Worlds Apart (4 page)

She stared at him. “
Who
has a hydrogen bomb? How could they get it here?”

He sorted through papers and handed her two sheets. “Read this. It’s utterly fantastic.”

It was no secret that many of the survivors on Earth thought the Worlds were responsible for the war. An energy boycott against the United States had precipitated the revolution that within hours escalated into nuclear war.

So here was a group that had decided to do something about it: revenge.
Die Schwerter Gott
, the Swords of God, a group of young Germans who had managed to remove the warhead from a missile that hadn’t fired. They were moving it to the spaceport in Zaire, one of two launch facilities that had survived the war. There was a shuttle on the pad; they planned to load the bomb into the cargo hold and launch a suicide mission.

“But that’s not possible, is it? There aren’t any engineers left, no pilots.”

“It is barely possible. That shuttle is one of the luxury designs from Mercedes. Very fast, very wasteful of fuel, but it can take twenty or so people from Earth to high orbit in one go, two days’ flight. It’s automated to a fare-thee-well; anyone who can read the manual and punch a
computer could get it here. They couldn’t dock safely, not without a skilled pilot, but that’s immaterial to them.”

She handed back the papers. “You want us to go to Earth and stop them?”

“Actually, what we hope is that you’ll get to Zaire before they do. They’re having trouble transporting the bomb; there’s no air transport left in Europe. They’re moving it overland to Spain, where they’ll get a boat to Magreb. That’s how we found out about them, intercepting radio messages while they were arranging for the boat.”

“What if we get there too late?”

“You’re stuck. Our shuttle will get you there, but you have to take theirs to get back.”

“Is there anybody there, at the spaceport?”

“The telescope shows a few people wandering around. No organized activity; no communications we’ve been able to monitor.”

“But they aren’t likely to let us just walk in and hijack their shuttle.”

“Who can say? You might scare them all off when you land.”

“I suppose.” She shook her head. “I have to make a decision right away, can’t talk to anybody?”

“Just to me. You have to decide before you leave this room.”

“When would we be taking off?”

He looked at his watch. “About seven hours from now. You go from here straight to the hub.”

O’Hara stood up and crossed the room. She stared at the cube for a minute. “I just don’t understand. Why me? Just because I’ve been to the Zaire spaceport?”

“Partly because you’ve been there. Partly because…there may be violence. Not many people in New New have any experience with that.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” she said evenly. “Who gave you that bit of information? One of my husbands?”

“Says here… it’s from a transcript, um, of the therapy sessions you had last year.”

“How the hell could you get your hands on that?”

“I couldn’t. But if the Coordinators want something, they can generally get it.”

“You want me to believe that one of the Coordinators sat down and went through confidential medical records, just in case something useful might show up?”

“Of course not; it was done by someone in my office. But under the Coordinators’ authority. It was a simple computer search, semantic association—and we didn’t single you out. Everybody’s records were searched.”

“That’s nice to know. Nobody has civil rights.”

“It’s temporary. You have to admit that the situation—”

“I guess we don’t have time to argue about it. But if you want me because I can supposedly handle violence, you didn’t read that record very thoroughly. That’s why I was in therapy.”

“All I personally know is what’s on this piece of paper. That you’ve carried guns and fired them—”

“No plural. Once. I carried a gun once, in my lap, trying to get to the Cape when the war started. I also fired it only once.”

“That’s one more time than the rest of us.”

She looked back at the cube. “You mainly want people who’ve been on Earth.”

“That’s right; the more recently, the better. There won’t be any time to get accustomed to it.” He paused and leaned forward.

“You fit other criteria: we need people who are young and physically strong, who have experience working in spacesuits. And people without children.”

“That’s encouraging.” She returned to the chair and slumped into it. “I suppose you also want people who are relatively useless, who won’t be missed.”

He shook his head. “That’s not a factor at all. In fact,
the expedition’s leader is the Engineering Coordinator.”

“That’s not very smart.”

“It was her decision.” He crumpled up the piece of paper with O’Hara’s data on it and tossed it into the recycler. “What’s yours?”

“Oh…I suppose I have to do it.”

“No one’s forcing you.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean.”

3

She wasn’t even allowed to say good-bye. They taped a message for her to leave for Daniel and John, that she and several others were going back into isolation, but not to worry, it wasn’t the plague.

The lift to the hub was empty. O’Hara put on her sticky slippers and pushed the middle button, marked “0.”

The sensation of weight decreased as the lift rose, or fell, toward the hub. When it stopped she was weightless, which of course was no novelty. The doors slid open and a man walked in upside-down and stood on the ceiling, also with Velcro slippers. They nodded and O’Hara walked down the short corridor, making a little ripping sound each time she lifted a foot. A sign said
it would be more natural to use handholds and float through the corridor, but you were liable to collide with somebody coming around a corner or through a door.

She went into the locker room and checked out the spacesuit she’d been assigned last year, and a bundle of those damned diapers, and floated into the Operations Room.

There were four men there, her age or younger, and one woman, Coordinator Sandra Berrigan. Their space-suits were hanging in midair by the opposite wall; O’Hara pushed hers gently in that direction.

O’Hara swam over and introduced herself. She already
knew one of them, Ahmed Ten, but hadn’t recognized him at first. A short black man, back on Earth he’d worn his gray hair long, in a huge frizzy cloud; now he was shaven bald. It made him look younger.

“Two more to come,” Berrigan told her. “We’ll hold off the actual briefing until we’re aboard the shuttle. Good-man, you want to show O’Hara how the guns work?” She’d wondered about that; by statute, there were no weapons in New New.

Goodman was a beefy youngster with a quick grin. He beckoned for O’Hara to follow him through the airlock door.

