Beacon

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

The first thing you do, you make sure you’ve got air to breathe. If there’s the slightest doubt of hull integrity, you hurry into a pressure suit. Everything else comes second.

Collision.

Ebeneezer’s Candle did not take a high-angle hit, but she shook enough to turn me inside out and keep my head throbbing for a long time. When I got around to noting such things, there was a lot of dried blood on my face and in my scalp on the left side, from getting knocked around.

Ebbie’s radars had given no warning of the debris hurtling our way. The reason for that was the same reason that we didn’t take a direct hit. The front third of Ebeneezer’s Candle was buried in a large cometary body and I didn’t have the remote sensor packets deployed yet. They had been crawling toward their positions when two chunks of rock and metal shattered the berg, and sent ice and dust banging along Ebbie’s body.

“Ebbie, talk to me,” I said once my eyes quit spinning. I was watching air-pressure dials, wondering what the devil had happened and whether I ought to get into my pressure suit.

“Ebbie? Talk to me, girl.” I know, it’s inconsistent and illogical to give a ship a man’s name and still refer to it, and to the computer’s personality mode, as female, but that’s the way it is. It’s not just me, I promise.

“Evaluating.” It could only have been my imagination, but Ebbie’s voice sounded weak, confused—the way I felt. But the fact that it had taken her so long to respond would have been worrisome had I had time to worry about it.

“What hit us?” I asked.

There was another pause before she answered, “An object.” If Ebbie were human, I would have said that it was a flip response, but I didn’t think that she was capable of that. She started flashing screens of data at me, and I had those to concentrate on over the next several minutes.

The hull remained gastight. Once Ebbie assured me of that, I let myself take a breath or two and slowed my heart rate. Biofeedback. You have to remain in control no matter how close you come to the edge or how badly you hurt. And it was time to switch apparent time modes. We had done the “minutes squeezed into seconds” of an adrenaline rush. That was no longer necessary. I closed my eyes for fifteen seconds, holding my breath, as I tried to focus and step down from the danger high.

“Damage report?” I asked. This time Ebbie was ready, both with the good news and the bad. I already knew about the hull.

“Magnetic fuel containment remains nominal,” Ebbie said. If the mag-barrels had given, I wouldn’t have been around to hear that report. It was only the development of an antimatter drive that had made the round-trip times practical for humans to wander out to the Oort Cloud. At that, we still only skim the inner surface, the first few light-days of the cloud.

“There is, however,” Ebbie continued, “damage to the primary exhaust cone, as well as damage to several maneuvering thrusters. We will be unable to boost for our return to Mars Base as is.”

“Alternatives?” I asked, swallowing hard over the news that Ebbie wouldn’t be able to head for home.

“Recommend course change for Shipwreck Station 117+9,” Ebbie said. “We can make that in twenty-seven hours at safe acceleration.”

I spent several minutes reviewing data, but there was no real doubt. “Do it,” I told Ebbie.

Nobody’ asked me, but Oort Cloud is the worst place name misnomer since Eric the Red named Greenland. The problem is that people have a very definite idea of what cloud means, even if they’ve never lived anywhere that has clouds. They think of fluffy atmospheric constructs too thick to see through, and somehow (in the case of the Oort, at least) impossible to penetrate. Or, if they’ve heard just a little about the area, they imagine a thick shell around the Solar System crammed full of dirty snowballs and rocks. Two seconds of thought should be enough for people to see the fallacies in that, but I guess a lot of folks don’t use that much time on anything that doesn’t concern them directly and immediately. If the Oort Cloud was that thick, we couldn’t see the stars through it.

Even in the depths of the Oort space is mostly very empty. There are all of those comets and asteroids, some of them quite large—or we wouldn’t be out here trying to make a living, but the truth is, we miners still have to hunt for good claims.

That’s not to say that, once in a while, the neighborhood can’t get too crowded for comfort. There is enough stuff on so many different tracks that there are collisions, and chain reactions. At times it can get too cloudlike for comfort.

I was near the end of my third deep expedition, so I knew the ropes. In the eight weeks since I had arrived from Mars, I had tagged six good claims—four rock and metal, two mostly volatiles—and boosted them toward rendezvous with catchers orbiting my home planet. People who have never done this for a living say that it’s all in the computers, but getting your package to its destination with minimal loss, and with minimal delta-vee for the catcher to overcome is as much art as number crunching. That’s why miners get half of the take, with the catcher and backer splitting the other 50 percent.

All I wanted now was one last good claim to boost home with. We always push the last one in.

I had found just what I had been looking for, a chunk of valuable ices three kilometers along its major axis, more than half that across the beam. Depending on how much my earlier claims assayed out for, and how my investments were doing, it might be enough to let me retire. Maybe some people mine the Oort for the sake of the job, but it has always been nothing more than a means to an end—a long and comfortable retirement—for me. The minute my accountant told me that I had enough to insure that, it would be “Good-bye candle ships” for me!

I had my candle nosed into the berg nicely, and was setting clamps to keep it in position, and moving the instrument remotes out when those chunks of metal ores collided with the berg.

Once I had confirmed that there was nothing I needed to do immediately, I went to my sleeping bag on the mid-deck and sealed myself in. There would be time for work, and worry, later. But until we reached the shipwreck station, it was better to husband my energy, and get as much sleep as possible.

There had been other damage to Ebbie, relatively minor stuff—seals stressed or cracked, bulkheads slightly deformed, even a couple of small leaks, but those had been patched automatically.

Candle ships are remarkably durable. They have to be, the way we use them. We push chunks of metal, rock, and ice around, many of them measured in kilometers. We make the long haul out and back in at accelerations of up to one-g, reaching peak velocities close to seven-tenths of the speed of light. There are millions of people on Mars, the Moon, and in expeditionary bases and space habitats sprinkled around the Solar System who depend on what we can provide to make it practical. It would be far too expensive, and destructive, to haul everything up from Earth.

“Tim, we will have company at the shipwreck station,” Ebbie said when she noted that I had awakened six hours later. “We were not the only ones caught in the Event.”

“A chain reaction?” I asked. You’ve probably seen the same demonstration I first saw when I was about eight years old. The bottom of a transparent cube is covered with old-fashioned backbreaking mousetraps, with table tennis balls resting on each. One more ball is dropped in the top, and pretty quickly all of the traps have been sprung and the balls are bouncing all over the place. A basic physics demonstration. Or, you might think of it as the break in a game of pocket billiards—in three dimensions with the balls ranging up to the size of mountains.

“So it appears,” Ebbie said. “I am receiving incomplete information. Three of my antennas were damaged.”

I pulled myself out of my sleep sack. Regardless of what you may have seen in adventure vids, we do not have artificial gravity, except what we get from acceleration, and Ebbie was just creeping along now with her damaged pipes.

“You do have a good lock on the beacon at the shipwreck station, don’t you?”

“Yes, I have a double lock. I will get us there safely.”

One of the staples of adventure fiction when I was a kid was the spaceship stranded in the unknown reaches of space, with some vital commodity in too short supply for the protagonist to reach safety. Then the author pulls some cute little trick out of a bag, the protagonist fixes the whoozis with a wad of chewing gum or something, and everyone gets home safe and sound.

Bull. All of the cute little gimmicks get engineered into spaceships as soon as the engineers think of them and find a cost-effective way to include them. You don’t leave things to the dire-straits inventiveness of Wally Wizard and his electronic penknife. Things can still go wrong though. You can still get potted like the eight ball in the corner pocket. First in the asteroid belt, and later on when we started venturing out to the edges of the Oort Cloud, the engineers took a cue from Earth.

Back when sailors got their feet wet and the southern oceans were vast tracts that needed weeks or months to cross, some maritime powers established shipwreck stations on remote islands, refuges with stocks of food and other necessities and (once they had been invented) radios to let marooned sailors call for help.

In the same way, shipwreck stations were put in space. Theoretically, there was always supposed to be one within reach of a candle, even one left with only maneuvering thrusters, quickly enough to keep a miner from asphyxiating or dehydrating first. They had been mass produced and sprinkled all along the inner edge of the cloud, as deep as miners normally ventured.

“Will there be room for us to dock for repairs?” I asked.

“We will be the second ship in,” Ebbie said. “At least one other candle will follow. Another might need to.”

The shipwreck stations were not crewed. They were just temporary refuges available to anyone who needed them—small gastight habitats with fuel, food, water, oxygen, and the most basic repair facilities. If a ship needed more repairs than her pilot could manage with the available resources, they would have to wait for a ride and a tow—expensive, time-consuming, and very high on any pilot’s list of least-favorite things.

“I have been able to dampen the vibrations in one of the maneuvering thrusters,” Ebbie reported. “That has allowed me to boost our acceleration by zero-point-eight percent.”

Which would get us to the shipwreck station just a little faster. “As long as you’re certain that it’s safe, Ebbie.” That was unnecessary. Ebbie’s independent decision parameters are more closely circumscribed than mine.

“It is safe,” she assured me.

I chatted with the two other pilots who were heading toward the same shipwreck station, and with the maybe—who decided that she could make it home without a repair stop. Angie McBroom was nearest docking. Her candle ship was also apparently in the worst condition. It probably would not be possible to repair the candle to make the trip back under its own power. But Angie wouldn’t concede that until she could get out and make sure for herself. Clayton Reid was farther out, but not in much worse shape than I was. We both anticipated being able to boost for home, even if we might not be able to risk picking up another berg to push in.

“If it’s at all possible,” I told Ebbie after signing off from my second conversation with Clay, “I want to take something home. It might yet be possible to earn retirement on this trip.” But not if Ebbie deadheaded back to Mars.

