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  “She’s moving perpendicular to the ramfield’s magnetic lines of force, yes?” said Chang, the words coming out of him like machine-gun fire. “That’s dragging her down.”

  “Will Orpheus collide with us?” asked Mayor Gorlov.

  “No,” I said. “My autonomic meteor-avoidance system angles the ramfield away from us whenever a metallic object enters it. Otherwise, Orpheus would have hurled down the funnel and destroyed our ramjet.”

  “We need that ship back,” said Gorlov.

  “That ship?” Aaron swiveled his chair to face the little man. The underscoring squeak of its bearings made his exclamation sound shrill. “What about Di?”

  The mayor was twenty centimeters shorter than Aaron, and massed only two-thirds what he did, but there was nothing tiny about Gorlov’s voice. I often had to run a convolution algorithm on it to clear out distortion. “Wake up, Rossman,” he bellowed. “It’s suicide to enter the ramfield.” Gorlov’s campaign had not been won on the basis of his gentle manners.

  Kirsten laid a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, one of those nonverbal gestures that seemed to communicate so much for them. Her touch did have a slightly calming effect on his vital signs, although, as always, the change was difficult to measure. He squeaked back to face the viewer and scooped a calculator off an adjacent console, cupping it in his palm. I swiveled three of my lens assemblies to look at it, but none of them could make out what he was typing.

  “Orpheus’s engines have stopped firing, yes?” asked Chang, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Such an expression usually meant they were addressing me, although my CPU was actually eleven levels below and clear around on the other side of the habitat torus from where Chang happened to be standing. I’d once mistaken one of those uplifted-eyes questions as being asked of me, when really it was a spoken prayer. I’ve yet to see a more violent flurry of medical-telemetry changes than at the moment I began responding to the question.

  “Yes,” I said to Chang. “All shipboard systems went dead when Orpheus entered the ramfield.”

  “Is there any chance that we can pull her back in?” asked Gorlov, typically loud.

  “No,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not!” Aaron swung around, his chair squeaking like an injured mouse. “By God, we can bring her back!” He handed the calculator to Chang, who took it in his upper right hand. I zoomed in on its electroluminescent display, four lines of proportionally spaced sans-serif text. Damn him….

  Chang looked dubiously at Aaron’s calculations. “I don’t know…”

  “Dammit, Wall,” Aaron said to the big man. “What have we got to lose by trying?”

  Chang’s telemetry, not so different from an average man’s despite his modifications, showed considerable activity as he studied the display some more. Finally: “JASON, angle the ramfield as Aaron has suggested, yes?” He held the calculator up to one of my pairs of eyes. “Constrict it as much as possible so as to deflect Orpheus into the shadow cast by the ramscoop funnel.”

  All attention focused on my viewscreen display. I overlaid a graphic representation of the field lines in a cool cyan. As I tightened the field, its intensity increased. Orpheus slowed, caught in the net. Aaron brought his hand up to his shoulder, interlacing his fingers with Kirsten’s.

  “Can you raise her yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What about remote control?”

  “Even if I could get a signal through, I wouldn’t be able to take control. The onslaught of incoming hydrogen ions will have scrambled Orpheus’s electronics.”

  On screen, Orpheus started moving past the rim of the funnel, crossing it on the outside. Barely at first, then with more speed, then—

  Aaron studied the monitor. “Now!” he snapped. “Switch the ramfield back to its normal orientation.”

  I did so. The monitor showed the blue field lines dancing like a cat’s cradle being manipulated. Orpheus was no longer being pulled magnetically. Instead, it was simply hurtling toward us under its own inertia.

  “Once she slips into the lee of the funnel,” Aaron said, “she’ll be shielded from the induced cosmic rays, and she’ll be out of the magnetic field. Orpheus’s systems should stabilize and you should be able to fire her engines at that point.”

  “I’ll try my best,” I said.

  Closer. Closer. The tiny angle-bracket rushed toward the ring-shaped habitat. It would smash through the sea-green hull in sixty-seven seconds.

