Shape has no shape, nor will your thinking shape it; Space has no confines; and no borders time. And yet, to think the abyss is to escape it.
-CONRAD AIKEN, SONNET XXVI
JESSICA BUHLER LOOKED UP FROM THE SEAM on the cigar-shaped spaceship whose far end, like the horizon, hid what lay beyond. A handheld electronic weld-checker, secured by a safety cord, dangled from the glove of her spacesuit. The ship had been put together from oddly shaped pieces of metal, like a child’s puzzle, and the job of checking thousands of seams might never be done. The devices that sealed the seams checked welds as they were made, but when survival depended on every part and every person functioning perfectly, Adrian believed in checking and rechecking. That was his nature, Jessica knew, but it also was a measure of his commitment to the mission he had chosen. Before she was born, she amended. It was important to keep matters in perspective.
Beneath her was the long hull of the spaceship, apparently complete but as yet untested against the forces of acceleration. Frances Farmstead would have identified the genre as 1930s science fiction. She could tell, she would have said, because the ship looked as if it had been lifted from the cover of Astounding Stories, maybe the first installment of The Skylark of Valeron. Images that endure, she said, characterize situations better than rational analysis. They encapsulated the wisdom of the species.
Some of the crew laughed at Frances and her genres. “How’d them aliens get hold of a copy of Astounding?” they’d say.
But Frances was unperturbed. “If you don’t identify the situation, you won’t know what to do when it comes times to act,” she said, and she was so sure of herself that some of them began to wonder if she might be right.
But building the ship hadn’t been as easy as the stories made it sound. There was none of this “they all pitched in and by working hard they put the ship together in a few weeks,” or “they built the ship in an empty barn by working after school and on weekends.”
Jessica was attached to the smooth metal surface by magnetic grapples as she moved, with her machine, from seam to seam. When she raised her head she could see the blue, cloud-strewn globe of the Earth disturbingly above, and then, in a gut-wrenching transformation, like some inescapable abyss yawning below. She closed her eyes and mentally readjusted her relationship to the universe. It was an exercise in which they all had grown skillful—all except Frances who, in spite of her experience in identifying situations according to the genre models that came to her so readily, had been space-sick until the chemists and physicians found a medicine that worked. Even then Frances had never been able to labor outside where the need to invent one’s own orientation had left her dizzy and disturbed.
Past the far end of the ship Jessica could see the skeleton of the old space station, half its parts scavenged for structural elements and hull plates. Like the Kennedy Space Center from which they had boosted into orbit, the space station had been abandoned in place. At first the construction workers who would become the crew had lived in the quarters that once had housed astronauts and experiments. As soon as they had settled in, the station itself, trembling in all its fragile connections, had been raised from its degraded orbit by rocket motors carefully placed to minimize stress. Only afterwards, as people considered the difficulty of constructing the ship that would house the alien-designed equipment and of boosting into orbit the necessary parts, did someone suggest supplementing what had to be manufactured below with materials already available. The first part of the spaceship built, then, was the crew’s living quarters. In the alien designs those spaces had been left blank, as if the aliens had understood that creatures who received their message were likely to come in many shapes and sizes. It was an issue frequently discussed over the mess table and in late night bull-sessions: what did it mean that the aliens made no assumptions about the physiology of sentience?
Nobody wept over the deconstruction of the space station except a few sentimentalists who had pinned their hopes for space on this stepping-stone to the stars. That would once have included Jessica and the head of the project, Adrian Mast, and the ageless Frances, his adviser and co-conspirator. But that had been twenty-five years earlier, when all this started in a book found by Adrian on a UFO remainder table. Five years earlier the Energy Board had given them the power, but that left the would-be space-travelers dependent upon their own manpower and the construction workers they could recruit. The number of volunteers had surprised them, but all this, and their training, had taken a year, and the construction itself, another four years.
Part of the resources allotted to them was the space station. In another form it might, indeed, reach the stars. If the alien designs worked. That was the immediate concern. What would happen when the button was pushed? Would the containment vessel work or would the ship simply disappear in a titanic union of matter and antimatter? Would the ship disintegrate under acceleration? If it moved, would it move at interstellar speeds? Could they control it? Could their bodies endure it? If everything worked properly, where would they go and how long would the voyage take?
Those were the questions that worried Adrian, even if he didn’t show it. They worried Cavendish, who fretted about it all the time until everybody told him to shut up. And it worried Frances most of all, although she concealed it from Adrian and everybody else. She couldn’t conceal it from Jessica, however; nothing can be concealed between two women who love the same man, and everything is obscure to the man who is so wrapped up in his job that he has no time for personal relationships.
All this passed through Jessica’s mind in the fleeting moment of relaxation and attitude adjustment before the terrible realization hit her that the ship had begun to tremble beneath her feet.
——
“What’s going on?” she said into the suit radio she had activated with her chin. The receiver only crackled as if someone had leaned against the on-switch. By that time Jessica had slipped the seam-checker into magnetic catches on her suit and was running across the outer hull, breaking one magnetic grapple free and swinging it ahead, and then the other, in an unconscious coordination of movements that she had perfected over the past years. “What’s happening?” she asked again. Unfortunately, she was almost as far as she could get from the nearest open hatch. By the time she was halfway there, her body had tightened with the notion that the ship had begun to move. She looked back over her shoulder. It was a contortion in the airtight suit made possible only by her slender athleticism. The skeleton of the space station seemed farther away. It was all subjective, she told herself, and then she was at the hatch and pulling herself into it, locking the hatch door in place with another athletic contortion, and waiting for the air pressure to build to the point where the inner door could be unlocked.
