“Are you all right in there?” Hawkins was shouting into his suitcomm, as if they could somehow hear him better the closer he got and the louder he yelled. “Marianne, can you hear me? Mays?” He flew like an arrow toward the upright capsule.
By now the Moon Cruiser had cooled to black and the mist was rising. McNeil showed Hawkins how to trip the latches that fastened the strap-on fuel tanks and rocket mo-tor to the capsule; they kept their distance as the explosive bolts blew the propulsion rig loose.
Even with their suit maneuvering rockets on full, it took several seconds before the two men could get the big can-ister to move. Their helmet beams sent odd shafts through the fog as McNeil and Hawkins grappled with it; finally it rose reluctantly from the steaming fumarole it had blasted in the middle of the ice.
The strange flying assemblage, two white-suited astro-nauts holding a burned and blackened wreck between them, came through the mist like something from a ruined Ba-roque ceiling, a mockery of apotheosis. The lights of the faroff
Ventris
beckoned them through the white limbo.
The big ship’s equipment bay doors were split wide open. With the Manta still somewhere underwater and the Old Mole parked out on the ice, there was more than enough room inside for the battered Moon Cruiser. Groves had left the bridge and was on hand to help the others wrestle the capsule into the hold. Motors spun in dead silence and the clam-shell hold slowly resealed itself. Valves popped and air poured into the hold, imperceptibly at first, then with a whisper, then in a hissing crescendo.
Angus McNeil, designated ship’s doctor, found himself rig-ging two life-support systems in the ship’s tiny gym, which doubled as the clinic. Bill Hawkins, still wearing his sweat-stinking spacesuit, glued himself to a monitor screen in the wardroom, watching McNeil work, until Jo Walsh finally talked him into getting out of his suit and into fresh clothes.
Force against duration, that was the critical curve, and Groves thought he’d blown it. The fluffy sublimed stuff on the moon’s surface hadn’t been deep enough; the underlying ice had been too hard; the capsule had stopped too fast. Worst of all, the retrorocket hadn’t fired. The cynical faith that Groves and McNeil had expressed—that Mays had planned it all, that he knew exactly what he was doing—had apparently been misplaced.
Hawkins, meanwhile, was driving himself into ecstasies of despair. Unable to help or even get close to the clinic, given the cramped quarters, he was calling up the entries under “kinetic trauma” from the wardroom’s library, trying to make himself an expert.
Case histories, garnered from accident reports in over a century’s worth of space travel, made grim reading: “Onset of 8,500 gees per second averaged to 96 gees in an exposure lasting 0.192 seconds was fatal within 4 hours with massive gross pathology. . . . The 8,500-gee per second rise time to 96 peak is 0.011 second, corresponding to 23 Hertz, which excites whole-body resonance. . . . Orientation of impact force applied to the body relates to axes of internal organ displacements, hydraulic pressure pulsation in blood vessels, and interaction of head, thorax and pelvic masses between spinal couplings. . . .”
Mays had gotten the worst of it, with a broken neck and lower spine and a severed spinal cord. Marianne, lighter, younger—and shorter—therefore less massive and more flex-ible, had broken no bones. But her internal organs had suffered as Mays’s had, having been subjected to “whole-body resonance.”
The Manta was coming up from below. Once clear of the boiling core and its turbulence, with communication between the
Ventris
and the Manta restored, Blake and the professor had been able to monitor events overhead.
The submarine rose from the seething surface of Amal-thea and made its way unaided through the cloying mists of the vacuum, using short bursts of its auxiliary rockets, to the hold of the
Ventris
. They managed to dock the awk-ward little makeshift spacecraft—which had never been intended to be one for more than a few seconds at a time—without incident. Through the mists, the copper sky above the
Ventris
held a bright new object, a Space Board cutter keeping station in Amalthea’s wake.
Blake and Forster got through the equipment bay airlock in time to hear the announcement from the ship’s computer over the intercom:
CWSS 9, Board of Space Control, now holding in orbit. Inspector Ellen Troy requests permission to board Ventris
.
“Not good, Inspector,” said Walsh. “Your timing is ex-cellent, though”—suspiciously excellent, she didn’t bother to add. “We need to get them aboard that cutter of yours and into first-rate medical facilities.”
Walsh interrupted him before he could reply. “I don’t know what the politics of this are, but I guess they must be pretty important,” said Walsh, who’d put in tens of thousands of hours on the flight decks of Space Board cut-ters. “I hope you’re prepared to accept responsibility for the deaths of those two people, Inspector. You’ve sent away their only good chance to survive.”
Sparta faced her old acquaintance, who managed to con-tain her anger only because her discipline was greater than her pride. “I do take responsibility, Jo. If there’s anything I can do to prevent it, they won’t die.”
