The Precipice (36 page)

Dan headed up to the bridge after his shower. Both pilots were in their places. No music was playing.

“All systems ready for turnaround,” Amanda murmured.

“Check, all systems go,” Pancho replied.

Standing behind their chairs, Dan asked, “Where's Fuchs?”

“Prob'ly still in the sensor bay,” Pancho said, “playin' with his toys.”

Amanda frowned slightly as she touched the comm screen. “Turnaround in five minutes,” she announced.

Glancing over her shoulder, Pancho said, “Boss, you oughtta find a chair.”

He scowled at her. “I've been in micro-g before, kid.” Before you were born, he almost added.

He could see Pancho grinning in her reflection on the port in front of her. “Okay, you're the boss. Footloops on the deck
and handgrips on the overhead.”

“Aye-aye, skipper,” Dan said, grinning back at her.

“Thrust cutoff in two minutes,” Amanda called out.

“Two minutes. Check.”

When the main thrusters cut off, Dan felt completely at ease. The feeling of gravity dwindled away to nothing, and he floated
off the deck slightly. Grabbing one of the handgrips, he hung there and watched the pilots working their touchscreens.

“How's Fuchs doin' back there?” Pancho asked.

Amanda tapped the central screen and it showed Fuchs strapped into the fold-up chair in the sensor bay, looking a little pasty-faced
but otherwise okay.

“Maneuver thrust in two minutes,” Amanda said.

“Check,” Pancho replied.

Dan worked his feet into the loops on the deck without letting go of the overhead handgrips. The maneuvering jets fired and
he felt as if somebody suddenly shoved him from one side. He remembered from childhood his first ride in a people-mover at
some airport: he'd been standing facing the doors, and when the train lurched into movement he'd nearly toppled over sideways.
Only the grownups crowded around him had prevented him from falling.

“Phew,” Pancho said, “this bird turns like a supertanker: slow and ugly.”

“You're not flying a little flitter now,” Dan said.

“Turn rate is on the curve,” Amanda pointed out, tracing the curve on the touchscreen with a manicured fingertip. Her screen's
background showed the white cliffs of Dover.

“Uh-huh,” said Pancho. “Still feels like we're pushin' freight.”

Amanda said, “We are: all that deuterium and helium-three.”

The fuel weighs a lot, Dan realized. Funny. You think of hydrogen and helium as being light, almost weightless. But we've
got tons of the stuff in our tanks. Dozens of tons.

There was nothing much to see through the port. No panoply of stars swinging past. No asteroids in sight. Nothing but emptiness.

“Where's the Sun?” Dan heard himself ask.

Pancho chuckled. “It's there, boss. Hasn't gone away. We're just angled up too much to see it through the windshield, that's
all.”

As if in confirmation, a stream of light glowed through the port.

“Sunrise in the swamp,” Pancho called out.

Dan felt another sideways surge of thrust, pushing from the opposite direction.

“TYirnaround maneuver complete,” said Amanda.

“Flow to main thrusters,” Pancho said, working the touchscreens.

“Main thrusters, confirmed.”

Weight returned to the bridge. Dan settled back onto the deck.

Amanda smiled happily. “On course and on velocity vector.”

“Hot spit!” Pancho exclaimed. “Now let's see how that leakisdoin'.”

Kris Cardenas almost made it back to her own apartment before two young men in dark business suits caught up with her.

“Dr. Cardenas?”

She turned. The man who had called her name was taller than his partner, slim and Uthe, sallow complexion, his dark hair cropped
into a buzz cut. The other was huskier, blond, pink-cheeked.

“Come with us, please,” said the dark one.

“Where? Why? Who are you?”

“Mr. Humphries wants to see you.”

“Now? At this hour? It's—”

“Please,” said the blond, slipping a dead-black pistol from inside his jacket.

“It fires tranquilizing darts,” said the dark one. “But you wake up with a bitching headache. Don't make us use it on you.”

Cardenas looked up and down the corridor. The only other person in sight was a mousy little woman who immediately turned away
and started walking in the opposite direction.

