For the next two days Theo stayed mostly in his own compartment studying the tutorials and maintenance videos about the antennas. He saw that he would have to go outside to assess the damage that the attacker’s laser beams did. The maintenance robots could be helpful, but only if he could program them with exact instructions.
He was stretched out on his bunk, so intent on the maintenance video that he didn’t hear the scratching on his privacy partition.
“Thee? You in there?” Angie’s voice.
He yanked the plug out of his ear and looked up. His sister inched the accordion-fold partition back a sliver. “Can I come in?”
Angie pushed the partition wide open. “May I. All right. Satisfied?”
“Come on in,” he said, swinging his stockinged feet to the tiled deck. He clicked the remote and the instruction vid disappeared from the screen built into the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk.
Angie sat in the spindly little desk chair, her fists clenched on her knees.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Okay. I’m learning a lot about how the antennas work. I’ll have to go outside and check the damage. Prob’ly tomorrow.”
“You want me to go with you? You know, like backup?”
He started to say that she’d be more trouble than help, but bit back the reply and answered instead, “You could be a big help by monitoring me from the control pod.”
Angie’s eyes widened eagerly. “I could do that,” she said.
“Okay. Good. I’ll tell Mom.”
“Thee?”
“What?”
“She cries.”
“Who? Mom?” A blast of something close to panic jolted through him.
Nodding, fighting back tears herself, Angie said, “At night. After we go to bed. I can hear her in her compartment. She tries to muffle it but I can hear her crying.”
Theo couldn’t believe his mother was afraid of anything. “It’s about Dad, I bet. She’s crying about Dad.”
“You don’t really think he ran away from us, do you?”
“What else? We’re here and he’s not.”
“But Mom says he did it to protect us. To draw the attack ship away from us.”
A thousand thoughts raced through Theo’s mind, all jumbled up, blurring together.
“Thee, you don’t really think he abandoned us, do you?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Dad’s prob’ly dead.”
“No!”
“Most likely. But we’re alive, and I intend to keep us that way.”
Victor Zacharias was alive, but starving.
The pod in which he was coasting sunward carried only a minifridge’s worth of packaged food: mostly sandwiches and preserved fruits. He had been living on one sandwich and one piece of fruit per twenty-four hours. His stomach rumbled hollowly.
As the pod sailed silently through the dark emptiness he had plenty of time to think. And plan.
The pod had an emergency transponder that could beam out a distress signal. But it was a notoriously weak signal, Victor knew, and bound to be swamped by the comm chatter that would be sweeping over the area where
How can I get them to notice me? Victor asked himself. He pondered that question through the long, lonely hours he spent in the command chair, staring at his useless instruments and sensors. He dreamed about it when he cranked the reclining chair back and willed himself to sleep. He worried that the nanobatteries powering the pod’s systems would run dry, but then he realized he’d starve to death long before that happened.
At first he thought his hunger would be a sharp prod that would make him think. After a week he realized that starvation dulled the mind. No brilliant ideas surfaced; all he could think of was food.
He wished he had the mental discipline of a Buddhist monk, capable of submerging himself into deep meditation. Victor’s mind was not so trained. He wanted an idea, a plan, a scheme. He wanted action, not the oblivion of Nirvana.
He wanted, above all, to get back to Pauline and the children. With a shake of his head he reminded himself, they’re not children anymore. Angela’s ready for marriage. Theo is a man in every way except experience.
And still the pod drifted, like a leaf caught in a tide, like a man-made asteroid sweeping along in its mindless orbit.
Feeling weaker each day, Victor forced himself to check and recheck every item of equipment in the pod. Every piece of hardware, every computer program, every system. There’s got to be something here that I can use as a tool, something that I can use to get noticed, to get rescued.
Again and again he checked his inventory. There was a communications laser built into the pod’s outer hull, but lasers were strictly for line-of-sight communications. Radio waves spread out like ripples on a pond, but the tight beam of a laser was good for communications only if it was pointed directly at the ship you wanted to communicate with.
I could make the laser swing around in a circle, Victor thought. That might catch some ship someplace. But he knew that was a tactic of desperation. The chances of his pencil-thin laser beam reaching another ship’s receiving sensor were little better than the chances of being struck by lightning out here in the middle of empty space.
Yet that night he dreamed of a star shining in the soft night sky of Earth. The star pulsated. Shepherds gathered in the desert and marveled at it.
When he woke he thought he must be getting irrational. “Next thing you know you’ll be dreaming about Santa Claus,” he growled at himself.
He fought off sleep but eventually it overpowered him. And he dreamed again of the star blinking in the cloudless sky of a desert on Earth. Blinking. Blinking.
Victor awoke with a new sense of purpose. The first thing I’ve got to do is modify the laser, he told himself. Get its pulses down into the petasecond range. The shorter the pulses, the more power in each pulse. Each pulse will carry megawatts worth of power, plenty bright enough to see on Earth. There must be thousands of astronomers looking at the stars each night. They’ll have to notice me!
But first I’ve got to modify the laser.
Theo was soaking in a hot shower after long hours in his space suit, working outside on the slagged antennas. Whoever their attacker was, he had done a thorough job of destroying the antennas: long ugly gashes sliced through the metallic monolayer that had been sprayed along
He let the steaming water relax his cramped and aching muscles. Neither Mom nor Angie tried to hurry him out of the shower. What the hell, he rationalized, the water’s recycled. We’re not losing any of it: it just goes into the purifiers and back to the holding tank. He remembered when he was a kid, maybe seven years old, and he’d taken a pair of welder’s goggles into the shower with him and pretended he was swimming underwater on Earth, like the vids he’d seen. After three-quarters of an hour Dad got sore, he recalled, but Mom laughed when Dad told her about it.
