A Voice in the Night

BLINKER

The second shock hit as Ward stepped off the ladder onto lunar rock.

“Look out.” Amy’s startled voice rang in his earphones.

The ground swayed. Dust rose. He looked up at her.

“Twice in one day,” she said. “Is it always like this?”

“Didn’t used to be.” Ward had lived here almost five years, before they’d automated everything, and moved everyone back to Moonbase. Or Earth. He didn’t think there’d been more than a dozen quakes during that whole time.

“Glad to hear it. Maybe we need to do a seismic survey.”

“I hate to put it this way, but it’s your problem now.” As of noon, Amy Quinn had become the new director of the NASA/Smithsonian Farside Observatory. Ward was officially on his way home.

The ground steadied.

The observatory, a dome and a smaller saddle-shaped building and a field of eighty-six radio telescopes on tracks, had been humanity’s most remote penetration, unless you counted computers and robots. And Ward never counted them.

It was located on the far side of the moon just south of Moscoviensse. A place its one-time inhabitants had cheerfully called World’s End.

The complex lay atop a group of low gray hills. The dome was sixty-one meters high, roughly fourteen stories. The outer lens of the magnificent twenty-seven meter multiple-mirror Schramm reflector penetrated its polished surface, black and smooth. The Schramm was the biggest optical telescope in existence.

The saddle-shaped building had provided living quarters and technical support for the crew and staff of seven. This was the annex, and it was connected with the dome by a ground level passageway. Starlight shone through the passageway’s walls.

Solar collectors crowded the roof of the annex. A laserburst antenna turned slowly on its axis, tracking a comsat. Its windows were dark and empty. Beyond, the tracked telescopes pointed their dishes toward the radio galaxy Perseus Alpha.

Home.

Amy climbed cautiously down the ladder, and dropped to the ground. “It feels depressing,” she said. “You actually lived out here?”

“Five years.”

Her expression registered sympathy, admiration, and astonishment.

“It was a good experience,” Ward said. “We had top people, and we were in on everything that was happening.” Moreover they had all liked one another, and they were away from the bureaucratic pressures and monumental egos one normally found in terrestrial facilities. Ward had never understood how it happened that so exemplary a staff would be assembled at one site: Bentwood and Kramer and the two Andersons and Mau-Tai and Ali. And when they retired or moved on, the replacements also seemed extraordinary: people with talent and a sense of humor and a willingness to jump in and do any kind of job.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said, doubtfully.

The first quake, eight hours earlier, had hit while she and Ward were admiring the sharp clarity of the image of the irregular galaxy NGC-1198. One of the technicians was pointing out a Cepheid variable when the Cepheid abruptly faded back into the river of light, and the river dimmed to a smudge.

Monitors indicated almost no damage to the complex, save for the Allison amplifier, which was ironically the guts of the Schramm.

Ordinarily, Ward would simply have sent out a tech to fix the problem. But he wanted to see World’s End one more time before he went back to Earth. Furthermore, he told himself, Amy should be exposed to the facility she was about to direct.

He carried the replacement amplifier in a canvas bag slung over his right shoulder. It bounced against his side as he walked uphill. It was good to be back. The air in his helmet was cool and fresh. It moved across his face, tasting of ozone, as if there had just been a thunderstorm. The suit was bulky, but not burdensome in the light gravity.

The complex loomed ahead dark and vaguely gothic in the starlight. “It has a lot of atmosphere,” Ward said.

Amy chuckled. “You got that right.” And it may have been that something in his voice caught at her. “You’re really attached to this place, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. It’s the last outpost.” He slowed down for her, mindful that she was not used to the gravity.

“How do you mean?”

“Everything’s unmanned now. The Titan mission will be unmanned. Mars is unmanned. They even pulled us out of here.”

“But, Edgar, there’s no point keeping anyone here now. You can sit back at Moonbase and run things just as easily.”

“I know. And there’s no point sending people to Titan either. But what’s the point of going if we don’t really go?”