She backed into the clamps that held a row of spacesuits just inside the inner hatchway. It was a slow process, but faster than trying to maneuver down narrow corridors in a bulky suit and then being unable to communicate except by radio. Finally she was free. Dressed in what looked like a one-piece garment of long underwear, she propelled herself down a zero-gravity corridor toward the forward control room. It was like a high-platform dive without an entry, a repetition in which she caught herself with bent knees at a turn and launched herself again until she arrived, at last, at a room crowded with dials and screens and computers and keyboards and distraught people milling about aimlessly and weightlessly.
Adrian was among them and Francis and Peter and a dozen or more others whose names and faces had become as familiar to her as neighborhood buddies. Some of them hung upside down or sideways to her orientation, but that surrealistic panorama no longer had the power to surprise. She had no time now to identify them individually. “What’s going on?” she asked again.
They looked at her, in every possible configuration. “Someone programmed an engine test into the control-room computer,” Adrian said. “Fortunately, there were only a few atoms of antimatter in the containment vessel—maybe a billion or so—left over from the pre-installation tests. And only a similar femtogram of matter. Otherwise it might have been catastrophic.”
“We didn’t move,” Frances said. “Just shuddered.”
“Who did it?” Jessica asked.
Frances shrugged.
“No way to know,” Adrian said. “We don’t even know how it was done.”
“But you said a test was programmed into the control-room computer?” Jessica said.
“That’s the only way the engine could be started,” Adrian said. “The entire process is so complex that the human mind can’t perform the necessary calculations or react quickly enough. We’ll check the computer programs, but I suspect that whoever was clever enough to install the program so that it nestled, unsuspected, among the computer’s legitimate programming, won’t have left any digital fingerprints.”
“At least,” Peter said nervously, “we know that the engines work.”
“We knew that already,” Adrian said. “From the static tests.”
“But we didn’t know if the mountings would hold or the ship would blow up.” A muscle twitched near Peter’s left eye.
“We still don’t know,” Adrian said.
“Some people have said they saw the bearded man,” Frances said.
“The bearded man,” Jessica repeated.
The bearded man had become a legend within the crew. Ever since workmen had taken up residence within the space station, one person or another had reported brief glimpses of a strange man. He was described by each of the viewers as wiry in appearance, with skin burnt nearly black by space radiation, against which an unkempt white beard was even more spectacular. The sightings were so fleeting or so isolated that no verification was possible. As difficult as it was to imagine a mysterious person existing within the closed community of space workers, some people were beginning to believe in him; others thought he was a ghost or maybe a mass hallucination brought on by concern about their work and its risks, or the brooding presence of the aliens and all the unanswered questions they trailed behind them.
“We’ll put our best people to work analyzing the computer data,” Adrian said, “and providing safeguards against future sabotage.”
“Sabotage?” Jessica asked. “You think it was sabotage?”
“It certainly seems like it, but we can’t let it interfere with our mission or it will have succeeded. Let’s get back to finishing up. Tomorrow we load antimatter and reaction mass, and the day after that we take our first test-flight. Everything has to be ready by then.”
“You haven’t said yet who’s going to be on board during the test flight,” Peter said.
“Everybody who wants to be,” Adrian said. “Anyone who doesn’t want to share the risks can back out if they wish, with no hard feelings. We’ll let them board afterwards.”
“And what if it blows up?” Peter asked.
“Then we’ll all go with it,” Adrian said. “We might as well face reality: This is our only chance. The Energy Board won’t give us another. Who wants to survive their dreams?”
Jessica turned from the door into the control room to head back to her lonely job of checking seams. They were airtight, that had been clear ever since the crew moved in, but suddenly it seemed vitally important that they hold up under acceleration.
“Jessie,” Frances said, coming after her. “Can we talk?”
As soon as they had reached a point beyond earshot of the others,
Frances stopped Jessica with a hand on her arm. “You asked who did it,” Frances said. “Some members of the crew think it was you.”
——
Jessica looked at Frances, wondering why the old woman who was her unlikely rival was telling her this. “Why would anyone think that?”
“You were Makepeace’s agent,” Frances said. “People remember.”
“I’ve worked five years on this project,” Jessica said. “How long does it take to earn people’s trust?”
Frances gestured as if to say, “People have long memories.” And “Look at you—young and shapely and pretty. How can anyone who isn’t any of those things be sure what people like you would do?” The movement made her spin gently until Jessica reached out a hand to stop her and relieve Frances’s nervous inner ears. Unlike the revealing long underwear most of them wore, Frances was wearing loose coveralls; although biogenetic treatment had removed fat and years, it could not change the fact that she was short and sturdy.
“Anyway,” Jessica said, “why would I want to sabotage the ship when I was out checking seams?”
“I didn’t say it was reasonable,” Frances said. “I just thought you ought to know what people were saying.”
“I’m sure they’re saying the same thing about everybody, with the possible exception of Adrian,” Jessica said. “Nobody’s above suspicion, and even Adrian might be trying to test the crew.”
“Or get rid of people he doesn’t trust by assigning them to duties on the hull,” Frances said, “at the time of the test.”
“While we’re at it,” Jessica said, “we might as well throw in the bearded man.”
“Him, too.”
“Well,” Jessica said, spinning toward the distant hatchway, “at least I know you set them straight. About me.”
“You know I did,” Frances called after her.
But Jessica carried her suspicions back onto the hull and her lonely job. Was it ever going to end? Would she always be an outsider?
