Gift From The Stars (15 page)

By the time Frances and Jessica reached the control room, plodding along in the traditional step-by-step that pleased Frances and annoyed Jessica, the ship had been accelerating for five minutes at a steady one gravity. The control room wasn’t at all like those on the television shows Jessica had grown up with: it was sparse and utilitarian, with a semicircle of pivoting armchairs mounted on pedestals and equipped with velcro belts. The chairs faced a curved, plastic counter top inset with dials and keyboards. Above that a series of vision screens showed the various working areas of the ship and exterior views in all directions.

No windows. Jessica recalled Adrian chuckling when Peter asked about the plans. “Windows!”

Jessica shook herself before she fell into one of Frances’s genre pits. Identifying the genre wouldn’t help this time.

Adrian swiveled around to face them, pleased with himself and his world. Jessica hated to spoil his mood. She looked at Frances.

“I found this in Peter’s locker,” Frances said, holding out the mask.

Adrian took in its meaning at a glance. “So,” he said, suddenly sober, “Peter is the bearded man. I wonder what he hoped to gain by that. What does he have to say?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Jessica said.

“He isn’t around to ask,” Frances added.

“That’s a pretty fast search,” Adrian said.

Frances shrugged. “He was among those who left.” She seemed much more in control now that her trial by weightlessness was over. “You know the way things work. You propose and I dispose.”

Adrian accepted Frances’s breach of his word without comment. Jessica didn’t know whether it was because he expected it or because they had more serious concerns. She hoped it was the latter. She didn’t want to reevaluate the relationship between Adrian and Frances while she was still struggling with the implications of Frances’ last sentence and Adrian’s failure to react to it.

“That means we may be sitting on a time bomb,” Adrian said.

“Clearly,” Frances said.

“I feel sorry for Peter,” Adrian said.

“I know.”

Jessica looked from one to the other impatiently. “Why are you talking about poor Peter when there’s so much to done?”

“The question is,” Adrian said, “what’s to be done?”

“The ship is working like a dream,” Frances said, “but there’s no way of knowing when it will turn into a nightmare.”

Jessica looked from Adrian to Frances and back again. “What are you saying? You don’t even know what’s wrong. You don’t even know if anything is wrong.” She moved impatiently to the pilot’s chair and began looking at the readouts.

“If there’s anything wrong,” Adrian said, “—and there almost certainly is something wrong—it will be in the computer. The glitch in the computer program two days ago was a test.”

“And a warning we should have paid more attention to,” Frances added.

Jessica hated the way Adrian and Frances completed each other’s thoughts, like an old married couple. She typed in the command for the computer to switch to manual, but the ship continued its acceleration unaltered.

“We all knew how much this project meant to Peter,” Adrian said. “It’s still hard to believe that he would sabotage the only thing that would bring him peace.”

“What we didn’t know,” Frances said, “was how great his fear still was.”

Adrian shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it of clutter. “He started the whole thing. Without him there would be no alien message, no designs, no project.”

“He stood in for humanity itself,” Frances said. “Attracted by the mystery; afraid to find the answer. Attraction and repulsion. Balanced in most. Exaggerated in some, like Peter, to the point of anguish. Finally the fear got the better of him.”

“We may well be in a difficult situation,” Adrian said, “but it’s Peter I feel sorry for. He’ll never know. He has to know, and yet he never will.”

“I hate to say this,” Jessica said, “but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Peter has been working for Makepeace. Only Makepeace could have arranged for the capsule that fit so neatly into what was left of the station, and only Makepeace could have come up with the scenario that landed us here. He doesn’t want us to succeed. For earthbound humanity’s reasons, sure, but most of all for Makepeace’s reasons. I’ve worked for him and I know how he thinks.”

Adrian and Frances exchanged glances.

“That may be true,” Adrian said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

“Well then, try this,” Jessica said. “The manual controls don’t work.”

Adrian nodded. “And I’d guess there’s nobody aboard who knows how to reprogram the computer.”

Jessica looked at their eyes, first Adrian’s and then Frances’s. They were curiously unafraid. She realized that they were looking at her eyes, as well, and that in them they would read frustration and impatience and, yes, fear. She turned to the vision screens while she tried to gain control of her emotions. The rear view showed a rapidly retreating moon, and the one slightly to the side, a disappearing Earth still looking a fertile blue streaked with white. On the other side, where the sun would have been, the overload had closed down the receptors. Ahead was the star-strewn blackness of outer space.

She looked at the readouts. “We’ve been underway for an hour,” she said calmly. “Our speed is thirty-five kilometers per second, and we’re almost sixty-four thousand kilometers from Earth.”

