Lifeline

Chapter 45

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 50

Gray cliff walls jutted up against the black sky, miles from where Clancy stood. Behind him, Rutherford Crater closed together, offering a sight not unlike the view from Clavius, but an order of magnitude smaller. Razor-sharp black shadows and intense splashes of sunlight made the landscape look like a high-contrast photograph.

With his chin, Clancy kicked up the coordinates on his helmet. Soft red numbers glowed on his visor: minus 61 degrees latitude, minus 8 degrees longitude. Right on the spot. He felt as if he were standing in the middle of a giant bull’s-eye with somebody else playing at target practice.

He remembered his revelation as an undergraduate, when he had first discovered that Newton’s laws of physics required corrections when applied to orbits—either because of a planet’s oblate nature, or from its rotational wobbling, or from inhomogeneities in the planetary density. In fact, it seemed a miracle that Newton’s laws worked at all.

The thought haunted him now. The test projectile from Orbitech 1 was due to hit the lunar surface soon, and its orbit was well within the error bars.

Error bars.

The universe in practice was never so obliging as theory wanted it to be. Clancy flipped open his radio link.

“Hey, Shen.” He chided himself under his breath and tried again, using her first name. “Wiay, let’s move up onto the wall.”

“We’ve got a half hour.” Wiay Shen clumped into view, leaving slowly settling dust clouds behind her as she walked. Her footprints would remain there for centuries. “And we’re ten miles from the impact point, so we’re plenty safe.”

“We’re nine point seven miles away, if our radar fix is correct. And the impact point is only an approximation, anyway. Let’s go.”

“What’s the hurry, Cliff?”

Silence. Then Clancy spoke in a measured voice. “I said, let’s move it.”

“Okay, you’re the boss.”

Clancy swung himself around in the big suit and made his way up the rocky incline, putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to fall asleep just because moving took so long. He frowned at himself for being so impatient.

They left the six-pack below them at the base of the crater wall. Shen helped him negotiate the jumbled terrain, pointing out cuts in the rock that he missed. They circumvented boulders that looked larger than Orbitech 2 would ever be. For a moment Clancy longed to be back up in space, at the L-4 construction site, watching his crew welding girders, sealing habitats, putting together the largest closed environment ever made by man. If the “yo-yo” really worked as Clancy imagined it would, they might be able to go back there—someday.

They reached an outcrop of lava rock jutting hundreds of yards straight up. Turning, Clancy looked down onto the crater bed, now two hundred yards below them. Pieces of ancient ejecta lay where they had fallen after the impact millions of years before. Clancy knocked loose a small rock and watched it roll down the slope in slow motion and silence. Now he had left his mark here as well. Little actions had such permanent consequences.

They paused to catch their breath, when Shen spoke. “Are you all right, Cliff?”

“Fine.”

“You galloped like a mountain goat coming up here.”

He answered her with silence for a few seconds. “I didn’t think I was moving that fast. Just in a hurry, that’s all.”

Over the radio he heard her breath stop as she prepared to say something. “Clifford Clancy, are you worried about the weavewire harness hitting us?”

Clancy nodded to himself, which of course she couldn’t see behind the polarized golden visor. “It’s Orbitech 1 I’m worried about. We’re so close to Clavius Base—what if some celestial mechanic desperate to earn ‘efficiency points’ miscalculates the orbit, trying to plant the harness too close, and misses? Imagine a kilometer per second projectile hitting us.”

“The Aguinaldo didn’t have any problem. The wall-kelp package they sent us was right on the money.”

“They hit Longomontanus. They couldn’t have missed that with their eyes closed. This is different. No one can be this accurate—not with a ballistic trajectory.”

“So, what’s the chance of the weavewire package hitting us standing here? Pretty darned small, I’ll bet. My grandma once told me about how paranoid people on Earth were when Skylab burned up in the atmosphere. And we laughed at how ridiculous they all were. We have a better chance of killing ourselves by falling up here.”

“Well, Skylab wasn’t aimed right at us,” Clancy muttered, but said nothing more. Shen had a point—the terrain was rugged where they were standing, and the canister shot from Orbitech 1 couldn’t be too far off. But standing still and waiting in the middle of the crater for the canister to hit would be a lot tougher on the nerves than trying to find it after it landed. He cleared his throat. “We’ll have a better view up here, that’s all. We can see where the package hits.”

