Mindbridge (3 page)

A door at the other end of the room opened and a technician looked in. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Right after the next incoming.” The door led to the staging area, where their suits would be sterilized. Once clean, they would go on to the vacuum chamber that held the LMT crystal.

“Time to zip up,” Tania said. She pulled the tunic up over her head and tossed it into a locker. The others did the same.

Jacque noticed that Ch’ing discreetly avoided looking directly at his female teammates. Jacque himself lacked that particular grace, but at least had the politeness to examine each woman with equal interest Carol returned his stare and added a deadpan wink.

All five were in excellent physical condition and attractive in spite of their hairlessness and rather overdeveloped muscles. Tania had faint stretch marks from having given birth six times on three different planets, and hairline cosmetic surgery scars under each breast. But they were marks of her profession and didn’t detract from her beauty.

Out of reflex vanity, Jacque stood in such a way that the women couldn’t see his back. It looked as if someone had kept score on it-with an axe. Twelve years before, he had been chased down an alley and pinned to the ground by four men while a fifth tried to find his kidneys with a straight razor. This was evidently done for amusement, as they already had his wallet. He and his father moved back to Europe as soon as he got out of the hospital.

The suit, or “general-purpose exploration module,” was a roughly man-shaped machine that could keep a hardy person alive for as long as a month in the middle of a blast furnace or swaddled in liquid hydrogen. Inside it, one could stomp through a hurricane without being blown over, walk the ocean floor without being crushed, or pick up a kitten without hurting it.

It had several tools that weren’t obviously weapons. With them and with the help of the suit’s strength-amplification circuitry, one could: make a pretzel out of a steel bar; reduce a city to rubble; run around the equator of a small world in a week. But it took you five minutes of contortions to scratch your nose, and certain other parts of the anatomy were simply inaccessible.

You learned to live with it.

The suits were damned expensive and rather difficult to operate. Simpler attire was available for worlds where the conditions were known ahead of time. But it was profitable to outfit a planet’s first Tamer team this way, since the only alternative was to send an unmanned probe ahead first. And the biggest expense in any Levant-Meyer Translation was energy, which was the same whether you were transporting a fully outfitted team or a small probe. Or a rusty beer can, for that matter.

Someone who was body-modest or squeamish could never learn to get along with a GPEM suit. You became too intimately a part of it; it recycled everything. Fortunately, those who got past all the tests and training to finally become Tamers couldn’t possibly be squeamish. And modesty was unlikely to be a strong force in their character.

Fitting yourself into the rigid suit was an operation similar to what a medieval knight had to go through to get into his armor. From a waist-high platform you lowered yourself into the bottom half. While your arms are still free, you hooked up the abdominal and femoral sensors and relief channels. Then a crane lowered the top half of the suit over you while you held your arms up, so that they slid easily into the suit’s arms. (Which was the reason for the difficulty in scratching your nose. There was just enough room inside the suit to twist and turn and manage to get one hand free without dislocating your shoulder. But it took time and determination.) An automatic locking mechanism sealed the top half to the bottom. With your tongue and chin you turned on the suit’s radio and optical circuits... and you were ready to go.

Jacque clicked on his radio. “I’ve never been in one of these things for a week,” he said. “It must get pretty ripe after a few days.”

“Some people, yes,” Tania said. “It’s all in your head.”

That’s right, Jacque thought, my nose is in my head. He experimented with the image amplifier, tonguing it from infrared to ultraviolet and back. It didn’t make much difference in the indirectly lit room; the pastel colors just washed out and came back.

“Well,” Ch’ing said. “Shall we-“

The door swung open and four suited figures came into the room, moving easily in their tonne-weight suits. Just returned from God-knows-where, their suits had a coating of pale blue dust. A thrill moved up Jacque’s back and set his scalp prickling, a feeling he had subdued for the past six years, knowing that not one candidate in twenty actually made Tamer 1.

He was going off the earth. Even if it turned out to be just an airless slab of cold granite, it was a place that no human had ever seen before.

“Let’s go.” They followed Tania into the sterilizing room, a cubicle with mirrors for walls, floor, and ceiling. Every half meter there was a slender ultraviolet-to-gamma tube. “Keep well spread apart. At least a meter between your outstretched arm and the next person.”

The reflections of the five people bounced back and forth, multiplying them into a vast army that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The door sealed and a pump throbbed somewhere, sucking air out of the chamber.

“Turn off your eyes.” The feeling of being in the middle of a huge crowd was replaced by claustrophobia: sealed inside a roomy coffin. Jesus, Jacque thought, how long could you stay sane if your opticals failed?

“Okay.” They turned their eyes back on and followed her to the LMT chamber. Two technicians on the other side of a window watched them file in. The light from the window was the only light in the room, but it was adequate to show them the way to the crystal. “Four minutes, ten seconds.”

The crystal was a glass gray circle, 120 centimeters in diameter. Tania stepped just over the edge of it.

“Carol, you can be on the bottom with me. Ch’ing and Vivian next, then Jacque on top.” Here any similarity between the GPEM suits and old-style armor vanished. Tania and Carol stood face to face in the middle of the circle while the next two climbed up to stand on their shoulders. Then Jacque clambered over all of them to be King of the Mountain. The gyroscopic stabilizers that ringed their suits’ waists kept the fragile pyramid from collapsing.

A glowing yellow cylinder of translucent plastic slid down over them. This was just a guide to keep them inside the LMT field; they were safe so long as they stayed a couple of centimeters from the plastic. Anything not inside the field when the current pulse came would simply be left behind. It didn’t have to be an arm or a leg; just a little piece of the suit would be more than enough.

“Ninety seconds.” Nobody said anything. “Thirty seconds.”

