Footfall Read online

Huge TV screens showed pictures as they came in from the Voyager. Every few minutes a picture changed. A close view of the planet, black-and-white streamlines and whorls. Rings, hundreds of them, like a close-up of a phonograph record. Saturn again, in color, with his rings in wide angle. Sections of the rings in closeup. Shots of moons. All just as it came in, so that the press saw it as soon as the scientists.

  At the Jupiter passings the pictures had come in faster, in vivid swirls and endless storms, God making merry with an airbrush, and four moons that turned out to be worlds in their own right. But to balance that they’d soon see Titan, which was known to have an atmosphere. Sagan and the other scientists weren’t saying they hoped to find life on Titan—but they were certainly interested in the giant moon, which had so far been disappointingly featureless.

  The screens shifted, and the babble in the room fell off for a moment. A moon like a giant eyeball: one tremendous crater of the proportions of an iris, with a central peak for the pupil. Anything bigger, Nat thought, would have shattered the whole moon. He heard a female voice say, "Well, we’ve located the Death Star," and he grinned without turning around.

  What do the newspeople think of us?

  He could picture himself: the idiot grin, mouth slightly open, drifting down the line of screens without looking where he was going, tripping over cables. Nat couldn’t make himself care. A screen changed to show something like a dry riverbed or three twined plumes of smoke or . . . F-ring, the printout said. Nat said, "What the hell . . ."

  "You’d know if you’d been here last night."

  "I’ve got to get some sleep." Nat didn’t need to look around. He’d written two books with Wade Curtis; he expected to recognize that voice in Hell, when they planned their escape. Wade Curtis talked like he had an amplifier in his throat, turned high. Partly that was his military training, partly the deafness he’d earned as an artillery officer.

  He also had a tendency to lecture. "F-ring," he said. "You know, like A, B, C, rings, only they’re named in order of discovery, not distance from the planet, so the system’s all screwed up. The F-ring is the one just outside the big body of rings. It’s thin. Nobody ever saw it until the space probes went out there, and Pioneer didn’t get much of a picture even then."

  Nat held up his hand. I know, I know, the gesture said. Curtis shrugged and was quiet.

  But the F-ring didn’t look normal at all. It showed as three knotted streamers of gas or dust or God knows what all braided together. "Braided," Nat said. "What does that?"

  "None of the astronomers wanted to say."

  "Okay, I can see why. Catch me in a mistake, I shrug it off. A scientist, he’s betting his career."

  "Yeah. Well, I know of no law of physics that would permit that!"

  Nat didn’t either. He said, "What’s the matter, haven’t you ever seen three earthworms in love?" and accepted Wade’s appreciative chuckle as his due. "I’d be afraid to write about it. Someone would have it explained before I could get the story into print."

  The press conference was ready to start. The JPL camera crew unlimbered its gear to broadcast the press conference all over the laboratory grounds and one of the public relations ladies went around turning off the screens in the conference mom.

  "Hmm. Interesting stuff still coming in," Curtis said. "And there aren’t any seats. I had a couple but I gave them to the Washington Post. Front-row seats, too."

  "Too bad," Nat said. "What the hell, let’s watch the conference from the reception area. Jilly’s out there already."

  On the morning of November 12. 1980, the pressroom at Jet Propulsion Laboratories was a tangled maze of video equipment and moving elbows. Roger and Linda had come early, but not early enough to get seats. A science-fiction writer in a bush jacket gave up his, two right in the front row.

  "Sure it’s all right?" Roger asked.

  The sci-fi man shrugged. "You need ‘em more than I do. Tell Congress the space program’s important, that’s all I ask."

  Roger thanked the man and sat down. Linda Gillespie was trapped near the life-size spacecraft model, fending off still another reporter who was trying to interview her: what had it been like, marooned on Earth while her husband was aboard Skylab?

  She looked great. He hadn’t seen her since—since when? Only twice since she’d married Edmund. And of course he’d been at her wedding. Linda’s mother had cried. Damn near cried myself, Roger thought. How did I let her get out of circulation? But I wasn’t ready to marry her myself. Maybe I should have . . .

