14

A siren wailed in the hollow.

Lissa got up from her studies and went outside. Susan was sitting on the barracks stairs. Windows opened throughout the complex of twelve buildings, and faces peered out. Many of the off-duty maintenance workers and engineers were out in the fields, standing and sitting down as they waited.

“This is it, I think,” Susan said.

An amplified male voice spoke:

“WE ARE ABOUT TO PUT INTO DRIVE. PLEASE FIND A SECURE PLACE IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Susan said. “The physics is perfect.”

Lissa sat down and closed her hand around the edge of the ceramic stair. The sun at the far end of the worldlet flickered slightly, but there was no other sign of anything happening. If the drive worked perfectly, there would be nothing to feel.

“WE ARE MOVING!” the voice boomed. Lissa tensed. There was no going back now. There were a few cheers from the windows. Lissa looked at Susan and smiled.

“Well,” her friend said, “we have a lot of studying to do before we get where we’re going, and the whole idea is to have fresh, trained minds to interpret whatever we find.” She got up and went inside, Windows closed, and the groups of people out in the tall grass began to break up. Everyone had pretty much expected the drive to work.

Lissa sat and looked at the landscape. The lack of any trees in the tall grass made it seem as if someone had peeled off some prairie and pasted it around the inside of the hollow like a rug. There was no wildlife, except for some earthworms. More would be done with the hollow’s ecology someday, but for now it was only a camping place for people who worked under the land. Suddenly, the barracks and dirt roads looked shabby to her. It was all comfortable enough, but it was not Bernal One, with its sophisticated urban elegance, or Earth, with its awesome beauty and haunting sense of history.

Her father’s last screen letter had told her that the experience of this journey would teach her a lot; but he didn’t know what was really going on, or that all humanity might be in danger. I’m just slightly homesick, she told herself.

“It is a dangerous journey,” Dr. Shastri had said when she had asked him about possible dangers to the asteroid. “But our advantage is that we’re housed in a large structure, and that with its new drive we can make the trip quickly.”

“What if the drive fails?”

“We have the torch cluster as backup, and we could even build a mass driver track if we had to. Those two methods would get us back to inner Sunspace very slowly, but we would get back. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to be able to carry so many trained people such a distance and back in such comfort. We want them to have no worries except their work. I don’t think we’ll have much to worry about with our equipment. It’s the unknown, the things no one can foresee, that may pose dangers.”

She had known everything Dr. Shastri would say. For much of the journey she would have nothing to do but continue with her studies and familiarize herself with theories about the structure of the outer solar system. The asteroid could stay out there indefinitely, she told herself, for years if it had to. There wasn’t much to worry about. Dr. Shastri had stressed the importance of the students to the expedition. Their minds would provide the least-conditioned reactions to the alien artifacts that might be found, and their fresh approaches might make all the difference. Their entire scientific careers would be shaped by what they did on this expedition.

Lissa and Susan had attended various meetings and listened to older teams discussing the problems that might be encountered. There were only four other students on the asteroid, two boys and two girls, but Lissa and Susan rarely saw them, since they lived in one of the overhead barracks complexes. Their own building housed a dozen physicists, men and women who got up early and came back very late. Occasionally one of the women would say hello, but most of the time Lissa and Susan were left alone.

Lissa took a deep breath and looked around at her new, still unformed world, feeling sympathy for its in-between condition. But there had been a time, she reminded herself, when Bernal One had been a complete blank on its inner surface, long before she had been born, before her father had arrived there. Everything begins shapeless and unaware, but already there was a sun here, greenery, and fresh air; and it was the same with her—she was already something, trembling on the edges of becoming more, despite her unhappy restlessness.

Maybe a walk would help. She could circle the inner world in less than two hours. She got up and went down the dirt road toward the watercolor sun. But after a few minutes she began to think again about why Dr. Shastri had chosen her for the expedition. All her ideas to date had been put forward by other people. What did it matter that she had been thinking along similar lines? What did Dr. Shastri expect her to accomplish? She told herself again that he was thinking of the future, that older researchers had once been young, but she still felt unconvinced. Dr. Shastri didn’t know for sure what she might be able to do, and she didn’t know either. Maybe it would be nothing at all, and she would disappoint everyone as well as herself.

