The Heart of the Comet Read online

  “Something damned odd.” Saul shook his head, as if he half suspected an error. His pencil rolled along the grainy, stained calluses of his hand.

  “What?”

  “Contaminants, I think. Earth junk in the samples. That damned Quiverian…” He stopped, his gaze caught by something on the screen. “Just a sec, maybe this…”

  Virginia watched on the magnifier as he guided microprobes to divide and extract tiny samples from several oblong, mottled masses. How he could tell one brown blur from another was a mystery. At his level, experiment became an art, unfathomable. Micromanipulators translated his minute movements into surgical grace, his touch tracing out the mad jumble of ancient crystals, the snakelike clench and coil of slippery, gaudy hydrocarbons. Deft fingers and a probing mind. Mozart and Picasso had been equally incomprehensible.

  He worked steadily in silence, sucked back into his murky mysteries. Okay, take it easy, she thought. Don’t press. Not that you’ve been all that brave, eh? Anyway, males are slow when they have to switch hemispheres.

  She relaxed and watched his “weather wall.” Each crewman’s contract gave him the right to choreograph his environment. Saul had chosen well. A metallic-blue river wandered down to an emerald marsh beneath a swarm of flapping white birds that skimmed the shimmering surface. The images were firm, precise n glistening leaped up where a bird dipped a wing into the water and slewed to a landing. Beyond, scattered stubs of islands dotted a pale summer day. New England, probably Massachusetts.

  Yes, she had read that he had been at Harvard once. And summer, of course. Choose a time that brought a comfortable warmth, something to ward off the chill of ancient ice soon to surround them. It was late afternoon on the walls of the lab and the slow slant of sunlight proceeded. A storm front nuzzled at the horizon, winds whipped the velvet shadows that pooled beneath gnarled trees. She felt a reassuring heat from the scene, even though she knew it was her own wools that did the work. Saul wore a cotton two-parter, blue with white stripes, an ample Renaissance collar its only indulgence. She could see he was a man who cared little for clothes, would go naked if temperature and society permitted.

  As she watched pensively, he shook his head irritably, gave an umpf and snapped off the screen.

  “Done?”

  “Yes, with nothing to show for it.” He drummed fingers on the desktop.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Some contaminant I thought I saw. It was… no, nothing. Forget it.”

  “You’re worried about something.”

  He leaned back, let his face relax. “No… well, no more than usual.”

  “We’re going to be. on First Watch together,” she ventured. “Plenty of time to work on our own research then.”

  He nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. Sixteen months of peace and quiet carving ice and tending corpsicles.”

  “Another few weeks, we’ll start slotting people.”

  He nodded, distracted. Then he said abruptly, “I’m a poor host. Something from the bar?”

  “You have alcohol ration left?”

  “In this lab? I can make anything I want. I have my own beer, if you’d care to risk it.”

  “Of course.” She felt a need to break through, to reach him. His face was complex, a slate time had written all over, the mouth and eyes at battle with each other. His eyes seemed to peer at something far away—a problem coming slowly into focus, perhaps—unrelenting intellect. His lips betrayed this concentration, though. They twisted into an ironic curve, yet were full and sensuous, with a hint of passion and power. The cool mind that ruled the eyes did not know of this lower, submerged force. The contradiction warred across his face, complex with stubble, pale here and mottled there, a shiny brow with a curve that caught a reflected yellow beam from the New England sunset. He popped caps from two long-necked brown bottles with relish, suddenly seeming like a balding and wiry tradesman.

  Virginia bit her lip as they both sat. Now that she had braved the first moments and taken the step she had considered a hundred times, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  “You’re here because of our conversation the other day, aren’t you?” he said. Suddenly his expression was gentler, opening outward from his self-immersion. His eyes met hers.

  “Ah, well, yes.” She might as well attribute it to that.

  “What was it your mother had?”

  “I… Lupus.”

  “Ah yes.” A brief pain flickered in his eyes. He leaned back in his webchair, put hands behind his neck, stretched in the light gravity of the wheel. “I remember those years. That one, we got a clean solution. No side effects—as you so clearly demonstrate. Um. You ever see a really bad case?”