They crunched up a mild incline and stopped in front of the annex. Ward raised a remote. Lights blinked on inside. He touched it again, and the connecting passageway to the dome lit up. The airlock door swung open.

“I envy you,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m glad I’m leaving.”

They passed into the lock and he started the cycle.

“You’re right,” she said. “We are entering an exciting period.”

He nodded. They were closing in finally on the great questions. Was the universe open or closed? Flat? Or twisted? What had happened to the quantum energy of the original vacuum? What was the nature of the force that had called the cosmos into being? Why did the galaxies recede only at discrete velocities?

In better days, he and his small band of colleagues, isolated on the far side of the moon, had enjoyed the illusion that they were at the front of the wave, that they were in fact virtually alone in running the universe to ground, inhibited only by the demanding voices from Greenwich, Harvard, and Sidney.

She gazed at him thoughtfully. “What are your plans, Edgar?”

“CalTech. I’ll be working with Lasker.”

“You don’t sound all that enthusiastic.”

“Oh, it’s a good situation.” Maybe there was a sense that his life had peaked and started downhill. Maybe it had to do with returning to the scratching and clawing of workaday cosmology. Maybe he was just tired.

The annex was more sterile than he remembered it: a large two-story open well not unlike a garage. Offices ringed the upper level. A rover, a crane, and a pair of motorized dollies were parked in their stalls. Cabinets and cases and empty pallets lined the walls. Life Support was off to their right.

Ward struggled out of his pressure suit and hung it in the rack. The temperature, which was usually maintained a few degrees above freezing to protect the equipment, had been raised to a balmy sixty-eight.

Amy was a slender woman, in all senses of the word. On the moon, she weighed maybe seventeen pounds. She appeared to be approaching fifty, but Cal Wilkin, who had worked with her during her Harvard years, said she’d trampled that figure long ago. Her eyes were green and animated. There was something of the aristocrat about her: he suspected she had been born into money. He knew she had gone to the best schools, and was accustomed to being treated with deference. He grinned at the thought of the demands, whines, and threats she would have to deal with in parceling out time on the big scope.

He pointed to a heavy door in the rear of the building. “Back there,” he said, “are the old living quarters. Room for eighteen people. Although we never had that many. But we did get a lot of visitors.” At one time, World’s End had been the lunar showcase. VIP’s always swung by the great observatory, to look through the eyepiece, and drink coffee with the recluses.

The passageway to the dome connected on their left. Ward touched a presspad. Circuits bleeped and sighed. The door retracted into the overhead. He heard her catch her breath: the walls were transparent and seemed to open out into the moonscape. The lighting was soft, and the shadows of the rocks blended with those of the furnishings. Padded chairs and worktables were neatly arranged in clusters. Several wooden tubs were set off to one side. “We had a lot of greenery here at one time,” he said. In those days this lounge area had been filled with blossoms and potted trees. One of the tables was still set for poker, which had been the game of choice.

They stepped through, and the lock sealed behind them.

He dimmed the lights, and they might have been standing on the naked surface. The stars blazed overhead. It was a stunning effect.

Amy stared out at the sky. “It’s gorgeous,” she said.

“Like nowhere else.”

He opened up the air lock at the far end, and they strolled into the dome. Ward had always been proud to show off the Schramm. It tended to awe the dullest of visitors. It was the instrument of Jhard’ahl and Pierce and Brandenberg. “A lot of history has been made here,” he said.

The telescope dwarfed them. It was as big as a jumbo jet. But it was far lovelier. Its cream-colored casing was smooth and tapered and exquisitely balanced in a network of struts and braces and beams. It was enormous, and its power and beauty stirred his soul. Magnificent.

The observer’s cage was mounted on the side of the telescope, seven stories overhead. It was accessible from one of the two turrets that supported the instrument. Deep within the reflector, tiny motors whirred. The Schramm was moving, the entire dome was moving, adjusting to the motion of the Moon, tracking a target. Ward took out a notebook. “4C-1651,” he said.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s tracking Keeler’s quasar. Do you know Keeler? He’ll be one of your biggest problems. At this moment he’s getting a screwed-up image. He’s not happy, and he’s probably on the circuit screaming at Ops.”