  The trouble was, he wasn’t getting any story he could understand. People were excited, but they didn’t say why. The regular science press people weren’t telling. They all knew each other, and they resented outsiders at big events like this.

  Roger doodled, looking up when anyone called a greeting, hoping nobody would want his attention. He hadn’t asked for this assignment.

  He heard, "Haven’t you ever seen three earthworms in love?" and looked. A clump of science-fiction writers stood beneath a screen that showed . . . yeah, three earthworms in love, or a bad photo of spaghetti left on a plate, or just noise. He wrote, "F ring: Three earthworms in love," and tapped Linda’s shoulder. "Linda? Save my seat?"

  "Where’re you going?"

  "Maybe I can get something from the science-fiction writers." Nobody else was trying that; it might get him a new slant. At least they’d talk English. "It looks like things are starting."

  Frank Bristow, the JPL newsroom manager, had taken his place at the podium. Roger had met him briefly when signing in. The regular press corps all seemed to know him as well as each other. Roger didn’t know anyone.

  Bristow was about to make his opening statement. The Voyager project manager and four astrophysicists were taking their seats at a raised table. Brooks sat down again. He wished he were somewhere else. Roger Brooks was approaching thirty, and he didn’t like it. There were temptations in his job: too much free food and booze. He took care to maintain the muscle tone when his lifestyle didn’t. His straight blond hair was beginning to thin, and that worried him a little, but his jaw was still square, with none of the, softening he saw in his friends. He had given up smoking three years ago, flatly, and suffered through horrid withdrawal symptoms. His teeth were white again, but the scars between the index and middle fingers of his right hand would never go away. He’d been taken drunk one night in Vietnam, and a cigarette had burned out there.

  Roger Brooks had been just old enough to cover some of the frantic last days in Vietnam, but he had been too late to get anything juicy. He had missed Watergate: his suspicions were right, but he was too junior to follow them up. Other reporters got Pulitzer prizes.

  Something had changed in him after that. It was as if there were a secret somewhere, calling to him. Little assignments couldn’t hold his interest.

  "He missed one chance to be played by Robert Redford," one of his ladies had been heard to say. "He isn’t about to miss another."

  This was a little assignment. He wondered if he should have taken it, even for the chance to get to California, even though half the Washington newsroom staff would have sold fingers and toes for the chance. But nobody was keeping secrets here. Whatever Voyager One told them, they would shout it to the world, to the Moon if they could. The trick was to understand them.

  No big story, maybe, but the trip was worth it. He glanced at Linda and thought: definitely worth it. - He twisted uncomfortably as old memories came back. They’d been so inexperienced! But they’d learned, and no sex had ever been as good as his memory of Linda that last time. Maybe he’d edited that memory. Maybe not. I’ve got to stop thinking about that! It’ll show . . . What in hell am I going to write about?

  Another group was clumped beneath the full-size model of the Voyager spacecraft. They had to be scientists, because most of them were men and they all wore suits. A couple of the sciencefiction writers stood with them, more like colleagues than press. No reporters did that. Would that make an interest
ing angle? The sci-fi people didn’t pretend to be neutral. They were enthusiasts and didn’t care who knew it, while the reporters tried to put on this smug air of impartiality.

  The briefing began. The Program Director talked about the spacecraft. Mission details, spacecraft performing well. Some data lost because it was raining in Spain where the high-gain antennae were located—was that a joke? No, nobody was laughing.

  "Three billion miles away, and they’re getting pictures," somebody said on his right. A pretty girl, long legs, slim ankles, short bobbed hair. Badge said Jeri Wilson, some geological magazine. Wedding ring, but that didn’t always mean anything. Maybe she’d be here the rest of the week. She seemed to be alone.

  The mission planning people left the podium and the scientists, Brad Smith and Ed Stone and Carl Sagan, came up to tell what they thought they were learning. Roger listened, and tried to think of an interesting question. In a situation like this, the important thing was get yourself noticed, for future reference, then try for an exclusive. He jotted useful phrases:

  "New moons are going to get dull pretty soon."

