The Diamond Moon (17 page)

 

“Cheer up, boss. The war’s not over yet.”

 

In the Moon Cruiser, time passed unnoticed.

 

“You’re not
sleeping
,” Marianne whispered fiercely.

 

Mays opened his eyes. “On the
contrary
, dear,” he said, only slightly less energetically than usual. “You invigorate me.”

 

“And certainly you don’t think I’m
done
with you yet.”

 

“Oh I certainly . . . hope not.” He hesitated. “But I’m self-ish. I like to
mix
my pleasures.”

“Sounds interesting.” Her words were halfway between a purr and a growl. “Yes. I mean, we wouldn’t want to miss our view of Europa—we’ll be approaching it within the hour”— he hur-ried on as he saw the cool shock on her face—“and I do want to
savor
you at leisure.”

Her expression softened again. He wasn’t pushing her away, but she realized she really would have to make some allowance for his . . . maturity. “But do we have to put our clothes back on? Is there any reason we have to wear those smelly things in this perfectly cozy little steel container?”

He looked at her in warm Jupiter-light from the views-creen, at her grainless skin and supple curves and glossy black hair floating weightless, and then at his own body, nobbed and irregularly textured. “There is no reason for
you
to do so, but unfortunately my appearance . . .”

“I want to look at you.”

 

“I don’t want to look at me. I gangle. I am too
long-limbed
to avoid seeing at least some part of myself every time I move.” He plucked his floating trousers from the air and began to struggle into them.

 

Marianne watched a moment, then sighed expressively and reached for her jumpsuit. “I guess I have to get dressed too. I refuse to be held at a disadvantage. Even a symbolic one.”

 

“Wait ’til after Europa, dear.”

Her ardor had cooled, and she said nothing more until she was fully dressed. For his part, Mays seemed once more lost in thought. Marianne floated toward her acceleration couch, not eager to strap herself in again, and looked at the huge curve of Jupiter against the field of stars on the vi-deoplate.

She studied it more closely, and a tiny crease formed in her brow. “Randolph, you said Europa in an hour. Shouldn’t it be visible on the screen?”

 

“Why yes, certainly . . .” He flinched as he studied the screen. Jupiter was there, but none of its moons were evi-dent. Without a word, he switched the image to the flight-path schematic.

 

“My God, this
can’t
be right.”

Since shortly after they had left Io, the blue line of their path through space had been steadily diverging from the green line planned for them. The angle was small, but their velocity was large—and growing larger. They were no longer headed away from Jupiter, outward to Europa, but instead were spiraling lazily inward toward the huge planet.

“There was no
warning!
How could there be no
warn-ing!
” Mays’s voice was rich with outrage.

The capsule’s robot voice chose the moment to speak up. “Please relax and prepare for the next thrilling episode in your Jovian excursion. Your Moon Cruiser is about to fly past the world of buried oceans— Europa!”

Marianne was staring at the schematic. “Randolph, we’re falling right into Jupiter.”

“We’ve got lots of time before
that
happens,” Mays said. “And it needn’t, if I can get to this machine’s control cir-cuitry. This is all probably a pretty
simple
thing. But . . .” His voice faded out abruptly, as if he’d been about to say more than he should have.

“Tell me what you were going to say,” she said. She looked at him steadily, full of courage.

 

“Well, we’re
already
in the radiation belt. Even if I can
correct
our course, we will . . . absorb a very large dose.”

 

“We may die,” she said.

 

He said nothing. He was thinking of other things.

 

“Don’t give out on me, Randolph,” she commanded. “I don’t intend to die until I have to. You either—I won’t let you.”
XVII
“Manta, come in please.”

The Manta had disappeared from the bright screens on the flight deck of the
Michael Ventris
. The sonar channels gave out nothing but the deep throbbing of the core, un-derscoring the watery sounds the crew had grown used to.

“Professor Forster. Blake. Please respond.” When there was no reply, Josepha Walsh turned to the others and said, almost casually, “We’ve lost them in the thermal turbulence. Not unexpected.” The tension in her voice was barely a notch above business-as-usual.

