10000 Light Years From Home Part 29

"Topanga doesn't like hospitals," Gollem told them.

"The power units!" Kranz said urgently. "Call her back!"

They were pushing Gollem toward the commo board.

"No way. She just blew the last ignition charge. Where she's headed now she goes."

"What do you mean? To Coronis?"

"Never." He rubbed his s.h.a.ggy head. "I-I don't recall exactly. Mars, maybe the sun."

"With the power units that would have saved these people." Kranz's face had the expression he probably used on gangrene. "Thanks to you. I suggest that you remove yourself from my sight for the remainder of our joint existence."

"There never were any power units," Gollem said, starting to go out. "The phagers got my boat and you saw for yourself what that drive was like. Her acceleration would have broken you apart."

The woman followed him out.

"Who was she, s.p.a.cer?"

"Topanga Orlov," Gollem said painfully. "Val Orlov's wife. They were the first Saturn mission. Thatwas their ship, Ragnarok. She was holed up in my sector."

"You just wanted air."

Gollem nodded.

They were by the base display tank. The computer was running a real-time display of the oncoming Trojans. The green blip was Medbase and the red blip with the smear was the smaller Trojan and attendant gravel tail. He studied the vectors. No doubt.

It was now dark-period. Sleep time coming up. The people here might eat breakfast, but for true they wouldn't eat lunch. By noon or thereabouts Medbase would be organic enrichment on a swarm of s.p.a.ce ice.

So would ex-Inspector Gollem.

The two medics went out on the wards and Kranz unbent enough to accept Gollem's offer to man the commo board. The s.p.a.cer wobbled in to watch him. The sight of Ragnarok's blast-out had lit his fires.

Gollem taped a routine red-call and began to hunt across the bands. The old man mumbled about ships. n.o.body was answering, n.o.body would. Once Gollem thought he heard an echo from Topanga, but it was nothing. Her oxy must be long gone by now, he thought. A mad old phage-ghost on her last trip. Where had he computed her to? He seemed to recall something about Mars. At least they wouldn't end in some trophy-hunter's plastic park.

"You know what they got in them coc.o.o.ns? Squatters!" The old man squinted out of his good side to see how Gollem took this. "Skinheads. Freaks 'n' crotties. Phagers, even. Medics, they don't care."

He sighed, scratched his burned skin with his stump. "Grounders. They won't last out here."

"Too right," Gollem agreed. "Like maybe tomorrow." That tickled the old man.

Toward midnight Kranz took over. The woman brought in some hot redeye. Gollem started to refuse and then realized his stomach wasn't hurting any more. Nothing to worry about now. He sipped the stimulant. The woman was looking at a scanner.

"She was beautiful," she murmured.

"Knock it off, Anna," Kranz snapped.

She went on scanning and suddenly caught her breath.

"Your name. It's Gollem, isn't it?"

Gollem nodded and got up to go look at the tank.

Presently the woman Anna came out after him and looked at the tank, too. The old s.p.a.cer was asleep in the corner.

"Topanga was married to a George Gollem once," Anna said quietly. "They had a son. On Luna."

Gollem took the scanner cartridge out of her hand and nipped it into the wastechute. She said nothing more. They both watched the tank for a while. Gollem noticed that her eyes were almost good enough to make up for her chin. She didn't look at him. The tank didn't change.

Around four she went in and took over from Kranz and the men settled down to wait.

"Medbase Themis calling, please come in. Medbase Themis calling anyone," the woman whispered monotonously.

Kranz went out. It seemed a lot of work to breathe.

Suddenly Kranz snapped his fingers from the next room. Gollem went to him.

"Look."

They hung over the tank. The red smear was closer to the green blip. Between them was a yellow spark.

"What is that?"Gollem shrugged. "A rock."

"Impossible, we scan-swept that area a dozen times."

"No ma.s.s," Gollem frowned. "It's a tank ghost."

Kranz began systematically flushing the computer input checks. The woman left the board and came to lean over the tank. Gollem watched absently, his brain picking at phage-warped memories. Something about the computer.

On impulse he went to the commo board and ran the receiver through its limits. All he got was a blast of squeals and whistles, the stress-front of the incoming rocks.

"What is it?" Anna's eyes were phosph.o.r.escent.

"Nothing."

Kranz finished his checks. The yellow ghost stayed in, sidling toward the red smear. If that were a rock, and it had about a hundred times more ma.s.s than it could have, it just might deflect the Trojan's gravel swarm. But it didn't.

