"Two kilometers to go!" said Shirley from the engineering console. She took another sip of her algae shake and grabbed the squeezer between her knees as her fingers tapped over the screen.
"Whoops!" cried Katrina. "What happened?"
The airplane heaved upwards, rotated slightly, then dropped again, in the process shaking something loose that clattered its way to the tail of the airplane.
"It was a wave going by overhead," said George. They continued their rise. The darkness above began to turn into a dark green, then grew lighter and redder.
"Good!" said George. "These waves are a little sportier than I'm used to, but I least it'll be daylight when we break the surface so I can see them coming."
"What are you going to do?" asked Richard, his head sticking up into the cockpit area.
"We're still a hundred kilometers from the ninety-five percentile confidence pickup footprint region," said George. "The waves are heading our way, so I'm going to surf them! This is going to be rough, so get into your bunk. In fact, I want David and Katrina to strap into your beds too. Shirley! You stay at the engineering console. The minute we break the surface I want you to lock onto a commsat and send a message to Rocheworld Base to warn them of the interplanetary waterfall. The first one is only two hours away."
"Right!" said Shirley, and her hands became busy on the screen as she set up the automatic track, lock, and speedsend of the critical message. Richard climbed down past her, pausing to let David and Katrina descend ahead of him. As he passed by Shirley, he gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder.
"Go to it, Marconi."
George looked over at Arielle.
"I've got it, Arielle," he said. She lifted her hands from the controls, tightened her seat belt and lay back, her hands folded across her stomach, but her eyes constantly flickered back and forth between console and cockpit window. George rolled the plane from its vertical climb into a steep bank, headed in the same direction as the wave motion.
Until now I've regretted that decadent summer I spent between college and flight school. Three whole months in Hawaii doing nothing but surfing. This is one crazy surfboard, but it's the best I've got. He ran the fans up until an overspeed indicator lit up. Watching a plan map on his screen that showed a line indicating a wave overtaking a tiny red dot, he pushed the speed control even higher and the Magic Dragonfly shot upward. It broke through the surface of the water on the forward face of the speeding wave. For a few seconds the plane was airborne again, enough so that its tail broke free of the water. George dipped the nose and dove down the sloping front of the wave, gaining even more speed, then the airplane turned surfboard settled the bottom of its hull into the water. George kept the fans lifting and that together with the rush of air passing under the wings kept the hull from sinking and dragging them under.
"Comin' down!!" hollered George, his hands constantly moving to keep the plane balanced on the blanket of air passing under its wings. Behind him he could hear Shirley talking with Carmen and Thomas. While the speedsend message was clattering over the link between Jack and Jill through Walter, carrying a complete description of the alien play and Jill's interpretation of it, Shirley talked directly with Thomas.
"At the next high tide, there is going to be the first of a number of transfers of the ocean from Eau to Roche," she said.
"That bad?" said Thomas. "We saw the tidal bore turn into a geyser at the last change of tides, but that one just blew a little spray into the zero-gee region. We never realized that it would go that far."
"What tidal bore?!?" asked Shirley.
"This one," said Thomas. For a second Shirley watched his face glancing down at the console screen in front of him, and then his face was replaced with a speeded-up time-lapse picture of a large ring wave starting at the base of the water mountain just after low tide and rising rapidly up the conical mountain of ocean as a single high-speed wave with a steep front.
"It covers six hundred kilometers in the hour and a half between low and high tide," said Thomas, and it gets bigger and meaner as it's compressed into the smaller and smaller area around the peak. You'd better dive under again before it gets you."
"We can't," said George. "Dragonfly was never meant to be a submarine. Unless we have some rocks or heavy aliens for ballast, we always have positive buoyancy. We'll have to think of something else." His words sounded strained as the effort to maintain the delicate balance of lift, speed, and drag on the face of the moving wave began to take its toll.
"We're moving pretty fast," said Shirley. "Can we turn on the nuclear jet and take off?"
"I'm aqua-planing and the tail is dragging the surface," George said. "If I open the air scoops, all they'd scoop up would be water and the nuclear jet can't handle that."
"How about the monopropellant?" said Shirley. "I know it's meant for space use, but it could at least get us airborne enough so that we could switch to the nuclear jet."
"I'm afraid not," said George. "Don't forget that the exhaust port is underwater. If I introduced the monopropellant into the chamber it would be like trying to fire a shotgun plugged with dirt. We'd blow the tail off."
"There must be some way," said Shirley. "How about having Jill divert some of the crew air supply through the jet in place of the monopropellant. That would give us enough boost to get airborne, then we could open the scoops and turn on the nuclear jet. I'll get Jill to figure out whether it will work."
