“But this ain’t New New. My Life Support heat exchange is slaved into the primary system, which radiates waste heat from the gamma ray reflectors. It’s got to have priority over Life Support—I mean, you want to fry in eight hours or eight nanoseconds? But it’s an added complication, and one that nobody has any experience dealing with.”

He faced the rest of the table. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty much on Eliot’s side. Even if we did want to go back, that fourteen-month flip is a pretty extreme maneuver—must be eighteen, twenty times the propellant mass we’re designed to have at the flip. Lotta mechanical stress.”

“So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?” O’Hara said.

“We’re in shit up to the pits, is what I was going to say. No matter which way we go.”

Eliot pointed at Takashi Sato, Propulsion. “Sato. You have an opinion?”

“Two opinions. As a man, there is no question: I knew I would die aboard this vessel when I agreed to come along. I don’t want to go back, to die in retreat.

“As an engineer … it’s not that simple. Yes, as Mr. Viejo says, the flip at fourteen months is an emergency scenario. But if we were to power down the ship’s spin—live with zero gravity for a few days—and do the flip very slowly, there should be no problem. Possibly much safer, statistically, than continuing on.”

Several people spoke at once. Eliot called on Silke Kleber, I.C.E. Maintenance. “I would not invoke statistics this way. The fact is that whatever happened to them at New New is likely to happen to us if we return. That would be a nice reward for our concern, don’t you think?”

“Suppose they are alive, though, and need us?” O’Hara said. “For all we know, they just lost communication and information, as we did.”

“Then what was Berrigan pointing at?” Viejo said. “A computer program?”

“Might have been their monitor,” Seven said, “going blank just before ours did.”

Eliot shook his head. “This is all guesswork. We can’t make a decision based on ‘what-if’ speculation.” He turned to Seven. “Even if they are alive and need help, what could we give them, realistically?”

“Manpower. Brainpower. A few thousand good engineers and scientists.”

“They’ve got plenty left over. They also have a lot more redundancy in their information systems. If they’re alive, they’ll be back in shape long before we will.”

“You have a nice way of simplifying things, Eliot.” Carlos Cruz, Humanities, stood up. “If we don’t hear from them, they’re dead, so we should go on. If we do hear from them, they’ll be okay, so we should go on.”

Eliot smiled broadly. “Am I wrong, though?”