“Too soon to tell,” Ebbie said. “Repairing the main exhaust might be tricky. I anticipate that we can do a good enough job to get us home, without much loss of time over a normal return, but I cannot tell if we will be sound enough for a tow.”

While the shipwreck stations were being planted on bergs in relatively stable orbits, it was a matter of intelligent self-interest for miners to clear away the bits of rock and ice that might pose dangers to those stations. It’s an ongoing process though, since there is an almost Brownian motion within the cloud, new material moving toward the verge of the shell almost constantly. Whenever a new object is detected moving into an orbit hazardous to a shipwreck station, there is a small bounty added to the miner’s normal take for the claim.

A major event like the chain reaction that was moving three ships toward the same station, could rearrange the entire neighborhood. It would probably move more rocks and bergs into position to qualify for bounties. A major event could also damage or destroy a shipwreck station. We didn’t know until Angie reached our common goal that 117+9 had also been hit.

“The station remains habitable,” Ebbie said. “Its orbit has been affected though, and one supply cache was destroyed. The change in orbit will move it toward the inner Solar System, making it a long-period comet.”

Which would make it useless as a shipwreck station. It would have to be boosted back into its previous orbit or replaced. That wasn’t our problem. Ebbie assured me that the deviation was too slight to have any immediate impact.

“Will the destroyed cache leave the station short with three of us docked?” I asked. The pause before Ebbie replied this time was her way of letting me know that she had already computed the data out to more decimal points than I could grasp, not because she was processing information.

“No foreseeable shortages. Repair facilities will be marginal. Six percent of the cometary body was destroyed.”

“Will we be able to make our repairs?”

“Most likely,” Ebbie said. “If you want the percentages, over 92. Bartholomew’s Candle will not be so fortunate.” That was Angie McBroom’s ship. “Before, she had no more than a 5 percent chance of making repairs sufficient to reach Mars. This has erased that hope. She will have to wait for a ride home.”

I had spent a lot of time alone with Ebbie, over three tours out to the cloud. There have been months at a time when she was my only “human” contact. I knew her patterns.

“Even if the station’s orbit does not degrade enough to be dangerous by then, there won’t be enough supplies to hold Angie until a relief ship arrives,” I said.

“Zero chance,” Ebbie said. “Barta could sustain her that long, but Barta is so crippled that the risk is unacceptable.”

And Angie would never willingly abandon Barta, even though the ship could be retrieved later. I couldn’t entirely fault Angie for that. I’d be as hard to separate from Ebbie, out in the cloud. A pilot who comes home without his or her ship doesn’t have much future in the business.

“I guess that means that one of us will have to give Angie a tow,” I said. Either Clayton or me.

“That would seem to be the logical solution,” Ebbie said.

I growled at the way she used the word logical. It was a code to tell me that after all, Ebbie was the computer and had the massive brain and faster thinking than I could dream of, and when she said something was right, logical, that was that.

“Maybe Clay will volunteer,” I suggested after frowning at the nearest monitor.

“I suspect that that is slightly less probable than our claiming an asteroid that turns out to contain ten thousand tonnes of gold,” Ebbie said.

If it had been me speaking, I might have left out the word slightly. We’re all somewhat antisocial or we wouldn’t take jobs that keep us alone for up to three years at a stretch. But Clay Reid was the archetypal loner. If he were the only one available to do a rescue, he would do it. Anyone out in the cloud knows how thin the thread of survival is, but Clay would not do it with grace. He disliked everyone.

“Well, we’ll worry about that when we have to,” I said. “Let’s make certain that you’re going to be in shape for that sort of work before we make offers.”

Getting to the shipwreck station was not just twenty-seven hours of eating, sleeping, and hanging around. No matter what Ebbie is doing, I have a full schedule, most of it involved in just keeping my body in condition. Long periods of weightlessness leach calcium from bones, endanger muscles, and play havoc with the circulatory and digestive systems. Granted, things aren’t as bad for me as they were for early space travelers. For one thing, I was born on Mars and grew up adapted to that much less gravity. And there is the physiological tampering they do on us, the scavenger cells—biological nanomachines—mucking about inside us trying to haul the calcium back where it belongs, and so forth. But we still need plenty of plain old sweat equity to keep the body in tiptop shape. No miner wants to spend two or three weeks rehabbing on Mars after a deep tour.

A berg is just a dark blob of matter. Without the beacon marking the shipwreck station there would have been nothing to distinguish that lump of ice and dust from millions of others in the halo that marks the edge of the Solar System. The beacon is electronic. A visible searchlight powerful enough to be seen at any distance would take far too much power to be practical—it would melt the berg it was mounted on. But as Ebbie maneuvered us in to dock, there were lights visible, small markers on Bartholomew’s Candle and on the station itself. I guess Angie wanted to make double certain that Ebbie saw Barta and didn’t plow into her.

Ebbie gave me several views of the damage to Barta. It was fairly obvious that Barta wasn’t going very far on her own power without a major overhaul. It might even be decertified for deep operations. The ship would likely not be scrapped though. There are uses for the most beat-up hulks. While Ebbie moved us up to a docking tube at the station, I got a good look at most of Barta’s hull. I could only recall seeing one candle beat up worse, and her pilot had not survived.

“Angie McBroom was one lucky miner,” I whispered.

“Luck may have had some part in it, but Barta is a good ship.” There was a hesitation before Ebbie added, “Or was.”

“I was thinking that too. Her long-haul days may be over.”

“Barta won’t like the alternatives,” Ebbie said.

I looked toward the speaker grille, as if I might see Ebbie in it. We had been together a long time, spent ages conversing when we had no one else to talk with. I did think of Ebbie as a person, but only to a point. There was always the distinction, finally, that she was still only a computer.

“She won’t like the alternatives?”

“The word was appropriate,” Ebbie replied, her voice matching mine closely in tone. “I wouldn’t either.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I’m not sure how I’ll adjust when I’m not making long hauls any more myself.”

Ebbie had no response to that. She retreated to business.

“Twelve seconds to touch,” she informed me.

As usual, she performed the docking maneuver perfectly. It’s a big part of our business, and in this case she didn’t have to burn us part-way into the berg or calculate a balanced position so that we could boost it accurately home.

Angie McBroom was waiting when I cycled through the habitat’s airlock. She gave me a weak smile and a thumbs-up gesture while I climbed out of my pressure suit. The berg had just enough mass to give a slight feeling of weight, enough to keep me oriented and make it simple to slide the suit down so that I could step out without turning somersaults.

Angie was particularly tiny for Mars-born, but most miners are below average in size. Our candles don’t seem as cramped as they would if we were two meters tall. Angie had been at the business longer than I had. This was her seventh trip. According to rumors back at Lowell Port, she had the money to retire twice over, but kept going back out. I had known her, or known of her, for as long as I had been in the game. She was a legend in the Miners’ Guild. And we had talked by radio quite a few times.

Still, this was the first time I had ever laid eyes on her. She wasn’t nearly as old as I had expected. Everyone talked about her as “the old lady of the Oort.” Seven trips had to translate to at least twenty years, even if she had always dipped only into the very edge of the cloud and taken minimal stopovers on Mars. She had to be forty or more years old. But I would have guessed that she had to be under thirty-five, maybe only a year or two older than me. Her round face had tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, but many miners acquire those their first trip out. Her complexion was pale. There are no suntans in the Oort.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

“Your eyes don’t look all that sore.” I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Angie asked.

“All of the times we’ve talked, and all I’ve heard about you, it just seems strange, meeting for the first time.”

She shrugged. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

“Ebbie gave me a good look at Barta. Looks like you’ve used up a couple of your spare lives on this trip.” I moved to one of the benches and sat, then stretched before I took the elastic band off of my ponytail. I start every long haul with my hair shaved to the scalp, but the next haircut has to wait until I get home. You don’t want hair clippings floating around inside your ship, getting into places where they might do harm before they can be sucked up. I don’t even shave aboard Ebbie. I glanced around the habitat. I might whack off my beard and some of the hair while I was in the station, if I could find the tools.

“It is bad,” she agreed. I might have imagined that I saw ghosts race across her eyes. “It’ll be the devil to fix.” She sat on the bench with me, but not too close.

“Ebbie says we’ll be able to fix her up good enough for the trip home, probably good enough to give you a push.” I know, I wasn’t going to say anything until I knew for certain that Ebbie would be in shape for that kind of work and that Clayton wouldn’t do something completely out of character and volunteer, but that haunted look on Angie’s face changed my mind.

“Thanks. I want to give Barta a closer look first, make certain that she can’t get home by herself.”

“You know that the station won’t support you until a relief ship can get out here to do the tow,” I said.

She hauled in a deep breath. “I know. Rotten luck, huh? The worst chain reaction since I’ve been in the business. I only know of one other case when three ships were damaged by the same event, and that was when I was a kid.”

“Two pilots didn’t make it back from that one. I guess that makes our luck pretty good by comparison, even Barta’s.”

“Nobody told me you’d become a chaplain.”

I laughed. “Clay Reid will do that before I will.”

She joined me in the laugh. “I am glad I’m not going to be stuck here alone with him. I’d want to sleep with a knife in my hand. I’ve met him a couple of times, back at Lowell Port.”

“How long before he gets in?”

“Three hours. He says he plans to be back out seven hours after that.”

“You didn’t try to argue him out of the fast turn-around?” I tried to sound surprised. It was enough to get another slight laugh from Angie.

“I’m glad you got here,” she said. “I’ve been doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself.”

