"What?" Helen shook her head, somewhat absent-mindedly. "No. Nor agoraphobia, either. Space?"
"Space indeed!" A.J.'s voice shouted from behind her. He'd just entered from the other side. "What's gonna be up, Doc, is you. Several million miles up. And me! And Jackie, and Joe!"
It was finally starting to penetrate, and for a moment Helen Sutter felt something that she hadn't since she was seven years old. Coming down the stairs on Christmas morning to see a vast expanse of wonders laid out before her and realizing that they really, truly, were all there for her.
But, no, it was something she hadn't felt even then, it was something most people only have in their imaginations. Helen's exhilaration didn't stem from childhood fancies of being an astronaut. Those had long ago faded away. It stemmed from her life as an adult. All those long hard years of work and study, now come to as triumphant a conclusion as anyone could wish for.
Bemmie really had come down from the skies sixty-five million years before and fought for his life beneath the crackling skies of a bolide impact. His people had watched the solar system from a great base built inside a twenty-mile-wide asteroid. And she herself would step foot inside the first alien structure ever discovered by mankind!
"Well," she said finally, her voice sounding almost conversationally inane in her own ears. "Where do I sign up?"
PART IV: BLUEPRINTS
Design, n: an outline, sketch, or plan, as of the
form and structure of a work of art, an edifice, or a
machine to be executed or constructed;
the combination of details or features of a picture,
building, etc.; a plan or project.
Chapter 21
"That's his missing hand."
"Yep. Though calling something with eighteen branches a 'hand' seems pretty weird to me."
"He'd say the same about a clumsy paw with only five branchings, I'm sure."
"Well, which one of us is sixty-five million years freeze-dried, and which one of us is sitting here still using his hands? Ha! Don't have an answer for that one, do you?"
"You're such a wiseguy, A.J." Helen studied the 3-D model, derived from multiple spectra of imaging combined. "I wasn't half-bad in my modeling."
"Taking into account water loss, damage, all the other good stuff, some of your reconstructions were damn near perfect. You couldn't get all the internals, but the externals are good. The colors would be more earthy, though."
"How can you get colors out of this? I'm not even sure if the external skin or whatever it is has just dehydrated or gone through a hell of a lot more changes in the time it's been here."
"Guesses, but pretty good ones. We have some idea of the chemical processes that go on in vacuum now, and I can run simulations. If I take the chemical constituents I can derive from my various sensors and run a simulation of what it would've looked like before sixty-five million years of space exposure, I get something with a sort of warm brown tint. Like good leather."
"Interesting. Still, with all the variables, I'd say it's more like a wild-assed guess."
"Give me half-assed, and you have a deal."
Helen snorted. "No one gets half my ass."
A.J. should have made another comment at that point, but he was silent instead. Giving him a sideways glance, Helen saw a rather dramatic blush just starting to recede.
Well, now, that's cute. I guess a wiseass answer occurred to him that took him in a direction he wasn't ready to go.
She paused mentally at that point. It dawned on her that she was skirting an area that she wasn't ready to go. She been working alongside A.J. for three days, ever since she'd agreed to participate in the planned expedition to Mars. Almost every waking hour, in fact. The experience, she now realized, had just driven home the impressions she had gotten in the two years since she'd first met the man.
Don't kid yourself, woman. For whatever reasons—God only knows how and why it works—A.J. Baker really and truly turns you on.
She shook her head slightly. She was still twelve years older than he was—always would be—and she was still not ready to go there. Probably never would be.
Before she could start blushing herself—at her age!—she hurriedly went back to the subject at hand. "Are there any other rooms you can get into other than this one and the water room?"
A.J.'s tone seemed just a bit hurried, too. "A few, yeah. There's only one major room we haven't looked into yet. Its door is opened a little bit less than this one, but it was clearly jammed tight and no way we were going to lever it open. So now that we've done all the heavy work we can with the Faeries, I'll probably be trying to get one of them into that room. It might get stuck, though; it's going to be really, really tight. That's why I hadn't tried until now. And we've got a few more side corridors to go into first."