Joan D Vinge - Lost in Space Read online

  "I will need Dr. Robinson's portable gurney," Smith said abruptly. "I believe it is stored in—"

  "I'm on it!" Penny left her side, running toward the elevator, before Maureen fully realized what the words meant: ]udy was almost free from the tube. A vast rush of relief hit her. The first, hardest part was nearly over.

  And with that, her insulating shield of control shattered, and all the emotion she had held in check came pouring through.

  She looked back at Smith with a kind of disbelief, feeling as if she had never seen him before—knowing she had never seen the real man, in all the time they had worked together. "We trusted you," she said, hearing the outrage in her voice. "You tried to kill my family…"

  Smith lifted an eyebrow, as if she had accused him of having bad manners. "Existence offers us nothing, if not the opportunity for an endless series of betrayals."

  She stared at him, wondering if he had gone mad, or she had.

  He looked at her; his gaze was clear and cold. "There is a world behind the world, Professor Robinson," he said gently, as if he were speaking to a child. "Lie once, cheat twice, and everything becomes clear… Do not mistake my deception for a character flaw. It is a philosophical choice, a profound understanding of the universe." His mouth quirked. "It is a way of life."

  "You're a monster," she said, with soft fury.

  "Perhaps." Smith shrugged. "But I am also the only one who can save your daughter's life." He nodded as Penny stepped out of the elevator, towing the floating gurney.

  "All right, Penny precious," he said, in the tone of voice Maureen had always heard as kindly, before now. Now it only sounded condescending, as if he was mocking them all. "I need you to short the power, on my command."

  "Does he have to call me 'precious'?" Penny said, her mouth pulling down. She had never liked Smith. Maureen had always told herself it was just Penny's cynical streak. But maybe Penny had been the best judge of human nature all along.

  "Professor, you will assist me in lowering the body," Smith directed, handing Penny a wrench without even glancing at her. As they moved into position, he looked back at her again, finally, and smiled. "Penny, precious… Now."

  Penny looked at her mother, defiance and fury reddening her face. Maureen nodded.

  Penny swung the wrench, slamming it against the power unit as if she wished it was Smith's skull. The cryo field deactivated in a flash of light. The tube swung open, and the lifesigns monitor beside Judy flat-lined with a desolate whine.

  "She's not breathing!" Maureen caught her daughter's limp body, and they lowered her onto the gurney.

  "Sickbay," Smith snapped, suddenly the doctor Maureen remembered again. "Move!"

  Together they pushed the gurney out through the blast doors to the waiting elevator.

  The doors closed and the elevator began to descend. They barely noticed the lurch as the entire ship shuddered, struggling to break free of the sun's grasp.

  Don swore, as his final attempt to boost the ship free of the sun's gravitational drag failed. "The sun won't let us go," he said into the mike. "Noah, I need options—"

  "Major West," Noah said at last, his voice still unnervingly professional, "we are unable to provide contingencies."

  Don looked at the displays.

  As Noah registered his expression, he murmured, "I'm sorry, Don…"

  "We've got to divert all power to the engines," Robinson said, still working at his controls. "Rerouting Life Sciences."

  Don said nothing, as the nonessential Life Sciences systems went offline. Robinson might be a genius, but a physicist's view of the universe was like a VR game, where anything could happen. Don lived in the real universe, where a good pilot knew what wasn't possible…

  But that didn't mean he'd give up trying for a miracle.

  The drive core indicator on his panel showed a power increase. "Robotics," Robinson said, and as he shut it down, the engine capacity jumped again.

  "Medical-"

  As Robinson put through one more power shunt, the damaged system crashed. Electricity arced across consoles, shorting more of them out; SHUNT ERROR flashed on his monitor, WARNING: MEDICAL SYSTEMS CRASH. "No!" Robinson gasped, starting up out of his seat. "Judy—"

  "No cardiopulmonary or respiratory functions," Smith said.

  Maureen stared at the scanners above the diagnostic table where Judy lay. A holoschematic of her body shimmered in the air, above her frighteningly still real one. Her heart was highlighted in red.