“If the program maintains this acceleration,” Adrian said, “by tomorrow we’ll be about one-sixth of the way to Mars.”

Jessica input an inquiry. “Our course and speed has us arriving at Mars orbit two hours before the planet does. Unless something changes, it seems likely that Peter had something else in mind.”

“And it seems likely,” Frances said, “that if Peter had intended to destroy the ship, it would have exploded by now. Some celestial fireworks would have been a good object lesson for the rest of humanity.”

“The question is,” Adrian said, “what were Peter’s intentions?”

“Jessica,” Frances said, “you just got that information from the computer, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You said it had locked you out?”

“I said it wouldn’t let me change our acceleration or course, or switch to manual,” Jessica said. “Everything else is proceeding normally. It’s providing readouts, controlling air composition and temperature, showing us views, everything it was built to do—except letting us choose where we want to go and how fast. Like a virus that’s taken over that one part of the computer.”

“That means that Peter had some kind of plan.”

“Like a one-way ticket to an unknown destination,” Adrian said.

“I guess we’ll know when we get there,” Frances said.

“If he just didn’t want to get rid of us with a ticket to nowhere,” Jessica said.

Adrian shook his head. “That wasn’t Peter’s way. He had these twin compulsions of fight and flight. He couldn’t bring himself to fight, but he couldn’t bring himself not to seek the answers his neurosis needed. So he has sent us to find out the answers.”

“Which he’ll never know,” Jessica said impatiently.

“Which he’ll never know,” Frances agreed. “And he’ll grow old never knowing. He’ll have psychotic episodes when he wants to kill himself because of guilt and others when he thinks he’s getting messages from us or from his aliens. He’s going to have a miserable existence and die a miserable death, wishing he were here, but at least he’s going to know that we’re out there, looking.” Frances gestured toward the forward vision screen with its star-sprinkled vastness.

“It could be the aliens themselves,” Jessica said. “It could be an alien virus, inserted who knows when, intended to bring us to them, like sheep to the slaughter.”

“That sounds like Peter’s paranoia,” Adrian said.

“Or Makepeace’s,” Frances said.

“On the other hand,” Adrian said, “Peter may well have had information that he was withholding.”

“What kind of information?” Jessica asked.

“Information about where to go once the ship was built.”

“Instructions from the aliens?” Jessica asked.

Adrian nodded.

“But why would he withhold it?” Jessica asked.

“Maybe he concealed it even from himself,” Frances said. “Because it was too horrific.”

“If it was too horrific for him, why shouldn’t it be horrific for us?” Jessica asked.

“Because he’s paranoid,” Adrian said, “and we’re not.”

Jessica turned back to the keyboard at the pilot’s station. “Maybe you’re satisfied with going where Peter’s paranoia takes you, but I’m going to learn how to master this computer. I’ll break into its programs and make it take us where I want to go! After all, we’ve got all the time in the universe.”

“And where do you want to go?” Adrian asked.

Jessica was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be—abducted.” She swung back around to face them.

“Frances,” Adrian said, “I think it’s a good idea to develop the skills to
reprogram the computer. Between Jessie and me, and whoever else has some talent for it, we ought to be able to figure out how to do that.”

“That’s a good idea,” Frances said.

“But, Jessie,” Adrian said, “once we do regain control, I think we’ll have to consider leaving Peter’s programming intact.”

“But why—?” Jessica began.

“I think he programmed in the instructions about how to get to the aliens, the part of the original message he never revealed to anyone. And I think we won’t ever find a more suitable goal, and we’ll never be satisfied until we find the answers to our questions as well as Peter’s.”

“Why did they send us the plans?” Frances said. “What do they want from us? Who are they?”

Jessie turned back toward the vision screen that showed the depthless blackness littered with tiny lights that represented the long way ahead. Everything was orientation and a constant adjustment of one’s relationship with the universe. If their acceleration remained constant, the ship would leave the Solar System in thirteen days and in another four hundred days or so they would pass beyond the Oort Cloud.

Behind them, looking at it from the viewpoint of the universe, would be cosmic debris. Ahead would be the abyss, the bottomless pit of interstellar space.

And even deeper, the mysteries of where they were going and what strangeness waited for them at the end of their voyage.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.

L
EWIS
C
ARROLL

Part Four

THE RABBIT HOLE

THEY EXISTED INSIDE AN EXPLOSION OF LIGHT. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.

The external vision screens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.

“No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.

“Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.

They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.

“If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”

“We should make notes.”

“I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read:
make notes
. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”

“That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”

“It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.

“It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.