David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“We’ll need a consensus on this plan, of course, which may well take time.”

“Consensus, hell. Every day we wait the Newburn gets further away!”

Saul scratched his head. “Well, some will see the Newburn as a side issue.”

Carl gritted his teeth. “It’s forty lives.”

“True, but even I might be forced to put them on the back burner. The major problem is understanding the Halley lifeforms. If I can finish my current experiments on time—”

“Experiments!” Carl couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “You think they’re more important than forty people?”

“I didn’t say that, Carl! But we’re not out of the woods yet. There are so many diseases! We have to understand how the cometary ecology works when we add a new source of heat. That’s what we hadn’t anticipated, of course. I was speaking on tightbeam with Earth day before yesterday, and Alexandrosov, the head of the Ukrainian Academy, has a theory. Even with the minutes of time delay in the conversation, we got a lot of thinking done. I told him my ideas—preliminary ones, of course—and he saw an analogy—”

“Aw crap,” Carl said harshly.

“What?” Saul blinked.

“You’re talking like this was a damn thesis problem or something.”

“Thesis?” Saul blinked. “Carl. I assure you, an event of this magnitude, with so many implications, is bigger than a mere—”

“Shit, I don’t mean how big a deal it is with your professor friends back Earthside! I mean that you’re using it to make points!”

Saul’s face compressed, reddened. “That’s incredible. I—”

“You keep running tests and making up theories, yakking to your buddies Earthside—and the rest of us are working our butts off to stop this stuff.”

“I don’t need you to—”

“Come off it!”

“I’m sure I don’t know—”

“Life on comets! Discovery of the century! Saul Lintz, the interplanetary Darwin!”

Saul stiffened. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Some of us, we’re starting to wonder.”

Saul glowered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You weren’t Mr. Popular in the scientific world when you signed on for this cruise, were you?”

“I was the last living figure identified with the origin of the Percells, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Right.” Carl felt a sudden hot embarrassment, remembering who and what this man represented. But he could not keep his resentment in check. “The Israel you knew wiped out, family dead, career finished—you were on the ropes.”

Saul spoke in separated syllables. “So nu ?”

“So you ship out. Why not take this ride—it’ll return you when your past is old, forgotten, right?”

Saul said with surprising mildness, “I didn’t think I’d return and still don’t.”

Carl rode over this pause in the momentum. “But! Along comes alien life, and then the green gunk, the purples—bonanza! You’re famous—by accident, really. Anybody could’ve analyzed that ice and found microbes. But to understand it—that’s the big game. That’s where Saul Lintz will make his mark, show that he’s not just lucky. No, he’s a first-class scientist. And he can work on all the new stuff by himself. Study it hard. Squirt it Earthside when he likes. Every biologist back there is waiting for a speck of data about the first alien life, and the only person he can get it from is— ta-daah ! —Saul Lintz!”

Carl finished, puffing, his breath spurting cotton clouds in the cold air. Saul regarded him silently, his face lined and more than middle-aged in the harsh phosphorescent glare. A long silence passed between them and Carl calmed down, began to regret … But it was too late.

Saul poked at the caked sealant. “This wasn’t why you called me out here. You asked me to volunteer for the Newburn rescue. Very well. I volunteer. I don’t have to eat any of this chazerei ”

He cast off awkwardly, heading back toward Central. As he coasted, still looking back at Carl, hip words game in the chilled quiet: “It’s really Virginia, isn’t it?”

And Carl knew that it was.

He came into the Rec and Lounge cylinder with a sour, tired weight pulling him down. The grav wheel had been one of the last items transferred from the Edmund . It was always depressing coming in from near-zero G into a centrifugal G field, for several reasons. Even in a big wheel, there were Coriolis forces that set your reflexes off, induced a mild veering nausea. After a day in near-zero, where the slightest tug was important, you couldn’t walk without feeling the misaligned forces. Halley’s spin always pushed you slightly to the left.

But the worst of it was the simplest: you had been an eagle, and were now a groundhog.

So Carl was not in a warm mood when he met the Ortho. The man’s name, Linbarger, was stenciled on his crew over-alls.

“Don’t sit there,” he said as Carl eased into a recliner.

“Huh? Why not?”

“Got a friend coming.”

“Plenty of room.”

“Not for some there isn’t.”

Carl put down his drink. “You’re just out of the slots, so I’ll take that as a sign of the drugs not wearing off yet.”

Linbarger had all the slot symptoms. He was a thin stub end of a man, all skin and bones and no meat. The slots gradually used up your stored fat because the body was still running, only at an exponentially reduced level. But Linbarger must have been thin to start with. His head was long and narrow, set on a chicken neck with a knotty Adam’s apple. His face was all nose and cheekbones. His watery gray eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw round and hard.

“My friend, he’s just been unslotted, too. And I’d just as soon neither of us sat next to a Percell.”

“Oh, really?” Carl said with mock concern.

“So clear off.”

Linbarger wasn’t awakened for the rendezvous, so he’s not mentally adjusted from Earthside ideas , Carl thought. Okay, I’ll allow for that. Some . “Look, things are tough enough around here without you being a jackass.”

Linbarger rose and knotted his fists. “Don t breathe on me, Percell, or I’ll—”

“Oh, it’s my bad breath? Sorry, I didn’t bring any mouthwash from Earthside.”

“You know what I mean. It’s the damned germs you’re carrying.”

Carl snorted derisively. “The microbes are in the ice, not in us.”

Linbarger’s face took on a sour, cynical cast. “I’ve been out of the slots three days, reviewing what’s happened—and you can’t fool me . Normal people have died twice as often as you Percells.”

“So?” Carl had heard something about that from Virginia, but in the confusion and long hours of these last two weeks it had meant nothing. Just another piece of data.

“You Percells are using this to take over the expedition.” Linbarger announced it as a known fact. Heads turned at other tables. Carl noticed Lani Nguyen get up, concern knitting her face, and start toward them, but another Ortho put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“That’s what you think?”

“We all do—those of us normal people who have come out of the slots. We know it. You can’t pull the wool—”

“Spare me.” Carl said, lifting his hands. There was no such plot—who the hell had time to think about such things? —but how could he convince Linbarger of that?

Across the curve of the cylinder he saw Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad. He called, “Sully!”

The black man approached, compensating for the Coriolis twist with an easy stride, a drink in his hand.

“I was hoping you could straighten this guy out,” Carl said. “He’s going around saying that it’s us, the Percells, who’re.”