GERRY GRIPPED THE FIFTH AND FINAL singularity drive, conscious that if Mitch hadn’t overdosed himself with barbiturates, his life support would have given out seventeen minutes ago. Gerry had a line around his waist, and this line, attached to Drive Five, slowly settled in a deep arc toward the surface of the asteroid, its fall slow in the weak gravity, as if it settled through molasses. Ian maneuvered around behind, gripping him, fearful of falling off the asteroid. Gerry’s fingers felt stiff from holding the drive so tightly. He was sweating inside his suit, and his smell was ripe because the Tarsalan virus had sabotaged his personal hygiene unit and all his intragenic filters were off-line.
He heard Ian’s stertorous breathing through his suit radio. The sun was to his rear, and Gerry’s shadow was like a piece of black felt on top of the drive.
He glanced toward Ian and saw his old friend latch his safety belt to one of the drive’s maneuvering rings. “How do your crampons feel?”
“Still holding.” Ian sighed. “This is taking so long.”
“Last one.”
“I keep thinking of Mitch, drifting away.”
“We stay professional, like he says.”
“We’ve been going for eighteen hours. We’re punch-drunk tired. We’re going to start making mistakes soon.”
“Last one. Go ahead.”
“I wish we could fight this damn virus.”
“It would be like two men trying to dike a flooding Mississippi.”
Ian withdrew the pneumatic drill from his pack, like pulling a huge white arrow from a giant quiver, brought it down, maneuvered carefully, then glanced at Gerry. Gerry reached over and grabbed onto his arm. Once Ian was convinced Gerry was holding him tightly, he muttered under his breath, “Three, two, one,” and fired the T-bolt through the brace. Both of them tensed up. Gerry watched his monitor as his crampon psi increased tenfold, and was glad that his feet felt as if they were stuck in deep mud. The last one. Ian started to laugh, first a few short guffaws, then a long run of ha-ha-has, as if they had just deviously outsmarted the virus. No sooner had he finished laughing than the right guidelight mounted at the side of his helmet blinked out. They both froze. They braced themselves. Little things were going wrong all the time now. As though everything was going through a quick aging process. Gerry’s left guidelight blinked out, and the little red warning signal on his inside visor screen, retinally focused so that he could see it easily, told him that the virus was now checkmating his means of illumination.
“I don’t get how this virus works,” said Ian.
“And look, it’s nearly night.”
The terminator came at them like a quick and relentless black tide, spilling over the uneven surface like ink. He couldn’t help thinking of the rising tide of barbiturates in Mitch’s bloodstream. Funny the way it worked, but the second the terminator touched them, their remaining guidelights went out, as if the leading edge formed an invisible circuit. The darkness was so complete that he felt as though he was in a coffin. The stink of his own fear came to him like the sharp zest of a lemon. The red light blinked again, and in this darkness he was too afraid to move—because first it could be the guidelight, then it could be the crampons, and then they could fall off the edge of Mount Gaspra.
“What do we do?”
Ian’s breathing came over his radio—uneven, stopping at times—and it took him a full fifteen seconds to answer. “Wait for daybreak.” This immediately seemed reasonable, because daybreak wasn’t too far away, only three and a half hours, and they had worked so hard that they were considerably ahead of schedule anyway. Neither of them said anything for several minutes. The whole episode had a dreamlike aspect, especially when Gerry started thinking of the physical particulars: two human beings on an asteroid, desperately isolated from every other human being in the solar system, both of them gripping the last drive, neither moving nor saying anything. Because it was so dark, Gerry began to feel disembodied after a while. But then Ian, a man who always had to talk, gave way to that particular impulse, and the first words out his mouth had to do with Neil, and how Neil was going to have to eat crow when they got back.
“I’m not even thinking of that, Ian,” said Gerry. “I’m just hoping it all works out.”
“Whatever happened to Neil?”
“I guess he started believing in his own propaganda.”
“I just want you to know, I admire the hell out of you, Gerry. I used to admire Neil, but now I admire you. Not only for this mission, but for the … the way you’ve turned your life around. Giving up drinking and all. It’s really helped me.”
“You should thank Glenda. Glenda’s the one who made me see sense.”
“It’s seven weeks for me.”
“Congratulations.”
