Farthest Reef (5 page)

“If it didn’t we wouldn’t get anywhere,” added Marie, still smiling at Alex.

Suzy sealed the doors, saying: “Computer. Shuttle bay,” and the car began moving forward. It picked up speed quickly, making little sound as it traveled. Seated in the back, Alex had to look past the girls to see ahead, but all he saw during the brief trip were lights and loading stations blurring past them.

“I notice the tubeway has a rail,” observed Alex.

Suzy was looking back at him with an alluring smile. “The car rides on it … magnetically. It’s really just a guide bar.” He could tell her eyes were undressing him. “The computer guides it and times all tube travel.”

“The trick is transferring from the cylinder to the weightless part of the ship,” offered Marie, happy to have Alex’s eyes shift to her.

Suzy gave her a dark look. “Yes,” she said, a little too loudly. “The computer matches the speed of the car to the speed of the wheel. Then it guides the car during the matchup and shifts it to the other tube.”

“Without error? Hard to believe.” He was trying to keep his eyes off both the girls.

“So far, so good,” said Marie cheerfully.

Suzy interrupted again and gave Alex a data cube to play in his quarters when the ship jumped to Jupiter. The girls had reminded him of college coeds until he brought up the modifications to his shuttle. To his surprise, both girls were able to relate every technical detail with laconic precision. They also explained why his ship was aboard
Goddard
.
Diver
, Suzy explained, had been taken to Earth to be overhauled and fitted with a mechanism similar to the type used to trap sea creatures, but she gave no further details, except, “Yours is bigger, of course.” Again she punctuated her statement with a warm smile.

During the trip Alex felt the car jerk, and then gravity faded as he felt the familiar falling sensation of weightlessness. “I assume we’re out of the cylinder?” he posited.

The two girls nodded and smiled excessively. “That was the cross-over to the weightless …”

“I get it,” interrupted Alex. He was becoming very uncomfortable with all the female scrutiny. “Will I be able to visit my shuttle?”

Almost sadly the guides informed him that he couldn’t enter his ship until they reached Jupiter. “Dingers,” he said disappointedly. “I’m not asking to fly her.”

But it was no use. Despite an obviously overwhelming desire to please Alex, Suzy and Marie were under orders. The tubeway trip amounted to little more than a stopover at the shuttle bay and a brief strap ride to visit his shuttle.

As the protocol officers had said,
Diver’s
sleek delta shape had been transformed. Added to her belly was a streamlined yet bulging white pod. “Dingers,” cried Alex when he saw her. “You made her look … pregnant!”

Some time later, encased in the jump pod built into the wall of his stateroom, he wondered if he ever wanted to fly
Diver
again. It had looked like a trussed bloated animal inside
Goddard’s
bay. Did he want to handle the same controls that had brought him to this situation? Did he want to dive again into the clouds of Jupiter and snatch clicker men, to shanghai them on a voyage to a star? To date, no one had asked him how he felt about it. Not Stubbs, nor even his ‘friend’ Professor Baltadonis. He could refuse. He could bail.

The pod they had assigned him for the jump to Jupiter was located below decks in the cylinder. All Alex knew was that his current location had been a short tubecar ride from the shuttle bay. His quarters were small and equipped with all the comforts of home, chief among them a capsule shaped pod that would serve as his bed and his cocoon during the jump.

Perhaps more important, at the moment, was a refreshment dispenser. The room was more confining than he would have liked, but despite missing Mary and feeling claustrophobic as he lay in the pod, he kept his mind on the orientation data the guides had given him. The vid panel was built into the curving roof of the module, so all he had to do was lie there and watch.

An hour or so into the briefing the open side of the pod closed. A moment later the first shudder of weightlessness reverberated through the ship. Alex felt another, then another, then he noticed a sweet smell in the air. He knew it was the medication that was supposed to help him endure the flight. As expected, he began to feel drowsy. His eyes were on the briefing but his mind was wondering if Mary could see him now, and if she would be able to reach him in jump space. Another more powerful ripple went through the ship. He felt slightly nauseous and closed his eyes. A sensor over his head saw his eyes close, waited a few seconds, and stopped the program.