At the end of her long shift, tired and hungry and still brooding over Frances’s subtle accusation, she straightened up from the last seam and took one final look around. The next day she would be loading antimatter and who knew whether some accident would destroy all their work and hopes and them as well. The following day, if all went without disaster, they would make a test run. However matters went, there would not be many more chances to stand free above the abyss and consider her birth planet, a blue, water-blessed oasis in the vast desert of space. She looked at it steadily for several minutes, thinking warm thoughts of home and family and favorite things, before she sighed, secured her equipment to the magnetic catches on the suit, and turned toward the nearest hatch.
Only then did she think about the bearded man and swung around to face the ruins of the space station, looking like the archeological remains of a curiously shaped dinosaur. On an impulse she moved to a portion of the ship closest to the former station and launched herself into the dark desert she had just been considering. She made a small adjustment of her steering jets and caught a girder on the station as she passed. That sort of space maneuvering had become commonplace in the past four years, although some of the crew were better at it than others and a few, like Frances, never did it at all.
Jessica swung herself along the girder until she reached a portion of the station that still retained a few plates. There she used her magnetic grapples to walk toward the part of the station that was relatively untouched. In the middle of a solid metal wall was a hatch that she didn’t remember, that had no business still being there. She cycled it open. Beyond was darkness, and, from the lack of condensation when the hatch opened, airlessness as well. Her suit lights revealed a storeroom in which discarded equipment and tools floated like a Dalí nightmare. She shut the door behind her, to keep the debris from cluttering nearby orbit, and made her way through this obstacle course to the far wall where another closed hatch waited to be opened.
She hesitated. Why had no one been here before? Or if they had been here, why had they left the equipment loose behind them and why were the hatches closed? But then, before further doubts could damage her resolve, she reached forward to palm the hatch switch.
The hatch opened. A gush of ice particles rushed past her helmet as moisture from the air within froze instantly. Jessica was glad she had closed the far hatch; the equipment and maybe she herself might have been expelled through it. The segment of station in which she was standing, it was clear now, had been used as an airlock for the room beyond and the debris, as camouflage. In the next section someone had been living. A net-enclosed sleeping niche was in one corner and in another a closet that might house a toilet and perhaps a shower. A water spigot broke the smooth surface of a far wall next to plastic-fronted cupboards stacked with dehydrated food and quick meals, and a microwave.
The walls themselves were papered with posters and photographs. They were not of Earth but of space and astronomical objects—planets and stars and nebulae and galaxies, and artists’ renderings of spaceships making their way among them.
Jessica felt a tap on the shoulder of her suit.
——
Jessica turned to face a person in another suit—but not the bearded man an over-active imagination had summoned. Features were not easy to discern in the helmet but she could see that the person had no beard. Then she recognized Cavendish. She started to switch on her suit radio, but Cavendish shook his head and motioned her forward. She pulled herself into the segment ahead and turned to see Cavendish follow. He swung himself around at the door and cycled it shut. After a few moments he eased his helmet loose, waited, and then pulled it off. He motioned Jessica to do the same.
Jessica winced at the odor in the room. Someone had been living there for a long time with little sanitation and less concern for cleanliness. Perhaps the waste-disposal system had malfunctioned. The place stank.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I might ask you the same thing,” Cavendish said. His left eye twitched.
“Someone’s been living here,” Jessica said.
“No doubt about that.”
“It occurred to me maybe we were overlooking the obvious,” Jessica said. “Maybe the sabotage came from the outside. We get so used to being alone up here; we don’t consider other possibilities. Maybe those wild stories about the bearded man aren’t just wild stories.”
“So you came here to check up,” Cavendish said. “It doesn’t make any sense, though, does it? How could anyone avoid discovery when we were living in this place for a year before we dismantled most of it to build the ship?”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense,” Jessica said, “but here it is. Someone has been living here. Anyway, that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?” She looked at Cavendish suspiciously. She had never fully accepted him and his place among them. She knew he had deciphered the original message, and that he had smuggled the information out of SETI and published it in the disguise of a UFO cult book; and she knew that his doubts about alien motives had driven him mad, or, rather, had reinforced his natural paranoia to the point of psychosis. But he was as responsible as anyone for gathering the crew that had built the ship and helping to persuade the Energy Board to allocate resources and let them go.
“I kept looking at the remains of the space station,” Cavendish said, “and there was something wrong with it. I didn’t know what it was until I began to compare its appearance with videos from the past. And then I realized—”
“What?” Jessica prompted, hoping it wasn’t more of his paranoia. But then she remembered how her gaze had been drawn to the station time and again.
“That this part of the station was different. It wasn’t here until a few months ago.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jessica said. “Does it?”
“It makes more sense than the possibility that someone was living here and nobody noticed.”
“Then you think—”
“That this is a space module designed to look like a part of the station, or a part of the station retrofitted to serve as a space module. It could have been an escape vessel in the original plans.”
“You think it could have detached itself when we began arriving in orbit,” Jessica said.
“And hidden itself god-knows-where. Maybe on the other side of the Earth. Maybe a few hundred kilometers away. We weren’t looking for anything or anyone. We thought we were all alone.”
“And then,” Jessica said, “whoever-it-is decided to come back to see what we were up to. We can check it out. It should be easy enough to discover whether this section has jets and fuel tanks and controls…. But why did it return now, just as we are about to fuel the ship and test it?”
“Maybe you’ve just said why,” Cavendish said.
“He—or she—but it must be a he. I can’t imagine a woman putting up with this kind of filth,” Jessica said. “He must want to stop us from going.”
