Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“It’s okay,” And said. “Just hurry, please. She needed another twenty seconds to reach the Shuttle Control Center.

In the cockpit of the shuttle, Marnie Leeds had backed slowly away from Clarke, allowing her French Canadian guests to ooh and aah at the view. The hotel-spa was shaped like a clamshell, with ceiling-to-floor windows on the concave side facing Earth. Many tourists spent their entire time on the station savoring the sight, reluctantly leaving the picture windows only to sleep. The Neugebauer Infrared Array hung four hundred meters above the hotel. A thirty-meter telescope anywhere is a remarkable sight, but permanently perched thirty-five thousand kilometers above Africa, it was riveting. The segmented primary mirror glistened with a yellowish hue from its bacteria-thin gold coating.

She looked down at the carbon nanowire space elevator cable, which snaked from the geosynchronous station to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Nearly cloud-free today, the continent was framed between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Marnie activated the shuttle’s electron beam pointer. She highlighted Cairo, Algiers, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Abidjan, Lagos, Kinshasa, Capetown, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa, circumscribing the cradle of mankind in less than two minutes. Her passengers responded with delight. She opened a channel to Ops. “Shuttle One to Weber. We’re on our way. ETA twenty minutes. Over.” Whichever astrophysicist was on duty in the gravitational wave telescope, he or she knew well in advance when tourists were coming. Marnie always hailed them anyway. Tourists were a minor time-sink for the scientists and techs, but their steady revenue stream was a godsend, so they were treated like visiting royalty.

Of the whole crowd that rotated in and out of the Weber, she most liked turning the tourists over to Greg. He was one of the few scientists on the project who really enjoyed engaging the public, and he did it with wit and charm. Kids initially reacted cautiously to his sharply chiseled face and intense eyes. His captivating talk of voracious black holes, punctuated with energetic violin playing for illustration, had them pleading for more by the end of a tour. Marnie relished his enthusiastic explanations of collapsing stars and warped spacetime. “The life of every star is a war between gravity and pressure,” he inevitably began. “Hydrogen fuses into helium. Then the helium fuses into carbon and oxygen. That supplies the outward pressure to balance the crushing pull of gravity. Gravity is the stellar angel of death.” All the while accompanying himself on the fiddle, he usually made a scary face with that one and the kids whooped. “Gravity always wins when a star’s nuclear fuel is exhausted.”

“Negative, Marnie.” Greg’s voice, unlike she’d ever heard it before. “Radiation surge coming. Didn’t Ana get to you yet? Go back to Clarke. Get everybody under cover.”

“Greg, when?”

“Now, goddamnit. Do it now.”

She switched over to the passenger comm system. “Everybody belt down.”

Moments later Ana was on the circuit. Her voice stayed level, but Marnie knew frantic when she heard it.

“Greg.” She was having trouble breathing. “Marnie’s got six aboard Shuttle One, two adults and four kids. She’s coming around. Headed back. Just a kilometer away. Three minutes out, tops. Shuttle Two’s still down. We’ll turn One around as soon as Marnie’s group is back onboard.” Her voice quavered. She desperately wanted to order Marnie and Shuttle One to pick up Greg. But even with her fiancé’s life at stake she knew the rules. Tourists come first, no exceptions. Ever. “Greg, what can we do?”

A long silence. “Ana, I haven’t a clue, sweetheart. I wish I’d said it more often, but you’re beautiful and I love you.” A pause. Then: “I think we’re at the end here.”

“There must be something—.”

He went quiet again. “Give Kristi a hug. And listen, tell her to read her email. It’s important.”

Marnie pitched the shuttle 180 degrees in the ten seconds after she’d spoken with Greg. Guidebooks ricocheted off the cabin walls. Frantic yells came from the passenger section. “It’s okay,” she told them, while she turned sharply toward Clarke’s airlock. One of the kids started to whimper. “Hold tight, everyone. Brace yourself!” She gave it a solid thirty seconds of thrust. The sudden acceleration pushed them all into their seats. The shuttle raced back toward the hatch at an illegal fifty knots. The approach was slightly off-center. She tapped the port thruster, and was horrified to see it remain ON after she released the button.

The shuttle bounced hard off the emergency bumpers. Her head snapped sideways into a restraint. Metal tore. Thank God for the pressure suits. Marnie struggled to remain calm as the deploying airbags punched at her. Her youngest charge, Lissette, was screaming. The emergency lights glowed angry red, then failed as the passenger cabin split along its main seam. A hurricane of escaping air tried to suck out her passengers. They were all screaming now.

Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.

Marnie remembered her training as the airbags deflated.

Don’t panic.

Her suit was intact. So was everyone else’s. She flipped on her helmet lights, unbuckling the six terrified tourists. Holding Lissette herself, she pushed and pulled the family toward safety. The airlock was meant for four. No time for that luxury. She jammed her six wards inside and pushed in after them. Ana’s face was on the monitor, giving her a thumbs-up. The inner door closed on her arm and rebounded open. She tried again and held her breath until the hatch closed. The green lamps came on and she slapped the emergency re-pressurize knob. Air flooded the chamber. “Keep your suits on,” she told everyone. When the pressure equalized, Ana yanked open the outer hatch. “Around the corner,” she said. “Don’t stop, keep going, turn right, thirty meters to the shelter.” When one of the kids tried to ask a question, she simply shook her head. “Go! Go!” she barked.

Marnie watched her take a moment to look back at the wrecked shuttle. Ana bit her lip. Then she pulled herself into the shielded station core.

Greg saw the seismograph needle twitch twice, then jerk back and forth with growing fury. The oscillations surged, and he watched the arm snap off in mid swing. Pulling himself to the digital console, he read a peak strain of ten to the minus seventeenth on Icewave , his cryogenic diamond gravity-wave detector. No way , he thought. Can’t be that high. It must be a major system glitch. But the hundred kilometer interferometer gave him the same impossible result. Savor this , he told himself. You just recorded a gravity wave a hundred million times more powerful than any on record. The neutrino guys are about to experience the biggest flash in history. Incredible. Probably fry half their equipment. The cold realization that other, far deadlier, radiation was also coming froze the thought and turned his face chalk-white.

It had been over a minute since the siesmograph needle had sent its warning. The radiation monitors hadn’t budged. I’m not dead yet. It can’t be a collapsing neutron star, I’d be toast by now. “Ana,” he radioed, “the strain is so big that it’s got to be something nearby.”

“Wait, Greg? What could it possibly be?”

“A supernova. Something massive. Maybe a Wolf-Rayet star. The core might have run out of nuclear fuel and imploded, but the star’s outer envelope runs behind the process. The gamma rays coming from the interior would have needed a few more minutes to break through the envelope. Call Kamiokande in Japan, okay?”