McGillicutty managed to shut up long enough to check his own control board. “Two minutes,” he announced at last.
Under the beam for seven minutes. Marcia suddenly found herself thinking of her husband, Gerald MacDougal, back on Earth, back home in the lab in Vancouver. Even at the speed of light, he was ten long minutes away. But it wasn’t numbers and seconds. It was that Gerald was in the past, his reality cut off from hers by the wall of time. No matter what he did, no matter what happened to him, she could not possibly know about it until the sluggish lightwaves crossed the void between the worlds.
He could die in the midst of sending her a live message and she would not know it for ten minutes.
If, for Marcia, Gerald was trapped in her past, then she was trapped in his past. Each in the other’s past. There was something deeply disturbing about that, as if both of them were frozen in place, like some insect trapped in Precambrian tree sap, imprisoned as the sap fossilized into crystal perfection, leaving its victim perfectly preserved, trapped in the amber of time.
“Twenty seconds,” McGillicutty announced. This weird pulsation and manipulation of gravity was not something she understood. She was more than a little afraid of it, to tell the truth. Somehow, it smacked of magic, of voodoo and mystery. How could there be a beam made of gravity waves? It even sounded like a nonsense phrase, a cheese made of xylophones, a cloud made of steel.
She blinked and forced herself to concentrate on the display screen. “Ten seconds.” Nine minutes and fifty seconds ago, the beam had struck her husband’s world, but that stroke of time would not pass through her frame of experience for another ten seconds, nine seconds, eight seconds—she fiddled with her tuning controls, sharpening the image—four, three, two, one, zero—
Her screen display went wild, and her terminal speaker was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful screeching roar of noise. She cut off the audio and stared in astonishment at the oscilloscope trace on the screen. Something was producing a powerful and complex signal out there. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, as if it were repeating over and over again.
It took her a moment to look up and realize that the rest of the people in the lab were more surprised than she was. Even McGillicutty seemed to be in shock. It took her significantly longer to realize that the squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band was all that was left of Earth.
With a bump and a clunk, the Pack Rat undocked herself from the Moonside cargo port of the Naked Purple Habitat. Dianne Steiger glanced at the chronometer: 1001 GMT, just after ten in the morning, departure right on schedule, though it didn’t come soon enough for her. If there were weirder places than NaPurHab in the Solar System, she didn’t want to know about them. The Rat backed off with a cough from her control jets, engaged her gyros and came about to a new heading. The big bright ball of Earth swung into view through the starboard port.
With folded hands, Dianne Steiger sat at the control panel and watched the proceedings.
The massive, somehow scruffy bulk of NaPurHab loomed large in her forward port. NaPurHab flew a looping figure-eight orbit that shuttled back and forth around Earth and Moon. Right now the hab was headed down into the Earthside portion of its orbit. That was where the Rat got off, fired engines to circularize her orbit and get on course for her next port of call. Dianne keyed the comm panel and called NaPurHab comm and traffic. “NaPurHab, this is Foxtrot Tango thirty-four, call signal Pack Rat, departing for deadhead run to High New York Habitat. On auto departure, now sending departure vector data on side channel. Please acknowledge.”
“We copy you, Pack Rat. Departure plan received, recorded and approved. Slide on in to HNY easy. Milk the fatcats until they moo or meow. See you next time.” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, also know as Frank Barlow, was a decent sort, even if he drifted into the stilted Naked Purple lingo now and again.
“Thanks, Frank,” Dianne replied. “I’m looking forward to it.” Not exactly true, of course, but what the hell. On her job description, Dianne Steiger was called a pilot-astronaut. But she knew better. Dianne was a backup system. The robots, the automatics, the artificial intelligence routines—they were the astronauts. They did all the work. She was here because this freight run flew close to inhabited areas in the crowded regions of Earth orbit, and because the astronaut union was still fairly strong, if in decline.
Union rules and safety regs required a pilot aboard in case the incredibly unlikely occurred and the automatics packed up while leaving the manual controls functional. Nice theory, except that virtually every mishap that could incapacitate the autos would wreck the Rat past all possibility of controlling her ever again, by any means. But regulations were regulations.
Even the few tasks left to Dianne could just as easily have been done by machines. But it was deemed wise to give the pilots at least something to do, even if the computer could have controlled that circuit, and a servo could have sealed that hatch. A pilot left completely inactive, her reflexes completely dulled by boredom, was not likely to be of much use in an emergency. Or so went the theory. Dianne felt pretty dulled down, even so.
Flying spaceships was supposed to be romantic, exciting, dangerous and challenging. Dianne had gone through eight years of training and ended up running a glorified delivery service.
She was thirty-three years old, but looked older. Her hair was long and brown, half-gone to gray. At the moment she had it bound up in a tight braid coiled on top of her head. When she let it down, it was as wiry as a bottle brush. Her face was lined and lean, and her eyes were wide and bright. People who didn’t know her assumed at first sight that she hadn’t eaten in a week, Her face took expressions to their extremes. Her slightest smile lit up a room, her least frown was frightening.
She sorely missed her cigarettes aboard ship. Someday they’d build a ship with an air system rated to handle tobacco smoke. She made up for it on the ground, though. She was a chain-smoker between flights, her fingers stained yellow with nicotine. She was small and slight of build, but surprisingly strong, with a bone-crushing handshake and a hard, muscular body built over her slender frame. Her appearance, her body, had helped her get a job. The shipping companies like their pilots small and quick.
She had, quite literally, set her sights a lot higher than flying an orbital shuttle. She had been a candidate for the starship project, before they scrapped it. She’d been one test away from acceptance as a cold-sleep reserve pilot aboard the Terra Nova. She was to have been the third-wave pilot, thawed out when the first-wave pilot retired and the second-wave pilot took command. When the second-wave pilot died or retired—then she would have been the commander of a starship.
Then the whole starship project had been canceled, victim of the Knowledge Crash recession that had hit Earth and the rest of the Solar System. It was an era of retreat, surrender, drawing back from the frontiers to safety. So now the nearly completed Terra Nova rode in low Earth orbit, mothballed.
The recession hadn’t offered much to ex-starship pilots. There weren’t any openings on the passenger lines, or even on the cargo ships moving between the major planets. And so Dianne was reduced to humping freight back and forth between NaPurHab, the low-Earth-orbit stations, and the dirtside spaceports. And she was lucky to get even this job. All the other Terra Nova pilots had out-emigrated long ago, looking for work in the Settlement worlds. But pilot jobs were lean out there, too.