“That would fit in with the sabotage,” Cavendish said.
“We’ve got to tell Adrian,” Jessica said.
Cavendish shook his head.
“That’s why you didn’t want me to use the suit radio,” Jessica said, “in case anybody was listening.”
“If Adrian decides to postpone the fueling and the test run until we find out why this has happened and who is behind it, the saboteur will have succeeded,” Cavendish said.
Jessica looked at him, trying to read his expression. All she could see was his left eye twitching. What he said made sense. It all fit together. And yet it was wrong. “We can’t keep this to ourselves,” she said. “That wouldn’t be fair to Adrian or the crew or the mission.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” Cavendish said. “Nothing must delay our project.”
“But we don’t know what other sabotage may already have been accomplished,” Jessica said. “And we don’t know where the person is who occupied this room.”
Cavendish looked at the room with sudden surprise. Jessica followed his gaze. Someone had lived there, someone who worshipped space and the stars, a hermit who had brought his cave with him.
“Nothing must delay the project,” Cavendish repeated, but this time his tone was different. He was pleading now, his eyes fixed on her as if his very existence depended on her answer.
“I don’t agree,” Jessica said. “But I’ll wait until after the fuel is loaded.”
Cavendish’s eye twitched again, and Jessica wondered what she would do in this place isolated from everything and everyone if the unstable personality in front of her should snap. What if he attacked her to prevent her from doing what he clearly thought was against the best interests of the project, or his own? But she showed no signs of her unease. She put on her helmet and as she shoved herself forward, Cavendish moved aside and let her pass.
——
The antimatter was to be ferried from the nearest orbital converter by a vehicle shaped like an elongated dumbbell, with an engine on one end and a tiny pilot’s saddle and controls on the other. In between, empty racks waited for vessels treated as gingerly as eggs and looking something like them—white and tapered toward the ends—or maybe more like oversized footballs for a game between Titans.
Alien devices shaped like giant moths were circling the sun, soaking up solar radiation, transforming it into high-energy gamma rays by means of alien-designed “magic crystals” constructed of “strange matter,” and beaming them back to receivers in synchronous orbit. The receivers produced the antimatter from the gamma rays. One receiver had been diverted to storing its output in magnetic containers that Adrian, and a team of theoretical physicists and ingenious engineers, had constructed from the alien designs found in the appendices of Cavendish’s book.
Would they work? Well, they—or devices similar to them—worked in orbit to store antimatter until it could be converted into energy beamed down to Earth. But vehicles had to ascend from the spaceship’s near-Earth orbit to synchronous orbit, gingerly detach the magnetic vessels and place them with equal care into the clamps prepared for them, and bring them back to the ship’s lower orbit. And there the vessels had to be removed and placed in new racks aboard the ship, fastened to devices that would allow them to be tapped, one by one, for their alien contents and fed, a small stream of ions at a time, into the magnetically shielded engine.
Jessica thought about all these things as she maneuvered the first ferry to dock with the receiver. A sleep period had passed since she had discovered the space-hermit’s lair. Nights and days had no meaning in orbit, but for convenience most of the workers slept at the same time, with only monitors on duty. Jessica had not slept much, and when she had awakened she had avoided Adrian. It was easy to do in the bustle and suspense of fueling. Her skill in piloting and zero-gravity maneuvers was generally acknowledged, and she had volunteered. The thought that everything depended on her—everything they had dreamed and worked for—made her stomach churn, but the thought of not volunteering was even worse. And the thought of what her crewmates would think if she didn’t volunteer.
The thought she finally settled on was that she would rather be handling the job than leaving it to someone less likely to pull it off without blowing up themselves and the ship, and maybe a few hundred thousand acres of home-world accidentally beneath at the moment of explosion. The orbital receiver was a maze of receptors and reflectors with an enigmatic spherical structure in the middle. The lethal eggs were racked outside the sphere where they had been deposited automatically once they had been filled with the most destructive substance in the universe.
She remembered what her mother had told her when she graduated from college and went out into the world on her own. “I have learned only two things in my life,” her mother said, “and it’s all I have to pass along to you.” And then she said, “Nothing’s easy” and “everything takes twice as long as it’s supposed to.” Her mother had been right more times than Jessica could remember, and now she would have looked at the business of transferring the antimatter containers and nodded. It wasn’t easy and she suspected that it would take twice as long as it was supposed to.
As she flipped the switches that held the first magnetic bottle to the converter rack, she thought about Cavendish’s aliens. She called them “Cavendish’s aliens,” because Peter’s book had started it all. His cult book would have been considered a work of imagination, or psychosis, if anyone considered it at all, but Adrian had stumbled upon it and thought the designs might work. And they had. They had produced antimatter generators and a spaceship that might even prove capable of interstellar travel. And the spaceship might even take them to—what? Adventure? New worlds? The aliens who had sent the designs? Their hearts’ desires?
Did Cavendish’s aliens really exist, and if they existed would they be generous patrons distributing their largess to rational creatures wherever they existed? Or was there something dangerous, something explosive, at their core? Like the antimatter containers themselves, did they require delicate handling?
One by one Jessica brought the magnetic bottles to the ferry and snapped them gingerly into place until the broomstick was full. Then she maneuvered her cargo out of the converter maze into open space and waited until the spaceship arrived at a point when a slowing of her speed could lower her orbit to a near-Earth rendezvous. There she assisted with the unloading and storage of the eggs, fueled the ferry, and headed back to the converter. Not once but three times. Her mother was right. It took twice as long as it was supposed to, but, at last, the eggs were stored, she and the ship and the crew had survived, and the ship was ready for its test voyage.