Gollem played monotonously with the board. The old s.p.a.cer snored. The minutes congealed. Kranz shook himself, took Anna out to tour the wards. When they came back they stopped at the tank. The whatever-it-was stayed in, closing on the Trojan.

Sometime in the unreal dimlight hours Gollem caught it, wavering on a gale of s.p.a.ce noise: "I have contact! Val! I'm coming-"

They crowded around him as he coaxed the tuners but there was nothing there. Presently a ripple of relays tripped off in the next room and they all ran to the tank. It was dead; the computer had protected itself against an induction overload.

They never knew exactly what happened.

"It's possible," Gollem admitted to them. It was long after noon when they decided to eat.

"While we were on the way here I know I computed that Trojan all the way to Medbase, before that I got really bombed. Maybe I threw a bridge into the course computer, maybe it was already in. Say she took off with no course setting. Those old mechs are set to hunt. It's possible it inverted and boosted straight back out that trajectory to the rock."

"But your ship had no ma.s.s," Kranz objected.

"That thing was a s.p.a.ce-scoop feeding a monster drive. The pile dampers were cheese. Ragnarok could have scooped herself solid right through the gravel cloud and blown as she hit the Trojan. You could get a pocket sun."

They went over it again at dark-period. And again later while he and Anna looked at nothing in particular out the ports. A long time after that he showed her a script he'd fixed for the wall of Medbase Free Enclave: Launched in abyssal cupolas of s.p.a.ce Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light-- Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pa.s.s out of sight.

n.o.body seems to have noticed that Hart Crane really was the first s.p.a.ce poet; he envisioned s.p.a.ce-flight with only the first planes of the 1920's as evidence. The quotes here are from the full text of THE BRIDGE, of which only snippets appear in most anthologies. Crane suicided in 1932. Poets extrapolate.

-The Author.

BEAM US HOME.

Hobie's parents might have seen the first signs if they had been watching about 8:30 on Friday nights. But Hobie was the youngest of five active bright-normal kids. Who was to notice one more uproar around the TV?

A couple of years later Hobie's Friday night battles shifted to 10 P.M. and then his sisters got their own set. Hobie was growing fast then. In public he featured chiefly as a tanned streak on the tennis courts and a ninety-ninth percentile series of math grades. To his parents, Hobie featured as the one without problems. This was hard to avoid in a family that included a diabetic, a girl with an IQ of 185 and another with controllable pet.i.t mal, and a would-be ski star who spent most of his time in a cast. Hobie's own IQ was in the fortunate one-forties, the range where you're superior enough to lead, but not too superior to be followed. He seemed perfectly satisfied with his communications with his parents, but he didn't use them much.

Not that he was in any way neglected when the need arose. The time he got staph in a corneal scratch, for instance, his parents did a great job of supporting him through the pain bit and the hospital bit and so on. But they couldn't know all the little incidents. Like the night when Hobie called so fiercely for Dr. McCoy that a young intern named McCoy went in and joked for half an hour with the feverish boy in his dark room.

To the end, his parents probably never understood that there was anything to understand about Hobie. And what was to see? His tennis and his model rocket collection made him look almost too normal for the small honors school he went to first.

Then his family moved to an executive bedroom suburb where the school system had a bigger budget than Monaco and a soccer team loaded with National Merit Science finalists. Here Hobie blended right in with the scenery. One more healthy, friendly, polite kid with bright gray eyes under a blond bowl-cut and very fast with any sort of ball game.

The brightest eyes around him were reading The Double Helix to find out how to make it in research, or marking up the Dun & Bradstreet flyers. If Hobie stood out at all, it was only that he didn't seem to be worried about making it in research or any other way, particularly. But that fitted in, too.

Those days a lot of boys were standing around looking as if they couldn't believe what went on, as if they were waiting for-who knows?-a better world, their glands, something. Hobie's faintly aghast expression was not unique. Events like the installation of an armed patrol around the school enclave were bound to have a disturbing effect on the more sensitive kids.

People got the idea that Hobie was sensitive in some indefinite way. His usual manner was open but quiet, tolerant of a put-on that didn't end.

His advisor did fret over his failure to settle on a major field in time for the oncoming threat of college. First his math interest seemed to evaporate after the special calculus course, although he never blew an exam. Then he switched to the pre-college anthropology panel the school was trying. Here he made good grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie had no trouble with things like Chi square, of course. But after making his A in the final he gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded.

His advisor found him spending a lot of hours polishing a six-inch telescope lens in the school shop.

So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an under-achiever, but n.o.body knew what kind because of those grades. And something about that smile bothered them; it seemed to stop sound.