“Now,” said the blond, pointing his pistol at her.

With a resigned droop of her shoulders, Cardenas nodded her surrender. The blond put his gun away and they started along the
corridor toward the escalators.

“At least this one doesn't have a snake,” the blond whispered hoarsely to his partner.

The other man did not laugh.

P
ancho felt an old excitement bubbling up inside her as she wormed her arms through the spacesuit's sleeves. After more than
five days of being cooped up in the ship, she was going outside. It was like being a kid in school when the recess bell rang.

Standing by the inner airlock hatch where the spacesuits were stored, she popped her head up through her suit torso's neck
ring, grinning happily to herself. This is gonna be fun, she thought

Dan looked uptight, though, as he held her helmet in his arms and watched her pull on the gloves and seal them to the suit's
cuffs.

“Jealous?” she teased.

“Worried,” he replied. “I don't like the idea of you going out alone.”

“Piece of cake, boss,” Pancho said.

“I ought to go with you. Or Amanda, maybe.”

With a shake of her head, Pancho countered, “Mandy's
gotta stay at the controls. Shouldn't have both pilots out at the same time, if you can help it.”

“Then I'll suit up—”

“Whoa! I've seen your medical record, boss. No outside work for you.”

“The safety regs say EVAs should be performed by two astronauts—”

“Whenever possible,” Pancho finished for him. “And since when did you start quotin' IAA regulations?”

“Safety is important,” Dan said.

Inside the spacesuit, with its hard-shell torso and servomotor-amplified gloves, Pancho felt like some superhero out of a
kids' video confronting a mere mortal.

“I'll be fine,” she said as she took the helmet from Dan's hands. “Nothin' to worry about.”

“But if you run into trouble…”

“Tell you what, boss. You suit up and hang out here at the airlock. If I run into trouble you can come on out and save my
butt. How's that?”

He brightened. “Okay. Good idea.”

They called Amanda down from the bridge as Dan struggled into the lower half of his suit and tugged on the boots. By the time
he was completely suited up, backpack and all, except for the helmet, Pancho was feeling antsy.

“Okay,” she said as she pulled the bubble-helmet over her head and sealed it to the neck ring. “I'm ready to go outside.”

Amanda hurried back to the bridge while Dan stood there grinning lopsidedly at her, his head sticking out of the hard suit
like some kid posing for a photograph from behind a cardboard cutout of an astronaut.

Pancho opened the inner hatch of the airlock and stepped through. The airlock was roomier than most, big enough to take two
spacesuited people at a time. Through her helmet she heard the pump start to clatter, and saw the telltale on the control
panel switch from green to amber. The sound dwindled
to nothing more than a slight vibration she felt through her boots as the air was pumped out of the chamber. The light flicked
to red.

“Ready to open outer hatch,” she said, unconsciously lapsing into the clipped argot of flight controllers and pilots.

Amanda's voice came through the tiny speaker set into her neck ring, “Open outer hatch.”

The hatch slid up and Pancho stared out at an infinite black emptiness. Hie helmet's glassteel was heavily tinted, but within
a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see dozens of stars, then hundreds, thousands of them staring solemnly at her,
spangling the heavens with their glory. Off to her left the bright haze of the zodiacal light stretched like a thin arm across
the sky.

She turned her back to the zodiacal light's glow and attached her safety tether to one of the rungs just outside the hatch.

“Goin' out,” she said.

“Proceed,” Amanda replied.

“Gimme the location of the leak,” Pancho said as she clambered out and made her way up the handgrips set into the crew module's
side.

“On your screen.”

She peered at the tiny video screen strapped to her left wrist It showed a schematic of the module's superconducting network
of wires, with a pulsating red circle where the leak was.

“Got it.”

Although she knew the ship was under acceleration and not in zero-g, Pancho still felt surprised that she actually had to
climb along the handgrips, like climbing up a ladder, toward the spot marked on the schematic. Deep in her guts she had expected
to float along weightlessly.