Except for one thing. The crew. Who would go and who would stay behind? “Adrian wants to see you,” Frances said as soon as Jessica removed her suit.
——
Adrian waited for her in the tiny conference room located between the living quarters and the control room. It doubled as a mess hall. Everything that wasn’t a metal, load-bearing wall was made of lightweight plastic: tables, stools, clamps to hold trays and utensils, and vertical clamps for bottles. The room smelled of meals recently warmed in the microwaves that lined the walls, and over-riding that, of human effluvia that only registered when crewmembers came in from work outside.
But Cavendish was there, too, strapped onto a stool, looking paranoid and defiant at the same time.
Adrian studied her face. Jessica could feel him trying to gauge her trustworthiness.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“What?”
“About the vehicle disguised as living quarters on the old station?”
“Peter argued that I shouldn’t tell anyone,” Jessica said forthrightly, “that it would only delay the test flight. I didn’t like it, but I allowed myself to be persuaded. It looks like that was a mistake.”
“Peter says it was the other way around, that you tried to persuade him.”
“So I see,” Jessica said. “If that’s what he has told you, then one of us is lying. Either he talked me into not reporting it so that he could report it first and cast doubt on my loyalty to the project, which raises questions about his motivation, or I tried to conceal information that might be critical to its success. Who are you going to believe?”
Adrian steadied himself on the edge of the table to keep from floating away. “A difficult question. Peter has been involved in this project even before Frances and I—”
“And I was a Makepeace agent before I converted,” Jessica said. “Maybe Makepeace planted me on the project. On the other hand, I’ve been a valuable member of the crew, and I’ve just retrieved and stored three loads of fuel.” And I’m tired as hell, she could have added, and my nerves are ready to snap from tension. And you’ve got me here answering foolish questions.
Jessica had a foot hooked under a chair and didn’t have to steady herself. She shook her head; the movement made her shoulders rotate.
“And Peter has been programming the computer,” Adrian said. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he continued, postponing any decision. That was his major flaw. “There can’t be any strangers among us, no bearded men, no ancient astronauts. Why should there be evidence of one?”
“There are stories—” Cavendish began.
“Space legends,” Adrian said. “You get a bunch of people together under stress, and stories get started, myths get created and repeated until they lose their origins, people begin to believe in them.”
“But the room—” Cavendish said.
“I’ve checked the computer records,” Adrian said. “No astronaut is unaccounted for.”
“Records can be doctored,” Cavendish said darkly. “NASA wouldn’t have wanted it known that they left an astronaut in orbit.”
“No way they could have kept it secret,” Adrian said.
“Then someone else has been living there,” Jessica said.
“Peter said he followed you,” Adrian said.
Jessica looked at Peter. Cavendish looked away.
“And he said you seemed to know where you were going.”
“I had a hunch,” Jessica said. “A sense of wrongness. If you saw it, you’d realize I couldn’t live in such a mess. It would have to be someone who can sneak away without being noticed.” She thought a moment. “Peter’s assignment, programming the computer, leaves him unsupervised. He wouldn’t be missed.”
“And you’ve been working alone out on the hull,” Adrian reminded her.
Jessica shook her head again. “The results of my seam checking are available on the computer. But if the room isn’t evidence of a bearded astronaut left behind when the station was abandoned, someone else has been living there. Or it’s a set-up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s a puzzle,” Jessica said. “Put in place to slow us down. To give someone else time for—”
“What?” Adrian prompted.
“I don’t know,” Jessica said.
“It’s not going to work,” Adrian said. “We’re going ahead on schedule.”
“The test flight?” Jessica saw Cavendish’s body tense. At that moment she understood what was going on, but there was no way to prove it within the time available.
Adrian nodded. “The only decision we have to make is who is going with us.”
——
A sleep-time later the entire crew, all awake at the same period for a change, scattered throughout the ship making last-minute checks of operations and systems that already had been checked many times before. Obsessive-compulsive behavior became normal, as the entire project, and the lives of those aboard, depended upon every part performing perfectly, except for the crew, whose inevitable mistakes had to be anticipated. And there were some alien-design functions built into the ship that Adrian and a few others thought they understood, but no one could be certain until the ship moved. That made everybody nervous, particularly Cavendish, who buried himself in computer readouts and simulations.
Finally, however, everything was declared as ready as it was likely to get, and Adrian assembled the crew in the largest of the three dormitories, the one for single men; the two smaller for single women and for couples. Contemporary mores mixed genders as if ignoring their differences could eliminate them, and the builders of the star ship expected growing fraternization. Eventually the largest dormitory might be turned over to the couples. But the designers—mostly Adrian—had decided that a certain amount of privacy, limited though it was by the spaceship volume and its necessary functions, would be a healthy preface.
Even the largest dormitory was crowded by the 212 people who had volunteered to construct the ship. One had been killed, one had been injured so seriously that she could not continue, and one had come down with multiple sclerosis. The conquest of space exacted casualties.
Some of the crewmembers sat on the edge of bunks, an arm or a leg wrapped around a tubular support. Others anchored themselves to the wall by the hand-holds placed at regular intervals, and others simply floated, at ease in free fall, in mid-air. Jessica was one of them.
Adrian was just inside the oval bulkhead, whose entrance could be sealed automatically in case of a meteor strike or other accident. Most of the construction crew could see him, but all could hear. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “that we are prepared to take a momentous step. Our job here is done, and our next challenge lies ahead. Not all of you signed on for that part of the adventure, and those of you who choose not to stay aboard for the test flight may wait in the remains of the old space station.”