“I guess I didn’t mention—I started going to A.A. meetings before we left.”
“That’s great, Ian.”
“And I want to meet someone when I get back.”
“I thought you had Stephanie. That night we went for a walk around the lake … I got the impression—”
“Stephanie doesn’t know what she wants.” He said this abruptly, with evident hurt in his voice. Gerry waited for him to elucidate, but he steered clear of Stephanie. “All I’m saying is … I believe in the future. That might sound funny, considering we’re up here, and we have one system failing after the other. But … you know what it’s like. The drinking. Especially when you start doing the heavyweight rounds. And I was doing a lot of heavyweight rounds before you came up. I was a miserable human being, Gerry. I didn’t believe in the future. And now I do. And I just want you to know that … even if things don’t work out … all this has made a big difference to me.”
Sunrise ripped over the opposite horizon of Gaspra like a wild bushfire at the end of the asteroid’s short night.
They found their way back to the sled.
The sled wouldn’t start at first, and when Ian checked the diagnostics monitor, he saw that the number-three relay in the ion pump was misfiring, turning back on itself so that it was in danger of shorting out.
The pilot shut the number-three relay down, keying in the off-line sequence with a quick and practiced hand, and while this resulted in a lessening of drive power, and a concomitant reduction in speed, they still covered the ten miles from the end of the asteroid to the Primary Command Vehicle in under twenty-five minutes. They maneuvered through the critical plane and, looking down at the pitted gray-brown surface with its little freckles of shadow here and there, Gerry got the sense that they were not flying above a planetoid but passing a gigantic transport truck, this illusion created by the way the horizon sloped drastically in all directions.
The PCV came into view a short while later, its clean, angular planes, panoramic freighter windows, and fluorescent green anchoring supports a comforting sight to both of them. They were thankful to at last land the sled, untether themselves from each other, make the final risky walk to the air lock, and get inside the Prometheus, where the danger of falling off Mount Gaspra didn’t exist.
Telemetry and orbital dynamics called for the ignition sequence three hours and twenty-two minutes later—in other words, Gaspra had reached that precise point in its age-old journey around the sun when it could most effectively be targeted toward the Moon. As Ian went through the sequence Gerry felt, like a presence inside him, the death of Mitch Bennett. The pain was no longer acute, but it was still there, a chronic ache. Through the freighter windows he saw the sun, a bright star, something that could easily be transplanted to a Christmas card as a stand-in for the Star of Bethlehem. Ian had his gloves off and his long fingers danced over the keyboard with virtuoso intensity. With the command patterns now encoded, he went to the engage sequence, something he had to do with a special key made of orange-tinted titanium. But when he turned the key the red warning light went on, and they learned that the spreading Tarsalan virus had hamstrung the ignition cascade.
“The PCV’s main computer was supposed to fire engines one, three, and four but instead asked me to fire two, four, and five,” said Ian. “I’m going to have to bypass the computer and make myself the interface.”
Ian took out tools and fiddled with the key box, and got to the guts of the thing. There were some sparks and smoke, and finally a smooth hum. The position of the sun shifted as they began heading homeward in a steadily collapsing orbit.
But the ignition sequence was just the start of their troubles.
Three days later, communications with AviOrbit Control became intermittent. They sat together by the console, and while Gerry saw that the bits of information were coming in—they could be seen in a representative sawtooth pattern on the Vox interpretive software screen—the virus jumbled those sound packets so that the vocal result was the equivalent of a spilled jigsaw puzzle. They glanced at each other. It sounded like a bunch of ducks settling down for the night. Ian went into the background language and made adjustments, typing furiously, and they finally got Ira.
“What the hell is happening?” asked the AviOrbit boss.
“We’re having further degradation,” said Ian. “Maintain an open channel at all times.”
Navigation blinked out for up to thirty minutes at a time and then would come back on, and Ian would scramble to recalibrate their fall sunward. Four days in, they sat by the navigational unit and Ian had his wristwatch up close to his eyes. They were both sweating because life support was making the temperature warm. Ian’s face had gone red in the heat, and a small droplet of perspiration hung from the point of his nose.
“I hope my watch is right,” he said, and fired another braking burn, having to use his own wristwatch for the timing because the navigational counter was currently off-line due to the virus.
