. I want to thank Dr. Halverson for the invitation, and you folks for the warm reception.

“I won't mince words. I want you to know that you have my full support. There is no more important work being done today than the effort to stabilize population.”

“It's the White Clock Society,” said Alex, keeping his voice low.

Bone
white, I thought. And it keeps ticking. It counts the time left before Rimway's population outruns its resources to the degree that people begin to die in large numbers. Their slogan was on the wall behind Mendoza:

“Unless we persuade people there is a problem,”
Mendoza was saying,
“we will never be able to arrange a solution. Despite all our technology, there are hungry children on Earth, disease-ridden adults on Cordelet,
economic dislocations on Moresby. Members of the Confederacy, during the past ten years, have suffered literally dozens of insurrections and eight full-blown civil wars. All are traceable, either directly or indirectly, to scarcity of resources. Elsewhere, economies go through their standard cycles, taking wealth from all and impoverishing many. This isn't the way it was supposed to be.”

“Am I hearing this right? This is the guy who's trying to extend life spans.”

“No,” Alex said. “That's Dunninger.”

“But Mendoza was helping him.” I looked at Alex. “Wasn't he?”

“Makes you wonder, doesn't it?”

Mendoza talked for twenty-five minutes. He used no notes, and he spoke with passion and conviction. When it was over, he got a standing ovation. I've never worried much about overpopulation, but I wanted to join the general cheering. He was good.