Infinity Beach

20

“If it were going to blow us up,” said Kim, “I’d think it would have done so by now.”

“You’re probably right. So we should be safe. For the moment.”

“How do you mean, for the moment?”

“We can’t very well take it home.”

“Why not?”

“It might be a tracking device.”

“You don’t really think that’s so?”

“What else would it be if it’s not a bomb?”

She thought it over. “It could be a gift.”

“Like at Troy?”

“Solly, we may be getting a little paranoid here.”

“Yep. Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a little paranoia when you’re being chased. We’ve no idea of their capabilities. And so far their intentions don’t seem especially friendly.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get rid of it.”

Solly nodded. “My thought exactly.”

The object clung to the hull, not far from the main air lock.

Solly got up and started for the door. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

They left the pilot’s room and walked downstairs. Solly opened a closet in the main floor entry. “Only thing we can do. Go outside and shoo it away.” He frowned. “It’s probably not dangerous, Kim. If they’d wanted to attack us, they’d have done so by now. Chances are, they’re hoping we didn’t notice we’ve got a piggyback.”

She nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Stay put and keep warm.” He selected an insulated bar and hefted it. “This should work.”

“How about if I go out this time?”

“How much EVA experience do you have?”

“How hard can it be?”

“It isn’t hard. But it helps to know what you’re doing.” He kissed her.

“Solly,” she said, “why would they put something on the hull that we can just go outside and remove?”

“You’re suggesting they didn’t.”

“That’s right. I’m suggesting it isn’t going to come loose.”

“Let’s find out.”

Kim had played enough chess to know the basic credo: always assume the opponent will make the best possible move. “I don’t like this,” she said.

Solly managed to look as if everything were under control. “It might be just a mind game. If it’s anything more, if something happens out there, tell Ham to head for St. Johns, okay? Don’t go home. If we have to risk losing something, let’s make it the outpost and not Greenway.”

She felt drained watching him climb into a pressure suit. And she thought suddenly of the Beacon Project. Here we are. Come get us. But no, it really couldn’t be like that. It was not reasonable.

“What irritates me about all this,” she told him over the link as he finished dressing and climbed into the air lock, “is that I never seem to be able to do anything to help.”

“So far you’ve done it all, Kim. Now sit tight and I’ll be back in a half hour.”

They ran a radio check, shut off the gravity, and turned on all the portside exterior lights. Minutes later the panel indicated the outer door had opened. She directed the AI to watch Solly with whichever imagers it could bring to bear.

“Kim,” said Ham, “he also has a camera atop his helmet.”

“Can you activate it?”

“Of course.”

“Do so.”

Pictures appeared on three screens, a side view of Solly, one from the rear, and the view from his helmet. A fourth imager locked on the object.

Solly attached his tether to a safety ring just outside the air lock and strode purposefully across the hull, secured by magnetic boots.

There were no stars, and consequently no sky. Space and time existed in this nether-universe, though the latter seemed to run at a variable rate, and the former was squeezed. This did not resemble, say, a night under thick clouds; because even the clouds would have been visible, sensible objects whose presence was felt, whose weight pressed down on an observer. This was a true void, an absence of everything, a universe which theory held to contain neither matter nor energy, save that which occasionally penetrated from outside, through the agency of jump engines.

It reminded her of the terrifying moments in the spillway, when the world had closed down on her, buried her. When the only light, cast by her wristlamp, had faded into a darkness of mind and spirit that might have gone on forever.

Solly moved among the antennas and sensors and housings littering Hammersmith’s hull. She watched him draw close to the object, watched him turn his light on it.

It had come to rest between a service hatch and a sensor mount.

“What do you think, Kim?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful.”

He touched it with the tip of his bar. There was no reaction. “I’m going to give it a poke,” he said.

“Gently,” she advised.

“Poking.”

She saw no reaction.

“It’s on pretty good,” said Solly. “Probably magnetized.”

He stooped down and tried to wedge the bar beneath it. The saddle seat irised open. Kim jumped.

So did Solly.

It was as if a dark eye looked up at them.

“Solly,” she breathed.