“Oh, give me a break, Cliffy. I won’t tell anyone you’re chicken. Now I’ll have something to hang over you. You’re going to have to ask me out or I’ll tattle.”

Thanks a lot, he thought, not sure if she was joking. He decided to ignore it. “We’re already here, so let’s stay put. As soon as the canister lands we’ll get back down.”

“Fair enough.” Shen twisted a backpack off her shoulders, looking graceful in her bulky suit. He realized it was just his imagination filling in details. Rummaging through the pack, Shen withdrew a tripod and set it up, extending the telescopic legs to their full length.

Clancy followed her lead, but he had trouble slipping his own backpack off over his air bottles. When he finally broke out the charge-coupled diode, Shen was ready to mount the detector.

“Ready with the CCD?”

Clancy grunted. “As soon as it’s calibrated.” He ran the CCD through a self-test. With its enclosed iris slowly shutting out the light, the solid-state device verified sensing a light change down to a single photon.

Satisfied, Clancy pushed to his feet and handed the CCD to Shen. Since the Moon had no atmosphere, the harness streaking to impact would make no trail across the black backdrop of stars. But the CCD could find it.

They worked in silence setting up the detector, finishing with plenty of time to spare, according to the digital clock on Clancy’s heads-up display. Once Clancy ensured that the CCD’s view angle covered the entire crater floor, he positioned himself out of the detector’s field of view. Shen joined him, lounging back against the outcropping. They waited for the smooth ocean of rock and dust on the crater floor to be marred by another impact.

After some minutes Shen broke the silence. “You really think it’ll work—the yo-yo, I mean?”

Clancy chewed on the question as he continued to scan the crater floor. “If everything cooperates.”

“You mean, like Orbitech 1?”

“How about celestial mechanics itself? We’ve got a lot of ‘ifs’ that have to be satisfied—if our part of the harness gets here; if we can finish the yo-yo; if the weavewire is really strong enough; if Orbitech 1 can land the wire and reel it back in.…”

Shen’s comment filled the inside of his helmet. “All we have to do is attach the weavewire to the harness and let Orbitech 1 pull the yo-yo up. I thought this had all been worked out by the Clavius and Orbitech eggheads.”

Clancy smiled to himself. Shen believed her practical experience as an engineer placed her far apart from the wild-eyed celestial mechanics.

“Well, Orbitech 1 can reel out a few hundred thousand miles of weavewire in a precise orbit, exact enough to land on the Moon—but even if the wire has a locator beacon on it, can you imagine how tough it’s going to be to find that sucker falling out of the sky? And remember, we won’t have much time to connect it, either—probably only an hour or so. Dr. Rockland and I were arguing this morning about what the speed of sound in the weavewire is.”

She turned toward him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“That’s how fast one end of the wire knows what the other end is doing, which tells us how early Orbitech 1 has to start reeling it in. Rockland thinks sound would propagate mechanically through the fiber, which means they would have to start reeling it back almost a day before the end even gets here. But I think because of the binding potential and the chemical bonds in the weavewire, a signal will travel almost at c —probably a third the speed of light.

“You certainly know how to throw a wet towel on a hot idea, Cliffy.” Shen sounded disappointed.

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate—”

“Incoming! Look!” Shen’s shout rang through his helmet. Clancy spotted the light flashing on the CCD unit. Across the crater floor a thin line plowed across the lunar dirt. It looked like a giant mole racing just under the surface, creating a tunnel miles long.

Shen read from the CCD, picking off impact coordinates from the matrix of light-sensitive diodes. “Impact point: nine point six nine two three miles; preliminary velocity parameters indicate it was moving at one point oh oh four klicks. That’s pretty darned close for government work, huh, Cliffy?”

Clancy was floored. The impact was well within even theoretical error, much less experimental bounds. “Got the final location?” He gathered up his backpack to tear down the sensor.

“Roger dodger over and out.” He heard a click as Shen switched to the open channels. She turned to find the relay transmitter on top of the crater and spoke. “Clavius Base, we’ve got our Christmas present. Going to pick up the package and we’ll come on home.”

Clavius Base acknowledged them, and Shen started talking to Clancy again. “I think Orbitech 1 has nailed down the delivery system, wouldn’t you say?”

“Let’s get this stuff packed and go after the harness.”

“Right.” Shen bumped up against his buttocks. He felt the pressure through all the thick padding. It didn’t go away.

Clancy turned and noticed that she was patting him with her hand. He flinched and decided to ignore the exchange, not sure how else to react. Thank God she had at least picked one of the most private spots in the solar system.

