Enigma (13 page)

When Thackery reached the dress-out room at the foot of the climbway, Guerrieri was already dressed and aboard, beginning his checkout of the gig. Muir had donned all but her helmet and was trying to help Eagan with his gloves. The E-suit fit her more closely than her usual garb of choice, leading Thackery to a quiet and favorable reevalution.

“Oh, good, Thack,” Muir said on seeing him. “You can do this. My gloves are so freezin’ slippery I can’t get a grip on his.” Tossing the glove she had tucked under one arm to Thackery, she stepped to the hatch and dropped through.

“That’s so the microbes can’t get a grip on them, either,” Thackery called after her. He waited a moment for a laugh that didn’t come, then turned to Eagan.

“I don’t know if I should let you do those,” Eagan said sparringly as he held out his hands.

“Why?”

“I think you want my job.”

“Banish the thought,” Thackery said as a loud
clack
announced that the first glove was properly seated.

“I don’t know. You’ve been busting cee all week—no, since we left A-Cyg, really. Even Sebright’s noticed, asked about you.”

“When was that?” Thackery said, and then bit down on his lower lip as he applied leverage to the remaining glove. “I don’t know, one of my watches. After Four. What was all that bowing and scraping about up there, anyway?”

Clack
.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Thackery said, stepping back. “You’re all set.”

“Sure you don’t. All the same, better watch it, it’s hard on the knees,” Eagan jibed. “You going to stay here and help Mike?”

“Yes. Go on, check out your gear.”

It took another forty minutes to get all three of the surveyors on board and the gig checked out to Sebright’s satisfaction. Watching on the bay monitor in the dress-out room, Thackery did not hear the go to proceed. But there was no mistaking the hissing and the basso thrum of pumps as the air in the bay was drawn into a storage reservoir. Now it was the pressure hatch at the foot of the climbway, and not the bay’s wide clamshell space door, which
Descartes
’ internal pressure held firmly closed. A few moments later the gig was released from its anchors, and slid sideways out the space door and away.

The picture shuddered as the wind grasped at the camera pylon, extended two metres above the fuselage of the gig. The picture was of a rock-littered desert stretching out to meet a pale violet sky.

“Wish we were watching upstairs on the edrec deck,” Tyszka said wistfully.

“It’s being recorded. Later,” Thackery chided.
It looks like a recording now
, he added silently, disappointed.
Mars, or maybe Procyon Six—I’ve seen so much video this seems like just one more. Connect, Merritt—your friends are down there
.

“Here they come,” Collins said suddenly.

At the bottom of the screen appeared heads, distorted by the foreshortening of the wide-angle lens. In that moment, as the landing team walked out onto the landscape, kicking up the dust of a new world, Two lost its patina of familiarity for Thackery.

“This is fantastic!” crackled the voice of Eagan. On the monitor, the shortest of the three figures raised his arms to each side and made a slow pirouette. “I haven’t even seen them yet and I can tell you the pictures don’t do justice.”

Another of the blue-suited figures turned and waved vigorously toward the camera. “For something that clogs up the whole damn bay, the gig sure looks tiny down here,” Guerrieri radioed. “Man, I was starting to forget what a wide-open space really looks like. This is going to spoil the edrec room for me for a while.”

“I can practically feel the wind right through the suit,” Eagan crowed. “Look at this! I feel naked.” Sebright chuckled. “Best advice is not to follow through on that impulse.”

In the background, Muir had been edging away from the others. Now she broke into a trot, heading toward the horizon. She stumbled and almost fell, and they heard her laughter as she caught herself and kept going, dancing nimbly among the rock obstacles.

“Don’t go out of sight,” Eagan called after her.

Without breaking stride, Muir reached up and switched off her radio.

“Stay with her, please,” Sebright counseled, and the two men started after Muir at a brisk walk. Two hundred metres out, she disappeared over a rise. A few moments later Eagan and Tyszka followed her footprints into invisibility.

“Hey, Donna.” They heard a long sigh of pleasure. “No walls. No people. Oh, what a wonderful place.”