"Such diversion of crew air supply is not allowed," said Jill in a severe tone. "Calculations will not be done on disallowed options."
Shirley didn't argue, but turned to her console and spoke as she typed in a code word.
"SEM-1, this is Chief Engineer Shirley Everett. Suggested diversion of crew air supply is essential to save crew from certain death by tidal wave. Obtain authorization to consider diversion from Flight Commander and Mission Commander, then proceed with analysis."
In a few seconds Shirley heard Jill again through her imp. "I still object to the diversion, but my objections have been neutralized. The analysis shows that your plan is feasible, although it will take the Christmas Branch fifteen minutes to rearrange the plumbing in the tank section. The amount of stored gas available is still not enough to lift the plane from the water by itself. We will need more air speed and a down-hill run."
"I can get that," said George. "On the face of a wave—the bore wave. If it's big enough and we time things just right, we can be airborne before we get trapped by the curl at the top." As he talked, he adjusted the pitch of the nose and the plane lifted a little and climbed up to the top of the wave.
"The wind is dying down and this wave is going to peter out soon anyway," he said. "Might as well get off here and get ready for the big one." He dipped, then rose, and the wave slipped out from under them and the Dragonfly settled into the trough behind. The short day was almost over and Barnard was setting in back of them over Eau. They watched the sunset through the long distance lens of the scanner video, and as they watched, a frothy wave grew on the horizon and swallowed up the sun.
"We're going to have to do this in darkness," said George to Shirley. "I want you to get me an infrared and low light level video picture of this region from the commsat, then go back and check out the crew." He turned to Arielle.
"Get your suit on, Arielle, then come back and relieve me. If the wave gets us, Dragonfly is going to get broken up. Not that the suits will keep us alive much longer," he said with a grim face as she made her way back through the heaving corridor.
"Richard, Katrina, David!" said George. "Suit up! Then David and Richard come forward and take up your console stations. Katrina, as soon as you have your suit on, you'd better get back in your bunk and strap in."
"I still have some chemical analyses to do on the water samples that we took on the way up," said Katrina. "I'll fasten my safety lines to the Christmas Branch's work wall. It is essential that the data be transmitted back to Prometheus before the wave hits."
George shrugged. It really didn't matter where she was. There was no "safe" place anywhere on the plane. She was probably right to keep on working too. It sure kept you from brooding about the dangers ahead. He took the advice, and clearing his screen, pulled in the infrared image from the commsat overhead. Dragonfly was a tiny hot cross in the middle of a blue ocean. He zoomed the picture back until Dragonfly was a tiny white dot, then he saw the warm yellow whitecaps at the peak of the bore speeding toward them, leaving a roiling blotchy sea of warm and cold patches behind it.
"How much time do we have?" he asked Jill.
"Twenty minutes," said Jill.
Arielle was standing at his shoulder, her pert face and curly hair distorted by the fishbowl helmet on her head.
"Your turn," she said, climbing into the pilot seat and copying his display.
"Not much to do except wait," said George. "See you soon." He made his way to the back where Shirley was waiting for him, holding his suit open for him to step in.
"How is the tank switchover going?" he asked.
"It was completed five minutes ago," she replied. "Fortunately we had never used the monopropellant line so it didn't need to be purged. Here, let me get that zipper while you get your helmet on."
Fifteen minutes later everyone was suited up and at their stations. "I've got it on the scanner camera," said Shirley. David picked up her display on his console and watched the stars disappear one by one as the horizon in back of them rose up into the air. "It's a kilometer high!" he said.
"It is one point seven kilometers high and growing," said Jill. "It will be over two kilometers tall by the time it reaches us."
"The bigger, the better," said George, increasing the speed of the fans into their danger region once again as Dragonfly swam away from the approaching wave. "There is no way we can build up enough speed to surf this one, but if it's tall enough, we can get airborne and away before the whitecaps at the top slap us down."
The view from the back through the scanner camera became blacker and blacker as the wave rose up to cover the sky. The crew felt the plane tip forward and rise upward like they had hit an updraft. The horizon in front of them dipped, and the landing lights peered downward at the falling ocean surface. They were a half-kilometer up in the air.
"Now!" said George as he manipulated the controls that normally controlled the thrust level of the monopropellant rocket system. The plug of water was blasted from the jet exhaust by a burst of air, and Dragonfly leaped forward. The sea was briefly illuminated with a brilliant yellow-white blowtorch flame from behind as the oxygen combined with the ammonia and methane in the atmosphere.
"Wow!" said George. "I forgot about that effect." He turned to Arielle. "We're in the air."
