Charles Sheffield - Starfire

John Hyslop showed no sign of moving. He was still writing numbers on his notepad. Maddy watched as the shuttle hatch opened and the LMB executive at once hurried away. His every movement said Time is money!

Mulligan Johnson and Candy Wentzel were next. He was talking animatedly and Candy was smiling and nodding.

Some scandal involving Photonics?

Hard to imagine. Much more likely, Candy was a newcomer and needed somebody who knew his way around Sky City. In media races, an hour’s delay could be fatal. Maddy knew what she would have done, and Candy had probably followed the same line of logic: examined the passenger list, decided in real time that Mulligan Johnson was her best bet, and collected him as effortlessly as a child picking a daisy. Maddy didn’t disapprove of that. Candy, like Maddy, took her job seriously. You did what you had to do.

Next, the familiar-but-unfamiliar dark-faced stranger vanished through the hatch, still clutching his black cylindrical bag. The only passengers left were two who had arrived on the shuttle in wheelchairs and who were now waiting for nursing assistance. Both men had the puffy complexion and purplish lips suggesting congestive heart disease. The low-gee environment of Sky City might help — if they survived the shock of the launch and the strain of vomiting in the first few days. Space was the last resort for those individuals who, incomprehensibly to Maddy, refused a simple heart-lung replacement.

Still John Hyslop was sitting and staring at nothing. Maddy reached the end of her patience and nudged him. “Don’t we have meetings to attend?”

He turned to look at her with those steady gray eyes. “We’ll be there on time.”

She knew now that his jumpiness at their first meeting had been the result of a Neirling boost. Usually he was the calmest man she had ever met — calm enough to drive her crazy.

“Not if we hang around here, we won’t.” Maddy stood up. “Let’s go.”

He nodded, stood up also, and started toward the hatch. But when he came to it he didn’t go through. Instead he continued forward.

“Where—” Maddy began, and paused. A strange sensation of dizziness hit her as she left her seat. It passed as quickly as it had come, but by that time John had drifted all the way to the end of the main compartment and through the door into the pilot’s cabin. Passengers were not supposed to go in there.

“Quite a difference,” he was saying as Maddy came up behind him. “Fifteen percent?”

“At least.” The woman in the pilot’s seat was lean and blond and hollow-cheeked. She turned to survey Maddy with eyes of arctic blue, then nodded to indicate that she, too, was included in the conversation. “The end spec is supposed to be a twenty-one percent increase for the new engines, but we’ve not quite reached that yet.”

“That will be great. What’s the change in final mass ratio?”

“A factor of two with present performance. Over three if we ever hit spec.”

“I have a thought about that. How long will you be here?”

“Nine hours. Then we head back down.”

“Good. Plenty of time.” Hyslop again had the little notebook in his hand. “I was listening closely right through the powered ascent phase, and it sounded to me as though one cluster wasn’t firing as cleanly as the others.”

“Exactly right.”

“L-8?”

“That’s the way I feel it, and it’s the way the gyros measure it. But we’ve been through ground maintenance twice, and they insist that everything is nominal.”

“I bet your tests were done at constant external pressure. Downside maintenance sometimes cuts corners that way and uses ambient. I think the aerospike for the L-8 cluster may be following a recorded pressure that’s trailing the actual pressure by a few seconds. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But if you call Dan Iverson at the Flight Test Facility here on Sky City, the FTF can run you a dynamic test with variable ambient air pressures. You’ll be able to find out if that’s the reason the L-8 cluster is off.”

“Great.” The woman raised blond eyebrows, plucked to a thin line. “I assume you can authorize that?”

“Sure. No, wait a minute.” Hyslop paused, with an expression of surprise and irritation that Maddy found comical. “Damn it, I could have last week, but I’m not sure I can anymore. Look, go to Dan anyway, and tell him that John Hyslop told you that Dan is to get authorization from Bruno Colombo to have the test performed.”

“Dan Iverson. John Hyslop. Bruno Colombo.” The curved eyebrows went up farther. “I hope I can remember all the names. One of them is you?”

“I’m John Hyslop.”

“I’ve heard that name.” She reached out a long, slender hand. “Kirsten Lindstrom.”

“Will you do it?”

“Sure. Why not?” She shrugged. “We have lots of time before we leave, and I’d love to have that twenty-one percent increase in EJV. If it works out, I’ll let you know.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be. Go through Dan.”

“It’s a promise.”

Maddy, at last, was able to drag him away and off the shuttle. As soon as they were out of the pilot’s hearing she said, “Didn’t you even know her before?”

“No. You heard us introduce ourselves.”

“But you went right into the cabin, which passengers are not allowed to do, and you started telling her what was wrong with the way she did things.”

“I did?” He was frowning at Maddy. “I don’t think so.”

“I heard you. All that about the way the engines were firing, and what she ought to do about it.”

“But that wasn’t criticism of her. We were talking about the engines.”

“If you came into my project, and I didn’t even know you, and you started telling me you understood it better than I did, and how I ought to be running it, I’d— I’d— well—” It occurred to Maddy that at the moment John Hyslop was her project, and he understood himself far better than she did- She finished weakly, “Well, I don’t know what I’d do.”

She had left herself open for a major put-down, but all he did was stare at her, very seriously, and say, “I hope she didn’t feel that way. I was trying to do her a favor, because her bonus depends on the performance of her shuttle. I said a fifteen percent improvement in EJV was great, but that was only so she wouldn’t feel bad. The ratio of final payload to initial mass depends exponentially on the EJV. When the spec promises a twenty-one-percent increase, fifteen percent is terrible. Kirsten Lindstrom and I both knew it, but neither of us said it,”

It was a correction rather than a put-down. Not in the least like Gordy Rolfe’s cut-you-off-at-the-knees mockery and open sneer. Maddy decided that she preferred John Hyslop’s way of doing things, particularly when he added, “I suppose we have a different style of operations out here. But I feel sure you’ll get used to it. Have you ever been out at the shield before?”

“Never.”

“Then the more you know about it ahead of time, the better. Let’s go and get something to eat and we’ll talk about it.”

It was a genuine offer, well intended. Maddy had not eaten since morning and should have been starved. Instead, the thought of food produced a swirl of nausea. Her head was suddenly aching and the dizziness was back, worse than before.

It couldn’t be that she was sick. She was never sick; hadn’t been sick since she was seventeen. But the room in which they stood was rocking about her, and the straight line of Sky City’s central axle seemed to bend and twist as she stared along its length.

“Are you all right?” John Hyslop’s face was close to hers. She wondered why he was asking, then realized that she was clutching his forearm in both hands. She tried to shake her head. Nausea gripped her. She wanted to swallow, and couldn’t.