by Unknown
The door to her sleeping chamber was open. The chamber itself was empty, with all the personal clutter stowed away.
Vandamme was at her workstation, craning round at him. Her screen showed a view of the hangar with the suited figure of Lewis still poring over the dismantled harvester.
‘What is he doing?’ asked Paul.
‘Just maintenance,’ said Vandamme. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’ She eyed him warily. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ said Paul curtly. ‘May I watch?’
She was uneasy. That might be because he had marched in on her. It might be because they had parted so badly last time they had spoken.
But it might be for another reason.
‘Do you want me to tell Lewis you’re out?’
‘Not yet. I may change my mind again.’
She did not turn back to the monitor. She was keeping her eyes on him. He stood there, balancing on his toes, and said nothing.
Suddenly she said, ‘Would you like me to make you coffee?’
‘Yes, if you want,’ he answered, surprised.
‘Just watch him for me, would you? You don’t have to tell him it’s you.’
She rose. Glancing at him once more, she left the chamber.
Immediately Paul took her place at the console. He said, ‘Hunter.’
The face of the ape-man appeared.
‘Report activity on all workstations.’
‘Workstations One and Three are inactive. Workstation Two is Hunter. Workstation Four, repeat of message zero eight: zero four: zer—’
‘Thank you. Kitchens?’
‘Increase of energy consumption by three kilowatts in the Bravo unit kitchen.’
That would be Vandamme making the coffee. But she did not need to stand over it while it was brewing. She could have slipped into another chamber, even into his own. What was she doing?
He knew it was unreasonable. If she had been going to sabotage his transmission she would have done it here, before he turned up. And in the time it took to make coffee, what could she do? One burst at best. But he was in the realm of the unreasonable now. Any move by anyone must be suspected. Paranoia must be the worst of all madnesses – the ultimate loneliness. And he must act as if the madness were his. ‘Main radio transmitter?’
‘Responding to Workstation Four – repeat of message zero eight: zero—’
‘Auxiliary transmitters?’
‘Inactive.’
Vandamme was in the kitchen. Lewis was in the outer layers, and May … Where was May?
Vandamme was in the Bravo unit kitchen! She was in the living-quarter suite that Paul and May and Lewis inhabited. Why had she gone there, when there was an identical kitchen just opposite her own chamber in the Alfa suite?
Where was May?
‘How do you like that?’ said Lewis.
Paul sat bolt upright in shock. Voice shaking, he said, ‘Hunter!’ again. The ape appeared. But Paul could not speak. He did not know what instruction to give.
It shouldn’t make any difference, he told himself. If Vandamme had gone to the Bravo unit so she could speak with May – it should make no difference. The monitors were all inactive. The auxiliary antennae were inactive. No one was interfering.
But where was May?
She should be on watch. Lewis must have shuffled the watches again. Why? Why had he done that? What were they up to?
‘It’s still a bit crooked,’ came Lewis’s voice over the monitor.
Paul jumped to his feet. So abrupt was his movement that in the light gravity he lifted off the floor and stumbled as he came down. He turned for the door of the chamber. It opened. Vandamme had returned with two covered mugs in her hand. ‘It’s strange that you came in just then,’ she said. ‘I was wondering about something you said, and whether I could ask you about it. When you wrote that about the We making the universe—’
‘Wait!’ he exclaimed, pushing past her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Need to check something!’
‘Don’t you want your coffee?’
He skipped away, ignoring her. He passed the airlock. In the far common room he stopped in front of the seal to May’s chamber.
‘May?’
No answer.
‘May!’
No answer.
He went in.
The room was dark but it brightened immediately on his entry. There was no one there. The monitor was unmanned. The screen was blank.
‘May!’ Paul shouted. He beat on the sleeping-chamber door. ‘Are you there?’
A voice answered indistinctly from inside.
As he waited for the door to open, Paul had time to ask himself what he was doing, hammering here at May’s bedroom. He had been surprised. Did that matter so much? There would be some explanation why the watches had changed again. But he couldn’t think what it was. And the change was suspicious. Anything was suspicious …
The door opened. May stood there, dressed only in a sleeping shirt that dropped to her upper thighs. Her hair was tousled, her eyes small, her cheeks suffused with sleep.
‘This had better be important,’ she croaked.
He stared at her.
‘What’s the matter, Paul?’ said May.
‘I thought you were on watch,’ he stammered.
‘Vandamme agreed to stand in for me.’
‘Why?’
‘For God’s sake – what business is that of yours, Paul?’
‘Why did the watches change?’
She glared at him. ‘Because pregnant people,’ she said curtly, ‘need to sleep.’ She looked over his shoulder. Vandamme was standing in the door to the common room. She had followed him all the way from her chamber. She still held the two covered cups in her hand.
‘What on Earth’s going on?’ cried May.
For a moment he stared at them both, feeling all the blood running to his face. Then he snarled, ‘We’re not on Earth,’ and stalked past Vandamme to shut himself in his own chamber.