Inside the makeshift clinic there was barely enough room for both crash victims. Loose straps kept them from floating away from their pallets in the near-zero gravity, although they would not have gotten far, entangled in webs of tubes and wires that monitored heart rhythms, brain rhythms, lung function, circulatory system, nervous system, diges-tion, chemical and hormonal balances. . . .
On top of damage from torn tissues, broken bones, and displaced internal organs, Mays and Mitchell were suffering from the effects of ionizing radiation absorbed in a lightly shielded capsule during more than eight hours inside Jupi-ter’s radiation belt. That damage posed more of a problem than fractured bones, ruptured flesh, or severed nerves.
Through tubes of microscopic diameter, pre-packaged molecules entered their bodies to course like emergency ve-hicles through their bloodstream. Some were natural bioch-emicals, others were tiny artificial structures, “tailored nanocytes,” that worked not by snipping and pinching and whirring, not like Lilliputian machines, but by lightning catalysis, the complexification and decomplexification of interlocking molecules. Frayed muscles and ligaments and organ flesh, torn nerve fibers, fractured bones were sought out; damaged bits were gobbled away and digested, the waste products scavenged for their constituent molecules; replacements were constructed on site from the sea of bal-anced nutrients in which they swam by incalculable swarms of natural and artificial proteins and nucleic acids. . . .
Sparta joined them in the clinic and stayed there the whole time, with the PIN spines beneath her fingers extended and inserted into the ports of the machine monitors. Beneath her forehead, the dense tissue of her soul’s eye reviewed the analyses, partly
smelling
the complex equations that presented themselves for her mental inspection, partly seeing them written out on the screen of her consciousness. From time to time, several times a second, she made subtle adjustments to the chemical recipe.
Life-signs monitors went to yellow: the patients were out of danger. They’d be tired and sore when they woke up, and it would take some getting used to the stiffness of their repaired flesh, but in every measurable respect they were well on their way to good health. Sparta had known it before the monitors announced it. She had already gone to the cabin they’d assigned her and was sound asleep, uncon-scious from exhaustion.
Blake was there when she woke up. It was his cabin too. She was still wearing the velvety black tunic and pants she’d favored since their reunion on Ganymede. In Blake’s eyes she’d always looked sexy, wearing her usual shiny don’t-touch-me suit or even in a spacesuit, a bag of canvas and metal, but these days she was starting to dress like she didn’t mind people thinking so. It was less a surprise than it might have been when she smiled wearily and began tak-ing off her crushed and slept-in clothes.
Naked now, she sat on the bunk facing him, folding her bare legs into lotus position. “It’s about the Knowledge, and what it really means.” She easily resumed the conversation they’d begun on Ganymede as if no time had passed.
“They were looking for supermen,” she said. “But there must have been more to it than pride. Back at the Lodge I spent hours quizzing my father and the commander and the kids on the staff, finding out what they knew of Free Spirit practices, what they had learned of the Knowledge, how they interpreted what they knew. I tried to see if it fit with my own understanding of the Knowledge. I was never taught, you know; they programmed it right into the neu-rons.”
She nodded. “I learned a lot this year, some from other people but most from self-guided deep probes of my own memory. But the most insistent image came from me: a vivid experience I had when I was . . . crazy. There was a moment in the darkness in the crypt under Kingman’s place, St. Joseph’s Hall— when I looked into the pit—under the ceiling map of Crux. There was a head of Medusa on the stone that covered it.”
“We’re many things, Blake, both of us. In the pit, there were scrolls and the chip of Falcon’s reconstruction and a bronze image of the Thunderer, but what I see whenever I think of that moment are the two little skeletons, so deli-cate—so yellow and old. Infants, identical in size. I knew immediately that they must have been twins. And I knew what they symbolized. Like the king and queen of the alchemists, they were the Heavenly Twins—and the Heavenly Parents—Gold and Silver, the male Sun and the female Moon.”
“All right. The point is that for thousands of years there’s been a cult of Knowledge, using lots of different names to hide its existence. Free Spirit is a pretty recent one, from the 12th or 13th century. And for all those centuries they’ve been busy putting out
false
knowledge, to screen their pre-cious truth.”
Blake couldn’t restrain himself. “Egyptian, Mesopota-mian, Greek mythology, it’s loaded with hints. It’s there right in Herodotus, those tales of the Persian Magi—they were the historical adepts of the Knowledge. And Hermes Trismegistus, those books that were supposedly priestly revelations of the ancient Egyptians but were really Hellenistic fictions concocted by worshippers of the Pancreator to put people off the track. Weren’t they marvelous fantasies though, wonderfully vague and suggestive? Some people still believe that stuff today! And the so-called great relig-ions . . . Don’t get me started.”