  "Not dozens of rings. Hundreds. We’re still counting." Long pause. "Some of them are eccentric."

  "What does that mean?" someone whispered.

  The sci-fi man in the khaki bush jacket answered in what he probably thought was a whisper. "The rings are supposed to be perfect circles with Saturn at the center. All the theory says they have to be. Now they’ve found some that aren’t circles, they’re ellipses."

  Other scientists spoke:

  " . . . May be the largest crater in the solar system in relation to the body it’s on . . ."

  "There isn’t any Janus. There are two moons where we thought Janus was. They share the same orbit, and they change places every time they pass. Oh, yes, we’ve known for some time those orbits were possible. It’s a textbook exam question in celestial mechanics. It’s just that we never found anything like it in the real universe."

  Brooks jotted down details on that one; it was definitely worth a mention. Janus was the moon named for the two-faced god of beginnings—

  He whispered that to Linda, and got an appreciative nod. The Wilson girl wrote something too.

  "The radial spokes in the rings seem to be caused by very tiny particles, around the size of a wavelength of light. Also the process seems to be going on above the ring, not in it."

  Radial spokes in the rings! They ought to disappear as the rings turned, because the inner rings were moving faster than the outer rings. They didn’t disappear. Weird news from everywhere in Saturn system. Some of Brooks’ colleagues would understand the explanations, when they came . . .

  Yet the press conference offered more than Brooks had expected. He had interviewed scientists before. It was the lack of answers that was interesting here.

  "We don’t know what that means."

  "We wouldn’t like to say yet."

  "The more we learn from Voyager, the less we know about rings."

  "If we fiddle with the numbers a little we can pretty well explain why Cassini’s Divide is so much bigger than it ought to be." Dramatic pause. "Of course that doesn’t explain why there are five faint rings inside it!"

  "If I’d had to make a long list of things we wouldn’t see, eccentric rings would have been the first item."

  "Brad, what about braided rings?"

  "That would have been off the top of the paper."

  Everyone up there looked happy, Brooks noted. Fun things were going on here. If Brooks didn’t have the background to appreciate them, who did?

  A newsperson asked, "Have you got any more on the radial spokes? I’d have thought that violated the laws of physics."

  David Morrison from Hawaii answered, "I’m sure the rings are doing everything right. We just don’t understand it yet." Brooks jotted it down. "Where I want to be," Roger said, "is in a motel room with you." They were walking the grounds of JPL: lawn, fountains, vaguely oriental rock gardens, a bridge, all very nice.

  "That was years ago," Linda said. "And it’s all over."

  "Sure?"

  "Yes, Roger, I’m sure. Now be good. You promised you would. Don’t make me sorry I came with you."

  "No, of course I won’t," Roger said. "It really is good to see you again. And I’m glad you’re happy with Edmund."

  Are you? Linda wondered. And am I? Of course I am. I’m very happy with Edmund. It’s when he goes off and leaves me to take care of everything and I’m alone all the time and I see these goddam romantic perfume ads and things like that that I get unhappy about Major Edmund Gillespie. I wonder if the feminists did us any favors, letting us admit we get horny just like men!

  She grinned broadly.

  "Yeah?" Roger demanded.

  "Nothing." Nothing I’d tell you. But it’s nice to see I could have some company if I wanted . . . "

  Lunch was in the JPL cafeteria. Roger and Linda were made welcome at the science-fiction writers’ table, but the writers didn’t know any more than Roger did. They were having fun with not knowing.

  Someone passed a cartoon down the table. It showed hanging off to one side, either the Star Wars Death Star or Saturn’s moon Mimas, Saturn huge across the background. In the foreground a spacecraft used mechanical arms to twist the F-ring into a braid. The caption: "You’ve a wicked sense of humor, Darth Vader!"

  Another writer looked up and yawned. "Oh. It’s just another goddam spectacular picture of Saturn." That earned him appreciative laughter.

  But no one knew, which made it a frustrating lunch. Saturn had secrets, maybe, but he wasn’t telling them, and the writers didn’t have any logical guesses about the strange pictures.

