Realization dawned on Larry, together with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You mean that if you’re the one working in the observatory…”
“Neither you nor Dan will hurt me. There, it sounds silly and terrible at the same time, doesn’t it? But if you’re both convinced that one of you is a murderer, then the only person who can continue the astronomical work has to be me.”
“But… suppose there is a murderer, and it’s neither one of us? Suppose it’s somebody else?”
Valery didn’t hesitate an instant. “If that happens, then maybe you two idiots can work together to find out who the real madman is!”
She turned and headed for the door. From the set of her slim shoulders, the stubborn toss of her golden hair, Larry could see quite clearly that she didn’t want him to try walking with her.
He sagged back against the table, feeling utterly drained. The whole world is falling apart… everything’s breaking up and there’s nothing I can do —
Then a thought struck him. Dan had said that they’d have to get fresh deuterium for the reactors from the water on the planet. That meant sending a complex load of equipment down to the surface, together with people trained to run it. It means Dan will have to go down to the surface of the planet. The dangerous, maybe deadly surface.
Larry almost smiled.
11
Guido Estelella was an astronaut, the only man on ship—asleep or awake—who had experience in piloting rocket craft from orbit down to the surface of a planet and back up again. He hadn’t been one of the political prisoners, back when the ship had been an orbital jail, a place of exile for Earth’s scientists. He had been a free man, an astronaut by training. It was his joy.
But the same Earth government that made prisoners of thousands of scientists and sent them into orbital exile with their families had also cut space flight down to almost nothing. Orbital flights, mostly to repair communications and weather satellites; a few flights to the Moon each year, bringing workers to the factories there. That was all. No more Mars flights. No further exploration of the solar system. Earth could not afford it.
So when the prisoners coaxed Earth’s government into letting them drive their orbiting prison out toward the stars, Estelella volunteered to join them.
“After all,” he said, “it’s my namesake, isn’t it?”
So he went to the stars, frozen in cryosleep for nearly fifty years, to be awakened when he was needed. Now he was awake and working.
And most unhappy.
Guido Estelella stood in an insulated pressure suit on the surface of the new world. Everyone else called it Major, a contraction from “Alpha Centauri’s major Planet.” But in his own mind, Estelella called it Femina: a woman, a certain kind of woman—beautiful, selfish, treacherous, hot-tempered, dangerous.
He always felt tired here. Maybe it was the high gravity, putting an extra load on his muscles. Maybe it was just the constant fear.
For six weeks now, Guido had been flying a small landing craft down to the ground from the main ship, which was now orbiting five hundred kilometers above the planet’s equator. At least twice each week he carried men and equipment down to the small base camp they had made by the shore of one of Femina’s landlocked seas. The rest of the time he trained youngsters to fly the landing craft. There had been one wreck, killing two men and a girl. There had been several very close calls. Guido had aged more in the past six weeks than he did in his fifty years of cryosleep. Far more.
At the moment he was standing halfway between the stubby, winged landing rocket and the sprawl of equipment and plastic bubble tents that made up the base camp. A strong wind was whipping the green water of the sea into whitecaps, but inside his pressure suit, Guido felt the wind only as a faint screeching sound, muffled by his earphones. What was bothering him wasn’t the wind, but the ugly brownish-yellow cloud that it was carrying toward them from the sea horizon.
“Ship to camp,” a girl’s voice crackled in his earphones. “We’ve confirmed that there’s a new volcano active on the far coast of your sea, and the prevailing wind is bringing the fallout in your direction.”
Guido nodded unhappily inside his helmet. He clicked a button on his waistband panel.
“I think we’d better get the shuttle up and out of here before that cloud arrives.”
“Take off early? But we’re not ready.” It was Dan Christopher’s voice, coming from the camp, much stronger than the ship’s transmission.
Guido began to head toward the shuttle craft. “The last time I saw a cloud like that, it brought with it a lightning storm that kept us grounded for two days. And the rain had such a high sulfur content and so many stones in it that we had to resurface the entire top of the shuttle. The heat shield, even the pilot’s bubble were pitted and etched. I don’t want to get caught on the ground like that again.”
“But you can’t take all of us with you. Some of us will have to stay here during the storm. And the equipment…”
“My first responsibility is for the shuttle. Your equipment is • protected, and you can sit out the storm in the underground shelter.” He reached the shuttle’s hatch, popped open the access panel, and pressed the stud inside. The hatch cracked open and the ladder unfolded at his feet.
“Wait,” Dan’s voice responded. “I’ll send out as many people as we can. How many do you have room for?”
“Four. Unless you want to remove some of the cargo we packed aboard this morning.”
“The deuterium? No chance. It’s worth a helluva lot more than any of us.”
Guido looked at the sea. It was frothing heavily now, steep breakers building up and dumping their energy on the sandy shore. The grass and trees were swaying in the mounting wind. The cloud was closer, spreading, blotting out the sunshine arid the golden sky.
“I can wait about ten minutes,” he said.
Inside the main bubble tent of the camp, Dan frowned and glared at the radio set. The main tent was a hodgepodge of radio equipment, viewscreens, cooking units, tables, crated supplies, folding tables and chairs, and five busy people.
Dan could hear the wind’s growing anger outside. One of the girls seated at an analysis workbench glanced up at the roof of their transparent bubble: the plastic was rippling in the wind, making an odd kind of crinkling noise that they’d never heard before. It had taken them days to get accustomed to things like wind, and the noises that an open world makes. Now it was starting to sound frightening.
“Nancy, Tania, Vic…you three get into suits right away and get to the ship. Ross, you and I are going to stay. Vic, bring the latest tank of deuterium with you.”
“But it’s less than half full,” Vic argued.
Dan waved him down. “I know, but we’d better get it shipboard. No telling how bad this storm can get; might damage the equipment. The deuterium’s far too valuable to risk.”
Vic nodded.
“Get into a suit,” Dan said. “Ross and I will hang on here.”
Ross Cranston glanced sharply at Dan, but said nothing. He didn’t like being second-best to a meter-tall tank of stainless steel, even though he knew that the deuterium gas inside it was more important to the ship than any computer operator.
The two girls and Vic were suited up in a few minutes, moving slowly in the heavy gravity. Vic hefted the tank by its handles, his knees giving slightly under its weight.
“Can you manage it?” Dan asked anxiously. “Yeah.” Vic’s voice was muffled by his helmet. The three of them cycled through the airlock and started trudging heavily through the wind-blown sand and grit toward the sleek little shuttle rocket. Dan watched them through the tent’s transparent plastic. The two girls each grabbed a handle of the tank and helped Vic to carry it.