The solar-activity warning system failed, and they were forced to use one of the backup radiation monitors to alert them to any possible anomalous radiation from the sun. Gerry climbed into the helm area to hold the wand in the air, and the little speaker crackled and the needle jumped into the red. They were forced into the radiation bunker for the next eighteen hours, having to strip down to their thermals, as the magnetized protection of the bunker allowed no metal of any kind. It was like sitting in the scoop of a backhoe shovel, the ceiling sloped and cramped, and the only light coming from a nonmagnetic phosphorescent strip that put out such a pathetic number of weak green lumens that only the edge of Ian’s face was outlined with an ill-defined edge of olive murk. They were like two men in a dark steam bath, only there wasn’t any steam, just the steady hiss of the monitor telling them that solar activity raged outside. At last the radiation passed and they came back out to take their posts at the command console.
Because the five FMC Transit Collective drives were the most advanced AviOrbit had ever built, and were able to accelerate, in theory, indefinitely, the trip sunward was quick, and after six days Gerry and Ian were halfway back to Earth.
But in that six days, a lot happened.
At one point, their life support began to behave erratically. They both huddled around the monitors and watched the temperature plummet, the little blue bar sinking and sinking. Ian went into the background language and tried to write some corrective code, but even as Gerry watched, new Tarsalan-generated code appeared, as if antiphonally answering whatever Ian might try. So at last they got into their CAPS. Gerry cranked up the heat and heard the little crackling noises of the conduction coils, and merciful warmth caressed his shivering body. But eight hours later he watched the blue bar on the life-support readout rise, and he got so hot, and his ventilation was by this time so riddled with virus, that he took off his CAPS and pressed himself against the polycarbonate pressure windows to keep cool. Ian came up and joined him.
“Remember the time we went to Mexico? That heat wave they were having?”
But all Gerry could truly remember of the Mexico trip was the tremendous amount of tequila they had downed.
The cabin pressure became too high, and his eardrums ached. The alarm dinged and told them that hull tolerances had climbed into the yellow, so they had to vent atmosphere in order to bring the pressure back down. Out the freighter windows Gerry saw a cold, blue cloud of the stuff drift away over the surface of Gaspra, like a tenuous and ill-defined band of ghosts, the color reminding him of the color of the blue marlins his brother caught at Trunk Bay.
Then, as they were nearing Mars, the virus locked the venting system into the open position and the air became so thin that it reminded him of the time he and Neil had climbed Mount Baker, back in the days when they actually still did things together. Ian sat at the console, his fingers clicking over the keys, and his blue eyes were a picture of concentration, predatory and birdlike as he finally managed to reroute air away from the vent manifold and into auxiliary tanks. By this time pressure was so thin that Gerry felt dizzy, and he was wondering if he might be suffering from altitude sickness. They broke out the emergency breathers—they wanted to conserve their CAPS for whatever emergencies might lie ahead. Once he had his breather strapped to his face, he didn’t feel so light-headed anymore.
They again stopped at Mars, establishing a braking orbit around Earth’s red neighbor, and approached the FMC’s Phobos-Deimos Terminal, an immense structure fabricated out of the planet’s two moonlets, the planetesimals joined by hundreds of luminous skywalks. PDT Control okayed them for rendezvous, stipulating a ten-kilometer limit, and Ian parked the craft in a tandem orbit behind Deimos. The two men got out and were ferried by taxi to a hotel on Deimos for the night. Meanwhile, the Federated Martian Colonies refurbished their ship with the necessary life support to get them the rest of the way to Earth.
Their room, in a hotel that resembled a stack of bubbles, much like the bubble nests Siamese fighting fish manufactured to breed, was made of a one-way material. Outside, looking in, Gerry saw an opaque blue sheen similar in color to a sapphire. But once he was inside looking out, he got a spectacular view of the Martian surface ten thousand miles below. (Phobos had been moved into a considerably higher orbit while Deimos had been maneuvered into a much lower one for the construction of the PDT.) Gerry beheld the red planet with a mix of awe and reverence. Its red, orange, and ochre shades reminded him of the flowerpots Glenda had in their backyard at home. And even though it was a dead world, it was at least a self-supporting world—if worse came to worst, they would always have Mars. He saw the volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge. He saw Valles Marineris, and the whitish straining of the polar ice cap as it tried to finger its way south. A world without a phytosphere. As beautiful in its way as Earth. He couldn’t help thinking of Luke Langstrom. Somewhere down there, Dr. Langstrom had his home. Spacecraft occasionally flew by. It was like a scene out of a futuristic dream, and he was thankful, because ordinarily he never would have gotten to see something like this.