“I understand,” he said, “that a new living facility has been added recently.”
Jessica could feel Adrian’s glance, but she was looking at Cavendish, clinging to the support of a nearby bunk. Cavendish was looking hard at Adrian as if forcing himself not to betray himself by looking at her. Then Jessica looked away to see Frances studying them both. Frances knew that Cavendish was avoiding looking at either of them. But Jessica wondered how much Frances knew and whom she believed. Adrian trusted Frances’s judgment. Even though Frances reduced everything to familiar scenarios, she had been partnered with Adrian for twenty-five years, and they had brought this whole thing off, just the two of them. So what Frances believed counted.
Jessica thought back to her own beginnings. She had grown up secure and happy in a supportive California family, free to go where she wanted, to surfing or the tennis court or off to college, never doubting that she had a place to return to and people who loved her, no matter what, until the quake of ‘21 hit and her family was in the middle of it. The Energy Board could solve or ameliorate most human problems, but it couldn’t control the natural processes of the Earth. Jessica never knew whether her family was killed when their house collapsed or by the tsunami that washed everything out to sea.
In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the recruiters for the Energy Board had looked like a new family, and she had reached out to them blindly. She had accepted one harmless assignment after another, mere bureaucratic information gathering, unaware that she had been identified by the agents working for William Makepeace. Even when she received the assignment of feigning an affiliation with a group of space enthusiasts, it seemed like only another way to gather information, and simulating a relationship with a man she had never met, and never heard of, seemed innocent enough. She was part of a family, and family did no wrong.
And then when she met Frances and later Adrian she discovered that life was not so simple. Life demanded choices between options that seemed equally attractive. Nobody knew how choices would turn out, so it was a matter of weighing facts and the logic that connected them. Ultimately, though, it boiled down to temperament: either you were conservative, like Makepeace, valuing what he possessed and what those around him possessed, which formed a seamless wall of covenants, and you were apprehensive of the change that might endanger those possessions; or you were adventurous, willing to try something new even if it cost you everything, enraptured by a dream and pursuing it past the point of pragmatic reality, hitching your wagon, literally, to a star.
That was why she had abandoned the family she knew for the dream she had only barely understood—that and the attraction of the man who owned the dream, or was owned by it, the unprepossessing Adrian Mast, whose soul was illuminated by his belief in humanity’s future in space.
“So,” he was saying, “we will test ourselves and our ship today. Nobody will hold it against anyone who wishes to leave. In fact, we will make it easy. There will be no guard on the exit hatch, and the monitors will be turned off. Those who choose to leave will be given an opportunity to rejoin the ship after the test run, or they may return to Earth on the next shuttle. Are there any questions?”
Cavendish looked as if he wanted to speak but remained silent.
“All right, then,” Adrian said, “the test will begin in two hours. And may good fortune be with us on our maiden voyage.”
Jessica looked at Frances and then at Adrian and finally at all the faces with whom she had grown familiar over the past few years. She realized that what she had chosen was a new family, but a family all the same, and the possibilities were great that this day she would lose this one, too—and life itself.
——
The engine started smoothly, almost imperceptibly. Louder than the whisper of the exhaust were the exhalations of breaths within the control room. Jessica hadn’t realized until then that waiting for the moment of truth had been like waiting for the dentist’s explorer to touch an exposed nerve or reaching the point on the roller coaster ride where it hesitates at its apex before plunging into space. She looked at Adrian, who was strapped into the pedestal chair next to her. He glanced at her and grinned. It was an expression at least as much of relief as joy.
Two other crewmembers in the control room monitored the engine room gauges and the remote sensors, but otherwise it was Jessica and Adrian. Frances had complained of a headache and gone to the unmarried women’s dormitory to lie down, but Jessica thought it was because she didn’t wish to risk being space-sick in front of Adrian when the ship began to move.
Jessica looked at Adrian again. He nodded. She edged the ship out of orbit with the manual controls, careful not to approach the remains of the space station where members of the crew, as yet unspecified, had absented themselves, or to point the ship’s exhaust in that direction. The antimatter should be completely annihilated in the magnetic-bottle reaction chamber, but no one knew if the design was perfect or if it had been perfectly translated into metal and strange metal. In the world where matter met antimatter, nothing less than perfection sufficed.
Jessica had not slept well the previous night. In fact, she did not remember sleeping at all. But now she felt alert, alive, exhilarated, as if she had set out to kill a dragon but had captured it instead and tamed it and rode it, wings flapping, into the sky. The ship that they had put together piece by piece and part by part, that had seemed as if it would never be complete or if complete would never function as intended, was an entity, by some gestalt magic turned into a living creature. Even the feeling of weight was different, pressing them into their seats, giving reality to what had seemed like airy insubstantiality.
The control room was silent as people concentrated upon their tasks, but a murmur came from the corridor. It was a sound like the well-bred approval of a Wimbledon point well-played, and Jessica realized that the crew, at stations throughout the ship, had broken into relieved conversation.
“We’re off to see the universe,” she said to Adrian.
He nodded and grinned, as if he did not trust himself to speak.
As soon as the ship had cleared near-Earth orbit, Jessica accessed the next preprogrammed maneuver. Their velocity would gradually accelerate until the ship reached an orbit beyond that of the moon, which would be, by that time, on the other side of the Earth.
“I’m going to check on Frances,” Jessica said.
“I should have thought of that,” Adrian said.
