RETURN TO FARSIDE
Grant was listening to Trudy’s excited voice as he fastened the two ultraviolet lamps to the metal floor of the hopper.
“… swung the ’scope over to the Orion constellation and took spectra of Betelgeuse.” Even in the small speakers of his helmet he could hear the exhilaration in her voice. “Beautiful! You should see ’em! I got emission lines nobody’s ever seen before. Not from old Beetlejuice! I could write a paper about it!”
“That’s great,” he said. “You didn’t stay up all night, did you?”
“Oh no. I got to bed around three, three thirty, somewhere in there. Maybe four.”
Glancing at the digital readout on his wrist, Grant said, “So you got maybe four hours’ sleep?”
“Something like that. I’m going to set up the ’scope to look at Sirius C today. Get spectra from its atmosphere.”
“Assuming it has an atmosphere.”
Trudy replied, “We know it’s got something of an atmosphere, Grant. Now I’m going to find out how thick it is and what it’s made of.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m about ready to haul my butt back to Farside. As soon as Nate comes out of the shelter.”
“Great! Call me when you get back. I owe you a steak dinner.”
“I’ll do that,” said Grant. Steak grown out of a culture in a laboratory was nowhere near as satisfying as the real thing, but there weren’t any beef cattle closer than half a million klicks, and dinner with Trudy would be fun no matter what was on the platter, he thought.
Straightening up stiffly in the cumbersome space suit, he looked at the mound of rubble that marked the shelter as he called Oberman on the suit-to-suit frequency. “Nate, I’m ready to get going. How about you?”
A moment’s hesitation. Then, “Be with you in a minute, Grant. Just tidying up my bunk.”
Housekeeping, Grant thought. Nate’s paying attention to the finer points. Housekeeping was important. You made the place neat and clean for the next guys to come out here. And they did the same for you. Grant wondered if cowhands in America’s Old West did the same with their frontier shacks.
Turning, he looked at the big tube of the telescope. It rose like some ancient tower, canted over slightly, the huge mirror and frame at its base serving as an anchor to keep it from tipping too far. The Leaning Tower of Mendeleev, he thought.
“I’m getting into my suit now,” Oberman called. Grant sighed to himself, then said, “Okay, I’ll come in to check you out as soon as I finish preflight on the hopper.”
“You haven’t checked out the bird yet?”
“Not yet. Just starting.”
“Jeez, you said you were ready to haul ass.”
“I am. Preflight only takes a couple of minutes,” Grant said, starting to feel irritated.
“Unless you find something wrong,” Oberman added.
Yeah, Grant replied silently. Unless I find something wrong.
* * *
Professor Uhlrich got up from his chair, went around his desk, and brushed the fingertips of both his hands against his special tactile wall screen, which displayed the spectrum of the red giant star Betelgeuse.
“Impressive resolution,” he murmured.
“That’s the carbon monoxide line,” Trudy said, barely able to stay in her chair at the conference table.
“And this,” Uhlrich said as his fingers moved across the glow of colors and dark absorption lines, “this is…?”
“Formaldehyde!” Trudy burst.
“No! It can’t be. Not in Betelgeuse’s photosphere.”
“I checked the reference spectrum twice last night and again this morning,” Trudy said. “It’s formaldehyde, all right.”
“Incredible. A complex organic in the photosphere of Betelgeuse.”
She had never seen the professor look so pleased. He gazed right at her, smiling, absently stroking his trim silver-gray beard.
“We must write a paper on this,” Uhlrich said. “And we must send an online message to International Astrophysics Letters with the raw data, to establish precedence. Then we will write a full paper for the journal.”
Agreeing eagerly, Trudy added, “I think we can detect Sirius C’s atmosphere directly and get spectra on it.”
“Yes! Of course!”
Uhlrich returned to his desk, as sure-footed and confident as if he were sighted, his face beaming.
As he sat at his desk again, the professor recited, “First results from the Farside Observatory’s hundred-meter optical telescope. That will be the title of our message to IAL.”