  “No. I read—”

  “Not the same thing. Under the ’scope the cells aren’t tight little cylinders, y’know—they’re misshapen, meshugenuh, tortured things. The patient’s connective tissue clogs. Swollen joints. Repeated infections. Liver damage, early death. There’d been good detectors to warn parents if a baby had it, sure, but nobody cracked the real problem—the genetic fix-up—until we did. Sorry—until Simon Percell did.”

  “You can take a lot of credit.”

  He laughed. “My career in the last couple of decades, my dear, has depended on my not taking credit.”

  “With us Percells… it’s different.”

  He smiled wearily. And warily? she wondered. “You are, Virginia, an expression of how different a map is from the territory.”

  She frowned.

  “Sorry, I’m being opaque. Habit of mine. We charted all the DNA nucleotides long ago. Knew where everything was—a great map. Only we didn’t know what it meant.”

  “My genes don’t carry the lupus—you knew how to do that. And the usual Percell enhancements are effective.”

  “Obviously.” A grin.

  She felt herself blushing at the compliment, rummaged for something to say. “We have all kinds of advantages…”

  “True…” He was still pensive, reflecting on times she could not know. Yet, those days would not die, as long as there were Percells. And that legacy lived in every corridor of this expedition.

  He sighed “But not true enough. Sure, we got the hemoglobin disorders, Huntington’s disease, all the easy targets. Just lop off a few molecules. Trimming. Pruning. Change the cryptogram and—presto.”

  “I read that there are over two million people who owe you that.”

  “Been dipping into the forbidden Percell underground newspapers?” he said with mock seriousness. “Yes, that’s right—you’re from Hawaii. Plenty of pro-Percell sentiment there still, eh? Who passed on your security clearance?”

  “I’m so good, they had to let me come,” she said with a proud smirk.

  “Bravo!” He applauded. “Bravo, indeed. And you are good—I looked in your file, back when Captain Cruz had me on the recruiting committee.”

  “Really?” She was suddenly serious. “What… what’s in there? Did they—”

  He waved a hand. “Nothing about your subversive ideas. Not a jot.”

  Her eyes widened, her mouth formed a shocked O—and then she saw he was kidding. “Ah… oh.”

  “They don’t care if you think Percells are just as good as—what’s the slang? yes—as good as Orthos are, you know.” His voice dropped. “Since they’re all so damned sure you’re not.”

  She saw suddenly that she had been right—his pose before others was a mask. “They… do think that, don’t they?”

  “I’m afraid so. Many of them, anyway.”

  “Even though they let some of us go on this expedition.”

  “Let…” he began, then shook his head. “They had their reasons.”

  “But…

  “Virginia, has it never occurred to you that getting bright, hardworking, potentially troublemaking Percells out of their hair might be a very attractive idea?”

  “Of course.” She frowned.

  “And isn’t some side of you
glad to be rid of all that krenk… that Earthside bullshit?”

  She had to admit he was right. When the Edmund had lifted free of Earth orbit, she had felt…released. “Well…ins some ways.”

  “Such as?” He sat forward, apparently genuinely interested. The slanting burnt orange of the Massachusetts sunset struck his bald patch, yet he did not seem old, only wise and kind and quietly powerful.

  “Well… my father, he thought I was special. That our family was unique, a kind of historic experiment.”

  “Ah. A common mode.”

  “I… I hated it.”

  “Feeling special?”

  “Being… different.”

  “You’re not, really.”

  “Tell them.”

  “Your parents should’ve shielded you from that.”

  “They… Listen. When I was eleven, I was the only girl in my class without nylons. So I went to the local Woolworth’s and bought a pair. I had no idea how to hold them up—I got the old kind, by mistake.”

  “Your mother…”

  “She died when I was ten.”

  “Lupus.”

  She nodded.

  “So you were a tomboy. Surfing, basking in Hawaiian splendor.”