Once the CCD and tripod were packed, Clancy led the way down the crater wall. Dust floated behind him, kicked up by his feet as he scrambled down the rocky incline. The dust drifted reluctantly back to the surface. The other jumbled debris looked frozen, delicately balanced.

His thoughts turned to Shen. If things were different—if he weren’t in charge of the whole blasted construction crew—he might work up enough courage to see whether her blatant flirtation meant something, or she was just being brash—Was she getting even for all the good-natured but rough comments most women construction engineers endured on the male-dominated crew.

He felt a surge of emotion from deep inside, a need to explain to her, to hold her and experience all the things he had been holding back for the past year … but he knew it could never happen. His position as construction boss demanded unwavering obedience, and if she were to take advantage of his authority.… Best to leave things be and not make a move, much as he wanted to.

He stepped over a section covered with loose gravel and turned to check on Shen. He felt his feet start to slide as the ejecta debris, undisturbed for centuries, broke loose and flowed under him. He waved his arms, trying to keep his balance on the steep wall.

Clancy managed to twist his body and cover his helmet with his padded arms as he fell. He bounced against rocks on his way down. Screams came over his suit radio. Clancy slammed into a boulder and heard a crack!

Shen’s shouts in the ear speakers seemed drowned in static as he lost consciousness.

Wiay Shen watched in horror as Clancy tumbled down the rocky slope. His space suit slammed off boulders, leaving tiny gravel slides where he struck. Clancy rolled end over end as if falling underwater; he kept his arms wrapped around his helmet.

It took Shen a full three seconds to react. When she realized the screaming came from her own mouth, she silenced herself and started scrambling down the incline after Clancy. The sluggish suit and the low gravity made her effort exaggerated and slow.

Clancy came to rest by the base of the crater wall two hundred yards below, the top half of his suit hidden by a boulder. He lay a hundred yards from the six-pack.

Shen bounced down the steep grade, taking long, careful jumps. She couldn’t see Clancy moving. “Cliff, can you hear me? Clifford!”

She reached the boulder, knelt by Clancy’s body, and ran a gloved hand over his space suit. It was still pressurized—at least he hadn’t popped a leak. She felt a rush of relief at the discovery. The only sound she could hear was her breathing.

“Cliff, say something, you klutz!” The joking tone seemed limp.

She shook her hands out and wriggled them underneath Clancy’s body. If his neck was broken, she shouldn’t try to move him … but if he was dying, it wouldn’t matter anyway. With a grunt, she rolled his body over. How could anybody be hurt through all that padding? she wondered. Through his helmet, she could see that his head hung to one side. She scanned the vitals on his chest-monitor unit:

BLOOD PRESSURE: 163/80

TEMPERATURE: 99.6

RESPIRATION RATE: 93

Shen couldn’t tell if he had been injured. She made a quick decision to give him a sedative. She punched the emergency code into his chest unit, fumbling to hit the right buttons with her thick-gloved fingers. She swore at the red light that started blinking. She tried a second time, making sure to enter the medical override code correctly. This time the light burned a steady green.

Clancy’s suit began to pulsate as the lower part constricted, then expanded around his legs. Based on the old-fashioned “G-suit,” the movement prevented blood from pooling at the lower part of his body due to inactivity. A tiny needle on the inside of his suit pricked Clancy’s neck, injecting a sedative. It also withdrew a small amount of blood, so the automated diagnostics could make a white-cell count and a blood-sugar test.

Shen watched the diagnostics flash on the chest unit.

Minutes passed as she radioed to Clavius Base, explaining her emergency. Clancy’s respiration rate lowered. Satisfied that he wasn’t going to die on her, Shen straightened and looked around.

A milk run, she thought. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the crater—something we could do ourselves. She had talked Clancy into doing it, looking for another excuse to get him alone. It should have been a piece of cake—watch the weavewire harness impact, scoop it up, and get back to Clavius Base within an hour.

Her eyes lit on the six-pack a hundred yards away.

She’d better start moving. She took the distance at a lope. Once the electric motor started, she backed the six-pack to within a few yards of Clancy.

Clancy moaned into his suit radio. At least it was some sound. The ones hurt really bad didn’t make any noise. Shen bent over him and pressed her helmet against his. She could not make out his garbled words.

