Chindi

Chapter 38

THE MEDIBOT DIAGNOSED Hutch with a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs, a chipped collarbone, some torn ligaments, and what she came to refer to as a body bruise. Tor suffered more cracked ribs, a broken knee, and lacerations. Both were, despite their injuries, in a jovial mood until the painkillers put them under.

Hutch slept sixteen hours. When she woke she remembered only pieces and bits of the previous few days. “Considering what you’ve been through,” Je

It was a curious experience: At first she recalled only sharing her air tanks with Tor, but she had no recollection of how she got into that position. Then she remembered juggling the go-packs. Then the rest of the flight over the rocky exterior of the chindi. (“Was it really the chindi?”) Her memory proceeded backward until the giant starship blew out of the snowstorm and made for the oort cloud.

She was ravenous and they fed her fruit and eggs, and assured her that Tor was doing fine but was unavailable at the moment. She did however have a visitor.

Mogambo was in a gray-and-blue McCarver jumpsuit. Ready to go to work. “That was quite a show you put on out there,” he said. “Congratulations.” There was a darkness in those gray eyes.

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” she asked.

“Nothing.” But there was, and he was letting her see that there was.

“The go-packs,” she said.

“It’s all right.” He was operating somewhere between magnanimity and a sulk.

“Use the shuttle.” They were chasing that down now. “I brought one go-pack back with me. It’s a little bent, but I’m sure we can repair it.”

“Brownstein says there’s a liability issue. He’s not sure he wants to put us on the chindi in any case.”

“Oh.” Her mind wasn’t clear. “I thought we already settled that.”

“He says he agreed to bring us along. Not to land us on the chindi.”

“I see.”

“He says he won’t do it without your approval.”

“Well.” Hutch kept a straight face. “I can understand his reluctance.”

“There’s no danger.”

“That sounds familiar.”

He backed off and lowered his voice. “How’s your arm?”

“My shoulder,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“Good. We were worried about you.”

“Professor, you see what we just went through.”

“Of course.”

“You understand that I’d be reluctant to chance anything like that happening again.”

Tor showed up behind Mogambo, on crutches. “How’s the patient?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Tor. Thanks.”

“How are you, Professor?” he said. “I hear you’re going over to the chindi.”

“We’re still working on it,” he said, not taking his eyes from Hutch.

Tor smirked and looked momentarily as if he were going to say more, but he let it go.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

He nodded, suggesting she was doing the only rational thing. “Thank you, Priscilla,” he said. “I’m in your debt.”

SHE DID THE promised interview with Claymoor that evening. To her dismay, he had used the McCarver’s telescopes to get pictures of her sailing awkwardly above the chindi and of her graceless crash landing. Thump. Bang. Whack.

“You’re not going to use them, I hope,” she protested.

“Hutch, they’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

“I look like a wounded pelican.”

“You look incredible. You know what’s going to happen when people see those shots? They’re going to see that you’re an incredibly brave young woman. A woman absolutely without fear.”

“Absolutely without sense,” she grumbled.

“Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. You’re going to become the world’s sweetheart.” He gestured toward the mike clipped to his lapel. “Can we start?”

She nodded.

They were in a VR studio which looked like First and Main on the chindi. They sat in upholstered chairs along the lip of the Ditch, placed so that the audience could look past them down the dark passageways that traveled off in all directions. “I’m seated here with Priscilla Hutchins,” Claymoor said, “where we have a pretty good view of the interior of an alien starship. It’s called the chindi, and I should point out that what you can see is only a very small part of the ship. But before we get to that…” He leaned forward and his brow wrinkled. “Priscilla, they call you Hutch, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do, Henry.”

He smiled at the imager. “Hutch performed an incredible feat earlier today to rescue one of her passengers.”

In fact, despite her reservations, the interview went well. Claymoor asked the usual questions. Had she been frightened? Terrified.

Had she at any time thought she wouldn’t be able to bring it off? It had seemed like a long shot from the start.

Had she been down inside the chindi herself?

What was a chindi, anyhow?

He ran the visual record, and here came Hutch tumbling through the sky. It looked terribly awkward, a crazy woman flying feet first over a slab of asteroid. She tried to explain that the physics of the situation wouldn’t allow her to slice through the sky with her arms spread before her, in the way you’d expect from someone who wanted to look halfway graceful. But Claymoor only smiled pleasantly and ran the shot again, this time in slow motion.

Tor came in as scheduled, pretending he’d just dropped by, and explained how it happened he’d become stranded on the chindi. “Did you think they’d be able to rescue you?”

“I knew with Hutch over here, they’d give it everything they had.”

An hour after they’d concluded, the yacht caught up with its runaway shuttle. Brownstein collected it, informed Hutch that it seemed none the worse for wear, refilled its fuel tanks, and asked what she wanted done about Mogambo.

“You just want to give him trouble,” she said.

“He’s not an easy man to like, Hutch. I thought you’d enjoy having him forced to come to you for another favor.”

“When does he want to go?”

“In the morning.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s okay with me. But get him to sign a paper that if that damned thing takes off again, he’s on his own.”

AS THINGS TURNED out, Mogambo and his people had almost three months to explore the chindi, because that was how long it took before a rescue mission could get boosted up to their speed.

It was a longer time than the McCarver was supposed to be out on its own, and it had more people on board than originally scheduled, so supplies began to run short and they had to go on half rations.

The Academy developed emergency designs for fuel pods and platforms that could be gotten up to a quarter light-speed. The platforms consisted of little more than shells with fusion and Hazeltine propulsion systems. But they had to be hauled out to the Twins, where rocks of appropriate mass were culled from the rings to be used as what were now called Greenwater Objects. The McCarver, nursing damaged engines, needed thirteen stages to descend to standard velocities. By then the Academy’s operational fleet had also recovered the Memphis and the Longworth.

The technique of dropping Greenwater Objects in hyperspace to boost velocity lacked a correspondingly elegant method to shed velocity. Returning from a state of high acceleration consumed substantial time and resources.

As departure neared, Mogambo resisted being taken off the chindi, even though Sylvia Virgil assured him that the Academy would return to the artifact better equipped for a more comprehensive inspection. Had food and water been available, Hutch suspected he might have insisted on waiting.

At least part of his reluctance to leave was generated by his awareness that the costs of a return would be immense. It would, he judged, not happen until a vehicle capable of reaching the necessary velocities on its own had been developed. Furthermore, the Academy’s willingness to invest the necessary sums would be undermined by the fact that a decent sampling of the chindi’s treasures had already been obtained. The Academy, or some other agency, would unquestionably one day return, but he would be an unlikely participant. So there was an emotional scene in the shuttle when Hutch rode over to take him and his colleagues off for the last time. They had by then erected a plaque by the exit hatch, on the outside, informing all and sundry that the chindi had been visited, on this day and year of the Common Era, by Maurice Mogambo and so forth and so on.