He stood up and she rose with him. “The authority they’ve given DSI,” Dianne said. “If Wolf Bernhardt is in charge, that’s his authority. And you said DSI has absolute U.N. priority over any and all resources and facilities. They’re trusting this guy Bernhardt with a hell of a lot of power. He could take over every lab on Earth, just for starters.”
“Yes, I suppose so—if he were a fool. If he wanted to be locked up, or to wake up dying from a bullet in the back of his head. Things are a bit panicky, and I wouldn’t be amazed if people starting playing very rough. Wolf knows that what the U.N. can give, the U.N. can take away. They hope that he can find more positive expression for his ambition. They want him—us—to come up with answers. That’s where you come in.”
Gerald led her out into the hall, down to a proper office, designed for the purpose. Gerald opened the door and walked in without knocking.
Herr Doktor Wolf Bernhardt was seated at his desk, engrossed in his work. Gerald leaned up against the doorframe and Dianne sat down in the visitor’s chair. By the looks of it, Bernhardt had been working at a frantic pace for many long hours.
The room was in chaos—but a neat man’s chaos, a valiant rearguard action against disorder. There were stacks of paper everywhere, and piles of datablocks—but each heap of paper had its edges squared off, and each datablock was neatly labeled in a precise hand. The center of the desk was surrounded by the mountains of information, but was itself an empty plain, nothing on it but a late-model notepack and a single sheet of paper that looked to be a list of things to do with half the items checked off. To one side of the sheet were a pen and a china cup half full of what seemed to be slightly stale, cold coffee.
Wolf was staring at the notepack’s screen, his fingers busy on the touchpad. Dianne Steiger studied him for a moment. His appearance matched that of his office: a precise, orderly man trying to keep up with too much coming in from all sides at once. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly combed, his shirt fresh, his eyes clear and alert—but exhaustion was peeking through the facade. He was not working through the notepack steadily, but in spurts of energy that spent themselves almost before they began. Then he would blink, shake his head, and force himself to concentrate anew. He took a careful sip of the coffee and made a face. At last he glanced up and realized with a start that Dianne and Gerald were there. “My God. I did not even hear you come in. Forgive me, I have been working too hard. You are astronaut Dianne Steiger, yes?”
Astronaut. That was his interest. A light went on in Dianne’s head. Suddenly she knew why she was here. She had thought that perhaps Bernhardt had wanted an eyewitness account of the Big Jump as seen from space, but no. This was something far bigger. She looked at Gerald, her heart suddenly trip-hammer fast with excitement. Something in his face seemed to confirm her guess. She looked back to Wolf Bernhardt.
“Yes I am.” She hesitated a moment, and then blurted it out. “You want the Terra Nova.” Her heart was pounding, and a dull, silent roar echoed dimly inside her head. Terra Nova. The prize lost so long ago. Dianne rarely allowed herself even to think of the canceled star-ship project. She had been only a few steps away from becoming a reserve pilot before the program had been canceled.
But now the prize would be even more rich. There were dozens of worlds, eight whole star systems in one to explore out there—
“I have the Terra Nova,” Bernhardt said abruptly, cutting into her reverie. “There are rush crews prepping her for a sprint mission to the Dyson Sphere right now. What I want—what I need—is you.”
Dianne lifted her left hand as carefully as she could, and tried to move it with something close to grace. But even wiggling her fingers was clumsy. “Ah, sir, of course I want to go—but I don’t think I can pilot. Not for a while. Not with this hand.”
“Pilots I have,” Wolf said dismissively. “What I want you for is captain. No one else on Earth can know that ship as well as you do.”
The roaring in her ears suddenly got louder, and Dianne blinked hard. Dreams aren’t supposed to come true, especially in the middle of a nightmare. Earth had been kidnapped, and so she got to fly a starship. Right into a Dyson Sphere. Suddenly her heart sank. That was a plan for disaster. But Wolf Bernhardt was still talking. Dianne forced herself back to reality.
“—the Terra Nova is tremendously complex. The training to handle it goes far beyond flying even a large interplanetary craft. We need someone who understands the broad picture. My office has found enough spacers who can fill the specialty jobs aboard—lander pilots, science specialists, medical, astronomers, orbital observation scientists and so on. Gerald here will be going along as chief scientific officer. But there are damn few from the original group of Terra Nova officers and crew candidates, people who really know that ship and what she can and can’t do. Most of the original candidates out-emigrated to find work. They’re back in the Solar System where we can’t get at them. The others—ah, well, there were very high casualties among spacers when the Big Jump happened.”
Bernhardt hesitated over that point, as if he could say more. It occurred to Dianne that she had never seen a breakdown of just how many casualties there had been. This DSI operation was keeping a lot of disturbing data to itself. “What it comes down to,” Bernhardt went on, “is that you are far and away the most qualified person for this job who’s still with Earth and alive.”
Dianne thought fast, considering as many sides of the situation as she could. It was tempting to just agree, to make the grand gesture and charge off to adventure. But no. False courage or bravado might help her ego, but the price for Earth would be too high. If she had to throw her dreams away, so be it. She leaned forward abruptly. “Yes, I’m here and alive. And I want to stay that way for a while.” She had to take charge of this little chat now if she was going to do it.
Wolf looked at her in surprise. “You aren’t accepting the mission voluntarily? I assure you that I have the power to draft labor—”
“For a suicide mission?” she asked. “For a mission that will throw away one of the few cards planet Earth has in this game? I’ll fly the Terra Nova—but not straight down the throat of a monster four hundred million times bigger than Earth! Not until I know something more about that monster.”
Wolf looked at Dianne. For the first time, he seemed to be considering her as something more than a chess piece. “What, exactly, are you saying?” he asked carefully.
“That the Terra Nova took years to build, and so would her replacement. If we even could build her replacement, with most of our off-planet resources and infrastructure gone. For at least the time being, she is irreplaceable. This new Multisystem of yours is likely to be dangerous enough without sending the ship to commit suicide deliberately. Wouldn’t it be nice at least to try to collect some data with the ship before she is vaporized by the enemy? Perhaps, to find out who and what the enemy is?”