  “Yes. It was beautiful, but… Well, my father raised me. I remember one day when I was playing catch in a T-shirt with the boys, I heard some giggles over my bouncing breasts. This was on Maui, where nobody’s especially reluctant to talk about such things. So I went back to Woolworth’s. The saleslady had to explain about bras—I didn’t even know what the sizes meant! Then, in seventh grade, I started wearing skirts instead of jeans, because the other girls were. A boy looked at my hairy legs and said, ‘I’m gonna get you a razor for Christmas:’ I could have died! The next day, I borrowed my father’s razor and cut my left shin so badly I still have the scar.”

  “I see.”

  She felt suddenly embarrassed. Somehow, all that had come out without her having planned it. “I wasn’t very good at those things. I used to tell myself it was because my mother died and there was no one to tell me. So I concentrated on math, on computers.”

  “And if you hadn’t. you could be a perfectly happy housewife somewhere, children yanking on your apronstrings.”

  She smiled impishly, crushing a sudden inner pain by old reflex. “To hell with that.”

  “Precisely.”

  Besides, I didn’t have that option, she thought. “There’s a quid for every quo.” That’s it—cryptic and ironic. Show him I’m not just a simple schoolgirl who became a computer whiz because of adolescent angst.

  But Saul’s face had become pensive, his eyes reflecting some inward turning. “I love you all, you know.”

  “You…”

  His voice was very low. “All the Percells. You… you’re paying for our…”

  “Your what?”

  “Our sins.”

  “But you’re not!Imean, we’re not! I—You did no wrong! It’s others who—”

  He waved a hand, silencing her. “I’m sorry. I… sometimes I remember how it used to be. What we hoped for, worked for. That’s all gone now. That’s a major reason I signed on. To run away from a whole host of failures.”

  “But you’re not—”

  “No, let’s stop. It’s… those days are impossible to forget, but pointless to remember. Better to let them go.”

  “Saul, I—I respect you so—”

  But he waved his hands energetically in front of his face, banishing all talk. “Tell you what, I’ll get you a refill and… and…”

  Abruptly, he turned aside and sneezed.

  “Damn! Can’t get rid of this thing.”

  “Take an anti.”

  “I have.”

  Another cross he’ll have to bear, she thought. Living in a snowball, sniffling all the time.

  Percells didn’t have to put up with runny noses. The gene tailors, while they were splicing away anemia and lupus and the other target diseases, had trimmed the complex of coding molecules that had given viruses their free ride, and humanity a million years of colds and flu.

  “Well then… let me make some tea.”

  He smiled wanly, his steel-blue eyes still distant, thinking of something far back in a past she could not fathom “Yes, fine. My mother…she did that. Then came the chicken soup.” He laughed, but not his eyes.

  CARL

  He suppressed a guffaw. The crucial step, the insertion of the sleepslot modules into the head of the comet, didn’t seem at all like the climax of a dangerous, five-year voyage by sailship, a prodigious engineering feat, a modern marvel. Instead, it looked to him like the coupling of monstrous genitalia.

  The slender slot tug Whipple glided forward, nose down. Stripped of its solar sails and antennae, it was the uniform ruddy color chosen to maximize its thermal balance during the years in flight from Earth orbit. The sleep-slot payload rode forward, its extra shielding against cosmic rays filling a bulging, rounded knob, slightly thicker than the main body.

  Below, Shaft 4 gaped. The surrounding ice was freshly exposed from the scratchings and abrasions of mechs—creamy, virgin ice which had not seen the harsh glare of sunlight since the time the planets and comets first formed.

  Carl started to chuckle and coughed to cover it. Over the hiss of suitcomm nobody could tell the difference, probably. He blinked, but the pornographic illusion would not go away. I must be a lot more tired out than I thought.

  —Needs a li’l of three-degree realign at sixty azimuth,— Jeffers sent.

  “Right. Got it,” Carl replied. Jeffers’s data was integrated as he spoke, and then Carl’s helmet screen leaped into activity. A graphics view turned, green lines against black ground, showing how the Whipple looked along all three axes. Then the desired view came, an overlay in orange cocked at an angle along two axes. Carl punched in corrections.

  A cluster of higher-ups were watching by TV, he knew, and Ould-Harrad stood on the surface below, cold-eyed and critical. They would certainly send back an edited version in the squirt to Earthside. Plenty of eyes to catch a mistake. Watch Carl Osborn snag ninety-odd souls halfway in, maybe.