“Well, I suppose he has reason to be upset.”

“He upsets at a low level.” Ward was about to launch into a Keeler story when the third shock hit.

A ripple rolled through the floor, and the lights dipped. He tightened his grip on the amplifier. Before he was quite certain what had happened, the sensation was gone. The internal motors seemed to kick up a notch. That might mean the telescope had been jarred out of position, and they were making adjustments.

“That was a big one,” said Amy. She glanced around uncertainly. “Are we okay?”

“I think so.”

The observer’s cage suddenly looked desperately high. Not a place to be during a quake. Damn. He wondered whether any more jolts were coming. It almost seemed as if the old place was irritated with him.

He went into the operations office, and activated the commlink. “Moonbase,” he said, “this is Ward.”

“Go ahead, Edgar.” Bill Clayton’s voice. The duty officer.

“We are going offline with the Schramm.”

“That’s a roger. How long do you expect to be down?”

He looked at Amy. “Hard to say.” He might need only to reset the present unit. An hour or so. On the other hand, the amplifier could be wedged in tight. “Could be a few hours,” he said. That would be more than enough time. But it would upset a lot of people who were using the scope.

“Roger. We copy.”

He signed off.

The Schramm coded its images, which were then transmitted by laserburst to the sensors of a comsat. The comsat converted the signal to radio, and broadcast to Moonbase, which handled relay to Earth. Now Ward broke that link.

He slung the canvas bag with the amplifier over his shoulder. “You want to go up?”

“Of course,” she said.

The elevator was a small hatchwire box, capable of carrying four people. It creaked as it ascended through the turret.

Ward loved the big observatories, these gleaming interfaces between humans and infinity. They were necessarily set high in remote places, where the wind blew and the stars murmured. This one, of course, was the champ.

He had become a cosmologist because astronomy seemed dull. He had never been much interested in the mechanics of stars, or the chemical properties of the planets. It didn’t matter to him that there were volcanoes on Pluto or nitrogen on Neptune. Nor did he care how the sun cooked its helium.

Give him the beginning and end of the universe. Edgar Ward on the track of the Big Bang. Yes, indeed. The Schramm was less a window on the galaxies than on creation.

They rose toward the telescope housing.

By God, this was the way to live.

Ward remembered how it had been when they’d opened the observatory. They’d invited the top people in the field to attend, but few had actually come. The shuttle flight scared most of them off. But Swifthawk had come from Kitt Peak, Yamoto from Princeton, Stevens from Hamburg, Coddie from Greenwich. Haswell and Corrigan at Fermi had received invitations, but they’d declined, thank you very much, Haswell claiming a stiff work load, Corrigan a bad back. Then they’d changed their minds and come. Ward had admired that. He’d been at Moonbase when they arrived, pale and shaken. But they’d come. And they’d endured the lunar flight to get here, where they’d all gathered in the well, and toasted the Schramm, and the future.

The elevator stopped. “Penthouse,” said Ward, opening up.

They walked out into the cage. It was a relatively narrow space about the length of an ordinary living room. Mesh panels rose not quite shoulder high on both sides. At the near end, a ladder descended to ground level.

Amy gravitated immediately toward the eyepiece. Its housing was mounted on a universal joint, and projected down from the ceiling. A padded chair had been installed for the observer. “Did they actually come up here?” she asked. “They could see the same image on the monitors downstairs, right?”

He smiled. “They loved it up here. They claimed the image was clearer, that it got distorted by electronic transmission.”

Their eyes met and they laughed.

She looked at the chair, and at him. “May I?”

“You’re in charge.”

“Yes.” She sat down, and adjusted the viewing tube. “Hard to believe.”

It was covered with dust.

“I won’t be able to see anything, will I?” She put her eye to the lens.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Depends on the status of the amplifier.”

She looked, and shook her head. “Dark. How long will it take? After we put it in?”

“Depends how good an image you want.” The unit would collect photons over a period of time and, on signal, analyze its data base, and provide a picture. The picture would be far sharper than anything one could see through a conventional telescope. “I’d say we should have something in forty minutes.”

