Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister’s when she wanted it to be-that was one of the things we were measured on, before they signed us for the mission. “I’ll dial it up,” she said, pushing herself over to Vera’s keyboard. Payter shook his head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console. Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten seconds it crackled on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking into the camera and saying the last words anybody would ever hear from her.
    Tragedy can only be tragic just so long, and we’d heard it all for three and a half years. Every once in a while we’d play the tape, and look at the scenes she had picked up with her handheld camera. And look at them. And look at them, freeze-frame and blowup, not because we thought we’d get any more information out of them than Gateway Corporation’s people already had, although you never knew. Just because we wanted to reassure ourselves it was all worth it. The real tragedy was that Trish didn’t know what she had found.
    “This is Mission Report Oh-Seventy-Four Dee Nineteen,” she began, steadily enough. Her sad, silly face was even trying to smile. “I seem to be in trouble. I came out at a Heechee artifact kind of thing, and I docked, and now I can’t get away. The lander rockets work. But the main board won’t. And I don’t want to stay here till I starve.” Starve! After the boffins went over Trish’s photos they identified what the “artifact” was-the CHON-Food Factory they had been looking for.
    But whether it was worth it was still an open question, and Trish surely didn’t think it was worth it. What she thought was that she was going to die there, and for nothing, not even going to cash in her awards for the mission. And then at the end, what she finally did, she tried to make it back in the lander.
    She got into the lander and pointed it for the sun, and turned on the motors, and took a pill. Took a lot of pills; all she had. And then she turned the freezer up to max and got in and closed the door behind her. “Defrost me when you find me,” she said, “and remember my award.”
    And maybe somebody would. When they found her. If they found her. Which would likely be in about ten thousand years. By the time her faint radio message was heard by anybody, on maybe its five hundredth automatic repetition, it was too late to matter to Trish; she never answered.
    Vera finished playing the tape and quietly restowed it as the screen went dark. “If Trish had been a real pilot instead of one of those Gateway go-go prospectors, jump in and push the button and let the ship do its thing,” said Lurvy, not for the first time, “she would have known better. She would have used what little delta-V she had in the lander to kill some angular momentum instead of wasting it by pointing straight in.”
    “Thank you, expert rocket pilot,” I said, not for the first time either. “So she could’ve counted on being inside the asteroids a whole lot sooner, right? Maybe in as little as six or seven thousand years.”
    Lurvy shrugged. “I’m going to bed,” she said, taking a last squeeze from the bottle. “You, Paul?”
    “Aw, give me a break, will you?” Janine cut in. “I wanted Paul to help me go over ignition procedures for the ionthrusters.”
    Lurvy’s guard went up at once. “You sure that’s what you want him to go over? Don’t pout, Janine. You know you’ve gone over it plenty already, and anyway it’s Paul’s job.”
    “And what if Paul’s out of action?” Janine demanded. “How do we know we won’t hit the crazy time just as we’re doing it?”
    Well, nobody could know that, and as a matter of fact I had been forming the opinion that we would. It came in cycles of about a hundred and thirty days, give or take a dozen. We were pushing it close. I said, “Actually, I’m a little tired, Janine. I