Lifeline

“You’ve got to bend your whole body backward,” Shen said, seeing what he was trying to do. “Like this.” She leaned back in an exaggerated curve. “Otherwise, you’ll just see the inside of your helmet.”

“I hope we can spot the harness before it lands,” he said.

“Visually, not much chance of that.” Shen stared straight ahead at the unbroken crater floor. “But Orbitech 1 coated it with radar-reflecting paint. That should make its cross section a hundred times bigger on radar than it actually is.”

Tomkins thought for a moment. “The Moon is still a big place for it to land.”

Shen turned toward Tomkins, but her gold-coated visor blocked off any view of her face. “You didn’t see how close that first harness hit where it was supposed to. Dead on. It’ll get here.”

“Then everything should go as planned.” He sensed some other worry in her. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“Yes, it should, shouldn’t it?”

Tomkins started to reply, but he kept quiet. Shen’s sarcastic tone left him puzzled. It seemed out of place, especially on such an important occasion. He could understand her feelings for Clancy and her concern for his safety. Yet the sense he was getting was more than just “my lover is leaving.”

Tomkins sighed. Much as he had disliked his years in management, they had left him with a few rudimentary processes for dealing with human problems.

He asked softly, “Did I miss something about the journey? I was under the impression that the yo-yo was straightforward—once the weavewire hook arrives, it’ll be attached to the hook already in place. It’s a thousand times less complicated than building and piloting a spacecraft.”

He heard Shen snort at him. He hated these helmets—he could not see her expression. He continued, “Well, a constant tenth of a G acceleration isn’t going to harm them, either. So what’s up?”

The six-pack bounced over a rock Shen didn’t bother to avoid, jarring Tomkins. The vehicle seemed to have sped up during his conversation, and the textured ground flowed along beside them. They began to climb the side of the crater wall. He heard a long sigh over the helmet speakers.

“Dr. Tomkins, I know you wanted to stay out of the details once you let McLaris take over the base administration, stuff, but—” She paused. “Well, I’m surprised you kept yourself so completely in the dark. Four days from now, McLaris and Cliff will be zipping along at more than two thousand miles an hour straight toward Orbitech 1, with nothing to stop them but a couple of revamped engines from a crashed shuttle. They won’t have any gravity to slow them down, no weavewire pulling in the opposite direction to halt their progress. If those engines don’t fire exactly when they’re supposed to, and for exactly as long as they need to, the Phoenix will smash into Orbitech 1 like a meteor. I’d have to be crazy not to be worried.”

Tomkins looked straight ahead without seeing the outside view. He hadn’t even noticed that Shen had stopped the six-pack. She lifted one of her legs over the seat and eased out onto the lunar surface. Tomkins followed her, planting his feet on sturdy ground with a clear memory of Clancy’s fall a few weeks before. Two miles away and a thousand feet below their level, Tomkins could see the activity in the center of the crater, where the skyhook would hit.

Below, McLaris and Clancy would be strapping themselves into the compartment where they’d remain for the next several days, if all went well.

It had been so easy to hand over the operation of Clavius Base to McLaris. He had been so efficient, so methodical in his work. Shen was perfectly right—Tomkins had divorced himself entirely of management responsibility. He had not even taken time to review what was happening on the base. McLaris took care of everything while Tomkins was wrapped up in the radio telescope—his true love. He prayed he wouldn’t have to give that up.

Shen stood on an outcrop jutting from the crater wall. Tomkins joined her. The Phoenix looked alone and unhindered out on the flat plain, like a hitchhiker waiting for a ride. Once the hook fell out of the sky, the crew would have to scramble to hook it up before their time ran out. The old patched hull of the Miranda looked contorted by its airtight welds and grafted metal plates. While Clancy’s engineers had begun to restore the manufacturing facilities on the Moon, they had not yet rebuilt the industrial facilities enough that they could construct a new vessel.

With the salvaged hull of the crashed shuttle, and extra materials dismantled from unnecessary equipment on Clavius Base, they had turned the Miranda into a completely new kind of vehicle, a true phoenix. The rocket engines had been removed and mounted on top, test fired once to make certain they could provide braking thrust. The thing looked like a bastardized hodgepodge of leftover parts.

Which it was.