  Smith activated the cardiac stimulus program. "Clear," he said.

  Judy's body jerked on the table; the holographic heart beat once, and was still.

  "Again," Smith said sharply. "Clear."

  Lights flickered on the bio console, and the holograph winked out.

  Maureen sucked in a breath. "We're losing her!"

  Smith's eyes raked the room, searching for any equipment that hadn't gone down. There was none. He leaned over Judy's body and began manual CPR, pressing down on her sternum, forcing her heart to beat by sheer physical pressure. "Come on, child," he murmured. "Fight. Put a little heart in it!" When Judy still did not respond, he stepped back and with his fist began precise, staccato blows to her chest.

  Maureen watched him, white-knuckled. Smith almost seemed human again, caught up in the work of a physician —as if it really mattered to him whether he saved her daughter's life; as if the person she had believed he was still existed, somewhere inside him.

  But then she realized what he was saying, under his breath, as he jarred Judy's recalcitrant heart again and again: "The life… I save… may be… my own…"

  He stopped suddenly, pressing his ear to Judy's chest. He took her pulse. He smiled.

  Maureen pushed past him. "Judy? Baby—?"

  Judy's eyes flickered open; somehow, she managed a weak smile. "You should try to look less worried," she whispered faintly. "It has a tendency to spook the patients."

  Maureen looked up at Smith, suddenly not caring whether he was the most hideous monster ever to walk the Earth. "Thank you," she said, from the bottom of her heart.

  "I hope I have proven the well-being of your family is of great import to me," Smith said, smiling back at her. "You are a good woman, Professor Robinson, anyone can see that. Perhaps, if you convinced your husband to trust me…" His eyes were like stones.

  Maureen jerked a medical laser free from its wall bracket. She pinpointed his forehead, her expression even colder than his. "Stabilize her, Smith. Because you only breathe as long as she does."

  "Heat seal breach in forty seconds," the computer said.

  The console showed engine capacity at one hundred and fifty percent. "That's all the power we've got," Robinson said.

  Don nodded. "I'm putting the pedal to the metal. Here goes." He engaged the main thrusters. Vibration shook the ship like a dog with a chew toy, as he bet all the power they had against the law of gravity, in a last-ditch wager to win the Jupiter's freedom.

  And lost.

  "She can't break free!" Don cut the engines, before the riptide of counterstresses tore the ship apart. "She doesn't have enough thrust." He shook his head, staring at the displays as the Jupiter resumed its long fall toward the surface of the sun.

  "There's got to be some way to get through this—!" Robinson said, his eyes raking the control panels.

  Don wondered whether Robinson was addressing him, or God. Because the only thing that would save them now was a real miracle…

  Don turned in his seat to stare at John. "That's it."

  "What's it?" Robinson asked, looking around; but Don had already ascended his chair toward the hyper-drive initiator.

  "If we can't go around the sun," Don shouted, "we have to go through it! Using your hyperdrive — "

  "If we engage the hyperdrive without a gate, we could be thrown anywhere in the galaxy!" Robinson got to his feet, shaking his head.

  "Anywhere but here," Don said.

  Robinson stared at him. And then he spun back
to the console, thumbing a panel open. He took out two keys, tossed one up to Don. Inserting his key on the console, he said, "On my mark."

  Don inserted his own key into the initiator console.

  "Three-two-one — " Robinson recited, "initiate."

  They turned the keys.

  The images of Mission Control on the displays below dissolved into static. Don heard a barely audible voice saying, "We're getting resident radiation distortions from the spacecraft. She must be breaking up." Heard Noah demanding, "… me see those numbers, Annie — "

  And the last thing he heard, before they lost all contact, was Noah Freeman's oddly elated voice saying, "Son of a bitch."

  Don put the displays on exterior view: the image showed the Jupiter's saucer-form hull glowing like a forge, sweating droplets of alloy that vanished toward the billowing mountains of superheated gas below them.

  "Warning," the computer said. "Heat shield breach."

