The Sails of Tau Ceti (7 page)

Tory nodded. “I can live with that. Just remember, that I never learned how to salute properly.”

He laughed. “Another old wives’ tale. Have you ever tried to salute in microgravity?”

She shook her head.

“As the arm comes up, torque causes the body to rotate in the opposite direction. Then, if you snap your hand down smartly, you go into a wobbly spinning motion. If your head happens to contact something solid, you can knock yourself out. Any other preconceptions that I can lay to rest for you?”

Tory gnawed on her lip. One subject had been on her mind since she had agreed to go on the expedition. She weighed the consequences of bringing it up now versus waiting. She decided that it was best to get everything on the table as quickly as possible. “Is it true what they say about spacers?”

“Depends on what they say.”

“The word is that things get pretty friendly aboard ship on long patrols.”

Van Zandt stared at her for long seconds. His mouth curled up slightly at the edges as Tory’s ears began to burn. “I presume you’re asking about sexual liaisons aboard ship.”

She nodded, surprised at her own awkwardness. After all, if she was to be cooped up in a vacuum-sealed can with this man for three years, she had every right to know what ‘duties’ he expected her to perform.

He sighed and leaned back. “It is true that space crews on long patrols often form close bonds, and sometimes those bonds involve sexual liaisons. People get together for companionship, or just to have a warm body next to them at night. Such relationships can last a day, a week, a patrol, or a lifetime. There is but a single rule and it is inviolate. Whatever happens, it must be agreed to by both parties. There can be no coercion involved. Does that set your mind at ease?”

“What happens when the spacers have wives at home?”

He shrugged. “Some are faithful, some aren’t. The same goes for the wives. I know of several arrangements where one woman is married to two spacers. It makes for a comfortable relationship unless both ships are in orbit at the same time. Or was your question a subtle way of asking whether I’m married?”

She felt her complexion grow even redder. “It wasn’t. Are you?”

“Divorced,” Van Zandt said. “My wife didn’t like the long separations that go with patrol duty. We ended our contract amicably and are still good friends. You?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“No one steady since I graduated from college.” Tory averted her gaze. “You must think me old fashioned.”

“Not at all. I am aware that Martian mores are different from those of Earth. No need to apologize for them.” He looked down at his glass, which was empty. “I need a refill. How about you?”

“Yes, please.”

She watched him as him made his way through the crowd toward the bar. After three years on Phobos, her thoughts were of more than the mission.

#

Tory Bronson stared bleary eyed at her work screen and wondered what it was that she had been about to do. She had returned to Phobos ten days earlier to a nearly insurmountable problem. In theory, dismounting the
Starhopper
instrument package from the stack and adding a fleet corvette in its place was little more than a recalculation of vehicle mass and balance. In practice, it meant a major overhaul to the vehicle’s control software.

Nor was there anyone else to do the work. Once she decided what was to be done with each of about ten thousand different subroutines, the small army of programmers she had been promised would guide the computers in their work. Determining what had to be done in the first place was a job that required a single brain and a single vision. At the moment, that brain ached from overload.

The biggest headaches were the subroutines that checked the instrument package’s health from millisecond to millisecond. All were carefully designed to keep the interstellar probe functioning for the half a century of unattended flight required to get to Alpha Centauri. Every subroutine would interpret the removal of the instrument package as a major system failure, and would attempt to route around the failed component. When that failed, God only knew what they would do. Most of the health monitoring routines could simply be deactivated, of course. Most, but not all. Some were vital to the proper operation of the booster. Figuring out which category each routine belonged in was the difficult part of the job.

Since her return to Phobos, Tory had been at her workstation from breakfast until long after the corridor lights went blue. She never really caught up, but the extra hours kept her from falling farther behind. She had forgotten what it was like not to feel tired. Fatigue caused her work to suffer, which made her less productive, which required longer hours, which increased her fatigue. She had no difficulty in recognizing the vicious cycle for what it was. Recognizing it and being able to do something about it were two different things.

Her only respite from the tyranny of the computer came during meals hurriedly gulped down at her workstation and the two hours each day she spent answering Garth Van Zandt’s questions. He, too, was working long hours as he struggled to learn everything he could about his new command. She did not envy him his task. Even after three years of watching
Starhopper
go together beam by beam, she was still trying to master the tiniest details of the booster’s construction. Van Zandt had less than six weeks to cram three years of knowledge into his brain, and was handicapped by not even having a simple computer implant. Nor did he have time to learn to use an implant even if he decided that he needed one.

Tory rubbed her eyes and turned her attention back to the workscreen. A schematic diagram of the
Starhopper
booster was displayed in its three dimensional depth. To the untutored, the diagram appeared a hopeless clutter of multicolored lines. To Tory, this was the least complex schematic that would allow her to follow the simulation she was running. It helped that the project computer was keeping track of the thousands of parameters affected by the modification she had just made to the control software. Even for one certified immune to avalanche effect, it was enough to give a person a headache.

After fifteen minutes of following a millisecond-by-millisecond projection of plasma flow in the booster’s energy converter, she became aware that someone was standing behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to discovered Ben Tallen’s lanky form.

“Ben!” she cried with a start. “Make some noise the next time so you don’t scare me out of ten years growth.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You were into it pretty deeply there. I didn’t want to interrupt something important.”

“When did you get in?”

“I arrived on the evening ferry and came right over. Have you eaten?”

She shook her head, suddenly aware of the emptiness in her stomach.

“How about showing me where one can get fed around here.”

She rubbed her tired eyes and said, “I really shouldn’t. I’ve got four computer alarms to check this evening before I call it a night.”

“You’ve got to eat sometime.”