“I see it.” The opening was as wide around as her hand was long. The darkness was palpable, a couple of centimeters deep.

“Be careful.”

Solly waited to see whether anything else would happen. When it didn’t, he went back to trying to work the bar under the object. Kim’s view was poor: everything was a mix of shadows and bright lights and Solly’s arms. She wished they could bring it inside, look at it, but even that seemed dangerous.

Who would have believed it? They had obtained an apparently genuine extraterrestrial artifact, and they were going to throw it away.

She wanted desperately for this to be over and Solly to be back inside.

He worked the bar in and was grunting loudly as he pushed down. And suddenly the hull and the sensor mount, half-seen in the uncertain light, seemed to ripple.

The effect came and went so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d really seen it.

The object came loose.

“Okay,” Solly said. He got his right hand under it and peeled it off like a man removing an orange skin. When it was clear, he lifted it high, held it for her to see and the imager to record, turned it a half dozen ways so they missed nothing. Then he flung it away. She watched it spin out into the dark.

“Good show, Solly.”

“Thanks.”

Solly pushed the bar into his belt and retreated into the air lock. He switched over to the AI’s channel. “Ham, where’s the object?”

“Still outbound, Solly. At three kilometers per hour. Showing no sign of internal power.”

She glanced up at the screen dedicated to Solly’s helmet imager and watched the lights come on in the air lock. The door swung shut and gravity returned throughout the ship. She could see the bench opposite the one he was sitting on. And part of the control panel, a blinking amber lamp, a hand rail, and one of Solly’s feet.

“Ham,” he said, “Track the object as long as you’re able. If there’s any change, let us know.”

“I’ll do that, Solly.”

The amber lamp would continue to blink until air pressure reached normal. Then it would turn green.

Kim was wrestling with the problem. It was possible the Hunter had blundered the first contact, and it might be that she was now doing the same thing. “We might wind up being a laughingstock for future historians, Solly,” she said.

“I just don’t like any of this, Kim. We’ve established there’s something here. Now I think we need to turn the whole thing over to a team that can come out here prepared to—”

The amber light dulled.

And brightened.

It wasn’t supposed to do that.

“—To do the thing systematically,” Solly concluded.

Behind the lamp, the wall and the control panel wrinkled. In the way of a strip of pavement on a hot day.

It was gone almost before the sensation had registered. “Solly,” she said, “are we having an imager problem?”

“No,” he said. “I saw it too.” The silence in the ship was overwhelming. She left the pilot’s room and was waiting by the air lock when it opened. Solly came out.

She put all the lights on in the entryway and looked into the air lock. Everything seemed normal.

“Ham,” she said. “Rerun the sequence from the helmet imager, beginning about four minutes ago. Put it on one of the entry windows.”

There were two large windows in the entryway. Both had carried images of the skies as they might have been seen from Greenway. Now one went dark and then lit up with Solly entering the air lock.

“Too recent,” she said. “Back it up another couple of minutes.”

“It was just a power dip,” said Solly.

“Maybe.”

She watched him moving rapidly backward, saw the saddle in reverse flight, watched it sail in toward him, saw him put it down on the hull. Use the bar.

Solly-in-the-window worked backward furiously on the saddle. The circular opening in the seat closed.

“Okay,” she said. “Stop, Ham. Run it forward.”

Solly laid his helmet down, peeled off the suit, and sat down to get out of the boots.

The sensor mount rippled again.

“Ham,” said Kim, “hold it.”

Solly’s brow creased. They ran it several times. Then she took him to the sequence in the air lock, and they watched the amber lamp fade and brighten and the control panel lose its definition. It seemed to fold slightly, and darken, as if something had passed in front of it, as if the space it occupied had changed in some indefinable way.

“Does that—” she stared at the image on the monitor, “—normally happen out here?”

“No.” He switched over to the forward hull imager, backed up the record, and they watched the entire scenario from another angle.

The sensor mount was in the foreground. Solly was behind it. And this time, it was Solly who rippled.

“I don’t understand that,” he said.

Kim’s heart had picked up a beat. “It scares me, Solly.”