"I've got her, George," she said. She dove down the surface of the wave until they had sufficient airspeed, then opened the atmosphere scoops and pushed forward on the throttle for the nuclear jet. There was a pale glow from the rear as the heated atmosphere rushed from the exhaust and the plane started to fly away from the face of the towering wall of water. A cheer arose inside the plane, echoed by cheers from the lander, then a noticeable fraction of a second later, cheers could be heard from the remainder of the crew on Prometheus.
"We're airborne, Rocheworld Base. We'll meet you at L-4 where we can watch the show, then transfer for the trip out to Prometheus."
Suddenly there was an yellow-orange glare from behind and the ominous thuds of control rods being jammed into a reactor core at emergency speeds. The thrust stopped.
"Reactor overheated," reported Jill. "We have a major leak in our liquid sodium heat exchanger loop."
"It was corrosion from the ocean water," said Shirley. "I was afraid of that, but there was nothing we could do."
"Switch to monopropellant!" hollered George, beginning to panic. "We've got to get altitude!"
"The monopropellant tanks are no longer connected to the jet," reminded Jill.
"Fire the air jet again, then... Do something!"
"I will glide," said a quiet voice, and the silent cabin tilted as the tiny pilot traded altitude for speed and came into equilibrium with the wave above and behind them, gliding on the pocket of air pushed in front of the wall of water.
Using her glider experience, Arielle slid back and forth on the air in front of the bore, gaining a little altitude each cycle. The crest of the wave was still far above them, growing taller as they approached the inner pole. Arielle called up a commsat low-light-level video image of the ring wave converging to a central point. On one side of the ring was the dot of Dragonfly, its landing lights making it visible from space. For a long time Arielle stared at the screen, judging the motion of the aerospace plane and the converging ring-shaped bore wave moving up the water mountain to the peak, and trying to visualize the invisible ring of trapped air just inside the water ring. Suddenly she dipped the nose of the silently gliding airplane, and trading altitude for speed, streaked down the surface of the wave and out across the flat ocean, putting the wave temporarily behind.
"Just like the cliffs at La Jolla," she said as she streaked straight at the opposite wall of the twenty kilometer high ring wave. Now, trading kinetic energy for altitude, she zoomed almost straight upward. Rolling out, she picked up the top of the air geyser that was starting at the center of the ring. They were thrown upward and Arielle fought her way out from the turbulent center to the strong outside winds.
George stared at his screen in fascination at the converging ring of white water as seen from the commsat. The ring turned into a foaming circle.
"The water geyser has started," said Shirley. "You'd better get us to one side. It has a lot more energy and inertia and is going to blast its way up here at high speed."
Arielle nodded and pulled out and upward.
"We're only ten kilometers from the zero-gee point," said David, watching a trajectory plot on his console screen.
Arielle allowed herself a little smile.
"We make that easy," she said. "Then she is all downhill to Rocheworld Base. How many do we have to go?"
"Fifteen hundred kilometers," said David. Arielle was silent for a minute.
"Well, I have forty kilometers altitude, too bad my Dragonfly is not a real glider. I could make that easy. Well, we shall see." They all hung loosely in their seats as Dragonfly shot through the zero gravity neck and started downward for Roche.
"Look ahead," said Arielle, pointing to a thin line of red light on the dark globe ahead of them. "We have come out on the other side. It is dawning at Rocheworld Base."
"Here comes the geyser," said Shirley, who was watching toward their rear through the scanner instruments.
George copied her screen. It was too bad that the sunlight wouldn't reach into the inner poles for another hour. If it was this impressive on the infrared scanner, it would have been spectacular on video.
"How thick would you say it is?" he asked.
"About ten kilometers," said Shirley. "The column is starting to break partway up."
George watched as the top portion of the geyser pushed its way through the narrow gravitational neck between the two planets, then started its slow fall toward the rocky lobe below. In the infrared scanner, every one of the volcanic craters below the falling, frothy blob had a bright red pseudocolor, while the pseudowhite ones could be correlated with the view out the cockpit window of the patches of dull red dotting the black peak of Roche ahead. On the Eau side of the blob, the geyser column thinned out as the base fell back under its gravitational pull, while the top portion continued to coast through the zero-gravity region.
"That's the first one," said George. "Get me Rocheworld Base, Shirley." Soon Red's concerned face was on his screen.
"The first batch of water has transferred over and is heading for the surface. We've still got fifteen hundred kilometers to go and no propulsion power. The only thing that's keeping us up is Arielle. You'd better leave without us. We'll try to crash land on a high ridge when we run out of altitude, and if the next two transfers don't get us, you can come back again and pick us up."
"We're not leaving until we're in real danger," said Red determinedly. "How big is the water ball?"
"I would guess about ten kilometers in diameter," said George. "How about it Jill? Will it get to them?"
