Lifeline

The two watchers remained discreetly outside as Brahms walked into the darkened cabin, activated one reading-light panel, and stood in the glow. He looked around the dimness and found the metal-topped courtesy table. Tim Drury had painted a red-and-black checkerboard on its surface, making the lines himself.

Brahms leaned over and ran a hand across the pattern. It showed faint, jittery imprecisions, but that gave it charm. He turned around slowly and felt under the table surface for the small storage compartment. He opened it and removed the packet of red and black magnetic checker disks.

The guards outside watched, but Brahms got up and closed the door on them. This was none of their business.

Brahms spread out the pieces on the board, red and black, and looked down at them. He glanced up again, uneasy, as if he sensed Tim Drury’s presence there, neither approving nor disapproving.

Brahms stared down at the pieces, then moved one red disk diagonally. He waited, squeezed his eyes shut, and got up. He went to the other side of the table and moved a black piece.

“I’ll play for you, my friend,” he said to the empty room.

Brahms proceeded to play checkers with himself deep into the night, making kings and sacrificing them. He lost track of how many games he won. And lost.

Chapter 45

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 50

Gray cliff walls jutted up against the black sky, miles from where Clancy stood. Behind him, Rutherford Crater closed together, offering a sight not unlike the view from Clavius, but an order of magnitude smaller. Razor-sharp black shadows and intense splashes of sunlight made the landscape look like a high-contrast photograph.

With his chin, Clancy kicked up the coordinates on his helmet. Soft red numbers glowed on his visor: minus 61 degrees latitude, minus 8 degrees longitude. Right on the spot. He felt as if he were standing in the middle of a giant bull’s-eye with somebody else playing at target practice.

He remembered his revelation as an undergraduate, when he had first discovered that Newton’s laws of physics required corrections when applied to orbits—either because of a planet’s oblate nature, or from its rotational wobbling, or from inhomogeneities in the planetary density. In fact, it seemed a miracle that Newton’s laws worked at all.

The thought haunted him now. The test projectile from Orbitech 1 was due to hit the lunar surface soon, and its orbit was well within the error bars.

Error bars.

The universe in practice was never so obliging as theory wanted it to be. Clancy flipped open his radio link.

“Hey, Shen.” He chided himself under his breath and tried again, using her first name. “Wiay, let’s move up onto the wall.”

“We’ve got a half hour.” Wiay Shen clumped into view, leaving slowly settling dust clouds behind her as she walked. Her footprints would remain there for centuries. “And we’re ten miles from the impact point, so we’re plenty safe.”

“We’re nine point seven miles away, if our radar fix is correct. And the impact point is only an approximation, anyway. Let’s go.”

“What’s the hurry, Cliff?”

Silence. Then Clancy spoke in a measured voice. “I said, let’s move it.”

“Okay, you’re the boss.”

Clancy swung himself around in the big suit and made his way up the rocky incline, putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to fall asleep just because moving took so long. He frowned at himself for being so impatient.

They left the six-pack below them at the base of the crater wall. Shen helped him negotiate the jumbled terrain, pointing out cuts in the rock that he missed. They circumvented boulders that looked larger than Orbitech 2 would ever be. For a moment Clancy longed to be back up in space, at the L-4 construction site, watching his crew welding girders, sealing habitats, putting together the largest closed environment ever made by man. If the “yo-yo” really worked as Clancy imagined it would, they might be able to go back there—someday.

They reached an outcrop of lava rock jutting hundreds of yards straight up. Turning, Clancy looked down onto the crater bed, now two hundred yards below them. Pieces of ancient ejecta lay where they had fallen after the impact millions of years before. Clancy knocked loose a small rock and watched it roll down the slope in slow motion and silence. Now he had left his mark here as well. Little actions had such permanent consequences.

They paused to catch their breath, when Shen spoke. “Are you all right, Cliff?”

“Fine.”

“You galloped like a mountain goat coming up here.”

He answered her with silence for a few seconds. “I didn’t think I was moving that fast. Just in a hurry, that’s all.”

Over the radio he heard her breath stop as she prepared to say something. “Clifford Clancy, are you worried about the weavewire harness hitting us?”