When they peeled away her jumpsuit, they saw that something had cut Emily almost in half at the waist. The flesh was charred, the trunk partially severed, but there was no blood.

“They cleaned her up before putting her out the airlock,” said Solly, pulling a sheet over the mutilated body.

“What could have happened to her?” asked Kim.

“A laser, maybe.” Solly looked puzzled.

They returned the corpse to its container and Kim kept reminding herself that at least now she knew. But it wasn’t much consolation.

Analysis of the recordings provided no clue as to what, if anything, had happened on the hull or in the air lock. A trick of the light, perhaps. Or disturbances in the space-time continuum. After all, Solly had been outside the ship. Maybe there were side effects when you opened up air locks to hyperspace. Indeed, no other explanation offered itself. So they put it out of their minds, as best they could, and resumed their normal shipboard routine.

And as the days passed with no recurrence of the effect, they forgot about it altogether.

Meantime, the conversation centered on the kind of reception they’d receive when they got back to Greenway. Police or a parade? Kim was unwaveringly optimistic. You cannot prosecute the person who answers one of the great all-time scientific and philosophical questions. Solly, who’d been around longer, suggested that their accomplishment would only serve to anger Agostino even more. “We might look good to posterity,” he said, “but the locals may take a different view. Remember Columbus?”

“What about him?”

“Died in a Spanish prison.”

On the other hand, Kim thought Agostino could be relied on to milk the mission for all it was worth, to make it sound as if it had been an Institute initiative from the start. In that case, their careers would be safe as long as they cooperated.

Kim believed her interest in the sciences to be generally selfless, spurred primarily by a desire to push the frontiers of knowledge forward, to be part of the collective effort. She didn’t think she’d been in it for herself. But she resented the prospect that someone else might try to grab the credit after she’d gone through so much.

Five nights out of Alnitak, Kim, absorbed in these thoughts, was showering for dinner.

Because there were only two people on board, there was no pressing need to conserve the water supply. She had just rinsed her hair and was using a towel to dry her face before opening her eyes. But she sensed movement in the washroom.

“Solly?” she asked.

Once before he’d slipped in while she was in the shower, and had taken advantage of the opportunity, wrapping the curtain around her and fondling her through the translucent plastic.

But he did not answer and when she looked no one was there.

She dismissed the incident and the mild disappointment, dressed, and went down the hall for dinner, which included chicken, a fruit salad, and hot bread. They were talking about inconsequentials when Ham broke in: “Solly,” he said. “I am losing control over some of my functions. They are being rerouted elsewhere. To an alternate manager.”

“That can’t be,” said Solly. “Are you reporting a virus?”

“It is difficult to say precisely what the cause is, Solly.”

“Which systems are you losing?”

“I am having some difficulty with communications, diagnostics, life support. The deterioration is continuing as we speak.”

“Ham, what can we do to rectify the situation?”

“I do not know. You might wish to consider going to manual. If the process continues, I will shortly become unreliable.”

“Can we do that?” asked Kim. “Can we get home on manual?”

“Oh, sure,” said Solly. “It just means we’ll have to throw all the switches ourselves. And we might chip a little paint at the dock. Otherwise it’s no problem.” Nevertheless he looked worried.

They finished dinner, somewhat at less leisure than they’d begun, and went across to the pilot’s room. Kim took some of the hot bread with her.

Solly removed a wall panel marked AUTO OFF. “Ham,” he said, “I’ll check with you periodically. Try to locate the problem and eliminate it.”

“Yes, Solly. I am endeavoring to do that.”

His fingers touched a pumpkin-colored handle and moved it forward. A row of orange lamps came on. “The pilot finally gets to earn his pay,” he told Kim.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked.

“We relax.” He gestured toward the navigation console, which was built into a desk. “If you see any red lights and I’m not here, call me.”

“If something happened, wouldn’t the Klaxons sound?”

“Maybe. If we’ve got a virus in the system, everything becomes unreliable.” He must have seen the doubt in her face. “But don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. The ship is pretty much still automated. It’ll still produce hot water, prepare the food, recharge the power cells. The only difference now is that we’re going to have to punch some buttons to make things happen.” He paused, considering their situation. “If there’s a variance between actual conditions and prescribed conditions, the ship may not notice. Which means we might have to turn up the thermostat once in a while. Piece of cake, other than the inconvenience.”

