The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [95]
Nobody dared laugh. During the past two weeks, D. W. Yarbrough and Sofia Mendes had worked nonstop, dropping the Stella Maris closer and closer to the planet. The process was dangerous and frustrating, and D.W. was sometimes startlingly short with people.
Everyone was irritable, and after D.W. finally managed to wrestle the ship into an acceptable orbit, they went into freefall and things got even worse. For over three years, they’d worked like mules to be here, within sight of the planet they had come to investigate. In a small place together for over eight months, they’d gotten along remarkably well, but there were accumulated tensions and anxieties and a grinding restlessness that did not surface in shouting matches very often but was evident in sudden silences as people swallowed retorts.
Of all of them, D.W. was most likely to snarl, dressing people down for minor mistakes or lapses in attention to detail or ill-timed remarks. Emilio, no worse than any of the others, nevertheless caught hell most often. When Yarbrough laid down the law to reestablish the regular order, Emilio threw out a little joke about the disordo irregularis. D.W. stared at Sandoz until his eyes dropped and then told him, "If you can’t be serious, be quiet." Which shut Emilio up for days. Another time, after the Father Superior left everyone feeling ruffled by issuing a string of abrupt commands at breakfast, ending with a particularly sharp decree aimed at Sandoz, Emilio tried to take the sting out of it by asking, "You want fries with that order?" Yarbrough just about took his head off with a barrage of very rapid, very colloquial, heavily accented Spanish no one else could follow, but whose meaning they could guess at by the effect.
Anne might have approached D.W. to see if she could provide a little perspective on the general topic of overcompensation but within an hour, she herself was on the receiving end of a lecture, having forgotten to cover a salt shaker, whose contents had then drifted out of the holes over several days. D.W. opened the storage cabinet and a miniature snow squall resulted. There was an unpleasant exchange and George got involved, and it took both Sofia and Jimmy’s intervention to calm everyone down.
Eventually the adjustment to zero G was over, nausea had abated all round, the ordo was back in place, and everyone was once again working with reasonable efficiency. They did a full survey to begin with, launching several satellites to encircle the planet, collecting atmospheric and geographic data. At this distance, the patterns of ocean and land-mass were clear. The overall impression was of greens and blues running to purple, broken by areas of red and brown and yellow, frosted with the white of clouds and very small ice caps. It wasn’t Earth but it was beautiful, and it had a powerful pull on their emotions.
The biggest surprise was the sudden reappearance of the radio signals. Whenever they moved between the moons and the planet, the ship received bursts of incredibly strong radio waves. "They’re aiming at the moons," Jimmy realized as he sketched the system and worked out what was happening physically. There was no indication of any indigenous life or colonies on the moons. "Why would they be aiming radio at the moons?"
"No ionosphere!" George announced triumphantly one afternoon, floating into the common room from his cabin, where he’d been going over the atmospheric data. It came to him out of the blue, when he wasn’t thinking about the radio problem. "They’re using the moons to bounce the signals off."
"That’s it!" Jimmy yelled from the bridge. He shot into the common room, hooked a hand around a support pole like a gigantic orangutan, and friction-spiraled to a halt. "That’s why we only got the signals every fifteen and twenty-seven days back home!"
"You lost me with that one," Anne called from the galley, where she and Sofia were getting lunch ready.
"Without an ionosphere to contain radio waves, you could only use line-of-sight signals, like microwave towers at home," George explained. "If you wanted