“Okay, I'm there,” she said at last.

“Tether yourself,” Dan's voice commanded sternly.

Pancho was still tethered to the rung next to the airlock
hatch. Grinning at Dan's fretfulness, she unreeled the auxiliary tether from her equipment belt and clipped it to the closest
grip.

“I'm all tucked in, Daddy,” she quipped.

Now to find the leak, she thought. She bent close and played her helmet lamp on the module's skin. The curving metal was threaded
with thin wires running along the module's long axis. There was no obvious sign of damage: no charred spot where a micrometeor
might have hit, no mini-geyser of escaping nitrogen gas.

It can't be more than a pinhole leak, Pancho told herself.

“Am I at the right spot?” she asked.

No answer for a few moments. Then Amanda replied, “Put your beacon on the wire you're looking at, please.”

The radio beacon was strapped to Pancho's right wrist. She laid her right forearm on the wire.

“How's that?”

“You're at the proper spot.”

“Can't see any damage.”

“Replace that section and bring it in for inspection, then.”

She nodded inside her helmet. “Will do.”

But she felt silly, cutting out what looked to be a perfectly good length of wire. Something's wonky here, Pancho thought.
This ain't what we think it is, I bet.

Behind his unkempt beard, Big George was frowning with worry as he sat at one of the consoles in the spaceport's control center.
This little cluster of desks was occupied by Astro employees, monitoring
Starpower
1's flight. They sat apart from the regular Selene controllers, who handled the traffic to and from Earth.

George wanted to send his message to Dan in complete privacy. The best the Astro controllers could do was to hand him a handset
and tell him to keep his voice down.

Wishing they had worked out a code before Dan had impetuously
sailed off, George pulled the pin-mike to his lips and said hurriedly, “Dan, it's George. Dr. Cardenas has disappeared. She
told me last night she was worried that Humphries wants to kill you. When I called her this morning she wasn't in her office
or in her quarters. I can't find her anywhere. I haven't told Selene security about it yet. What do you want me to do?”

He pulled off the headset and nudged the controller who had given it to him. The man had been studiously keeping his back
to George.

He swiveled his chair to face the Aussie. “Finished so soon?”

“How long will it take to get an answer?”

The controller tapped at his keyboard and squinted at the display on his console's central screen. “Seventeen minutes and
forty-two seconds for your message to reach them. Same amount of time for their answer to get back here, plus a couple additional
seconds. They're moving pretty damned fast.”

“Thirty-five minutes,” George said.

“Got to allow some time for them to hear what you've got to say and decide what to say back to you. Probably an hour, at least.”

“I'll wait.”

Martin Humphries unconsciously licked at the thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip. He hated talking with his crotchety
sour-faced father, especially when he had to ask the old man for advice.

“You kidnapped her?” W. Wilson Humphries's wrinkled face looked absolutely astonished. “A Nobel Prize scientist? You kidnapped
her?”

“I've brought her here, to my home,” Humphries said, holding himself rigidly erect in his chair, exerting every gram of willpower
he possessed to keep from squirming. “I couldn't let her warn Randolph.”

The conversation between father and son was being carried by a tight laser beam, directly from Humphries Space System's communication
center on the top of Alphonsus crater's ringwall mountains to the roof of the senior Humphries's estate in Connecticut. No
one could eavesdrop unless they tapped into the laser beam itself, and if someone did, the drop in the beam's output at the
receiver would be detectable.

“Killing Randolph isn't bad enough,” grumbled the old man. “Now you're going to have to kill her, too.”

“I haven't killed anybody,” Humphries said tightly. “If Randolph has any brains at all he'll turn back.”

It took nearly three seconds for his father's reply to reach him. “Sloppy work. If you want to remove him, you should have
done it right.”

Humphries's temper flared. “I'm not a homicidal maniac! Randolph is business, and anyway, if he dies it will look like an
accident. His ship fails out there in the Belt and he and his crew are killed. Nobody will know what happened and nobody will
be able to investigate, not for months, maybe years.”