Kim took a long time to ask the question that really bothered her. “Solly,” she said, “do you think it’s possible—?” She hesitated.

“—That—?”

“—The virus came from the device!”

“No,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly. “It’s a glitch in the programming, Kim.” He hesitated. “It happens.”

Kim studiously avoided bringing the subject up again. That evening they wandered down to the rec room and watched, but did not participate in, Party of Five, a light comedy in which the lead characters discover they are living next door to a group marriage with two husbands and three wives.

Party of Five did not get many laughs, and Kim spent most of her time thinking how cavernous the ship felt. Solly tried to look relaxed, but he kept laughing at the wrong parts.

Before they went to bed, he reactivated the AI, but did not return control of the systems to it. “Ham, have you been making progress with the virus?”

The windows opened out onto an ocean. In the distance, Kim could see a whale spouting.

“Ham?” said Solly. “Answer up.”

He glanced sidewise at her and tried again. The AI had always responded within seconds.

Kim got up, put her hands in her pockets, and turned away from the seascape. “It sounds as if it’s down altogether,” she said.

“Apparently.”

“Ever know it to happen before?”

“Never. But this is also the first time I’ve had to shut down an AI. Maybe it has that kind of effect.”

“Ham,” she said. “Are you there?”

They went up to the pilot’s room and Solly sat down at the console and initiated a diagnostic. “This’ll take a few minutes,” he said.

The windows opened onto the same seascape, although the whale was gone.

“When we get back,” she said suddenly, “you aren’t going to walk away from me, are you?”

“No.” Solly put an arm around her. “I love you, Kim.”

He gathered her in and they kissed.

“Kim—” he said.

“Yes—?”

“Will you marry me?”

It came without warning. “Yeah,” she said, carefully keeping her voice level. “I think I’d like to do that.”

The diagnostic chimed. It showed no problem. Everything was fine.

“That can’t be,” said Solly. “I mean, we can’t even raise the AI.”

Solly broke out the captain’s best stock that evening to celebrate their engagement. They made love to candlelight and soft music, starting in the briefing room, where the windows were full-length and provided a glorious view from the top of Mount Morghani, pausing once on the third-floor landing, and continuing with unabated zeal into the bedroom.

Even though they were alone on the ship, Kim always took care to close the bedroom door. On this occasion, however, Solly carried her in and tumbled her among the sheets, and so the door remained open.

The night went on and on, with occasional downtime for him during which they talked of the future. And then Solly came for her again, and she delightedly gave herself to him.

He was inexhaustible that night. Even with a body that was effectively twenty years old, he seemed to be performing above and beyond the call. But she stayed with him and there came a moment when he was lying with his head toward the foot of the bed and he brought her down atop him, turning her on her back, spread-eagling her.

She luxuriated in the sensation of his body beneath hers, his lips against the nape of her neck, his hands exploring her. The illumination in the ship had dimmed to nighttime levels, which meant the passageway behind her was dark save for the soft glow of the security lights.

Her head was thrown back in ecstasy and she was groaning and sighing, partly because she was inclined to do so, partly because she knew it inflamed him. Her line of vision went through the open door into the corridor.

And she saw something move.

It was a glimmer, a shadow, something at the far edge of awareness. Yet it was there.

She was immediately trying to get Solly to stop. But he was at full throttle.

Something was taking shape back there.

A pair of eyes. From the darkness near the top of the doorway, just outside in the corridor.

Suddenly she was back in Kane’s villa, terrified in the cool emotionless gaze of the thing in that other passageway. Solly’s hands were still holding her, playing with her. She pulled them away and rolled off onto the floor and, without taking her eyes from the apparition, got Solly to understand something was wrong and began feeling around for a weapon. The best she could find was a shoe.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, startled.

The eyes were the same emerald color, but flecked with gold. Vertical irises. Cat’s eyes. Cool, dispassionate, surgical. Very much like the thing in Kane’s villa. But she saw no madness here. Only malevolence.