“If we’re ever at Lowell Port at the same time, you can buy me a beer.”

“I’ll do that. How much damage does your Ebbie have?”

I gave it to her briefly. “Ebbie says it should take about ten hours work to get us shipshape for the long push home. Three sessions outside, two if I really push myself.”

“I’ll give you a hand, once I make sure that I can’t get Barta up for the trip under her own power. Make sure you get things right.” I didn’t try to refuse her help. With two people working, the job would go much faster.

We spent an hour going over the radio traffic, making certain that we hadn’t missed anything pertinent. The only talk going on was out in the cloud, and fairly close. Home was six months off by radio. There could be no advice from there, and there was no hurry in notifying Lowell Port. Even the permanent stations most distant from the Sun were four light-months from Shipwreck Station 117+9. The talk was with other pilots skimming the cloud, and there were only two close enough for conversation—Clay and the miner who had decided not to head for the station after all. The rest were between ten and thirty light-minutes away.

The event was still in progress. That’s part of the problem with a chain reaction. Anything that gets bumped has its orbit and momentum changed. Collisions lead to more collisions, and to more changes in the orbital schematics. It would take time to get the new map finalized. But farther off there was less chance of ships being damaged. The warning could travel faster than rocks and bergs. People could get out of the way.

Angie went to do her second survey of the damage to Bartholomew’s Candle. It wouldn’t change the bad news. We both knew that, but she tried to sound optimistic, and I didn’t tell her that she was wasting her time.

Clayton Reid’s ship docked while Angie was getting back out of her pressure suit. Reid had never given his ship a name. It was just “Clayton Reid’s candle.” Knowing that Clay was about to touch, I tensed up, as if I expected him to bump us hard enough to feel the docking. That was ridiculous, of course.

“I hope he’s in no hurry to come in,” Angie whispered. Viewing the damage to Barta had been rough on her. The more time Angie had before we were graced with Clay’s presence inside the habitat, the easier she would find him to tolerate.

“If he’s planning to be on the wick in seven hours, he’s going to have to get busy right away,” I said, also whispering, as if I feared that he might hear us talking about him.

The radio chirped for attention. I went for it.

“I’ll be starting my repairs right away,” Clay announced. “I’ll be in when I need to recharge my tanks.”

“Come on in whenever,” I said. “But if you’ve still got enough full air tanks in your candle, you’d best recharge there. The station lost part of its supplies in the event.”

He growled but said, “I’ll do that.” I hadn’t given him much choice, the way I had phrased it. Even Clayton Reid had to respect the needs of the shipwreck station.

After I had switched off, I turned back toward Angie. “That buys us a little time without his presence. Maybe I pissed him off enough that he won’t come in at all.”

“It’s possible,” Angie said. That halfsmile came back to her face, briefly. “Now, what about looking after your Ebbie?”

In an emergency, I could have attempted the repairs to Ebbie anywhere. But when you’re perhaps weeks away from any help at all, and five or six light-months from home, you don’t take any chances that aren’t absolutely necessary to assure your survival. Going outside to fix your candle when you’re on your lonesome presents routine dangers. If you screw up, you don’t have any backup.

Having an extra set of hands available speeded up the work considerably. There was only one place where Angie and I had to set up a mechanical persuader, a lever to hold a piece in place while I ran the cold welder to repair a fitting. Without her help, I would have had to do that a half dozen times.

After one two-hour work session, there was only one critical repair—and two or three minor jobs—left. At the far side of the station, a kilometer from Ebbie, we could see Clay working. He hadn’t so much as given us a wave when we came out.

“Let’s take a break,” I told Angie. “We’re making good time. There’s no need to press ourselves too hard.”

It can be tiring moving around and doing anything physical in a pressure suit, even in micro-gravity. In some ways, that’s harder than working in full planetary gravity. And despite the best innards in our pressure suits, it can get chilly spending extensive time outside that far from the nearest major source of heat—that is, the Sun.

When we were back inside the habitat and out of our pressure suits, Angie cranked up the thermostat a couple of notches. I heated a couple of bags of coffee.

“Ebbie wasn’t hurt as badly as I had thought from the reports Barta got from her,” Angie said.

“We were lucky,” I admitted. “We shouldn’t have any trouble at all getting Barta home for you.”

“But you’ll miss a chance to push a paying load home.” She sounded reluctant to mention that, but Angie hadn’t earned her high reputation among the mining community by shunning inconvenient facts.

I shrugged. “That’s life in the pits. We may be loners, but there are still times when we need each other.”

“Just tell me when you want to go out and finish the work.”

“We ought to take at least an hour between. Give the suits time to get back up to speed. Then we can look at the repairs we did the first shift before we tackle the remaining work, make sure I didn’t screw anything up.”

“Not likely.”

The hour stretched past an hour and a quarter. I was very comfortable sitting where I was, and I was enjoying my chat with Angie. It was warm in the habitat and I was feeling a little drowsy—and contented.

I yawned and stretched, having a last little argument with myself on the subject of getting back to work. I had just about convinced myself that it was time to get productive again when there was a buzz from one of the instrument clusters on the far wall. A small blue light started to flash.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. The question was enough to get me to my feet and moving. Angie was faster. She got to the panel and punched a couple of keys.

“There’s another ship coming in, but it’s not making any signals and not answering the station’s queries.”

“Try it manually,” I said, a waste of air since she had already started doing that.

Angie tried all five standard communications and distress channels. I worked the radar panel, trying to get better resolution. But the station’s damaged antennas kept the picture generic, so I patched through and let Ebbie do the scanning.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I said when Ebbie fed me all of the data she was getting.

“What?” Angie asked.

“Ebbie’s got a full EM scan going. The shape isn’t right and the heat signature of the main propulsion unit is all wrong, like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

It wasn’t that Angie didn’t trust my report. She just wanted to see for herself. And it can help to have a second set of eyes, and a second brain, scan suspect data. We both stared at what Ebbie was providing.

“The silhouette I could understand,” Angie said finally, “if the candle had serious structural damage. The lack of any radio traffic could also be a result of damage. But that electromagnetic scan is all wrong.”

“Any guesses?”

“None that I care to voice. I don’t want people to think I’ve finally flipped my dish completely.”

“A new ship design?” I suggested. “Something on its first trip out here?”

She shook her head quickly. “We would have heard if there was anything that radical in the works.”

“Maybe it didn’t come from Mars or one of the space habitats that support the guild. Could it be that Earth has decided to get back into the mining game?”

“That we would have heard about even faster,” Angie said. Earth had been pretty much shut out of the deep mining business decades before. They couldn’t compete. The depth of Earth’s gravity well imposed too much overhead. Even for the things Earth needed she had to come to the Mars-based mining co-op, and the Miners’ Guild.

“If it’s not ours and it couldn’t have come from Earth, that pretty much only leaves one other possibility,” I said. I was almost as reluctant to voice that alternative as Angie was. “It must be coming from the other side of the cloud.”

We stared at each other. This can’t be happening, I thought. It had been 147 years since Tara Jewel O’Brien, the first child born off-Earth, and people had been looking for aliens for at least 90 years before that. Every search had turned up blank. Most folks had finally started to discount the possibility that we would ever find anyone else.

“There has to be another explanation.” Angie spoke very softly, and there was almost an edge of fear in her voice.

“You’d think so,” I replied. I got back on the radio to Ebbie. “Analyze all of the data about the new ship. Give me your best estimate of its nature and origin.”

Ebbie took more than a minute to respond. The delay told me as much as the words she finally used. “The vessel is of unknown type and origin. It does not conform to any specifications in my database, nor can I extrapolate circumstances which might have contorted any known objects into these figures.”

What I wanted most was the chance to communicate with home, get advice from all of the experts that Mars, Earth, the Moon, and all of the habitats could find. But that would take nearly a year, just for the round-trip communications time, and all we had were hours before the ship, or whatever it was, arrived.

I had just got to the point of deciding that it was time to tell Clay about our mysterious visitor when he came into the habitat and started to strip out of his pressure suit.

“There is an anomalous vessel, or something, approaching,” he announced as soon as his helmet was off.

“We know. We’ve been trying to figure out what it might be. It doesn’t conform to any known pattern.”

“There is a chance that it is of alien origin,” Clay said, words delivered from the Mountaintop.

Angie and I exchanged a glance. “I think we’d better finish the work on Ebbie while we can,” I told her.

Clay never got all of the way out of his suit. He was sealed back in and through the airlock before Angie and I could get suited up.

It was, to understate the obvious, a distraction. I wanted to have Ebbie ready for a hard push home before the alien ship—if that was what it was—reached the shipwreck station. If the ship was following the beacon in and not just passing by. Part of me, a large part, wanted to get the repairs completed, dock Barta to Ebbie, get Angie aboard, and light the wick for home before the newcomer arrived. I had the distinct feeling that history was about to be made… and I would have just as soon avoided it. It might be uncomfortable, if not lethal. I would gladly have given Clay the honors if he had asked. The words would have been out before my brain could censor them.

But Clay was never the cooperative sort.

Angie and I kept links open to the habitat’s instruments through Ebbie. She also kept track of Barta that way. Ebbie ran diagnostics to track the progressive systems failures aboard Barta. Before much longer Angie would have to put her ship in sleep mode, with only the most essential services running, if she wanted to save anything.

“There, I think we’ve got it,” I said after we had been out for eighty minutes. “I’ll tell Ebbie to run her complete preflight checklist. That’ll take twenty minutes. If she says it’s OK, we’ll start worrying about getting Barta docked to her.”