The dusty road in front of her seemed to run straight into the sun. The light was warm on her face, but unlike that of the real Sun, it would not burn her skin or eyes; it was a tamed sun, a light plate, for human use only. She quickened her pace, feeling the gritty dirt crunch under her boots. She looked around, telling herself that she was lucky to be here, that there was no reason at all to feel lost and alone, not even Alek’s absence. Everything mattered and nothing mattered. He had put a spell on her, made her sick inside, and it was getting worse after she had thought it had gone away. Alek’s parting words had helped for a while only, and now she hovered on the edge of dismay. He should have been here, walking beside her, smiling and being himself, squeezing her shoulders, joking and brushing her cheeks with his lips . . . he should have been here!

She felt ashamed. There was something terribly wrong with the whole idea of love. It got in its own way, bringing pain and even greater obstacles. Human beings got together to be happy, to bring in the next generation and guide it to maturity because they themselves couldn’t live forever; but it seemed too complicated, too roundabout, to feel love and pleasure, to be rewarded and denied, to dream of other things and then be stricken with needs that were just waiting to spoil everything . . .

She looked at the timer on her wrist and saw that she had been walking for nearly an hour. She kept on and came to a high metal fence, where she stopped and looked out over the canyon at this end of the world. The sun plate stood on the other side, doing its job without a thought of pain or doubt.

She turned right and walked along the fence, running her palm across the metal weave. Listening to her own thoughts had made her jumpy, and the walk had not calmed her down.

The road veered away from the fence and headed back across the length of the asteroid toward another block of barracks. She realized that she was walking toward a complex that would be at a right angle to her own barracks; but as long as her feet stayed on the ground and her head pointed toward the empty space, the land directly ahead would seem level, curving away left and right, and closing above her head. And this worldlet, she reminded herself, was moving toward the outer solar system, slowly building up an awesome velocity. The asteroid’s path would resemble a very flat parabola, tending toward a straight line; and somewhere beyond the Orbit of Pluto, the worldlet might slip into a wide orbit around a dark body, a dead world of planetary size, and the search for the source of the alien signal would reach its final moments . . .

Ahead, among the buildings she was approaching, people were still doing some construction, molding ceramic materials into building components and fitting them together. She stopped and looked around the hollow. Barracks clusters now stood in every quadrant. The group she was approaching was the last to be completed; it would house the most recent arrivals. They had come in the last hours before the drive had been switched on, and had gone immediately to prepare their quarters.

She drew closer, wondering if Alek thought about her as often as she did about him. Maybe he had already forgotten her. I’m so green, she thought suddenly. It didn’t seem right when viewed from the outside, but it felt right from the inside no matter what she told herself; deep down, her feelings for Alek seemed strong and immovable. He was alive inside her. Images of him changed and spoke to her. She listened and watched within herself, tingling at times, yearning, reaching out toward him. It seemed that she might be able to steal into his mind and surprise him; but she always fell back into herself, dismayed by the distance between them.

Power tools hummed as she came along the road. Buildings in various stages of completion stood at her left and right. Men and women in helmets and goggles were heating sections together with white-hot probes.

Did growing up mean becoming emotionally dependent on a person who had once been a stranger? She had needed her parents, but they had chosen to have her; parents had to raise their kids, make them strong enough to go on their own. But Alek was someone she had found, a stranger who now held her feelings by long strings, pulling her toward him all the time despite what he had said; and part of her was glad the strings were there, attached to the mushy, weak parts of her that she didn’t understand . . .

She stopped and watched the construction. There was a worker kneeling on the roof of one barrack. He wore no shirt. She took a few steps closer. He stood up. The sweat glistened on him as he turned around, and she saw that it was Alek.