Gift From The Stars (12 page)

She backed into the clamps that held a row of spacesuits just inside the inner hatchway. It was a slow process, but faster than trying to maneuver down narrow corridors in a bulky suit and then being unable to communicate except by radio. Finally she was free. Dressed in what looked like a one-piece garment of long underwear, she propelled herself down a zero-gravity corridor toward the forward control room. It was like a high-platform dive without an entry, a repetition in which she caught herself with bent knees at a turn and launched herself again until she arrived, at last, at a room crowded with dials and screens and computers and keyboards and distraught people milling about aimlessly and weightlessly.

Adrian was among them and Francis and Peter and a dozen or more others whose names and faces had become as familiar to her as neighborhood buddies. Some of them hung upside down or sideways to her orientation, but that surrealistic panorama no longer had the power to surprise. She had no time now to identify them individually. “What’s going on?” she asked again.

They looked at her, in every possible configuration. “Someone programmed an engine test into the control-room computer,” Adrian said. “Fortunately, there were only a few atoms of antimatter in the containment vessel—maybe a billion or so—left over from the preinstallation tests. And only a similar femtogram of matter. Otherwise it might have been catastrophic.”

“We didn’t move,” Frances said. “Just shuddered.”

“Who did it?” Jessica asked.

Frances shrugged.

“No way to know,” Adrian said. “We don’t even know how it was done.”

“But you said a test was programmed into the control-room computer?” Jessica said.

“That’s the only way the engine could be started,” Adrian said. “The entire process is so complex that the human mind can’t perform the necessary calculations or react quickly enough. We’ll check the computer programs, but I suspect that whoever was clever enough to install the program so that it nestled, unsuspected, among the computer’s legitimate programming, won’t have left any digital fingerprints.”

“At least,” Peter said nervously, “we know that the engines work.”

“We knew that already,” Adrian said. “From the static tests.”

“But we didn’t know if the mountings would hold or the ship would blow up.” A muscle twitched near Peter’s left eye.

“We still don’t know,” Adrian said.

“Some people have said they saw the bearded man,” Frances said.

“The bearded man,” Jessica repeated.

The bearded man had become a legend within the crew. Ever since workmen had taken up residence within the space station, one person or another had reported brief glimpses of a strange man. He was described by each of the viewers as wiry in appearance, with skin burnt nearly black by space radiation, against which an unkempt white beard was even more spectacular. The sightings were so fleeting or so isolated that no verification was possible. As difficult as it was to imagine a mysterious person existing within the closed community of space workers, some people were beginning to believe in him; others thought he was a ghost or maybe a mass hallucination brought on by concern about their work and its risks, or the brooding presence of the aliens and all the unanswered questions they trailed behind them.

“We’ll put our best people to work analyzing the computer data,” Adrian said, “and providing safeguards against future sabotage.”

“Sabotage?” Jessica asked. “You think it was sabotage?”

“It certainly seems like it, but we can’t let it interfere with our mission or it will have succeeded. Let’s get back to finishing up. Tomorrow we load antimatter and reaction mass, and the day after that we take our first test-flight. Everything has to be ready by then.”

“You haven’t said yet who’s going to be on board during the test flight,” Peter said.

“Everybody who wants to be,” Adrian said. “Anyone who doesn’t want to share the risks can back out if they wish, with no hard feelings. We’ll let them board afterwards.”

“And what if it blows up?” Peter asked.

“Then we’ll all go with it,” Adrian said. “We might as well face reality: This is our only chance. The Energy Board won’t give us another. Who wants to survive their dreams?”

Jessica turned from the door into the control room to head back to her lonely job of checking seams. They were airtight, that had been clear ever since the crew moved in, but suddenly it seemed vitally important that they hold up under acceleration.

“Jessie,” Frances said, coming after her. “Can we talk?”

As soon as they had reached a point beyond earshot of the others,
Frances stopped Jessica with a hand on her arm. “You asked who did it,” Frances said. “Some members of the crew think it was you.”

Jessica looked at Frances, wondering why the old woman who was her unlikely rival was telling her this. “Why would anyone think that?”

“You were Makepeace’s agent,” Frances said. “People remember.”

“I’ve worked five years on this project,” Jessica said. “How long does it take to earn people’s trust?”

Frances gestured as if to say, “People have long memories.” And “Look at you—young and shapely and pretty. How can anyone who isn’t any of those things be sure what people like you would do?” The movement made her spin gently until Jessica reached out a hand to stop her and relieve Frances’s nervous inner ears. Unlike the revealing long underwear most of them wore, Frances was wearing loose coveralls; although biogenetic treatment had removed fat and years, it could not change the fact that she was short and sturdy.

“Anyway,” Jessica said, “why would I want to sabotage the ship when I was out checking seams?”

“I didn’t say it was reasonable,” Frances said. “I just thought you ought to know what people were saying.”

“I’m sure they’re saying the same thing about everybody, with the possible exception of Adrian,” Jessica said. “Nobody’s above suspicion, and even Adrian might be trying to test the crew.”