  But now he was living in a physicists' universe… As he watched, the extending hyperdrive segments along the ship's perimeter flared with energy, and a shimmering force field enfolded the ship. The attenuators charged, and the ship seemed to elongate as it began its shift into another dimension. The sun's flaming face grew strangely distorted as the hyperdrive warped space around them.

  "Hyperdrive is at one hundred percent," Robinson said. "Major, you have the com."

  Facing the hungry sun Don grinned, as much an act of defiance as of belief. "Let's see what this baby can do…" He engaged the hyperdrive.

  "Dad—" Will Robinson's voice said, behind them.

  From the corner of his eye, Don saw Robinson leap from his seat and start across the bridge to his son. He opened his mouth to—

  Before he could call out the warning, everything changed.

  Robinson and his son were flung across the room by suddenly shifting gravity, as an invisible wave of transforming energy broke over them all. Belowdecks, it caught Maureen and Penny, and Smith wrapping Judy in thermal blankets; swept them all aside.

  As it swept Don from his seat, the hull began to disappear, and around him sections of the ship winked randomly out of existence.

  The same wave passed through all their minds at once, stopping thought as the impossible became reality; their bodies froze in midflight, along with time itself, as the universe swallowed its tail… and what happened after that was beyond all comprehension.

  In Mission Control, the graphic representation of the Jupiter began to flicker, merging into the graphic of the sun. Noah stared at the screen as Annie said, "We can't keep a fix on her, sir."

  Noah released the breath he had been holding uselessly, and murmured, "Godspeed…"

  The first leaping tongue of atomic flame kissed the Jupiter Two's elongated hull; but her shimmering, intangible form had already passed beyond its reach.

  The ship fell through the sun, untouched, untouchable, her translucent disk drawn wire-thin, before she vanished from known space in a sudden flare of light.

  Chapter Nine

  The nameless world rolled through the void, its journey around distant binary suns undisturbed for eons.

  Until now. High above its ruddy surface a wormhole opened in space, and a ship fell through into the starry void. The name of the ship was the ]upiter Two.

  The nameless world would never be the same.

  Maureen Robinson kneeled on the floor beside Penny, making sure her daughter was really all right, and not just too dazed to tell her what was wrong. The mind-twisting Something that had seized them all had left no visible aftereffects, at least down here. Smith seemed to have been struck speechless; but in her opinion, that was hardly a problem. She glanced up, reassuring herself that he was still standing sullenly, arms folded, in the same spot across the room.

  She got to her feet, thinking of John and Will… and looked up in relief as John entered the room.

  John stopped in the doorway, seeing his wife and Penny and Smith—and an empty gurney. "Judy?" he asked. "Where's Judy?"

  As if on cue, his eldest child stepped through a doorway at the far side of the room. Still in the process of fastening her coveralls, she said, "Boy, either I cut down on the coffee or sew in a flap. It's hell getting in and out of that thing." She smiled as his incredulous gaze met hers.

  "Are you — " John began.

  "Vitals are normal," she said, still maddeningly nonchalant. "Pulse and respiration seem to be—"

  "Baby, are you okay—?" he demanded, crossing the room. She might be a grown woman and a doctor, she might even be better at being him than he was; but she was still, would always be, his firstborn child.

  Judy broke off, her expression changing as if she only now realized that he was upset. "I'm fine, Daddy," she said gently, "really."

  God, he thought, am 1 that much of a human cypher? He held her close, overwhelmed by the emotions filling him, now that his fear of losing her was gone.

  Someone made a small, disgusted noise behind him. "Will every little problem be an excuse for familial sentiment?" Smith asked sourly.

  John turned away from his daughter to face Smith, and the emotion overwhelming him was suddenly pure rage. "How much, Smith!" he shouted into the other man's face. "What was the price tag you put on our future — ?" not even sure whether he meant the world's future or only his family's.

  Smith retreated through the doorway into the medical lab, raising his fists as if John's words had been blows. John felt his own hands tighten into fists, aching to lash out. He took a step forward —

  Just as Will entered the room.

