Brigid murmured, “This place is clean, in good repair. Somebody’s been using it recently.”
“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,” responded Grant.
Kane passed a large VGA monitor screen, a twin of the one in the Cerberus control complex. The power indicator below it was lit, so on impulse, he stroked a key. Instantly an image flickered across it, filling the four-foot square of ground glass.
The image swiftly acquired sharp focus, but it still took Kane a moment of staring to understand what he was looking at. Brigid said, “An exterior view of the station, probably transmitted from some sort of vid sat in synchronous orbit with it.”
Kane realized she was right, but the sight didn’t awe or particularly impress him. The screen showed it clearlya round, slowly rotating mass, like a floating coin seen edge-on. Illuminated by sunlight, it looked ancient, rust pitted, slapped together. Some sections were completely skeletal with no outer sheathings at all, metal frameworks exposed to the void.
“This is really something,” said Brigid.
“What is?” Grant wanted to know.
She waved to the image on the screen, then to the room around them. Voice quivering with excitement, Brigid declared, “We may be the first Earth people to step off the planet in two hundred years. It’s historic in a way.”
Kane glanced at the screen and smiled sourly. Parallax Red looked like such an unfinished, godforsaken hunk of junk, he couldn’t help but wonder why anyone visualized it as a Utopia or even why predark scientists had thought it worth building at all. Visiting it certainly didn’t meet his criteria of historic.
A few months back, Lakesh had showed them a satellite shot of Earth, taken from two thousand miles up. The view had depressed Kane, showing a forlorn planet that the rest of the universe had forgotten about a long time ago. Parallax Red had that same dismal, bleak look about it.
The upper right corner of the monitor screen showed a sweeping, rocky curve, the white pumice desert of the Moon’s far side glaring in the merciless light of Sol. The harsh sunlight reflected from the Moon was so intense it overwhelmed the twinkling specks of stars.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Grant intoned softly. “Nothing of the historic about it if you ask me.”
Brigid sighed wearily and just a bit exasperatedly.
Kane moved on to the closed exit door, his point-man’s sixth sense suddenly edgy and restless. A wheel lock jutted out from a circular hatch-port, surrounded by two interlocking collars of dark metal and thick flanges.
“An air lock.” Brigid’s voice was low. “Probably to keep the jump chamber isolated if the rest of the station lost atmosphere.”
Grant took a motion reading and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “No readings.”
“No movement?” questioned Kane.
“No readings. Whatever that hatch is made of, it’s too damn dense for the sensor beam to penetrate it.”
“Maybe that’s what happened here,” Brigid stated. “The station lost its atmosphere and they sealed this part off. If we open the door, we might get sucked out into a vacuum and decompress.”
All of them thought that over for a moment, then Kane said with forced cheeriness, “There’s only one way to find out. We didn’t travel a quarter of a million miles to just look at the front stoop, did we?”
He put both hands on the lock, fancying he could feel the frigid metal even through the insulation of his gloves. “I’ll go slow,” he said. “At the first sign we’ve got problems, I’ll button her up again.”
Slowly he twisted the wheel lock, hand over hand, half turns with a few seconds interval in between. The wheel spun easily, and Kane guessed it had been used frequently and recently.
The lock completed its final cycle, and he heard the metallic snapping of solenoids even through his helmet. Before pushing it open, he threw a questioning glance over his shoulder at his companions.
Pointing the air analyzer at the hatch, she said, “No change in either content or pressure.”
Grant shook his wrist. “Still no motion readings.”
“All right,” declared Kane, leaning his weight against the hatch cover. “Here we go.”