Farside (39 page)

But suddenly he snapped his eyes wide open.

“Nate’s taking the hopper?” he asked Trudy. “The one you rode in here on?”

She looked perplexed. “I guess.”

“Get him on the radio! Freak two. Now!”

As Trudy obediently picked up the space suit sleeve again she said to Grant, “Lie back. You need to rest.”

“Get Nate on freak two,” he insisted. “He can’t use that hopper. I disabled it.”

“Then he’ll use the one you came in on,” she said.

“If he’s smart … that’s what he’ll do. But Nate isn’t that—”

Halleck’s impatient voice came through the speakers. “What do you want?”

*   *   *

Oberman heard Grant’s voice in his suit speakers.

“Don’t try to take off … in that hopper!”

“So you’re awake, huh?” Oberman said. “I always thought you had a thick skull.”

“Nate, don’t light up … that hopper! There isn’t enough oxy to—”

“No use begging me, Grant. I’m not taking you or Miss Goody-Goody with us.”

“You can’t—”

Oberman held his gloved thumb over the control panel’s ignition button. “So long, pal,” he said to Grant. “Hope I didn’t crack your skull.”

“Don’t!”

To Halleck, Oberman said, “Hang on.” And he leaned his thumb against the ignition button.

The hopper lurched off the ground in total silence. The ground fell away.

“We’re off!” Oberman said. “Next stop, Gagarin!”

Suddenly the thrust cut off. For a terrifying instant the hopper seemed to hang in space, hovering a few hundred meters above the hard, stony ground.

Then it plunged downward, falling like a stone.

Halleck screamed. Oberman had time to screech “Shit!” before the hopper hit the ground and smashed into pieces.

*   *   *

Grant stared at Trudy as he heard Oberman’s arrogant, “We’re off! Next stop, Gagarin!”

He thought, Maybe there’s enough LOX in the pipeline to—

Then he heard Halleck’s scream and the radio link abruptly cut off. On the airless Moon, the hopper’s crash made no sound at all.

Trudy looked stricken. “Are they…?”

“They’re dead,” Grant said, miserable with sudden guilt. “I killed them.”

The last of his strength seemed to leave him. He faded into unconsciousness.

BACK TO FARSIDE

Grant faded in and out of consciousness. Vaguely he was aware of somebody bending over him. Not Trudy.

“Pretty bad,” he heard a voice mutter. Dr. Kapstein. Ridiculously, Grant wondered if she’d thrown up again in her space suit on the way over from Farside.

With Trudy helping, Kapstein and whoever else had come to Korolev with her worked Grant into a fresh space suit. He felt them lift his pain-wracked body and carry him to the shelter’s airlock. The pain seemed to be easing, but he felt woozy, as if he were muffled in cotton batting. Painkillers, he thought; Kapstein’s pumped me full of painkillers.

When he opened his eyes again he saw that he was in the locker area at Farside. Kapstein and Trudy and even Carter McClintock were looking down at him. His nose wrinkled.

“Smells like … salad dressing…”

Kris Cardenas’s youthful face bent over him. “Stopgap defense against the disassemblers,” she said. “We used all the salad oil in the kitchen, and lots of other oils.”

“Great…”

Dr. Kapstein’s face looked grim. “We’ve got to get you to Selene.”

“But … quarantine…”

“The quarantine’s lifted,” Cardenas said. “Now that we know what we’re looking for, Selene’s open again.”

“Good.”

Kapstein said to Cardenas, “Whatever you put into him probably has saved his life.”

“Therapeutic nanomachines,” Cardenas said.

“They stopped his bleeding and even reduced the subcranial edema.”

With a knowing smile, Cardenas said, “My little nanobugs have their uses.”

*   *   *

Edie Elgin rode back to Selene with Grant. Trudy wanted to go, too, but Uhlrich insisted there was too much work to be done for him to allow her to leave Farside.

Grant rode on one of the lobber’s passenger compartment seats, tilted back almost flat. Sitting on the seat next to him, Edith shook her head mournfully.

“The biggest news story since the war, and I can’t say a peep about it,” she complained. “Even my husband has told me to keep quiet about it.”

Feeling light-headed, but free of pain, Grant asked, “How can you cover up Mrs. Halleck’s death?”

“Hopper accident,” Edith said with a shrug. “Blame it on the guy she was with, that Oberman fellow.”

It was really my fault, Grant told himself. But he said nothing to Edie Elgin.

Kris Cardenas stayed at Farside, supervising the cleanup as the vanadium-gobbling nanomachines ran to the end of their programmed lifespans and went inert. Grant fidgeted in his hospital bed, wondering how his people were getting along without him.

By the time he was able to walk and exercise normally, Trudy flew in to see him.

Grant was sitting up in his bed, watching a news broadcast on the wall-mounted television set when she appeared at the door of his hospital room, looking bright and fresh and totally happy. He jumped out of bed as she ran to him. They embraced and kissed and he reveled in the warmth of her.

Then he realized he was wearing a ridiculous flimsy hospital gown, open at the back.

“I’m not dressed very well,” he said, grinning.

“You look great to me,” said Trudy.

“My head’s okay,” he told her as he led her to the only chair in the room. “The medics say the nanomachines inside me accelerated my healing. I ought to be going back to Farside tomorrow.”

“I know. I came to see you and go back with you.”

“Uhlrich let you go?” Grant asked as he sat on the edge of the bed.

Nodding, she replied, “The professor is just about delirious. Carter’s decided that the McClintock Trust will fully fund Farside’s operations for the next five years. We won’t need to beg money from Selene.”

“No wonder he’s happy.”