“You want to do that right away?” Angie asked.

I nodded. “I want to be ready to light the wick at a minute’s notice, if we have to.”

“That’s probably wise,” she agreed. She turned, not quite enough to really see Clay, but enough to get me to glance his way. “I think he feels the same way. He might not even wait to see who our visitors are.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I haven’t made up my mind. If we left first and never found out who or what is coming, it would plague me the rest of my life, but finding out could be even more unpleasant.”

Angie was looking up, out in the direction of the radar contact—not that we could see anything yet—rather than at me, so she couldn’t see my grin. “I know exactly how you feel,” I said. “I’ve been having the same debate with myself.”

We moved into Ebbie to wait for her to complete the diagnostics. As soon as Ebbie gave the OK, we would do the rest of the work. Mating the two candles right at the shipwreck station would be touchy. The easy way, the by the book way, would be to back both ships a dozen kilometers from the surface of the berg, then do the snag-and-hug. But we couldn’t rely on Barta for her half of the work. Ebbie’s thrusters had enough cold gas left for her thrusters to enable us to do the job in close, though.

“Everything checks out nominal, Tim,” Ebbie said after the last test. “We won’t have any difficulty at all getting home with Barta. And I should need only minimal work at Lowell Port to be ready to head out again.”

“That’s good to hear, Ebbie. We’re going to mate Barta and get us ready to leave in a hurry if we have to. You understand?”

“I do, Tim. I have been making my preparations based on that assumption. Will we be leaving before the anomalous object gets close enough for visual identification?”

“Probably not, but that is subject to change. We might get cold feet and change our minds. Just be ready for either.”

“Of course.”

“Angie, do you want to do this from here or go over to Barta for the docking?”

She hesitated. “I’d like to be with Barta, but that might complicate things afterward. I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Before we started docking maneuvers, I warned Clay and gave him time to get inside or on the lee side of his candle, in case something went wrong.

“Do it gentle, Ebbie,” I said once Angie and I were strapped in. It was the first time that the second seat in Ebbie’s control cabin had ever been occupied. It folded out from under the secondary control station. With both seats down and in use, there was hardly room to move between them.

Ebbie backed away from the station as softly as could be, and swiveled until her nose was pointed at Barta’s side. Angie was linked to Barta, making certain that she knew what was going on and didn’t activate collision avoidance maneuvers by mistake. I assume that Ebbie was also communicating with Barta. Ships normally talk with each other like that, even when they’re not getting ready for intimate relations. I sometimes think that the candles talk to each other more than their pilots do.

I watched my monitors and gauges, hands poised to take manual control in the unlikely event that something went wrong with Ebbie’s automatics. I suppose that I held my breath at times as well. I didn’t want anything to go wrong, especially anything that might mean that we wouldn’t be ready to light the wick in a hurry if we had to.

Nothing went wrong. When it was over, Ebbie was sideways to the docking tube, anchored thirty meters off the end, hooked to it by three cables. Docking at a shipwreck station with a tow buckled on is not Standard Operating Procedure.

Angie and I would have to work our way down—and then back up—those cables unless we chose to stay aboard Ebbie and not return to the station habitat. I gave Angie the choice.

“Let’s go down,” she said. “If we’re going to stick around long enough to see what’s coming, that’s the place to do it.”

“Just remember, we may have to shinny back up the cables in a hurry when that ship gets here.”

We took our pressure suits off and used station stores to charge the maneuvering-gas tanks in them, although we had charged the air tanks from Ebbie. About ten minutes after we had settled in near the habitat’s instrument console, Clay came back in.

“I have finished my repairs,” he announced.

Bully for you, I thought. What I said was, “Are you going to leave now or wait to see what’s coming?”

“I will stay for now,” he said. “At least until we have a clearer idea of what the anomaly is.”

“Yeah, us too,” I said. By the partly written rules that we govern ourselves by, we should have left the shipwreck station immediately after completing repairs and getting Barta docked to Ebbie. At the very least, we should have quit drawing on station supplies, leaving as much as possible in case someone else needed the facilities. But I suspected that we would have drawn more complaints had we not stayed around this time. If we left before finding out what was coming, no one would have ever let us hear the last of it. Besides, with 117+9’s orbit decaying, it would require major attention soon anyway.

“The object has started slowing down,” Angie announced. “It is definitely coming here, not just passing by.”

“How long?” I asked.

“If it maintains its current rate of deceleration, just under two hours.”

Two eternal hours. The ranging gear gave us improved definition on the object. The scanners refined the spectrum of its emissions. The object was definitely a ship, but absolutely not of any known human manufacture. And the crew, if there was one, was not answering radio calls.

At first, Clay had taken off only his helmet. But keeping the rest of his pressure suit on apparently became too much of a burden because he took it off eventually, then put it on again no more than twenty minutes later, forty-five minutes before the mystery ship would arrive. Ten minutes after that, Angie and I got back into our suits as well.

“A prudent step,” Angie said when I made the suggestion.

“In case we have to run for it, or decide to leave early,” I said, trying to whisper softly enough that Clay wouldn’t hear.

We had a visual on the ship by then, not that it was very revealing. Even at extreme magnification the image wasn’t very clear. The ship had come in hotter than any of us had, which meant that it had to decelerate more rapidly to match speeds with the shipwreck station for rendezvous.

I fought the urge to go outside and watch. Even if the ship had been a candle with a pilot we knew (and trusted), that would have been poor judgment. In case of mishap, we would be safer inside the habitat, especially sealed in pressure suits. Of course, we would have been safer yet in our candles, backed away from the berg and ready to light the wick… and safest of all several hours out, burning for home. But we had already made the decision not to go, and no one suggested a change of plan.

Clay started to fidget and pace. With as little room as there was in the habitat with three people dressed in pressure suits, that was annoying. It appeared as if he might be having difficulty fighting the urge to move to his candle.

“That ship is definitely not of human manufacture,” Ebbie informed me eight minutes before its ETA. “It appears to be totally alien in design.”

“Could it be only partly alien?” I asked without thinking.

Ebbie did not respond.

Six minutes out, the ship increased its rate of deceleration. Then the hot drive was turned off and the vehicle edged its way in to final rendezvous with cold gas, reversing attitude so that the exhausts would remain away from the berg. The ship might be alien, but there are certain necessities that remain the same as long as the propulsion systems aren’t totally beyond our ken. The same basic mechanical needs. The laws of physics had to be the same for them as they were for us. That had to limit the alienness of the ship. It was a third larger than Ebbie.

“A little shaky coming in,” Angie commented softly.

“That ship looks as if it’s been beat up worse than Barta was,” I replied. “Maybe the pilot was injured, or just hasn’t gotten his nerves back.”

“He’s going to park awfully close to Barta and Ebbie. Maybe we should have waited aboard,” Angie said.

“I just thought of something.”

“What?” Angie turned from the monitor to look at me.

“What the hell do we say?” I said. Even Clay turned to look at me. “Some alien creature finds his way through the airlock and comes in the door.” I pointed at it. “What the hell do we say? Are we going to be able to communicate at all?”

I hadn’t given those questions any thought in the hours of waiting. It was too… preposterous a notion that after all of these decades, we were actually going to meet an alien. Face to face. Assuming that the alien had a face.

“There’s no way to know,” Clay said. “Perhaps we would have been wiser not to put ourselves in the position where we might have to make the attempt… or suffer the consequences.”

“There must be a pilot, maybe more than one,” Angie said. “No matter what he or they look like or come from, they can’t be that much different from us. From the looks of that ship, they might be in the same business we are, mining the cloud. If he, she, or they need help, we have to try.”

I guess it did come down to that, we would help if we could. I doubt that I would have put it in words the way Angie had though. I would have been afraid of sounding stuffy or trite.

Time for reflection was running out. On balance, that might have been a definite asset.

The alien ship was not equipped with standard docking gear (standard for us, that is), so it couldn’t link to the shipwreck station the way that the three of us had originally. Instead, the alien ship deployed three grapples, the way Ebbie had after docking Barta, and then extended a long bar, a probe of some sort, to secure its anchorage, about the same distance above the berg as Ebbie, one hundred meters from Ebbie and Barta.

We had excellent views of the ship now, up close and personal, both from the habitat and from Ebbie’s cameras. The alien vessel was thicker and longer than our candles, and the general layout appeared to be a separation into three clear segments, with the rearmost—propulsion—the largest by far. The forward section was the smallest.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the skin of the alien ship; undecorated metal, much the worse for wear. There were several small patches of some sort of characters on the hull. They looked faded in visible light, though Ebbie said that they were much brighter in ultraviolet.

“If someone walks in and says, ‘Take me to your leader,’ I’ll die laughing,” Angie whispered.

“I think I’m going to be afraid to do much of anything,” I said, not looking at her. “I’ll be too scared to even faint. I mean, what would they think polite, or a deadly insult? We’ve got no rule book for this.”

The wait, even after the alien ship had docked, seemed eternal. If I were solely dependent on my own recollections, I would swear that it had to be ninety minutes from the time the ship planted its last grapple until the hatch on the forward segment opened. Ebbie assures me that it was only seventeen minutes though.

“We’ll have to operate the airlock from in here,” Angie said, moving toward the controls.

“We don’t know if our visitor or visitors breathe oxygen,” Clay said. “Or if any of the other components of our air might be poisonous to them.”

“We can still open the door,” I said. “If they’re not certain about our air, they can stay in their pressure suits.”

Pronouns had been a bit of a problem. We didn’t know the number or sex of whoever was in that ship. It was enough larger than our candles so that the front segment could hold two beings roughly the size of humans, even for a long voyage. The hatch, at least, appeared suitable for human-sized bipeds.

