Outward Bound, page 16
"Can she get them into suits?" one of the CR officers asked, turning from the screen that was showing Kelsoe and the others at Grayling. "It might give us more time to work something out."
The doctor shook his head. "No chance. She's still in shock. It's a miracle she's been able to do this much."
"Those fliers are gonna run out of range before much longer," the other CR officer said.
"Is there some way they can cut the lines?" somebody among Kelsoe's staff suggested from Grayling. They had been joined on the Bridge there by Colonel Weyer, chief of the military command at Grayling, who reported directly to Kelsoe.
"Maybe if we were equipped with laser artillery," the rescue pilot's voice answered, sounding sarcastic in his exasperation. "But we're not."
A numbed hush fell over the room. The juniors waited for the authorities to come up with something. The authorities were at a loss. All of them watched the screens, waiting for the tragedy to play itself out.
Then Linc looked across at Captain Ullerman. Ullerman sensed him from the corner of his eye and turned his head. "I think I know how we can cut the cable," Linc said. The CR officers pushed on the handrails to turn toward him. Linc hesitated. Ullerman nodded for him to go ahead. "Could we back up on that sequence we just had from the rescue flier?" Linc said, looking at the engineer, Quine. "I thought I saw something."
The officer in charge nodded. Quine played with keys on his console. The view coming in from the flier stopped for a second, then went into fast-motion reverse. Linc waited until the lattice section flew into view, almost filling the screen, then began shrinking. Running backward, it was the instant just before the pilot had been forced to evade. "Freeze it there," Linc said. "Now run it forward again slowly . . . more . . . a bit more . . . Now hold." Linc pointed. Something bright yellow was lodged among the tangle of struts and girders. It was one of the remote-operated waldos used for general construction. "It's there at the other end of the line from the capsule," Linc said. "It has its own cutter. We can control it from here—right here in the Shack."
Chapter Thirty
SEVERAL seconds of silence followed, echoed on the screen from Grayling, where Kelsoe and his staff had heard too. Everyone exchanged looks, waiting for someone else to voice the objection that had to be there but was too obvious to just at that instant. Yet nobody did. Finally, the senior CR officer nodded curtly "Do It," he said Ullerman looked around uncertainly as the realization hit him that the onus was suddenly on him to take it from here.
"Let Linc try," Willie prompted, with uncharacteristic forwardness from among those to the side. "He's the best telecontrol man we've got."
Ullerman pulled himself together. "Get an identification from the assignment list of which waldo that is, "he said to Quine and indicated one of the telecontrol consoles. "Then get a link from it to Unit 9 there."
Not waiting to be told, Linc hauled himself over to the TC console that Ullerman had specified, clipped into the operator harness, and began pulling on the gloves. One of the others, spurred into action by his move, plugged in the helmet for him and lowered it over his head. "Do we know if that waldo out there is still working?" Linc heard somebody asking as darkness blotted out the scene in the room.
"We'll soon find out," Quine's voice replied.
The start-up page appeared in Linc's visual field. He stepped rapidly through the familiar activation routine—"It's checking positive," Quine's voice said from somewhere, sounding crisper now that there was something to do—and suddenly Linc was out in space.
But hurled into an experience unlike any he had known before. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. The stars around him careened in a wild, irregular motion which, although it was purely visual, caused his stomach to churn and threw his balance reflexes into chaos. It was like being on a runaway roller coaster bucking and falling in three dimensions. Although the waldo was still anchored, Linc found himself clutching instinctively to hold on with the manipulators, via the gloves.
Ullerman's voice came through the helmet. "We have a slave off your visual, Linc. It looks good. You copy?"
"I'm reading you."
"How does it feel?"
"Rough."
"You need to get to the other end of the line. The engineers don't want to risk the recoil of cutting it where you are. Can you do that, Linc?"
That was all he needed, Linc thought, fighting the heaves still assailing his stomach. "I'll try, sir."
"There probably isn't a lot of time . . . ."
"Sys on," Linc ordered. "Manipulator both, power gain to max." A virtual gauge superposed upon his vision confirmed the setting. He gripped the structure immediately in front of him. "Anchor, disengage. Sys off." Now he was attached only by the metal-fingered hands, clamping at full power. The forces feeding back through the gloves made him feel as if he were hanging onto a treetop swishing in a gale. The waldo swung away from the girder like a flag from a mast, then crashed back against it as the structure changed direction. Linc marveled that its joints were able to take the stress.
Cautiously releasing one hand, he extended it to a new position. Miraculously, the single remaining hand held. Making certain the first was firmly secured before releasing the other, he pulled in and turned the waldo slowly until he was looking out along the cable that connected to the capsule. The line in between snaked up and down and from side to side in curves flowing first toward him and then back again, while the stars continued their deranged dance in the background. That was the gap he was going to have to cross. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the rescue flier whirling past in the distance; then it was gone again. From nowhere the preposterous thought formed in his mind that if he ever did go climbing with Patch in the mountains again, at least it wouldn't be like this. Alternating his grasps with slow deliberation, he began hauling himself hand-over-hand out onto the line writhing across empty space.