"The amount of water transferred is sufficient to cover Roche to five centimeters deep."
"Hah!" said Red. "Just barely enough to get our feet wet."
"But you're in lowland country," said George, looking at the sunline moving rapidly across the surface of the rocky globe. "And right in line of one of those channels leading from the inner pole. It sure is obvious now what eroded those channels."
"What's the chances that this first flow will get to Rocheworld Base, Jill?" he asked.
"Unknown," said Jill. "It depends on how much is absorbed as it flows."
"You just keep coming, said Red. "We'll stay here until we see the whites of their tides."
"The leading edge of the drop is hitting the surface," said Shirley. George switched his screen to her infrared scanner view. For a few seconds all he could see was a cold blue column seen from above, partially blocking a dull-red warm conical mountain with yellow and white hot spots. Then at the base of the column there exploded a boiling cloud of yellow as the icy water poured down on the red-hot lava of the erupting volcanoes and turned into steam. For twenty minutes the torrent continued to fall, and soon the base of the waterfall was hidden in an expanding cloud of steam. From the bottom of the cloud streaked rivers of water streaming down the channels, riding a layer of steam over the tops of the tongues of lava that had preceded them. Fingers of steam rose into the air, twirled by the strong coriolis forces near the center of the rapidly spinning double planet system. Large, lazy tornadoes were spawned, and moved ahead of them across the sunlit planet.
"Just what I need," said Arielle, putting Dragonfly into a dive that was aimed at the base of the nearest tornado.
"What are you doing!" shouted George in alarm. Yet he knew better than to try to stop her.
"We still have thousand kilometers to go and I need altitude," said Arielle. She turned to grin at him, knowing full well what was bothering him. "You western types are used to tight, nasty one-gee twisters that can rip apart airplanes," she said. "Just look at throat on that one, George. It over kilometer in diameter. Just pretend it's a thermal—with clouds in it."
George did relax a little at that image as Arielle dove the plane at the ground. Timing her approach carefully, she swooped in under the funnel at high speed as it lifted a few hundred meters from the surface. She slammed Dragonfly into a tight bank and started spiraling up.
"Are you sure you've never flown fighters?" asked George as the gee load pinned him to his seat.
It may have been a lazy tornado, but it was still more tornado than thermal. The first few turns were through rough air that had Dragonfly creaking. Something broke loose in the rear of the plane and banged around until the Christmas Branch corralled it. It was dark grey inside the funnel, but they had plenty of light from the almost continuous flashes of lightning. Dragonfly was struck twice on the wing and had Shirley and Jill frantically reconfiguring circuits to work around burned out cables. As they spiraled upward, the radius of the funnel widened and the turbulence dropped. They clattered through a small cloud of blue hailstones, then flew out the top just in time to witness the sun setting behind Roche. Arielle set the plane on a long shallow glide angle and reached up to take off her helmet.
"We have still a thousand kilometers to go, but now we have some altitude. It is not enough though." She turned to look at Shirley. "Could I please have monopropellant tank reconnected?"
"Jill and I did that long ago," said Shirley. "But it isn't going to do us much good. It'll only give us fifteen minutes of thrust."
"That's enough to get us up out of here to L-4!" said George.
"If that were true I'd have reminded you long ago," said Shirley. "Unfortunately we no longer have the nuclear reactor to augment the monopropellant exhaust velocity. By itself the monopropellant isn't strong enough to put us in orbit, even in this low-gee planet."
"But it can give me altitude," said Arielle. "And altitude means distance."
Arielle turned to George. "Keep glide angle shallow and let me know when we at one kilometer altitude. I'm going to get something to eat and take a nap." She hopped down from the flight deck and made her way back to the galley, where a still open-mouthed George heard her order a huge meal from the galley imp. He shook his head and turned back to his console. There was no way he could get himself to sleep at this point. He looked at the control settings, started to reach for them, then slapped the back of one hand with the other.
"No need to fiddle with them, George," he muttered to himself inside his helmet. "The lady's setting is perfect." To pass the time he watched the second of the interplanetary waterfalls as seen from Clete and Walter at L-4 and L-5, and discussed them with Shirley and Red.
"This one looks smaller," said George. "Of course I was closer to the last one."
"It is smaller," said Red.
"How come?" said George. "We're closer to periapsis and the tides should be stronger."
"Thomas has been modeling the details of the system, including simulating the ocean with a collection of tiny mass points. There is some complicated interaction of the orbital dynamics with the rotary dynamics and the tidal dynamics that makes the periapsis high tide slightly smaller than the high tides just before and just after periapsis."
"Don't forget the atmosphere," said Shirley. "At periapsis Barnard is heating Roche and Eau is in shadow, so the atmospheric winds are blowing down the mountain. At the high tides on either side, Barnard is heating Eau, boiling off the ammonia and adding wind waves to the tidal bore."