Obviously, none of us were prepared for what did emerge from that hatch.

My first impression was that any of us could have worn the alien pressure suit. The proportions of arms and legs to the torso and to each other weren’t quite right. Both sets of limbs appeared equal in size, and the feet seemed to be radically different from human feet. Judging solely from the suit, the alien might have had a horse’s hooves.

But there was one much more glaring difference. There was a large spherical protrusion from the chest of the alien. From the scaled-down view we had on the monitor, it looked as if he or she was wearing a second helmet there.

The alien came down one of the cables holding his/her ship to the berg, using only the upper limbs to maneuver. The pressure suit’s gauntlets had two segments for digits, like mittens but with both portions equal and opposite each other. He or she made directly for the airlock door.

Angie had already pumped the air out of the airlock. Now she opened the outer door. The alien entered without hesitation. Angie closed the door and started to pump air back in.

“Now we find out,” I said. I would have given almost anything to be anywhere else in the Solar System, even on Earth—the one place I had always sworn I would never visit.

Clay and I moved farther from the door. Angie couldn’t move until she hit the button to open the interior door. She hesitated, but not pushing the button would not give us any safety. There was a large button on the other side of the door so that it could be opened from inside the airlock. Even an alien would probably deduce that in seconds.

“Go ahead,” I whispered.

She pushed the button.

My heart thumped wildly. Fear was not a new companion, but he was a lot closer, more overpowering, than in a long time. While we waited for the alien to cycle through the airlock I had a flashback to the first time my father had taken me out of the pressure dome back on Mars, my first time out on the surface. I knew that people frequently went outside the dome. Some people worked out there every day. There were accidents, but not often. It was safe or my father wouldn’t have taken me. He told me that. I believed it. Still…

This time I didn’t have anyone’s assurance that what we were doing was safe. There were no statistics, no precedents.

The door opened. The alien stepped into the room, staggered, then caught his balance, reaching out to put a hand against the wall. With feet spread wide, he looked not at any of us but at a gauge on the left sleeve of his pressure suit. Then he reached up, twisted his helmet, yanked it off, and dropped it.

Then he collapsed.

As dramatic entrances go, that one would be hard to top. It was worthy of the professionals at the Bradbury Theater in Lowell Port. It was also a terrific ice-breaker. Our tension, fear, gave way to instinctive concern. Even Clay took a step toward the fallen alien before he thought better of it. Angie and I kept moving. One of us knelt at each side of the alien, wanting to help even before we realized that we didn’t have the faintest idea where to start, or what might be wrong with our visitor.

Our first close look at the alien’s face did bring us to a complete stop though. The contours of the face were… lumpy. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the surface of a human brain with all of its convolutions, that was about how the alien’s face looked. The color was yellow ochre, various shades from the dark of the folds to the lights of the high points. There was no protruding nose, but what I took to be a pair of wide, angular nostrils between and only slightly below eyes that were set widely apart. The eyes were closed. Lips were more pronounced folds in the skin, and the same color. The mouth was a twelve-centimeter-wide gash across the bottom of the face. There was no hair or fur to cover the skin.

Ugly as sin, I thought. OK, that was a xenophobic, insensitive reaction, but I did feel a real physical revulsion. My stomach announced its displeasure in a sudden cramp. I fought the urge to turn away, to look anywhere but at that face. Still, I wasn’t prepared for when Angie gave a terrified scream.

I looked at her. The color had completely drained from her face. She was pointing down at the protrusion from the alien’s chest. I had almost forgotten that. I turned and looked.

Even with the warning of Angie’s reaction, I almost screamed as well. It was a second helmet, and there was a second face, a second head, looking out of it. Dark brown, almost black, eyes, shaped like a cat’s, were staring at me, but the eyes seemed not to be seeing anything.

I lurched to my feet and took a step, almost a jump, back. When I looked around I saw that Clay had moved closer. He had been standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, and he had to move in a hurry when I leaped to my feet and backpedaled.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, looking at the alien’s second head. “No sense at all. It can’t be.” He sounded offended by the extra head.

“Write a nasty letter to Darwin,” I said, choking back the urge to vomit. Logic be damned, the sight outraged my instincts.

“What do we do?” Angie asked, looking up. She hadn’t moved from the alien’s side, other than to lean back on her haunches. “He’s still breathing. This head is, at least,” she added, pointing at the one that was in the proper position.

“What the hell can we do?” I asked. “We don’t know anything about his physiology.” I was staring at the extra head. “We couldn’t know if we were doing the right thing or not.”

“We’ve got to try something,” Angie insisted. “At least help me get him out of this pressure suit. Maybe that’ll give us a better idea what to do.”

And maybe it would bring more revolting surprises.

“Perhaps pure oxygen will bring him around,” Clay suggested.

I turned and gave him a glance, moderately surprised that he had actually come up with a suggestion that sounded good. But maybe I also resented the fact that he had been able to think more clearly about the situation than I could.

“Get an oxygen bottle then,” Angie said. “Tim, help me get this suit off of him.”

I got back down, steeling myself for whatever we might find. Getting the alien out of the suit was a larger task than it sounded. The fittings were different, and not all that obvious. The secondary head complicated matters. We didn’t know the why of that until we finally did have the pressure suit off.

The second head had been coarsely sutured to the alien’s chest. The extra helmet had been glued over a hole cut in the pressure suit. There was a lot of what we assumed was blood staining the alien’s clothing.

I had to stop and take my own helmet off in a major hurry. Vomit is one hell of a mess inside a pressure suit, and the smell remains almost indefinitely afterward. I barely made it. Angie had even less time to spare.

“My God!” Angie said once she was again able to speak without retching. “What went on here?”

The alien’s tunic had been ripped open down the front. The neck of the second head had, as far as we could see, then simply been sewn to the chest, assuming that the area corresponded to the same area on a human.

“We’ll never know if we can’t keep this alien alive,” Clay said. He had brought over a portable oxygen canister, complete with face mask, tubing, and a pump-bag. He got down next to the alien and started the oxygen—placing the mask over the head that was where it belonged.

“Why don’t you see if you can get inside his ship?” Angie said, looking at me. “Maybe you’ll find something to tell us What’s going on.”

“You mean like the rest of him?” I pointed at the second head. My hand shook so badly that I pulled it back in a hurry.

“Whatever,” Angie said. “Anything.”

I nodded. I just hope there aren’t any more of them, I thought. It didn’t seem likely that there would be another whole alien in the ship. If this one had had help from another of his own kind, would he have left his ship and come to us?

I didn’t think so. I hoped not.

There was a definite sense of relief to stepping inside the airlock and sealing the inner door, shutting me away from the peculiar alien with two heads. Clay had been right. That made no sense at all. It looked crazy—insane crazy. I checked to make sure that I had air flowing inside my suit, and no leaks, then cycled the lock and waited while air was pumped out. Watching the pressure gauge over the outer door gave me something to think about—something to focus on—that did make sense, something normal, proper. I tried to shut out everything else until I had to think about those other things again.

My sense of balance (like everything else) was a little shaky, like having an inner ear infection. When I stepped outside, I moved very cautiously, keeping one hand against the side of the habitat. I stood there, breathing deeply, trying to get my mind functioning at something approaching normal speed before I shut the outer door. In the fractional gravity of that berg, there was no room for mistakes. And I was going to have to shinny up a rope and try to break into that alien spacecraft. I thought about the difficulty getting the alien’s pressure suit off and wondered if I would be able to figure out how to get into his ship. I wasn’t certain that I wanted to.

I took a grip on one of the cables and looked at the ship overhead. I could see the outline of the hatchway thirty meters over my head. It might have been five minutes before I put the second hand on the cable and started pulling myself up the line.

There wasn’t enough gravity to make the climb difficult. I always kept one hand tightly on the cable and worked my way up cautiously. I didn’t want to build up any speed since I was-n’t tethered to the cable by a safety line. If I did get separated from that wire, I would be able to maneuver back with my suit’s small cold gas thrusters, but I would have hated to do that, the state my mind was in. I figured that I could clip on a safety line when I got to the top, while I tried to figure out how to open the hatch. Once I had a tether clipped to the cable, I could also take another moment to decide whether or not I really wanted to be able to open that door.

It was almost too easy. The latch was under a sliding panel. Pull the panel down. A large knob with a ridge running across the face was easy to grip. I turned it counterclockwise, the way it would work to open if the ship were human. That didn’t work so I tried the other direction. When that also didn’t work, I had to pause. Then I pushed in on the knob. When I felt give, I tried turning to the left again. This time the knob rotated and the hatch opened.

I hesitated for several minutes after the door stopped moving. I looked through the hatchway. There were lights on in the airlock, but very dim, bluish in color. I had my helmet lights on though, so I could see without difficulty. The airlock was barely large enough to squeeze into. That was similar to the design of our candles. Anything bigger than the minimum acceptable would be a luxury, deadweight.

I took a deep breath, used that as the excuse for extending my hesitation. Finally, though, I did pull myself through the hatchway into the airlock, then cycled through into the interior of the alien ship.

There was no way I could know what I might be looking for. The one thing I was almost certain of finding was in a bunk at the rear of the cabin—a headless body, strapped in place. The bed covering was stained with the same rust-color that had been on the tunic of the other alien. I had been prepared for finding a body, so I didn’t have the same gag reaction as before. I sucked in a deep breath, held it until I was certain that there would be no flood of nausea, then went to investigate.

