“Any luck?”
“The beeper’s pretty much useless now, Cliff. Just a ping or two. It’s more confusion than help.” Shen’s voice sounded loud in his helmet.
“Find anything, Homann?” He could see the silver of the other man’s suit as he bounded ahead.
“You’d hear the hollering if I did.”
“Get to a higher spot so you can see better—but be careful.” The skipping track of the package’s landing had been obvious from a distance, but on the jumbled crater floor it was indistinguishable. Clancy worked his shoulders back and forth to reach an itch on his back. Comfortable again, he looked up at the crater walls towering over him. They jutted into the star-filled sky, hiding their fissures and jagged edges.
“Looks like it skidded into the crater wall and bounced back,” Homann said. “Five hundred pounds of packaged seaweed. Blooey! So much for ‘Fragile—handle with care.’ Ever see any of those classic Roadrunner cartoons? I wonder if it’s Acme wall-kelp.”
“Okay, okay, just direct us to the terminus of the skid path. Come on, Pete, I’m getting tired of being out here.” Clancy tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. There’s got to be an easier way to find this stuff, he thought. He’d calculated enough scattering cones at MIT to be able to guess where the package would land.
“I’ll give you a nice long back rub when we get back, boss,” Shen said.
“Ooooh!” Homann broke in. “You could give me one!”
“Quit clowning, you guys.”
Homann directed them across the crater floor. Even from the inconvenient vantage point, now Clancy could see the skid tracks from the impact. “X marks the spot!” Homann radioed.
“Shen, listen for beeps.”
After a few more minutes of searching, Clancy brushed fine lunar dust off the pitted surface of the package. Buried under three centimeters of dust, the desk-sized container was bashed on one end from its collision with the rock, but the outer wall seemed to be unbreached. The kelp was intact.
He radioed, “Merry Christmas, everybody!”
“Easy, easy!” Philip Tomkins hovered over the construction workers like a mother hen. Duncan McLaris stood on his tiptoes away from the crowd, watching. The rest of Clavius Base observed through personal holoscreens. The ConComm link to the Aguinaldo showed the Filipino Council of Twenty, with Dr. Sandovaal in the foreground.
Clancy pried at the container until the seal suddenly burst open. “Ooof.” He went sprawling backwards.
Shen caught him and propped him back up, patting his shoulder. “I told you you’d be throwing yourself at me after a year, boss.”
Clancy ignored her and motioned to Dr. Tomkins. “All yours, sir.”
Tomkins straightened and peered into the hololink with the Aguinaldo. “I sincerely thank our Filipino friends for this gift of food, this opportunity. If it fulfills only a fraction of your expectations, Dr. Sandovaal, it will indeed save our lives here at Clavius Base.”
With Sandovaal nodding sagely in the background, Tomkins cracked open the main chamber of the container. “It appears to be intact!” Tomkins turned to the holotank. He grinned, and his big body seemed to be filled with a greater excitement than Clancy had ever seen him display.
Sandovaal’s voice came across the three hundred thousand kilometers from the Aguinaldo. “When your lunar tunnels are filled with wall-kelp, just remember me.” He moved out of sight of the holotransmitters, the bare hint of a smile on his face.
Clavius Base got its first look at the wall-kelp. Clancy sniffed the air, frowning, and looked into the wet, green receptacle of wall-kelp.
Perhaps this substance was going to save them, but for now, it smelled even worse than the dirty socks in his space suit.
Chapter 22
From L-4 to L-5—Days 18–27
Encased in the vast solar sail-creature, Ramis watched through the monitors, studying his course. The awesome face of Earth seemed like an oil painting below him, reaching up to swallow him in its oceans.
“You were always there to catch me when I fell, Sarat,” Ramis muttered. “Are you there to catch me now?”
Sarat’s orbit approached closer than two Earth radii at its nearest point, before they swooped back out again on their way to L-5. He wondered if anyone on the planet could look up and see him blotting out a swath of stars against the night sky. Or if anyone would bother. He wondered if his brother Salita was staring up into the Philippine darkness right now … or if the Islands had been swallowed by an even greater darkness.
Leaving the planet behind, Ramis and Sarat climbed toward Orbitech 1.
Ramis shifted his legs in the cramped cyst-cavity. He had no room to move, no place to stretch—and sitting here in the same position had begun to drive him insane with boredom after a week. He took extreme care not to bump the three sail-creature embryos at his feet.
Ramis removed his helmet and took a deep breath of the humid air. He didn’t want to leave the helmet off long—hard cosmic rays still penetrated even Sarat’s tough exoskeleton—but fresh oxygen drove back the claustrophobic dankness for a while.
By now the wall-kelp had grown all along the inner sides of the cavity, making the air smell rank. But it would be enough to start a new forest growing in Orbitech 1, and it gave him food to eat on the long journey. Unprocessed and raw, the kelp tasted awful, but his stomach kept it down. He knew, conceptually at least, that it provided him with necessary nourishment and moisture.
Ramis groped around the spongy cyst until he found the joystick controls for the external video. Swiveling the camera, he focused on the bright pinpoint of the L-5 colony waxing larger and larger. A week ago the colony had been invisible against the stars. Now, under extreme magnification, he could just make out the two counter rotating wheels of Orbitech 1. Also at L-5, the Soviet station Kibalchich revolved slowly into view on the fringe of the Lagrange gravity well.
Time was growing short for them, for him. He found it difficult to think clearly.
“Calling Orbitech 1!” Ramis squinted at the screen in front of him. Why weren’t they answering? “Orbitech 1, come in please.” Maybe his transceiver was too weak. Maybe he was trying the wrong frequency. Maybe they had stopped listening for messages entirely after Clavius Base had cut off communications.
A thought struck him—what if the new director, Curtis Brahms, had done something else? Brahms did not scare Ramis; it was the uncertainty that made him uneasy.
Ramis muttered under his breath. He had been talking to himself too much in the past few days. “How am I supposed to rescue you if you won’t answer?” He snapped the helmet shut.
Maybe the radio’s gain was too weak. Maybe he had used the batteries too much over the past week, chatting with people on the Aguinaldo just to quell his loneliness and isolation. As he swung close to Earth, he had scanned the radio bands. Briefly he caught a burst of hysterical shouting, but it had faded into static before he could tune it.
There was nothing to do. No way to notice that time was passing. Sarat continued to drift on course, to waste away and die.
Keeping himself occupied, Ramis squinted at the cross hairs barely visible on the video screen. The camera angle had been offset enough to account for the American colony’s orbital motion. By centering the image in the cross hairs, the sail-creature would tack ahead and arrive at the right position to intercept the colony in its orbit.