Jessica made her way to the single women’s dormitory, adjusting to the realignment of walls and floors under acceleration pressure. She missed the freedom of weightlessness, but that loss was balanced by the exhilaration of motion.
The dormitory was empty.
Jessica felt a flash of hope that Frances had, somehow, slipped away to join those who had absented themselves from this test run, but recognized the folly of that thought. Frances could not have left and would not have left, and Jessica did not want her to leave. The competition between them was nothing compared to their friendship.
Jessica found Frances in the single men’s dormitory. She was standing in front of an open locker. Frances turned to look at Jessica as she entered. “I thought it was time to check on the absentees,” Frances said.
“Adrian said—”
“Leaders can afford to be magnanimous only if they have skeptical lieutenants,” Frances said. “We’re launched on an adventure, and in every adventure scenario there’s a weak character who is going to endanger everybody, and the quest itself.”
“I always thought you had me picked for that role.”
Frances shook her head. “That was always a possibility, but it’s either the one you don’t expect or the one you know is going to break, like Conway’s brother in Lost Horizon. In this case, it was most likely to be someone who wasn’t on the test flight.”
“And how did you figure out who that was?”
“I turned the monitors back on. Nine people left the ship: Cavendish and eight of the people who were with him from the start, back at the abandoned Kennedy Space Center.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“That was clear after his accusation. The accuser is either unwisely ignored or is trying to shift suspicion from himself.”
“Or trying to convince himself that his treachery belongs to someone else,” Jessica said.
“That, too. But this pretty much clinches it,” Frances said. She pulled an object from the open locker and held it, dangling, from her hand.
Jessica stared at it, trying to decipher what it was. Then it came into focus: it was a latex mask, like a man’s skin slipped intact from his head. There was a bald head mottled with spots of age, a tanned and aged face, and a long, white beard….
“The bearded man,” she said. “And the locker?”
“Peter’s,” Frances said.
From over the public address speakers Adrian’s voice said, “I thought you’d all like to know: I’ve started the next programmed flight sequence.”
Jessica knew what that meant. The ship was launched on a course for Mars. One of the tragedies of manned spaceflight was that the energy behind space exploration had dwindled before humanity had an opportunity to investigate any of the planets, even the nearer ones, and on their maiden test flight Adrian hoped to rekindle the popular imagination with a flyby.
The information about Cavendish may have come too late.
——
By the time Frances and Jessica reached the control room, plodding along in the traditional step-by-step that pleased Frances and annoyed Jessica, the ship had been accelerating for five minutes at a steady one gravity. The control room wasn’t at all like those on the television shows Jessica had grown up with: it was sparse and utilitarian, with a semicircle of pivoting armchairs mounted on pedestals and equipped with velcro belts. The chairs faced a curved, plastic counter top inset with dials and keyboards. Above that a series of vision screens showed the various working areas of the ship and exterior views in all directions.
No windows. Jessica recalled Adrian chuckling when Peter asked about the plans. “Windows!”
Jessica shook herself before she fell into one of Frances’s genre pits. Identifying the genre wouldn’t help this time.
Adrian swiveled around to face them, pleased with himself and his world. Jessica hated to spoil his mood. She looked at Frances.
“I found this in Peter’s locker,” Frances said, holding out the mask.
Adrian took in its meaning at a glance. “So,” he said, suddenly sober, “Peter is the bearded man. I wonder what he hoped to gain by that. What does he have to say?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Jessica said.
“He isn’t around to ask,” Frances added.
“That’s a pretty fast search,” Adrian said.
Frances shrugged. “He was among those who left.” She seemed much more in control now that her trial by weightlessness was over. “You know the way things work. You propose and I dispose.”
Adrian accepted Frances’s breach of his word without comment. Jessica didn’t know whether it was because he expected it or because they had more serious concerns. She hoped it was the latter. She didn’t want to reevaluate the relationship between Adrian and Frances while she was still struggling with the implications of Frances’ last sentence and Adrian’s failure to react to it.
“That means we may be sitting on a time bomb,” Adrian said.
“Clearly,” Frances said.
“I feel sorry for Peter,” Adrian said.
“I know.”
Jessica looked from one to the other impatiently. “Why are you talking about poor Peter when there’s so much to done?”
“The question is,” Adrian said, “what’s to be done?”
“The ship is working like a dream,” Frances said, “but there’s no way of knowing when it will turn into a nightmare.”
Jessica looked from Adrian to Frances and back again. “What are you saying? You don’t even know what’s wrong. You don’t even know if anything is wrong.” She moved impatiently to the pilot’s chair and began looking at the readouts.
“If there’s anything wrong,” Adrian said, “—and there almost certainly is something wrong—it will be in the computer. The glitch in the computer program two days ago was a test.”
“And a warning we should have paid more attention to,” Frances added.
Jessica hated the way Adrian and Frances completed each other’s thoughts, like an old married couple. She typed in the command for the computer to switch to manual, but the ship continued its acceleration unaltered.
“We all knew how much this project meant to Peter,” Adrian said. “It’s still hard to believe that he would sabotage the only thing that would bring him peace.”
“What we didn’t know,” Frances said, “was how great his fear still was.”
Adrian shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it of clutter. “He started the whole thing. Without him there would be no alien message, no designs, no project.”
“He stood in for humanity itself,” Frances said. “Attracted by the mystery; afraid to find the answer. Attraction and repulsion. Balanced in most. Exaggerated in some, like Peter, to the point of anguish. Finally the fear got the better of him.”
“We may well be in a difficult situation,” Adrian said, “but it’s Peter I feel sorry for. He’ll never know. He has to know, and yet he never will.”