The girls liked him, though, and he went through the usual phases rather fast. There was the week he and various birds went to thirty-five drive-in movies. And the month he went around humming Mrs.

Robinson in a meaningful way. And the warm, comfortable summer when he and his then girl and two other couples went up to Stratford, Ontario with sleeping bags to see the Czech multimedia thing.Girls regarded him as "different" although he never knew why. "You look at me like it's always good-bye," one of them told him. Actually he treated girls with an odd detached gentleness, as though he knew a secret that might make them all disappear. Some of them hung around because of his quick brown hands or his really great looks, some because they hoped to share the secret. In this they were disappointed. Hobie talked, and he listened carfully, but it never was mutual talk-talk-talk of total catharsis that most couples went through. But how could Hobie know that?

Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from heavies and agreed that pot was preferable to getting juiced. His friends never crowded him too much after the beach party where he spooked everybody by talking excitedly for hours to people who weren't there. They decided he might have a vulnerable ego-structure.

The official high school view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this they were supported by a test battery profile that could have qualified him as the ideal normal control. Certainly there was nothing to get hold of in his routine interviews with the high-school psychologist.

Hobie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew he was not at his most intuitive. They went through the usual openers, Hobie sitting easily, patient and interested, with an air of listening to some sound back of the acoustical ceiling tiles.

"I meet a number of young people involved in discovering who they really are. Searching for their own ident.i.ties," Morehouse offered. He was idly trueing up a stack of typing headed s.e.x differences in the adolescent ident.i.ty crisis.

"Do you?" Hobie asked politely.

Morehouse frowned at himself and belched disarmingly.

"Sometimes I wonder who I am," he smiled.

"Do you?" inquired Hobie.

"Don't you?"

"No," said Hobie.

Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it wasn't. Not pa.s.sive aggression. What? His intuition awoke briefly. He looked into Hobie's light hazel eyes and suddenly found himself slipping toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real p.u.b.escent preschiz, he wondered hopefully? No again, he decided, and found himself thinking, what if a person is sure of his ident.i.ty but it isn't his ident.i.ty? He often wondered that; perhaps it could be worked up into a creative insight.

"Maybe it's the other way around," Hobie was saying before the pause grew awkward.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, maybe you're all wondering who you are," Hobie's lips quirked; it was clear he was just making conversation.

"I asked for that," Morehouse chuckled. They chatted about sibling rivalry and psychological statistics and wound up in plenty of time for Morehouse's next boy, who turned out to be a satisfying High Anx. Morehouse forgot about the empty place he had slid into. He often did that, too.

It was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning. "Dog," she was called then, although her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy little bird who c.o.c.ked her head to listen up at him in a way Hobie liked. Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and the pediatrician later on, but neither of them knew that.

They had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite prosperous and peaceful.

That is to say, about seventy million people were starving to death, a number of advanced nations were maintaining themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being fought over, Hobie's family's maid had just been cut up by the suburban peacekeeper squad, and the school had added a charged wire and two dogs to its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and theU.S.-Sino-Soviet detente was a twenty-year reality.

Dog was holding Hobie's head over the side of her car because he had been the one who found the maid crawling on her handbones among the azaleas.

"If you feel like that, why don't you do something?" Dog asked him between spasms. "Do you want some Slurp? It's all we've got."

"Do what?" Hobie quavered.

"Politics?" guessed Dog. She really didn't know. The Protest Decade was long over, along with the New Politics and Ralph Nader. There was a school legend about a senior who had come back from Miami with a busted collarbone. Some time after that the kids had discovered that flowers weren't really very powerful, and that movement organizers had their own bag. Why go on the street when you could really do more in one of the good jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie running for something, a sincere face on TV.

"You could join the Young Statesmen."

"Not to interfere," gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then he pulled himself together and tried some of the Slurp. In the dashlight his seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and beautiful.

"Oh, it's not so bad," said Hobie. "I mean, it's not unusually bad. It's just a stage. This world is going through a primitive stage. There's a lot of stages. It takes a long time. They're just very very backward, that's all."

"They," said Dog, listening to every word.

"I mean," he said.

"You're alienated," she told him. "Rinse your mouth out with that. You don't relate to people."

"I think you're people," he said, rinsing. He'd heard this before. "I relate to you," he said. He leaned out to spit. Then he twisted his head to look up at the sky and stayed that way awhile, like an animal's head sticking out of a crate. Dog could feel him trembling the car.

"Are you going to barf again?" she asked.