“Hot or cold?” Vivian said. “Any bets?”

“Bet you a dollar it’ll be just like Earth,” Carol said. “But you’ll have to give me a thousand to one. Ten thousand.”

“Yeah,” Jacque said. “Biosphere must be thin as an eggshe-“

SCENE: Classroom in an exclusive, old-fashioned private school in upstate New York. Drowsy hot day in late spring, airco broken.

CAST OF CHARACTERS: TEACHER is William J. Gilbert, M.A., this form’s instructor in the physical sciences. He is annoyed at the class’s lack of attention but thinks he has hit upon a device that will liven things up. JACQUE LEFAVRE did not do the previous night’s homework and doesn’t know a biosphere from a bowling ball. Two days before, he has officially dropped the terminal “S” from his name (because he was tired of being called “zhocks”) and, instead of taking notes, he is practicing his new signature. Assorted STUDENTS and one FLY.

TEACHER

Sitting on the desk-trying not to seem stiff.

I think that the text’s explanation of the biosphere is rather obscure.

Gets off the desk, stiffly.

Do you agree, Mary?

FIRST STUDENT

Yes, sir. But I think I understood it.

SECOND STUDENT

Whispers to Third STUDENT:

Jesus, what a brown-nose.

TEACHER

Did you have something to say, Ronald?

SECOND STUDENT

No, sir. Just that I think I understood it, too.

Class reacts predictably.

TEACHER

You have no idea how happy that makes me.

Reaches in drawer and brings out a navel orange.

Perhaps a demonstration will make it equally clear to everybody.

Produces pocket knife and opens it with a flourish.

How many people have had calculus and analytic geometry?

Only three hands go up as he carefully cuts through the skin and rind, making a circle around the middle of the orange.

Very well, then. I won’t call this a locus.

He twists and worries at the orange until he has three pieces: the fruit and two hemispheres. He sets the fruit aside.

These two halves of the skin and rind will be our biosphere model.

He puts the two hemispheres together.

Imagine, if you will, that there is a tiny star in the center of this sphere.

He sets down one half and points to the inside of the other with a pencil.

Since the star is in the center, any point on this rind is going to be the same distance from the star. Thus, every point on the rind will get the same amount of energy from the star, and will be at the same temperature.

Taps the outside.

Likewise with the skin. Same distance all around, same temperature. A little cooler than the inside.

FOURTH STUDENT

Inverse square law.

TEACHER

Very good, Stan. But please don’t interrupt..

A FLY has entered the room and is buzzing very loudly, trying to escape through the windowscreen. The TEACHER glances at it for a moment, then continues.

TEACHER

We will say that the temperature of the inside of the rind is a hundred degrees Centigrade, the boiling point of water. The outside skin is where the temperature is zero degrees, the freezing point.

Now, Mary. Will you tell the class what that means?

FIRST STUDENT Quickly:

It means that the only place in the system where you can have liquid water is the volume that corresponds to the rind of the orange.

TEACHER

Very good. What else?

FIRST STUDENT After a moment:

Everywhere else you’ll just have steam and ice?

TEACHER

Looks at the FLY again but decides not to go after it.

That’s true, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for. Anybody else? Mark?

FOURTH STUDENT

Puts down hand.

Where there’s no liquid water, you can’t have life as we know it. Because carbon-based life needs water...

TEACHER

as a more-or-less universal solvent, that’s right. And that’s why we call it the biosphere. Bios is Greek for life, and only in this sphere can life exist. Amy?

FIFTH STUDENT

But last year in Biology Miz Harkness said that a biosphere was all the air and water and ground on Earth, where plants and animals can live.

TEACHER Gruffly:

A word can have more than one meaning.

The FLY stops buzzing and JACQUE looks over at it. JACQUE has been trying to look inconspicuous, but it’s difficult because he’s the largest one in the room, and the vagaries of the alphabet have put him in the front row.

TEACHER

Jacque? Could I have your attention?

JACQUE

Yes, sir.

JACQUE has lived in America for eleven years and has no trace of a French accent. When he returns to Switzerland in nine months, with a slowly healing back, he will have lost forever the musical Lausanne accent that surrounded him as a child, and will speak his native tongue like an educated foreigner.

TEACHER

Bearing in mind what Mary and Mark just said, tell me: which would have the larger biosphere, our sun, or a hot blue star like Rigel?

JACQUE

Hesitates.

Our sun?

TEACHER

Absolutely not! The lesson last night used Rigel as an example. Didn’t you study it?

JACQUE

Uh. . . sir.. . we had a. . . voltage fluctuation last night and I couldn’t get the book to work.

TEACHER

Shakes his head.

I wish I had a dollar for every time...

Rhythmically slapping his palm with a ruler.

Your assignment for tonight, then, Jacque, will be to write a four-page paper about the biosphere. In it you will explain why one is more likely to find a hospitable planet going around a hot star than around a relatively cool one.

JACQUE

Yes, sir.

TEACHER

And you will read it for the class tomorrow. And answer questions.

The voltage fluctuation story is true. Even at this age, JACQUE knows more about physics and astronomy than the TEACHER does. William Gilbert’s M.A. was in Music Education. When he reads his paper tomorrow, JACQUE will point out that by the TEACHER’s definition, the Earth is not within the Sun’s biosphere [since if Earth were airless, the temperature on the surface could exceed the boiling point of water, as it does on the moon], and therefore cannot support life. He will also remark that the extent of Rigel’s biosphere is meaningless, since young blue stars don’t form planets. Thus he will make a powerful enemy, not for the first time or the last, and would be destined to flunk the course if the alley rendezvous were not to cut short his semester.