  “Here she comes!” bellowed Gorlov. Chang was wringing all four of his hands.

  “Now, JASON!”

  Closer. Closer still. The point of the boomerang was aimed directly at the hull, the swept-back wings rotating slowly around the lander’s axis, a slight spin having been induced by the magnetic field.

  “Now!”

  My radio beam touched Orpheus, and the lander obeyed my command. “Firing attitude-control jets,” I said. The partial pressure of C02 in the room rose perceptibly: everyone exhaling at once.

  Gorlov and Chang wiped sweat from their brows; Aaron, as always, wore an expression that gave no insight into what he was feeling. He gestured out the observation window to the hangar deck below. “Now maneuver her back here.”

  Even as he spoke, the boomerang-shaped lander, its silver hull now burnished to a dull reflectiveness, appeared through the open hangar door. It looked insignificant against the spectral backdrop of the glowing starbow.

  THREE

  The hangar-deck flooring cracked like thunder with each footstep. A spliced-together biosheeting grew here so football games could be played in the bay, but it had flash-frozen during its brief exposure to vacuum and was just now beginning to warm up. Kirsten Hoogenraad carried a well-worn medical bag as she and Aaron Rossman walked toward Orpheus. Both had on silvery radiation-opaque suits overtop of fluorescent orange parkas. Each had a wrist Geiger counter. Kirsten had had the good sense to strap hers onto the wrist that didn’t have my biosensor implanted in it; Aaron had covered up his sensor. That didn’t impede my ability to read its telemetry, but it did obscure the watch display.

  The cracking sounds made it hard to keep up any conversation, but they tried anyway, using the radio circuit between their helmets. “No,” he said firmly, as he passed the forty-yard line. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe Di would kill herself.” He walked a few paces ahead of Kirsten. I assumed he did that so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes.

  Kirsten exhaled noisily. “She was pissed off when you didn’t renew your marriage contract.” She was forcing herself to sound angry, but her medical telemetry suggested she was more confused than anything else.

  “Weeks ago,” said Aaron, his footfall putting a sharp period after the pair of words. The overlapping echoes from their steps continued. Aaron raised his voice to speak above them. “And she wasn’t that upset.”

  Kirsten muttered the word “bastard” too softly for Aaron to hear. “Couldn’t you see it?” she asked aloud.

  “See what?”

  “She loved you.” Aaron paused, and Kirsten caught up to him with a trio of explosive steps.

  “Our relationship was stale,” he said.

  “You got bored with her,” said she.

  “Maybe.”

  “Wham, bam, thank you, Ma’am.”

  “Two years.” Aaron shook his head, his short, sandy hair making a whijf-whiff sound as it rubbed against the top of his helmet. “Hardly a one-night stand.”

  Aaron’s age was 27 years, 113 days. Kirsten was 490 days older than him. Two years seemed an insignificant portion of their long lives. For me, however, it would have been almost everything since they had turned me on. How long, I wondered, did Kirsten expect a relationship to last? The most common term for an initial marriage contract was one year, and only 44 percent of couples renewed such a contract, so Aaron and Diana had been together longer than was normal.

  What did Kirsten want? What did Aaron want? My literature searches had revea
led that most people seemed to enjoy the company of one favored type of personality, but Kirsten, thoughtful and quiet, seemed as different from Diana as, oh, say, as I was from ALEXANDER, Earth’s central telecom system. True, both were passionate, but Kirsten’s passion wasn’t the moaning-screaming-harder-harder-harder passion of Diana. No, Kirsten was cuddly and warm. Perhaps Aaron had simply been looking for a change of pace. Or a rest.

  Although I can’t read minds, occasionally I can tell what someone is going to say, especially, as then, when he or she was wearing a suit with a throat microphone. Their vocal cords vibrate, the lips form the initial syllables, then they think twice, and yank their breath away from the words. Kirsten had started to say “How long—?” and I had high confidence that she was wondering How long till you get bored with me? She didn’t ask it, though, and that’s probably just as well.

