At the end of the day, she stopped by Frank’s office. He didn’t look happy to see her, but there was nothing unusual about that. “Frank,” she said, “is there any provision to keep the families informed?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The families of Quinn and his people. When we hear something, do we contact the families, let them know what’s going on?”
“It’s not our responsibility, Priscilla,” he said.
“Whose is it?”
“We pass everything to the Academy people. It’s up to them.”
* * *
SHE DIDN’T PUSH it. Maybe he was right, and they were better advised to stay out of it.
Her appetite had gone away, so she passed on the Cockpit for dinner, passed on dinner altogether, and went into a game room. She sat down in front of one of the displays, and chose Destiny, which allows participants to explore the stars, where they discover glittering civilizations, hungry aliens, and hi-tech structures designed to trap interstellars like flies in spiderwebs. But she couldn’t keep her mind on it and shut it down after ten minutes and a close call with a white dwarf, which very nearly sucked her ship out of the sky.
There were other games: takeover efforts by runaway robots, interstellar wars, experiments gone awry producing dragons that threatened to gobble down New York or Geneva or wherever if you don’t step in with your laser cannon and stop them. But they were all boring futuristic shoot-outs. It was as if the manufacturers, or the players, didn’t recognize the sheer drama in looking down at a stretch of ground that had never been touched by a human foot. How about, she thought, a game in which you play God? Design a new set of rings for Saturn? Or put together a new nebula? Maybe the Butterfly Nebula?
Well, no, none of that would be very popular. But maybe a game involving rescue missions?
She was still sitting in front of the screen when Cal called. “Priscilla,” he said, “I was hoping you’d be home this weekend.”
“No, I’m still at Union, Cal. I won’t be getting back to Princeton for a bit.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know, I’m discovering how much I miss you.” She sensed a transformation into his alter ego, Mark Klaybold. “This place feels so empty without you.”
“Cal, I’m sorry.” She almost called him Mark. “There’s just not much we can do about it.”
“Well, that’s not necessarily true. I’d love to take you to dinner Saturday.”
“That would be nice. I wish we could manage it.”
“So we can do it?”
She wondered if he hadn’t heard her. “Cal,” she said, “I won’t be in town.”
“No, no.” Across the room, someone cheered. Apparently they’d blown up an alien star cruiser. “Where are you, Priscilla?”
“In a game room.”
“Oh. Okay. Anyway, I was thinking of going up there. To the Wheel. I’ve never been in orbit before. And this seems like the perfect time. I’m not involved in the show right now, so—”
Not a good idea, she thought. She liked Cal, but inviting him up for the weekend had some obvious drawbacks. “Have you looked at the price of shuttle tickets?” she asked.
“Yes. They aren’t cheap, are they? But you’ve had to spring for them.”
“I’m part of the organization, Cal. I get a pretty good rate.”
“Oh.”
“Look, I’m not going to have much time this weekend. My schedule’s loaded. But I’ll be going down for a few days next month. If you want, maybe we can get together then.”
“Promise?”
“Sure,” she said. “Absolutely.”
* * *
SHE’D HAD ENOUGH of the games. She wandered over to the Cockpit and ordered a barbarossa. The news channels were showing pictures of Quinn and his people. They looked okay. Almost content, actually. Which meant the pictures weren’t recent.
On one of the talk shows, Miles Conover and his gal pal Ivy sat around discussing current topics with assorted guests, and she got a surprise. One of the guests was Michelle Worth, the reporter who’d challenged Governor McGruder.
“—Are you saying that the death of Captain Miller could have been avoided?” Ivy was asking. The question was directed at Michelle.
The reporter shook her head. “I’m not saying that. I am saying that there’s no provision for taking action when things go wrong. Ivy, look at what’s going on now at Teegarden. People are stuck out there with no supplies, and they had to wait three days for the Grosvenor even to get the news that they were in trouble. Three days to start the rescue effort. It’s shameful. Suppose those people were running out of air. Like Miller. Look at the attitude you get from the bosses: Well, you guys just hang on, we’ll be there in a week or two. Why isn’t there somebody at the Wheel ready to go?”
“That’s simple enough,” said the other guest, whom Priscilla did not recognize. “It costs money. You try to buy an interstellar recently?” He was blond, overweight, and liked to roll his eyes.
“All right,” said Michelle. “But there’s more to the story. You know who Priscilla Hutchins is, right?”
Priscilla’s hair rose.
“She’s the pilot,” said Conover, “who brought back some of those kids.”
“Right. I have it from a reliable source that Hutchins tried to leave for Teegarden a couple of days ago. When news of the problem first came in. You know what happened?”
“I have no idea,” said Conover.
“She was stopped by the bureaucrats. From what I understand, they have an established procedure, and she wasn’t following the procedure. So the people at Teegarden will have to wait a few extra days with no food.”
Great, she thought. That’s going to enhance my situation around here.
* * *
HER DRINK ARRIVED. She tried it, and her link chimed. “Priscilla? This is Morgan White.”
The supervisor at Operations. “Hello, Morgan. Anything wrong?”
“No. I just got word about something, though. Thought you should know, if you haven’t heard already. When they went through the Baumbachner, the results weren’t so good. The techs are saying that there’s a good chance if you’d activated the drive, it would either have exploded, or made the jump and exploded the next time you tried to use it.”
* * *
“YEAH, PRISCILLA,” FRANK said, with a smile playing on his lips. “I heard about the Baumbachner an hour ago.”
“I wanted to say thanks.”
“It’s okay. You’ve been right all along. We should have an emergency vehicle. They’re trying to fix the Bomb now, but I still don’t trust it. We need an emergency vehicle, but we just don’t have the funds for it. And this is why we need to stay within the system. Okay?”
* * *
PRISCILLA WAS TASKED with composing a reaction to the news reports. She put together a statement which, when Frank and Patricia had finished tinkering with it, pointed out that the Grosvenor was proceeding to the rescue and was expected to arrive in the Teegarden system in about three and a half days. It added that the Baumbachner had not been permitted to proceed earlier because it was no longer capable of interstellar flight. “An attempt to take it to the Teegarden system,” someone added, “would have done nothing more than kill the pilot.” It also noted that the ship was being refitted and would be maintained as an emergency vehicle. Priscilla had been instructed not to mention the fact that the actual rescue was still probably five days away. The pundits brought that issue up on the talk shows, however, and the WSA was beginning to take another beating when they caught a break: Mickey Alvin, then at the peak of his comic career, got involved in a bar fight and was arrested early that evening. That became the next day’s main story.