With its head in place, the body might have massed sixty kilograms. The undulating surface of the alien heads was continued over the entire body. The effect was still disturbing, almost as if the entire body were covered with large pustules the same color as the skin. The hands had four digits, two opposed to two, all about the same size with one less joint per than human fingers. There were no nails or claws, but the ends of the digits were almost as rough as the gripping surfaces of pliers or wrenches. The feet were very like horse hooves.

Despite my revulsion, I investigated that headless body very closely, and I was recording what I saw. There are two camera lenses in my helmet, one at each side, giving true three-dimensional video. This might be the only opportunity we, mankind, got for this sort of observation.

I removed the alien’s clothes—tunic and trousers, no underwear. Not having the equivalent of Gray’s Anatomy for this species, I could only make guesses about what I saw, but if the alien anatomy was anything like human, I was looking at a female… judging from the lower plumbing. There were no apparent breasts or nipples, nothing that I could point to and guess that it might serve the same function.

After I had turned the body over and given the cameras a chance to record everything—including a shot directly over the neck—I started looking around the rest of the cabin. There was only one room, not two like in my candle. The control panels didn’t look like ours, but there were screens, gauges, and controls. I couldn’t read the legends or calibrations. The interior of the cabin did show considerable damage. There were panels that had been deformed by whatever had hit the ship, controls that had been popped out of place. There was considerable loose debris, and one chunk of twisted metal about four kilos in mass showed the same sort of stains, the stuff we assumed was alien blood.

There were no books of instructions, no alien-to-human dictionaries, nothing that I could make any sense of other than in a general fashion.

I spent about forty-five minutes searching without learning anything that might help us help the alien lying on the floor of the habitat. The one left in the ship was beyond help. Nor had I learned anything that might tell us where the aliens had come from, or why one had decapitated the other, sewed the head to his own chest, and come into our shipwreck station to pass out. I didn’t know if the head was a trophy, or just some bizarre memorial rite.

I passed along what I was seeing. Angie gave me updates on what was happening inside the station. The alien seemed to respond to pure oxygen. His color got darker, he started to breathe more freely on his own, and after more than thirty minutes he started to show a little movement in his fingers and hands. There was no change apparent in the condition of the second head.

“I’m coming back,” I announced finally. “I’m sure as hell not accomplishing anything here.”

I made the trip back down the mooring line more quickly than I had made the trip up. I hurried into the airlock, closed the outer door, and started the pumps to put air into the lock. With my eyes closed I waited for the pressure to equalize. I did my best not to think about anything but what was happening right there in the airlock. I didn’t want to think about the other stuff. There were no answers there, nothing but aggravation, questions we could hardly hope to understand.

Angie looked up when I stepped out of the airlock. She had removed her helmet and pressure suit. There was no obvious threat from the alien, unless he carried microbes that could infect us. It wasn’t until later that I worried about that. It was too late for us, if there was. But the year or so we would spend on the wick heading for home would be a generous incubation period. If there was contamination that might not show in that time, everyone in the Solar System could be in big trouble.

“Any change?” I asked after I took my helmet off.

Angie shook her head. “Nothing major. I’m picking up a solid heartbeat, forty beats per minute. Since we don’t know what’s normal for them, I can’t say if that’s good or bad. His breathing seems easy, about sixteen per minute.”

“We don’t know if any of the readings are normal,” Clay said. “Anything we do could do more harm than good. Unless he wakes up and finds some way to tell us what he needs, we’re blind, deaf, and dumb.”

“How about the second head?” I asked.

“That’s the same as before,” Angie said. “Maybe there’s just a hint of darker color to it now. But what about that? Why did the one do that to the other? What’s the purpose?”

“I know this sounds crazy, but he may have expected that it would give the other some chance to survive. Extreme first aid, maybe, like putting a tourniquet on an arm or leg to stop an arterial bleeder.”

Angie looked at me as if she thought I were crazy for suggesting that. “Either that or he went stark, raving mad.”

Then I mentioned the other possibilities that I had thought of, trophy or some kind of rite.

“Anything is, I suppose, possible,” Clay said. “Since we know absolutely nothing about these aliens but what we can see.”

I had told them about the headless body and the stained metal. If they had bothered, they could have watched the video. I had done a lot of talking while I was in the alien ship, reporting just about everything I saw and did—everything but some of my thoughts.

“I wish we had someone we could call for help, close enough that it might do some good,” Angie said. I guess that we had all wished for that, but wishing would never make it so.

“We are limited,” Clay said. “We are doing perhaps the only thing we can now. Either the alien will get better or he will die. It is out of our hands.”

That much was obvious. But if this alien died—and that seemed likely—then what? I thought that we would have to take the alien ship and the remains of its crew back into the inner Solar System. That was when I started thinking about bacteria and viruses, and anything else small and deadly that the aliens might have carried. The authorities back home would probably not let us dock the alien ship with any of our major facilities. They might not even let any of us get anywhere to pose a hazard to other people for who-knows-how-long. But caution would have to contest with curiosity. They would want to study what we had. I had Barta docked with Ebbie. That would leave Clay the task of pushing the alien ship in. I wasn’t sure that he would care for that arrangement, but I wasn’t going to suggest switching loads.

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” I asked, rather a forlorn plea in my own ears.

Angie shook her head. Clay didn’t waste energy on any reply. It was a stupid question, I guess. And Clay had never been one to waste time on stupidity.

“All we can do is wait,” Angie said.

I got out of my pressure suit. It was beginning to feel like a prison. If there was any danger, so be it. I had already exposed myself. By that time I had started to console myself with the thought, the hope, that the alien’s physiology and biological environment would be so different that any bugs that might infect them would be unable to infect us. That seemed like a safe bet at a time when I didn’t have the option of withdrawing my wager. I was also counting on the guess that the alien spacefarers would be as nearly free of contagious microbes as human space jockeys normally are. We’re flushed regularly, when we return from a deep tour and before we go out on the next one. When you might be more than a year from any sophisticated medical help, you take every precaution.

Even Clay eventually got out of his suit. Then he ate a meal. He sat as far from the alien as possible and worked through a full ration pack. I joined him. Angie stayed by the alien, hardly ever looking away from him, as if she thought she might keep him alive by the force of her stare, and will.

“We’ll never be able to talk with him,” Clay said after he finished eating. “Not in the time we might have. A language with totally alien foundations, with no points of reference in common. No Rosetta Stone.”

“No what?” I asked. He explained the reference.

“If he recovers enough, we’ll find a way to communicate,” I said. “We can find the points of reference. Hell, Reid, we must be in the same business. Orbital mechanics, astrophysics, they’ll be the same. We can start from the math. We can point and each say our name for whatever it is we’re pointing at. We can draw pictures, diagrams, charts. One way or another, we can establish basic communications.”

“Just so he can tell us what to do to help him,” Angie said. “If he ever regains consciousness.”

“As long as he can tell us why he took that second head and sewed it on,” I said, half under my breath.

Nine hours later, Clay was sitting on a bench, his back against the wall. He had been dozing for the past three hours. I was on the floor in the opposite comer. I guess I’d been slipping in and out for nearly as long as Clay. Even Angie’s attention had flagged. She remained sitting next to the alien, but her head had drooped forward—several times. None of us had done much talking in five or six hours. There was nothing intelligent left to say.

When I was alert enough to think, it was things like, I wish he’d make up his mind one way or the other, and, Get it over with; die or wake up. How much longer were we going to have to wait? Could we just load the alien on one of the ships, dock Clay’s candle to the alien vessel, and start for home? Waiting for the alien to decide to live or die was frustrating. At one point I even considered slapping his face to see if it would provoke any reaction. Then I considered suggesting that Angie do it, mostly to save me the bother of getting up and walking over to them. In the end I just kept my mouth shut.

Then I heard a scraping noise, something different, and looked at the alien. He had pulled up his right leg. The knee was twenty centimeters off of the floor. The movement had also caught the attention of Angie and Clay. Reid leaned forward, staring. Angie went into a flurry of activity, turning to look at the elevated knee, then checking the alien’s vital signs.

When Angie gasped, I guessed that the alien had opened his eyes. I was right. I got up on one knee so that I could move in a hurry if I had to, if the alien somehow threatened Angie. Yes, that sounds ridiculous, but we had no idea what to expect.

“We’re doing what we can,” Angie said, leaning closer to the alien’s original head. “It isn’t easy. We don’t know what to do.” Maybe she thought that her words would get through by telepathy. She spent several minutes talking, telling him where he was, who we were, and so forth.

Wasted air, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have any more intelligent ideas to offer. Hell, maybe he would turn out to be telepathic. Who was I to say?

I stood. That way I could see for myself that the alien’s eyes were open—the eyes in his proper head. Clay stayed put. He was bent forward, elbows resting on his knees, staring.

Angie kept talking, making what I’m sure she considered to be soothing sounds—if only the alien interpreted them the same way. Maybe her nonstop chatting was nerves more than anything else. If it had been me, I would have left a little silence here and there to see if the alien would respond.

It must have been ten minutes before Angie gave the alien a chance to answer. She shut up abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. For a minute or so there was absolute silence. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, but nothing more.

The alien made a series of weak, guttural sounds. I was willing to concede, as a first hypothesis, that he was speaking. But he might have been choking, or trying to clear his throat. Call it six or seven words, a dozen syllables… assuming it was speech. Whatever it was, it was still unintelligible.

Angie looked at me. “How do we start?” she asked, overlooking the many minutes of chatter she had already inflicted on the alien, and on us.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I can’t think of anything better than what you’ve been doing.”

