Hidden Variables (16 page)

I never saw it. Puberty arrived, sex dreams replaced my fantasy. I forgot all about the cliff face, the terror, the feeling of force that could not be resisted. Forgot it totally—except that dream memories never disappear completely, they lie at some deep submerged level of the mind, until something pulls them out again.

And here I was again, back on the same cliff face, sliding steadily to my fate, powerless to prevent it. I woke up with my heart rate higher by thirty beats a minute, with cold perspiration on my forehead and neck. It took me a long time to return to the present, to banish the bygone fall into the pit.

I finally forced myself up to full consciousness and looked at the screen above me. The purple blaze of a plasma drive danced against the black backdrop of HC-183 and its surrounding star field. It hung there, falling forever but suspended on the feathery stalk of the drive exhaust. I lay there for about ten minutes, just watching, then looked across at Wenig. He was staring at me, his eyes unblinking.

"Awake at last," He made a sort of coughing noise, something that I think was intended to be a laugh. "You're a cool one, Captain Roker. I couldn't sleep with that hanging there"—he jerked his thumb at the screen—"even if you doped me up with everything in the robodoc."

"How long did I sleep?"

"About three hours. Ready to give up now?"

I was. It had been my idea, an insistence that we ought to try and get some sleep before we did the next phase of our maneuver around HC-183. Wenig had opposed it, had wanted to go on at once, but I thought we'd benefit from the rest. So I was wrong.

"I'm ready." My eyes felt as though they'd been filled with grit, and my throat was dry and sore, but talking about that to Wenig wouldn't do much for McAndrew or Nina Velez. "Let's get into position and try the radar."

While Wenig juggled us over to the best position, sixty thousand kilometers from HC-183 and about the same distance from the
Merganser
, I wondered again about my companion. They had drawn lots to come with me, and he had won. The other four scientists back at the Institute seemed a little naive and unworldly, but not Wenig. He was tough and shrewd, and I had seen the speed of those hands, dancing over the keyboard. Had he done a bit of juggling when they drew lots, a touch of hand-faster-than-the-eye?

I thought of his look when he spoke about Nina. If McAndrew was infatuated, perhaps Wenig shared the spell. Something strong was driving him along, some force that could keep him awake and alert for days on end. I wouldn't know if I was right or not unless we could find a way to haul
Merganser
back out of the field. The ship still hovered over its pendant of blue ionized gases, motionless as ever.

"How about this?" Wenig interrupted my thoughts. "I don't think I can get the geometry any better than it is now."

We were hanging there too, farther out from the proto-planet than the
Merganser
but close enough to see the black disk occulting the star field. We could beam short bursts of microwaves at our sister ship and hope there was enough signal strength to bore through the sheaths of plasma emitted by the drives. It would be touch and go—I had never tried to send a signal to an unmanned ship on high-drive, but our signal-to-noise ratio stood right on the borderline of system acceptance. As it was, we'd have to settle for voice-links only.

I nodded, and Wenig sent out our first pulses, the simple ship ID codes. We sent it for a couple of minutes, then waited with our attention fixed on the screen.

After a while Wenig shook his head. "We're not getting through. It wouldn't take that long to respond to our signal."

"Send it with reduced information rate and more redundancy. We have to give McAndrew enough to filter out the noise."

He was still in send mode when the display screen began to crawl with green patterns of light. Something was coming in. The computer was performing a frequency analysis to pick out the signal content from the background, smoothing it, and speeding it up to standard communication rate. We were looking at the Fourier analysis that preceded signal presentation.

"Voice mode," said Wenig quietly.

"
Merganser
." The computer reconstruction of McAndrew's voice was slow and hollow. "This is McAndrew from the
Merganser
. We're certainly glad to hear from you,
Dotterel
. Well, Jeanie, what kept you?"

"Roker speaking." I leaned forward and spoke into the vocal input system—too fast, but the computer would take care of that at the other end. "Mac, we're hanging about sixty kay out from you. Is everything all right in
Merganser
?"

"Yes."

"No," broke in another voice. "Get us out of here. We've been stuck in this damned metal box for sixteen days now."