  Carl shook his head. To hell with that. Just watch the vectors, do the job. Can’t let nerves scramble your synapses, as Virginia would say.

  He fired four jets just behind the Whipple’s central engine housing. The pulsed ruby-red against the black. Each cut off in sequence as the orange image on his faceplate merged with the green.

  —Cleared.—

  —Here goes,— Andy Carroll sent. Andy sat forward in the small bubble cabin of the ship, and had nominal control. Jets flared a pale blue along the aft beams.

  The Whipple glided smoothly in, clearing the yellow protective liners with ease.

  —On the money!— Andy yelled. —Picking up the guide.—

  The sleep-slot knob drove cleanly in, catching in the railings that would keep it from going astray once inside. Over suitcomm Carl heard shouts of celebration and even some handclapping leaking through from an open channel back in the Edmund’s lounge.

  The sleep-slot module separated, descended. The sail tugs were as slim and weight-wise as classic nineteenth-century windjammers. Their slender, silvery frames carried sleep slots, supplies, and a robot crew—all in cylindrical modules fitted snugly along a tubular frame, the spine for the great spread wings that cupped the solar wind. Those gossamer sheets were now furled, awaiting humdrum service as mirrors for the surface greenhouses. That left the naked frame, a great beast now stripped by reductionist logic to a skimpy skeleton.

  And somewhere out there the Newburn sails on, Carl thought about the missing fourth tug. Lost, a victim of the cold percentages.

  —Reversin’ her!— Andy backed his ship out carefully. It would slip down a different path, into its own chamber. Jeffers now commanded the mechs inside to draw the sleep-slot module downward through nearly a kilometer of shaft, into the vault that had been prepared for it.

  Carl turned up his bonephone:
Beethoven’s Fifth Violin Sonata, the last movement a liquid rush of piano notes. A reward. Lugging big masses around was standard stuff, but it felt different when there were ninety lives at stake. He needed to ease off, relax. The main show was over, but he still had hours of work to go.

  The graceful, fluid sway of chamber music seemed to Carl natural for working in zero G. He could never understand Jeffers or Sergeov, who listened to that raucous, heavy-handed Clash Ceramic stuff while they worked. He vectored down beckoning to the distant dot that was Colonel Ould-Harrad.

  Carl slowed above Shaft 6 to accompany the African officer, who was space-able but less used to making speed through tunnels. A mistake could cram you into the wall with bone-splintering impact. It took years for Earthsiders’ bodies to really believe that lack of weight didn’t mean absence of inertia.

  They shot downward. Fiberthread walls rushed past, illuminated by regular yellow daubs of electrified phosphor paint. Carl watched Ould-Harrad’s swarthy face for signs of some reaction, but the man kept his eyes intently ahead and said nothing. Carl felt a twinge of disappointment. He had lined this shaft himself, without mechs, putting in fourteen-hour days to meet the deadline. And a pretty job, it was. Damn-all if anybody’d say word one about it, though.

  Of course, Ould-Harrad was an Ortho, and pretty hard-line about it, according to scuttlebutt. All during the voyage out the man had been distant, formal, his poker face giving away nothing. He clearly expected that young upstarts would remember their place. Not likely he’d be glad handing a menial Percell.

  Carl shrugged and turned up the Fifth Sonata. Only after some time did it occur to him that they were, after all, failing face down in a shaft that dwindled away into the distance, the phosphors converging dots… Even in a micro-G, Ould-Harrad’s mental alarm bells were probably ringing.

  “Hit the brakes, the vault’s only a few hundred meters ahead,” Carl sent.

  —I see. Good-.- was the only reply.

  They slowed as the tunnel flared into a roomy chamber, already partly lined with brilliant lime-green insulation. The sleepslot module was already descending from the intersecting Shaft 4, a stubby intrusion. It nearly filled the uninsulated half of the vault. Everywhere the primitive ice gave back glinting reflections of the sweeping lamps of men and mechs. Carl had helped hack out the rough-cut walls, using big industrial lasers. Seams of carbonaceous dirt and rusty conglomerates made curly, mysterious patterns on the broad stretches of black ice, like writing by some unseen biblical hand.