"I just want you to know we're with you every inch of the way, son," a high-ranking voice in his helmet informed him.
Yeah, right . . . . Linc was having to concentrate too much to reply.
The ride on the piece of debris had been nothing compared with the line. Linc was hurled back and forth, feeling like a fly on a whip that was being cracked. And yet, as his confidence in the waldo increased, and he began getting the hang of coordinating his moves, he managed to move faster. He was past the halfway point when Ullerman's voice came through once more.
"Linc, do you read?"
"I read."
"You're doing just great. Nancy has got a hand camera operating in there. The doc says that Arvin's shoulder looks as if it's out. Arvin's head has cleared a bit, and he wants to talk to you. Can we patch him through?"
"Right now? I am kinda busy."
"He's being insistent."
"Make it quick, then."
One side of Linc's visual field became an internal shot from the capsule, showing Arvin clinging with his good arm to the pilot's support frame. The other side of him was crookedly misshapen. His face was strained and whiter than Linc had ever seen it. A cut in his arm was oozing globs of blood that drifted lazily in the air like slow-motion details from a violent action movie. "Am I through?" he asked in a wheezy voice.
"You're patched into the waldo channel," someone answered.
"I can see you, Arv," Linc confirmed. "I'm right outside, almost there now."
"I guess I flunked pilot's school, eh?" Arvin said.
"I wouldn't say you had a lot to do with it. We'll get you out of there, don't worry."
"Look, Linc . . . just in case this doesn't work out . . ." Arvin winced and had to pause to regather his voice. He gasped several breaths. "There's something that you have to know . . . It's important."
"We don't really have time for this," Quine's voice cut in.
Linc decided Arvin was partly delirious. "Arv, save it. You can tell me about it back in Grayling. I got work to do, buddy. Sys on. Com out," he instructed. The scene from inside the capsule vanished.
Now there were just ten yards or so to go. The capsule's mass was less than that of the wreckage at the end Linc had started out from, and its oscillations correspondingly more violent. Its outside was buckled where the cable had crushed it. Fortunately, the capsule was designed with a double hull. Getting the knack now, Linc was able to use the surges in the cable to help him along. He was almost there when a new voice came through.
"Cadet Marani?"
"Yes?"
"This is the chief engineering officer from the Bridge at Grayling."
"Sir?"
"You're just approaching the capsule, is that right? We've been following you on the shots coming back from the rescue fliers."
"Almost there now, sir."
"We have a Doppler-radar fix on you from here. Look, I don't know if you follow this, but the center of mass there is moving away from us at a considerable velocity. However, due to the rotation, the end of the cable that you're at periodically traces a reverse trajectory that almost cancels it. That means that if you cut the line at the right moment—which we'll tell you from here—the capsule should come out of it practically dead in the water, on little more than a slow drift relative to us. Do you understand?"
"Anchor on the capsule side . . . Don't make the cut until you say so."
"You've got it."
The way a wheel rolls, the axle carries the whole assembly forward, while the point on the rim immediately below is actually rotating backward at the same speed. The two velocities cancel, and so the rim of the wheel doesn't slip. The CEO was saying they were going to try to lose the capsule's velocity by detaching it a an instant when a comparable state of affairs existed.
Linc finished the final yards swinging almost evenly, like an orangutan coasting the trees. He hauled himself around the mess of cable and anchored the waldo on one of the capsule's thruster mounts. Relief swept through him as he felt himself become a part of something solid again. "Sys on. Control, right appendage. Disenable manipulator. Enable cutter. Sys off." His right arm had become a cutter. He positioned it around the base of the cable. "In position and ready," he reported into his helmet mike.
Voices came across the gap from Grayling.
"Delta—vee two-twenty, reducing."
"Here's that harmonic again. This could be it . . ."
"One-eighty, one-fifty . . . The derivative's not leveling. It looks like we're going all the way down."
"Standing by, Marani?"
"I read. Standing by."
"Under a hundred. Good enough?"
"We can go more. It's not bottoming yet."
"Forty . . . thirty . . . twenty-five . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . . Look at that. It's flat. You won't do any better. It's gonna pick up again now."
"Okay, cut it!"
Linc snipped two of his fingers together; fifty miles way across space, metal shears cut through braided steel almost an inch thick . . . .
And almost instantly, his world returned to sanity.
Like a flurry of snow being called to order, the stars suddenly stabilized, and the cable became part of a spinning anomaly shrinking and vanishing rapidly into the distance. Linc found himself on the outside of the capsule, drifting gently against a backdrop of space that was normal again. Then it all vanished abruptly, and he was back, dripping with sweat, inside the Construction Shack.
