Free Second Chance by David D. Levine Page A

background noise.
    Every time I found myself wondering where those hands, that mouth, had been, I reminded myself that it was wrong to think of him as “a homosexual.” He was more than what he did in bed. He was a whole human being—and a fine human being, far more tolerant of me than I’d been of him. As we worked, he displayed no discomfort or awkwardness from my earlier self’s mistreatment of him.
    I felt like a heel.
    Bobb’s brow furrowed, then his eyebrows shot up. “Hey! Got one!”
    “Let me see.”
    He swiveled his monitor so we could both see it. “There.” The graph showed a nice periodic pulse at 260 MHz, not very powerful but extremely crisp and regular.
    Extremely crisp. I’d never seen a natural signal with such a constrained pulse width. “Wait a minute. What’s the period?”
    “A little under a second.” He tapped with his stylus on the controls. “Point eight two seconds, to be precise.”
    “Wait, wait...” A memory nagged at me. Each of Cassie ’s five modules broadcast a module beacon—a powerful omnidirectional ping at 215 MHz, which they used to locate each other on arrival at Tau Ceti. “If it’s 215 megahertz, blueshifted to 260...” I turned the monitor toward myself and popped up a calculator window, which told me that the source was approaching at nineteen percent of lightspeed. A very familiar number. And subtracting the same blueshift from the signal’s 0.82-second period yielded an original period of... exactly one second. “Look at this. One second period. 215 megahertz. Nineteen percent of lightspeed. Does that mean anything to you?”
    Bobb’s eyes widened and his mouth broke into a huge grin that echoed my own. “The module beacon.”
    We looked at each other. “It’s Alpha !” I shouted.
    Bobb and I grabbed each other in an enormous hug, laughing and pounding each other on the back. The return of the lost module meant more metals... more instruments... more living space! We scooted off in opposite directions to share the happy news with the rest of the crew.
    I didn’t realize until I was talking with Matt that I’d embraced Bobb without fear. I smiled to myself at that.

    -o0o-

    The grainy image on the big monitor showed why Alpha was so late. One of the four sails that was supposed to catch the light from the boost lasers, then drop off for coast phase, was still attached—bent and twisted into a crumpled C shape. The sail had probably jammed on initial deployment, and had cut the module’s thrust during boost phase by twenty percent or more. There was some concern that the jammed sail could cause problems during the first aerobraking maneuver, as Alpha slammed into Molière’s atmosphere at interstellar speed. But simulations showed that it would most likely come off as the module’s aerobraking ballute inflated, and if it didn’t do that it would probably simply burn away early in the maneuver.
    Everyone chattered excitedly over the personal possessions the module held. My own two hundred and seventy grams was mostly devoted to a pocket Bible that had been my grandfather’s—I remembered thinking of alpha and omega as I placed it in the bin labeled ALPHA. But then my breath caught in my throat as I remembered something else that was on board the wayward module—a full set of crew tissue samples and memory scans. Left to its own devices, Alpha was fully capable of reconstituting the entire crew by itself.
    Of course, that wouldn’t happen. We had already transmitted the rendezvous code, and when Alpha joined us after two years of deceleration it would be unoccupied. But if the situation had been reversed, if it had been Alpha that had arrived on time and the other modules delayed, it would have been Alpha’s cells and scans that would have created... me. Or someone like me.
    Would that person have had as tough a time of it as I had? Probably he would not have been vived at all. I still didn’t know why I had been.
    Which made me realize that