The eyes were disembodied.

They floated a few centimeters from the ceiling.

Solly was staring down at her but she held a hand against his back, trying to get him to stay still. She found the remote, which was on a side table, and touched it. The lights came on.

Solly looked at her. Looked out into the passageway.

It was empty.

“Kim?” Solly looked down at her. “What’s wrong?”

She was weak, unable to move. “It was outside the room.”

“Outside? What was outside?” He padded into the corridor and looked both ways. “Nothing here,” he said. “What did you think you saw?”

She tried to describe it but it just came out sounding hallucinatory.

“All right,” he said, when she’d compared it to the thing in the lake. “Let’s find out.”

She got into her clothes and Solly pulled on a pair of shorts and detached a lampstand to use as a weapon. Then they examined each room on the third floor, Solly doing the actual search while Kim stayed in the corridor to ensure that nothing got behind them.

He looked in closets and cabinets and behind beds. They moved with deliberation, and Kim was pleased to see that, despite the absurdity of her claim, he took her seriously rather than simply trying to argue what he must have thought: that she’d been seeing things.

They went down to the second floor and repeated the process, and then finally they searched the bottom of the ship. Long windows allowed them to see into all of the storage areas and the launch bay. He even climbed down into the lander through the open cockpit. The lander itself was attached to the Hammersmith’s underside. They inspected the areas given over to the recycling systems, water tanks, and cargo. They looked in the engine room. When they were finished he turned to her. “Kim, there’s no place left to hide.”

It didn’t matter. “I saw it,” she said. It was impossible, and she wanted to put it aside, wanted desperately to believe it was an illusion. A dream. A result of the wine she’d drunk earlier in the evening. But she’d been wide awake. Solly had seen to that.

“It was there,” she said. “It vanished when I put on the lights.”

“Like a reflection would have done.”

“Yes.”

“But it wasn’t a reflection.”

“No. It wasn’t. Couldn’t have been.”

There was egress to interior wiring and systems compartments through several access panels. But it would have required time to remove and then replace them. He looked at them, and they were locked down tight.

“I saw it.”

“I believe you.”

They went back up to their room, walking softly along the carpeted floors, and turned out the lights, returning the ship’s illumination to what it had been. Kim looked into the semidarkness, studied the row of tiny security lamps which came on automatically when the ship dimmed down for nighttime running. There was nothing that could have fooled her into thinking she’d seen a pair of eyes.

The most frightening aspect was the thing’s resemblance to the earlier apparition. She wondered if it had somehow contrived to follow her out here.

She’d brushed aside the experience in the Severin Valley, locked it in a remote corner of her mind, and convinced herself it had been a trick of the light, or a product of an over-supply of oxygen.

Now she was confronted by it again. And for the first time in her adult life, she questioned her worldview, her assumption that the universe was rational. That it was governed by self-consistent laws. That there was no place for the supernatural.

“You all right, Kim?” He was standing over her, pulling on his clothes, obviously worried.

“I’m fine,” she said.

There was another, more likely, possibility.

She sat down at the console and replayed the visuals from Solly’s helmet imager, stopping the display when the ripples appeared, on the hull and in the air lock.

The thing she’d seen was connected with the saddle. The object had not been a bomb; it had been a transport.

If that were so, she wondered whether she and Solly could even talk to each other without being overheard. Had the celestials mastered enough of the language to eavesdrop?

She told Solly what she thought.

“Okay,” Solly said. “We’ll proceed on the assumption we’ve got an intruder. That would explain what’s happening to Ham as well.”

“There is this,” she told him. “At least it won’t try to murder us in our sleep.”

“I don’t want to be downbeat on this, but why not?”

“Because it wants to follow us home.”

“Kim, I hate to point this out.” He lowered his voice. “The course is already set. If it were to get us out of the way, all it would have to do is sit tight and ride old Ham into port.”

They were sitting on the bed, staring out into the corridor, which now seemed like strange territory, a passageway from another world. “No,” she said. “It probably doesn’t know what leg of the trip we’re on. It’ll want us functioning until we get home. Until it can be sure.”

“I hope.”