  His clenched fists fell open, and dropped to his sides. Looking at Will, he shook his head.

  Smith stared at him, uncomprehending. And then he lowered his hands. "You can't do it, can you?" he murmured. "You can't kill me." His eyes came alive: I know you… they said. His mouth twisted with amusement and disgust. "Ah, the virtue of high-minded ideals. You can't kill the man, without becoming a monster…"

  John held Smith's gaze through an agonizing length of silence; until he realized that nothing he could possibly say to this man would have any more effect than saying nothing at all. He turned his back on Smith then, his own mouth a knife slash of frustration.

  "Coward," Smith said, and John heard the smile in it.

  John spun back, the flat of his hand slamming into the control stud on the wall beside him as if it was Smith's face. The door of the medical lab into which Smith had retreated dropped like a guillotine's blade, sealing him inside.

  John stepped away from the door, breathing hard, his muscles knotted as if he had actually been in a fight. Will stared up at him, looking puzzled and a little frightened. John tried to force his face back into something like a normal expression.

  "What happened, John?" Maureen came to his side, and he knew from the look on her face that the question had nothing to do with Smith. She put a hand on his arm; he felt her fingers tighten like steel bands. "Where are we?"

  He took a deep breath.

  * * *

  Don had just finished taking the hyperdrive offline and reinitiating the ship's main systems when the Robinsons reentered the bridge. He watched about half the monitors in the room come back to life, and then let his chair descend. "I've bypassed most of the damaged systems," he said. "We'll have to repair the rest manually."

  He saw Judy standing with her parents; surprised to see her up and around, more surprised by the enormous sense of relief that filled him. "You had me worried, Doc. Nice to see you thawed."

  Judy smiled and shrugged, as if she regarded a near-death experience as No Big Deal. "You have the most puzzling definition of a smooth ride…"

  Don grinned briefly, ruefully, in acknowledgment. Too bad she became a doctor, he thought. She would have made a hell of a pilot.

  He crossed the room to the navigation pedestal and brought its rebooted system online. A holograph of the Jupiter Two appeared above its surface. "Computer, map our current location."

  T
he holo display shimmered, and when it cleared again, the area around the Jupiter was filled with a holographic representation of a solar system he had definitely never seen before. "Searching for recognizable stellar configurations," the computer said tonelessly. There were none. They all watched, riveted by the sight as the starfield continued to expand, while the image of the Jupiter shrank until it was no longer identifiable within the swarming mass of lights.

  "This data base has starmaps of the entire known galaxy," John Robinson said finally, very quietly.

  "I don't recognize a single system." Don shrugged, shaking his head.

  "We're lost, aren't we?" Penny Robinson asked. Her voice sounded very small and far away, as if it reached him from somewhere beyond this artificial construct of the stars they knew… somewhere in the endless reaches of uncharted space.

  He didn't answer. He didn't need to.

  Chapter Ten

  JuriLj slauitq removed another piece of Don West's fused cryo suit from his naked back, feeling her eyes take a highly unprofessional interest in his muscles. God, he has a nice body… She gave herself a mental kick, grateful that she was standing behind him. What is wrong with me—?

  She had known he had a nice body from the first moment she saw him. And a face to match, somehow sweet and funny and heart-stoppingly handsome all at once; with blue, blue eyes… nice hair, incredibly kissable lips. She hadn't been able to take her eyes offhim… until he'd opened his mouth.

  And then he'd become just another flyboy: a walking ego, who let his little head do all the thinking for his big head. She'd met way too many of those to let this one get near her, let alone get under her skin.

  She'd seen a lot of men—a lot of them naked, after she'd decided to become a doctor. It wasn't like she'd been a nun in those days, either. But since she had begun working on this mission… realized that the future of the entire planet could rest on its success… she'd barely noticed whether the people she worked with were male or female. How could she think about herself, when that was so much more important?

  So why did she still want to run her hands over Don West's shoulders, feel those strong, well-muscled arms slide around her back… Stop it! She pried lose another piece of his suit.