The message board was still blinking.
She sliced off a piece of meat, tasted it, and opened the bottle. It was a Chablis. Then she keyed the message, and got a trim, blond female with spectacular good looks. «Winckelmann» she said, 'my name is Allegri. I'll be coordinating the evacuation. We have fourteen people to take off. Plus Dr. Wald, who is enroute here now. We want to begin departures in forty-eight hours.
'I know that's later than the original plan, but we've still got work to do. For your information, Kosmik will begin operations at ten A.M. our time Friday. Temple time. This transmission contains time equivalents. We want to be out with twenty-four hours to spare. We also have artifacts to move, and we should start with those as soon as possible. Please contact me when you can.'
The screen blanked.
Hutch pushed back in her chair. People in these remote places usually took the time to say hello. She wondered whether Allegri had been underwater too long.
She put Quraqua on the main display, went to mag 32.
Sunlight flooded the cloud cover, illuminating a world of mud-colored prairies, vast green forests, sprawling deserts, and winding mountain chains. Neither of its oceans was visible. There were two, both shallow, and not connected. It was generally a parched world, a condition that Kosmik hoped to cure during the first phase of its terraforming operation, which it had dubbed Project Hope.
The southern ocean surrounded the icecap, creating a circular body of water averaging about five hundred kilometers in width. Beyond, several finger-shaped seas pushed north. The longest of these was Yakata, a local term meaning Recreational Center for the Gods. It penetrated about three thousand kilometers into the land mass. At its northernmost extremity, just offshore, lay the Temple of the Winds.
She'd read somewhere that Quraqua was thought to be entering an ice age. Whether true or not, both caps were quite healthy. When they went, they would make a substantial splash. And, if the experts were right, Quraqua would get instant oceans.
Ten o'clock Friday morning, Temple time. When was that? She called up the data Allegri had sent.
Quraqua's day was twenty hours, thirty-two minutes and eighteen seconds long. Everyone understood the psychological importance of using the familiar twenty-four hour clock, but adjustments were necessary whenever humans set down for an extended stay on a new world. On Quraqua, timepieces were set to run until 10:16:09, A.M. and P.M. Then they leaped forward to noon and midnight. This method eliminated time from both sleeping and waking cycles.
Coincidentally, it was now Sunday at the Temple of the Winds, just as it was on Wink. Terraforming would begin in something over ninety hours. Henry Jacobi wanted to complete the evacuation with a one-day safety margin. And they had two shuttles to work with. It would be easy.
But she was uncomfortable. It did not look as though getting clear was at the top of Jacobi's agenda. She directed the navigational computer to lift Wink out of lunar orbit and make for Quraqua. She entered both deadlines into her personal chronometer, and set the ship's clocks to correspond to Temple time.
The navigation display warned her that the ship would leave orbit in thirty-six minutes.
Hutch finished her dinner, and swept the leavings into the vacuum tube. Then she switched on a comedy and pushed back to watch. But by the time the boosters fired, and the ship began to move, she was asleep.
She woke to a chime. Incoming transmission.
The lights were dim. She'd slept seven hours.
Richard appeared on the monitor. 'Hello,' he said. 'How are we doing?'
'Okay.'
He looked troubled, in the way that he did when he was about to tell her something he knew she wouldn't like. 'Listen, Hutch, they're in a bad way here. There are several sites beneath the Temple. The one we're all interested in is down deep, and they're just now getting into it. We need to use all the time we have available. The shuttle that they've got here will accommodate three people plus the pilot. Figure out a schedule to get everyone out. But leave us the maximum working time.'
Hutch let her exasperation show. 'Richard, that's crazy.'
'Probably. But they could be very close. They're almost into the Lower Temple. Hutch, it dates from 9000 B.C., the same era as the construction on the moon. We need to get a look at it. We can't just leave it here to be destroyed.'
Hutch disagreed. 'I think our first priority is to get out before the water rises.'
'We will, Hutch. But meantime we have to make every day count.'
'God damn it.'
Richard smiled patiently. 'Hutch, we won't take any chances. You have my word. But I need you to help me. Okay?'
And she thought: / should be grateful he's not refusing to leave the surface, and daring Kosmik to drown him. His inherent belief in the decency of other people had led him astray before. 'I'll see what I can do,' she said. 'Richard,
who's running the Kosmik operation here? Do you know?' 'The director's name is Melanie Truscott. I don't know anything about her. She's not very popular with Henry.' 'I don't suppose she would be. Where's her headquarters?' 'Just a minute.' He turned aside, spoke to someone.
'They've got an orbiter. It answers to Kosmik Station.'
Suspicion filled his eyes. 'Why do you ask?' 'Curiosity. I'll be down in a few hours.' 'Hutch,' he said, 'don't get involved in this. Okay?' 'I am involved, Richard.'
A wispy ring circled Quraqua. It was visible only when sunlight struck it at a given angle. Then it glowed with the transient beauty of a rainbow. The ring was in fact composed primarily of ice, and it was not a natural feature. Its components had been brought in—were still gliding in—from the rings of the gas giant Bellatrix V. Several Kosmik tugs had gone out there, extracted chunks of ice, and launched them toward Quraqua. These were 'snowballs.' They were intercepted, herded by other tugs, and placed in orbit, where they would be used to provide additional water for the planet. At zero hour, Kosmik would melt the caps, and slice the snowballs into confetti, and start them down. Estimates indicated it would rain on Quraqua for six years. Terrestrial forms would be seeded, and if all went well, a new ecology would take hold. Within five decades the first human set-tiers could claim a world that would be, if not a garden, at least manageable. Wink's sensors counted more than a thousand of the icy bodies already in orbit, and two more approaching.
Hutch had been around bureaucracies enough to know that the fifty-year figure was optimistic. She suspected there'd be no one here for a century. And she thought of a remark attributed to Caseway: 'It is now a race between our greenhouse on Earth and the greenhouse on Quraqua.'
Wink had entered orbit.
The world looked gray and unpromising.
Who would have believed that the second Earth would be so hard to find? That in all those light-years there would be so little? Pinnacle's gravity was too extreme, Nok was already home to an intelligent race from whom humans kept their existence a closely guarded secret. And one other habitable world she'd heard about circled an unstable star. Other than those, there had been nothing.
The search would go on. Meanwhile, this cold, bitter place was all they had.
Kosmik Station was a bright star in the southern skies. It was a scaled-down version of IMAC, the terrestrial space station, twin wheels rotating in opposite directions, joined by a network of struts, the whole connected to a thick hub.
Its lights were pale in the planetary glow. A utility vehicle drifted toward it.
She ran Melanie Truscott's name through the computer.
b. Dayton, Ohio. December 11, 2161
Married Hart Brinker, then account executive with banking firm Caswell & Simms, 2183. Marriage not renewed, 2188. No issue.
B.S., Astronomy, Wesleyan, 2182; M.S. and Ph.D., Plan-etary Engineering, University of Virginia, 2184 and 2186 respectively.
Instructor, UV, 2185-88
Lobbyist for various environmental causes, 2188-92
Northwestern Regional Commissioner, Dept. of the Interior, North American Union, 2192-93