Tony Groves was sitting in at McNeil’s engineering console; McNeil and Hawkins had come into the flight deck still in their spacesuits, helmets loose, to follow the progress of the Manta on the high resolution screens. They matched the captain’s mood—alert, serious, but not alarmed. They’d heard Blake’s and the professor’s descriptions as they dove, seen the fitfully transmitted images from the old sub, read the sonar data. They knew the core was shielded from their sonar probing, and that at any rate communication with the Manta might be difficult in the vicinity of its boiling sur-face. There seemed no good reason to fear mishap.

“At any rate, the last message was they were coming up. Angus, you and Bill might as well head for the lock; it can’t be long before . . .”

 

A sudden loud wailing from the radiolink interrupted her.

 

We are receiving an emergency signal. A space vessel is in distress
, the ship’s urgent, dispassionate computer voice announced. Repeat.
We are receiving an emergency signal. A space vessel is in distress
.

 

“Acknowledged,” Jo Walsh told the computer. “Vector coordinates on graphics, please.”

The big video screen switched to a map of near space. The distressed craft was seen creeping in from screen left, on a projected course that was bringing it into the lee of Amalthea—where, it appeared, it was on a collision course with the moon.

“I’d give it three hours to get here,” said Groves.

 

“And who the hell would that be?” demanded McNeil. “Nobody could have got this close without sector I.D.”

 

“Computer, can you identify the distressed vessel?” Walsh asked calmly.

 

The vessel is an automated tour capsule, registry AMT 476, Rising Moon Enterprises, Ganymede Base, presently off its pre-set course
. . .

 

“You don’t say,” Groves muttered.

 

The vessel does not respond to attempted radio contact
, said the computer.

 

“Silly question perhaps, but are we sure it’s occupied?” Blake demanded.

 

“Computer, can you confirm that the capsule is occu-pied?”

 

According to manifest the vessel is occupied by two pas sengers: Mitchell, Marianne; Mays, Randolph
.

 

McNeil looked at Groves and before he could help himself, he laughed a half-embarrassed laugh. Groves nodded knowingly.

 

Bill Hawkins looked at him in shocked disapproval. “They’ve been in the radiation belt for hours! In a minimally shielded . . . canister. We’ll be lucky to reach them alive!”

 

“My apologies,” McNeil said. “But Mays—what an ex-traordinary man! What gall!”

 

“What the hell are you going on about, McNeil?” Haw-kins yelled at him.

 

“Later, gentlemen,” said Walsh. “We’ll have to see to them.”

 

“What do you want to do, Jo?” asked Groves.

 

“You guys jettison the hold, along with everything loose. I’ll need you with me, Tony, to run the trajectories.”

 

“All right, but what then?”

“Stripped, this ship’s got the delta-vees to cut a low orbit around Jupiter, match orbits with the capsule, take them aboard. Reach them in under three hours, do another go around, get back into the shadow in maybe another four, with maneuvers—before we take too many rads.”

“We’ve got a duty to a vessel in distress—but we’ve got a duty to the mission as well,” said McNeil reluctantly. “If we use all that fuel to rescue them, we’ll be stranding ourselves here.”

“What the hell are you talking . . . ?” Hawkins interjected again, his clear English skin turning bright red. “No excuse, Angus,” said Walsh, cutting Hawkins off firmly. “The Space Board will take us off. Before then, a few hours in radiological clean-up should do for us.”

“For us, maybe,” said McNeil, persisting. “What about them?”

Groves said, “He has a point. Add three hours to their exposure, even partially shielded, and they’ll be pushing the limit. We’ve got the delta-vees to do what you suggest, Cap-tain,” Groves added quietly, “but not enough time.”

“We’re wasting what time we’ve got, talking,” Walsh said. She ran her hand through her brush-cut red hair; oth-ers had long ago learned to read this unconscious gesture as her way of displacing anxiety when she needed to con-centrate. “We do it my way unless you’ve got a better idea.”

“One idea, anyway,” said Groves. “That capsule is incom-ing with about three hundred meters per second delta with respect to Amalthea. If it’s as well-aimed as it appears to be . . .”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Let it crash.”

 

“What!”
Hawkins was quick to react. “Let them
die
. . . ?”

 

“Oh, do be quiet, Hawkins,” Walsh snapped at him. Like the others, she had responded to the navigator’s suggestion with thoughtful silence.