The shuttle floated huge in the pressurized bay. There was a strange smell in the air, burnt metal, like the smell around a welder.

“What they done,” Goodman said, “was take an oxy gun and put a fuel feed on her, then put a sparker at the nozzle. Fuel’s a mixture of vegetable oil and powdered aluminum.” He brought her an oxy gun with an extra tank and a ceramic extension on the nozzle. “Point her down there and give the trigger a quick one.”

She aimed down the long dimension of the bay and pinched the trigger. A squirt of bright flame roared out twenty or thirty meters, orange shot through with blinding blue-white. The noise of it echoed around the chamber. Recoil from the blast pushed O’Hara gently back against the airlock door.

“We all have these?”

“You and me and two others. They wasn’t time to make more.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to use them. That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, awful,” Goodman said, without too much conviction. “Remember, it won’t go in a straight line on Earth. You got to aim high, for the gravity.”

“Right.” O’Hara wondered what virtue the computer had divined in Goodman.

The airlock opened and Berrigan peered in. “Everybody’s here. O’Hara, come give us a hand. Goodman, you have two more customers.”

All that was left to be loaded were the spacesuits and some paper crates of food. They put them in nets and hooked the nets one at a time to a centrifuge device, to weigh them. Berrigan entered their masses into a console inside the shuttle.

There was nothing dramatic about taking off. Pumps hammered, fading away as they drew air from the chamber. Then the outer lock irised open, there was a tiny push of acceleration, and they drifted, slower than a walk, out into space.

“Change orbit in an hour and twenty minutes,” Berrigan said. “Let’s go over our plan, such as it is.”

She switched on a cube and tapped in some instructions. A flat map of the Zaire spaceport came up. “All we really have to do is leave this ship here,” she said, pointing to the end of the runway, “disabling it so that it can’t be refueled and used against us. Then we just walk down this track to where the shuttle’s waiting.

“That’s where it gets a little complicated. If it looks like there’ll be any trouble, we get aboard in a hurry and leave. Assuming the ship does work.

“If we have free run of the place, though, there are some interesting things we might do. First, Goodman and O’Hara run up to the operations center, here, and burn anything that looks important. We don’t want to leave them with any launch capability at all.”

“What about us?” Ahmed Ten asked. “Can this Mercedes take off without any launch support?”

She laughed. “With a trained monkey at the controls. Everybody’ll get a chance to study the manual for it, but basically all you have to do is ask the computer for a catalog, punch in your destination and launch time, and strap yourself in.

“While you two are having fun, the rest will be down
in this building here. That’s a cryogenic storage area, and it appears to be intact. Cryogenics means nitrogen; we’ll take as much as we can. Goodman and O’Hara will keep their eyes open for a vehicle. But even if we have to hand-carry it, we should be able to move a few tonnes, to bring back to the farms.

“I’ll go straight to the shuttle and do a systems check on it. It should only take a few minutes to find out whether it’s still working.”

“If it isn’t, we’re all dead?” O’Hara said.

“There’s a chance not. This isn’t a suicide mission.

“We have enough air, tank switching, to stay in our suits for forty hours. And we can probably find compatible air tanks at the spaceport, though that’s not certain. Standard German ones won’t fit.

“Still, we could probably make time, perhaps indefinitely. Find or make a hyperbaric chamber, keep the inside of it sterile. If the shuttle is down but repairable, Michaels and Washington and I might be able to fix it.

“If that doesn’t work, we still have a slim chance. Antarctica.” New New was in regular contact with the scientists trapped there. “The Mercedes can land on its tail, though it takes a level surface and a steady hand. Even if we can’t get into orbit, we might be able to fly it like a floater. Or actually find a floater that could get us there.”

“I thought there weren’t any working floaters in Europe or Africa,” Ten said.

“There aren’t, but that’s because the power net’s been destroyed. With three good engineers we should be able to jury-rig a portable power source.”

“What happens when we get down there?” Goodman asked. “Take the place over from the scientists?”

“No; we’ve made a deal with them. They’ll share their supplies with us until a rescue mission can be staged. That probably wouldn’t be until Deucalion comes in. But
we could make it. Then they’d come back with us.”

“Five years,” O’Hara said.

“They say the penguins are fascinating,” Berrigan said. “Never get tired of watching them.” She turned off the cube. “That’s it. Any questions?”

“This is all happening so fast,” O’Hara said. “Nobody’s explained why we have to go down there in the first place. I’m no engineer, but it seems to me there must be a dozen ways we could stop them from up here—I mean, that bomb has to be in actual contact with New New, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. If we could make it detonate even a kilometer or two away, it would just be so much extra sunshine.”

Goodman scratched his head. “So why don’t we just shoot the goddamn thing with a laser?”

“That would work if they came in slowly enough. A mining laser would at least scramble their electronics, maybe detonate the bomb prematurely, or defuse it. But they’ll be coming in at as much as thirty kilometers per second; we can’t get enough energy flux on target. That’ll be tried, of course, if we fail in Africa. We can also put a wall of dust and rock in their way, using a mass driver, which would be even more effective, if they’re stupid enough not to make evasive maneuvers. But even if we fill the ship with holes, kill them all, the bomb might still make it through. And it’s not just the bomb; when it goes off it’ll ignite all the deuterium and tritium in the ship’s fuel tanks. That’s enough to blow New New into gravel.

And melt the gravel.”

Nothing eventful happened during the five days it took them to spiral in to low Earth orbit. They did a lot of calisthenics, enjoyed unusually good food, read the
Mercedes manual with some interest. Twice they took jolts of amphetamine, so they would be ready for the drug’s effects when they landed.