Lifeline (22 page)

Karen nodded, then sat back. The words sounded like a reprimand to Ramis, but he could detect no negative tone in Brahms’s voice. The director held up his hand and ticked off a third reason, as if he didn’t want to lose his train of thought.

“Also, the Soviets were working on many different research items. They were very close-mouthed about everything, but we were able to watch them constructing the
Kibalchich
through our telescopes. All we know is that it was a research station. Now, if they are indeed gone, perhaps they left something behind that we can use. We can take their technology for our own benefit.

“Fourth—and this may be more important than you realize—by undertaking such an adventure, you will give a tremendous boost to our morale here. I’m not too stupid to admit that we’re in bad shape. Our researchers are too frightened or too depressed to do their best work. This mission of yours would give them something to hope for, something to watch. We could even hold a competition for designing the best apparatus to assist you in getting over there.

“After we broadcast it over ConComm, you’ll also be a hero, twice over—to
Clavius Base
and to your home,
Aguinaldo.”

He smiled, looking boyish all of a sudden without his eyeglasses. “And, finally, what have we got to lose?”

Ramis grinned back at him, but in a corner of his mind he thought of another reason, one that Brahms no doubt had been reluctant to say out loud.
If I don’t come back, that’s one less mouth you have to feed from your precious supplies.

Brahms cleared his throat and turned to address Karen. She jumped at the sudden attention and averted her eyes.

“Now then, Dr. Langelier, I’m interested in hearing your ideas about bringing supplies back.”

“Well, I don’t know if your assessors have been keeping you up-to-date on my work.”

Brahms flicked his eyes to the console screen on his desk surface. He brushed his fingers over a few keys and stared at the words scrolling up. “Ah, yes, your weavewire. But that was years ago, and in New Mexico yet. There haven’t been any new developments that I can see, unless you count those garments you’ve made.”

Karen wet her lips. “Let me explain, Mr. Brahms—put this in perspective. The weavewire is only one molecule thick and held together by an unusual type of potential. It won’t mean anything to you, but it’s called a one-and-a-half-dimensional material. It’s so thin you can’t see it, but it won’t break except under conditions so extreme we can’t even create them in the laboratory. And since it’s only one molecule thick, it requires very little raw material and weighs almost nothing, in addition to being extremely flexible.”

“And?” Brahms tapped one finger on the desktop with the first signs of impatience. “I’m sure that’s all summarized here.”

“Well, up until lately, I’ve only been able to draw out a couple hundred kilometers a day under stringently controlled laboratory conditions. As I draw it out I have to electromagnetically braid the fiber into a macroscopic weave so it will not be dangerous. Being one molecule thick, it can slice through anything—steel, people, the colony.

“Anyway, I’ve perfected a new process to draw out tens
of thousands
of kilometers a day without being under those stringent conditions. That is, I can make the weavewire on demand, anywhere and any time. Since the weavewire doesn’t even exist until it’s drawn out, we don’t have to store it—we can use it as an indestructible cable. When Ramis goes, he can trail a double wire behind him. If he reaches the
Kibalchich,
our two colonies will then be connected by a very thin and very strong cable—a lifeline, like they used to have between rescue ships. We can use it as a ferry to haul things back and forth, like a big pulley.”

Brahms watched her. “I thought you just said the wire would slice through any material—”

“Any material except itself! We could construct a harness made of weavewire that rides along the length of the line, use that to haul supplies back from the
Kibalchich.”

Brahms got a far-off look in his eyes. “Yessss.” He stood up and nodded to them with his decision. “Ramis, as soon as Dr. Langelier has everything ready for you, I want you to go to the
Kibalchich.
I will announce the project and have a competition to design the best method for getting you there. That would certainly raise the colony’s morale.”

He pointed toward the door in an obvious gesture of dismissal. Ramis felt so uncomfortable at being near the director, he lost no time getting up from his seat.

“I can’t tell you how much of a pleasure it is to be able to make this kind of announcement instead of something much more unpleasant,” Brahms continued. “Good luck, and Godspeed.”

Relieved, and trying not to run, Ramis fled the acting director’s office.

***

Chapter 28

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 39

Leaning back on his bunk, Duncan McLaris stared at the gray-brown rock of the textured wall. Some of the rooms were finished with white ceramic tiles; others had been sealed and left
au naturel.
McLaris preferred the latter.

He tilted his gaze up to the narrow strip of thick glass that formed a window for him to look out at the lunar surface and the stars beyond.

With the new catacombs and the extra quarters dug in them, Cliff Clancy’s engineers had spread out. Many of the other
Clavius Base
personnel had moved into newer and more spacious quarters. Since he was now base manager, McLaris himself laid claim to one of the biggest new rooms—one close enough to the surface to have the lip of a window.

