Lifeline

Shen couldn’t tell if he had been injured. She made a quick decision to give him a sedative. She punched the emergency code into his chest unit, fumbling to hit the right buttons with her thick-gloved fingers. She swore at the red light that started blinking. She tried a second time, making sure to enter the medical override code correctly. This time the light burned a steady green.

Clancy’s suit began to pulsate as the lower part constricted, then expanded around his legs. Based on the old-fashioned “G-suit,” the movement prevented blood from pooling at the lower part of his body due to inactivity. A tiny needle on the inside of his suit pricked Clancy’s neck, injecting a sedative. It also withdrew a small amount of blood, so the automated diagnostics could make a white-cell count and a blood-sugar test.

Shen watched the diagnostics flash on the chest unit.

Minutes passed as she radioed to Clavius Base, explaining her emergency. Clancy’s respiration rate lowered. Satisfied that he wasn’t going to die on her, Shen straightened and looked around.

A milk run, she thought. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the crater—something we could do ourselves. She had talked Clancy into doing it, looking for another excuse to get him alone. It should have been a piece of cake—watch the weavewire harness impact, scoop it up, and get back to Clavius Base within an hour.

Her eyes lit on the six-pack a hundred yards away.

She’d better start moving. She took the distance at a lope. Once the electric motor started, she backed the six-pack to within a few yards of Clancy.

Clancy moaned into his suit radio. At least it was some sound. The ones hurt really bad didn’t make any noise. Shen bent over him and pressed her helmet against his. She could not make out his garbled words.

She bent to pick him up and looked for a place to hold on. Clancy was a full foot taller and outweighed her by eighty pounds. Once the space suit was thrown in, she was dealing with a hundred fifty pound differential in normal gravity. Even though he only weighed about fifty pounds on the Moon, inertia still made a difference.

Shen got her hands under his armpits and pulled him off the ground. It seemed as if she were tugging him through thick jelly. “I thought you were slim and trim, Cliffy!” She coughed with the effort and staggered to her feet, trying to balance Clancy’s bulk without jarring him too much.

Carrying him in her arms, she felt like an absurd parody of an old Frankenstein movie—a petite female monster hauling a big lunk of a victim. She felt her suit straining to combat her exertion and keep her internal environment regulated.

Clancy’s suit continued its constricting motions. The sedatives seemed to have taken effect—his blood pressure was down, as well as his respiration rate. At least he was stabilizing.

Shen gingerly placed Clancy on the six-pack’s flatbed and secured him there with a cable. She didn’t plan to follow the speed-limit signs on the way back to the base, and she certainly didn’t want her cargo to fall overboard.

She scrambled to the operator’s console, keeping an eye on Clancy as she started the engine. She moved the six-pack forward and started for the steep pass through the crater wall.

Only fifteen minutes had passed since the canister from Orbitech 1 had landed. Shen had a fix on its location, but that was far in the back of her mind as she pushed the vehicle to its limits toward Clavius Base.

Duncan McLaris absently tapped a dual-end pen on his desk. One end contained carbon ink for writing on paper surfaces; the other was a magnetic scribe for use on a flatscreen. Tomkins’s once-cluttered office looked organized; it gleamed. McLaris had removed and stored the stacks of computer readouts and pictures of radio telescopes. The noise from the pen’s tapping bounced through the room.

McLaris focused his mind on a single topic—a burning question to which he already knew the answer. And the answer made him feel sick inside.

In the excitement following Clancy’s proposal of the yo-yo, and Brahms’s agreement to try, no one else seemed worried about the most important question of all—who would risk their lives in the attempt? Who would have to go to Orbitech 1?

Part of the answer was obvious—Tomkins and many of the others were so immersed in their work that they didn’t want to be disturbed. But others, especially Clancy’s engineers, ached for a chance to get off the “Rock.” It would indeed be an experience of a lifetime.