Barbary (17 page)

“We’ll have to broadcast an explanation and an apology,” the
vice president said. “And you’d better prepare yourself for a disciplinary
hearing.”

“You can’t discipline me!” Thea said. “I’m a citizen.”

“We’ll see.” He paused. “How long before the craft returns
to the station?”

“It’s only been out forty-five minutes,” Thea said. “It’ll
take about an hour to decelerate, turn, and come back. Since I don’t have to
conserve its fuel anymore.”

“Thea,” Yukiko said, “it isn’t responding.”

“What?”

Barbary clenched her fists around the handhold.

It
has
to come back! she thought. It
has
to!

“It
has to
be responding,” Thea said, with equal desperation.

“It isn’t. It’s still accelerating.”

After a long silence, during which Barbary was afraid to
sneak a look inside the launch chamber, Thea said, “You’re right.”

In the intense quiet, Barbary could hear her own heart
pounding. She bit her lip.

“I’m going to the control chamber,” the vice president said.
“The military attaché will have to know what’s happened. He’ll be able to deal
with the logistics of destroying the probe.”

Barbary froze. The vice president’s chair buzzed toward her.
If she jumped out in front of him and asked him not to shoot Mickey —

He would probably laugh at her.

If his bodyguards did not shoot
her
for jumping out
at him.

She hid in a nearby corridor till he, his bodyguards, and
Thea and Yukiko entered the elevator, still arguing.

After they were out of sight, Barbary entered the launch
chamber. Heather’s raft sat on its tracks, waiting to go out again. Barbary
floated to it, opened its door, and slid into the seat.

She stared at the controls. She thought she remembered what
Heather had done, but she was not certain. She was not even sure she could
figure out in which direction to go to find the alien ship, and Mick’s raft.
Away from the sun, she guessed. But there was an awful lot of nothing out
there, and rafts were awfully small.

Heather said the computer could drive the raft

She turned it on.

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“Do you know where the raft with the transmitter is?”

“Yes.”

“I want to go there.”

“Please wait.”

The kaleidoscope patterns appeared. Barbary gritted her
teeth. Computers were supposed to know everything instantly.

But if it knew the location of Mick’s raft, why was it
making her wait? The only reason she could think of was that it was reporting
her.

She slapped the switch that turned off the computer. She did
not know if that would keep it from reporting her — if that was what it was
doing — but it was the only thing she could think of. She would have to find
Mick herself. She pulled down the door and sealed it and tried to remember what
control Heather had used first.

“Open up!”

Barbary started at the muffled voice and the rap on the
transparent roof.

Heather stared in at her. She looked furious.

Barbary opened the hatch.

“Move over!”

“Heather, they’re going to shoot Thea’s contraption, and
Mick’s inside it. I have to stop them.”

“Move over!”

Barbary obeyed.

Heather swung in, slammed the hatch shut, and fastened her
seat belt.

“Your computer told me part of it, and I figured out the
rest.” She took over the controls.

“Thea tried to make her camera come back,
but it wouldn’t.”

“Mick probably knocked loose some of the connections.”

Their raft slid into the airlock. The hatch closed.

“I just hope I got here soon enough to get us out,” Heather
said. “I bet they’ll freeze all the hatches in about two seconds, if they
haven’t already.”

The outer door slid open.

Heather made a sound of triumph and slammed on the power.
The acceleration pushed them both back into their seats.

With the raft accelerating and the station growing smaller
behind them, Heather glared at Barbary.

“Now,” she said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“There wasn’t time,” Barbary said.

“Oh.” Heather’s scowl softened. “That’s a good point.”

Barbary squinted into starry space. “How do you know where
to go?”

“It’s not that hard. From where the station is now, and the
direction and speed the ship’s approaching, it has to be lined up with
Betelgeuse, if Atlantis is directly behind us.”

Barbary tried to imagine the geometry of the arrangement
Heather described, with all the elements moving independently of one another,
and came to the conclusion that it was hard, even if Heather was so used to it
that she didn’t know it.