“Or get rid of people he doesn’t trust by assigning them to duties on the hull,” Frances said, “at the time of the test.”

“While we’re at it,” Jessica said, “we might as well throw in the bearded man.”

“Him, too.”

“Well,” Jessica said, spinning toward the distant hatchway, “at least I know you set them straight. About me.”

“You know I did,” Frances called after her.

But Jessica carried her suspicions back onto the hull and her lonely job. Was it ever going to end? Would she always be an outsider?

At the end of her long shift, tired and hungry and still brooding over Frances’s subtle accusation, she straightened up from the last seam and took one final look around. The next day she would be loading antimatter and who knew whether some accident would destroy all their work and hopes and them as well. The following day, if all went without disaster, they would make a test run. However matters went, there would not be many more chances to stand free above the abyss and consider
her birth planet, a blue, water-blessed oasis in the vast desert of space. She looked at it steadily for several minutes, thinking warm thoughts of home and family and favorite things, before she sighed, secured her equipment to the magnetic catches on the suit, and turned toward the nearest hatch.

Only then did she think about the bearded man and swung around to face the ruins of the space station, looking like the archeological remains of a curiously shaped dinosaur. On an impulse she moved to a portion of the ship closest to the former station and launched herself into the dark desert she had just been considering. She made a small adjustment of her steering jets and caught a girder on the station as she passed. That sort of space maneuvering had become commonplace in the past four years, although some of the crew were better at it than others and a few, like Frances, never did it at all.

Jessica swung herself along the girder until she reached a portion of the station that still retained a few plates. There she used her magnetic grapples to walk toward the part of the station that was relatively untouched. In the middle of a solid metal wall was a hatch that she didn’t remember, that had no business still being there. She cycled it open. Beyond was darkness, and, from the lack of condensation when the hatch opened, airlessness as well. Her suit lights revealed a storeroom in which discarded equipment and tools floated like a Dalí nightmare. She shut the door behind her, to keep the debris from cluttering nearby orbit, and made her way through this obstacle course to the far wall where another closed hatch waited to be opened.

She hesitated. Why had no one been here before? Or if they had been here, why had they left the equipment loose behind them and why were the hatches closed? But then, before further doubts could damage her resolve, she reached forward to palm the hatch switch.

The hatch opened. A gush of ice particles rushed past her helmet as moisture from the air within froze instantly. Jessica was glad she had closed the far hatch; the equipment and maybe she herself might have been expelled through it. The segment of station in which she was standing, it was clear now, had been used as an airlock for the room beyond and the debris, as camouflage. In the next section someone had been living. A net-enclosed sleeping niche was in one corner and in another a closet that might house a toilet and perhaps a shower. A water spigot broke the smooth surface of a far wall next to plastic-fronted cupboards stacked with dehydrated food and quick meals, and a microwave.

The walls themselves were papered with posters and photographs. They were not of Earth but of space and astronomical objects—planets
and stars and nebulae and galaxies, and artists’ renderings of spaceships making their way among them.

Jessica felt a tap on the shoulder of her suit.

Jessica turned to face a person in another suit—but not the bearded man an over-active imagination had summoned. Features were not easy to discern in the helmet but she could see that the person had no beard. Then she recognized Cavendish. She started to switch on her suit radio, but Cavendish shook his head and motioned her forward. She pulled herself into the segment ahead and turned to see Cavendish follow. He swung himself around at the door and cycled it shut. After a few moments he eased his helmet loose, waited, and then pulled it off. He motioned Jessica to do the same.

Jessica winced at the odor in the room. Someone had been living there for a long time with little sanitation and less concern for cleanliness. Perhaps the waste-disposal system had malfunctioned. The place stank.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I might ask you the same thing,” Cavendish said. His left eye twitched.

“Someone’s been living here,” Jessica said.

“No doubt about that.”

“It occurred to me maybe we were overlooking the obvious,” Jessica said. “Maybe the sabotage came from the outside. We get so used to being alone up here; we don’t consider other possibilities. Maybe those wild stories about the bearded man aren’t just wild stories.”

“So you came here to check up,” Cavendish said. “It doesn’t make any sense, though, does it? How could anyone avoid discovery when we were living in this place for a year before we dismantled most of it to build the ship?”

“No, it doesn’t make any sense,” Jessica said, “but here it is. Someone has been living here. Anyway, that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?” She looked at Cavendish suspiciously. She had never fully accepted him and his place among them. She knew he had deciphered the original message, and that he had smuggled the information out of SETI and published it in the disguise of a UFO cult book; and she knew that his doubts about alien motives had driven him mad, or, rather, had reinforced his natural paranoia to the point of psychosis. But he was as responsible as anyone for gathering the crew that had built the ship and helping to persuade the Energy Board to allocate resources and let them go.

“I kept looking at the remains of the space station,” Cavendish said, “and there was something wrong with it. I didn’t know what it was until I began to compare its appearance with videos from the past. And then I realized—”

“What?” Jessica prompted, hoping it wasn’t more of his paranoia. But then she remembered how her gaze had been drawn to the station time and again.