The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [135]
They searched every fold of the immense crumpled sail—visually when they had to, and with infrared viewers when those were present. These viewers would instantly pick up the tiny signal of a warm human body anywhere in the destroyed sail.
They searched all the space around destroyed Diana, on the chance that somehow Natasha had been flung free through some unknown accident….
Above all, they searched Diana’s tiny cabin.
That didn’t take long. With only herself aboard there was no need for privacy; Diana’s capsule amounted to only a few cubic meters of space, and no possible place to hide.
But she wasn’t there. As far as the searchers could tell, Natasha Subramanian wasn’t anywhere at all.
38
THE HUNT FOR NATASHA SUBRAMANIAN
What the three fourths of the Subramanian family that remained on Earth had resolved to do was carry on with as normal a life as was possible, with the other quarter of the family gallivanting through cislunar space in a contraption of plastic and buckyball carbon. Accordingly, once they had sent Natasha their final good luck message, Ranjit had got on his bike to head for his office. Myra had seen the possibility of a whole hour, maybe two, for her to try to catch up on what her increasing backlog of journals had to say about some of the hotter subjects in the area of AI and prostheses. Such gifts of a few personal hours were not frequent. They came when young Robert was asleep, or when he was at his special school, or when he was, as now, dutifully following the housemaid around, helping her—or, more accurately, “helping” her—with her early-morning tasks of making beds and tidying rooms.
So, with a cooling cup of tea on the table before her—and, of course, with the news programs playing on her room screen in case, however improbably, something unexpected occurred in Natasha’s race—Myra was trying to make sense of some of her journals when she heard the sound of her son’s heartbroken sobbing.
She looked up and saw the maid carrying him into the room. “I don’t know what happened, missus,” the maid said, sounding struck. “We were emptying out the wastebaskets when Robert suddenly sat down and began to cry. Robert never cries, missus!”
Which Myra, of course, knew as well as she did. But there it was. So Myra did what untold billions of other mothers have done, all the way from the australopithecines. She took her son in her arms and rocked him soothingly, murmuring into his ear. It didn’t stop the crying, no, but the tears simmered down to sobs. Myra was asking herself whether this unusual and troubling—but certainly not life-threatening—development warranted calling her husband at his office, when there was a stifled shriek from the maid. Myra looked up.
There on the screen was the image of her daughter’s solar yacht. Apart from the fact that one edge was, ever so slightly, tipped up, it looked exactly as it had an hour earlier. But now there was a red banner underneath the image that said “Accident in lunar race?” And when the audio volume was turned up, there was no question mark in the agitated remarks of the newscaster. Something bad had happened to Diana. Worst of all, Diana’s pilot—which was to say, Myra’s beloved daughter—was not answering distress calls from the commodore, and it seemed that whatever had gone wrong with the solar yacht had somehow abducted its pilot.
Myra Subramanian’s terrible worry was perhaps the most personal distress anyone in the world can feel, but she was not alone. The more the tender vessels dug into the puzzle of what had happened to Diana, the more hopelessly unanswerable the puzzle seemed.
Emergency workers from the commodore’s yacht had long since suited up and reached Diana’s command capsule.