“I hate to say this,” Jessica said, “but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Peter has been working for Makepeace. Only Makepeace could have arranged for the capsule that fit so neatly into what was left of the station, and only Makepeace could have come up with the scenario that landed us here. He doesn’t want us to succeed. For earthbound humanity’s reasons, sure, but most of all for Makepeace’s reasons. I’ve worked for him and I know how he thinks.”
Adrian and Frances exchanged glances.
“That may be true,” Adrian said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”
“Well then, try this,” Jessica said. “The manual controls don’t work.”
Adrian nodded. “And I’d guess there’s nobody aboard who knows how to reprogram the computer.”
——
Jessica looked at their eyes, first Adrian’s and then Frances’s. They were curiously unafraid. She realized that they were looking at her eyes, as well, and that in them they would read frustration and impatience and, yes, fear. She turned to the vision screens while she tried to gain control of her emotions. The rear view showed a rapidly retreating moon, and the one slightly to the side, a disappearing Earth still looking a fertile blue streaked with white. On the other side, where the sun would have been, the overload had closed down the receptors. Ahead was the star-strewn blackness of outer space.
She looked at the readouts. “We’ve been underway for an hour,” she said calmly. “Our speed is thirty-five kilometers per second, and we’re almost sixty-four thousand kilometers from Earth.”
“If the program maintains this acceleration,” Adrian said, “by tomorrow we’ll be about one-sixth of the way to Mars.”
Jessica input an inquiry. “Our course and speed has us arriving at Mars orbit two hours before the planet does. Unless something changes, it seems likely that Peter had something else in mind.”
“And it seems likely,” Frances said, “that if Peter had intended to destroy the ship, it would have exploded by now. Some celestial fireworks would have been a good object lesson for the rest of humanity.”
“The question is,” Adrian said, “what were Peter’s intentions?”
“Jessica,” Frances said, “you just got that information from the computer, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You said it had locked you out?”
“I said it wouldn’t let me change our acceleration or course, or switch to manual,” Jessica said. “Everything else is proceeding normally. It’s providing readouts, controlling air composition and temperature, showing us views, everything it was built to do—except letting us choose where we want to go and how fast. Like a virus that’s taken over that one part of the computer.”
“That means that Peter had some kind of plan.”
“Like a one-way ticket to an unknown destination,” Adrian said.
“I guess we’ll know when we get there,” Frances said.
“If he just didn’t want to get rid of us with a ticket to nowhere,” Jessica said.
Adrian shook his head. “That wasn’t Peter’s way. He had these twin compulsions of fight and flight. He couldn’t bring himself to fight, but he couldn’t bring himself not to seek the answers his neurosis needed. So he has sent us to find out the answers.”
“Which he’ll never know,” Jessica said impatiently.
“Which he’ll never know,” Frances agreed. “And he’ll grow old never knowing. He’ll have psychotic episodes when he wants to kill himself because of guilt and others when he thinks he’s getting messages from us or from his aliens. He’s going to have a miserable existence and die a miserable death, wishing he were here, but at least he’s going to know that we’re out there, looking.” Frances gestured toward the forward vision screen with its star-sprinkled vastness.
“It could be the aliens themselves,” Jessica said. “It could be an alien virus, inserted who knows when, intended to bring us to them, like sheep to the slaughter.”
“That sounds like Peter’s paranoia,” Adrian said.
“Or Makepeace’s,” Frances said.
“On the other hand,” Adrian said, “Peter may well have had information that he was withholding.”
“What kind of information?” Jessica asked.
“Information about where to go once the ship was built.”
“Instructions from the aliens?” Jessica asked.
Adrian nodded.
“But why would he withhold it?” Jessica asked.
“Maybe he concealed it even from himself,” Frances said. “Because it was too horrific.”
“If it was too horrific for him, why shouldn’t it be horrific for us?” Jessica asked.
“Because he’s paranoid,” Adrian said, “and we’re not.”
Jessica turned back to the keyboard at the pilot’s station. “Maybe you’re satisfied with going where Peter’s paranoia takes you, but I’m going to learn how to master this computer. I’ll break into its programs and make it take us where I want to go! After all, we’ve got all the time in the universe.”
“And where do you want to go?” Adrian asked.
Jessica was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be—abducted.” She swung back around to face them.
“Frances,” Adrian said, “I think it’s a good idea to develop the skills to reprogram the computer. Between Jessie and me, and whoever else has some talent for it, we ought to be able to figure out how to do that.”
“That’s a good idea,” Frances said.
“But, Jessie,” Adrian said, “once we do regain control, I think we’ll have to consider leaving Peter’s programming intact.”
“But why—?” Jessica began.
“I think he programmed in the instructions about how to get to the aliens, the part of the original message he never revealed to anyone. And I think we won’t ever find a more suitable goal, and we’ll never be satisfied until we find the answers to our questions as well as Peter’s.”
“Why did they send us the plans?” Frances said. “What do they want from us? Who are they?”
Jessie turned back toward the vision screen that showed the depthless blackness littered with tiny lights that represented the long way ahead. Everything was orientation and a constant adjustment of one’s relationship with the universe. If their acceleration remained constant, the ship would leave the Solar System in thirteen days and in another four hundred days or so they would pass beyond the Oort Cloud.
Behind them, looking at it from the viewpoint of the universe, would be cosmic debris. Ahead would be the abyss, the bottomless pit of interstellar space.
And even deeper, the mysteries of where they were going and what strangeness waited for them at the end of their voyage.