"There doesn't seem to be as much steam this time either," said George as they watched the blob of water fall on the volcanos and drown them in a torrent of icy liquid. The sun was rising on the other side of Roche and although both airplane and lander were in darkness, Clete gave them a sunside view of the forming of the north and south polar vertical tornadoes, made visible by the steam boiling up from the point of Roche.
"Wow! Look at that!" said Red as a silvery lounge sprang out from the shadows of the inner pole and moved rapidly across the sandy valleys of Roche.
"That's why I think you'd better get ready to leave," said George. "The volcanos are drowned and no longer boiling away the water. With the head and the velocity that the blob builds up dropping the forty kilometers from the zero-gee region, you get air entrapment, just like an avalanche. Those fronts must be moving at five hundred kilometers an hour."
"I've got an infrared image of the flow below us," said Shirley.
"Let's see it," said George, and his screen flickered to show the dull red warm rock beneath them. Streaking out in fingers from the grooves worn in the rocky point of Roche were blue cold streams of high speed menace.
"Doesn't look good," said George. "Are you ready to go?"
"Yes," said Red. "But we've voted to stay."
George started to argue with her, then lapsed into silence as one by one the fingers of speeding cold water seemed to stumble and break into a warm yellow froth as the trapped air layer failed and dumped the tons of high speed water into the salty sands, where it spread into a more slowly moving flood.
"See, George," said Red. "No problem."
"That one got within one hundred kilometers of you," said George. "You leave when the next one hits. That's an order!"
"You just get here before it does," said Red. She paused. "That's an order."
"Yes ma'am!" he replied.
"We're at three kilometers altitude," reminded Jill.
"Wake Arielle up," he said. "We need altitude."
Ten minutes later Arielle strolled down the corridor, dressed in a freshly pressed tailored jumpsuit and nibbling on a large chunk of pseudo-cheese. She paused at Shirley's console.
"We are ready with a maximum altitude program?" she asked pleasantly.
"It will use all but ten percent of the monopropellant, but I can give you twenty five kilometers," replied Shirley. Arielle wrinkled her nose, then had a short conversation with her imp.
"I take all one hundred percent," she said.
"Don't you need some in case there is a problem with the landing approach and you have to go around? Don't forget you don't have the VTOL fans."
"Don't forget," smiled Arielle. "There is no such thing as a go-round in a shuttle landing." She tossed her head back to get the curls out of her eyes, climbed up to the pilot seat on the flight deck, and strapped herself in.
"We are ready?" she asked. Then after a pause she dove the airplane at the invisible surface below.
"I do wish you had your radar, Jill," she said as she watched the blurred infrared image grow in her screen.
"Aren't we getting a little close?" said Jill.
"The monopropellant gives better thrust when used with high density air," said Arielle confidently.
When the infrared image stopped looking blurred, Arielle pulled Dragonfly out of its dive, opened the atmosphere scoops slightly and shoved the throttle all the way forward and held onto it as she turned the long-winged airplane into a vertical rocket. Only when the roaring at the rear of the plane had subsided into some empty coughs did the little hand pull the throttle back to its initial position. No other motion was made as the plane coasted upwards on its inertia, the crew floating lightly in their harnesses after the high gee climb. At the very top of the climb, Arielle switched to the space attitude control system and with the last bursts of monopropellant left in the lines to the nose jets, she tilted the plane forward and again started the long glide toward Rocheworld Base.
"Five hundred kilometers to go," she said. "How much time do we have?"
"The next waterfall comes in ten minutes," said David. "But it takes twenty-five minutes to fall, and then the flood has to travel from the inner pole to Rocheworld Base. It depends upon how fast the water travels and that depends upon how long it stays in the air-entrapment state. It could be two hours, it could be four, it could be that it never even gets there and we have all the time in the world."
"I think I go faster," said Arielle, tilting the nose of the plane slightly. She then put her console into compute mode and long fingernails tapped on the screen as she and Jill optimized a curved trajectory that would put then at Rocheworld Base at zero altitude in minimum time.
"This is going to be a big one," said Shirley, watching the ring bore build up on Eau through the infrared imager on the commsats. Richard was sitting next to her on the science console. His screen had two pictures. One just like Shirley's and the other taken at a similar time in the first of the tidal transfers.
"There must be a partial resonance in the ocean basins of Eau," said Richard. "This one is bigger than the first one that had the wind helping it."
