Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  “It’s me, Major.” James’s voice was flattened and depersonalised by the cheap speaker. “As you see, I’m alive. Unlike you, I have no choice about it.”

  Alex was confused. Adam shook his head, a warning against hope. He opened the general address key and said, “What happened, Captain?”

  “We came to an arrangement, Hector and I.”

  “What kind of arrangement?”

  “He’s with me. He’s under my control. There’s no need to worry.”

  The screens all died, and without a signal the door to the com room slid open. The corridor beyond was twilit, uninviting, and it echoed with James’s voice as it carried over every intercom speaker in Saturn Three.

  “Come this way,” he said, “and you’ll see what we’ve devised.”

  The voice led them on, urging and enticing, a disembodied and spectral presence. They wanted to hold back, but they were tired of fighting and hiding; they moved on with an inner peace that was born of helpless resignation. Surely, nothing could surprise or astonish them now.

  As they came to the first junction in the tunnel the walls and floor shook, the massive pressure bulkhead door at its far end slamming down. They watched with detachment as the doors banged down section by section, each drop shortening the tunnel as the apparent wave passed over them and moved on as the barriers continued to fall in the direction of the com room.

  Now they were sealed into a section of the corridor. Under the grating beneath their feet a pressure-resistant foam was spreading and hardening into a dam which would back up the action of the doors. Measures designed to conserve the precious atmosphere of the station were being called into use to form a prison; they watched calmly, without enthusiasm or excitement.

  “I couldn’t leave you,” James said, and they turned in the direction of the voice. It came from the branching tunnel that joined their own. It was dark and open, and someone—the Captain?—was moving towards them in the shadows. “Not,” James went on, “when you were just on the point of accepting me as one of you.” He was drawing nearer, moving towards the slanted light that fell from the main corridor. “You were going to accept me, weren’t you? I know we argued, but I’m sure it’s nothing that we can’t settle between us. It’ll be so much better this way.”

  He stepped into the light. It was Hector, it was James, it was a horrifying symbiosis of both. Hector was pitted and streaked with filth from his immersion in waste, and to the filth on his chest and arms had been added an overlay of something dark and dry.

  James’s head was clamped firmly on to the robot’s massive shoulders. The mouth was slightly open, and the lips and teeth were blackened with dried blood whilst the heavy-lidded eyes were turned upward, no pupil showing. The neck was stretched and ripped, forming a ragged edge where it met the dirty bodyshell.

  Alex began to sag and Adam, holding her shoulders, could not find the strength to keep her upright; nor could he move his eyes from the macabre parody before him. He stooped, lowering her as gently as possible and falling to his knees in order to support her as she subsided to the ground. Hector began to move towards them.

  FOURTEEN

  Adam awoke suddenly. The room around him was coming alive, warming and brightening as its clock setting moved into an artificial phase of day. It was an unfamiliar room, and he did not know how he had come to be in it.

  As full sensation returned he became aware of a succession of minor discomforts that were beginning to make their complaints in various parts of his body. They intensified as he moved and looked about him, their low overall murmur becoming distinct individual cries of annoyance. He uncrossed his hands from his chest—an unnatural pose which suggested that he had somehow been brought here and arranged in sleep—and lifted himself on an elbow.

  Now he recognised the place. It was Alex’s old room, the one that they had given to James on his arrival. But why was he here?

  He couldn’t remember coming here, he couldn’t remember being tired and falling on to the bed; nor could he remember being brought to the room by anybody else. Such ignorance was perplexing, but it led him to pay close attention to the ache that was beginning to come into focus behind his left eye, and to the bad but half-familiar taste in his mouth.

  A blanker pill. Somebody had given him a blanker pill, effectively wiping out twenty-four hours or more from his memory. He’d experienced the disjointed, disoriented feeling before—back on Earth, of course, where there was so much one might want to forget, and where a temporary confusion as the gap in one’s life healed and closed was far preferable to much of the unpleasantness of everyday existence.

  He searched back, reaching for his last memory, trying to re-establish the continuity as quickly as possible. At first there was nothing and then, fading in from a white and featureless background, a slow replay of an exploding spacecraft. That was good, a useful point from which to begin reconstruction, but nothing came with it; the explosion simply repeated itself in his memory, bursting and burning again and again, a vivid boundary-marker for his perceptions.

  The Captain; something about him, but Adam wasn’t sure what. Perhaps he was alive, or injured, or dead. Adam grimaced as a further series of agonies raised a protest against his efforts to sit upright, and he started to pay closer attention to his body’s dissatisfaction.

  His forearms appeared to be bruised, as were his thighs above the knees; it was as if some weight had been laid across them to pin him down. His shoulders were particularly sore, and his throat was raw and dry. He’d even bitten his tongue a couple of times. Adam began to be rather glad of the blanker pill—the abuse and the pain that his injuries suggested would be better forgotten.

  But what had happened? Memories of the giant Demigod, resurrected and mobile, were vague and hardly seemed to threaten at such a distance.

  I don’t think he wants to kill us.

  Where, he wondered with growing unease, was Alex?