The three rescue craft moved in and enveloped the stricken capsule in a plastic bag, which was quickly sealed and filled with air. Medics and rescue techs were already in the lock, waiting to enter. They found the three occupants unconscious. The slackening of the cable had allowed a tear in the inner hull to open, losing the last reserves of air. In the engineer's estimation, the remaining supply had by that time run down to less than five minutes' worth in any case. They were rushed back to Grayling, Arvin with a dislocated shoulder and strained back, Cliff with a concussion, Nancy still in acute shock, and all of them with multiple cuts and bruises. But none of the damage was serious or permanent, and all three were expected to come out of it just fine.
Linc earned himself a new nickname: Bronco.
Chapter Thirty-One
LINC'S sixteenth birthday came while he was out in space at Grayling. Julie gave him a tie clip in the design of an anvil. "Because I know you'll create it in metal some day," she told him. It was the perfect gift. Linc had no idea where she had gotten it. This was the first time he'd had a birthday gift from anyone outside his immediate family—and that had been only when he was a kid.
They had met for lunch in the cafeteria in North Tower, where Julie worked. She was helping with the tending of patients now. Linc had completed his construction basics and was in a day of free time before starting a class on remote-directed space-assault robots. The joke among the other cadets was that he should have been teaching it.
"How's Arvin doing?" Linc asked across the table as he dug his fork into a plate of mixed salad. Cliff and Nancy had been kept under observation in the sick bay until the previous day, and then released. Linc had received an E-mail from Nancy's parents in Maine, thanking him for what he had done. They also sent one to Arvin to let him know they didn't hold him accountable for the accident. Nancy had no doubt sent them a line giving all the news. Although the authorities that ran Grayling didn't go out of their way to publicize their activities, personnel there were not expected to cut themselves off from the world. Censorship wouldn't have been consistent with what the Outzone was all about.
"He's doing okay," Julie replied. "The doctor saw him this morning. It wouldn't surprise me if he's up and about this afternoon. It'll be a while before he can use that arm properly again, though."
"It's good he's so much better." Linc speared a green olive and ate it.
Julie eyed him over her sandwich. "Does this mean the standoff that's been going on between you two might finally be over? It'd be about time."
"Hey, I seem to go through this with everybody. Talk to him about it, not me. I've been approachable all the time." Linc shook his head. "He's still got some kind of problem. I've given up trying to figure it."
"So might you if you had to walk around Seville Trace with your face looking like a peach that got run over," Julie said, chiding mildly.
"Don't try to hang that one on me. It was squaring up an account that needed squaring. He knew that."
"Was it really that important?"
"It's the way I do business." Linc started to look irritable.
Julie smiled resignedly and reached across to squeeze his hand. "Let's not spoil lunch by going off into all that now, especially on your birthday," she said. "The Armstrong will be arriving in less than two weeks. Then we'll be on our way at last. Let's think about that."
Linc stared at her, then let go of the tenseness that had started building for a moment and grinned. He chewed a mouthful of salad and squeezed her hand back. It felt soft and smooth, tempting all the impulses of the age he was at. But he had held off from pushing things in that direction. They hadn't talked much about it. There seemed to be an unspoken understanding that it was something they both wanted to save until their new life in the Outzone began. Maybe it was silly to even think about at such an age, but the possibility had crossed Linc's mind of starting a family when they got there. Or was it silly only by the standards of the dying culture they were leaving? Nature and biology's opinion on the matter was clear. By all accounts, the need for people in the Outzone was insatiable, and marriages and pairings were encouraged at ages that would be considered preposterous, unnatural even, on Earth. Perhaps that was what drew people there unconsciously, instinctively—especially young people. The spirit that drove the Outzone was that of life and birth and growth. What lay behind was slowly succumbing to stagnation, decay, and death.
Three cadets at the far end of the room got up to leave. "Watch it guys, it's the hero," one of them said as they came to the table where Linc and Julie were sitting. The other two walked by muttering:
"Hero, hero . . . ."
"Hero, hero . . . ."
One of them gave Linc a light, approving clap on the shoulder as he passed. This would go on for a few days yet, Linc could see. He shook his head and looked at Julie helplessly. She smiled and let go of his hand to resume eating her sandwich.
"It's going to be so different out there," she said. "Think of it—where people value the things that are actually worth something. On Earth they've forgotten how to make everything except money. But what good is it if there's nothing worthwhile left to buy?"
Linc stared at her. Wasn't that about what Dr. Grober had said in different words? It seemed an eternity ago now. And the mysterious "Mr. Black" at Coulie? . . . Angelo had said it in deeds, not words. It was the first time Linc had gotten the feeling he was beginning to understand what they had meant.