The alien turned his head, enough to see me. He made another short series of sounds.

“I wish I understood you, fella,” I said—more practice in the fine art of understatement. I pointed at Angie. “She’s doing everything we can think of to help.”

He looked at her again.

“If only you could tell us what to do,” Angie said to him.

“Point at the other head,” I suggested.

She did that. Then she shrugged and asked, “Why?”

The alien looked at his extra head. His eyes closed after a few seconds, but did not stay closed for long. He seemed to suck in a deep breath—the oxygen mask was no longer over his mouth and nostrils—then made more sounds.

I picked up my helmet to use the radio. “Ebbie, have you been monitoring this?” The alien watched what I was doing.

“Yes, Tim. I believe that it is speech, but I do not have enough data to guess at meaning or structure.”

That stopped me for about three seconds. “I didn’t know you had routines for anything like that,” I said.

“I have very extensive language routines. I do not have all human languages in memory, and there was always the chance for something like this. If there were some way to link me directly with the alien’s computer, assuming that it is functional, it might be possible for us to develop mutual communications.”

I felt like kicking myself, or inviting Clay to do it. “If we can link Ebbie to the alien ship’s computer, she might be able to begin some sort of translation,” I said.

“Of course!” Clay slapped himself on the forehead.

Angie looked first at me, then at Clay. Her expression was almost blank.

“I never thought to ask Ebbie if she had any translation routines,” I said. It had never occurred to me. No one in my lifetime had given much serious credibility to the chance of finding aliens. Yet some dreamer had put that sort of programming into a candle computer, just in case. It would have been a lot more convenient if someone had told us about it.

Clay got up long enough to fetch the alien’s helmet, the one that had been on the head sitting on his shoulders, and handed it to Angie. She took it, pointed inside, then pointed in the general direction of the alien’s ship. The she talked into the helmet before moving it toward the alien.

He gestured toward the helmet but could not lift his hand enough to reach it. Angie held the opening near his mouth and he did more talking, not as loud as when he was talking to us.

I did more talking into my helmet, then took it over. Angie and I set the helmets together on the floor, open end to open end. “OK, Ebbie, we’ve got you set up, I think,” I said. “Let us know over the habitat radio if you get anything.”

I had no idea how long Ebbie might need to get anything we could use—if she would ever be able to. Ebbie has a lot of computing power. All of the candle ships do. They need it for a lot of things, not the least of which is the ability to keep a pilot company for two years or more at a time.

“You want to try to feed him?” I asked Angie. “Fix up some broth, maybe a ration pack, see if there’s anything he can eat?”

“We might poison him!”

“Water, at least,” I suggested. “His chemistry must be able to handle that.”

Angie hesitated, then nodded. I got a squeeze bottle and gave it to her. Angie squeezed a little water into her own mouth first, holding the spout far enough away so that the alien would be able to see that it was a clear fluid.

“Water,” Angie said. She held the tube near the alien’s mouth. He opened it a little and she gave a very gentle squeeze, just a few drops.

He obviously recognized the taste. He said something, perhaps a single word, then held his mouth open again. Angie gave him a little healthier amount this time, and then more, letting him set the pace. She stopped only when he indicated that he had had enough. He said several more words, softly, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“We’ve started communicating,” I said, looking at Clay.

Several minutes passed before we heard from Ebbie. “This is going to be difficult,” she said. “Their computer suffered damage. I can’t diagnose how much. We are starting from utter basics, scientific truths, mathematical constants, and so forth. With only the audio link you have provided, it will take hours to get to anything that you might be able to use to converse with the alien. If his computer has the necessary knowledge.”

“Do what you can, Ebbie,” I said. “If you can get to the point where the two of you can understand each other past the numbers, we can try communicating with the alien, let you and the other computer do the translating.”

“That is what I am working toward, Tim. We are working together even now.” Well, I knew that Ebbie could operate several different tasks at once—dozens of them.

The alien seemed to be a little stronger after taking his sips of water. Ten or fifteen minutes later, he gestured for another drink, and Angie gave it to him. He could lift an arm now. The first thing he did was reach up and touch the face of the head sewn to his chest. He appeared to caress its cheek. While he did, he talked softly, too softly for me to have made out the words even if I could have understood them.

“If we prop him up a little, maybe he could take some food,” I said, watching the alien pay attention to the extra head. I had to talk, had to say something, anything. Watching that macabre monologue was making my stomach feel queasy again.

“I still don’t think that we should risk that,” Angie said.

“A little broth, something more than just water,” I said. “He can’t do much if we can’t get something more into him.”

“How about some of his own food?” Clay suggested. “Did you see anything in the ship that might be food?”

“I didn’t even think about food,” I admitted.

“I’ll go have a look, bring back anything that looks even remotely as if it might be food.” I was surprised to hear Clay volunteer. Maybe he just wanted a look at the ship’s interior. Or maybe, just to give him the benefit of the doubt, he was actually caught up in trying to help a fellow pilot.

“That would be safer than risking any of our food on him,” Angie said.

So Clay worked his way back into his pressure suit and left the habitat. He was actually moving rapidly, to do something for someone else. Maybe all of the waiting had something to do with his speed. Or maybe there was a touch more humanity to Clayton Reid than I had ever given him credit for.

“Maybe it’s time to start thinking about propping him up a little,” I told Angie. “Eating might be easier for him, the way it is for us in gravity.”

“But what about…?” She didn’t point at the spare head, but her eyes moved that way. “If we put him more upright, won’t that put extra pressure on those stitches?”

“He came in walking,” I reminded her.

“And passed out. Either way, we’re still guessing,” Angie said. “Why don’t we wait until we see if Clay finds anything?”

I couldn’t argue with that. Postponing tricky decisions was probably still the best choice.

“He does seem to be a little stronger now,” Angie said.

The alien was moving, but never much at once. He seemed to be trying to make himself more comfortable, in very tiny increments. That extra head had to be putting a strain on him, even in the very light gravity field we were in.

It was about then that I noticed that the alien was almost constantly staring into that extra face. It was more than that brief monologue and touching I had noticed before. I found myself wishing that I could read his expression, his emotions. If he had any. I mentioned the staring to Angie.

“I noticed before,” she said. “As soon as he had a little energy, I think. It’s spooky.”

“It was spooky from the beginning. It’s so… un-human.”

That almost provoked a laugh from Angie, or a retch. I wasn’t certain which. “No kidding,” she said after she had a chance to recover from that initial impulse.

“Have you had the feeling that this must be a really weird dream?” I asked. “That none of it is really happening?”

“Don’t go metaphysical on me, Tim. It doesn’t suit you, and my head hurts without trying to parse questions like that.”

The alien said something. Angie turned her attention back to him. He repeated, as closely as I could make out the sounds, what he had said before. He added a couple of weak gestures not enough to help us decipher the words.

“I don’t know what you said,” Angie told him, shrugging in a minimal gesture of her own. “We re trying to find food for you. Maybe that will help. Anything more will have to wait until our computers find a way to translate for us. If they do.”

One sound from the alien. Maybe “yes,” “no,” or maybe just a conversational place holder, an “ah” or “er.”

We had to wait another twenty minutes before Clay returned with a collection of things he had found in the alien’s ship. He gave the packages to Angie, let her display them to her patient while he stripped out of his pressure suit again.

“That place was a mess,” Clay said to me, speaking as if he didn’t want the alien to overhear. “It’s remarkable that he survived.”

“That survival is still in doubt,” I pointed out.

Clay looked at the alien. He had apparently chosen one of the packages. Food. Angie helped him eat. The stuff was some sort of thick paste, not much different in color than the alien’s skin—it didn’t look very appetizing to me.

“Perhaps we should have all of the computers working together on translation,” Clay said.

“I asked Ebbie if that would help,” I told him. “She didn’t think that it would. She said that all of the translation programs were essentially identical and that since we only have one link to the alien’s computer, there would be no benefit.”

“Even if we can nurse this creature back to health, I don’t see any way that we could help him repair his ship so that he could go back to his own kind,” Clay said.

I didn’t answer right away. I was having difficulty getting used to this sudden garrulousness from Clay. It was the clearest sign that the uniqueness of our position was affecting him.

“I know,” I said finally. “What I said before still holds. I think you’ll have to give him a tow to Mars. I’ve already got Barta docked to Ebbie.”

He nodded slowly. “I suppose you’re right. The question in my mind is whether the cabin of his ship is safe enough for him to travel in, or if he will have to ride with me.” It was clear that he would prefer to have the alien in the other ship, and I can’t say that I blame Clay for that.

“He’s going to need attention for some time, I think, even if his ship were habitable—and I doubt that it is,” I said. “But there are some benefits.”

He gave me one more very slow nod. “Trade-offs,” he said, almost under his breath.

“As long as he stays healthy, you should have a year to converse with him, once the translation program is set up.” Ebbie would transfer everything to the other candles, and send it on to Mars in a burst transmission so that the experts there could continue working on it while they waited for us.

It occurred to me that having a year alone with the alien would give Clay the lion’s share of the attention when we got home. Under the circumstances, he would probably deserve it. He would be “the” expert on the aliens. But I never considered offering to let him ferry Angie and Barta while I took the alien and his ship. All of that attention: if I enjoyed that sort of thing, I wouldn’t have been an Oort miner in the first place.

The alien took a long time with his eating. I guess it was work. Clay’s talkativeness wore itself out. We watched the meal. When it was over, the alien gave what sounded like a sigh of satisfaction and closed his eyes for a protracted moment. When he opened them again, he spoke. I doubt that it was anything so prosaic as, “My compliments to the chef.”