She bent to pick him up and looked for a place to hold on. Clancy was a full foot taller and outweighed her by eighty pounds. Once the space suit was thrown in, she was dealing with a hundred fifty pound differential in normal gravity. Even though he only weighed about fifty pounds on the Moon, inertia still made a difference.

Shen got her hands under his armpits and pulled him off the ground. It seemed as if she were tugging him through thick jelly. “I thought you were slim and trim, Cliffy!” She coughed with the effort and staggered to her feet, trying to balance Clancy’s bulk without jarring him too much.

Carrying him in her arms, she felt like an absurd parody of an old Frankenstein movie—a petite female monster hauling a big lunk of a victim. She felt her suit straining to combat her exertion and keep her internal environment regulated.

Clancy’s suit continued its constricting motions. The sedatives seemed to have taken effect—his blood pressure was down, as well as his respiration rate. At least he was stabilizing.

Shen gingerly placed Clancy on the six-pack’s flatbed and secured him there with a cable. She didn’t plan to follow the speed-limit signs on the way back to the base, and she certainly didn’t want her cargo to fall overboard.

She scrambled to the operator’s console, keeping an eye on Clancy as she started the engine. She moved the six-pack forward and started for the steep pass through the crater wall.

Only fifteen minutes had passed since the canister from Orbitech 1 had landed. Shen had a fix on its location, but that was far in the back of her mind as she pushed the vehicle to its limits toward Clavius Base.

Duncan McLaris absently tapped a dual-end pen on his desk. One end contained carbon ink for writing on paper surfaces; the other was a magnetic scribe for use on a flatscreen. Tomkins’s once-cluttered office looked organized; it gleamed. McLaris had removed and stored the stacks of computer readouts and pictures of radio telescopes. The noise from the pen’s tapping bounced through the room.

McLaris focused his mind on a single topic—a burning question to which he already knew the answer. And the answer made him feel sick inside.

In the excitement following Clancy’s proposal of the yo-yo, and Brahms’s agreement to try, no one else seemed worried about the most important question of all—who would risk their lives in the attempt? Who would have to go to Orbitech 1?

Part of the answer was obvious—Tomkins and many of the others were so immersed in their work that they didn’t want to be disturbed. But others, especially Clancy’s engineers, ached for a chance to get off the “Rock.” It would indeed be an experience of a lifetime.

But who really would get the most out of being sent? Clancy himself was the first obvious choice, since it was his invention—if he wanted to go. Someone else in his crew would go next. But yet … they couldn’t send just engineers; they needed someone who would make the event meaningful, an emissary—someone who could make this joining of the colonies truly memorable. Someone to make speeches and give good holotank footage.

McLaris stopped tapping his dual-end pen and bent it between his fingers.

He knew who else should go—someone who had ties back on Orbitech 1 … someone who had the vision to pull the separate colonies together and ensure the survival of the colonists.

Someone who needed to face up to the fact that he had stolen and destroyed the last regular means for the colonies to visit each other.

McLaris’s pen broke in half. He looked at the two pieces, bewildered, thinking how foolish it would be to try and put them back together again.

Once the six-pack climbed through the pass, Rutherford Crater sloped down to the monotonous plain where Clavius Base lay. Shen pushed the vehicle to its full speed, driving without relying on its inertial navigation system to find her way back. She turned on the emergency beacon, and she knew Clavius would be standing by with help when she got in. But until she came within line of sight of a receiver, she couldn’t depend on anybody else.

Clancy’s suit diagnostics were tied in to the six-pack through a light fiber; Shen kept his vital signs flashed on the vehicle’s heads-up display across the front screen. The numbers shimmered in a ghostly image from the holographic projection. Looking at Clancy’s life signs, she didn’t want to think about ghosts.

Two other six-packs appeared as dots across the plain, growing in size as they raced toward her. What good are they supposed to do? she wondered. I’m already trucking as fast as I can. She ignored their radio calls and drove on, not slowing down for fear of cutting Clancy’s time.

The low mounds and transmitting towers of the base showed up on the flat pan of the crater floor. Wide tracks from the other six-packs looked like the marks of a giant doodlebug around the center of the settlement. Not until she pulled up to the main airlock at Clavius Base did she allow anyone to help her—and then only to carry Clancy into the clinic.

Shen didn’t leave his side as they cycled through the big doors. Three medics hauled Clancy’s bulk between them, pushing her aside.

As he was carried away, Clancy mumbled something unintelligible. If those are his last words, Shen thought, he damn well better be saying how much he loves me.