“She’s got something there,” Guerrieri said fervently. “If I turn my back on these guys, I’m all alone here. It’s like I always have been alone here, you know? Because the gig’s out of sight, and that’s the only reminder that I was ever anywhere else. It’s a very strange feeling.”

“Understood, Gregg,” Sebright said. “Now if you folks would wander back, we’ll take a look at item one on the survey landing checklist.”

An answer came not from down on the surface, but from upship and the command deck and in the terse, angry voice of Neale. “Mark, are you there?”

“Yes, Ali.”

“I want to see you, the minute you break isolation.”

That minute was a long time in coming. After the gig was safely nestled back in its moorings inside the bay, it took three hours to process the landing team through primary decontamination. Beyond that stretched a 48-hour incubation period during which the contact decks continued to be sealed off physically and environmentally from the rest of the ship. By the time the team was pronounced healthy and the isolation mode terminated,
Descartes
had moved on to Five.

But Neale had no trouble summoning up her simmering anger when Sebright at last appeared before her, especially since by that time it was also clear that the scientific results of the landing were, to be charitable, trivial.

The encounter was in the privacy of her cabin anteroom, and she did not waste words on protocol. “What was the purpose of that display down on Four?” she demanded. “Is that a sample of the kind of leadership you’ve brought to this ship? Whatever his other failings, your predecessor wouldn’t have asked for a landing on a world like Four. He wouldn’t have allowed that landing to become an undisciplined frolic. He wouldn’t have wasted the time and resources of this ship on a private self-indulgence. Explain why you did it.”

But her emotion seemed to wash over Sebright without affecting his sanguine expression. “Walking out onto a new world is a high,” he said simply. “I want them to learn how to handle it when it doesn’t matter if they screw up or their attention wanders.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It is for me.”

Neale scowled. “You could at least make an effort to persuade me that this was a valuable rehearsal, or something to that effect.”

“Why?” Sebright said, stretching out his legs and resting one ankle on the other. “Look, Ali, I could argue that we really needed a full test of the gig so we knew we could count on it. I could wax poetic on how much we learned from a dry run of the isolation procedure. I could try to make you think we needed some physical samples to keep Gregg and Thack busy during the next craze. Most of that is even true.”

“Then do it, dammit, and let’s get this behind us.”

“Ali, if we get lucky, you want the contact to go smoothly. You want the contact team paying attention to the colonists and not the surroundings. Right?”

“They don’t need practice to do that. They need discipline.”

Sebright scratched his chin and studied her. “Maybe we should take you down with us. I’d be willing to bet that in all your time on
Dove
, you never made a landing.”

“It wasn’t my place to,” she bristled.

Sebright nodded. “I know that. But you wouldn’t say that kind of thing if you had that experience. Look, when this business was first starting and the astronauts would come back from a flight, everyone asked them what it was like to see the Earth from space. It was a very exclusive experience, and it seemed like only members of the club could make each other understand—and they didn’t need to. Maybe you even felt that way when you made your first orbital. I know I did.”

“So?”

“So now things are reversed. We’re used to the sight of a planet from orbit. It’s going down to walk on one that pushes those buttons for us. Don’t take my word for it. Go down with Jael and the others on the next one.”

“No,” she said sharply. “First, ship commanders belong on the command deck, not in a landing team taking unnecessary risks—certain tapes in the edrec library not withstanding. And second, there aren’t going to be any more of these excursions.”

“Survey landings are at the Concom’s discretion,” Sebright said quietly.

“Subject to
my
review. You don’t run this whole ship, Mark. You don’t even seem to be running your part of it with any particular distinction.” She looked away and exhaled sharply. “I’ll accept your other reasons for this landing, so there’ll be no more trouble over it. But you’ve used those reasons up, and until you have some new ones there’ll be no more survey landings.”

“I gave you another reason.”

“If you mean that nonsense of yours about needing to ‘adjust’ to making landings, I reject it. Every planet’s different anyway, so ‘adjusting’ to one won’t do a damn bit of good on the next. What they need is to be taught to put their responsibilities first. That’s how to make these things go smoothly, whether it’s a survey landing or a contact landing.”