Our message, Trudy thought. I’ll write the paper and he’ll put his name on it. In front of mine. Doesn’t matter. He’s in charge here, he’s got the prerogative. Everybody’ll know I did the work.
“I’ll send out the tweet right away,” she said.
“And mention Sirius C, as well,” Uhlrich commanded. “Spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere around the planet will be a spectacular feather in our cap.”
Trudy nodded happily. “You bet!” She pushed her chair back from the conference table, then hesitated.
“Is there something else?” Uhlrich asked.
“Something…” Trudy started. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“It’s … personal,” she warned.
“Yes?”
Trudy bit her lip, then finally said, “It’s about how you perceive the world around you. I mean … I know your sight is gone, but … you get around so well, you don’t let your blindness stop you in any way. I think you’re very courageous, sir.”
Uhlrich looked mildly surprised. “Why, thank you, Trudy. I do the best I can.”
“Can I ask you … how do you see me? I mean, do you actually know what I look like?”
He smiled slightly. “How do you know that one sighted person sees the same image of you as another one does? That’s why we describe spectra in terms of wavelength, rather than color, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” said Trudy.
“Your impression of the color red might not be the same as, say, Mr. McClintock’s. There’s no way for another person to know what it looks like inside your head, is there?”
“No, I guess not.”
Steepling his fingertips, Uhlrich went on, “But, to get back to your original question, I have a distinct image of your face in my mind. Your dossier includes a verbal description, which the auditory center of my brain sends to my visual cortex. I know that you have green eyes, light brown hair, a roundish facial structure. My visual cortex has created a picture of that face for me.”
“But how much detail do you see?” Trudy asked, hoping she wasn’t intruding too far.
“Enough to tell me that you are quite a lovely young woman,” said Uhlrich, his voice strangely hushed.
Suddenly Trudy felt embarrassed. “Oh! Thank you. I guess I should get out of your hair and go write that message to the IAL.”
She hurried out of the professor’s office, leaving Uhlrich smiling benignly from behind his desk.
* * *
Grant realized that he half expected a problem with the hopper, another glitch caused by nanomachines. But the bird checked out almost perfectly: a slightly lower voltage than normal from the fuel cells was the only anomaly and even that was too trivial to worry about.
He climbed down from the hopper and trudged toward the shelter’s airlock.
Could the nanos have come from me? he asked himself for the thousandth time. I don’t remember touching the tractor’s dewar. But I did check out Winston’s suit before he left for Mendeleev. Could I have infected him with rogue nanos? Kris says it’s impossible, but the nanobugs got into his suit somehow. How?
He cycled through the airlock and saw that Oberman had already donned the lower half of his space suit and was holding the hard-shell torso in his hands, ready to lift it over his head.
“Almost ready, Grant,” said Oberman.
“Let me give you a hand,” Grant said, as he took off his helmet.
“I can do it myself.”
Oberman slid the shell down his torso. Once his head came through the collar he wriggled his arms through the sleeves. Grant picked up the life-support pack and attached it to the fittings on the suit’s back.
“Hopper check out okay?” Oberman asked as he pulled on his gloves.
“Fuel cell’s voltage is a tad low. Nothing to worry about.”
“Batteries okay?”
Grant nodded, then realized Nate couldn’t see him because he was still behind the man, checking the connections between the backpack and the suit.
“The batteries are fully charged. We could make it back to Selene, almost, if we had to.”
“Not on a lousy hopper,” Oberman said.
“I said almost.”
Once Oberman sealed his helmet to the suit’s neck ring, Grant insisted on a radio test.
Looking sour, Oberman asked, “You want to go outside to check the stupid radio?”
Grant reached for his helmet. “Not a bad idea. I’ll go out and call you.”
“Whatever,” said Oberman.
Ten minutes later the two men were standing on the hopper’s open platform, hurtling across the barren lunar landscape, heading back to Farside.
And Grant was still wondering if somehow he was responsible for Winston’s death.