She peered into the blackness, unable to make out anything
but the bright multicolored points of stars.

Heather drew a piece of equipment from the control panel.

It looked like a face mask attached to a corrugated rubber
pipe. Heather fiddled with a control.

“Here,” she said, and pushed the mask toward Barbary. “You
can focus with this knob if you need to.”

The image of the alien ship floated before her, a sharp,
clear three-dimensional miniature, a jumble of spheres and cylinders, panels,
struts’ and irregularities, some with the hard-edged gleam of metal, some with
the softer gloss of plastic, some with a rough and organic appearance, like
tree bark. But for all Barbary knew, alien plastic looked like tree bark and
their trees looked like steel. If they had trees, or plastic, or steel.

“Can you make it show Mick’s raft?”

“That’s harder,” Heather said, “since I don’t know what
course Thea used. But I’ll try.” She bent over the mask, fiddling.

“Hey, Barbary,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Were you really going to come out here all by yourself?”

“I guess so. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“That was brave.”

“Dumb, though,” Barbary said. She never would have
remembered the right controls, and she would have headed off in the wrong
direction. “I guess you would have had to come out and get me and Mick both.”

“Still, it was brave.”

“Did you find Mick yet?” Barbary asked, embarrassed.

“Uh-uh, not yet.”

“Can we use his transmitter?”

Heather glanced up, frowning.

“We could,” she said, “but we can’t, if you see what I mean.
We’d have to use the computer, and if we turn it on it would probably lock our
controls and take us home. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”

“Okay,” Barbary said. “How long before we catch up to him,
do you think?”

“It sort of depends on how fast the raft went out and how
rapidly it was accelerating. Which I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been too
fast, or it would use up all its fuel before it got to the ship. Then it
wouldn’t be able to maneuver, so it would just fly by very fast. Without much
time to take pictures. So it has to be going slowly, instead. Anyway, we ought
to catch up within a couple of hours. I don’t want
us
to run out of fuel
— and I don’t want to get going so fast that we go right past without seeing
Mick.”

The raft hummed through silent space. Barbary kept expecting
the stars to change, to appear to grow closer as the raft traveled toward them.
But the stars were so distant that she would have to travel for years and years
before even a few of them looked any closer or appeared to move, and even then
they would still be an enormous distance away.

“Heather?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for coming with me,” she said.

“Hey,” Heather said, her cheerfulness touched with bravado.
“What are sisters for?”

A red light on the control panel blinked on.

“Uh-oh,” Heather said.

“What is it?”

“Radio transmission. Somebody from the station calling us.
With orders to come back, probably.”

They stared at the light. Heather reached for the radio headset.

Barbary grabbed Heather’s hand. “If you answer them, they’ll
just try to persuade us to turn around.”

“But we ought to at least tell them that it’s us out here,”
Heather said.

“They probably already know. If they don’t, maybe we ought
to wait until they figure it out.”

“Yoshi will be worried,” Heather said sadly, “when he comes
home, and he can’t find us.”

“We’re going to have to transmit a message to the aliens
anyway,” Barbary said. “To tell them we don’t mean to bother them, but Mick is
in the first raft and we’re coming out to rescue him. When we do that, they’ll
hear us back in Atlantis.”

“Uh-huh.” Heather gazed into the scanner. “I wonder why they
don’t want us to come near them? I wonder what they do when somebody does?”

“I guess they could blow us up with death-rays,” Barbary
said. “But that doesn’t seem too civilized.”

“And how are we going to explain cats to them? I wonder if
they have pets? I wonder what they look like?”

“Maybe they’re big cats themselves, like the aliens in
Jenny
and the Spaceship,”
Barbary said. “Did you read that?”

“Big
cats?”
Heather said. “That’s silly, Barbary.
The aliens come from some other star system. They evolved on a whole different
planet. They probably don’t even have the same chemistry we do. They might
breathe cyanide or methane or something. Big
cats?”

“Okay, okay, forget it,” Barbary said. “It was just a book.”

