She unlatched the side. My clothes were where I had left them, twenty-four years older but still in style. I had to stop halfway through dressing to swallow hard a few times, coping with zerogee nausea. It wasn’t too bad. I remembered the first time, back in graduate school, when I was useless for a couple of days. Now I just swallowed until the soup remembered to stay down, and finished dressing and floated up to join Marygay.
She was half-sitting, in a zerogee crouch, in the pilot’s station. I strapped myself in next to her.
“Darling.”
She looked bad, both haggard and bloated, and from her expression I knew I looked the same. She leaned over and kissed me, carrot-flavored.
“It’s not good,” she said. “This ship lost track of Number Four years ago. Number Two is more than a week behind, for some reason.”
“It thinks Number Four’s dead?”
“Doesn’t have an opinion.” She chewed her lower lip. “Seems likely. Eloi and the Snells. I haven’t checked the roster, who else is on board.”
“Cat’s on Two,” I said unnecessarily.
“It’s probably okay.” She stabbed at a button. “We have another little problem. Can’t get Centrus.”
“The spaceport?”
“The spaceport, no. Nothing else, either.”
“Could it be the radio?”
“I get the other two ships. But they’re close. Maybe it’s a power thing.”
“Maybe.” I didn’t think so. If the radio worked at all, it would pull in pretty weak signals. “Tried a visual search?”
She shook her head, one jerk. “The optical gear’s on Number Four. We’ve got sperm and ova and shovels.” Mass was critical, of course, and the planet-building stuff was distributed among the five ships with only enough duplication so that the loss of one ship wouldn’t doom all the others.
“I got some sort of carrier wave when I first turned it on. The ship thinks it’s one of the Centrus shuttles, in a medium-low orbit. Should be back in an hour or so.” We were in geosynch, high up.
I looked at the cold white ball of MF and remembered warm California. If we had gone to Earth twenty-some years ago, forty-some now, it would be warm and safe. No children to worry over or grieve.
Somebody was vomiting loudly. I unsnapped the vacuum cleaner from the back of the copilot’s chair and kicked aft to deal with it.
It’s not too bad if you work fast. It was Chance Delany, who looked more sheepish than sick.
“Sorry,” he said. “It didn’t want to get past my throat.”
“Drink water for a while,” I said, buzzing up the little globules. As if I were an expert.
I filled him in on the situation. “Good God. You don’t think the Mother Earth people got in power?”
That was Teresa’s crowd. “No. Even if they did, Man wouldn’t let them shut everything down.”
In another hour, the rest of the council was up–Sage, Steve, and Anita. Marygay and I were starting to look more normal, as our faces filled in and tightened up.
“Okay,” Marygay said, touching a viewscreen. “I’ve got it again. It’s a shuttle, all right.”
“Well, I’m the pilot. Let’s go get it and see what’s happening downstairs.” We couldn’t simply land the escape vessels as if they were overgrown shuttles–or, rather, we could, but the exhaust would kill any humans or animals not under cover for a radius of several kilometers.
“Let’s wait until everyone’s been up for a couple of hours. We ought to use the acceleration couches, in case.”
“Can you see it?” Anita asked.
“Not from here. But it is there; the signal’s pretty strong.”
“Only one?” Steve said.
“I think so. If there’s another one in orbit, it’s not broadcasting.” She came back hand-over-hand to where we were floating. “We should maneuver all three ships into echelon, for safety, and approach it in formation.”
“Good,” I said. You had to be careful where you pointed the gamma-ray exhaust, even in space. If all three were parallel, we were safe.
“No one aboard the shuttle?” Chance asked.
“I don’t get any voice response. They would’ve seen us arriving.” We’d be brighter than Alcor, coming in. “There might be something wrong with our radio. But I don’t think so. I do pick up the carrier wave, and that’s the frequency they’d use.”