Laughter could be heard in the background. By now everyone onboard was smiling. Some wit at ground control had prepared for this moment by lining up a tape of an old Red Sox broadcast, substituting the name of the team for the name of the anonymous batter. Low was forced to grin in spite of himself. The implication of ground control’s little game was obvious enough.
Devoid of static, a more familiar voice came on-line. “Congratulations, Commander Low, Copilot Borden. Congratulations, all of you.”
Low leaned toward the pickup. “What took you so long?”
“We decided to wait an extra orbit,” the voice responded.
“We didn’t just want to be sure. Everyone wanted to be more than sure.”
“Hell.” Borden drifted lazily in harness. “I thought they were taking their time.”
“According to the preliminaries, everything went exactly as planned.” Even over the radio and the distances involved, the speaker succeeded in conveying his excitement. “All objectives attained and well within accepted parameters. The mission appears to be a complete success.”
“Naturally,” Brink murmured into the silence. “There was no reason for it to have gone otherwise.”
Mission Control continued. “The Earth has a new moon. They’re working on a name for it right now.”
Miles kept her voice down. “Wanted to make sure it’d stay put before they named it. Politically expedient.”
“Hey, what about us?” Borden groused at the pickup. “Don’t we get any input, or what? As the first people to make contact with it, I think we’re the ones who have the right to name it. Now, I propose—”
“Never mind, Borden,” interrupted the voice from Houston. “There’s no telling what you’d say.” The quiet chuckle was clearly audible over the speaker. “Anyhow, you didn’t make contact. That honor falls to Commander Low and Mission Specialist Brink.
“Which doesn’t matter anyway. The final decision will be up to the President acting in consultation with the United Nations Council on Space.”
“It does not matter.” Brink shifted in his chair. “I would hope that my name would be remembered in a more constructive fashion.”
Knowing that everything had gone as planned allowed Low to relax, insofar as he was capable of relaxing. He would not truly experience that condition again until he was back on the ground and back by his beloved bay.
The main objective of the mission had been accomplished. Now there was time, not much, but some, to carry out those subsidiary assignments on which the scientific community had insisted. Behind him, Robbins was scattering questions at Brink. The scientist did his best to answer, in simple sentences devoid of all but the most inescapable technical terms. Miles was uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps mentally tallying votes for the forthcoming congressional election, in which she expected to play a dominant part.
Then Robbins was in his face. Or rather, over it, hovering near the ceiling and clearly comfortable in zero-g. He raised his eyes to meet hers.
“Is there something I can do for you, Maggie?”
“Yeah. What is it with you, Boston? Doesn’t anything rattle your cage? Don’t you ever get excited? What you just accomplished was the equivalent of performing brain surgery with a forklift. You probably just saved millions of lives and you don’t let out so much as a whoop. It’s not natural.”
He smiled thinly. “I never claimed to be natural. Only competent.”
She refused to be put off so facilely. “Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you want to set off firecrackers, whistle like crazy, pop a bunch of balloons?”
“I’m not the crazy-whistling, balloon-popper type, Maggie. As for firecrackers, didn’t we just do that?”
“Stop badgering the Commander, Maggie.” Brink’s admonishment surprised both interviewer and interviewee. “Those of us who stand in awe at the wonders of nature tend to celebrate our little triumphs internally. Not everyone feels the need to share his emotions with a worldwide television audience, no matter how many potential commercial endorsements may be at stake.” Releasing himself from his harness, he pulled himself toward the nearest port.
“As for myself, I will celebrate when we return to our domesticated subject and I am able to study instead of coerce.”
Robbins didn’t miss a beat, switching her attention from Low to Brink. Nothing fazed her, Low had to admit admiringly.
“Are we sure that’s safe?” she was asking. “I know a survey was in the overall mission plan, provided everything went well, but it seems awfully soon to be going back.”
“The rock won’t be hot, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Miles looked over from her station. “The Russians insist their explosives are clean. Environmentally friendly, even. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but if the charts I’ve seen are correct, the residual radiation shouldn’t be anything our suits can’t handle. Most of it will have been blasted out into space.”
“In any event, we will not be lingering long in the vicinity. More’s the pity, as the English say.” Floating near Low’s right shoulder, Brink pointed. “People are so paranoid about radiation. Out there is the biggest, dirtiest nuclear bomb imaginable. It’s exploding all the time, right over everybody’s head. Every time you step outside your house, you are being bathed in ‘radiation.'” He shook his head sadly. “People grow frantic when discussing the output of cellular telephones and microwave ovens and big-screen television sets. Then they go outside and lie in the sun.”
“Hey, no need to be sarcastic, Herr Professor Brink. I’m not ignorant.”
“I did not mean to suggest that you were, Maggie. I merely chose to emphasize my point. A brief visit to the asteroid will place us in no danger.”
“Well,” she murmured, “so long as everybody’s sure.”
Low and Borden paid no attention to the discussion. They were too busy computing trajectories, velocities, orbits, and a thousand and one other necessities.
Low didn’t even dwell on Robbins’s planned participation in the EVA. When it had first been proposed to him, he’d naturally been dead set against it. But the agency had been adamant. The publicity was too promising to pass up. Besides, with Low and Brink to watch her every move, what could possibly go wrong? Spacewalking was old hat by now, the suits were idiot-proof and it wasn’t as if they had to perform some complex engineering procedure during the EVA.
As it had been explained to him, it would be more in the nature of a stroll in the park. Brink would be carrying out the actual research. The Commander could spend most of his time keeping an eye on their resident journalist. If necessary, all of her suit functions could be operated remotely from the shuttle.
Nevertheless it was not an assignment that filled him with much glee.
Aware that he was arguing with a bureaucracy whose density approximated that of lead, Low had eventually given in. That did not mean that in the interim he had developed any enthusiasm for the proposal. If it had been left up to him, he would have voted for an immediate return to the Cape as soon as their main objective was accomplished. He did not propose the notion, knowing that Brink would sooner maroon himself on the object than surrender the opportunity to be the first scientist actually to do fieldwork on an asteroid. The scientist would freely have walked through the fires of any religion’s hell for the chance.
Brink’s urgency he could at least understand. For that matter, a small part of him he tried hard not to acknowledge was also looking forward to the encounter.
A compromise was reached. There would be an EVA, but it would be kept conservatively short. They would make one drop, do some basic surveying, take some surface samples, let Robbins gush breathlessly for the benefit of watching millions, and return to the shuttle.
“We have concluded the engineering stage of this mission,” Brink was observing. “Now the work of science can begin.”
“Not until we catch up to it again, Ludger.” Borden glanced over at the hovering scientist. “Tell me, what did the biologist say when he saw something moving in the Black Forest?” When Brink did not reply, the copilot responded with a deliberately heavy accent, “Gee! Gnomes!”
Miles laughed, Low conceded a grin and a smiling Brink nodded approvingly. Robbins looked completely at a loss. Trying to puzzle it out, she drifted into the rear of Low’s seat. One elbow nudged his arm.
“Give me some room, please, Maggie.”
“Sorry.” Using one finger, she pushed off the back of his flight chair. “Nobody’s going to explain it to me, right? Right?”
“Hang on to something,” Borden advised her cheerily.
Once more the shuttle’s thrusters were fired, raising her orbit and slowing her down. Before long they were closing on their target for the second time.
“There it is!” Robbins pointed excitedly toward the one increasingly bright dot in the heavens, steadying herself with a handhold. “I can see it.”
No one else commented. Low murmured a command to Borden, who executed the required function as fluidly and efficiently as a third hand. Complex operations continued to be carried out at the rate of approximately six per casual joke.