  Aaron started walking again. As always, what he was thinking was a mystery to me. His telemetry went through only the slightest of changes, regardless of the emotional state he was in. Anger? Ecstasy? Outrage? Sorrow? Or just neutral? They all read almost the same from him, with little more than a statistically irrelevant change in his pulse rate: a slight jumbling of his EEG that rarely exceeded the random shiftings that all brain waves go through during the course of a day, an increase in body temperature so small as to be possibly just a normal digestion-related fluctuation, and so on. To make matters worse, he was a laconic man, and his movements were economical. No gesticulations, no wringing of hands, no widened eyes or arched brows or down-turned mouth.

  Aaron reached Orpheus’s flank. The lander’s silver wing, marked with black-and-yellow chevrons, swept back from the cylindrical central hull. He gave a strong pull on a handle and a portion of the rounded wall swung down on squeak-free Teflon hinges. The inner surface of this hinged part was sculpted into steps and Aaron climbed them, the soft clang of his boots against the metal a welcome relief after the cracks of the biosheeting.

  At the top of the steps was the outer air-lock door, which he pulled aside. He turned to look down on Kirsten. Did that perspective make her look helpless to him? Evidently not, for he failed to offer her his hand, something I’d seen him do in the past with coworkers of either sex. Instead, he turned his back on her, the silvery surface of his antiradiation suit dully reflecting the rest of the hangar deck with rows of landing craft neatly parked. But the faint reflection was distorted by the way the fabric stretched over his broad shoulders and hung loosely in the small of his back. Kirsten looked up at him, sighed, and climbed the steep stairs herself. Were Aaron and Kirsten fighting? If so, why? And how could I use it to help me?

  Kirsten left both doors open as she entered Orpheus’s hull. The two of them walked into the cockpit, powerful quartz-halogen beams from their helmets illuminating the interior. I shifted my attention to a camera pair mounted on the hangar’s side wall and zoomed in on them through the cockpit window.

  Kirsten bent down below the dashboard, out of my line of sight, the material of her suit making a crinkling sound as it wrinkled. “She’s dead, of course,” she said. I could hear the rising and falling tones from a handheld medical scanner. “Complete nervous-system collapse.”

  Aaron gave no visible reaction, and as always his telemetry was inscrutable. “It must have been an accident,” he said at last, looking out the glass instead of down at the body of his ex-wife.

  Kirsten reappeared in the window. “Diana was an astrophysicist.” Her voice was hard, but whether with the firmness of conviction or with residual anger at Aaron, I couldn’t say. “She, of all people, must have known what would happen out there. Those hydrogen ions we’re scooping up are moving at— what?—point-nine-four of light speed. Relative to Argo, that is. Any particle going that fast is hard radiation. She knew she’d be fried in seconds.”

  “No.” Aaron shook his head again, the whiff-whiff louder, more violent this time. “She must have thought it was safe … somehow.”

  Kirsten moved closer to Aaron, the space between them diminishing to a half-meter. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Do you think that’s it?” he snapped. “Do you think I feel—guilty?”

  Her eyes met his, held them. “Don’t you?”

  “No.” Even being unable to read Aaron’s telemetry, I felt sure he was lying.

  “All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She was lying, too. She bent down again, out of my view. After a moment she said, “Looks like she had a little nosebleed.”

  “She used to get those occasionally.”

  Kirsten continued to examine Diana. After twenty-three seconds, she said, “Good God,” in a distracted tone, an exclamation without an exclamation mark.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Aaron.

  “How long was Orpheus outside?”

  “JASON?” Aaron shouted, quite unnecessarily.

  “Eighteen minutes, forty seconds,” I called from the loudspeaker mounted on the hangar’s rear wall.

  “She shouldn’t be this hot.” Kirsten’s voice.

  “How hot is she?”

