EIGHT WEEKS LATER
You’ll be all right, Trudy told herself as she stepped out of the airlock and onto the open floor of the Sea of Moscow. Just don’t look up; keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t look at the stars.
She was following Winston Squared out to one of the spindly little hoppers standing near the blast pad where the bigger, more powerful lobbers landed and lifted off.
“The nanobots have finished the mirror at Mendeleev crater,” she said. She knew that Winston knew that, everybody at Farside knew it, but Trudy needed something to chatter about. “Now Grant’s getting them started on the mirror at Korolev. At this rate we’ll have all three telescopes working before the end of the year.”
“Yeah, that’s good,” Winston said. “And Cyclops is starting to get data from the antennas we’ve already put up. The prof’s a happy camper.”
“You’re looking for intelligent signals?” Trudy asked.
With a cynical little chuckle, Winston said, “The great and wonderful search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The more we look the less we find.”
“I thought SETI—”
“Trudy, radio telescopes have been searching for intelligent signals for more than a century. With nothing to show for it.”
“You’re not using Cyclops for SETI?”
“Oh, sure. We’re scanning for intelligent signals. But it’s strictly routine, nobody expects to find anything.”
“But you said you were getting data,” Trudy said, keeping her eyes focused on his space-suited back, a few paces ahead of her.
“We sure are,” he replied, brightening. “We’re looking at the afterglow from gamma-ray bursters. Exploded superstars, three, four megaparsecs out.”
“Hypernovas?” Trudy asked.
“You know about them?”
“Only a little,” she said.
The hopper was about a hundred paces ahead of them, a flimsy-looking craft, little more than a platform resting on spidery legs. Trudy knew that Crater Mendeleev was nearly eight hundred kilometers away, and Winston had been ordered by Professor Uhlrich to fly her there.
“Sounds like interesting work,” she said.
“Not as glamorous as talking to ETs,” Winston replied. “But it sure as hell interests me. And the rest of the Cyclops crew.”
She nodded inside her fishbowl helmet. The Cyclops assembly would be the biggest and most sensitive radio telescope facility in the solar system, she knew, capable of picking up intelligent radio signals from thousands of light-years’ distance.
If there are any intelligent signals out there, she added silently.
They reached the hopper and Winston put a booted foot on its frail-looking ladder, then stopped and turned toward her.
“Ladies first,” he said, with a stiff little bow.
Thinking that there were advantages to being one of the few women at this lonely outpost, Trudy grabbed a rung and started up the ladder. She felt the rung sag slightly as she put her weight on it but ignored that and clambered laboriously in her bulky space suit up to the open platform.
Following right behind her, Winston went to the control console, nothing more than a slender podium at one edge of the platform. She stood beside him and clutched the slim railing with both her gloved hands.
“Better slip your boots into the loops on the deck,” Winston told her. “These little buggies don’t generate many g’s, but still you want to be anchored down good and tight.”
“How long will it take to get to Mendeleev?” she asked.
“We’re scheduled for forty-five minutes. Could go faster but that’d burn up too much of our fuel.”
Trudy felt her pulse thumping in her ears as Winston went through the brief checkout procedure and then asked the flight controller, safe and snug back in Farside’s underground shelter, for permission to lift off.
“You are cleared for liftoff,” she heard in the speakers built into her helmet.
Winston said, “Okay. Here we go.”
The sudden surge of acceleration made Trudy’s knees buckle, but she held tight to the railing and straightened up immediately. The ground fell away and all at once they were soaring up, higher and higher, as if they were riding a magic carpet. No sound, no feeling of wind rushing by; it was almost as if she were watching a 3-D video.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Winston asked, his voice light and carefree.
“Sort of,” Trudy replied cautiously.
She could see the barren, pitted ground sliding past them far below, pockmarked with craters, studded with rocks. I’m flying across the Moon, she told herself. She felt light-headed and her insides began to churn.
“We’ll be weightless most of the flight,” Winston said cheerily. “Feels great, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of,” was all that Trudy could say.
Her stomach was crawling up toward her throat and she felt that if she let go of the railing she would float off into infinity. Squeezing her eyes shut, she commanded herself to ignore the queasiness. Forget about it. Forget the cosmic emptiness out there. Think of something else. Something pleasant.
She thought back to her date with Carter McClintock.
They had bumped into each other in the cafeteria. Over the months since she’d arrived at Farside they saw each other daily, of course. But two days ago, there in the cafeteria, Carter had asked her to have dinner with him, in his quarters.
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a cook,” he had said, a rueful expression on his handsome face. “But then, there’s not much available here except prepackaged meals.”
“That’s okay,” Trudy had said brightly. “I can perform miracles with a microwave.”
“Can you? How wonderful.”
McClintock’s quarters were somehow more luxurious than Trudy’s. The place was the same size as hers, and had the same standard-issue sofa and chairs, desk and wall screens. The same kind of kitchenette. The same-sized bed. But McClintock had a real carpet on the floor, a red-patterned oriental. And the coffee table in front of the sofa was a handsome curved piece of glass, not the more practical boxy type that Trudy had in her room. An additional flat screen was mounted on the wall over the sofa; it showed an image of some famous painting of a woman and her little boy on a green summery hilltop.
“It’s not much,” he’d said as he showed her in, “but it’s home. For now.”
Trudy had worn her best dress, a sleeveless short-skirted thing of buttercup yellow, and she’d spent nearly an hour trying to make her hair look decent. McClintock was wearing a casual sweater, coppery red, and neatly pressed slacks.
With a wily grin he said, “I smuggled some wine from California in with the latest supply delivery. Would you like some?”
Dinner was wonderful. The food was quite ordinary, but Carter was a good conversationalist and kept her laughing with stories about his family Earthside. She wound up in his arms on the sofa, her heart pounding so strongly she thought he’d hear it or maybe even feel it as he held her close.
“I…” she had to take a breath before she could continue, “I haven’t had much experience, Carter. With men, I mean.”
“Neither have I,” he whispered. “With men, that is.”
She giggled and he began to undress her.
Yes, Trudy thought, there really is an advantage to being one of the few women at Farside.
“Starting retroburn in ten seconds.”
Winston’s voice broke into her reverie. Trudy blinked away the happy memory of her night with Carter McClintock and looked down past the edge of the hopper’s gridwork decking.
And there was the telescope, a big fat tube standing slightly tilted in the middle of Crater Mendeleev like the stumpy old-fashioned smokestack of an ocean freighter. At its base Trudy could see the hump of rubble where the robots had built the underground shelter for visiting humans.
The flight controller’s voice from Farside said crisply, “Copy retroburn.”
Suddenly weight returned as the hopper’s rocket engine fired silently. Trudy swallowed, then held her breath as the ground came rushing up to meet them. Miraculously their descent slowed, became almost dreamlike, until she felt the landing pads touch down with a gentle thump.
“We’re down,” Winston said.
“Copy your landing,” said the flight controller, a heartbeat later. “Right on time. Good job.”
“Thank Isaac Newton,” Winston wisecracked.
Then he turned to Trudy. “Come on, girl. Time to go to work.”
They spent the rest of the day checking out the telescope’s controls and the electronic links back to Farside. We could have done this remotely, Trudy thought as she ran through the diagnostics on the console inside the cramped underground shelter that the robots had built. No need for a person to come out here. After all, what’s important is how the controls work at Farside.
But Professor Uhlrich had insisted that an astronomer should go to the telescope site and check out everything in situ. Since Uhlrich could not go himself and Trudy was the only other optical astronomer at Farside as yet, she got elected.
“It’s a shame we had to drag you out there,” she said to Winston as she bent over the console, her eyes on the display screens. Both of them were still in their cumbersome space suits, although they had both removed their helmets inside the pressurized safety of the underground shelter.
“Glad to help out,” Winston said. “They can get along without me at Cyclops for a day.”
It was strictly routine work, but Trudy felt excited to be doing it. This is the first time the telescope’s been operated. I’m at the cutting edge, she told herself. This is something I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren about. Then she laughed inwardly. Yeah, tell them how boring the cutting edge can be.
But when she put the telescope’s imagery on the console’s center screen her breath caught in her throat.
“That’s Andromeda, isn’t it?” she heard Winston ask, in an awed whisper.
“M31, the Andromeda Galaxy,” Trudy confirmed.
It was magnificent, a giant spiral of billions of stars, its gracefully sweeping arms aglow with the bluish light of newborn stars.
“I’ve never seen it so clear,” said Winston.
The telescope’s “first light” image was truly beautiful, Trudy thought. This ought to please the professor.
“Let’s zoom in,” she murmured, turning a dial on the console.
“Holy god, I can see individual stars!” Winston sounded awed, and Trudy felt thrilled at his reaction.
“Good resolution,” she said. “That’s sort of what our own Milky Way looks like, if we could see it from outside.”
“Maybe we will someday,” said Winston.
“Maybe we will,” Trudy agreed. “Someday.”
The controls worked perfectly. The telescope moved ponderously in response to Trudy’s computerized commands. She knew the “first light” views the telescope was seeing were being relayed back to Farside. Uhlrich had already made a connection with Selene University’s public relations department to broadcast the images all across Earth.
The cutting edge isn’t boring after all, she told herself. My grandkids will be just as excited about this as I am.
It took a real effort for her to shut down the console and turn control of the telescope over to Uhlrich, at his Farside office.
“Time to go,” Winston said as he put his bubble helmet on.
Trudy twisted her helmet in its neck ring until it clicked shut and, with some reluctance, followed Winston out through the shelter’s airlock and onto the surface where the hopper waited.
After a dozen paces, though, Winston suddenly began to stagger.
Trudy grabbed for his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Can’t … breathe…”
In her helmet speakers she could hear Winston gasping. “Can’t…”
He collapsed. Trudy couldn’t hold him and he sank slowly to his knees, then fell facedown onto the dusty bare ground.