Helix (4 page)

The
heavy blatt of a helicopter’s rotor blades startled him. He laid aside the
handful of potatoes he was unearthing and squinted in the direction of the
noise. It was coming in low from the north, the vehicle as far as he could tell
identical to the one Chrissie had arrived in over a week ago.

His
initial thought was that Chrissie had changed her mind, was not leaving Earth
aboard the starship. His heart leapt, until his head gained control. She would
have called to tell him of this decision, not arrived out of the blue like
this.

He
stood and moved towards the derelict perimeter fence, staring across the
intervening fifty metres of scrub to where the chopper had set down, its
stilled rotors drooping like palm fronds.

A
suited figure climbed down from the fuselage, spoke briefly with the pilot, and
turned to stare at Hendry. He walked towards the graveyard, clutching a slim
black briefcase under his arm. The sight of such a dapper figure in this
blasted landscape was at once incongruous and alarming.

Something’s
gone wrong, Hendry thought. The cryogenic process malfunctioned, killing
Chrissie, and this suit has come to apologise on behalf of the ESO and offer
statutory compensation.

The
man was slim and very blond, and wore a pair of wraparound sunglasses that made
his expression— aided by an unsmiling mouth—inscrutable.

He
stopped before the fence, staring at Hendry. “You are Joseph Charles Hendry,
date of birth 24
^th
May 2052?” The words, delivered in a harsh
Germanic accent, seemed absurd.

“What
do you want?”

“I
am Gert Bruckner of the European Space Organisation.”

“It’s
about Chrissie. What’s happened?”

“This
matter does not concern your daughter, Mr Hendry. She is fine.” He turned his
head to the left slightly, staring past Hendry to the shuttle. Perspiration
stood out on his blond, reddening brow. “If we might get out of the sun...”

Hendry
relented, moved aside and gestured Bruckner to follow him. When they reached
the shuttle he indicated a chair beneath the awning, wondering what the hell a
representative from the ESO might want with him.

He
fixed a jug of cold camomile tea and sat across the table from Bruckner.

He
poured and looked up. “How can I help you?”

Bruckner
laid his briefcase on the table, undipped it and withdrew a sheaf of papers. He
leafed through them, concentrating on certain paragraphs, as if familiarising
himself with details. He took a sip of camomile tea.

“Mr
Hendry, you served with Space Oceana for ten years from ‘78 to early ‘89, a
smartware engineer on shuttles.”

“What
about it?”

Bruckner
glanced at a printed form. “You served with distinction, worked hard, even
instituted design improvements on a couple of parallel systems—”

“It
was my job, before things went belly up.”

Bruckner
nodded. For all the emotion he evinced, he might have been an automaton. “Those
good old days of solid fuel,” he said without emotion, and Hendry wondered if
the line was a quote.

Bruckner
went on, “How would you like that job back, Mr Hendry?”

Surprising
himself, Hendry laughed. It was impossible, of course. Why would the ESO be
starting up shuttle runs again? And to where? The Mars and Moon colonies were
long abandoned... Unless there was a plan to recolonise. But it would never
work.

“I
don’t understand. The colonies... I mean, why would the ESO be recruiting
shuttle engineers?”

Bruckner
stared at him, his expression neutral. “We aren’t, Mr Hendry.”

“In
that case, will you please explain yourself?”

Bruckner
nodded, took another sip of cold tea. He replaced the glass precisely upon the condensation
circle it had formed on the tabletop. “Mr Hendry, the ESO in Berne suffered a
terrorist attack two weeks ago. We lost a number of clerical personnel in the
bombing, and five technicians.”

“I
heard about it. So...”

“So,
we need to replace those technicians.”

“But
the ESO doesn’t fly shuttles anymore,” Hendry said. He saw himself reflected in
Bruckner’s lenses. The man stared at him, his mouth set.

“We
need the engineers not for shuttles, but for a project that until now has
remained—or so we thought—top secret.”

Hendry
thought he was about to suffer a coronary. Something tightened in his chest. He
felt dizzy. “What project?”

Bruckner
said, “The ESO is sending a starship, the
Lovelock,
on a mission to
colonise the stars. It is—and this might be construed as a melodramatic way of
putting it—Earth’s last hope.” For the first time, Bruckner smiled. “But I
think your daughter...” he referred to his papers, “Christine, might have
mentioned something about it?”

Hendry
said, “How could she keep quiet when she would never see me again?”

“Well...
perhaps now, if you accept the commission, your daughter
will
see you
again.”

His
heart thudded. All this was happening too fast. It was as if his emotions had
to play catch up with what his head was telling him.

“I...
But why me? Why not any of the dozens of other younger smartware—?”

Bruckner
cut in, “They’re dead, in one or two cases not interested. Your credentials are
impeccable. You are the logical choice.”

Hendry
just shook his head.

Bruckner
went on, “We’ve recruited four specialists so far to replace the five murdered.
One survived without injuries. The six, when the
Lovelock
lights out,
will form the maintenance crew that will be resurrected from cold sleep at
journey’s end to run a series of checks on the smartware systems and to bring
the ship down.”

“This
is incredible,” Hendry murmured to himself.

Chrissie...
Chrissie was not lost to him. If he accepted the commission, then one day, in
the far future, they would be reunited. He tried to envisage her surprise and
joy.

“This
is for real, not some sick joke?”

In
reply Bruckner took a metallic card from the breast-pocket of his suit and
passed it to Hendry. He tried to read the print, but his vision blurred.

“My
identification. You can access the relevant data if you have an up-to-date
com-system.”

“Okay...
okay, so the
Lovelock
is heading for the stars. What are the chances of
finding somewhere habitable? Surely pretty low?” Not that this, he thought,
would be any deterrent to his accepting the job. His reward would be to have
Chrissie again.