"Nina," said Wenig. "We'd love to get you out—but we don't know how. Didn't Dr. McAndrew tell you the problem?"

"He said we couldn't leave here until the ship you are on came for us."

Wenig grimaced at me and turned away from the input link. "I ought to have realized that. McAndrew hasn't told her the problem with the drives—not all of it."

"Maybe he knows an answer." I faced back to the microphone. "Mac, as we see it we shouldn't put the
Dotterel
up as high as fifty gee thrust. Correct?"

"Of course." McAndrew sounded faintly surprised at my question. "Why do you think I went to such lengths to get to this holding position out here? When you go to maximum setting for the drive, the electromechanical coupling for moving the life-capsule gets distorted, too."

"How did we miss it on the design?" Wenig sounded unconvinced.

"Remember the last-minute increase in stabilizing fields for the mass plate?"

"It was my recommendation—I'm not likely to forget it."

"We recalculated the effects on the drive and on the exhaust region, but not the magnetostrictive effects on the life-support column. We thought they were second-order changes."

"And they're not? I ought to be drawn and quartered—that was my job!" Wenig was sitting there, fists clenched and face red.

"Was it now? Och, your job, eh? And I've been sitting here thinking all this time it was
my
job." For someone in a hopeless position thirty billion miles from home, McAndrew sounded amazingly cool. "Come on now, we can sort out whose doing it was when we're all back at the Institute."

Wenig looked startled, then turned to me again. "Go along with him on this—I'm sure he's doing it for Nina's sake. He doesn't want her worried."

I nodded—but this time I was unconvinced. Mac must have something hidden away inside his head, or not even Nina Velez would justify his optimistic tone.

"What should we do, Mac?" I said. "We'd get the same effects if we were to accelerate too hard. We can't get down to you, and you can't get up to us without accelerating out past us. How are we going to get you out of there?"

"Right." The laugh that came over the com-link sounded forced and hollow, but that may have been just the tone that the computer filters gave it. "You might guess that's been on my mind too. The problem's in the mechanical coupling that moves the life-capsule along the column. It's easy enough to see, once you imagine that you've had a two millimeter decrease in column diameter—that's the effects of the added field on the mass plate."

Wenig was already calling the schematics out onto a second display. "I'll check that. Keep talking."

"You'll see that when the drive's up to maximum, the capsule catches on the side of the column. It's a simple ratchet effect. I've tried varying the drive thrust up and down a couple of gee, but that won't free it."

"I see where you mean." Wenig had a light-pen out and was circling parts of the column for larger scale displays. "I don't see how we can do anything about it. It would take a lateral impact to free it—you'll not do it by varying your drive."

"Agreed. We need some lateral force on us. That's what I'm hoping you'll provide."

"What is all this?" It was Nina's voice again, and she sounded angry. "Why do you just keep on talking like that? Anybody who knew what he was doing would have us out by now—would never have got us into it in the first place if he had any sense."

I raised an eyebrow at Wenig. "The voice of infatuation? I think the bloom's off the rose down there."

He looked startled, then pleased, then excited—and then tried to appear nonchalant. "I don't know what McAndrew is getting at. How could we provide any help?" He turned to the input system. "Dr. McAndrew, how's that possible? We can't provide a lateral force on
Merganser
from here, and we can't come down safely."

"Of course you can." McAndrew's voice sounded pleased, and I was sure he was enjoying making the rest of us try and work out his idea. "It's very easy for you to come down here."

"How, Mac?"

"In a free-fall trajectory. We're in a fifty gee gravity field because we're in a stationary position relative to HC-183. But if you were to let yourself fall in a free orbit, you'd be able to swing in right past us, and away again, and never feel anything but free fall. Agreed?"

"Right. We'd feel tidal effects, but they'd be small." Wenig was calling out displays as he talked, fingers a blur over the computer console. "We can fly right past you, but we'd be there and away in a split second. What could we do in so short a time?"

"Why, what we need." McAndrew sounded surprised by the question. "Just give us a good bang on the side as you go by."

