Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

A lot of people were frightened by what they heard he was doing. There was theological turmoil. Eventually he and his work were seized by a pious mob, and that was the last anyone ever heard of it. Or him.

“There’ve been other reports of breakthroughs, maybe valid, maybe not. But unfortunately nothing that’s made an impact.”

“Are you close?” I asked again.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s imminent.”

Imminent. The word kept popping up.

It was time to go home.

We loaded up on sandwiches and coffee, checked out, and went up to the roof. It was another cold, overcast day, no sun, and maybe snow coming. We retrieved the skimmer and climbed in. Alex took the driver’s seat. “Louise,” he said, “take us home.”

A sudden gust blew in off the ocean. There were only three other vehicles parked up there, which gives you an idea how busy the hotel was.

“Louise? Answer up, please.”

Nothing.

The AI lamp was dark. “She’s down,” I said.

Alex shifted his weight impatiently. He didn’t have a lot of tolerance for glitches. Moreover, when one occurred, he always concluded it was somebody’s fault.

And, of course, never his. “Brand-new vehicle,” he said, “and trouble already.”

He tried the toggle, but there was no sign of activity. “Probably a loose connection,” I said.

He grumbled. “You always claim these things don’t go down.” He switched over to manual and turned on the engine. “We’ll have to drive.” He extracted the yoke and engaged the pods. That always feels good, when nine-tenths of your weight drains off.

There’s another project that’s been going on for a long time: trying to find a way to reduce antigrav engines to something you could wear, say, on your belt. If you could walk around all day feeling the way you do in a skimmer… But that’s another one of those things that I doubt we’ll ever see.

“We should take it back to them tomorrow,” he said. “Get her repaired.” That, of course, would be my job.

He checked the screens for other traffic, touched the vertical thrusters, and we lifted off. I made a show of pulling on my harness to make sure I was securely belted.

He grinned at me and told me to hang on. We swung around, passed over the edge of the roof, and turned south. The core thrusters fired, and we began to accelerate.

A couple of kids were walking on the beach. And somebody in the downtown park was flying a kite. Otherwise, Walpurgis might have been deserted.

If you had to drive, this was the kind of area you wanted to be in. There was nothing else in the sky, save a lone vehicle coming from the west. We soared out over the marshlands, which dominate the land immediately south of the city. A few klicks out, we passed into a gray haze. The sensors showed no traffic ahead, but I knew Alex didn’t like driving when he couldn’t see. So he took us higher, and we emerged into sunlight at about two thousand meters. A few minutes later, the clouds broke up and we glided out over Goodheart Bay. There were a few boats, and I thought I saw a long tentacle rise out of the water and slide back in.

I told Alex, and commented they better stay alert.

Alex enjoyed driving. He didn’t get to do it often. But I think it made his testosterone surge.

The bay is big, 150 klicks before we’d hit land again, and Alex didn’t seem disposed to talk, so I closed my eyes and let my head slip back. I was almost asleep when I realized my hair was rising.

“Something wrong,” I told him.

“What? You’re not feeling well?”

“Zero gee.” That wasn’t a good sign. “We’ve lost all weight.”

He looked at the instrument panel. “You’re right. How’s that possible?”

“I don’t know. What’d you do?”

“Nothing. Are we going down?”

“ Up. We’re going up. ”

I know everybody reading this rides his or her skimmer around and never thinks much about the mechanics of it. As I always did prior to the incident I’m about to describe. The vehicles are usually equipped with two to four antigrav pods. The standard setting for them is.11 gee. You switch them on, eighty-nine percent of the weight cancels out, and you can lift off and go where you want. The way it works is that the pods create an antigrav envelope around the skimmer. The dimensions and arrangement of the envelope differ from one vehicle to another, but it’s designed for economy: The envelope is no larger than necessary to ensure that the entire aircraft, wings, tail assembly, whatever, is enclosed. If you could see it, it would resemble a tube.

The pods can be dangerous, so to change the setting you have to open a black box located in the central panel and do it manually. Alex looked down at it. He didn’t like black boxes. But he pulled the lid up, pressed the control square, and waited for the gravity to come back.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

We were still going up.

I took a shot at it and got the same lack of result. “It’s not working,” I said. Alex made a face that told me that wasn’t exactly news. I pried the face off the unit and pulled a couple centimeters of cable out of the system. “It’s been disconnected.”

“You mean deliberately?”

I thought about it. “Hard to see how it could happen on its own.”

The skimmer was a dual, which is to say it had two antigrav units, both mounted beneath the aircraft, one just forward of the cockpit, one toward the rear between the cabin and the tail. The control cable, which I held in my hand, divided in two and linked into both pods. When I tugged again on the individual strands, there was still no tension. “It’s been disconnected at both ends,” I said. “Or cut.”

“Can we fix it?”

“Not without getting under the skimmer.”

The color drained out of his face, and he looked down at Goodheart Bay, which was beginning to look pretty small. “Chase,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

We were passing three thousand meters, going up like a cork in a lake. “Lower your flaps,” I said. “And kick in the thrusters.”

He complied. We accelerated, and the rate of climb slowed. But it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

He got on the radio and punched in the Air Rescue frequency. “Code White,” he said. “Code White. This is AVY 4467. We are in uncontrolled ascent. Request assistance.”

A woman’s voice responded. “AVY 4467. Please state the nature of your emergency.” I wondered if it was the same person we’d talked to last time we got in trouble. “Be as specific as you can.”

“I thought I just did that.” Alex’s temper surfaced. “The pods are on full, and I can’t cut them back. We are stuck at zero gee. Going up.”

“AVY 4467, there is a manual control for the pods, usually located between the front seats. Open the-”

“Rescue, I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”

“Understood. Wait one.”

Alex looked out at the sky, looked at me, looked at the black box. “We’ll be okay,” he said. I think he was reassuring himself.

We rose into a cumulus cloud, passed through, and came out the top.

“Four four six seven, this is Rescue. Assistance is on the way. ETA approximately thirteen minutes.”

We didn’t have thirteen minutes, and we both knew it. We passed through four thousand meters. The numbers on the altimeter were blurring.

“Rescue, that will probably be too late.”

“It’s our nearest aircraft. Hang on. We’ll get to you.”

“Chase,” he said, “help.”

Suddenly I was in charge. The only thing I could think of was We could jump.

Get outside the bubble and the ascent would stop quickly enough. “I don’t see an easy way, Alex.”

Lines creased his face. “Air’s getting thinner.”