“I’d like to wait that long then, if you don’t mind.”

“It’s the same picture you’ll see at Moonbase.”

“Don’t care. I’d like to see it here.”

Ward decided he liked her. He nodded, gave her a thumbs up. “Then that’s the way we’ll do it.”

The cage was equipped with a series of work lamps. He turned them on. In order to get at the amplifier, he would have to remove a secondary mirror. It would be awkward, but he could handle it.

“We have coffee,” said Amy, surprised. “Would you like some?”

Ward had forgotten. They’d always kept a coffee maker and an ample supply up here. There was even a styrofoam cup dispenser and a small basin with running water which, fortunately, they had not shut off. “Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

She ladled some out of a small green tin into the coffee maker. It smelled good. One of the lamps flashed against the bottom of the container. The beam crossed the room and set a bright circle on a distant wall.

“It’ll be a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

Ward produced a screwdriver.

The mirror assembly was protected by a glass frame. He began removing screws. When he’d finished, Amy handed him his coffee. “No cream or sugar,” she said. “Sorry.”

They pulled the frame loose and set it aside. The mirror was fitted into a set of flanges.

He rotated it and lifted it out. Amy removed the spare amplifier from the canvas bag, and spread the bag out on the floor of the cage. He understood and laid the mirror cautiously on the canvas to protect it from scratches.

The amplifier was a tapered black box with lenses at both ends. He could not see any damage, but then he had not expected to. He released two springs, turned it counter-clockwise, and pulled it free.

“Lovely,” said Amy.

“We’re in good shape.” He inserted the replacement unit, fitted the flanges into the collar, and rotated it. The springs clicked. Perfect.

He handed her a remote. “Would you like to activate it?”

“Sure,” she said. “My first official act.” She aimed it and squeezed. A red lamp blinked on, and the internal computer hummed.

“We’re becoming irrelevant,” he said.

“That seems a little strong.” Her voice might have echoed through the dome. “They need us to come over and make repairs.”

Ward was seated on the floor of the cage. It wasn’t comfortable. “There might be another phase coming for us. Maybe when—if—we go to the stars. But meantime you and I will just sit around the pool.”

Her eyes fastened on him. “Not even then, Edgar. If there was ever a mission made for robots, it’s starflight.”

Ward was thinking that she was correct, and that the probability was that no one would ever really go anywhere. And the final quake hit. It rocked the cage, and pitched Amy off the arm of the chair on which she’d been balanced. For a terrifying instant, he thought the cage would break loose. He splashed coffee down his shirt front and leg. Below, a klaxon erupted. The lights flickered, and died.

“Edgar? Are you okay?” Her voice was whispery. Frightened. The shocks were still coming.

Aside from the red lamp on the amplifier, they were in total darkness. “Yes.” The klaxon continued to wail.

She moved close to him. “This is going to be a trip to remember.” She stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was never like this under the previous management.”

They sat in the dark and waited.

“We’ll be fine,” Ward said. “After we’re sure things have settled down, we’ll clear out.”

“Is the elevator working? Can you tell?”

“No. The lights are out.”

“How do we get down?” She almost concealed the quiver in her voice.

“There’s a ladder. We’ll be okay.”

Conversation in the dark, whatever the specific circumstances, tends to become intimate, takes on a dimension of truth that lamplight dissipates.

“So,” said Ward, feeling her proximity more intently than he had at any other time, “how do you like the Moon so far?”

“It’s a little scary,” she admitted. “But, if I had to go through a quake, I’m glad you were along.”

“Thanks,” he said. He used his remote to silence the klaxon.

“I wanted to come to the Moon,” she told him, “because this is where you get your ticket punched. You run the Schramm, you get to meet everybody. They all have to deal with NASA/Smithsonian’s director. They’ll want to keep me happy. I expect to put in my two years, and go back to a choice assignment.” He could sense that she was smiling. “Like you.”

“What makes you think it works like that?”

“Hard to see why it wouldn’t.”

