Carl arrived, red-brown stubble at his chin but showing no fatigue. He drifted to a webbing that served as furniture in low gravity. “I had a mech retrieve Kearns. He’s a frozen statue.”
Virginia said, “Is there any… ?”
“No chance. His cells are ruptured.” Carl sighed, his hand brushing at his face as if to dispel all this as a bad dream. He visibly took control of himself and said with a deliberately calm flatness, “I clamped down security on the surface locks, in case anybody tries to join them.”
“Ah. good,” Ould-Harrad said.
Carl said, “I put Jeffers and some mechs out of sight of the Edmund, armed with lasers.”
“For what purpose?” Ould-Harrad asked coolly.
“Insurance. In case they try something else.” Carl studied Ould-Harrad expectantly. “What’re you going to do?”
“I wish a quick check of Virginia’s simulation,” Ould-Harrad said.
Carl nodded and swung over to a work console. He tapped into the sequence and time-stepped through it, oblivious to their nervous attention. They waited expectantly until he unhooked, replacing the helmet.
“Won’t work,” Carl said.
“Why not?” Virginia demanded. “I spent—”
“Mechs aren’t fast enough in close-up work:”
“JonVon got them to do it!”
“JonVon is swell for minimizing moves, sure. But it doesn’t allow for safety factors or slips. There’re always some in close-quarter work.”
“I could correct, introduce stochastic—”
“Not with the clock ticking,” Saul agreed reluctantly. “If a mech finds some leftover box in the way, it’ll consult JonVon and there’ll be a pause. There simply isn’t enough time.”
Virginia blinked, feeling hurt that Saul so quickly took Carl’s side. “I still—”
“That settles matters,” Ould-Harrad said. “God and Fate act together. We must let them go.”
“We can’t,” Saul said. “The hydroponics, the Newburn, the—”
“I know. There is much equipment we would miss,” Ould-Harrad said. “Perhaps, indeed, the lack will speed our doom. But we have no choice. I will not condone any attack on the Edmund.”
“That’s… crazy!” Virginia blurted.
Ould-Harrad’s face was impassive, distant. “When one faces death, what matters is honor. I will not harm others.”
Saul and Carl shared a look of disbelief and frustration. Virginia thought Ould-Harrad won’t oppose an Ortho rebellion, but if Percells tried it…
“How about if we disable her?” Carl asked casually, leaning back with his hands behind his head, stretching.
He’s given up the Newburn. And deliberately showing nothing about how he feels.
“You heard Linbarger,” Ould-Harrad explained patiently. “If we show any signs of bringing devices out, anything that can be used as a weapon.”
“Yeah, they’ll use the big lasers on it. Sure. But they can’t shoot you if you’re already inside the ship.”
Ould-Harrad said, “As I said, any approach.”
Saul broke in, “I think I see… send them a Trojan horse, correct?”
Carl grinned. “Right. Inside the sleep slots they’re demanding.”
Ould-Harrad’s eyes widened, showing red veins. “A bomb? It could damage anything, hurt people, there would be no control—”
“No bomb.” Carl grimaced. “A real Trojan horse—put men inside.”
There was a long silence as they studied each other. Virginia could read Ould-Harrad’s puzzled reluctance—plainly, the man had decided to accept Linbarger’s demands and simply let the expedition make do for the next seventy years. His pan-equatorial stoicism had won out.
Carl, though, was almost jaunty, certain his plan would work. Saul pensively ran over the many possibilities for error and disaster—but he licked his lips in unconscious anticipation, tempted, almost amused at this sudden hope.
And what do I think? Virginia realized that she had bristled at Ould-Harrad’s assumption that Linbarger had to be accommodated. She had studied the charts the mutineers had broadcast. Edmund had just enough fuel to arc outward in something called a Byrnes maneuver: loop through a close gravitational swing by Jupiter, reach Earth in a high-velocity pass, and attempt an aerobraking rendezvous. But the window for that trick was closing fast, with only a few days remaining.
Is Ould-Harrad play-acting?Could he be planning to duck across to the Edmund at the last minute, go back with them?
“I do not know…” Ould-Harrad began meditatively.
“Think it through,” Saul cut in. “I see one major problem.”
Carl frowned. “That equipment is vital. There’ll be plenty of volunteers.”
“That I do not doubt. But a sleep slot is narrow and shallow. You could not get in with a spacesuit on.”
“So what? I…” Carl’s voice trailed off.
“Yes. The obvious defense for them is to vent the sleep slots in space, to be sure no one is inside.”
Carl bit his lip, thinking. Virginia was acutely conscious of seconds trickling away. She liked Carl’s plan, not least because it would give them something to bargain with. If Linbarger took off, the expedition would have to construct their own biosphere without many vital portions. It was one thing to grow a few seeds under lamps and quite another to start up an entire interconnected ecosystem from scratch. Like starting off juggling with eight balls. Of all the ways there are to die out here, I had not considered simple starvation.
Irritated, Carl spat out a curt, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
A long, agitated silence. Moments falling into an abyss.
Virginia had a technique for dealing with problems under time pressure. When she was first doing detailed simulations Earthside, she had evolved programs so vast that they had to be booked days or weeks ahead of time on huge mainframes. If your program went awry, you could stop it in midcourse. Then there were a few minutes when the system would do housekeeping calculations for distant users. You could hold on to your reserved time, still run your simulation if you figured out the difficulty and managed to fix it in that brief interval.
Under pressure like that, it was easy to clutch up. So she had developed a way of letting her mind back off the problem, float, allowing intuition to poke through the tight anxiety. Focus outside the moment, let the surface mind relax…
Idly she noticed that on the walls the storm had built to a sullen, roiling rage. Wind blew streamers of foam from the steep waves, and huge raindrops pelted the slender grasses on the inshore dunes, crushing them. The dog had vanished, the crabs milled aimlessly beneath the hammering, incessant drops. The heavy air churned, looking too thick to even breathe—
“Wait,” she said. “I’ve thought of something.”
CARL
Slots, he realized, were a lot like coffins. That’s what had always bothered him about them.
He had a small flashlight with him, thank God. He could see the grainy sheen three inches from his face, feel the soft padding around him. The trapped tightness, the constriction, the cold… In the dark it would have been worse. Much worse. He didn’t mind the empty yawning black of open space, free and infinite. This cramped coffin was different.