None of them had interfered. Lewis had been in the outer layers. May had been asleep – fast asleep, until he had come beating at her door. Vandamme had been monitoring Lewis and then making the coffee. She had made it in the Bravo unit because after ten years of use the Alfa kitchen devices were no longer reliable.
There was no one else – unless he counted the unborn child, curled in the warm blindness of May’s womb.
And his signal had been jammed again.
Your 09:04:0124 Message corrupted. The following groups unreadable …
… Investigate and report.
‘Hunter!’
‘Yes?’
‘Has someone tampered with you?
‘No.’
‘My message was corrupted. How was it done?’
‘I cannot answer this question.’
‘Someone’s tampered with you!’
‘No.’
‘But what if you’re wrong?’
The ape-man stared at him. No answer came.
‘What if you are—?’ began Paul again. Then he stopped himself. He looked into the blankness of the ape-man’s expression. ‘No, cancel that! Try again. There are four people on the station. Which of them were active between zero one-twenty and zero one-thirty yesterday?’
‘Records show that five people came to the station. One deceased at eleven: zero three: thirteen thirty-one: twenty fifty-seven. Two were on watch, one was off watch but active, and one off watch and inactive at the time you indicate.’
‘Stop.’
At the shoulders of the Hunter the concealing grasses waved silently, like the heads of a crowd of people all on tiptoe.
‘Say all that again.’
‘Records show that five people came to the station. One deceased at eleven: zero three: thirteen thirty-one: twenty fifty-seven—’
‘What if that’s wrong?’
Again the ape-man stared at him blankly.
XIV
They could have done
it, Paul thought.
They could have done it. They could have lied when they reported his death. He could be alive now. The station had three hundred per cent redundancy. There would be other living-quarter suites, besides the two he knew about. If Lewis was heating and pressurizing two suites, why not three? There could be sleeping chambers, furniture, even monitors. Lewis could instruct the conveyors to bring the man his food. He could have powered up a separate computer system and be doing everything relating to the extra man on that. No Hunter could leap from one system to another. What do you know about how many people the station can hold?
Lewis! Who had gone out to recover the body? Lewis had. Fake the death – on the screen the crew would see nothing but the suited body collapsing. Set up new chambers for the fugitive. Bury something man-shaped and say that it was the body. All possible. No one else need know, except Lewis – and Thorsten.
But – did Vandamme not know? Was it possible that her partner, and her colleague, could let her live for nine years in the station believing that she was alone?
Possible, yes.
But far, far more likely that she knew.
She did know. Her personality – that closed, praying, work-obsessed personality – was a lie. They had known, all four of them, that a new man was coming to the station. They had known that sooner or later he would want company. They had decided, together, how she would keep the newcomer at a distance while her partner hid. Paul had looked inside her sleeping chamber and seen it neat and tidy – so neat and tidy that perhaps she never slept there. And at the end of each watch she would slip through another airlock to spend the night in her living man’s arms.
Then she was the biggest liar of all. She was the real enemy.
But why, why, why? Why fake a death? Why go that far?
Because …
It will think about how to get the World Ear to function out here after all, Lewis had said. And This is the worst possible thing you could have done.
To get the World Ear to function, Earth must understand the magnetic tail. It was data from the tail that was lost whenever there was interference. But the interference itself would seem suspicious. The obvious suspect would be the station telmex. Unless he was thought dead.
It was Thorsten who had suggested that the source was the field.
Could they have done it? Could they? Crazy, to think that a man might be willing to fake his death and spend the remainder of his life in hiding, living apart from the others like a ghost in the station! And condemn another man, who was happy in the World Ear and the warm air of Earth, to be transported out here to take his place? It was a mad thought – but was it he who was mad, or they? It would stay with him now. It would gnaw at him. It would drive him insane, just thinking about it. And when he looked at it, was it any more crazy than allowing himself to be exiled to the very edge of the solar system? Once the reasons seem good, who could say what a man might do?
He had eliminated everyone else.
It was not an accident.
It was not natural.
But if – just supposing – it were true? Just supposing there were not four people in the station but five – how would he prove it?
There were thousands of bubbles. Eliminate the Alfa and Bravo living quarters and the outer layers, which could only function as insulation, and there would be – well, at least a thousand still. How could he search through them all? Put on a suit and go out to look? They would soon see what he was doing. Lewis could deny him the permissions to pass certain seals, claiming that his behaviour was irrational. And who would blame Lewis for that?
Or worse, they could simply move Thorsten into chambers that Paul had already explored; pressurize them, depressurize the old ones and watch while Paul blundered on through the bubbles, searching for a man who had slipped through his fingers. He could live his life and die in this place and never know the truth.
Report to Earth?
But Earth would think he was mad! He could not risk that. Not yet. First he would have to build a stronger case. First, he would have to find out whether or not he was mad himself. And …
And there was a way.
There was one place where the man could not be.
XV
The display reflected inside his pressure-suit helmet read: Ex: 0.6 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -80°. He was back in the main hangar.
The lighting flickered on coldly, triggered by his movement. The rows of crawlers stood in their places. At the near end of one row was a harvester with its back wheels dismantled – the one that Lewis had been working on. It sat on its grounded rear axle like a big grey frog squatting on its haunches.