“And my paper…” She hesitated, then amended, “
Our
paper on the composition of New Earth’s atmosphere has been favorably refereed. It’ll be in the next issue of the
International Astrophysics Letters
!”

“That’s terrific,” Grant said. “Your first published paper.”

“And it’s an important one. The professor’s pushing to finish the ’scopes at Korolev and Gagarin. Once we get all three working together, we’ll be able to produce detailed imagery of the planet’s surface.”

“And the Ulcer will get his Nobel Prize after all.”

“Looks like,” said Trudy.

Grant felt his brows knitting into a scowl. “But it’s not fair. You’re doing the work. He’s just sitting on his butt and taking the credit. What do you get, Trudy?”

She got up from the chair and came smiling to the bed and sat down beside Grant.

“I get you,” said Trudy. “The professor can have his Nobel. I get the real prize.”

EPILOGUE: SIX YEARS LATER

The sign on the office door was spanking new:

T. YOST

DIRECTOR

ANGEL OBSERVATORY

Trudy felt weird sitting at the desk that she still thought of as Professor Uhlrich’s. As soon as Grant came into the office with their daughter she got up, came around the desk, and sat with her husband and three-year-old Gwen on the side of the long table facing the softly glowing wall screen.

Grant leaned across Gwen to give Trudy a peck on the lips. The little girl fidgeted in the chair between her parents.

“The ceremony will be starting in a few minutes,” Trudy said.

Grant glowered at her darkly. “I still think you’re the one who ought to get the prize. Or at least he should’ve told them he’d share it with you.”

“We’ve been over that a zillion times, Grant. Let the professor have his moment of glory.”

Before Grant could say anything more, Trudy called out, “Display Sirius C.”

The wall screen instantly showed an image of the planet: lush green landforms and deeply blue oceans, decked with streams of white clouds.

“New Earth!” Gwen pointed a chubby finger at the display.

Grant stared at the image, knowing that it was the result of more than a year’s worth of painstaking work, taking the interference patterns from Farside’s trio of telescopes and meticulously building up a visual image of the exoplanet.

“That’s right, dear,” Trudy said to her daughter. “That’s what Mommy is studying.”

Grant said, “I’ll take you to Selene, Gwennie, and show you the ship they’re building. It’s going to take people to New Earth.”

“Me too?”

Grant laughed. “Maybe. Not the first ship out, but maybe someday.”

Trudy told Gwen, “You can go if you want to, darling. You can go as far as your dreams take you.”

*   *   *

Nearly four hundred thousand kilometers from Farside, the Stockholm Symphony Hall was filled to capacity. Standing in his formal white-tie and tails with the eight other Nobel laureates as they waited offstage, Jason Uhlrich could hear the audience’s murmurings; he pictured a vast sea of people come from all over the world to witness the ceremony.

The personal aide that the Nobel Foundation had given him was at Uhlrich’s side, ready to guide him to the chair waiting for him on the stage. Uhlrich was determined to walk in unassisted.

I did it in the rehearsal this morning, he told himself. I have the layout of the stage pictured in my mind perfectly.

“Professor Jason Uhlrich, astrophysics,” called the master of ceremonies.

Uhlrich pulled his arm away from the aide’s hand and strode out onto the stage, carefully counting his steps. A wave of applause rose from the audience, and he felt tears in his sightless eyes. He smelled the profusion of flowers banked along the rear of the stage but the sensation produced no image in his visual cortex.

He sat and waited while the other laureates came in, one by one, and introductory speeches were made. When it came time to receive the actual award from the king of Sweden, Uhlrich rose to his feet and walked to the podium in measured steps. Behind him, he knew, a giant LCD screen had been lowered to show images of Sirius C. He heard the audience gasp as the images appeared on the screen.

The king congratulated him and handed him the surprisingly heavy portfolio containing the gold memorial medal and a paper-thin flexible display screen that also showed images of the planet produced by the Farside interferometer.

Jason Uhlrich stood before the hushed audience while behind him a picture of an achingly beautiful world of green continents and blue oceans, dotted with white clouds, held the audience, the functionaries of the Nobel Foundation, the king of Sweden, the other Nobel laureates, and the whole world in rapt awe.

New Earth. A world like our own. Unpopulated, no cities, no sign of intelligent life. The Cyclops radio telescope array had scanned the planet thoroughly; it was silent.

But it was a world strikingly similar to our own.

A new world. Beckoning.

TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA

Able One

The Aftermath

As on a Darkling Plain

The Astral Mirror

Battle Station

The Best of the Nebulas

(editor)

Challenges

Colony

Cyberbooks

Escape Plus

The Green Trap

Gremlins Go Home

(with Gordon R. Dickson)

Jupiter

The Kinsman Saga

Leviathans of Jupiter

Mars Life

Mercury

The Multiple Man

Orion

Orion Among the Stars

Orion and King Arthur

Orion and the Conqueror

Orion in the Dying Time

Out of Sun

Peacekeepers

Power Play

Powersat

The Precipice

Privateers

Prometheans

The Rock Rats

Saturn

The Silent War

Star Peace: Assured Survival

The Starcrossed

Tale of the Grand Tour

Test of Fire

Titan

To Fear the Light

(with A. J. Austin)

To Save the Sun

(with A. J. Austin)

The Trikon Deception

(with Bill Pogue)

Triumph

Vengeance of Orion

Venus

Voyagers

Voyagers II: The Alien Within

Voyagers III: Star Brothers

The Return: Book IV of Voyagers

The Winds of Altair

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Bova is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of
Analog,
former editorial director of
Omni,
and a past president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. Bova is the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction. He lives in Florida.