Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
on the modules. A handful of members who worked the off-shift slept in their quarters; a few used the recreational and exercise facilities.
Rachel Dycek, already phasing out her important duties, attended the communications center, staring at weathersat images and waiting for the radiophone to beep. Phasing out.
Useless. Unnecessary. You can’t teach an old commissioner new tricks. When a person’s work is over, what does she do? Rachel recalled old pensioners who had looked forward for decades to their retirement from the work force—and had then turned into pathetic wretches in rocking chairs, without the slightest idea of what to do now that they had no purpose in life.
Rachel looked around the empty module and saw nothing that interested her. She shuffled off to her quarters, refusing to glance out any of the windowports along the way. She was being too hard on herself, but she had no one to talk her out of her gloom, to pat her on the back, to cheer her up. Events had left her at a loss. All her life she had forged ahead with a drive, soaring toward orbit … but now the rockets had cut out and left her in free-fall, disoriented, with nothing to anchor her.
What was she to do now?
She would return to an alien home as a well-respected scientist and administrator. The public would give her false laurels. She would fill her days with celebrity banquets, lecture tours, writing memoirs, granting interviews. Charities would want her to endorse causes; corporations would want her to endorse products. Her face would appear on posters. Children would write letters to her. Talk shows would use her as a guest when movie stars and professional athletes canceled unexpectedly.
Tell us, Dr. Dycek, why do you think your projects were such dead ends?
The clipping on the wall of her quarters brought back the pointed reminders of what life could be like on Earth, how she would be treated.
“FRANKENSTEIN” DOCTOR EXONERATED OF CHARGES BY UN PANEL
Perhaps she would be better off exiled to Siberia, to live quietly in a place where others could not find her or bother her. She could probably request that.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Human memory retained the details of failure long after every success had been forgotten. Her accomplishments would be swept under the rug, the sweet triumphs relegated to footnotes in history books, until one day Rachel would just lie down, slit her wrists, and watch the bathwater turn as red as the sands of Mars. …
SECOND PHASE TO CONTINUE
With a burst of defiance that exhilarated her, she yanked the clipping from her wall. The protective polymer coating stopped her from ripping it to shreds, but she crumpled it as best she could and tossed it to the floor. A childish gesture, but it felt good for a moment. Only a moment.
This useless bemoaning of her circumstances was pathetic, she realized, but she could not stop it.
Rachel glanced around her quarters. Should she bother packing? The night before, after her discussion with Keefer, she had taken out some of her possessions and scattered them around the room, but left them in disarray.
She felt worse after sitting in her quarters, and she left them, wandering from one pressure door to the next, like a grandmother checking her family after everyone had gone to bed. But Rachel had never considered the Lowell Base personnel her family. The dvas were her children, and they were cut off from her by a barrier of air pressure and freezing cold.
She passed the rec room, hearing sounds of people attempting low-gravity Ping-Pong, laughing and trading good-natured insults. Someone else played an electronic game.
She kept walking. Her vision was focused into a narrow tunnel, muffled, with gray around the edges. Without realizing it, Rachel found herself back in the communications center. She slumped back in her chair and sighed. The air was cold enough that she could see a faint white wisp of her breath.
On a panel, she found an insistent red light flashing—an emergency circuit. She sat up quickly, her years of training and experience shunting the lethargy aside. She had no way of telling how long it had been activated; with her lack of attention earlier, it could have been on for hours. She muttered an insult to herself and squinted down at the indicator.
The signal came from one of the dva pumping stations. She ran the coordinates over in her mind, pinpointing its location. The dvas checked in regularly, but they rarely had anything to report. Something must have happened to them.
She touched the icon on the screen, linking up to their transmitter. “Yes? I receive you. What is the problem? Report!” With her other hand she punched up current status numbers for the pumping station and saw the severity of their problem. Water pressure had dropped disastrously in one of the pipelines, and the other had been shut off completely.
“Dva station, please respond! What has happened out there?”
She had to repeat the transmission three times before anyone answered. No picture formed on the screen, only a burst of black-and-white static. “Hello?” Rachel said again. “I am not getting an image.”
The voice that came back spoke Russian. “Emergency! Pumping station inoperable. Massive water spillage. Pipe breach. Please send help!”
“What is it? Why can’t I get a picture?” she demanded. “This is Commissioner Dycek. Please tell me.”
“Video circuits destroyed. Send investigating team.” A short pause. “Better you see for yourself.”
Rachel sat in silence, staring at the static skirling across the flat panel. She remained stony-faced. If something had happened to the dvas, she wanted to see it in person. She was the only one who cared enough to do a good job. This seemed to be more than just a few pieces of missing equipment or supply losses that had plagued the dvas
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