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

In the end, Landolfi read his lines. He did it, he said, to end the distraction.

Cathie was clearly pleased with the result. She spent three days editing the tapes, commenting frequently (and with good-natured malice) on the resonance and tonal qualities of the voice-over. She finished on the morning of the 24th (ship time, of course) and transmitted the results to Greenswallow for relay to Houston. “It’ll make the evening newscasts,” she said with satisfaction.

It was our third Christmas out. Except for a couple of experiments-in-progress, we were finished on Callisto and, in fact, in the Jovian system. Everybody was feeling good about that, and we passed an uneventful afternoon, playing bridge and talking about what we’d do when we got back. (Cathie had described a deserted beach near Tillamook, Oregon, where she’d grown up. “It would be nice to walk on it again, under a blue sky,” she said. Landolfi had startled everyone at that point: he looked up from the computer console at which he’d been working, and his eyes grew very distant. “I think,” he said, “when the time comes, I would like very much to walk with you….”)

For the most part, Victor kept busy that afternoon with his hobby: he was designing a fusion engine that would be capable, he thought, of carrying ships to Jupiter within a few weeks, and, eventually, might open the stars to direct exploration. But I watched him: he turned away periodically from the display to glance at Cathie. Yes (I thought), she would indeed be lovely against the rocks and the spume, her black hair free in the wind.

Just before dinner, we watched the transmission of Cathie’s tape. It was strong, and when it was finished we sat silently looking at one another. By then, Herman Selma and Esther Crowley had joined us. (Although two landers were down, Cathie had been careful to give the impression in her report that there had only been one. When I asked why, she said, “In a place like this, one lander is the Spirit of Man. Two landers is just two landers.”) We toasted Victor, and we toasted Cathie. Almost everyone, it turned out, had brought down a bottle for the occasion. We sang and laughed, and somebody turned up the music. We’d long since discovered the effect of low-gravity dancing in cramped quarters, and I guess we made the most of it.

Marj Aubuchon, overhead in the linkup, called to wish us season’s greetings, and called again later to tell us that the telecast, according to Houston, had been “well-received.” That was government talk, of course, and it meant only that no one in authority could find anything to object to. Actually, somebody high up had considerable confidence in her: in order to promote the illusion of spontaneity, the tapes were being broadcast directly to the commercial networks.

Cathie, who by then had had a little too much to drink, gloated openly. “It’s the best we’ve done,” she said. “Nobody’ll ever do it better.”

We shared that sentiment. Landolfi raised his glass, winked at Cathie, and drained it.

We had to cut the evening short, because a lander’s life support system isn’t designed to handle six people. (For that matter, neither was an Athena’s.) But before we broke it up, Cathie surprised us all by proposing a final toast: “To Frank Steinitz,” she said quietly. “And his crew.”

Steinitz: there was a name, as they say, to conjure with. He had led the first deep-space mission, five Athenas to Saturn, fifteen years before. It had been the first attempt to capture the public imagination for a dying program: an investigation of a peculiar object filmed on Iapetus by a Voyager. But nothing much had come of it, and the mission had taken almost seven years. Steinitz and his people had begun as heroes, but in the end they’d become symbols of futility. The press had portrayed them mercilessly as personifications of outworn virtues. Someone had compared them to the Japanese soldiers found as late as the 1970’s on Pacific islands, still defending a world long vanished.

The Steinitz group bore permanent reminders of their folly: prolonged weightlessness had loosened ligaments and tendons and weakened muscles. Several had developed heart problems, and all suffered from assorted neuroses. As one syndicated columnist had observed, they walked like a bunch of retired big-league catchers.

“That’s a good way to end the evening,” said Selma, beaming benevolently.

Landolfi looked puzzled. “Cathie,” he rumbled, “you’ve questioned Steinitz’s good sense any number of times. And ours, by the way. Isn’t it a little hypocritical to drink to him?”

“I’m not impressed by his intelligence,” she said, ignoring the obvious parallel. “But he and his people went all the way out to Saturn in these damned things—” she waved in the general direction of the three Athenas orbiting overhead in linkup,

“—hanging onto baling wire and wing struts. I have to admire that.”

“Hell,” I said, feeling the effects a little myself, “we’ve got the same ships he had.”

“Yes, you do,” said Cathie pointedly.

I had trouble sleeping that night. For a long time, I lay listening to Landolfi’s soft snore and the electronic fidgeting of the operations computer. Cathie was bundled inside a gray blanket, barely visible in her padded chair.

She was right, of course. I knew that rubber boots would never again cross that white landscape, which had waited a billion years for us. The peaks glowed in the reflection of the giant planet: fragile crystalline beauty on a world of terrifying stillness. Except for an occasional incoming rock, nothing more would ever happen here. Callisto’s entire history was encapsuled within twelve days.

Pity there hadn’t been something to those early notions about Venusian rain forests and canals on Mars. The Program might have had easier going if Burroughs or Bradbury had been right. My God, how many grim surprises had disrupted fictional voyages to Mars? But the truth had been far worse than anything Wells or the others had committed to paper: the red planet was so dull that we hadn’t even gone there.

Instead, we’d lumbered out to the giants. In ships that drained our lives and our health.

We could have done better. Our ships could have been better. The computer beside which Landolfi slept contained his design for the fusion engine. And at JPL, an Army team had demonstrated that artificial gravity was possible: a real gravity field, not the pathetic fraction created on the Athenas by spinning the inner hull. There were other possibilities as well: infrared ranging could be adapted to replace our elderly scanning system; new alloys were under development. But it would cost billions to build a second generation vehicle. And unless there were an incentive, unless Cathie Perth carried off a miracle, it would not happen.

Immediately overhead, a bright new star glittered, visibly moving from west to east. That was the linkup, three ships connected nose to nose by umbilicals and a magnetic docking system. Like the Saturn mission, we were a multiple vehicle operation. We were more flexible that way, and we had a safety factor: two ships would be adequate to get the nine-man mission home. The air might become a little oppressive, but we’d make it.

I watched it drift through the starfield.

Cathie had pulled the plug on the Christmas lights. But it struck me that Callisto would only have one Christmas, so I put them back on.

Victor was on board Tolstoi when we lost it. No one ever really knew precisely what happened. We’d begun our long fall toward Jupiter, gaining the acceleration which we’d need on the flight home. Cathie, Herman Selma (the mission commander), and I were riding Greenswallow . The ships had separated and would not rejoin until we’d rounded Jupiter and settled into our course for Earth. (The Athenas are really individual powered modular units which travel, except when maneuvering, as a single vessel. They’re connected bow-to-bow by electromagnets. Coils of segmented tubing, called ‘umbilicals’ even though the term does not accurately describe their function, provide ready access among the forward areas of the ships. As many as six Athenas can be linked in this fashion, although only five have ever been built. The resulting structure would resemblea wheel.)