“You’re going to find that people are more apt to remember the things you’ve denied them. I wouldn’t want to discourage you, but I fully expect to spend the rest of my career staying ahead of a lynch party.”

The jolts lessened and became infrequent. And stopped.

The darkness was not quite stygian: he could see his hand in the glow of the status lamp.

“Edgar, do we have a flashlight?”

“No,” he said. “Not up here. We have a few in the annex.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“I think we’ve had a demonstration of why we shouldn’t be out here.”

Maybe this is why we should be out here.

He heard her moving around. “I think the coffee maker’s still working. And the telescope. We’ve got the important stuff.”

“Good.” He sighed. It was a poor way to end his long association with the observatory. “No point putting it off,” he said. “Let’s start down.”

“Wait a minute, Edgar. I haven’t seen the quasar yet.”

“You still want to bother with that?”

“After all this? Of course I do.”

When the red lamp went green, Amy was already in the observer’s chair. Ward heard the clean metallic sound of the eyepiece moving, and then the sharp intake of her breath. “It’s beautiful.”

When she had finished, he took his turn.

The quasars, seen through the Schramm, were always spectacular. On this night, as Ward finished up what he considered the meaningful portion of his career, none had ever been more so.

4C-1651 was a brilliant blood-red star.

More than a star: a fire in the night. A blaze. A conflagration, frozen in time and space. It was a dazzling beacon on the far edge of creation, removed from him by unthinkable immensities. The photons entering the telescope’s system of lenses and mirrors had begun their journey billions of years before the sun was born. Before the lights in the Milky Way had come on.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right,” said Amy. “This is the place to see the show.”

The descent was not difficult. Halfway down, Amy called his attention to a cool breeze. “This place is drafty,” she said. Ward had never used the ladder before, and he ascribed it to their exposed position. But when they got to the bottom, he detected no change.

They started through the dark, across the floor, toward the passageway.

“Edgar, you don’t think we’ve sprung a leak, do you?”

“No.” Punch a hole in the air seal, and you got a catastrophic event. Right?

Ward remembered the area as being generally open, but they encountered consoles and shelf units and work tables everywhere. After he got poked in the eye by something that fell over on top of him, he walked with a hand extended in front of his face.

They found a wall, and a few minutes later they arrived at the airlock. He located the control and tried the GO button. “Power’s off here, too,” he said. “We’ll have to crank it.”

Her voice came out of the dark. “Can I help?”

“Just stand clear.” The emergency panel provided access to a wheel. He turned it and counterweights moved in the walls. He heard the metal door lift.

Amy moved past him to check progress. “Keep going,” she said. “The passageway’s dark, too.”

Starlight spilled through. When the door was about halfway up, they slipped underneath.

“Everything down except the telescope and the coffee maker,” said Amy. “How do you figure it?”

“Damned if I know. That’s the kind of stuff I leave to the technicians.”

“I’m anxious to be out of here,” she said.

“I think maybe we are losing air. If so, the dome’s going to get cold. And that means the equipment will take a beating.” He stared out across the lunar terrain. “Damn. First thing we do when we get to the flyer is let Moonbase know.” He held up his hands, trying to gauge which way the air was moving.

Back the way they’d come.

It was probably being drawn into the dome. There were ducts on both sides of the lock. He pulled over a chair and stood on it to reach one. “It’s going in here.”

“Maybe it’s just circulating.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what?”

He tried the other one. And shook his head. “Same here. Maybe there’s a hairline break somewhere in the system. We’ve got a couple dozen of these things scattered around. I hope they’re not all sucking air.”

They walked quickly through the passageway, grateful that they were able to see again. At the annex lock, Ward pressed the control, not really expecting it to work. It didn’t.

Amy already had the emergency panel open. She pulled on the wheel, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Let me,” he said. He twisted it. Put his weight to it.

Ward shifted his position. It was made of rippled plastic with handgrips. But he strained without result. “Uh-uh,” he said, at last.

She looked at the closed door. Looked at him. Fear dawned in her eyes. “Edgar—”

He tried again. And gave up.

“There might be a vacuum behind it,” she said.

Panic hovered out on the edge of awareness. They could see the flyer, resplendent in starlight, on the plain.

“How about the commlink?” she said. “Maybe we can get help.”

“Everything’s dead.”

“We know the coffee maker’s getting power. How about we try tying into that?”

“I’m not a technician, Amy. Would you know how to do it?” She shook her head. “What else do we have?”

He tried the wheel again, shouted at it, gave a final fruitless yank.

“Edgar, is there another way out?”

“There’s an airlock in the rear of the dome. But we don’t have suits.”

“There are no suits in the dome?” Her amazement at the stupidity of the arrangement was apparent.

“We’ve never had a reason to keep any out here.” Ward tried to think. “We need to get a commlink working. Which means we’ll have to string cable down from the cage.”

“That sounds like a lot of cable. Where do you keep it?”

His heart sank. “In the annex.”

“Behind the door.”

“I’m afraid so.” My God.

“This place is certainly well laid out for an emergency.” Her voice was getting an edge. “Look,” she said. “Moonbase monitors seismic events, right? They must know we’ve had a quake.”

“I hope so. They might suspect we’re in trouble. If they do, they’re trying to raise us right now. When we don’t respond, they’ll come looking.”

“But—?”

“It’s late at Moonbase. Almost two in the morning. I doubt anyone will even notice there’s activity until they come in tomorrow and read the printouts.”

“Wonderful.”

“I’m sorry. I guess we’ve become complacent.”

“I guess so.” Overhead, a comsat was moving. Twinkle, twinkle.

“Maybe they’ll get worried,” he said, “when the Schramm doesn’t come back up on the circuit.”

“They might. But that won’t be until tomorrow morning either. Remember we told them we could be down for six hours.”

Ward’s stomach felt cold.

“Maybe we could disconnect one of the commlinks and take it to the cage?”

He saw no other choice. But he didn’t know a thing about them. And they’d be working in the dark.

She looked at him, and anger flashed. “Come up with something, Edgar.”

He looked away from her. Toward the floor. Up at the comsat.

Her eyes followed his. “If we had even a flashlight,” she said, “we could sit here and bounce an S.O.S. off the thing.”

The search for the flashlight was desperate, swift, and futile. They moved through the dark dome, yanking open drawers, feeling tabletops, struggling with cabinets. Ward’s frustration raged. How could they have been so negligent? What was the point of compartmenting if you had to be in the annex to survive?

How could he have been so dumb?

They groped through doors and across desks. He checked the washroom. She examined the operations office.

Almost two hours had passed since the quake. And the air was beginning to feel a trifle stuffy.

The telescope towered overhead. “You know,” she said, “we’ve got a quasar inside that thing. And we can’t produce a goddam flashlight.”

He sat back on a desktop. “Not a very auspicious start for you,” he said.

She banged a door shut. “Nothing,” she said. “I can’t believe there isn’t one here somewhere.”

Quasar. She was right: their quasar was brighter than a thousand galaxies. Why did they need a flashlight? With an index finger he couldn’t see, he drew an imaginary line out of the eyepiece toward the side of the cage. Then down onto the floor of the dome. Toward and through the slightly less black patch of darkness at the airlock into the passageway. And up into the sky. Four lines. Three changes of direction. “Amy,” he said, “there’s a mirror in the washroom.”

She did not answer.

He was redrawing his lines. No reason why it should not work. “My watch case is reflective. That makes two.”

“Edgar, what are we talking about?”

“You’re right,” he said. “We’ve got light. All we have to do is get it to the comsat.”

She touched his wrist. “It might be possible.” Back out in the passageway, where they could see, she produced a pocket computer and released the cover. Stars glittered in the polished metal. Not perfect, but close enough.

Three.

The washroom mirror was metallic. It was framed over the basin, about the size and dimensions of a medicine cabinet. Pieces of the wall came out with it.

They selected a location on the floor that combined lines of sight with the cage and the passageway. When they were satisfied, they set a chair in place and put the washroom mirror on it. “Once we’ve got the angle, we’ll tie the mirror down to keep it steady.”