From
where he lay on the cot, he noticed smudged fingerprints on the clear plastic from the many times he had pulled himself up to see better.

The window was important to him. His wife Diane had always insisted on being where she could stare outside. In their quarters on
Orbitech 1
she had grown a small pine seedling in a pot under a UV lamp. McLaris had left the seedling behind, with so many other things, when he had escaped from the station.

He had left those others behind to die, a hundred and fifty of them, in Brahms’s RIF.

But the satisfaction and pride of what he was now achieving for
Clavius Base
did much to chip away the leaden weight of his conscience. McLaris could honestly say he was doing his best work now. He saw some results quite plainly. He was getting things done—things that Tomkins had long put off out of disinterest.

Now that Tomkins had absorbed himself in his Arecibo II telescope project, he had come back to life; he was dynamic and enthusiastic again. He should never have become an administrator in the first place.

And the
Clavius Base
personnel did not shun McLaris quite so much. Though he hated even to consider it, McLaris had been vindicated by Brahms and his RIF. It had shown that McLaris wasn’t being an alarmist, that he had known exactly what the acting director would do.

And just three days before, Brahms had ejected Linda Arnando into cold space. They had mentioned that as only a footnote to their daily ConComm broadcast, but McLaris had heard. He had not known Linda Arnando well—she had seemed too much of a climber, always pushing to get ahead and looking to turn things to her own advantage. But the thought of her thrown out into space made him sick inside. Brahms was turning worse than even he had imagined.

Restless, McLaris got up and went to his computer console. He didn’t feel like sleeping, though it was ostensibly the base’s night period. After life on
Orbitech 1,
the crazy journey on the
Miranda,
and now the Moon base, all three with distinctly different periods of day and night, his body’s circadian rhythms had given up in despair.

He called up the electronic memo pad and accessed his crossheadings. A glance at the “Things to Do” window displayed four items McLaris felt he had firmly in hand. He was making progress.

Chimes rang at his door. McLaris called for the visitor to come in, but after he spoke he sat up, startled, realizing how late it was. He wondered who would call on him now.

The door slid open and Clifford Clancy stood outside, carrying a package wrapped in a silvery reflecting blanket from one of the lunar six-pack rovers.

“Dr. Clancy, what are you doing up this time of night?”

Clancy blinked and looked at his wrist chronometer. “‘Oh, sorry. I lost track of what time it is, as usual. Did I disturb you? You don’t look like you were asleep.”

“No, no. I was just scheduling things. Come on in. And by the way, I think you can call me Duncan. Anybody who’s saved my life has the right to do that.”

Clancy waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal, but McLaris could see he was hiding a broad smile. “Doesn’t do much good to have only one of us on a first-name basis. You might as well call me Cliff. We seem to be stuck here for the duration.”

“And with our jobs, we’ll be crossing paths once in a while,” McLaris added. He watched Clancy, and soon he could detect a strong undercurrent of nervousness in the head engineer’s actions.

“So, Cliff, what have you got? Is everything going all right with the Arecibo II project? Do you think Tomkins knows what he’s talking about?”

Clancy chuckled. “When it comes to telescopes and stuff, Tomkins is tops. I have no qualms with him there.”

But that wasn’t what Clancy wanted to talk about. McLaris sat back and waited in silence. He decided that banter would only put off what Clancy wanted to say, make him even uneasier.

“McLaris—Duncan, I mean—I just wanted to say that I’m … I appreciate the way you handled the, uh, problem between me and Tomkins. Some of my engineers were skeptical about building that telescope, but they’re all for it now. They were just so damned antsy with nothing to do—and this is a big enough project that it’s going to keep us all occupied for a long time. I’ve got one crew tuning up the mass driver, another bunch at the smelting processors.

“You were right. With the wall-kelp and our botanical stuff, we’ve already done what we can to survive. It’s just wait and see for now. You gave us something to keep our hopes up, to keep our minds active in the meantime. And I really appreciate it. That comes from me and all my men.”

“All your
people,”
McLaris said, grinning.

“Touché.” Clancy set down his package on McLaris’s rounded tabletop and unfolded the blanket.

“I found this in the wreckage of the
Miranda.
I didn’t know what to do with it and I sort of forgot about it until the other day. It must have been your daughter’s … and I thought you might want it back.”

McLaris stared down at Jessie’s computerized music synthesizer. Smudges of lunar dust marked its polished black sides. His eyes filmed over with a wet sheen of tears.

Clancy saw him and stepped backward toward the door, embarrassed. “Um, I just wanted to give that to you. I have to go.” He left McLaris’s quarters rapidly with his half-balanced, rolling gait.

