We’re all going to die, said a voice inside his head. We’re going to die and it’s my fault. All my own goddamned stupid fault.
The Mars module was about five meters starboard of the station’s leading edge and drifting slowly. Dan flew the MMU into that gap. Both hatches appeared to be properly sealed. Dan jetted around to the aft end of the module. The only way to see inside was through the observation blister—if the lid of the clamshell was retracted.
It was.
Inside the blister, a male and a female Martian clutched each other while their crimson flight suits, turned inside out but still attached to their wrists and ankles, billowed around them.
“What the hell!” Dan yelled into his helmet microphone.
“Don’t know,” said O’Donnell. “Look there.”
Beyond the Martians coupling and through the open door of the blister, Kurt Jaeckle bounced between the floor and ceiling of the module, cushioning each landing with his hands and feet. There was an unmistakable expression of glee on his face, the kind Dan expected Jaeckle would wear if he ever landed on Mars.
“This module isn’t going anywhere,” said Dan as he tapped out a tiny blast from the retrothrusters. “We’d better get inside.”
“But it’s drifting away!” O’Donnell’s voice in his earphones sounded demanding, urgent, but not panicked. That’s something, at least, Dan said to himself.
Aloud, he answered, “It’s sealed tight. It’s got no propulsion. It’ll drift, but we’ll be able to get it and reattach after we get the station straightened away.”
O’Donnell did not answer. Dan hoped his tone of command instilled more confidence than he actually felt. Maybe they could get the Martians back before the damned ET drifted too far. Maybe. It depended on what the hell was going on in the station itself.
Dan looked carefully at each of the other modules as he and O’Donnell looped toward the main airlock. Nothing else was obviously amiss. There was no voice traffic over any of the comm channels and the single life-support alarm still blared.
It seemed to take hours to get to the airlock, detach the MMU, open the hatch, and go inside. Dan looked through the tiny portholes of the airlock’s inner hatch as he started the repressurization pumps. Halfway down the connecting tunnel, Stu Roberts jerked about as if holding the end of a live wire.
“What the hell’s he doing?” Dan muttered over the clattering of the pumps.
O’Donnell nudged Dan away.
“Giving a rock concert,” he said matter-of-factly. “Does that every day.”
O’Donnell’s interpretation lent a crude logic to Roberts’s movements. The young tech windmilled his arm across the strings of an air guitar, pounded invisible drums, and ran his fingers along the keys of an imaginary piano. Two pairs of European couples, their lab uniforms disheveled and torn, popped out of ELM. They whirled and tumbled, their faces contorted in silent laughter. Hisashi Oyamo followed, bare to the waist. He pounded his beach-ball gut with his fists as he drifted near Roberts.
Dan tried calling Lorraine. Static crackled on Channel D. O’Donnell cut in on Channel C. “Green light, Dan.” The airlock pressure had equalized.
“Don’t open your helmet!” Dan snapped. “We’re keeping the suits on. I show one life-support alarm sounding. Everybody’s acting so weird, maybe there’s something in the air.”
“Like what?”
“Who the hell knows? But the suits stay on.”
Suddenly, Dan’s comm unit exploded into a synthesized cacophony of Klaxons, horns, buzzers, and bells. The airlock seemed to slide sideways and both men tumbled toward its outer hatch.
“What—?” O’Donnell gasped.
Outside the hatch’s porthole, the stars seemed to slant dizzyingly across the black sky. But Dan didn’t need a visual to know what was happening.
“The station!” he yelled. “It’s gone into a tumble!”
4 SEPTEMBER 1998
TRIKON STATION
Sometime earlier, while Dan was prebreathing pure oxygen in preparation for visiting the observatory, Chakra Ramsanjawi had sailed forth from his compartment in Hab 1 wearing an emergency breathing mask and a tank strapped to his back that held a three-hour air supply. The time was 0945 hours, and no one was in the connecting tunnel to notice him. The Martians and Trikon scientists were at workstations in their respective science modules. Freddy Aviles was still sleeping off the side effects of the previous night’s interrogation. Stanley was on duty in the command module in Tighe’s usual place.