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

“It might have to.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Food and water would be tight. We’re running out of time, and probably won’t be able to transfer much. We’ll do what we can. I expect we’ll all be a little thinner when we get back. But yes, I think we’ll survive.”

We stared at one another, and she turned away. I became conscious of the ship: the throb of power in her bulkheads (power now permanently bridled by conditions in the combustion chambers), and the soft amber glow of the navigation lamps in the cockpit.

McGuire’s nasal voice, from Amity , broke the uneasy silence. “Herman, you okay?”

Cathie looked at me, and I nodded. “Mac,” she said, “this is Perth. Herman’s hurt. We need Marj.”

“Okay,” he said. “How bad?”

“We don’t know. Internal injuries, looks like. I think he’s in shock.”

We heard him talking to the others. Then he came back. “We’re on our way. I’ll put Marj on in a minute; maybe she can help from here. How’s the ship?”

“Not good: the dock’s gone, and the engine might as well be.”

“How do you mean?”

“If we try a burn, the ass end will fall off.”

McGuire delivered a soft, venomous epithet. “Do what you can for Herman. Here’s Marj.”

Cathie was looking at me strangely. “He’s worried,” she said.

“Yes. He’s in charge now—”

“Rob, you say you think we’ll be okay. What’s the problem?”

“We might,” I said, “run a little short of air.”

Greenswallow continued her plunge toward Jupiter at a steadilyincreasing rate and a narrow angle of approach: we would pass within about 60,000 kilometers, and then drop completely out of the plane of the solar system. We appeared to be headed in the general direction of the Southern Cross.

Cathie worked on Herman. His breathing steadied, and he slipped in and out of delirium. We sat beside him, not talking much. After a while, Cathie asked, “What happens now?”

“In a few hours,” I said, “we’ll reach our insertion point. By then, we have to be ready to change course.” She frowned, and I shrugged. “That’s it,” I said. “It’s all the time we have to get over to Amity . If we don’t make the insertion on time, Amity won’t have the fuel to throw a U-turn later.”

“Rob, how are we going to get Herman over there?”

That was an uncomfortable question. The prospect of jamming him into a suit wasn’t appealing, but there was no other way. “We’ll just have to float him over,” I said. “Marj won’t like it much.”

“Neither will Herman.”

“You wanted a little high drama,” I said. “The next show should be a barnburner.”

Her mouth tightened, and she turned away from me.

One of the TV cameras had picked up the approach of Amity . Some of her lights were out, and she too looked a bit bent. The Athena is a homely vessel in the best of times, whale-shaped and snub-nosed, with a mid-ship flare that suggests middle-age spread. But I was glad to see her.

Cathie snuffled at the monitor and blew her nose. “Your Program’s dead, Rob.” Her eyes blazed momentarily, like a dying fire into which one has flung a few drops of water. “We’re leaving three of our people out here; and if you’re right about the air, nobody’ll get home. Won’t that look good on the network news?” She gazed vacantly at Amity . “I’d hoped,” she said, “that if things went well, Victor would have lived to see a ship carry his fusion engine. And maybe his name, as well. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Not ever.”

I had not allowed myself to think about the oxygen problem. The Athenas recycle their air supply; the converters in a single ship can maintain a crew of three, or even four, indefinitely. But six?

I was not looking forward to the ride home.

A few minutes later, a tiny figure detached itself from the shadow of the Athena and started across: Marj Aubuchon on a maintenance sled. McGuire’s voice crackled from the ship’s speakers. “Rob, we’ve taken a long look at your engines, and we agree with your assessment. We may have a problem.” Mac had a talent for understatement. It derived, not from a sophisticated sense of humor, but from a genuine conviction of his own inferiority. He preferred to solve problems by denying their existence. He was the only one of the original nine who could have been accurately described as passive: other people’s opinions carried great weight with him. His prime value to the mission was his grasp of Athena systems. But he’d been a reluctant crewman, a man who periodically reminded us that he wanted only to retire to his farm in Indiana. He wouldn’t have been along at all except that Bosh Freeman died, and Haj Bolari came down with an unexpected (but thoroughly earned) disease. Now, with Selma incapacitated and Landolfi gone, McGuire was in command. It must have been disconcerting for him. “We’ve got about five hours,” he continued. “Don’t let Marj get involved in major surgery. She’s already been complaining to me that it doesn’t sound as if it’ll be possible to move him. We have no alternative. She knows that, but you know how she is. Okay?”

One of the monitors had picked him up. He looked rumpled, and nervous. Not an attitude to elicit confidence. “Mac,” said Cathie, “we may kill him trying to get him over there.”

“You’ll kill him if you don’t,” he snapped. “Get your personal stuff together, and bring it with you. You won’t be going back.”

“What about trying to move some food over?” I asked.

“We can’t dock,” he said. “And there isn’t time to float it across.”

“Mac,” said Cathie, “is Amity going to be able to support six people?”

I listened to McGuire breathing. He turned away to issue some trivial instructions to Bender. When he came back he said, simply and tonelessly, “Probably not.” And then, without changing inflection, “How’s Herman doing?”

Maybe it was my imagination. Certainly there was nothing malicious in his voice, but Cathie caught it too, and turned sharply round. “McGuire is a son-of-a-bitch,” she hissed. I don’t know whether Mac heard it.

Marjorie Aubuchon was short, blond, and irritable. When I relayed McGuire’s concerns about time, she said, “God knows, he made that clear enough before I left.” She observed that McGuire was a jerk, and bent over Herman. The blood was pink and frothy on his lips. After a few minutes she said, to no one in particular, “Probably a punctured lung.” She waved Cathie over, and began filling a hypo. I went for a walk.

At sea, there’s a long tradition of sentiment between mariners and their ships. Enlisted men identify with them, engineers baby them, and captains go down with them. No similar attitude has developed in space flight. We’ve never had an Endeavor , or a Golden Hind . Always, off Earth, it has been the mission, rather than the ship. Friendship VII and Apollo XI were missions , rather than vehicles. I’m not sure why that is; maybe it reflects Cathie’s view that travel between the worlds is still in its Kon-Tiki phase, the voyage itself of such epic proportions that everything else is overwhelmed.

But I’d lived almost three years on Greenswallow . It was a long time to be confined to her narrow spaces. Nevertheless, she was shield and provider against that enormous abyss, and I discovered (while standing in the doorway of my cabin) a previously unknown affection for her.

A few clothes were scattered round the room, a shirt was hung over my terminal, and two pictures were mounted on the bulkhead. One was a Casnavan print of a covered bridge in New Hampshire; the other was a telecopy of an editorial cartoon that had appeared in the WashingtonPost . The biggest human problem we had, of course, was sheer boredom. And Cathie had tried to capture the dimensions of the difficulty by showing crewmembers filling the long days on the outbound journey with bridge. (“It would be nice,” Cathie’s narrator had said at one point, “if we could take everybody out to an Italian restaurant now and then.”) The Post cartoon had appeared several days later. It depicted four astronauts holding cards. (We could recognize Selma, Landolfi, and Marj. The fourth, whose back was turned, was exceedingly female, and had to be Esther Crowley.) An enormous bloodshot eye is looking in through one window; a tentacle and a UFO are visible through another. Selma, his glasses characteristically down on his nose, is examining his hand, and delivering the caption: