Farside (13 page)

“I understand,” said McClintock.

“Time is of the essence,” Professor Uhlrich repeated.

UHLRICH’S QUARTERS

Professor Uhlrich looked in McClintock’s direction, seeking some clue, some hint of hope, that the man understood how important, how crucially vital, the work of the Farside Observatory was.

It was like gazing at a frosted window: he could discern nothing but the opaque surface. Uhlrich knew from the level of McClintock’s voice how tall the man was, and the information from his dossier and various net sites said he was a strikingly handsome man in his early thirties. Uhlrich’s visual cortex drew a picture that vaguely suggested a vid star from many years earlier.

McClintock knows how to keep his thoughts hidden, Uhlrich realized. The man just sits there saying nothing, knowing that he has the power of life and death over the Farside Observatory, over me, myself.

At last he asked McClintock, “Is it absolutely necessary to keep Simpson at Selene?”

McClintock started to reply, hesitated, then answered, “He’ll only be there a day or so. If you want Cardenas to help you, we should keep Simpson reasonably close to her.”

The man understands nothing, Uhlrich thought. Patiently, he tried to explain, “With Mr. Henderson incapacitated, I need Simpson here to direct the technical crew. They must take apart the mirror frame so it can be shipped to Dr. Cardenas’s laboratory. I need Simpson here to direct them.”

“Couldn’t one of the other—”

“No,” Uhlrich said flatly. “Simpson. He’s the only one who can get the job done. The others are not equal to the task. Believe me, I know them well.”

“None of them?”

Struggling to remain calm despite McClintock’s obtuseness, Uhlrich replied, “You saw how lacking the man Oberman is. I’ve tried others before him: None of them were competent enough to head the technical team. Simpson is my last hope—unless I could hire someone else from Selene. Or perhaps even from Earth. But that would be expensive.”

McClintock said, “You know, Simpson has his own problems.”

“It’s rumored that he’s a drug user, I know.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me!” Uhlrich snapped. “But what choice do I have?”

“There’s no one else among your entire technical team that can handle the work?”

Dolt! thought Uhlrich. I’ve told the man twice that I need Simpson here and he still doesn’t understand.

“Mr. McClintock,” he said, very slowly, as if speaking to a child, “you don’t seem to realize how limited we are here. I have a mere fifty-some engineers and technicians—even less than that now, with Henderson out of action. They must run the mirror laboratory, do all the construction work out on the surface, and all the other technical tasks that are necessary. There are another eighteen specialists struggling to construct the Cyclops radio telescope array. Eighteen people! Eight dozen would be barely enough.”

McClintock shifted in his chair but said nothing.

“Selene’s governing council has given us only the barest minimum of funding,” said Uhlrich.

“Which is why you need help from the trust,” McClintock said, finally understanding.

“Which is why I need help from the McClintock Trust,” Uhlrich echoed. “Yes.”

“Well … as I said, Simpson can’t be in two places at the same time.”

“He is needed here. He can maintain contact with Dr. Cardenas over phone links.”

“I suppose so,” McClintock said doubtfully.

“Then it is settled,” said Uhlrich. “Simpson returns here at once.”

Sounding reluctant, McClintock said, “I’ll tell him so.”

“Good.”

McClintock seemed to understand that he was being dismissed. Uhlrich sensed him taking a final sip of his scotch, then getting up from the couch. The professor stood up beside him, barely as tall as McClintock’s shoulder.

The two men walked to the door and shook hands.

“Thanks for the drink,” McClintock said unenthusiastically.

“You are entirely welcome,” said Uhlrich, with equal warmth. “I hope we can work together fruitfully.”

“So do I, Professor.”

McClintock left and Uhlrich slid his door shut, leaned against it for a moment, then threaded his way back to the chair he’d been sitting in. He found his wineglass, drained it, then brushed his fingers along the tabletop until he found McClintock’s tumbler. The professor carried both glasses to the dishwasher in the kitchenette.

As he slipped the glasses into the half-full machine, Uhlrich thought, Simpson is the key to everything. He’s the only one who can get those technicians to do their jobs properly. He may be dependent on the medications he takes, but as long as he gets the job done I don’t care if he eats dogs and drinks vinegar. I need him!

The professor went to his desk and sat wearily in its little wheeled chair. He called up the latest data on the Sirius system and told the computer to display it in the audio mode.

“Sirius C will begin transit number thirty-eight in thirty-two hours, seven minutes, and fourteen seconds,” the synthesized voice began.

The planet will pass across the blazing face of the Dog Star, Uhlrich understood. From the minuscule dip in the star’s brightness, the planet’s size could be calculated to a finer precision. My new assistant, this young woman, Dr. Yost, will do that, he thought. Then he remembered that he had ordered her to report to his office again at 0730 hours.

I’d better get to bed, he told himself.

Simpson, he repeated silently. He’s the key to getting the work done. And McClintock: he’s the key to getting the funding to carry out the work.

Uhlrich shook his head as he began to get undressed. A drug user and a spoiled rich brat. He sighed, thinking that it was almost criminal that the great things he wanted to achieve depended upon such people.

DOSSIER: JASON MAXIMILLIAN UHLRICH

He was born to genteely impoverished nobility in the Austrian city of Linz, which was famous for the pastry called Linzertorte and for being the childhood home of Adolf Hitler.

Tales of the family’s bygone splendor filled his childhood, and his father still had enough influence to place young Jason in good schools. Because he was bookish and got better grades than his classmates, and because he was pompously proud of his family heritage, but most of all because he was slightly built and physically frail, Jason became a favorite target for the bigger and more rugged boys. He got his revenge against them by consistently being first in his classes, despite occasional swollen lips or bruised ribs.

It was at the prestigious University of Vienna that Jason Uhlrich turned to the study of astronomy. He had won a full scholarship and started in the physics curriculum, inspired by one of the university’s most illustrious alumni, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger. But astronomy lured him away from theoretical physics: Uhlrich fell in love with the study of the stars. Nobel Prizes rarely went to astronomers, he knew, but Uhlrich burned with an ambition to be among the rare few who achieved that lofty goal.

Alas, reality was very different from his dreams. Uhlrich was a gifted teacher, but only an ordinary researcher. A generation of students adored him, some of them going on to outstanding careers in astronomy. Uhlrich himself remained virtually anonymous: a slim gray figure in the background, not the forefront, of astronomical research. He was the person to whom his students dedicated the books that made them famous.

Then came the accident. He was working with a graduate student, a pretty young Hungarian woman with thick honey-blond hair who was specializing in infrared astronomy—at Uhlrich’s suggestion. She was building a sensitive IR detector and—again at Uhlrich’s suggestion—using liquid hydrogen for its coolant rather than liquid helium. When she worried about the dangers of the highly flammable hydrogen, Uhlrich assured her that the increase in the instrument’s sensitivity would be well worth the risk.

It wasn’t. One fine spring afternoon, as he worked alongside the student, inhaling her lovely perfume, the hydrogen exploded in a searing fireball that burned the student to death and destroyed both Uhlrich’s retinas.

Stem cell therapy could rebuild his burned face but could not repair the completely destroyed retinas. Neurosurgeons made Uhlrich see, after a fashion, by rewiring his visual cortex so that it could be stimulated by the auditory and tactile centers of his brain.

He saw through his ears and his fingertips. He was hailed as a living miracle of medical science. He returned to an almost normal life. The miracle was not perfect, of course: the images his visual cortex drew in his mind were not perfect reproductions of the people and things about him.

But he did see that lovely young graduate student in his mind’s eye. Saw her afire, heard her screams, every time he closed his sightless eyes.

Uhlrich exiled himself to the Moon. The newly independent lunar nation of Selene was starting a university and looking for top-flight people to fill its faculty. Through old associates (he had very few friends) Uhlrich received an invitation to head the astronomy department of the fledgling University of Selene.

“We need good men like you, Professor,” said one of his former students, who now headed Selene University’s selection committee. “Dependable, reliable, the kind of man who can turn out top-notch students.”

Thus Uhlrich traveled to the Moon, learned to live underground in the strangely light gravity, walked and talked and existed almost like a normal, sighted man, and tried to forget his previous life and sorrows.

Then another of his former students, now a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, discovered Sirius C, an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star that was less than nine light-years away, so close that the International Astronautical Authority launched a plan to get visual imagery of the world that the popular news media dubbed New Earth.

Suddenly Uhlrich was seized by a frenzy. Selene was already constructing a radio telescope facility on the far side of the Moon. Why not build an optical interferometer that could image Sirius C—before the IAA’s grandiose plan for space-borne telescopes could be completed?

Insisting that Selene could gain enormous prestige from the project, Uhlrich faced the lunar nation’s governing council in a white fury of ambition. They decided to study his proposal, which Uhlrich took as a polite way of refusing him. Just as when a father tells his importuning child, “We’ll see,” what he really means is no, but he doesn’t want to have an argument about it.

Desperate, Uhlrich sought an audience with Douglas Stavenger, the retired leader of Selene, the man who had directed the community during its earliest years, who had led Selene’s brief, almost bloodless fight for independence, who had chosen the very name for the lunar nation.

Stavenger, still Selene’s éminence grise despite his apparent youth, smiled at Uhlrich’s enthusiasm and agreed with him. Selene should be the first to obtain visual imagery of New Earth.

Selene’s governing council agreed to support the project—minimally. Which led Uhlrich to seek additional funding from the McClintock Trust. He had not expected the scion of the McClintock clan would actually come to the Farside Observatory and interfere with his operation.

But Uhlrich was determined to do whatever was necessary to make Farside Observatory succeed. His one chance for a Nobel Prize was at his fingertips.

Almost.

TELEOPERATIONS CENTER

The room felt strangely crowded to Uhlrich, stuffy and hot, even though there were only three people in it.

The professor had been informed that Grant Simpson had returned to Farside the morning after Uhlrich had ordered McClintock to bring him back. But when Uhlrich tried to reach Simpson on the phone, to discuss the engineer’s meeting with Dr. Cardenas, he received a recorded statement:

“I’m unable to speak with you at the moment. Please leave your name and a brief message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

Unable to speak with
me
? Uhlrich fulminated. The nerve of the man!

He asked the people monitoring the surveillance cameras that watched over every public space in the facility to locate Simpson. Within a minute they reported that Simpson was in the teleoperations center.

For all of three minutes Uhlrich drummed his fingers on his desktop. Too busy to answer my call, is he? His first impulse was to go down to the teleoperations center and let Simpson know in no uncertain terms that when he’s called by the chief of the Farside Observatory, he’d better answer right then and there.

But then he thought that it would be beneath him to go searching for one of his employees. Simpson should come to me; I’m his superior, he works for me. But I need him, the professor admitted to himself; he’s the only man around here who seems to be able to get things done. At any rate, Uhlrich felt safer in his own office, behind his own familiar desk. Why go traipsing through the corridors if you don’t have to? he asked himself. Why risk blundering into an embarrassing wrong turn?

Finally, though, he decided to sacrifice his dignity a little and go to the teleoperations center. Show them that I can go anywhere I decide to go, he thought. That I’m not a prisoner of my own office. I want to talk with Simpson, I want to talk with him
now.
I’ll make him understand that when I call, he comes. Or else.

He got up from his desk and started for the teleoperations center, his face set in a grim mask of determination, his fingers brushing along the wall of the corridor as he walked.

But as he strode down the narrow rock-walled corridor his irritation eased somewhat. No sense making a scene, he told himself. Go to the teleoperations center as if you’re checking on how the work is going. A good leader looks in on his people from time to time. Talk to Simpson from a position of authority, not like a helpless blind man or an angry fishwife.

So when he slid open the door to the teleoperations center, Uhlrich was quite composed and ready to speak to Simpson in a reasonable manner.

For several heartbeats Uhlrich stood just inside the door, feeling tense and sweaty in the small, poorly ventilated room. He knew there were four consoles standing against the far wall. Simpson had to be at one of them.