Sebright stood, his face offering an unflattering opinion of what he had heard. “There’ll be some trouble, bad feelings, if the others don’t get to go. You have to let me have one more rehearsal landing.”

“No, I don’t. Your bad judgment created the trouble,” she said curtly. “You deal with it.”

After nineteen days in the system,
Descartes
crazed again, carrying them on to the next star. Thackery left feeling as though the task he had set for himself was already half accomplished. He knew he had done a good job, and he knew that Sebright recognized it. That pleased him in two ways: because Sebright was his superior, and because since A-Cyg Thackery had seen a different Sebright, one that in time he might grow to respect.

Unfortunately, the obvious but unacknowledged falling-out between Sebright and Neale meant that Thackery could not count on that favorable impression filtering upward. To move up in Neale’s eyes, Thackery knew he would have to do well in something close to Neale’s heart.

And there was only one solution to that equation. The colony problem was more than Neale’s primary interest—it was a preoccupation verging on an obsession. Already it was a standing joke that anytime Abrams, the senior electronics tech, could not be found, she was probably in Neale’s quarters working on the star projector.

Yet there were risks in such a tactic—the risk of succeeding too well. If he were to somehow generate a real advance in First Colonization theory, he could count on arousing not her approval but her professional jealousy. Certainly he could not expect to retain credit for any minor insights shared with her. She had already shown with her crew interviews, particularly the lengthy exploration of Nakabayashi’s slow-ship/fast-ship argument, that she had no compunction about appropriating others’ ideas for her personal dispatches to the FC Committee.

No, for Neale a slightly different strategy was required. The road to her approval was not to be a high achiever, a rival expert, but to be seen as taking the colony problem seriously. Then his interest would be reinforcing, not threatening.
They always want confirmation from others that what they think important really is
, he thought.
Well, that I can give her
.

Despite that modest goal, Thackery knew he had to be properly prepared. Enthusiasm would not be enough; he had already felt the quick scorn Neale reserved for the self-serving and opportunistic. Nothing destroys the illusion of sincere interest faster than an ignorant question, he reminded himself, and nothing establishes credibility faster than an insightful one.

Time for that preparation hid to be found in a schedule nearly as hectic as that they had kept insystem. But by arranging to be assigned responsibility for analyzing the data from the four worlds least likely to support life of any kind, Thackery was able to steal hours from his regular duties without risking an embarrassing oversight. He spent those hours studying the direction FC theory had taken since
Jiadur
and Journa.

Thankfully, he was still a quick study, especially on matters sociological and theoretical, and two days before the craze ended he judged himself ready. But there was still the problem of arranging a private consultation, especially since Neale rarely met with ratings except at her own request. After weighing the alternatives, he chose to intercept her as she was leaving the wardroom after what he hoped was a satisfying meal.

“Commander Neale?”

“What is it, Thackery?” She did not stop, and so he followed her out into the corridor.

“I’ve been doing some thinking about the colony problem—”

“As I recall, you badly needed to do some.”

“Yes, sir. Commander, I’ve reached a bit of a branch point, and nobody seems to be able to tell me whether I’m going the right direction. If you could find a little time to spare me, I’d very much appreciate the benefit of your experience in keeping me on track.”

“What’s this ‘branch point’?”

“Commander, what I’m really hoping for is some guidance in evaluating the alternatives to the standard First Colonization paradigm.”

“You think there are any alternatives?”

“Well, I thought so, at least one interesting one—but that’s why I really need the advice of someone who’s been involved in this from the beginning.”

There was a long pause. “All right. I can give you ten minutes. Not here. My quarters, two o’clock.”

She kept him waiting several minutes, but acted as though the reverse had been true. “You don’t have much time, so let’s hear it,” she said as she settled in her lounger.

Thackery took a seat facing but not too close to her. “As I understand it, the reigning First Colonization theory is that there was a great civilization in Northern Europe during the last glacial interstade, some 25,000 years ago.”