Lifeline

Chapter 28

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All your people,” McLaris said, grinning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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