The radio light continued to glow. To Barbary, it seemed to
be getting brighter and brighter, more and more insistent.

Heather finally put on the headset. When she turned on the
radio, she spoke before a transmission from Atlantis could come through.

“Raft to alien ship, raft to alien ship. Um… hi. My sister
Barbary and I — I’m Heather — are trying to rescue a… a sort of friend of ours
who got stuck in the first raft by mistake. Now we can’t make the raft turn
around, so we have to catch up to it to get him.” She hesitated. “Please don’t
be mad or anything. Over and out.”

In the instant between the time Heather stopped transmitting
and turned off the radio, the receiver burst into noise.

“— do you hear me? You girls get back here right now, or —”

Barbary recognized the voice of the vice president.

Heather clicked off the radio.

“He sounded pretty mad,” she said. “I guess now they’ll tell
Yoshi where we are.”

“Heather, what if the aliens try to call us? We won’t be
able to hear them, if we don’t leave the radio turned on.”

Heather raised one eyebrow and flicked the switch again.

“— return immediately, and you won’t be punished. But if
you —”

She turned it off.

She shrugged cheerfully. “We wouldn’t be able to hear the
aliens anyway, with Atlantis broadcasting nonstop at us, unless the aliens just
blasted through their signal. I’ll try later — maybe the vice president will
get tired of yelling at us.”

“What do we do now?”

“We just wait,” Heather said. “I’ll keep looking for
Mickey’s raft. When we find it we’ll know better what we need to do and how
long it’ll take.”

“Let me help look,” Barbary said.

“Okay.”

Heather showed her how to search the star-field for
anomalies. At first glance, they looked like stars. But if one looked at an
anomaly at two different times, the bright speck would have moved in relation
to the real stars. The scanner could save an image and display it alternately
with a later view of the same area. An anomaly would blink from one place on
the image to another, and the human eye could see the difference. A computer
could, too, but it took processing time or a lot of memory, or both, to do what
a person could do in an instant.

“Astronomers used to discover new planets and comets and
things this way,” Heather said. “You can also search by turning up the
magnification, but that means you can only see a little bit of space at once.
So unless you got really lucky, you’d spend days and days trying to find what
you were looking for.”

Barbary scanned for the alien ship. When she finally found
it she felt pleased with herself, until she remembered how easily Heather had
done the same thing.

“Shouldn’t Mick’s raft be right in between us and the alien
ship?” Barbary asked.

“It could be,” Heather said. “But it isn’t. Nothing moves in
straight lines in space, not when there are gravity fields to affect your
course. Besides, I’m sure Thea didn’t send her camera on a direct line to where
the ship is now. She probably planned to arc around it. I mean, she wouldn’t
want to run into it. There’s no way to tell exactly what course she chose. We
could call and ask her —”

“As if she’d tell us —”

“She would. But I don’t think the VIPs would let her.”

“So we just keep looking?”

“Yeah.”

Barbary let Heather have the scanner. She knew Heather could
find Mick about a hundred times faster than she could.

“What’s it like, back on earth?” Heather said abruptly,
without looking up. “What’s it like to visit a farm, or camp out in the
wilderness?” She waited quite a while, as Barbary tried to figure out how to
answer her. Finally Heather said in a small voice, “Never mind. I didn’t mean
to pry.”

“It’s okay,” Barbary said. “It isn’t that. It’s just a hard
question to answer. There are so many different places and different things to
see — only I haven’t seen most of them. It’s hard to get a permit to go out in
the wilderness, and you need a lot of equipment, and that costs money. Nobody I
knew ever did it.”

“What about farms? Did you see cows and horses and stuff?”

“I’ve never been on a farm, either. There weren’t any near
where I lived, and they aren’t like in movies. They’re all automated. Big
machines run them. Some of them are covered with plastic to keep the water and
the heat in. A couple years ago I snuck off to a zoo. I saw a cow then. It
looked kind of bored and dumb. Horses are prettier, but hardly anybody on farms
has them anymore. Mostly, rich people keep them to ride.”