Read Second Chance for Free Online

resort? What are ‘greeblies’ and why are the ‘woffers’ so upset about them? And this is from just twenty years after we left! The later stuff is even worse.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I guess what I’m saying is, why are you worrying about trivia from Earth when there’s more than a lifetime of fascinating science to do right here?”
    Knowing I’d never convince him, I mumbled some excuse and turned away. But he hadn’t changed my mind either... I’d already followed the lives of my nieces and nephews as far as I could, and I wanted to know more about them, their children and grandchildren, the places I’d lived...
    Nuru kept reminding us that our primary mission was to gather as much data as possible and send it back as quickly as possible. Only when we had completed the initial system survey and our situation seemed stable, she said, would we have time to spend on distractions like catching up with eighty years of scientific progress back home. But I’d done the best I could toward our primary mission and I’d gotten nowhere with it. Here at least was something I knew I could do .

    -o0o-

    I’d poked at the problem a few times in the two weeks I’d been awake, but hadn’t even been able to determine the cause. Now I threw myself into the investigation full time.
    I started with basic hardware diagnostics. I was certain that Bobb would already have run those, but I wanted to establish a firm baseline. And in only a few hours of work, I did determine that the communications hardware was operating properly—at least to the extent it was able to check itself.
    But a hardware diagnostic was just the first step—like making sure a non-functioning device was actually plugged in and booted up. The next phase would dig deeper, isolating each component and testing its inputs and outputs separate from the system. I wrote myself a checklist and set to work.
    Days went by, then weeks. Each time I thought I’d found the source of the problem, it seemed that something else nearby would fail, requiring me to fix that before I could proceed. With nothing to report, other than that I was spending almost all my time on a side project that Nuru had explicitly told me not to do, I spent less and less time in the common area at dinner, just dashing in, grabbing a bite, and dashing out; finally I stopped attending completely. I spent hours at a time with my head buried in access panels, or staring at technical readouts. Sometimes I went for days without speaking to anyone.
    Nobody seemed to be missing me much. Mari, Tien, and even Bobb—who’d become extremely distant, for no reason I could discern—were probably quietly relieved that I wasn’t doing anything to mess up their science or rile up their emotions. Nuru had always given her people a pretty free rein, and probably assumed I was going into more depth on Achebe’s crust; she didn’t pester me for a status report. And Kyra and Matt were busy enough with their own work that they might not even have noticed I wasn’t interacting with them as much as I used to. Or else they, too, were relieved at it.
    But no matter how hard I worked, how little sleep I got, how many other malfunctions I worked around, the answer was always the same: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was an engineer’s nightmare—all the pieces worked, but the whole didn’t. The big dish was able to receive signals from our probe satellites, the signal was properly amplified, the amplified signal could be decoded, the decoded signal could be stored. That was under test conditions. But when I put all the pieces together and pointed the dish at Earth? Nothing.
    Naturally, I began to worry that it was Earth, not the dish, that was at fault. But with all three modules showing the same sudden cut-off of both natural and artificial signals at different times, that seemed unlikely. A global multiple thermonuclear detonation would have ended with a burst of radio noise; a meteor strike would have