Distracted, McLaris closed the door and stared at the dead instrument. He had given it to Jessie for her birthday—or was it Christmas? She had played it on
Orbitech 1
over and over again, in their quarters, in the lounge. Jessie had also played it in the cramped cabin of the shuttle as they fled
Orbitech 1.
She had made up her own songs, or followed along with the flashing colored lights to play preprogrammed tunes.

He remembered trying to braid her hair, trying to explain things to her that she couldn’t possibly understand, though she nodded sagely and accepted what he told her.

He had sat in the lounge with her, pointing out at the universe and tracing the constellations for her. Jessie had been intrigued by the idea of connect-the-dots with the stars, and had made up her own constellations, drawing a chair and a tree, and in the majestic form of Orion, she had drawn her “diddy.”

Jessie had cried when her mother had left for that short sabbatical on Earth, to see trees again, and mountains.…

Once again, like the shark’s mouth of a nightmare, McLaris remembered Jessie’s cracked, empty faceplate with the air hissing out. And though he tried and tried, he couldn’t move in his own splintered agony to help her.

He had told her to be brave. He had told her she’d be all right.

McLaris activated the keyboard. The instrument played back the last song in its memory—a crystalline, synthesized version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

McLaris remembered the three of them sitting in the
Miranda
as Jessie pushed on the follow-along keys when they lit up, playing the tune as the computer guided her. McLaris and Stephanie Garland sang along, laughing to drive away their fear and nervousness. Jessie giggled and played the song over and over, until McLaris thought he never wanted to hear it again.

But now, in his quarters, the song came out of the keyboard. Jessie’s fingers had played that song into the computer’s memory. It was like a ghost of his daughter coming back to haunt him. Or to forgive him.

Duncan McLaris sat back on his bunk and tilted his head to look through the window near the ceiling, seeing far beyond the stars. Then he closed his eyes, squeezing out warm moisture to run down along his temples as he lay back.

He kept crying, because there was no one to see him.

***

Chapter 29

ORBITECH 1—Day 39

The
Kibalchich
hung in the silent blackness fifty miles away. Even outside of
Orbitech 1,
suited up and floating without any curved walls to block her view, Karen had to squint to discern the Soviet station. It looked like a brilliant point, smeared into shapelessness by reflected sunlight. She couldn’t even tell if it still rotated, much less if it displayed any signs of life.

She knew she would see some of the frozen bodies from the RIF. The Lagrange gravity well encompassed a huge volume of space, but they were still out there, desiccated by the vacuum, frozen solid, their final expressions intact.

Karen had never been outside before. She didn’t like listening to every breath echoing in her head. The air pressure in her suit made her feel stiff, like a knight in rusty armor. During history’s first space-walk, Alexei Leonov had found it impossible even to bend over enough to get back inside the airlock of the
Voskhod 2;
if he hadn’t risked a desperate vacuum decompression maneuver he would have died in space, a few inches away from safety. Sometimes Karen wished she had limited her Russian background to being able to read their technical journals, as she had originally intended.

She waited quietly, floating next to Ramis as he prepared himself for the journey, checking his suit, looking around with practiced ease. Karen was accustomed to zero-G from her lab space, but this felt colder somehow, blacker, with the whole wide universe waiting to gobble her up. She couldn’t think of any word to describe the absolute opposite of claustrophobia.

Hour after hour, Brahms had his communications people attempting to contact the
Kibalchich.
They sent greetings, messages of peace; they announced that Ramis was coming over. No reply. They asked to know why the Soviets had warned them away, why they had stopped sending radio transmissions. Karen could have understood the Russian language herself, but no one had asked for her to respond to any contact.

“There’s nobody over there,” Brahms had said.

“Then how is Ramis supposed to get inside?” she had asked. Brahms looked at her as if she had interrupted his thoughts again.

“Do not worry, Karen,” Ramis had said. “They have emergency-access airlocks studded around the hull—all the colonies have them left over from construction. The crews had to be able to get inside quickly if a disaster happened, or if somebody detected a big solar flare. Maintenance people still use them to go out and inspect the hull. Those airlocks are all over the
Aguinaldo
and
Orbitech 1.
I can get in even if the Soviets do not answer when I knock.”

Karen didn’t think it made any sense for the Soviets to break off contact, especially now, when they would all have to pull together and pool resources. The
Kibalchich
was the smallest of the space colonies; perhaps they had run out of supplies already.

Karen’s stomach felt queasy, though she wasn’t the one going across the gulf. Were they all dead over there? What was Ramis getting himself into?