It would be simple. And elegant.

Ward was pleased with himself.

He returned to the ladder. Once more into the dome, dear friends. He climbed quickly in the light gravity. Despite his concerns, he was actually beginning to enjoy the experience. If he could make this work, it would make a rousing finish to his tour at World’s End. Hell, this was the stuff of legend.

Within a few minutes he was back in the observer’s cage.

The quasar was still there.

He estimated where he would mount Amy’s computer cover, a little above belt high on the wall to his left. Then he removed two mesh panels to provide an unimpeded angle to Amy’s position on the floor. He stacked them well out of his way, reminding himself that he now had no protection on the open side of the cage against a seven-story fall. With the same thought, he felt around until he found and stowed the canvas bag in which he’d carried the amplifier.

Next he turned to the eyepiece assembly. It was held in place by four screws. He removed these, pulled the assembly clear, and set it on the floor. A smear of light now touched the mesh wall about a foot above the table. He opened Amy’s computer, and reluctantly broke off the cover.

He moved the coffee tin and put the cover on top of it, in the light. Then he adjusted the focus. The light beam from the telescope brightened, and a patch of wall on the far side of the dome lit up. “Okay,” he called. “We’re in business.”

Amy cheered him on. He angled the beam down the wall. But the floor of the cage cut it off. He adjusted the eyepiece housing and moved the mirror higher. Moved it as high as possible. The luminous circle went down, but still did not reach ground level. “This might not work after all,” he called.

“Why not?”

“Angle’s not good.” The light beam drifted out into the dome. He felt very high, and very exposed. “I don’t see how we can do it without another mirror.”

She was slow to respond. When she did, her voice sounded tired and far away. “Is there another washroom?”

“In the annex.”

“How about the telescope? Maybe there’s a spare mirror in the telescope?”

“No—”

“A redundant mirror, maybe? Reflective metal? Do we have reflective metal anywhere?”

“I wish,” he said, “we had some lights in here. There might be something, but I’m damned if I can think what it might be.”

He heard a crash, and knew she had tossed something. Bostonian good manners giving way to frustration.

Maybe the bureaucrats were right. Maybe this is no place for people.

He sank down, between the observer’s chair and the table. The computer cover was rectangular, about the size and general dimensions of his hand. The mirror itself was dark, though he could see the red reflection of the quasar at the far end of the cage.

Amy’s voice floated up from the well. “Coffee,” it said.

Ward was weary, and in no mood for jokes.

“Coffee,” she repeated. “Use the coffee tin.”

The light beam struck the computer cover, which was tied to the mesh wall with strips from Ward’s sleeves and angled by packing the canvas bag behind it; it flashed on a downward trajectory until, at the far end of the cage, it glanced off the bottom of the coffee tin, which was tied to a table leg by shoe laces and the rest of Ward’s shirt. Then it fell seven stories to the bathroom mirror, to whose stability Amy had contributed her blouse; passed through the air lock, and was deflected by Ward’s watch case back into the sky. Toward the approaching comsat.

Three shorts. Three longs. Three shorts.

S.O.S.

“We were lucky,” she said, spearing a piece of cheese.

Ward sipped his drink and smiled. “Lucky, hell. We were good. We saved ourselves. And we saved NASA some money.”

Amy’s eyes were glowing. “I can’t help wondering where we’d have been if you hadn’t had a shiny watch case? Or if I hadn’t been carrying my computer?”

“We’d have come up with something else.”

“That’s easy to say. Listen, this experience underscores the philosophy that deep space should be left to robots and automated systems.” She dipped her cheese into the mustard, and gracefully swallowed it. “Things go wrong too often. When they do, people die.”

“When they do, people make it work anyhow.” He smiled at her. At that moment, he was aglow with self-satisfaction. “They can’t send us home. Somebody has to be here to pick up the pieces. We’ll be going back to World’s End, Amy. And beyond.”

“Ward’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law.”

“Yeah. You could say that.” He finished off his drink.