The Sails of Tau Ceti by Michael McCollum Page A

development we had not foreseen.”
    “What are your orders?” the advisor asked. His lower two arms hung at his side, much as a human’s would, while the upper set was clasped across the barrel of his chest. The position was that of respect, a subordinate awaiting instructions.
    Faslorn’s ears flicked as he considered this new factor in their plans. “Perhaps this is not the problem we had feared. It will give us the opportunity to fine tune the masquerade before we have to face the human multitudes.”
    “Is that wise?”
    “What choice have we? You will issue orders to all human specialists. I want to be advised of their preliminary assessments as soon as possible.
    “It will be done.”

CHAPTER 8
    Tory Bronson woke to bitter, biting cold. She lay there and wondered what had gone wrong with the power to her sleeping bag. Surely, Ben had not gotten up during the night and dialed the tent back to transparency so that he could look at the stars. He had been on Mars long enough to know better than that, hadn’t he?
    She found that willing her eyelids open was the hardest work she had ever done. When she could finally see again, the tent on Sutter’s Peak was nowhere to be found. In its place was a translucent barrier only a few centimeters in front of her nose. She watched without understanding as the glass alternately fogged and then cleared in time with her breathing. Then an ice cube melted somewhere inside her brain and her memories came flooding back.
    They had spent six weeks climbing the mountain of velocity after leaving Phobos. Each day the sun shrank a little as the thrum of the engines continued without letup. Those long weeks had been punctuated by periodic engine shutdowns as empty reaction mass tanks were jettisoned. Tory envisioned a long string of white spheres extending all the way back to Mars like a string of pearls. They had passed the orbit of Jupiter at the end of the first week, that of Uranus during week two, and Pluto only three days later. Once out of the Solar System, they had continued accelerating until they were moving as quickly outbound as the light sail was falling inward. By the end of the sixth week, Austria was two dozen times Pluto’s distance from Sol.
    For much of the journey, Tory had been too busy to think about the enormous gulf of space between herself and home. The first week she had done nothing but watch the operation of the booster. Her only breaks had been for meals, quick trips to the head, and catnaps. She had used her implant to monitor the flow of plasma, the interplay of magnetic fields, and a thousand other parameters. The booster had become a living, breathing entity to her. The steady flow of antiprotons and hydrogen into the reaction chamber were its lifeblood, the network of fiber optic cables, its ganglia.
    At the end of a long week, Tory had retired to her cabin to sleep the clock around. After that, she had joined the others in standing the regular watches that Garth insisted on while the engines were operating. When not on watch, Tory repaired software glitches uncovered by the health monitors. The worst of these she shipped to the programmers on Mars and Earth, while the minor problems, she repaired herself. Besides watches and software maintenance, she took her turn cooking, cleaning, and performing light maintenance.
    None of which explained how it was that she was freezing with her nose pressed up against a piece of frosted glass. Her situation reminded her of a joke she’d once heard: “You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up lying face down in the gutter and can’t remember know how you got there!” Then, as though the thought had been a catalyst, her sluggish brain gave up another memory.
    She was in her cold sleep tank in Austria ’s converted bunkroom! She was still puzzling over that fact when a flesh colored blur entered her field of view. There was a quiet clicking noise from somewhere far off. Her vision suddenly cleared