The entire crew except Arielle watched in fascination as the ring wave contracted and generated a thick climbing column of water. They watched in frozen fascination as the deadly menace rose like the head of a cobra from its coiled base. The underportions of the column thinned while the top portion that had enough momentum to overcome the weakening gravity continued upward and squeezed its bulk through the zero-gravity neck, compressed to a ten kilometer wide throat by the strong gravity gradients pressing inward around the zero-gravity point. The blob grew into an ellipsoidal ball on the other side and started to stretch as the lower portions were pulled along faster than the upper regions. Richard's screen had an overlay that Jill had traced out around the infrared image of the elongating ball.
"It's thirty kilometers long by twenty in diameter," said Richard. "That's enough to cover Roche a half-meter deep in water."
"And the volcanos aren't going to be much help in evaporating this one," said George.
As the ball fell, it pushed air ahead of it and flattened out on the bottom. When it reached the surface, the trapped air built up in pressure and squeezed out at high speeds from the edges, only to find itself trapped by an enlarging blob of water that moved rapidly over the nearly frictionless air, trading its gravitational head and inertia for speed.
"The bottom is moving like an express train, and the top is still falling!" said George.
"It's faster than an express train," said Richard. He generated a new "tagger" from the menu at the side of the screen and moved it with his finger to the front of one of the racing tongues of water. The green cross "tag" stuck at the change of illumination between the blue cold water and the disappearing warm red rocks of Roche. Richard's finger went back to the menu and picked out the second parameter—VELOCITY.
580 KM/HR was Jill's reply on the screen.
"It'll be at Rocheworld Base in less than three hours," said Richard. "Are we going to make it in time, Arielle?"
"We also arrive in less than three hours," she replied calmly, her eyes on the ground speed indicator. She pulled back slightly on the controls to take advantage of the slight tail wind in the level they were presently passing through. She would later use the altitude she had saved to gain more speed."
"Can you get us a more accurate time prediction, Richard?" asked George.
"I'll work on it," said Richard. A flick of his finger at the parameter—ACCELERATION produced a positive number. He flinched, then read—POSITION. He set up another tag at the position of Rocheworld Base then read the separation.
"It's at thirteen hundred kilometers from the base and still accelerating," said Richard. "The top of the drop is just feeling the back-pressure of the ground below and the pressure head wave is still pushing out around the boundary. I'll have to wait until the acceleration stops before I can predict an accurate arrival time, but it looks like two hours and fifteen minutes."
George glanced at Arielle. She was moving very slowly and deliberately, with only the rapid moving of her eyes giving any indication of the whirling thought processes going on under the curly hair. She was in her "test pilot in trouble" trance. A silence fell over the ship as everyone waited for her to speak.
"I would like rest of air, please. At any point below two kilometers altitude would be useful." She dropped out of her trance and turned away to tend to her flying.
"Everyone back in their suits," George said. "And give Shirley one of your suit tanks. One tank will last more than two hours and that's more time than that bore will give us."
"Reconfigure the plumbing again, Jill," said Shirley to her imp. "I'll get the tanks hooked up to the supply lines and you drain them as fast as you can." She swung from the console seat and walked down the corridor in the twelve percent gravity. At least they would have some solid footing for their dash to the lander.
Richard was soon suited up and back at his console, his bloated silver fingers pulling information off the image on the screen. The bore was now out in the sunlight. From a distance it looked like a river of quicksilver in the lined palm of an old Indian soothsayer.
"The pressure head is decreasing, but the velocity is six hundred ten kilometers an hour, three times faster than we're flying. Estimated time of arrival at Rocheworld Base is one hour and twenty-four minutes."
George looked quickly over at Arielle, looking for the trance. There was a pause as the colloid computer integrated a lifetime of experience in the air with the present situation and the new numbers.
"I think I have some bite to eat before I suit up," she said, hopping down from the flight deck. "I'm hungry. You keep watch on my Dragonfly for me, George?"
George grinned through his visor and checked over his control panels. For some reason his shoulders felt like they were moving to a region of lower gravity.
"Don't dawdle," he said in a pseudo-gruff voice. "Shirley wants to have Jill suck up the last of the cabin air after we're all in our suits." Arielle strolled down the corridor in her trim jumpsuit, weaving her way around the armored forms of Richard, David, and Katrina. She stopped at the galley for a slab of pseudochicken, then ignoring a patient Shirley holding up her open suit at the end of the corridor, she disappeared into the head.
Ten minutes later a refreshed Arielle with a newly remade face exited the bathroom, where she was met by an exasperated Shirley who unceremoniously stuffed her into her suit. As soon as the last seal was closed, the suit started to balloon as Jill pumped out the air in the cabin and added it to the tanks.
"Two kilometers altitude, Arielle!" hollered George through his suit imp.
"And the bore is at five hundred kilometers and still levitated," said Richard.