5
There had been no announcement of the jump, no countdown or other dramatics. Alex sat up when the pod cover shooshed open. His head swam and his jaw ached for some reason. “Ow,” he said, lying back down. He lay still a moment, testing his arms and legs to be sure everything was working, then he sat up again, holding the side of the pod for support.

“
Good morning, Captain Rose, shall we resume the briefing? We were discussing the general modifications to your shuttle’s Null-Gee systems … specifically, focusing the field.
”

“Dingers.”

The computer fell silent, perhaps attempting to interpret his response as a command. He stretched his muscles and groaned as pain rippled through his stiff joints. “I’m hurting a bit at the moment, so stow the lecture for a while. Pause for a while, computer.”

“
Stipulate duration of pause, please.
”

“End program! Point me to the painkillers.”

“
Goddard’s medical technicians have been notified of your discomfort.
”

In only a few minutes two medical personnel came into Alex’s quarters armed with gear he didn’t recognize. Finding him lying down, they were immediately on him, checking his vitals and drawing blood, before he could protest. They strapped him to the pod and put a small cap on his forehead.

“Do this all the time?” asked Alex, wondering if he should fight them off.

“Relax,” ordered the tech nearest his right arm. “You had a toxic reaction to the jump. It happens … one in, oh, a hundred thousand.”

“And they want me to make the jump to a star?”

“Now that we have your chemistry balanced, you’ll be fine,” offered the man.

“Come and look at Jupiter,” said a voice behind him at the door. It was Connie Tsu, dressed in a yellow foam suit. Her jet black hair was longer than Alex remembered, but all in all she looked the same as when they’d last visited Jupiter’s Reef. Connie looked him over, then she grinned. “Wormin’ not your style, Alex?”

He was sitting up now and, aside from being wet with perspiration, felt much better. He stood and tested his legs, glad to see that the room didn’t spin in circles any more. The med staff stood close by to support him. “I’m clean ice, gents,” he said. “Seamless.”

The two medical technicians checked him over one more time and gave him a clean bill of health, assuring him that future jumps wouldn’t be so hard on him. Then they left.

Tsu raised an eyebrow. “You were icing on Ganny, I heard.”

“’s me,” said Alex. “You? Lost touch with you after the last dive. How’s Jeanne Warren?”

“Jeannie’s do’n follow-up work on Callisto, same as me, at least until we got our orders to go to Mars. She’s here with the Bio boys. I’m piloting.” Connie stepped closer and looked closely into his blue eyes. “You ready to go home for a bit, eh? You look beggars.” She noticed his bag near the door. “Time for you to get back to Ganymede,” she said. “I’m here ’cause I wanted to say hello. Stubbs says
Diver
is being prepped for launch. You can test her out on the trip home. I’ll drive if you want me to.”

Alex picked up his bag and accompanied Tsu into the park-like commons. He was amazed for a second time by the arboreal splendor of the
Goddard’s
biocylinder. She pointed up at the brilliantly lit central core; it looked like a huge neon bulb. An opening in the trees nearby allowed him to see the end of the cylinder. The lighted part didn’t run the length of the cylinder, only the central two thirds. Tsu told him that in the curving ends of the cylinder were various levels containing supplies, a hospital, lab decks, etc.

“All this with only three hundred people?”

Tsu laughed and her dark oriental eyes flashed widely, an expression he remembered seeing several times before. “There’s three hundred and some terraformers and specialists from Earth. They all got picked up at Mars. Now she’ll be taking on the Jupiter crew, another seven hundred or so from the colonies … Io, Europa … and your Gannys, a’ course.”

She led Alex to a door and opened it. “We’ll take the shortcut,” she said. “You’ve done the tubes, right?”

He nodded and followed her through the door. “How long did the jump take, Connie? How much time?”

“A few seconds, either way.”

“Either way?”

Tsu smiled. “Forward or backward. Depending on your point of view. Your wife is two days older than when you left Mars. Sad, huh?”

The small room they’d entered had a large hole in the floor from which extended two rails. Beyond the tube was a sign on the wall that read, “SHUTTLE BAY.”

Tsu grabbed the handrails and stepped into the tube. “Here we go.”

Alex followed, and soon they were in the weightless environment of the
Goddard’s
shuttle bay. He was surprised to find
Diver
lit up and ready for launch. He could hear the soft whine of her engine chargers as the cable dropped him off at the open hatch with Tsu right behind him. “She looks ’kay,” she remarked, helping Alex unhitch his bag from the transport strap.