Brahms’s competition had resulted in some innovative designs for Ramis’s passage. It was only after the director had realized that some of his brighter engineers might use their designs personally that Brahms had called a halt to the contest.

Ramis’s spacesuit made him appear much larger than he was, insect-like. He was dwarfed by the Manned Maneuvering Unit strapped to his back and the harness carrying the half-dozen air bottles he would need for the long journey.

In case he couldn’t find any food on the Soviet station, Karen had helped him lash some supplies and a sealed container of wall-kelp to his waist. Despite Brahms’s sour protests, Ramis had insisted the gift from the
Aguinaldo
was for both L-5 colonies. Mounted on the center of his chest, Ramis wore a small two-dimensional video camera to record the journey and whatever he found inside the
Kibalchich.

Aided by the MMU, Ramis would Jump the fifty-odd miles of deep, bottomless space across the L-5 zone. The idea didn’t seem to bother him, and that concerned Karen. The
Orbitech 1
telescopes had pinpointed several of the
Kibalchich
’s manually operated emergency hatches, so he could get inside without other assistance—but after the warning the Soviets had issued, what if they had active defense mechanisms against such an entry? Ramis was resilient, maybe even reckless. That could be dangerous.

If nothing else, Karen hoped she had managed to impress on him the extreme danger from the trailing weavewire on his back. The single-molecule-thick strand was sharper than the sharpest razor in the world. A nick could just as easily cut off an arm or a leg, or sever an air tank in two and make it explode. The other Orbitech engineers were scared silly of the lifeline fiber, and they had been reluctant to help Ramis prepare, though Karen had made the first hundred feet of fiber a million braided strands thick, so it posed no greater danger than any fine wire.

Finally, Karen had volunteered herself, though she hated to suit up. She felt obligated to give him the best possible safety factor. The odds against him seemed bad enough to start with.

Karen felt herself sweating inside the snug, temperature-monitored environment of her suit. But Ramis’s breathing came over her headphones—slow, measured breaths, with no sense of excitement. She knew his greatest emotion right now would be relief at escaping the sharp eyes of Curtis Brahms, if only for a time.

Karen scanned the diagnostic on the outside of the dispensing cavity mounted to the hull of
Orbitech 1.
Using absorption resonance, the unit kept track of the total mass of weavewire that had been drawn out. High above, the thin, discontinuous mirror that directed sunlight into the colony’s two toruses looked black and filled with stars, reflecting the universe back into itself.

Ramis tugged at the belt that connected the weavewire fiber to him. “Is it all ready for me?” He pushed closer to the dispensing outlet, moving slowly in his huge suit, and studied the apparatus.

The thick, braided weavewire trailed from Ramis’s belt, which had also been woven from the fiber to give an anchoring point. The tail-end of the weavewire showed thin and faint, Day-Glo orange but visible only when he knew exactly where to look. The remainder in the dispensing cavity would be completely invisible in its double strand when Ramis reeled it out behind him.

Karen still felt the tightness in her stomach, but she forced herself to speak. “It’s ready to go. Just be careful not to start spinning. If you get tangled in it—” Her voice trailed off.

“I will be like a fish that has been filleted!” Ramis said, then laughed over the intercom. “But I want you to think good thoughts, Karen. Your fiber is making this journey possible. If I needed to bear a steel cable behind me, I would have so much inertia I could never stop my Jump. I would be a yo-yo between these two colonies.”

She wasn’t sure if she should feel proud or guilty.

Ramis spoke optimistically, as if he knew that Brahms, and most of
Orbitech 1,
were listening in on their conversation. “This will be a much simpler journey than my trip from the
Aguinaldo
here. This time I have a margin for error, and I am in control.”

Before
Karen could say anything, another voice cut in. Brahms. “Ramis, the entire colony is anxious to hear what you find in the
Kibalchich.
Is there anything more Dr. Langelier can do before you attempt your jump?”

Ramis swung around to face Karen. By his cautious movements, she knew he remained conscious of the weavewire. He held out both his hands, as if to ask a question. Karen shook her helmet slowly. Seemingly satisfied, Ramis spoke over the radio, “I am ready, Mr. Brahms.”

Karen reached out and grasped his space-suited arm, but the padding was so thick she couldn’t tell if he felt her reassuring squeeze.
You’re our only hope to get out of here, Ramis.

Ramis took an unsteady step. The MMUs held him back momentarily, adding to his inertia. He turned to face the
Kibalchich
and bent his knees, planting his feet firmly against the metal hull of
Orbitech 1.

Karen caught herself holding her breath.

“Do not worry,” he radioed to her.

Ramis pushed off and drifted out into space toward the distant Soviet colony.

***