Lifeline

Now that Tomkins was in line of sight of the operation, a voice crackled in his helmet. “We have a visual on the skyhook, everybody. It matches the radar echo. Give us five minutes and we’ll have you linked up and ready to go.”

Clancy’s voice came over the Phoenix’s radio. “Just stay clear of that weavewire. I don’t want anyone getting sliced up.”

“Everything’s under control out here, Clifford. You two just make sure you’re strapped in. You’ll be in for quite a yank when that cable starts hauling.”

Tomkins and Shen watched the scene without speaking. Though they couldn’t see it themselves, they learned that the tiny package had indeed struck the far side of the crater. A specially modified six-pack racer sped across the floor to retrieve it. Tomkins realized ironically that no one would ever be able to see the fine thread tying the colonies together.

Tomkins waved a hand to the yo-yo assembly below. “When Duncan explained this trip, I naturally thought everything was well known—very little risk and all that. I guess it’s a naïve way for theoreticians to view the world—just assume that things are ‘engineering problems.’”

Shen let out a short laugh. “‘Engineering problems’ can really screw you up bad if your survival depends on everything working just right.” She continued with vehemence: “Once Cliff got it through people’s head that it didn’t matter how fast the yo-yo was pulled up, everyone bought it. Escape velocity doesn’t mean beans when you’ve got a constant force pulling you up.”

Excited voices filled the radio. The six-pack racer returned to the Phoenix, and suited figures scrambled over the top. Tomkins wished he had some sort of binoculars, but the curved faceplate would have made them useless.

Once the hook was attached, the figures jumped back down to the crater floor and rolled away in their six-pack. The vehicle wheeled a safe distance away, then turned and waited.

“We don’t really know how long it’s going to take,” Shen said. “It should be soon now.”

“Clavius Base and Orbitech 1, we are ready to go!” Duncan McLaris’s voice broadcast. Since the sound speed in the monomolecular strand approached the speed of light, as Clancy had predicted, once Orbitech 1 started reeling in the weavewire, the Phoenix would start moving.

“See ya later, Cliffy!” Shen broadcast.

Before he could reply, the Phoenix suddenly jerked up, hauled off the surface of the Moon in a puff of lunar dust. The modified hull of the Miranda pulled away. From this distance, it looked to Tomkins like it was levitating. The yo-yo shot up into the black soup of stars at an angle to the horizon.

Clancy’s voice came over the radio. “We’re off! The acceleration is less than lunar normal, so we don’t feel too bad. But boy, we are getting a sight you would not believe!”

Whoops from a dozen different microphones filled Tomkins’s helmet. Down on the crater floor, where dust still settled to the surface, he could see tiny figures outside the six-pack making superhuman leaps in the lunar gravity.

The Phoenix ascended into the deep blackness. Shen stood staring down at the launch site.

“If you bend over like this, you can see better!” Tomkins said to Shen, bending backward as she had shown him. “Are you still worried?”

Shen continued watching for a moment, then turned to their six-pack. “Now it’s that guy Brahms who concerns me.”

Chapter 51

Climbing to L-5—Day 70

Luis Sandovaal tried to keep the antenna pointed toward the incoming signal, beamed from the Aguinaldo over three hundred thousand kilometers away. The computer-driven servo had failed and he had a hard time manually steering the delicate controls.

Cramped in the sail-creature cyst, he felt his impatience simmering into anger. He tried again to adjust the antenna, overshot the mark, and hissed at himself before making another attempt. Back in the lab he could maneuver the microwaldoes and juggle chromosomes one at a time in the nucleus of a single cell. He couldn’t dare admit that he was having problems now.

Hourly news updates, beamed from the Aguinaldo on the open channel between the colonies, gave Sandovaal and Dobo some respite from worrying about their trip. As bored as he sometimes felt, Sandovaal wondered how young Ramis had endured it. Dobo spent most of the time sleeping.

A burst of words came over the receiver. “#### showing that your velocity is falling as calculated. You will soon need to ### your sails #######.”

Sandovaal leaned into the transmitter. “You are coming through sporadically, Aguinaldo. Next transmission time I am switching to Orbitech 1.” He would have to adjust the antenna all over again! “Please patch all further transmissions through the American colony.”

“Rog## that. #### out.”