  The door moved aside obediently for him, and he stepped out into the corridor. There was no sound other than the usual pump and shudder of Saturn Three’s life-support systems. He wanted to run along to his own sleeping quarters, see if Alex was there; but he had to be satisfied with a stiff walk, and when he arrived the doors would not open for him. He placed his hands on and tried to push, to no effect. When he tried to knock, his hands hurt and the panel absorbed the sound. He turned away and moved towards the Central Nucleus.

  The nucleus was again deserted, and he passed through and headed for the lab. One door was still peeled back, and inside the mess was just as they had left it when they had run to the airlock. There was a trail of dried dirt leading from the edge of the open waste pit, showing where Hector had managed to drag himself out; this, as far as Adam could see, was the only addition.

  No Hector, no Alex. He moved to the edge of the pit and looked down, rubbing thoughtfully at the back of his neck.

  A few seconds later he was over by the sample analysis benches, pulling the light-concentrating mirrors around to unaccustomed angles on their gooseneck mounts. He managed to position one behind his head and another before his eyes to reflect the image of the first. The mounts were never intended to work at such an angle, and they tended to pull away from him. He had to hold them in place to get the view that he wanted.

  His neck was badly bruised, swelling and purple, and there was something forced under the skin that should not have been there. Adam twisted the mirror to more of an angle, bur his hair was falling across and covering the area that he wanted to see. He dropped the mirror and brushed the hair aside, then tried again.

  A sphincter of neat stitches held the socket in place. The skin had been shaved for about an inch all around, its exposed pinkness dragged up into little puckers by the surgical embroidery. The stitches pulled as he moved his head but the socket was firm, bone-rigid, the coloured plastic cap keeping it clear.

  Last time Adam had seen the socket, it had been an irremovable part of the Captain. Obviously this was no lon
ger the case.

  He sat back, fingers barely touching the implant, sick with a growing anger at this interference with his physical integrity. Almost as if his discovery had been awaited and noted, the lab’s p.a. speaker crackled and came alive.

  “Good morning, Adam.” It was James’s voice. “Did you sleep well?”

  Adam looked up at the lab camera. It had turned to cover him. The access plate on its side was missing, typical of Hector’s style of repair.

  “What did you do to me?” Adam said, but his voice came out as little more than a croak.

  “I hope you’ll forgive the medication, but it was necessary, believe me. You fought me so much, and with no good reason. I’m sure the sleep was some help in getting over it.”

  “Where’s Alex?”

  James’s voice skipped on, ignoring the question. The camera tracked as Adam moved across the lab. “Because you’re probably not feeling a hundred per cent, I thought I’d give you a fairly easy programme for the day.” The lab tannoy faded as Adam stepped through the door, and a speaker in the corridor took over as the camera in a wall recess moved to take him in. “First, we’ll have to restore the damage to the lab. The open floor could be dangerous, and we want to get back to operational status as soon as possible. I notice that we’re still low on samples from the PP twenty-five area on the grid since you cut your last expedition short. We’ll get that shortfall made up as soon as we can spare you for a few hours. In the meantime, since we’ll be doing work on the hydroponics waste pits we might as well catch up on general maintenance. Base computer tells me they need far more frequent attention than you seem to have been giving them lately.”

  The com room was empty. The screens all changed abruptly as he entered, a dozen Adams standing alone in the doorways of a dozen com rooms.

  He moved to the console, becoming images within images as the com room camera moved with him. The mixer panel was lit but unresponsive, more or less as he had expected. He looked up. James’s voice was still chattering from the corner speaker, lining up an endless series of petty tasks for Adam.

  “What are you trying to put into my head?” he demanded.

  “Put in?” The Captain’s voice seemed to contain a note of genuine surprise. “I don’t think you understand. As far as we know, the brain link is a one-way contact. Of course, that may not be the case; but we’ll have plenty of time to experiment later. In the meantime, I’m quite happy to be taking out. I find your mind so interesting. And you have such an abundance of energy to go with it; quite remarkable. For your age, that is.”

  “Where’s Alex?”

  “Please be patient, Adam. Any questions you want to ask will be answered when the time comes.”

  “What have you done with her?”

  “I’ve asked you to be patient. Much as I’d like to continue this discussion, I have some pressing business to attend to. Saturn Three is emerging from eclipse with regard to the Survey platform, and it seems they wish to speak to us. Excuse me for a moment.”

  The Survey platform? Adam stood for a moment as if unable to believe his ears, and then snapped out of the dream state and looked around. Ignoring the aches that the activity caused he righted one of the discarded swivel chairs and pulled it over to the console, sliding into it and readying himself for the first bleep of the Survey contact signal.

  “This is Survey Nineteen. Come in Saturn Three.” The voice was distant and harsh, the delivery casual but precise. “Come in Saturn Three. Shake out the sack and get your butts to the com room.”

  “Hello, Nineteen, this is Saturn Three. You won’t believe how . . .” Adam’s voice tailed off, and his momentary surge of joy evaporated. The pick-up microphone was dead and another voice indistinguishable from his own was broadcasting a reply.

  “Saturn Three,” acknowledged the voice that was not Adam’s. “Receiving you, Survey.”