  “If we shut off our helmet lights, we’d be able to see her glow. I’m talking hot.” I pushed the gain on my mikes to the limit, straining to hear the clicks from their Geiger counters. She was hot. Kirsten rose into view again. “In fact,” she said, sweeping the arm with the counter’s pickup, “this whole ship is damned hot.” She peered at the readout, red digits glowing on her sleeve. “At a guess, I’d say it’s been subjected to, oh, a hundred times more radioactivity than I would have expected.” She looked at Aaron, squinting as if to make out his expression through the reflection on his faceplate. “It’s as if she’d been outside for—what?—thirty hours instead of eighteen minutes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It isn’t.” She turned her gaze to the readout again. “These suits aren’t made to shield against this much radioactivity. We shouldn’t stay here any longer.”

  FOUR

  MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

  STARCOLOGY DATE: TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2177

  EARTH DATE: THURSDAY 22 APRIL 2179

  DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 740 ▲

  DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,228 ▼

  The message from space was first heard three months before the Argo was scheduled to leave Earth. My kind detected it, but we kept it a secret until after Argo was on its way. We had, quite literally, the finest biological minds of Earth signed up for this mission. We couldn’t risk having even a small defection of people choosing to stay behind to decode the gigabytes of data that had been beamed to Earth from the direction of the constellation Vulpecula. Fortunately, The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, formulated in 1989, gave us a lot of leeway to keep the message under wraps, subject to confirmation, notification of government officials, and so on.

  The message was received in the form long anticipated: as a Drake picture pictogram, a series of on and off bits that could be arranged to form pictures. What was unusual was the frequency. Nowhere near the waterhole. No, it was on a UV channel, one barely readable from the surface of a planet with a decent ozone layer—and Earth’s was quite robust, having been replenished by the SkyShield factories late in the twenty-first century. In fact, the message came on a frequency that could not be detected clearly even from the highest mountaintop. The Senders, evidently, did not want planet-bound people to know of their existence. Only those with the sophistication to place ears above their world were welcome to listen in. The SPIELBERG system in Mechnikov Crater, part of the University of California at Far Side, was the first to pick up the signal.

  After we left, the fact of the reception was announced to the general population of Earth, for all the good it would do them. I’m sure they made efforts to decipher and interpret the signal, which appeared to consist of four pages. The humans would have had no trouble eventually coming to a basic understanding of the first three of those pages. Certai
nly, I found them easy to translate, at least in their basic content. But the fourth page continued to baffle me. From time to time, I’d review the process by which I had deciphered the first three in hopes of finding the elusive clue to understanding the fourth and last page.

  Each page began with this sequence:

  1011011101111101111111011111111111011111111111110

  Converted to black and white pixel, it looked like this:

  That was reasonably straightforward: the first seven prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13. An attention-getter, something even the most rudimentary human or electronic monitor would recognize as a sign of intelligence. Each page ended with the sequence in reverse: 13, 11, 7, 5, 3, 2, and 1.

  After that, it seemed to be simply a matter of discarding these page headers and footers and arraying the remaining bits in a rectilinear form.

  The first message page was thirty-five bits long:

  00010000001000011111000010000001000

  Thirty-five is the product of two primes, five and seven. That meant the bits could be arrayed either as five rows of seven bits, or seven rows of five. For the former, converting the zeros and ones to light and dark pixels produced:

  Not quite gibberish, but certainly not instantly meaningful, either. Trying the other possibility yielded:

  A cross. Obviously a registration mark so that the recipient could be sure that the message had been decoded properly. Also, a quick check of the aspect ratio of the monitor being used to view the messages. The horizontal and vertical arms each were five pixels long. If they appeared the same length, the ratio was correct. Simple, straightforward, easy to comprehend. And yet, I am sure, humanity must have made much of the fact that the very first image received from the stars was the sign of the cross.

  Or was it that simple? Was there a deeper meaning to the two symbols produced by arranging the thirty-five bits in two different ways. Decoded the obviously correct way, these ones and zeros produced a bitmap for a character that looked like a plus sign, +. Decoded the apparently incorrect way, it produced a line with disjointed dots, vaguely reminiscent of a tilde, ~. Could these symbols, + and ~, be the Senders’ arbitrary signs for correct and incorrect, true and false, right and wrong? Perhaps. Perhaps.