Zach Hughes: Tiger in the Stars

would be useless to try to pull rank and force the young officer to give her the file so that she could see for herself why it had been classified. She thanked the young man and hurried to the third level. In an installation where everything was scaled down to conserve space, Intelligence occupied a respectable area. She was asked to wait in a rather roomy two-by-three-meter reception area. She sat nervously, crossing her legs. The enlisted man behind the desk reacted and she frowned at him coldly. She waited ten minutes and then was told she could enter the office of the intelligence officer on duty. She opened the door and saw a big, serious-faced man seated behind a small desk, his eyes downcast at papers. «Matt,» she said. He looked up, smiled. «Hey,» he said, with genuine pleasure. «Sahara.» He stood and came around the desk to take both her hands in his. «Welcome home. How was it this time?» «Routine,» she said. «Always nice to see the best-looking cadet in our class,» Matt Webb said, releasing her hands and stepping back to take in her trim form clad in space blue. «Still the sweet talker,» she said. «Sit down, sit down,» he said. «Take the load off.» «Yes,» she said. «It's not much gravity, but after almost five years in space…» «I know,» he said, returning to his chair. His smile faded and he looked at her, his calm, gray eyes showing concern. «You're here to find out about Plank,» he said. She nodded. «It isn't good, Hara,» Webb said. «All right.» She seized her lower lip between her teeth and waited. «The Star Buster lifted for home two weeks after he left,» Webb said. « Buster landed here after a routine trip. No communication with the Pride en route, although that means nothing, as you know. It's big out there, and even ships traveling the same route with only two weeks between them can be so far apart due to minor variation in trajectory that intership contact is unlikely. But he's way overdue, Hara. I'm sorry.» «That's all you can tell me?» «That's it.» She was silent for a moment. «Then why is his file classified?» Webb shrugged. «Routine. You know the situation down below. Opposition to the space program is reaching new heights. The brass is worried. There's a severe threat to cut the budget again. Now you and I know that the colonization program is Earth's great hope, but the other side has different opinions. They want to use the money to better conditions for those on Earth, not, as they say, pour it down a hole in the stars.» «I know,» she said. «But are you saying that you're keeping quiet about a missing ship because of public opinion on Earth?» «We keep the lid on as long as possible. Sooner or later someone down there will make an inquiry. We keep hoping that he'll come limping in here before someone, his mother, perhaps, gets worried enough to contact Central and demand to know where he is.» «Matt, it doesn't seem right.» «I know. I don't like it, but we have no choice. We're under fire. We're fighting for the life of the colonization program. We think we're justified in playing just a little dirty. And who does it hurt? Because you're concerned, you ask and we tell you. When his mother asks, we'll tell her. We hope she won't ask for a while. We'd like to know a little more about these disappearances.» «You said disappearances, plural,» she said. «Did I?» «Yes.» «All right. I'll have to remind you that this is highly classified information.» He ran his hand through his thick hair. «At any given time, we have perhaps half-a-dozen ships between here and the colonies. Sometimes more. Sometimes as many as 20 or 30 are out there. We've been going out to the Centauri systems for 50 years now. In that time we expected to lose a ship or two. We did not expect to lose a ship every one-point-five years.» She gasped. «So far we've been lucky,» Webb continued. «We haven't lost one of the

big boys. If that happens, we'll have a stink we won't be able to fight. Lose 10,000 colonists at once…» He looked toward the ceiling. «One ship every year and a half?» «On the average. No regular time intervals between, of course. And we have to estimate time of disappearance, since here on the moon, we're out of contact for almost ten years. But we're able to determine, of course, whether or not they disappear on the way out or the way back. It works out about equal. Almost half the number disappear going away, and half on the way home. They leave either the moon or one of the Centauri planets and that's the last we hear of them. And there's no rhyme or reason for it. Out of 30-odd ships one should have been able to set the space beacons working. In 50 years, at least one of them should have been spotted in space if they were merely disabled. Communications aren't all that good, but surely one of them should have been able to send out a distress call that, traveling at light speed, would have been picked up either on this end or the other end. But they don't show up by their

beacons and they don't send distress signals. They just vanish. They lift off and that's the last of them.» «Some basic problem in the power?» she asked. «Total explosion?» «We've had every engineer and scientist in the program checking. The hydrogen drive of a spaceship is potentially a huge bomb, but the safety factors are multiplied to such a point that the slide-rule boys figure the odds against total explosion are five million to one. They say the idea of more than 30 ships totally blowing up is inconceivable.» «Some common factor of human failure?» «Some of the ships had crews' of as many as ten. Ten men go nuts at the same time?» He sighed. «Oh, there are theories. Unknown space elements or factors. Everyone on board affected at the same time. Mysterious currents. Things we know nothing about. But, Hara, you know we've been in space a long time. There isn't anything out there we don't know about. It's just a big, fat empty place with nothing between here and Centauri; no black holes. No eerie gas areas, no bug-eyed monsters to swallow our ships whole.» «But there's something,» she said. «There is,» he agreed. «I wish I knew what. I wish I could say that it's as

