Felicia sat on the bed in her quarters. It was early evening; she had spent the whole afternoon worrying about Kosoff’s words. “For you,” he had said. He’s made it a personal favor to me to send a communications satellite to Gamma. And he’s going to want something in return.
She wondered what she should do, if anything. Automatically, she went to the kitchen and pulled a prepackaged dinner from the freezer. I’d better stay away from the restaurants, she told herself. I’d better be antisocial until Brad returns.
If he returns, she corrected. And burst into tears.
Unbidden, Emcee’s figure took shape in the holotank on the far side of the sitting room.
His calm face smiling slightly, the avatar said, “Please pardon the intrusion. I have an urgent and strictly private call for you from Dr. MacDaniels.”
“Brad?” Felicia dropped the dinner package. “Put him on!”
And there he was, in his skivvies, sitting in what looked like the cockpit of the shuttlecraft.
“Brad! You’re alive!”
She studied his face during the three-minute transmission delay. He looked thin and grimy and exhausted and altogether wonderful.
At last Brad dipped his chin and smiled tiredly. “Alive and well. I’m in the shuttlecraft, as you can see.”
“You’re coming back?”
Again the delay. Felicia realized that she must look a wreck, eyes teary, makeup smeared.
“I can’t get back,” he said. “The shuttle’s been damaged by the storms. But its interior is intact and it makes a good shelter for me until you get back here to Gamma and pick me up.”
“Brad, I love you.”
She watched his face as her words sped to him. He seemed subtly different than she remembered: leaner, more intent.
A grin spreading slowly across his face, he replied, “I love you too, Fil. I’ve missed you.”
For the next twenty minutes there was no one in Felicia’s world except Brad. As they chatted, she kept repeating to herself, He’s alive. He’s not hurt. He’s alive and he’s not hurt.
* * *
Kosoff’s meeting of the department heads ended with nothing much accomplished, except a confirmation that Captain Desai would haul Odysseus back to Gamma the next day. In the meantime, the starship would launch a satellite on a high-velocity trajectory into orbit around the ravaged planet, to assess the conditions on its surface and set up a communications link with Brad MacDaniels—assuming he was still alive.
Kosoff sat alone in the emptied conference room, berating himself for hoping MacDaniels had died in the storms. That’s not worthy of you, he fumed. MacDaniels is a pain in the butt, yes, but he gets things done. The Gammans would have been wiped out if it weren’t for Brad.
Of course, if he has happened to die, I’ll have the chance to console his widow. Despite himself, Kosoff smiled at the thought.
The holographic display at the far end of the table lit up. Emcee’s patient, impassive face announced, “Dr. MacDaniels calling you from planet Gamma, sir.”
“MacDaniels?” Kosoff shot out of his chair. “Put him through!”
To his credit, all his thoughts of the lovely Felicia fled from Kosoff’s mind as Brad’s weary, grubby face took three-dimensional shape. Almost all his thoughts.
* * *
“Just about everybody in the village has survived,” Brad was telling Kosoff. “And the cats from Beta are dying off, all by themselves. It’s like they were programmed to kill the Gammans, then die off themselves.”
“Strange.” With a shake of his head Kosoff said, “This can’t be natural.”
Brad’s eyes widened slightly, but he said, “I think you’re right. We’ve got to get our top engineering people to examine those eggs the cats flew in on.”
“And the biologists, of course,” Kosoff added.
Three minutes later Brad replied, “Right.”
“And you? You’re all right?”
Again the maddening communications lag. Kosoff hated sitting there, unable to do anything except wait.
At last Brad answered, “Tired. Pretty cruddy after all this time in the biosuit. But I’m all in one piece.”
“Good. We’re leaving Alpha tomorrow morning. Should be establishing orbit around Gamma again in two more days.”
“Fine,” said Brad. “I can use the time to clean up and get some rest.”
“You’ve earned it.”
As he cut the communications link with Kosoff, though, Brad found himself wondering how quickly he could get back to the village. Winter’s coming, he knew. We don’t have much time to waste.
* * *
Moving the starship, a lenticular-shaped spacecraft as large as a moderate-sized town, was not a simple maneuver. The distance between planets Alpha and Gamma was too short to allow the ship to accelerate to near light-speed. As Captain Desai put it, “We go in low gear.”
Brad remained inside the shuttlecraft most of the time that Odysseus was in transit toward Gamma. He popped out of the shuttle’s hatch, wearing only regular coveralls, and retrieved the helmet, boots, and gloves of his biosuit.
When his medical readouts showed nothing dangerous or even unusual in his condition, except a slight indication of malnutrition, Brad went outside again without the biosuit and enjoyed a leisurely walk across the meadow in which the shuttle rested.
Inwardly struggling between anticipation and reluctance, Brad finally decided he had to return to the village. Mnnx and the others must think I’ve abandoned them. Or maybe that the cats got me.
That evening he thoroughly cleansed the biosuit in the craft’s capacious sterilizer, where ultrasonic vibrations removed dirt and killed bacteria. The various parts of the suit even smelled clean when he removed them from the machine.
The following morning he pulled on the suit, all except the helmet and boots, then clambered down the tree branch to the grassy ground. As he lifted the helmet to his head, he looked to make certain that the air lock’s inner hatch was sealed. Keep the shuttlecraft’s interior as free from contamination as possible, he told himself.
Yet once he had put on his boots and helmet and started off for the village, he felt that his fears of contamination were probably exaggerated. I’ve breathed the local air. Maybe only for a few minutes at a time, but it hasn’t seemed to hurt me.
The local bugs aren’t interested in me, he thought. I’m foreign material to them. It’ll take ’em a while to develop a taste for Earthly cells. How long? Years? Centuries? Months?
After half an hour of walking through the meadow toward the low hills that ringed the village, Brad finally put through a call to Littlejohn. Mission protocol: clear all decisions with your department head before taking action. Actual protocol: take your action first and then inform your department head, when it’s too late for him to stop you.