The place exploded.
He waited until things calmed down and invited Shara onstage to say something.
She took her place behind the lectern. “I’ll never forget JoAnn,” she said. “She was young and brilliant, and had so much to give, and in the end, she gave it all. And Nick. He’d been a peerless friend. And he was a professional interstellar captain whose first concern was his passengers and crew. If he were here tonight, he’d consider that the ultimate compliment.”
Prize-winning physicist Akala Gruder said that she had known JoAnn and could not believe she was gone. “In a sense, she never will be.” She had never met Nick, she said. And added, “My loss.”
A few others expressed similar sentiments. Then we got a surprise. John introduced President Davis. He came in through a side door and, like everyone else that night, he spoke without notes. “We are gathered here this evening,” he said, “to pay tribute to our friends JoAnn Suttner and Nick Kraus. I don’t know that I can add anything that hasn’t already been said. Other than that it gives me great hope for the future to know that these two friends were by no means unique. Where, I wonder, do we get such men and women?
“One more thing. The parents of both are present with us tonight. They were invited to speak this evening, but they declined. We can all understand that. The emotional pressure is high. And I think their natural inclination is to let others do the talking. But that said, I would now like to invite them to come up to receive the Presidential Medal of Honor, which is hereby granted to JoAnn Suttner, and to Nicholas Kraus, for extraordinary heroism in the cause of providing assistance to those in desperate need.”
JoAnn’s husband, Jerry, was halfway across the Confederacy and had not been able to attend. But both sets of parents, Laura and Joseph Dayson, and Sandra and Jack Kraus, made their way onto the platform. The President handed them the awards, they exchanged a few comments, everybody wiped their eyes, and it was over.
In the morning, I was just settling behind my desk when Jacob announced that I had a call from Nick’s mother. “I saw you at the memorial last night, Chase,” she said. “I tried to get to you, but we lost you in the crowd.” That brought an uneasy moment.
“Hello, Ms. Kraus. It’s nice to hear from you. Please accept my condolences on Nick’s loss.” I paused, not sure where the call was going. “What can I do for you?”
“Call me Sandy, please. I know Shara, and she told me how things went.” My heart picked up a beat. “I wanted to say that I’m glad you and she were there. And that I hope you’re not too upset.”
“I’m okay,” I said. Suddenly I was back in the passenger cabin with Nick while he asked whether he could take me to Cranston’s. “I wish I could have helped.”
“You were there. It’s all you could do. Jack and I just wanted to say thanks. And to make sure you’re okay.” Jack, of course, was Nick’s father.
“Yes. Thank you. I’m all right. How about you?”
“We’ll get through it, Chase.” Her voice caught. She said good-bye, and she was gone.
Thirty-three
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
Alex showed up next day on Morning Deadline, whose host was Cal Whitaker. The topic, of course, was the Capella. Its projected arrival was now two weeks away. Also appearing on the program was Levi Edward, a celebrated newscaster who’d retired twenty years earlier and was now visibly near the end of his life. His face was lined, and he grunted with pain every time he moved. “Too much running for interviews,” he said, trying to turn it into a joke. The familiar baritone was still there.
Everyone in the audience knew that Edward’s wife, Lana, was on the lost cruise ship. He’d been at the forefront in pushing for a way to bring the Capella home. “I’d love to see her again.” He looked across the glass table at Alex. “If she has to wait another five years to get back—” He delivered a forced smile.
“What do you think, Alex?” asked Whitaker. “Is there any chance at all they might find a way to stop it from moving ahead another five years? Or has the Grainger incident ruled that out beyond any chance?”
Alex was clearly uncomfortable. “I don’t think there’s any chance now that we’ll find a quick fix,” he said. “If there’s any alternative plan in the works, I haven’t heard of it.”
“But they’re still saying that manipulation would probably work. Despite the Grainger, physicists are claiming that if we simply reduce the power in the engines, the odds are ninety-five percent that everything would be okay, and the process will stop. Am I right?”
“That’s what some of them are saying, Cal. But I don’t think the people who have to make the decision are willing to take that chance.”
Edward nodded. “It’s certainly a rational approach. I don’t know whether I agree with it or not, but I can understand it. Alex, if it were your call, what would you do? Would you mess around with these lifeboats? If you were a passenger on the ship, what would you want them to do?”
Alex’s eyes took on that distant look I knew so well. “If I were on board, with those odds, I think I’d want them to take the chance.”
Overnight, Project Lifeboat had become the focus of everyone’s attention. The news programs carried pictures of the “lifeboats,” and the various hosts walked us through them, counted the sixty-four seats in each, and assured their viewers that the vehicles seemed perfectly safe. Easy to say, of course, while they were perched on the landing strip at the Clayborn facility, where a substantial number of them were being manufactured.
Each lifeboat was folded into a gray, cube-shaped, plastene package with rounded edges. The cube measured slightly less than four meters on a side, which made it too large to fit into the Belle-Marie or most of the yachts that would be involved in the rescue effort. They were also too large to be carried by the shuttles that routinely took people and cargo to Skydeck. So special shuttles were being built. From Skydeck, the packages were loaded onto anything in the rescue fleet that could accommodate them. Some ships could carry two. A few of the cargo vehicles would be able to take an entire complement of forty-four, which would constitute enough to take care of everyone on the Capella. The complication was that there’d be only a few hours to find the Capella and load the lifeboats. If the operation was conducted successfully, which is to say if we were able to load forty-four lifeboats, then everybody should be able to get off when the ship returns in five years.