simple as the blink drive thing. That they simply blink out of this universe into another, or into some other dimension and that's it. But Plank was just using our hydrodrive. We're accelerating as near light speed as the laws of the universe allow, and that's pretty close as you well know. Old Einstein wasn't right in everything. We don't push our way out of the warp and frame of space time like the blink drive does.» She was doing her best to keep her lips from trembling. It was only now beginning to hit her. He was dead. «Hara,» Webb said. «I'm very sorry.» «I know,» she said. She rose. «You'll let me know if you hear anything? I'll be moonside for a few days. Then home.» «Of course.» «I'd like to look at what information you have. Could you get me a clearance?» «With your rank and record I don't think we need expect any difficulty,» he said. «I'm not requesting to see anything you haven't seen,» she said. «You understand that I'm not questioning your work or your abilities.» Sahara meant the words, but she also felt it necessary to say them. Women had come a long, long way, but they were still women. They had basic differences, differences in strength, in viewpoint. There were still men around, some of them in the service, who said that women were the true aliens, that their minds worked on a different plane from the minds of men. In short, remnants of resentment among certain kinds of men still remained. Webb, apparently, was not that kind of man. «Sure,» he said. «I know how you feel, Hara.» «Not being smart with you, Matt, but I doubt that.» She smiled wryly. «Because I'm not even sure I know how I feel.» The human mind is a curious thing. In privacy, it allows itself thoughts that, if known generally, would cause consternation. And, Hara thought, as she walked out of Webb's office, it is true that no one really knows himself. Was there actually a moment of relief when she heard of Plank's disappearance? No. Of course not. Only the quick feeling that a problem was solved. Then the sadness. For there was a conflict. While marriage between spacers was not totally impossible, it was feasible only under certain circumstances. The vast distances, the time involved in traveling, made a woman married to a spacer a widow for years at a stretch. Marriages were common aboard the big colonizer ships; but then the partners traveled together and were not separated while one of them went out to Centauri at what, to the universe, was a snail's pace. If Plank had chosen service instead of free enterprise, the problem would have been solved, but Plank was intent on making his stake. She on the other hand, had spent years preparing herself for her job. Theoretically, a woman had an equal chance to be accepted into the academy, but in practice more qualified women were passed over than qualified men. She had always had to work extra hard to achieve her goal. From primary school on she knew that she wanted to go into space; her competition came from millions of boys who were physically stronger, some of them quicker, some of them more intelligent. She set her goal and worked toward it, doing secondary level work as a primary, entering college two years ahead of schedule. It wasn't easy. She kept her body in shape with athletics and honed her brain constantly, doing without proper sleep to cram for exams she could have passed easily, in her efforts for the top mark, knowing that she had to be the very best to beat thousands of male applicants for each appointment to the academy. Men and women were equal in the eyes of the law, but at the academy it seemed that some instructors had not read the law. There, the female cadets were singled out, and to survive she developed a hardness, a callousness, which allowed her to take anything they could dish out. She excelled in her marks and survived the physical rigors. She graduated with honors and saw the first space berths given to men with lesser qualifications. In spite of all, she was not a man hater. She recognized things as they were, and she would never change them. She tried to keep under her protective, hard exterior a certain femininity, and apparently she succeeded, for she was pursued. From the time she was pubescent, boys noticed her. She developed her figure early and it improved with age. In the academy she was taut-skinned and shapely. Her measurements would have qualified her for any beauty contest, had such antique rites been retained in the society. She had perfect teeth revealed in their lovely whiteness as she smiled. Her hair was heavy in texture, unusual for a natural ash blonde, and she could do anything she wanted with it. Usually she wore it down, brushing over her shoulders, closing in on her face to accent her eyes. Her social life could have been active. She did not lack, invitations. She limited her dating, however, to official events, never letting any boy or man to become close enough to her to arouse her interest. Not until she met Plank. She had seen him during her first years at the academy many times. He was one year ahead of her and, on occasion, was in charge of details of which she was a member. He was, during the early years there, merely another cadet. She was not surprised when Plank asked her to be his date at the graduation ball for Plank's class. His invitation was one of several. She surprised herself by choosing him as her escort. She would have had difficulty explaining it to anyone, even herself. He was not her kind of man. Dark, somewhat stocky, he looked at her from under bushy eyebrows with eyes that seemed to undress her—and she was no man's sex object. But it was Plank who called for her at the girl's dorm and it was Plank who