* * *

It sounded easy, as McAndrew so glibly and casually suggested it. When we went into details, there were three problem areas. If we went too close, we'd be fried in the
Merganser
's drive. Too far off, and we'd never get a strong enough interaction. If all that was worked out correctly, we still had one big obstacle. For the capsule to be freed as
Dotterel
applied sideways pressure, the drive on the other ship would have to cut off completely. Only for a split second, but during that time McAndrew and Nina would feel a full fifty gee on them.

That's not quite as bad as it sounds—people have survived instantaneous accelerations of more than a hundred gee in short pulses. But it's not a picnic, either. Mac continued to sound cheerful and casual, mainly for Nina Velez's benefit. But when he listed the preparations that he was taking inside
Merganser
, I knew he was dealing with a touch-and-go situation.

After all the calculations (performed independently on the two ships, cross-checked and double-checked) we had started our free-fall orbit. It was designed to take us skimming past the
Merganser
, with a closest separation of less than two hundred meters. We dared nit go nearer without risking crippling effects from their drive. We would be flying right through its region of turbulence.

Four hours of discussion between McAndrew and Wenig—with interruptions from Nina and me—had fixed the sequence for the vital half-second when we would be passing the
Merganser
. The ships would exert gravitational forces on each other, but that was useless for providing the lateral thrust on the life capsule system that McAndrew thought was needed. We had to give a more direct and harder push some other way.

Timing was crucial, and very tricky.

Whatever we threw at the other ship would have to pass through the drive exhaust region before it could impact the life-capsule column. If the drive were on, nothing could get through it—at those temperatures any material we had would be vaporized on the way, even if it were there for only a fraction of a second. The sequence had to be: launch mass from
Dotterel
; just before it got there, kill drive on
Merganser
; hold drive off just long enough for the
Dotterel
to clear the area and for the mass to impact the
Merganser
's support column; and back on with their drive, at once, because when the drive was off the
Merganser
's passengers would be feeling the full fifty gee of the mass plate's gravity.

McAndrew and Wenig cut the time of approach of the two ships into millisecond pieces. They decided exactly how long each phase should last. Then they let the two on-board computers of the ships talk to each other, to make sure that everything was synchronized between them—at the rate things would be happening, there was no way that humans could control them. Not even Wenig, with his super-fast reflexes. We'd all be spectators, while the two computers did the real work and I nursed the abort switch.

There was one argument. McAndrew wanted to use a storage tank as the missile that we would eject from our ship to impact theirs. It would provide high momentum transfer for a very brief period. Wenig argued that we should trade off time against intensity, and use a liquid mass instead of a solid one. Endless discussion and calculations, until Mac was convinced too. We would use all our spare water supply, about a ton and a half of it. That left enough for drinking water on a twenty gee return to the Inner System, but nothing spare for other uses. It would be a scratchy and smelly trip home for
Dotterel
's passengers.

Drive off, we felt only the one-gee pull of our mass plate as we dropped in to close approach. On
Merganser
, McAndrew and Nina Velez were lying in water bunks, cushioned with everything soft on the ship. We were on an impact course with them, one that would change to a near-miss after we ejected the water ballast. It looked like a suicide mission, running straight into the blue furnace of their drive.

The sequence took place so fast it was anti-climactic. I saw the drive cut off ahead of us and felt the vibration along the support column as our mass driver threw the ballast hard towards
Merganser
. The brief pulse from our drive that took us clear of them was too quick for me to feel.

We cleared the drive region. Then there seemed to be a wait that lasted for hours. McAndrew and Nina were now in a ship with drive off, dropping towards HC-183. They were exposed to the full fifty gee of their mass plate. Under that force, I knew what happened to the human body. It had not been designed to operate when it suddenly weighed more than four tons. Membranes ruptured, valves burst, veins collapsed. The heart had never evolved to pump blood weighing hundreds of pounds up a gravity hill of fifty gee. The only thing that Mac and Nina had going for them was the natural inertia of matter. If the period of high gee were short enough, the huge accelerations would not have time to produce those shattering physical effects.