  “Routine check on shadowlock emergence. Won’t keep you any time at all, Three.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Nice to hear another voice once in a while.”

  “Come off it, Three. Everybody up here knows how much you like your privacy. Can’t say I blame you, either. How’s our favourite Spaceborn?”

  There was a laugh in the voice of the not-Adam. “She’s fine, never been better.”

  “She anywhere around?”

  “Right next to me. You want a word?”

  “Wouldn’t miss a chance like that. Put her on.”

  There was a pause, a shuffling. Then a voice that was either Alex or a perfect imitation said, “Hello out there.”

  “Hello to you. How’s the old man treating you?”

  “No problem. Any time he gets frisky, I hide his walking frame. What’s new with the Survey?”

  “May be some good news from Titan next month, we’re all keeping our fingers crossed.”

  “Sure.” Not-Alex sounded like she’d heard it all before. “There’s always going to be good news from Titan next month. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “You could surprise us yet. How are you getting on with that Demigod unit we dropped you?”

  “Best thing you ever did for us, no complaints at all. You’ve no scandal for us?”

  “Scandal? Clean-living boys like us? No chance. We had a monkey name of Benson space himself last month. Don’t think you knew him, he was fresh out from Earth. Course failure. We never found the body.”

  For a moment there was radio silence. Then, when the simulacrum of Adam’s voice returned, it was strangely devoid of its earlier air of bonhomie.

  “We’ve nothing else to tell you,” he said. “Any urgent messages?”

  “Not this time around.” The contact man on the platform was obviously puzzled by the sudden switch in mood, but he did not pry. “Have to love you and leave you, Three, I’ve got Enceladus coming up in four and a half minutes.”

  “Saturn Three out. Nice to talk to you.”

  “And to you. Until next time.”

  Adam sat back in the swivel chair, eyes focused on nowhere, his hand lightly touching the soreness of the implant at the back of his head. Had he really expected that Hector would overlook their one line of communication with the platform? Logic said no, but still Adam had leapt at what he thought was the opportunity. The predisposition of the human spirit towards hope, he reflected, was immense and inexplicable.

  “Now, Adam, I think we can proceed.” The voice was back to James, and had become businesslike again. Please make your way to the laboratory, then we can get started.”

  Adam did not react, but stared ahead as if he had not heard. The com room door abruptly slid open, as if to encourage him.

  “Please, Adam. I’d prefer not to have to force you.”

  Adam turned his head slowly, looked at the door without interest. Force me, you bastard, he thought. You want anything from me, you can force me.

  The door zipped closed, almost in a gesture of impatience. “Listen, Adam. You could starve, you could fry, you could freeze. I could do any of this to you if you don’t co-operate. And whatever happens to you will also affect Alex.”

  The door opened again, his second chance, and this time he moved. The voice moved with him, transferring to a corridor speaker. Hector had become more than a robot, he had somehow managed to soak himself into the very fabric of the station. Saturn Three had become one vast and all-enveloping extension of the Demigod’s perceptions and personality.

  “That’s good. I’m glad you’ve decided to see sense. This way we can come to the best working arrangement.”

  Alex emerged into the nucleus at the same moment as Adam, and they fell together in relief, James/Hector ignored for the moment.

  “Hurry along, please,” said the tannoy voice testily.

  “He was using your voice,” Alex whispered into Adam’s ear. “I thought I was going mad.”

  As he held her he lifted his hand, pushing her long hair aside and hoping that she wouldn’t realise what he was doing. His fingers brushed th
e downy furrow at the back of her neck, but there was no sign of the robot’s rough surgery. Confusion began to edge against relief, and she said, “What are you doing?”

  “Go along to the lab,” he said, his voice deliberately low. “I’ll join you in just a minute.”

  “Go in on my own? Adam, I can’t.”

  “You have to.” He turned his head aside, and her eyes widened as she saw the implant and the mistreated flesh around it. “I need you to keep him occupied so he won’t be able to watch me.”

  She shook her head, and Adam gave her a squeeze of encouragement. “You can do it. When you’re around he doesn’t seem to be able to see anything else.”

  He kissed her once, and then moved away. She stayed in the nucleus, looking after him; he turned, gave her a smile of confident assurance, and then walked on in the direction of the ramp and the upper nucleus.

  Hector had tidied himself up for her. The blood and the dirt were gone, and the golden curves of his bodyshell had been polished to a high brilliance. One could almost have believed him to be a tall and superhuman figure with his armour moulded into the shape of a musculature and his human stance, but as a substitute for a man he was incomplete and unconvincing. The utilitarian swivels and servos of his arms and hands gave him away, as did the turret and angle-poise mechanism that served him for a head.

  Perhaps it had bothered him once; it didn’t seem to bother him now. He’d obviously found some better salve for his ego. The turret came around to bear on her, and then dodged slightly to either side, looking for Adam to follow through the gap in the lab door.

  “You called me,” she said quickly, hoping to capture his attention before he could become curious. “Here I am.”

  “So you are.” The voice was Adam’s. The sensor moved to her and stayed on her. “May I say how beautiful you are looking today. Please, come forward where I can see you better.”