It was while they were in their hotel room that Ian again broached the subject of trying to meet someone when he got back to the Moon—as if the future were a certainty, and the precariousness of their situation meant nothing to him.
“I was kind of hoping for Stephanie,” he said. So. Stephanie, after all. “That is, if you don’t mind me moving in on her.”
“Why would I mind?”
Ian stared at the terra-cotta palette that was the Martian surface below. “Because, you know … you and her—”
“There’s absolutely nothing between us, Ian.”
“I was actually going out with her for a while.”
The strain he heard in his friend’s voice unnerved Gerry. “I kind of figured.”
“But when you came along … well … you know … I stepped aside.” And there was an admission in this, as if Ian understood that he must step aside, that his behavior, abominable for so many years by his own reckoning, disqualified his tenuous hopes for Stephanie’s affections.
“Stepped aside? For what?”
“I didn’t want to get in your way. Or in hers.” He reached up and scratched the back of his head. Outside, a ground-to-orbit launch vehicle, filled with people looking out windows, eased by. “It was just like the Maggie Madsen thing all over again.”
“Ian, I thought we weren’t going to talk about Maggie.”
“Anybody can see Stephanie’s crazy about you, just like Maggie was. Matter of fact … Steph was the one who broke up with me … once she met you, that is. That’s one thing I admire about her. She wasn’t going to two-time me.”
The sophomoric details of this astounded Gerry. “Ian, I had no idea.” Five miles away, across the delicate network of transparent skywalk tubes, he saw Phobos. “She didn’t mention anything to me.” Phobos looked like an olive with the pimento missing—the Stickney Crater.
“She didn’t?” He seemed to regard this as another indication of his own spectacularly failed personal life. “No, I guess she wouldn’t.”
“You should have said something.”
“I kind of mentioned it. In a backhanded way. That night I came to your room and broke the mirror. How you would never steal a girlfriend out from under me again? The whole Maggie Madsen thing?”
“That’s what that was about?”
“In a way … but … that night. I want you to forget about that night. I was going through a lot that night.”
Gerry frowned. “I had no idea you were talking about Stephanie.”
“I didn’t want you to … you know … get distracted from your work. Or feel uncomfortable.”
“Ian, you know me better than that. And I could never go with Stephanie. I love my wife. She’s the single most important thing in my life. I made that a hundred percent clear to Stephanie. She knows there can never be anything between us.”
“So you don’t mind if I move in on her, then?”
His friend seemed to be missing the point, so he let it go. “No … I don’t mind.” He lifted a citrangequat, a hybrid citrus fruit that for one reason or another had become extremely popular among Martian hydroponics growers, and began peeling the skin from the pear-shaped trifoliate, the peel coming off in blaze orange fragments that seemed to highlight the color of the planet below. “And I wish you’d forget about Maggie.”
“With Maggie, it was a crush. With Steph … it’s more.” Ian looked up from his contemplation of the warrior planet and turned to Gerry, a wistfulness creeping into his blue eyes. “I was hoping that when we get back … you know … you can build me up a bit. Tell her what a hero I’ve been.” He gestured in the general direction of Gaspra. “Because I’m having to drive that asteroid all by myself and it ain’t like drivin’ a bus. This is real test-pilot stuff. You make her understand that I’m worthy of her, and that I’ve been working real hard on being worthy, and that I don’t mean to screw up on her or anybody else ever again.”
Gerry recognized only too well what his friend was going through. This was alcoholic’s remorse again, like on the night he broke the mirror. He gazed at Ian in a new light, and realized that Ian was no longer the god of good times but a man, like so many others, who had been transformed by a woman. Ian didn’t even know if Stephanie loved him. Didn’t even know if she would have him when he got back. Yet there was a new purity to the man.
“I’ll make her understand, Ian.”