Paul skipped quickly down the aisle between the machines. He came to a halt before the red crawler.
‘Power,’ he said.
A yellow light flared on the crawler’s roof.
‘Open.’
The hatch opened. The interior was lit. He clambered up and inside.
‘Close.’
He passed through the airlock and pulled himself along to the pilot seats, trailing his legs in the minimal gravity. The screen came on automatically. So did the displays. He keyed in the pressurization sequence. Numbers on the screen and inside his helmet began to whirl. Gradually he became aware of sounds – the hiss of air, the hum of power.
The power indicator had started to fall: 98%.
Ex: 1.0 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -12°.
The crawler was a little pressurized box. If he removed his helmet now he would be able to survive.
He did not remove his helmet. He called up the crawler command mode options and studied them. He chose Full Manual Override.
An alert appeared. Full Manual Override meant that the crawler could not be commanded remotely from the station. If the crawler driver became incapacitated, the station crew could not pilot him out of trouble.
Paul dismissed the alert.
The system demanded an authorization code. He gave his. The system accepted it. It trusted him, because he was the telmex. Communications were his responsibility.
He placed his feet on the pedals, his hand on the clumsy great joystick.
Forward.
The hum increased. The screen showed the seal at the far end of the hangar coming towards him. At this point in his trip with Vandamme they had turned to the right, into the first lichen bubble.
He kept the joystick pointed ahead.
The seal filled the screen. He lifted his foot to halt the crawler, found the Open key and pressed it. He piloted the crawler into the airlock.
Vandamme’s voice spoke in his ear.
‘Who’s in the crawler?’
She must have seen him on her monitor. Maybe she had been about to take another of her search crawlers out.
‘Munro? Is that you in the crawler?’
‘… Yes.’
‘Are you going outside?’
‘I’m doing an inspection.’
‘You should use a utility crawler for inspections outside.’
‘This is better for what I have to do.’
Lewis could override any instructions he gave to the utility crawlers. He did not want to get halfway to his goal only to find his crawler turning back.
‘We should have full crew if you are going outside.’
Full crew meant two people in the manned crawler, one piloting a utility crawler remotely to lead or follow, and one – Lewis – in overall command. And an outside mission should be conducted to a clear plan, with schedules, objectives and abort patterns all discussed and agreed beforehand. And Earth should be informed too.
‘It’s not necessary for this mission.’
The airlock had closed behind him. The numbers on the screen were tumbling again. He became aware of a faint creaking around him, running along the sides of the cabin like the steps of a huge but invisible spider. He wondered what it was.
The exterior temperature had reached -140°. It blinked and displayed 133K. The creaking intensified. For an instant the temperature displ
ay wavered back to Celsius. Then it switched to Kelvin again, falling slowly to 129. The seal ahead of him opened. He drove forward into the first insulating layer.
It was unlit. He rotated the screen view. The lights of the crawler, rotating obediently on the roof, showed him a huge, featureless, arched tunnel, running to left and right and curving backwards as it ran. The view was misty. The gases that filled the tunnel were dense with the extreme cold. The seal to the next layer was ahead of him. He pressed the Open key. Nothing happened.
Cursing softly, he hit it again. Still nothing happened. He wondered if Vandamme had grown suspicious enough of what he was doing to override the crawler controls and lock the seal. But Vandamme should not have been able to do that. Only Lewis had the necessary permissions.
He had to get out, quickly! Once he was out, no one could stop him.
Think. Why doesn’t an airlock open? Because the automatic systems pick up a danger of decompression. And the obvious danger of decompression was …
He rotated the view again. The seal behind him was still closing. That was all it had been. Calm down. He must calm down. He was not thinking clearly and he must. There was a long way to go.
There. Closed. Now hit the Open key. And forward. And wait, and wait and wait …
The airlock closed behind him. The readings began to tumble again. Again he heard that ominous creaking, filtering through his helmet. Now he understood what it was.
It was thermal. The synthetic hull of the crawler was contracting as the temperature dropped away. Normally it stood in a hangar heated to -80° Celsius. But in the space of a few short minutes it was being exposed to a savage change – over a hundred degrees. The crawler was actually shrinking in the grip of the cold.
Paul swallowed. His palms tingled. The display had reached 90K. The seal ahead of him was opening. He rolled forward.
Another featureless, curving tunnel; but a different shape. The chamber was shorter – he could see the end walls. The outer layer was the most exposed to impacts and failures, and so had more compartments for greater safety. It was thick with mist. The mist flickered with light, as if tiny, silent thunderstorms were playing somewhere in the chamber, out of view of the screen. The glow came and went and left everything in darkness. A few seconds later it came again. It was the aurora of the station – the action of charged particles from space colliding with the gases trapped in this outer protective layer. The atmosphere out here was not composed of oxygen but of nitrogen and ammonia. The pressure hovered around 0.3. Even so, at ninety degrees Kelvin the gases were on the verge of liquefying. Droplets glistened where his headlights fell on the far wall.