Arielle made her way carefully back up the corridor and climbed into the pilot seat. She checked the display carefully, her hands still folded in her lap. Satisfied, she raised her hands and nodded at George, he nodded back and she took control again with the flick of a few switches.
"I'd like a status report, Richard."
"Bore distance from Base is four hundred sixty kilometers, velocity five hundred fifty kilometers per hour, arrival time forty-eight minutes."
"Jill, we arrive in forty minutes?"
"Forty-one," replied Jill.
"Too close," said Arielle. "I use air." She pushed forward on the controls and dove Dragonfly at the ground. As she pulled up she triggered the valve and the last of the air supply shot out of the jet in a blue-yellow flame. Arielle stopped the climb and pushed Dragonfly into a fast glide at a still invisible target eighty kilometers away.
"Jill?" she asked.
"Twenty-four minutes."
"Richard?"
"Thirty-four minutes."
Arielle made one tiny adjustment to the controls, tightened her seat belt and shoulder harness, then put her hands into her lap. She turned to look at George out of her helmet.
"We have hard landing," she reminded him.
"And just ten minutes to get the six of us up the side of the lander," George said as he tightened his seat belt and held a conversation with Shirley.
"You four get into the lock and cycle it, but don't open the outer door until we've stopped moving. Put your backs to the front wall and take some bedding to protect your helmets. Jinjur will never forgive us if we add anyone to her butcher bill."
"Are you and Arielle going to have time to cycle through? We could cram in six."
"You forget someone has to land this thing, and I'm not leaving Arielle up here all alone." The minute we stop I'm blowing the front canopy and Arielle and I will go out over the nose. Carmen! Are you monitoring?"
"Yes," came the reply from Rocheworld Base.
"Is the winch down?"
"Yes," came Red's voice over the intercom. "Ready and waiting. Hurry up!"
"I see the bore on the scanner video, it's gaining on us," said Richard.
"Give us a last reading on time difference, then get in that air lock!" said George.
"Eleven minutes," interrupted Jill. "Get into the airlock, Richard," she bossed. Richard obeyed and trotted to the rear of the plane and the lock door closed behind him. George and Arielle were left with the hiss of air passing over the silent airplane and the distant throb of air-lock pumps going through their motions on almost non-existent air. George could now see the lander, sticking up into the air, its dark outline standing to just one side of the setting globe of Barnard.
"Bad luck," complained George. "We're flying right into the sun.
"No! It's good!" said Arielle. "I can now see rocks easy because of their big shadow." She banked the plane slightly to pick a path that was relatively clear of boulders and gave up the last of her altitude for speed.
"BRACE YOURSELF!" screamed Jill to everyone but Arielle through their suit imps. Arielle pulled the plane up into a stall.
"Flaps!" she commanded, both her hands busy, one with the airplane controls and the other operating the fans at full reverse thrust. George pushed at the flap controls but found that they were already moving.
"Flaps, down," he and Jill said at the same time. The plane started to drop heavily to the surface, but Arielle dipped it just enough to bring it under control again, the forward speed almost gone, and slid the plane through the sand directly at the lander.
We're going to hit! thought George, his voice too tight to speak.
Arielle wrenched the rudder around at the same time as she twisted the fan controls. The Magic Dragonfly went into a broadside slide and came to a stop with its nose on one side of the lander and the left wing on the other, not ten meters from the legs of the lander.
"I made ringer, George!" shouted Arielle with delight.
"BLOW THE HATCH!" came a sharp command in George's ear. His thumb flipped the safety latch, but a waiting imp beat his gloved finger to the switch. There was a loud BANG! and the cockpit windows flew into the air. The ammonia-methane atmosphere rushed into the plane and there was a dull THUMP! as the inflowing gasses burned with the residual air in the plane. George clambered out on the nose and jumped to the surface, then turned to catch Arielle. Together they hurried toward the distant lander. Jill, her voice turned into that of a martinet, drove them with verbal whiplashes. Over the voice George could hear some leakage from the high speed data link between Jack and Jill.
SHIRLEY, RICHARD, KATRINA, DAVID—TO THE WINCH.
GEORGE, ARIELLE—UP THE LADDER.
RED, START THE WINCH AND GET THEM UP AND IN!
MOVE IT GEORGE!
ARIELLE IS WAY AHEAD OF YOU!
MOVE IT, YOU FAT OLD MAN!"
George found another source of adrenaline in his anger and he sprinted harder for the ladder. Arielle ran lightly up the rungs on the landing legs without using her hands, then when she reached the main body of the lander, crouched and leaped up the side of the rocket in the low gravity, then continued on, hand-over-hand, her legs dangling. George knew he couldn't do that, and scrambled after her. He got up the landing leg and paused to look up at Arielle.
