Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (28 page)

“Houston, Houston,
Sunbird
,” Dave repeats; “
Sunbird
calling Houston. Houston, do you read? Come in, Houston.”

The minutes start by. They are giving it seven out, seven back; seventy-eight million miles, ample margin.

“The high gain’s shot, that’s what it is,” Bud says cheerfully. He says it almost every day.

“No way.” Dave’s voice is patient, also as usual. “It checks out. Still too much crap from the sun, isn’t that right, Doc?”

“The residual radiation from the flare is just about in line with us,” Lorimer says. “They could have a hard time sorting us out.” For the thousandth time he registers his own faint, ridiculous gratification at being consulted.

“Shit, we’re outside Mercury.” Bud shakes his head. “How we gonna find out who won the Series?”

He often says that, too. A ritual, out here in eternal night. Lorimer watches the sparkle of Spica drift by the reflection of Bud’s curly face-bush. His own whiskers are scant and scraggly, like a blond Fu Manchu. In the aft corner of the window is a striped glare that must be the remains of their port energy accumulators, fried off in the solar explosion that hit them a month ago and fused the outer layers of their windows. That was when Dave cut his head open on the sexlogic panel. Lorimer had been banged in among the gravity-wave experiment, he still doesn’t trust the readings. Luckily the particle stream has missed one piece of the front window; they still have about twenty degrees of clear vision straight ahead. The brilliant web of the Pleiades shows there, running off into a blur of light.

Twelve minutes . . . thirteen. The speaker sighs and clicks emptily. Fourteen. Nothing.

“
Sunbird
to Houston,
Sunbird
to Houston. Come in, Houston.
Sunbird
out.” Dave puts the mike back in its holder. “Give it another twenty-four.”

They wait ritually. Tomorrow Packard will reply. Maybe.

“Be good to see old Earth again,” Bud remarks.

“We’re not using any more fuel on attitude,” Dave reminds him. “I trust Doc’s figures.”

It’s not my figures, it’s the elementary facts of celestial mechanics, Lorimer thinks; in October there’s only one place for Earth to be. He never says it. Not to a man who can fly two-body solutions by intuition once he knows where the bodies are. Bud is a good pilot and a better engineer; Dave is the best there is. He takes no pride in it. “The Lord helps us, Doc, if we let Him.”

“Going to be a bitch docking if the radar’s screwed up,” Bud says idly. They all think about that for the hundredth time. It will be a bitch. Dave will do it. That was why he is hoarding fuel.

The minutes tick off.

“That’s it,” Dave says—and a voice fills the cabin, shockingly.

“Judy?” It is high and clear. A girl’s voice.

“Judy, I’m so glad we got you. What are you doing on this band?”

Bud blows out his breath; there is a frozen instant before Dave snatches up the mike.

“
Sunbird
, we read you. This is Mission
Sunbird
calling Houston, ah,
Sunbird One
calling Houston Ground Control. Identify, who are you? Can you relay our signal? Over.”

“Some skip,” Bud says. “Some incredible ham.”

“Are you in trouble, Judy?” the girl’s voice asks. “I can’t hear, you sound terrible. Wait a minute.”

“This is United States Space Mission
Sunbird One
,” Dave repeats. “Mission
Sunbird
calling Houston Space Center. You are dee-exxing our channel. Identify, repeat, identify yourself and say if you can relay to Houston. Over.”

“Dinko, Judy, try it again,” the girl says.

Lorimer abruptly pushes himself up to the Lurp, the Long-Range Particle Density Cumulator experiment, and activates its shaft motor. The shaft whines, jars; lucky it was retracted during the flare, lucky it hasn’t fused shut. He sets the probe pulse on max and begins a rough manual scan.

“You are intercepting official traffic from the United States Space Mission to Houston Control,” Dave is saying forcefully. “If you cannot relay to Houston get off the air, you are committing a federal offense. Say again, can you relay our signal to Houston Space Center? Over.”

“You still sound terrible,” the girl says. “What’s Houston? Who’s talking, anyway? You know we don’t have much time.” Her voice is sweet but very nasal.

“Jesus, that’s close,” Bud says. “That is close.”

“Hold it.” Dave twists around to Lorimer’s improvised radarscope.

“There.” Lorimer points out a tiny stable peak at the extreme edge of the readout slot, in the transcoronal scatter. Bud cranes too.

“A bogey!”

