“Yes.” To do otherwise would waste a potload of fuel and require her to start the entire process over. “We’ll meet them at 97.”
“It may be that there is validity to Wilbur’s Proposition.”
“Which says…?”
“Given mass beyond approximately two hundred thousand tons, the power requirements for Hazeltine propulsion increase dramatically. I need not point out that the asteroid exceeds that limit. I would add that the Proposition has never been tested, and is disputed by many.”
“What would be the practical effect?”
“They’d need a considerably higher power input than we do, far more than would be proportional to their size. I can do the calculations if you like.”
“Please.”
She sent another transmission to Tor. Cancel my last message. No jump for chindi on schedule. We now think it may take longer because of the added mass. No need to worry.
“Hutch, we have incoming from the Longworth. Professor Mogambo.”
But it wasn’t Mogambo. A young blond aide appeared. “One moment, Captain,” she said. The delay was down to less than a minute. “I’ll let him know you’re on the circuit.”
Nick smiled. “He’s reminding you who’s in charge.”
There’d been a time when Hutch had no patience with such games. But that was long ago. She wondered what it said about her character that she’d learned to tolerate arrogance on a fairly wide scale.
The blonde walked off and Hutch was left looking at a communication station. Eventually Mogambo strolled onstage, apparently in the middle of a conversation with someone she couldn’t see. He held up a hand, begging her patience while the conversation continued. Finally, he turned to her and activated the sound. “Sorry, Hutch,” he said. “We’ve gotten busy.” He was looking down at her from a wide overhead screen. She switched him to the navigational auxiliary at her right hand. “Has it worked?” he asked.
“You’re asking me whether Tor took a wrench to the chindi’s engines?”
After the delay: “Well, not precisely. But I wanted him to show some ingenuity. I’m sure if I were over there, I’d find a way to slow it down.”
Or blow it up. “It’s not a practical option, Doctor.”
He nodded. “You may be right, Hutch. It’s hard to know what we should do in this circumstance, isn’t it?” He gazed out of the screen at her. “I know you’re concerned about your passenger. And I hope we succeed in getting him off. But if we lose the artifact…” He squeezed his eyes shut, and she was startled to see a tear start from his left eye. He tried surreptitiously to wipe it away, but knew he’d been caught. “Thanks, Hutch,” he said. “I know you’ll do what you can.”
“Hutch,” said Bill, “two minutes to jump. The chindi is now passing.01c.” One percent of light-speed.
“Not good,” said Hutch.
Nick held up his hands. Whoa. Let’s not get excited. Everything’s going to be fine. “Why isn’t it good?” he asked.
“It’s now moving faster than we can.”
“How do you mean? We can travel between Earth and Alpha Centauri in twenty minutes.”
“Not exactly. But, in any case, Nick, we don’t move very quickly. We jump into a subway in one place and jump out at another. But where flights through normal space are concerned, we aren’t very fast.”
“You’re telling me we can’t catch up to it if we have to?”
“You got it.”
“Then, even if the chindi started cruising now, we couldn’t get Tor out?”
“Correct.”
“Hutch,” said Bill, “if the Wilbur proposition is correct, and my estimates of chindi mass are accurate, it will require a velocity of.02773c to make its jump.”
That would be moving along. Almost three times its current velocity. “Okay, Bill,” she said.
Nick frowned. The hearty confidence of the first few hours was gone. “I guess,” he said, “there’s a lot to be said for Wilbur.”
They were down to thirty seconds. Hutch went back to Tor. “We’re about to make our jump, Tor. It looks as if it might take another day or so before the chindi follows. Got that? Another day or so. The ship’s massive. Operates differently from the way we do. You just have to ride it out. So you won’t hear from us again until you’re on the other side. We’ll be waiting for you.”
TOR HEARD THE transmission as he was getting ready to retire for the night. It was annoying because it meant at least an extra day before they could get him out of this tomb.
The pocket dome had changed in some subtle way. It wasn’t simply that he was alone in it, that George was dead and Alyx gone. But the interior itself had grown smaller, unbending, more oppressive. Whereas it had once been noisy and cheerful and optimistic, it now seemed that any sound he might make could attract unwelcome attention. The passageways and the endless chambers spread out around him (and when he dared to think of it, for more than a hundred levels below him), and overwhelmed him with their sheer emptiness. He no longer thought of them as Main Street and Barbara Street, as Third or Eleventh. They were alien again, empty, silent, dark. And identical. It struck him that the only differentiated feature they’d discovered in the entire complex—and they’d walked, it seemed, countless kilometers—was the Ditch.
Although Tor was stranded in an environment in which there were no nights or days, his metabolism kept track for him. That first evening, he had braced his makeshift bed against the rear wall and retired into it, turned off the lights, and lay looking up into the dark. In all that vast place, it seemed to him nothing moved.
Later, he woke with a sense that something had disturbed him.
He switched on the light and lay in its soft glow, trying to fathom what had caught his attention. There was no noise. Nothing moved in the dark chamber that constituted the world outside the dome. Everything inside remained where he had left it. The status lamp glowed cheerfully, indicating the power level was where it was supposed to be.
Must have been his imagination.
He rolled over and pressed a palm against the wall, then against the deck. The vibrations had stopped. The engines were off, at last, and the chindi, finally, had gone into cruise mode.
Cruise mode? But hazeltines always feed off the main engines. You don’t shut them down before a jump. What was going on?
He opened a channel on his commlink. Hutch was gone, but there was a chance that Mogambo had arrived in the neighborhood. “Longworth,” he said, “are you out there anywhere?”
The silence rolled back.
“Anybody…?”
HE’D BROUGHT A sketch pad, which he set up outside the chamber. And he began finally to try to capture the essence of the situation. The rock and the metal doors. The sense of absolutely nothing out beyond the fading light. As if one could walk down the corridor and stroll into oblivion.
Yes, he thought, capturing the shadows.
And the unimaginable mass that held the darkness together.
And George’s ghost, caught here forever.
He listened, imagining he could hear distant footsteps.
He worked until he got hungry. Then he went inside and ate too much. Two chicken sandwiches, and some donut holes.
Before he went back out, he changed the power cell.
THE FLIGHT TO RK335197 ran a little more than three days. It was a quiet time. Alyx joined them on the bridge, and that became the place where all three hung out, except during meals. Mission control was empty now, a place of echoes and shadows. There were no more games and no more sims. Nobody had much appetite, and even Nick found it difficult to remain cheerful. It wasn’t that they feared for Tor—everyone was convinced that the chindi would arrive more or less on schedule and they’d have no trouble mounting a rescue—but the loss of George had taken the heart out of them.