“Yeah,” Alex grunted. “So much new gear, I wonder if I can fly ’er?”

Tsu touched his arm before they entered. “Slept through the orientation tapes, right?”

Alex smiled sarcastically. “The medication didn’t help, but I got most of it.”

“This whole thing is buggin’ you, right?”

He peered at her incredulously. “Why’re you askin’?”

“Alex,” Connie said, almost in a whisper, “They did you wrong. A year back I told them to go to you directly, bring you in on the planning. They didn’t listen.”

“I’d have told ’em no.”

Tsu looked at her foam-clad feet, thinking, then looked up at him. “I don’t think so. I’m thinkin’ you’d give anything to go to explore another star.”

Alex looked into
Diver’s
open hatch. The inner chamber looked the same as when he left Jupiter, years before. There, he’d opened sample tubes, sabotaging reef samples to slow the advance of science into the reef. He knew the act had been futile but he’d never regretted it. He’d tried to make his sabotage look like an accident, but the Corpies knew. He guessed that was the reason Earthcorp didn’t trust him enough to ask if he wanted to go. He still hadn’t made up his mind. All he knew for sure at the moment was that he wasn’t going to start discussing it with Connie. “Let’s go,” he said. “Mary’s waiting.”

6
Except for Connie sitting in Mary’s seat, everything seemed the same as the last time he had operated his ship. The cabin had been cleaned and refitted with newer cabinetry, but
Diver
still had the same feel as when he flew her last.

“She’s more powerful. Twice what you handled,” said Tsu, watching Alex swing his ship away from the giant needle in the sky. “You know about the snatcher, but did you know they dropped the balloons? Not necessary. Null-gee is enough, they think. Are you pissed?”

“The balloons were a backup,” said Alex. “If the gravity failed …”

“You’d have sunk like a stone without the null-gee. And you know it.”

Alex fixed his gaze on Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon. Behind it sat Jupiter and that giant ruddy shadow he knew to be its Great Red Spot. “You may be right,” he admitted. “Actually, considering the more powerful null-gee we had on the second trip in, I concluded that the balloons probably just got in the way. We almost got stuck down there a few times because of them.” He pushed the stick forward and felt
Diver
spring to life. The acceleration snapped his head back against the seat. “Whooooa! I see what you mean.”

“Pulse plasma-ramjet accelerators,” said Tsu, yawning. “Twice the thrust you had before. Paid for by Uncle Earthcorp. Have you any idea what those cost to build?” She cast a dark eye on Alex. “You have nothing to complain about.”

Before the approach to Gannytown, Alex tested the systems, old and new; except, of course, the snatcher. He was dubious about that particular addition. When Tsu insisted he test it, he suggested Connie step outside and he’d suck her in to see if it worked. She laughed, but Alex didn’t. He’d reviewed the data on the snatcher almost as soon as he had the chance. It was, as Stubbs had said, like something used to nab deep sea biota on earth, a large scale hose and containment system designed to ingest delicate organisms without a scratch.

Alex tried to imagine the circumstances that might allow them to snatch a clicker man. On the first two trips into the reef, clicker men had rarely gotten close to
Diver
. If having
Diver
in their midst wasn’t alarming enough, the clicks clearly didn’t like the null-gee field. Occasionally small groups of clicker men had gotten close enough to grab, perhaps, but they were always under the watchful eye of other clicker men watching at a distance. Even if they did snatch a clicker man and beat it out of there, would the snatcher harm them? Could they even transport them safely to
Goddard
, let alone another star system? Alex said the last thought aloud.

“Talkin’ to yourself, Alex?” asked Connie, a slight smirk on her face. “Are we losin’ it?” She was glib but not unconcerned. Her hand instinctively moved to the control stick in front of her, ready to take control of the ship. Alex noticed and smiled, suspecting that his banter was undermining his credibility as a pilot. “Ready to grab the controls if I freak?” he asked jokingly. “You’re a good pilot, Tsu. Why lap dog for the professors?”

Connie’s dark eyes flashed. “I’m in it for the adventure,” she admitted. “This beats sitting in a lab. Sure, politics got me here, but piloting is my goal. Better than being a lab slave.”