“Somebody else out here.”

“Hello, hello? We have you now,” the girl says. “Why are you so far out? Are you dinko, did you catch the flare?”

“Hold it,” warns Dave. “What’s the status, Doc?”

“Over three hundred thousand kilometers, guesstimated. Possibly headed away from us, going around the sun. Could be cosmonauts, a Soviet mission?”

“Out to beat us. They missed.”

“With a
girl?
” Bud objects.

“They’ve done that. You taping this, Bud?”

“Roger-r-r.” He grins. “That sure didn’t sound like a Russky chick. Who the hell’s Judy?”

Dave thinks for a second, clicks on the mike. “This is Major Norman Davis commanding United States spacecraft
Sunbird One
. We have you on scope. Request you identify yourself. Repeat, who are you? Over.”

“Judy, stop joking,” the voice complains. “We’ll lose you in a minute, don’t you realize we worried about you?”

“
Sunbird
to unidentified craft. This is not Judy. I say again, this is not Judy. Who are you? Over.”

“What—” the girl says, and is cut off by someone saying, “Wait a minute, Ann.” The speaker squeals. Then a different woman says, “This is Lorna Bethune in
Escondita
. What is going on here?”

“This is Major Davis commanding United States Mission
Sunbird
on course for Earth. We do not recognize any spacecraft
Escondita
. Will you identify yourself? Over.”

“I just did.” She sounds older with the same nasal drawl. “There is no spaceship
Sunbird
, and you’re not on course for Earth. If this is an andy joke it isn’t any good.”

“This is no joke, madam!” Dave explodes. “This is the American circumsolar mission, and we are American astronauts. We do not appreciate your interference. Out.”

The woman starts to speak and is drowned in a jibber of static. Two voices come through briefly. Lorimer thinks he hears the words “
Sunbird
program” and something else. Bud works the squelcher; the interference subsides to a drone.

“Ah, Major Davis?” The voice is fainter. “Did I hear you say you are on course for Earth?”

Dave frowns at the speaker and then says curtly, “Affirmative.”

“Well, we don’t understand your orbit. You must have very unusual flight characteristics, our readings show you won’t node with anything on your present course. We’ll lose the signal in a minute or two. Ah, would you tell us where you see Earth now? Never mind the coordinates, just tell us the constellation.”

Dave hesitates and then holds up the mike. “Doc.”

“Earth’s apparent position is in Pisces,” Lorimer says to the voice. “Approximately three degrees from P. Gamma.”

“It is not,” the woman says. “Can’t you see it’s in Virgo? Can’t you see out at all?”

Lorimer’s eyes go to the bright smear in the port window. “We sustained some damage—”

“Hold it,” snaps Dave.

“—to one window during a disturbance we ran into at perihelion. Naturally we know the relative direction of Earth on this date, October nineteen.”

“October? It’s March, March fifteen. You must—” Her voice is lost in a shriek.

“E-M front,” Bud says, tuning. They are all leaning at the speaker from different angles, Lorimer is head-down. Space-noise wails and crashes like surf, the strange ship is too close to the coronal horizon. “—Behind you,” they hear. More howls. “Band, try . . . ship . . . if you can, your signal—” Nothing more comes through.

Lorimer pushes back, staring at the spark in the window. It has to be Spica. But is it elongated, as if a second point-source is beside it? Impossible. An excitement is trying to flare out inside him, the women’s voices resonate in his head.

“Playback,” Dave says. “Houston will really like to hear this.”

They listen again to the girl calling Judy, the woman saying she is Lorna Bethune. Bud holds up a finger. “Man’s voice in there.” Lorimer listens hard for the words he thought he heard. The tape ends.

“Wait till Packard gets this one.” Dave rubs his arms. “Remember what they pulled on Howie? Claiming they rescued him.”

“Seems like they want us on their frequency.” Bud grins. “They must think we’re fa-a-ar gone. Hey, looks like this other capsule’s going to show up, getting crowded out here.”

“If it shows up,” Dave says. “Leave it on voice-alert, Bud. The batteries will do that.”

Lorimer watches the spark of Spica, or Spica-plus-something, wondering if he will ever understand. The casual acceptance of some trick or ploy out here in this incredible loneliness. Well, if these strangers are from the same mold, maybe that is it. Aloud he says, “
Escondita
is an odd name for a Soviet mission. I believe it means ‘hidden’ in Spanish.”

