Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

Carpenter entered the lounge. He half expected to be arrested the moment he showed his identity plaque, but no, they told him that everything was in order, so apparently he was in the clear, not linked in any way to the conspirators, too unimportant even to notice during his short stay on Valparaiso Nuevo.

Noon.

He was supposed to create a disturbance if the others hadn’t arrived on time—cause a delay, make them hold the shuttle until the rest showed up. At the check-in counter he said, “Some friends of mine aren’t here yet. You’ll have to wait on the departure until they arrive.”

“That’s impossible, sir. Orbital schedules—”

“I saw them last night, and they were definitely intending to be here on time!”

“Perhaps they are already on board, then.”

“No. A courier out there who knows them said—”

“May I have their names, sir?”

Carpenter rattled off the names. He was still speeding. The desk steward asked him to repeat them more slowly, and he did. A shake of the head, then.

“Those people are not on this flight, sir.”

“They aren’t?”

“Reservations canceled. All three. We have an entry here on the board that they will not be taking the flight.”

Carpenter stared.

They’ve been arrested, he thought. No doubt of it now. Olmo has them, and with any luck they’ve been telling him about the plot, unless, of course, they’ve been stashed away for interrogation later on.

And the bombs—the bombs—had Olmo found them all? Did he know?

“If you don’t mind, sir—you’ll have to take your place on board, now—”

“Yes,” Carpenter said mechanically. “Of course.”

Moving with the leaden tread of a dying robot, he went lurching onto the shuttle. Looked about for Jolanda, Enron, Davidov. Not to be seen. Of course not.

Let himself be strapped into his gravity cradle. Waited for the shuttle to push off.

Enron. Davidov. Jolanda.

A colossal bungle. He could do nothing. Nothing at all. Make them delay the flight? They wouldn’t. They would simply pull him off and stick him in restraint at the shuttle terminal. Suicide, is what that would be.

“Please sit back, enjoy the flight—”

Yes. Sure.

The shuttle was moving outward, now. Quarter past twelve, exactly. Carpenter put his hands over his eyes. He had felt a little while before that he was as tired as he had ever been, but he suspected now that he had gone beyond that, that now he was tired as he could ever possibly get. If you could die of sheer weariness, he thought, he would be dead by now.

“What time is it?” he asked a man in the opposite seat, a long while later.

“Valparaiso Nuevo time?”

“Yes.”

“One twenty-eight exactly.”

“Thank you,” Carpenter said. He turned toward his porthole and stared fixedly out, wondering which side of the shuttle was facing toward Valparaiso Nuevo, and, if it was this one, which of the many little points of light out there was the habitat he had left a little while before.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The explosion, when it came, was like the sudden distant blossoming of a scarlet flower in the sky. And a second flare of red, and a third.

rhodes was clearing out his desk when the annunciator light went on and the android outside said, “Mr. Paul Carpenter is here to see you, Dr. Rhodes.”

It was Rhodes’ final day at Santachiara Technologies, and he had a million and a half things to do. But he could hardly tell Paul Carpenter that he was too busy to see him.

“Tell him to come in,” Rhodes said.

He wasn’t prepared for the change in Carpenter’s appearance. His old friend looked as though he had lost twenty pounds in just a matter of weeks, and aged ten years. His face was haggard, his eyes were vacant-looking and rimmed with red, his long yellow hair had lost most of its luster. Carpenter had shaved off his beard for the first time in Rhodes’ recent memory, and the look of the lower half of his face, gaunt and hard and outjutting, was altogether unfamiliar.

“Paul,” Rhodes said, going to him, wrapping his arms around him. “Hey, fellow. Hey, there!”

It was like embracing a sack of bones.

Carpenter smiled grimly, a ghostly burned-out smile. “A crazy time,” he said softly.

“I’ll bet it was. You want a drink?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” said Rhodes.

Carpenter flashed him that dead, practically expressionless little spectral smile again. “You didn’t give it up, did you?”

“Me? Not a chance. I’ve got a serious habit, fellow. But I can do without it right now. Sit down, will you? Relax.”

“Relax, he says.” Carpenter chuckled hollowly. He gestured at the packing crates, the stacks of cubes and virtuals. “You going somewhere?”

“This is the last day. I start at Kyocera on Monday.”

“Good for you.”

“I’ll be taking most of my people over with me. Hubbard, Van Vliet, Richter, Schiaparelli, Cohen—all the key personnel. Samurai is appalled, of course. They’re talking big lawsuit. Not my problem.”

“No?”

“Kyocera will indemnify.”

“Nice,” Carpenter said. “I’m very glad for you, Nick. Go over there and genetify the hell out of things. Fix everything the way it needs to be fixed. A new human race that can breathe methane and drink hydrochloric acid. Do it, Nick. You and Dr. Wu.”

“I haven’t talked with Wu yet. He’s still up there on Cornucopia, retrofitting the crew for the interstellar trip.”

“Cornucopia?”

“The Kyocera research satellite. Practically next door to the place that—”

“Ah,” Carpenter said. “Yes.”

Neither of them spoke for a time.

“What a shitty thing. Valparaiso Nuevo.”

“Yes.”

“Isabelle still hasn’t even begun to cope with it. Jolanda was her best friend.”

“I know,” said Carpenter. “What vitality that woman had! I can’t believe she’s—”

“No. Neither can I.”

“I saw it blow up. Sat there on the shuttle, watching it, thinking, Jolanda, Enron, Davidov. And all those thousands of other people. But mainly Jolanda. Jolanda. Jolanda.”

“Don’t talk about it, Paul. Don’t even think about it.”

“Sure.”

“You certain you don’t want a drink?” Rhodes asked.

“Listen, if you’d like to have one—”

“Not me. You.”

“I don’t dare touch it. I had a hyperdex overdose while I was up there. Only thing that saved my life, but it ruined my nervous system for a long time to come.”

“Hyperdex? Saved your life?”

“A long story,” Carpenter said. “Farkas decided he needed to kill me, and Jolanda tipped me off and gave me some of her pills, and—oh, shit. Shit, Nick I don’t feel like talking about it at all”

“You shouldn’t,” Rhodes said.

It was unbearable, he thought, to see Carpenter this way, this dazed, woozy shell of a man, this wreck. But Carpenter had been through so much, the iceberg thing, the firing, the trip across the country, the L-5 explosion—

They sat in silence again for a while.

The thing about a friendship that goes back this many years, Rhodes told himself, is that when a moment comes when it’s more appropriate not to say something than to say something, you can just keep your mouth shut. And the other one will understand.

But after a time it was impossible for him to sustain the silence. Quietly Rhodes said, “Well, Paul? What now? Do you know?”

“Yes. I do.”

Rhodes waited.

“Back to space,” Carpenter said. “I’ve got to get out of here. Earth is fucked, Nick. At least it is for me. I have nobody here but you. And Jeanne, I guess, but I don’t really have her. And I don’t want to mess her up any more than she already is, so the best thing I can do is to leave her alone, I don’t want to stick around and watch things continue to fall apart here.”