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circumstances their duckout for Greensward took precedence.
It was a full two days before the heavy routine slackened. Until then sleep
was grabbed a few hours at a time, pre-made meals gulped while
standing, and conversation confined to barked commands and quick reports of
the starship's systems. A balky gravity generator caused twelve hours of
anxiety, hours of lost sleep, and many curses. At last, it functioned as
smoothly as everything else.
Page 47
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After the bout with the gravity generator, Cranston slumped in the control
room, Baldy and Gor each at their consoles. Dione appeared, just off the
sensor watch shift, dressed in slacks and blouse, her hair tied in back. Loose
strands hung over her forehead and when she glanced at
Cranston her face radiated a vitality that no fatigue could hide.
Cranston waved her to a chair at the command console and asked Baldy and Gor
to join them. It was time to learn the nexus of the entire and now
extended mission: Jason Clarke's project.
The actual moment was anticlimactic. "We'd like to know what you and your
father were working on," Cranston said. Dione brushed back the strands of hair
from her forehead. She and her father had kept the project confidential for so
long that simply blurting out its details now was difficult. She took a deep
breath and began.
"We were working on a way of communicating instantly over long distances. Dad
called it 'biocommunication.' It involves a form of energy we still haven't
uncovered. Dad was finding out more about it every day."
"Long distances? Like from the Earth to a moon-base?" Baldy asked
suspiciously. If so, it wasn't all that important. Laserays did it in seconds.
"I mean over light-years," Dione corrected. "Biocommunication isn't governed
by laws of relativity. Dad and I used it all the time between the outpost and
Earth."
"This could get complicated," Cranston said flatly and spoke to Dione.
"Suppose you begin& well from the start. How did you come across this
biocommunication?" His voice betrayed skepticism.
"Three summers ago I was in a residential apartment in the New York
Citiplex," she began and for the first time Cranston realized how little he
knew of her life. "I was doing something I'll come to that in a moment when I
knew that Dad was arriving at the spaceport that afternoon. I knew the time
and name of the starship." Dione's mouth puckered. "It came as half mental
picture, half sensation."
Cranston tried to hide his disappointment. He was familiar with dozens of
cases when people heard arrival times and starship names, forgot they knew,
then dredged up the information from the subconscious. Gor and
Baldy were thinking almost the exact same thing.
"It wasn't a subconscious memory because Dad returned from some planet
suddenly, to get some botanical samples back to Earth. No one knew he was
coming," she explained as though reading their thoughts. "I
went to meet him."
"I suppose he was surprised," Cranston said dryly, wondering if this was a
version of mental telepathy now that subconscious memory had struck out.
"Amazed would be more like it," Dione retorted, annoyed and defensive despite
herself at the skepticism in Cranston's tone. "Of course he wanted to know how
I knew his arrival time, or that he was landing at all."
"An' how did you, Miss Dione?" Gor asked kindly.
"It took us months to find out, Gor. We tried to recreate the exact situation
at the moment I got that mental picture of his arriving. There was a key
element we overlooked at first. It seemed so insignificant. It concerned
something I was doing at the exact instant I got the message."
Dione paused, thinking how implausible the next bit would sound.
"Which was& " Cranston nudged.
"Repotting a geranium," Dione answered. A long silence hung over the control
room like a winter frost. A click of the compute center sounded like the crack
of a lasegun.
"Repotting a geranium
?" Baldy asked slowly, as though wanting to make sure he heard correctly. He
knew of many occult space stories, but this&
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