NO SIGHTSEEING! MOVE IT! MOVE IT!!! MOVE IT!!!
Jill's voice took on a harsh tone that sent George back to his first week in ROTC summer camp under the tender ministrations of a drill instructor. Fear and hatred drove him up the ladder. He could see the wall of water coming over the horizon to his left, its foaming top colored blood-red in the setting sunlight. The water was swallowing the kilometers long shadow of the lander as George clambered into the airlock filled with Red and the five others.
"I've got the winch stored," said Red. "Shut the outer door."
George was nearest the door and started to close it. He stopped. With him in the lock, there was no room for the door to close, and no time left to cycle the lock. He stepped back out onto the top rung of the ladder, holding himself steady with his left hand on the vertical handhold next to the door.
"George!!!" shouted Red, as George started to pull the door shut with his right hand. "Nooooo..." she wailed as he pushed the door lever over and locked himself outside.
"Take off, Thomas!!! That's an order!" said George through his imp.
The ten-meter-high wall of water hit the base of the rocket and it started to tip.
"Got to go!" said Thomas.
The atmosphere around George was ablaze with flame as the ascent module lifted from the toppling rocket and boosted into the sky. George's feet slipped from the rung and he was left hanging by the inadequate grasp of his sausage-fingered gloves. As the acceleration built up he found his left hand slipping from the vertical handhold. He grabbed for the horizontal ladder rung and got it, but that cost him his right handhold on the door lever. Dangling by one hand from the bottom of the accelerating spacecraft, he was blinded, deafened, and burned by the exhaust from the powerful rocket engine. He felt the suit cooling shift to maximum power to prevent his legs from frying in the intense heat. He tried to get his right hand up to the ladder rung, but couldn't do it. They hit max-Q and the supersonic blast was finally too much. His fingers slipped off the rung and he fell through the flaming exhaust toward the distant ground below. He was still moving upward, coasting on the momentum of the rocket that had left him behind. He came to the peak of his trajectory and started to fall.
Time seemed to stop. George found that he had automatically assumed the spread-eagle position he'd learned when skydiving, only this time he didn't have a parachute. He felt a faint twinge of regret. Regret that he would never again see Jinjur and Red and the others again. George felt cheated. There was so much more he wanted to do on this world. Then there were all the moons of Gargantua to explore. Well... he had made it to Barnard alive and had fun exploring at least one world.
We all have to go sometime, he said to himself. Might as well get this over with. He pulled in his arms from the spread-eagle position and dove headfirst for the ground.
"NO! GEORGE! NO!" screamed Red's voice over his suit imp.
George rapidly resumed the spread-eagle position and looked around. The ascent module had turned, rocketed back down, and was now rising up to meet him! As it came closer he could see a grinning brown face peering up at him through triangular windows. The entry port at the top of the spacecraft was open. Reaching up from the lock was a slender, space-suited figure. She had a long lanyard, but it wasn't needed. Thomas swooped the rocket up underneath George and scooped him right into Red's arms.
"I always was the best one on the block at the ball-and-cup game," Thomas bragged.
George felt the acceleration increase as Red dragged him into the lock and the air cycle started.
"I nearly lost you!" said Red as she took off his helmet. Tears were streaming down her face and into her suit. George started to cry too. He put his arms around her and tried to give her a comforting hug, but the suits got in the way. When Sam got the inner door open he found them nuzzling each other's faces, both wet with tears.
With his suit off and holding Red by the hand, George joined the rest of the crew in the view lounge as they floated at L-4, waiting for Prometheus to arrive. Arielle was at the telescope, tracking the fractured cross of duralloy that used to be the Magic Dragonfly as it was being borne off by the waves, the wing tips crumbling as they were dashed against boulders and tumbling rocks.
"Goodby, Jill," she cried, her voice breaking.
"Arielle, dear," said Jill's voice through her imp. "I'm still here. You must remember that these voices we computers use are just to aid you in identifying which computer is talking to you."
As it spoke, the voice changed slowly from the overtones of Jill to the overtones of Jack. It then switched to that of James, who in his most butlerish voice continued to drive in the lesson as its voice changed to that of a tinny robot. "It is very important that you realize that we are noth-ing but ro-bots."
"You right," agreed Arielle. "I am silly to cry over computers." Then she burst into tears again.
"What's the matter now, Arielle?" said George.
"My Dragonfly was such a pretty plane, and now she is all broke!"
"We've got three more dragonflys for you," said George reassuringly. "And you have all the rest of your life to fly in them."
"Here comes Prometheus to pick us up," said Sam, peering out the side of the viewport window.
"C'mon, Red," said Thomas. "Time to fly this ship back to its dock."