  Halfway through the lunch Linda called to someone. "Wes. We didn’t expect to see you here!"

  He was a trim athletic man in a faded baseball cap. Linda introduced him around the table. "Wes married Carlotta," she told Roger. "You remember Carlotta. She was my best friend in school."

  "Sure," Roger said. "How are you?"

  One of the writers looked thoughtful. "Wes Dawson . . . You’re running for Craig Hosmer’s old seat."

  "Right."

  "Wes has always been for the space program," Linda said. "Maybe you fellows will vote for him?"

  "Not our district," Wade Curtis said. "We live north of there. But maybe we can help. We’re always interested in people who’ll promote space."

  It was late afternoon when they got back to the house. Roger pulled into the driveway.

  "You might as well come in and meet Jenny," Linda said. "Remember her?"

  "Sure I remember The Brat. I had to bribe her to leave us alone!"

  "Well, she’s grown a bit now." Linda led the way to the house and unlocked the door. It was strangely silent inside. She went to the kitchen and found a note held to the refrigerator by a tomato-shaped magnet. Roger was standing behind her, scanning over her shoulder, as she read it.

  SIS: Had to run down to San Diego. Beach party. Charlene’s with me. Back tomorrow. Jenny

  "She’s a freshman at Long Beach State. Anthropology. But she took up scuba diving in a big way. Her current boyfriend is at Scripps." Linda shook her head in dismay. "Mother will kill me if she finds out I let her go to an all-night party."

  Roger shook his head. "The Brat’s in college? Jeez, Linda, she can’t be more than, what, fifteen?"

  "Seventeen."

  Roger sighed. "I guess it’s been longer than I thought."

  "Yes, it has been. Want some coffee?"

  "Sure."

  She got out the filters and put water on. Roger hadn’t said anything, hadn’t done anything, but she could feel the vibes. Had Jenny planned this? But no, she didn’t know Roger was in/town, and she wouldn’t if she had. She’d always liked Roger, but she liked Edmund more. No, Jenny wouldn’t have deliberately arranged to leave her alone with a lover from the past.

  It had been a long time, but she remembered every detail. Pampered Georgetown University freshman dating
the reporter from the Washington Post. They’d planned it, a weekend together in her parents’ Appalachian cabin. It had been summer, and no one was using the place. The weather in the mountains had been perfect. There’d been a delicious thrill of anticipation as they drove up the twisting highway. She hadn’t had that feeling since.

  Edmund was different. Edmund was older too, and more glamorous. Fighter pilot. Astronaut. Everything a hero should be. Everything but a great lover . . . That’s not fair, not fair at all.

  There’d been anticipation when she met Edmund. It lasted all during their courtship—and died on their wedding night.

  I’d forgotten all this, but I feel it now. Just as I did then. But—

  The coffee machine was set up and there wasn’t any reason to watch it any longer. She turned. Roger was standing very close to her. She didn’t have to move very far to be in his arms.

  PART ONE:

  THE ROGUES

  1

  DISCOVERY

  "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

  SHERLOCK HOLMES in The Sign of the Four

  COUNTDOWN: H MINUS SIX WEEKS

  The lush tropical growth of the Kona Coast ended abruptly. Suddenly the passionflower vines and palm trees were gone, and Jenny was driving through barren lava fields. "It looks like the back side of the Moon," she said.

  Her companion nodded and pointed toward the slopes off to their right. "Mauna Loa. They say it’s terrible luck to take any of the lava home."

  "Who says?"

  "The Old Hawaiians, of course. But a surprising number of tourists, too. They take the stuff home, and later they mail it back." He shrugged. "Bad luck or no, so far as anyone knows, she—Mauna Loa is always she to the Old Ones—she’s never taken a life."

  Captain Jeanette Crichton expertly downshifted the borrowed TR-7 as the road began another steep ascent. The terrain was deceptive. From the beach the mountains looked like gentle slopes until you tried climbing them. Then you realized just how big the twin volcanoes were. Mauna Kea rose nearly 14,000 feet above the sea—and plunged 20,000 feet downward to the sea bottom, making it a bigger mountain than Everest.