“Yeah,” says Bud. “Hey, I know what that accent is, it’s Australian. We had some Aussie bunnies at Hickam. Or-stryle-ya, woo-ee! You s’pose Woomara is sending up some kind of com-bined do?”

Dave shakes his head. “They have no capability whatsoever.”

“We ran into some fairly strange phenomena back there, Dave,” Lorimer says thoughtfully. “I’m beginning to wish we could take a visual check.”

“Did you goof, Doc?”

“No. Earth is where I said, if it’s October. Virgo is where it would appear in March.”

“Then that’s it,” Dave grins, pushing out of the couch. “You been asleep five months, Rip Van Winkle? Time for a hand before we do the roadwork.”

“What I’d like to know is what that chick looks like,” says Bud, closing down the transceiver. “Can I help you into your space suit, miss? Hey, miss, pull that in, psst-psst-psst! You going to listen, Doc?”

“Right.” Lorimer is getting out his charts. The others go aft through the tunnel to the small dayroom, making no further comment on the presence of the strange ship or ships out here. Lorimer himself is more shaken than he likes; it was that damn phrase.

The tedious exercise period comes and goes. Lunchtime: they give the containers a minimum warm to conserve the batteries. Chicken à la king again; Bud puts ketchup on his and breaks their usual silence with a funny anecdote about an Australian girl, laboriously censoring himself to conform to
Sunbird’
s unwritten code on talk. After lunch Dave goes forward to the command module. Bud and Lorimer continue their current task of checking out the suits and packs for a damage-assessment EVA to take place as soon as the radiation count drops.

They are just clearing away when Dave calls them. Lorimer comes through the tunnel to hear a girl’s voice blare, “—dinko trip. What did Lorna say?
Gloria
over!”

He starts up the Lurp and begins scanning. No results this time. “They’re either in line behind us or in the sunward quadrant,” he reports finally. “I can’t isolate them.”

Presently the speaker holds another thin thread of sound. “That could be their ground control,” says Dave. “How’s the horizon, Doc?”

“Five hours; northwest Siberia, Japan, Australia.”

“I told you the high gain is fucked up.” Bud gingerly feeds power to his antenna motor. “Easy, eas-ee. The frame is twisted, that’s what it is.”

“Don’t snap it,” Dave says, knowing Bud will not.

The squeaking fades, pulses back. “Hey, we can really use this,” Bud says. “We can calibrate on them.”

A hard soprano says suddenly, “—should be outside your orbit. Try around Beta Aries.”

“Another chick. We have a fix,” Bud says happily. “We have a fix now. I do believe our troubles are over. That monkey was torqued one hundred forty-nine degrees. Woo-ee!”

The first girl comes back. “We see them, Margo! But they’re so small, how can they live in there? Maybe they’re tiny aliens! Over.”

“That’s Judy,” Bud chuckles. “Dave, this is screwy, it’s all in English. It has to be some UN thingie.”

Dave massages his elbows, flexes his fists; thinking. They wait. Lorimer considers a hundred and forty-nine degrees from Gamma Piscium.

In thirteen minutes the voice from Earth says, “Judy, call the others, will you? We’re going to play you the conversation, we think you should all hear. Two minutes. Oh, while we’re waiting, Zebra wants to tell Connie the baby is fine. And we have a new cow.”

“Code,” says Dave.

The recording comes on. The three men listen once more to Dave calling Houston in a rattle of solar noise. The transmission clears up rapidly and cuts off with the woman saying that another ship, the
Gloria
, is behind them, closer to the sun.

“We looked up history,” the Earth voice resumes. “There was a Major Norman Davis on the first
Sunbird
flight. Major was a military title. Did you hear them say ‘Doc’? There was a scientific doctor on board, Dr. Orren Lorimer. The third member was Captain—that’s another title—Bernhard Geirr. Just the three of them, all males of course. We think they had an early reaction engine and not too much fuel. The point is, the first
Sunbird
mission was lost in space. They never came out from behind the sun. That was about when the big flares started. Jan thinks they must have been close to one, you heard them say they were damaged.”

Dave grunts. Lorimer is fighting excitement like a brush discharge sparking in his gut.

“Either they are who they say they are or they’re ghosts; or they’re aliens pretending to be people. Jan says maybe the disruption in those superflares could collapse the local time dimension. Pluggo. What did you observe there, I mean the highlights?”