The disk hummed very purposefully and powerfully. He guessedand was pretty positive he was correct that he stood before a synthetic-gravity generator. He felt a gentle field of static electricity surrounding it, one that caused his loose hairs to shift and stir.
Kane had no idea of the effect radius of the gener-ated-graviton field, but the device looked so bulky and heavy he doubted every habitat was equipped with one. More than likely the compound was divided up into sections, with similar environmental and gravity-regulating stations placed at equidistant points that would allow the different fields to bleed into one another for stability.
Bending down, he scrutinized the LED and the small row of buttons beneath it. He chose one at random and pushed it. Immediately the steady drone of the generator dropped in pitch and the number on the readout screen changed from 0.8 to 0.9. He felt no substantial difference in the gravity.
Kane kept his finger poised over the buttons, face set in lines of concentration, weighing a number of causes and effects. Then he said, “You’re doing it againmaking up shit as you go along.”
He immediately felt a little embarrassed by speaking his thoughts aloud, but he began depressing the buttons in descending order. As the steady hum of the generator altered in pitch, the LED flashed the changing numbers. They went from 0.9 to 0.8 to 0.6 and to 0.5.
When the display glowed with 0.2G, Kane heard an odd ringing in his ears and felt a lifting sensation in his belly that spread throughout his entire body. By the time the LED read 0.0G, his feet were a few inches above the floor. Mars’s gravity was a little under half of Earth’s, but the generator nullified even that, as he had expected.
He hoped the generator wasn’t equipped with an automatic fail-safe reset, which would restore normal gravity, but even if it were, the sudden change to zero-G conditions would give him a small edge.
Most of the time, that was all he ever asked for.
Chapter 28
Grant couldn’t be sure if the oxygen content flowing from the air vent was stronger than before. His nose had been broken three times in the past, and always poorly reset. Unless an odor was extraordinarily pleasant or virulently repulsive, he was incapable of detecting subtle smells unless they were right under his nostrils. A running joke during his Mag days had been that Grant could eat a hearty dinner with a dead skunk lying on the table next to his plate.
For twenty minutes or so, he had sat and leafed through volume two of The Cambridge Medieval History . He didn’t read much of the dense, double columns of copy, but he found the illustrations, particularly the color plates of knights in plate armor, of interest.
Upon taking a deep breath, he caught a very faint odor that hadn’t been in the room before. He stood up, turning to face the vent, inhaling the cool air flowing from the duct. Since he couldn’t be sure if the new smell meant an increased oxygen content, he decided to wait a few minutes for the mixture to be completely circulated through the habitat. He had no inclination to face EHe or her agony-inducing harp unless she had an additional handicap, even a marginal one.
He returned to his chair and silently counted off three minutes. When he rose, he experienced a brief wave of dizziness, a light-headedness that abated as quickly as it had come over him. Holding the heavy hardcover book in his right hand, he went to the hatch and beat loudly on it with his left fist, shouting, “Hey, open up! We’re hungry!”
He had to repeat his call and hammer even more forcefully before the hatch finally irised open. Elle stood blinking up at him, a beatific smile on her pushed-in face. Though she still held the harp, it wasn’t pointed directly at him.
“Huh?” she asked, words slurred. “Whad you wan’?”
She swayed a bit from side to side, her long toe-thumbs crooking and uncrooking on the floor.
Recalling a passage from the book, Grant said sternly, “We want a haunch of roast mutton with mint jelly and tankards of ale.”