“Right. Give me ten minutes to see if anything else is going to pop up on this run.”

“What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the diagram on the screen.

“I’m changing the bus timing on the booster control feeds to accommodate
Austria
’s data links. I have to check to see if I messed anything up when I made the changes.”

“And did you?”

“Hundreds of things,” she replied. “That’s the problem with this damned software. Everything affects everything else.”

“Aren’t the modifications going well?”

“They’re not going badly. You just have to be damned careful about introducing problems, especially in the fuel feed system. Think of it as messing with your own genetic code.”

He nodded and studied the schematic drawing she had displayed on the screen. It was obvious that he had no idea what he was looking at.

“
Starhopper
’s fuel feed circuits and controls,” she explained, “plus a bit of the engine control circuitry.”

“What does it do?”

“It aligns the antimatter before injecting it into the reaction chamber where the proton-antiproton annihilation reaction takes place.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said with a laugh.

Tory cleared her screen and accessed another schematic diagram — one used for briefing visiting politicians and university presidents. It showed generic drawings of the interstellar probe’s antimatter torus, reaction mass tanks, and the various engine circuits. She spent the ten minutes explaining the operation of the booster to him, after which, she guided him to the deserted project cafeteria.

“How much of that explanation did you understand?” she asked after gulping down half a sandwich.

“About a tenth,” he said.

“Before getting this job, I thought plasma physics was difficult, too. Now I find I speak this strange language that people can’t understand.”

Ben put down a drinking bulb of coffee and nodded. “I know what you mean. I never understood politics before I signed on with the science ministry. Now it’s all so clear to me.”

She shrugged. “You can have it. Politics involve people and people ain’t logical.”

He laughed. “You want to know who I feel sorry for?”

“Who?”

“Those poor bastards riding that light sail. If we have trouble figuring ourselves out, just think of the trouble they’ll have understanding us.”

“Or we will have understanding them,” she said.

#

“All personnel! Final warning. Stand clear of the landing area. Monitors, report status.”

Katherine Claridge, M.D., stood in her vacsuit on a small hillock at one end of Phobos and listened to the ground controller issue final instructions for the landing of the
Starhopper
booster. She was not alone. Around her were Garth Van Zandt, Tory Bronson, and most of the project personnel on Phobos who could be spared from their other duties.

Kit Claridge was a short blonde woman who had to work to keep her weight down. Despite this, she was in exceptional shape for her age (50 standard years). She was assistant chairman of the medical school at the University of Olympus, also the occupant of the Steinmetz Chair for Exo-biology. She was also Dardan Pierce’s personal physician.

Pierce had broken the news of the alien light sail to her two weeks earlier. She had been doubly dumbfounded by the news. First, she had thought him incapable of keeping a secret of that magnitude for longer than thirty seconds. Secondly, she had been struck speechless when he offered her a berth on the ship that would go out to meet the aliens.

“Are you sure you want me, Dard?” she had asked after regaining use of her lower jaw muscles.

“Why not?”

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of selection process? There are other exobiologists who are far more renowned than I am.”

“They aren’t MDs. I’ve checked. Besides, you are filling two berths for the price of one. Efficiency in all things, I always say.”

“But damn it, you don’t hand your doctor the biggest scientific plumb in history without consulting someone. My God, they will hang you in effigy at the next meeting of the System Society for the Advancement of Science. You have to at least appear to play the game.”

“Look, Kit. I don’t know all of those other biologists, but I do know you. I do not care what Sadibayan thinks, or de Pasqual, or even the first minister. I want you.”

“But why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Because you won’t panic when you meet the aliens, no matter how slimy they may look. You will look at them with that same Olympian detachment you use with me every time you tell me I am too fat. This is the first opportunity human beings will have to make a good impression on another species. I know you will represent us well. What’s the matter, don’t you want to go?”

“Want to go? I will kill to go! I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Look, if they want
Starhopper
, they have to let me fill a billet. The one I have chosen is the biologist slot. That’s you, unless you don’t want it.”

She’d shut up at that point lest he change his mind. She had spent the next two weeks in a daze, still unable to believe her good luck. Hell, after this expedition, she just might become the most famous exobiologist who ever lived.

Exo-biology had been a science in search of a subject for nearly three centuries. Generations of practitioners had written millions of scientific papers on what alien lifeforms ought to be like, all without having even a single non-terrestrial specimen to study. Yet, dangling from that blue-white light in the sky was a ship, and in that ship were living, breathing,
thinking
beings from another star. At the least, they would bring with them the Tau Cetian equivalent of body lice, intestinal bacteria, and perhaps even shipboard cockroaches. To Kit Claridge, that was a veritable alien ecology!

Finally, all of her patients had been referred to other doctors, her classes reassigned, and her administrative duties finished. She packed a single kit bag and caught the morning ferry to Phobos, arriving the day before they planned to bring the booster down to dismount the instrument package. She had spent much of her first day becoming acquainted with Garth Van Zandt and Tory Bronson.

She shaded her faceplate with a gloved hand as Phobos’ rotation brought the sun above the local horizon. The ground in front of her was unnaturally flat. It had been leveled off as a landing field next to the Phobos distillation facility. This was where small mountains of ice covered in reflective foil were landed after being towed into position by light sails. Once landed, they were carved up and carted off to the refinery. It was also from the landing field that tankers delivered their cargoes of slush hydrogen to the Earth Liners and other vessels in orbit about Mars.

Kit listened as the safety monitors reported the field clear of all personnel. When they finished, the general comm circuit resounded with the noise of a radio-borne siren. The clumps of vacsuited figures arrayed behind safety barriers suddenly ceased their chatter.