Space Stations

Those men were a bright and lively lot. I admired them for many things: their abilities, their courage, their dedication to science. Yet I felt a sort of pity for them. Every one, in his own way, had suffered some painful loss. Disappointment in love, disaster in business, defeat of some driving ambition, failure of a dream.

“We're all of us unhappy,” one of them confessed when I had bought him a farewell drink. “If we'd been content with Earth here and now, we wouldn't be gambling our lives for the uncertain secrets of NBH. Or the chance we'll get back to some fabulous Utopia four hundred years from now.” He made a bitter face. “The fact is, we're diving into our own black holes.”

Wishing them well, I'd never wanted to follow. Yet I had never outgrown my longing to see my father again, or escaped my childhood fascination with the ominous riddles of NBH. Out of college, I came home with a degree in cosmogony, planning to join my mother at the foundation. She told me she was shutting it down.

“We can't.” I felt dismayed. “Think of my father.”

“I do. Every day.” Her lips quivered. “But he's had ten years at the station, if he stayed there. We'll never know what he's done or failed to do, but Magellan Ten has drained the last of our funding. This last mission will evacuate and abandon the station.”

“My father—” The decision seized me in an instant, “I'm going out on Ten.”

“I thought you might.” I saw her tears again, but she didn't try to keep me. “Wherever you find him, still at the station or back on some future Earth, he may need you more than I do.”

There were just two of us on Ten; she had found no other volunteers. We met the pilot in the same bar where she had found my father. He was Colin McKane, a rawboned, hardbitten Scot who had abandoned his native heaths to scout a hundred planets and found none he cared to see again.

“My home, my family, all I ever loved—” Moodily, he sloshed another shot into his glass. “All thrown away in a crazy lust for new worlds and strange adventure. There's nothing left I really care about. Matsu and LeBlanc were my last friends, fellow exiles from long ago. They went out on Nine. I promised to go out and bring them home.”

He shrugged, with a twisted grimace.

“If we can expect this wasted Earth to make a better future for us.”

Hiro Matsu and Jean LeBlanc. I'd known them in training. Both of them scientists of some distinction, they were both devoted to ideas science rejected. I'd helped Matsu load crates of equipment designed to test a conviction that he could reverse gravity by reversing the spin of cosmic anti-strings. LeBlanc's project was to look for a way though the singularity, and backward in time.

“Crackpots, maybe,” McKane said. “But we can't leave them there to die.”

We found NBH truly black, lost in the vast gulf created as it consumed the nearby stars.

All we could see was the brighter patch of magnified stars beyond it. Nodding at them on the monitor, McKane turned uneasily in his seat to shake his head at me.

“Feel it?”

Even there, trapped deep in its unforgiving grasp, there was really no force I could feel.

Spinning around the lowest safe orbit, we were still in free fall, the enormous gravity precisely balanced by the centrifugal force that held us there. Yet suddenly I was chilled by the recollection of a moment of terror in my childhood, when my father was tossing me high above his head and catching me as I fell. My mother heard my screams, sensed my fright, and made him stop.

That left me with a dread of high places. Now, even in the stable-seeming ship, I felt that was falling past the stars into an infinite and bottomless pit, with no support and no escape. A wave of sickness left me weak and cold with sweat. I had to grip the seat restraints and look away.

McKane grinned at me, and bent again to his flight computer. The asteroid was harder to find than the black hole. It had strayed away from the galactic coordinates Arkwood and my father recorded for it, and the starlight was far too faint to reveal it.

“A wild black cat,” McKane called it, “hiding from us in a big black cellar.”

Searching the spectrum for its locator beacon, he heard nothing. He made a dozen skips, with stops for radar searches. Earth was two long days behind us before a final jump brought it into searchlight range. A mass of dark iron a mile or so thick, ripped from the heart of some shattered planet, it was all jagged points and knife-sharp edges. We watched its slow spin till the dock came into view, a squat little tower jutting from a flat black fracture plane.

It showed no light. McKane called and got no reply.

“It looks dead. If you want my hunch, LeBlanc and Matsu found it already abandoned or dead. The safest thing for us is to get out now.”

“I came for my father.”

“There can't be anybody here.”

“I've got to know.”

“If anybody's alive, why don't they have the radio beacon going? And a light flashing to show us in?”

“I want to dock and see.”