“The
Lovelock
will be heading for a star system a little over five hundred light
years from Earth. Before the Mars colony was disbanded, radio telescopes
gathered data on Zeta Ophiuchi, a blue main sequence star. We processed the
data after the withdrawal, and discovered that the star possesses a planet,
which, from spectrographic analysis, is a good candidate for habitation. This
will be the
Lovelock’
s first port of call.”

Hendry
nodded, attempting to come to terms with what Bruckner was telling him.

A
purpose to life, after so long without one. A chance to be with Chrissie, to
build a colony out there among the stars...

“When
do you need my reply, Mr Bruckner?”

The
official indicated his card. “My details are there,” he said. “If you contact
me within the next two days, shall we say, we can send a helicopter for you.
There will be a period of training in Berne before departure. Contractual
details will be discussed in Berne, should you accept the offer.”

Bruckner
stood, inclined his head, and indicated a sheaf of paper on the tabletop. “Read
through the mission synopsis before you contact me.” He paused, then said,
“Goodbye, Mr Hendry. I hope we meet again.”

Hendry
watched him go, step carefully over the remains of the fence, and cross to the
helicopter. Seconds later the chopper took off, whisking Bruckner away. Hendry
watched it, snickering over the parched brush, and wondered if he’d dreamed the
conversation.

That
night Old Smith contacted him again. “Well, given any more thought to the
offer?”

“I
thought about it long and hard, Smith. But something’s just come up. My
daughter wants me to join her.”

“And
you’re going?” Old Smith looked crestfallen.

Hendry
smiled. “It’s an offer too good to refuse,” he said.

“So
you’re going up to Switzerland?”

Hendry
smiled. “Somewhere up there,” he said.

They
chatted a while longer before Old Smith waved a frail hand. “Good luck on the
journey, Hendry. It’s a long way...”

The helicopter ferried
him as far as Sydney—now little more than a fortified military base—from where
an ESO sub-orb ship carried him the rest of the way to Europe. Strapped into
the acceleration couch behind the taciturn pilot, Hendry had the very real
sense that he was indeed going to the stars. The chopper ride to Sydney had
failed to bring home to him the fact of where he was going, merely what he was
leaving. Now, cocooned by the high-tech apparatus of space flight, much of
which was familiar but a lot of which had been developed since his days in
space, he knew that what Bruckner had told him was, amazingly, true: he was
going to be frozen in a suspension unit and fired off to the stars. The fact
brought home to him the immense privilege of being saved like this, and at the
same time what a small cog he was in the vast, impersonal machine of the
European Space Organisation’s colonisation mission.

The
sub-orb ride took five hours. From an altitude of 40,000 feet, planet Earth
looked little different from how it had appeared fifty years ago, a little
greyer, perhaps, and the landmasses reconfigured thanks to the rising tides.
But at lower altitude, after take-off from Sydney and when coming in low over
southern Europe, the full effect of global warming could be seen: the sere land,
denuded of vegetation, with not a tree in sight. The cities were static, roads
broken like fragile threads, buildings derelict.

At
the midpoint of the journey, as they were sailing high over Southern Asia and
the Middle East, the pilot spoke for the first time. “That’s India down there,
or what’s left of it. A billion dead. A country wiped out.” He grunted. “Only
the temples are left standing.”

“Plague?”
Hendry asked.

“And
civil war, and drought.”

A
while later the pilot commented, “To your left. That was Israel, Jordan, Syria
and all the rest. It’s a no-go area now. Nothing lives down there, not after
the nuke wars.”

From
the air, the devastated region gave the paradoxical impression of calm, a
geographical serenity not matched by a century of conflict culminating in the
mutually destructive war of ‘75.

Italy
was a parched wasteland, its surviving population having fled north a decade
ago. Only as the sub-orb screamed in over Austria did a kind of normality
return—though that was deceptive. Despite the sight of lush green valleys down
there, Hendry knew that Austria was no longer a functioning state; like eighty
per cent of other European countries, it had suffered from civil wars, plagues,
societal breakdown due to the more invidious malaise of mass unemployment as,
one by one, services necessary for the smooth running of a modern industrial
state had ceased functioning.

Switzerland
was a fortified enclave populated by the rich and the privileged, and the
lucky—those who had found themselves in the right place at the right time:
Chrissie, for example. It was ironic that the Swiss state, for so long neutral
and without an army, now possessed the largest fighting force in the northern
hemisphere—employed to patrol the borders and keep undesirables out.

Hendry
was taken by armed convoy from the spaceport to the ESO headquarters, a journey
of some half a kilometre through what looked like a shantytown of ad hoc
buildings and listless citizens roasting in the midday heat.

His
driver saw him staring. “Mainly Italian and Greek refugees,” he said. “They
work in the factories, what few are still running.”

By
contrast, the ESO compound was an oasis of modern brick buildings equipped with
air-conditioning. He was shown to an apartment overlooking a swimming pool, in
which tanned, healthy-looking Europeans disported themselves.

He
underwent a comprehensive medical check-up later that afternoon, conscious for
the first time in years of his middle-age gut and general level of unfitness.
“We’ll soon knock you into shape,” the medic joked. “Now let’s have a look at
your head.” For the next hour he suffered tedious probes and prods as a
neuroscientist checked the functioning of his implants, the sub-dermal receptor
sites set flush to his skull that allowed him to interface with shipboard
smartware. It had been one of his fears that recent developments in that area
might have rendered his hardware obsolete—but the head-tech assured him that he
had nothing to worry about. There had been precious few innovations in that
area for at least ten years.