 

“Listen, Walsh . . . Captain Walsh . . . I insist . . .”

 

“Hawkins, we’re not going to let them die. Now either keep quiet or leave the flight deck.”

 

Hawkins finally perceived that the others knew something he didn’t and wanted silence in which to think about it. He shrank back into a corner.

 

“The sublimed ice is about ten meters deep,” said McNeil. “That will take up some energy.”

“Yes, that’s a plus. Given the snow density—what’s your guess, maybe point four gee-cee?—and their inertia”—Groves was bent over the navigator’s board, tapping keys—“they should experience instantaneous deceleration of . . . oh, about forty gees. We’ll have to look up the specs, but it’s my impression those Moon Cruisers are built to maintain structural integrity well beyond that.”

“And the people inside?” Walsh asked. “Tied in properly . . . they can survive it.”

 

“Assuming they’re eyeballs-in,” McNeil added. The en-gineer seemed almost diffident. “Should they have the un-fortunate luck to come in upside down . . .” He left the rest unsaid.

 

“Right,” said Walsh. “We’d better have a look through the telescope.”

Groves addressed himself to the console, releasing the optical telescope from its tracking function, reorienting it according to the computer’s coordinates for the incoming capsule. The fuzzy image of the gray tubular capsule with its belt of fuel tanks and its single little rocket motor came up on the big videoplate; at this distance it appeared to be motionless against the limb of Jupiter.

The people on the flight deck studied the image in si-lence.

 

“Remarkable,” said Jo Walsh.

 

“Now is that luck? Or is that luck?” asked McNeil.

 

“I think the answer is no both times,” Groves said dryly.

 

Hawkins could stand it no more and broke his silence. “What is everyone clucking about?”

McNeil explained. The apparently disabled capsule was oriented so that its rocket engine was perfectly aligned to brake its fall onto Amalthea. Even without the help of a retrorocket, the capsule was in the ideal attitude for a crash landing.

“This looks less like an accident than it did two minutes ago,” Jo Walsh said.

 

“Talk about party crashers; this Mays fellow takes the cake,” Groves said.

 

“You mean they
planned
to land here?” Hawkins said, wiping his blond hair, slick with perspiration, away from his staring eyes.

“Not that it makes much of a practical difference,” said McNeil jovially. “Whether they understand it or not, they’ll have taken damn near a lethal dose of rads by the time they arrive—we’ve no choice but to take them under our wing.”

“All right, Tony, you’ve got your way,” said Walsh. “We’ll let them hit and pick up the pieces later.”

“Let’s just hope they don’t hit on top of us,” Groves said brightly, ever the pixie. “Now that really would be pushing coincidence into the realm of the supernatural, wouldn’t it?” But Walsh’s riposte landed more heavily than she’d intended—no one laughed.

Three hours passed. The timing was lousy: the disabled capsule was incoming on the sidescreen, the Manta was upcoming on the main screen. But Walsh was a cool head who’d handled many a more complex emergency.

She figured Professor Forster and Blake Redfield could fend for themselves. Hawkins and McNeil were already suited up, standing by to rescue the passengers in the cap-sule when it hit. Groves stayed with her on the flight deck to help her keep track of everything and everybody.

The capsule arrived first.

 

Silence right to the end, too fast to follow by eye, it arrived in a flash of orange light and a hemispherical cloud of vapor.

 

“Ouch,” said Tony Groves. Walsh just gave him a look, which they both knew meant,
let’s hope you didn’t screw up the calculations
.

 

Within seconds, Hawkins and McNeil were out the
Ven-tris
’s airlock and jetting over the misty landscape toward the impact site.

 

“God, they hit fast. Did you see rocket flare?” Hawkins asked, his throat tight. “You think they had time to brake?”

“Too quick for my eyes,” McNeil replied. He was reluc-tant to say that there had been no retrorocket flare. “They could have been lucky. People have survived peak gees of sixty, seventy, even more.” Survived, if you could call it that . . .

The point of impact wasn’t hard to find even by eye, for the crash had blown a huge hole in the mist and, like a giant smoke ring, a rolling donut-shaped cloud of weightless vapor held its shape and position over a shallow crater in the ice. In the exact center of the wide bowl, wreathed in steam, was the capsule, rapidly cooling but still glowing from impact.