Food did seem to improve the alien’s condition, even before he had time to digest it. He appeared to be stronger. His gestures when he talked were—if not quick—not as slow as before, and slightly more animated. He did seem more inclined to talk after he finished eating. At times he rambled on for two or three minutes before falling silent.

At one point, Angie offered him the water bottle again and he took it. She pointed to the flask and said, “Water.” He took his drink and said something that sounded like it was all G’s and Z’s with maybe a Y or U thrown in the middle. Angie tried to repeat the word, with a notable lack of success, then said, “Water,” again. The alien tried to echo that word, with as little success as she had had with his word.

“Come on, Ebbie,” I said under my breath. “Let’s get that translation program working.”

The alien was cradling the extra head in both hands. At times he talked to it while he stroked one cheek or the other. Even worse—from my point of view—some color seemed to be returning to the head sticking out of the alien’s chest. That made the hair stand on my arms. If felt as if the skin were crawling up and down my spine. If the second head talked back, I wasn’t sure what I would do. I wouldn’t have ruled out a complete panic attack. It might have been too much for any human mind to handle. It would have been more than any human should have to handle.

But it didn’t happen. Thankfully.

Angie had finally felt the need for sleep. While she dozed on one of the benches, I sat next to the alien and made certain that he had water when he wanted it. By that time we could recognize his word for water even if we couldn’t reproduce it. He also seemed to doze off and on. When he was ready for a second meal, he was able to feed himself. His condition was clearly improving. I suspected that if it hadn’t been for the second head, he might have been nearly back to normal—whatever normal might have been for him.

Angie slept for two hours. Clay dozed for a time as well, propped up in his corner. I was also tired, but I did my best to stay awake, coming alert each time my head dropped forward. I tried a little water myself, hoping that would help keep me from falling asleep.

Despite everything, I almost did drop off. The air in the room felt heavy—hot and stagnant despite blowers and conditioners. Neither Angie nor I had bothered to turn the thermostat back down. I became aware of the low background hum of the machinery that kept everything operating. It was a lullaby. The alien had closed his eyes and seemed to be sleeping as well after his second meal.

A string of words in the alien language coming from the radio speaker almost turned me inside out. I must have been on the verge of falling asleep. The shock started my heart pounding before I realized that it was Ebbie’s voice uttering the alien sounds. Clearly, she had made some progress.

Angie and Clay had also come awake, and the alien had his eyes open when I looked at him. He replied. Ebbie said something else in his language. Then she switched to English.

“It has not been easy,” she informed us. “There are still vast gaps in what I have been able to learn. After we worked through physical and mathematical constants, we compared operating similarities, finding words for common functions and features. The leap from there to conversation was most difficult, and there are a great many words we cannot yet bridge, but I believe that there is enough for a beginning. We will monitor conversation in the habitat, and do such translating as we can while we continue our direct work. In time, we should be able to fill in many of the gaps that exist now.”

“Ebbie, this is Angie McBroom. Can you ask him what else we can do to help his recovery?”

There were several exchanges between her and the alien in his language. I suspect that the alien’s computer got into the act as well, but I can’t be certain of that. The discussion went on for a couple of minutes before Ebbie switched back to English.

“You are probably doing all that is possible,” she said. “I am interpolating here, but I think that what he really needs most is a blood transfusion, and human blood would almost certainly not be appropriate.”

“What about a saline solution?” Angie asked, something I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years. Intravenous saline packets would be part of the shipwreck station’s medical stores. “Would that help?”

“Let me investigate,” Ebbie said before she switched back to the alien language. This time the conversation went on for a considerable time, and from the gaps in the talk between Ebbie and the alien I was certain that there were also contributions from his computer.

“It probably can’t hurt and might help,” Ebbie said. “The suggestion has been made that the appropriate place to insert the fluid would be near where his mate’s head has been attached to the chest, just above, where the sutures are closest together.”

“His mate’s head?” I said, rather loud.

“Yes, the head,” Angie said. “What is that all about?”

“An extreme measure to preserve the life of this one’s mate,” Ebbie said. “I queried the other computer at great length on this. Apparently—and I am once again interpolating through language gaps—it was the only possible way to preserve that life. The head was removed. This one made a number of cuts on his own chest and attached the head there, over his heart. Preserving the mate’s life is necessary to preserving the life of this one. These beings pair-bond so deeply that if one mate dies the other does also, without exception.”

“How does it work?” Angie asked. “How can grafting the head on do anything?”

“The other body appeared to be too badly damaged for repair, even without the decapitation,” I added.

“I cannot be certain of the details,” Ebbie said. “Some of what I have deduced may be total guesswork, and is therefore subject to a rather large margin of error. I think that once the alien returns to his own people their medical specialists will be able to grow a new body for the head. That is the only sense I can make of it.”

“How long can he, they, continue like this?” Angie asked. “We’re not going to be able to repair their ship here. We’ll have to take them back to Mars. Can they survive for however many years it takes to get them home like that?”

“I do not know.”

“Where do they come from?” Clay asked.

“The second planet of Alpha Centauri A,” Ebbie said quickly. “We established that quite early in our session.”

“We’ve never received any replies from our radio transmissions directed there,” Clay said. “And I am unaware that we ever heard anything from that location before we quit trying.”

“We did not go into any of that,” Ebbie said. “I doubt that it would do much good. The alien’s computer does not seem to have any great store of historical data in storage, at least not in those portions that have survived. As I said before, she did suffer considerable damage.”

“At least now we’ll be able to talk to them in their own language,” Angie said. She had moved away from the alien and was rummaging in the medical supply cupboard. When she had the IV packet she was looking for, she went back and knelt beside the alien. “Any suggestions on how I start this IV?” she asked. “How do I find a vein?”

Ebbie asked the alien. He tapped his chest a finger’s width to the left of the centerline. He talked at the same time.

“The main vein there is about a centimeter deep, I believe, from the low spot in his skin,” Ebbie said. “As close to the head of his mate as possible.”

There wasn’t enough gravity on the berg to count on that alone for an intravenous drip. The IV pack included a small pump. The entire unit was designed to adhere to the arm of a human. The needle would extend itself from the bottom of the pack. It would seek a vein in a human. We were about to find out if it could manage the same feat for this alien.

Angie hesitated for a long time, both before she set the pack in place under the chin of the second head, and before she activated it. “I’m afraid I might kill him,” she said. Ebbie did not translate that.

The alien must have had doubts of his own. He stiffened up as the needle punctured his skin. For a moment he remained almost rigid, holding his breath. His face paled, but returned to what we took as normal shortly. Angie kept track of his heart rate and respiration. She watched his eyes. We all waited.

After ten minutes, we started to think that at least we hadn’t killed him with the IV. It was too soon to look for any improvement, but at least he showed no signs of getting worse. He had not gone into shock or anything like that.

“Ebbie, tell him that we won’t be able to repair his ship here, that it’s too badly damaged. Tell him that we’ll take him and his ship to our home-world. I’m sure that we can either repair his ship there or provide him with a replacement.” Wouldn’t the cost of that raise a storm! I waited for Ebbie to pass that much information along. The alien spoke at some length in reply, with a couple of sidebars while he and Ebbie tried to decide on a translation for something or other.

“As near as I can make it out,” Ebbie said when they were finally done, “he offers thanks and says that he did not think that it would be possible to repair his ship here, that he knows that it needs major repairs. He asked how long it would take to get to our homeworld, and how far that was from his home.”

“Tell him,” I said.

I think that I saw something that might have been despair on the alien’s face once Ebbie got that information across to him. She spoke for nearly a minute. He replied slowly.

“He is not certain whether or not they can survive that long. Apparently it will far exceed the longest time ever known for this sort of arrangement. I had to go to some length to get the time and distance involved in terms he could understand. He has no concept of our measures of those. It seems, though, that his ship is not markedly faster than I am. With the time it will take us to get him to Mars, and the time his return from there to his homeworld will take, they will have to remain as they are for more than ten Earth years.” Plus whatever time it would take for our people to repair his ship and decide to let him go. There would be arguments over that. Some of our folks would want to keep him around to study, whatever that might do to him.

I looked at the alien. I didn’t have to be able to read his expressions or body language to feel something of his anguish. His desperation. I don’t know that I would have had the heart to try what he was going to have to attempt.

“Ask him,” I said. “Ask him if he will try.” I don’t know why, but it was suddenly extremely important to me that the alien not give up, that the desperation that had led him to such extreme means of keeping his mate alive would sustain him. I listened intently to what Ebbie said, and to what he replied, even though I couldn’t begin to make sense of the alien sounds.

“He will try,” Ebbie reported. “He says that he has no alternative.”

Now, all of us have to wait, the entire human race. We got our Centauran to Mars alive. His ship was repaired and we saw him off on his way home. He’s not even halfway there yet.

He is still alive, and apparently his mate’s head remains… vital, I guess is the word. That was the last information we had from him. We’re in contact, spottily now that he’s so far out. It takes messages eighteen months in each direction, and that figure is constantly increasing.

We have also sent messages toward his homeworld—hundreds of thousands of words. Some of that is in human languages, mostly English. The rest is in his language. We can’t even start looking for a reply for more than six years. We’re still trapped by the speed of light. But people do a lot of talking about that reply, wondering what it might contain.

Angie, Clay, and I did the best we could for the alien. So, despite some opposition, did everyone else who came in contact with him or his ship. The Oort Miners Guild made enough noise to make certain that things were done right. Maybe our first contact with an alien species was unplanned, unexpected, but maybe it went all the better for that.