Oh, it was interesting enough, as a souvenir of the days when wars were actually fought between nations, instead of between legions of police on one side, and on the other a horde of criminals and a few squads of slippery terrorists. He cast a longing look at the toilet, but Pat was still locked inside. “Well,” he said to the Ukrainian woman, forcing jolliness into his tone, “was there any interesting news in the uplinks?” Dutifully she rehearsed the principal items for him: England’s MI-5 had caught a dozen Welsh freedom fighters redhanded in possession of nuclear materials; some Sikhs at the Marseilles airport had machine-gunned Moslem pilgrims en route to Mecca; and in Washington the President had finally announced the death of his kidnapped press secretary. Hilda would be going crazy, he thought; but he didn’t think it long. The door to the toilet was opening, and he was already unbuckling himself to go there.
Pat was looking baffled when she finally came out, and when Dannerman got his chance at the toilet he saw why. The writing on the cubicle wall wasn’t graffiti. It was instructions, a complete tech manual to the use of a micrograv toilet, and it took a bit of doing. As he was finishing up with the complex flush maneuver he heard squawking from outside. He hurried back to his seat, Rosaleen waving him on; and there, spinning slowly on the screen, was an orbiter that he recognized because he had spent so much time studying its pictures. There was no doubt about it. Just disappearing from view between the solar-collector struts and a communications dish was the blister that might, or might not, have come from outer space. The construction was immense.
“So that’s Starlab,” he said.
“Of course it is,” Rosaleen said fretfully. “And, look, the optical mirror has been left uncovered all this time-who knows how much damage it’s taken from microjunk impacts?”
“There’s a little ship attached to the side,” Dannerman observed.
“Yes, the ACRV-the Assured Crew Rescue Vehicle. It was supposed to take crew back to the Earth in an emergency, but poor Manny Lefrik never got a chance to use it.”
“Manny Lefrik?” Memory clicked the name into place: the astronomer who had died on Starlab. “Did you know him?”
She sighed. “Of course I knew him. Very well, in fact, and on this very satellite; Jimmy was quite right about making love in microgravity.” And then, noting the expression on his face, “Oh, Dan! Can you not believe that I was not always a million years old? But buckle yourself in quickly; there will be much maneuvering now. Hurry!”
She was right about the maneuvering. Docking was tricky, with a lot of swearing in three languages from the pilots up ahead as they jockeyed the spacecraft to its port. But then there was a faint metallic crunch and a shudder, and a cry of satisfaction from Pat Adcock. The Clipper had mated with Starlab.
Beside him, Rosaleen Artzybachova was busily removing the containment straps from her instrument cases. “Let me help you,” Dannerman offered.
She hesitated. “Yes, perhaps it would be better if you took one. But do be careful with it!”
“Stay put, you people,” Delasquez called from up front. “We’re checking the life support.”
But Starlab’s systems were apparently working, even after all these years; the internal pressure and. temperature were all right-a bit chilly, maybe, Jimmy Lin suggested, but they wouldn’t need the suits. (“Thank God,” Rosaleen muttered gratefully. “I hate trying to get in and out of those things.”) Even the lights were working-some of them, anyway. Enough.
Then the arguments started. Pat wanted somebody to stay behind in the Clipper, preferably one of the pilots. “For Christ’s sake, why?” Jimmy Lin snarled.
Just in case.
“Just in case, screw that. Nothing’s going to happen here, and anyway Dannerman can stay on board if you want him to. I’m going in.”
And he did, Pat right behind him; even encumbered with one of the instrument boxes Rosaleen Artzybachova squirmed ahead of Delasquez, who was angrily stuck with going through the shutdown checklist. In spite of Lin’s suggestion, Dannerman was not far behind. As he squeezed through the docking port, tugging his own massive toolbox, he heard Rosaleen’s shocked voice-“Do your mother! Everything’s all different.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dan
It wasn’t what he had expected. He hadn’t expected Starlab to be so warm, but it was. That was passive heating, Rosaleen said, only sunlight. He certainly hadn’t expected it to stink. But it did, a rancid, pervasive odor, part chemical, part almost like cinnamon. Was it the decaying body of the abandoned astronomer? Not likely. It wasn’t really a spoiled-meat smell, and besides the mortal remains of the lost Manny Lefrik must have long since finished all the decay that was possible to him.
But that was not the greatest shock. Rosaleen Artzybachova had been right. It was all different. The views of the Starlab interior he had studied displayed gray metal cabinets, sunshine-yellow and warm red walls, patterned wall hammocks. Those things were still here, most of them, but to them had been added objects that the schematics had never displayed: green-flecked lumps of transparent matter, like lime Jell-O, with glittering sparks of gold and diamond light flickering within it; a great copper-colored pillar, six-sided, that gave out perceptible warmth; a huge cupboard sort of thing with a door that slowly swung closed when Dannerman tried to peer into it-things for which he had no easy name. There had been structural changes, too. Even some of the walls were gone. The partitioned space of the original had been opened up, and here and there, all about, stuck at crazy angles from the remaining walls, were the machines that were like nothing Dannerman had ever seen before. The more he looked the stranger they got. He saw some that were palely luminous, some velvet black; they were rounded or jagged-edged, some with brightly glowing dots on the surface that flickered and changed as he watched, some faintly crackling or humming. None of them looked normal.
“Jesus,” he said. “I guess you were right, Pat. That’s not any human stuff.”
Pat’s face was glowing in triumph. “Effing well right it isn’t, Dan-Dan! It’s alien. And it’s ours!”
“But what do those things do?”
“What’s the difference? My God, Dan,” she said happily, reaching out to caress the pinkly glowing surface of one of the machines, “once we get this stuff back and figure out how it works-can you imagine what it’ll be worth? We’ll make a bundle out of this.”
“If we can move it,” Rosaleen Artzybachova muttered, trying to fasten her instrument box to a handhold on the wall while, like everyone else, she was distractedly staring at everything around her. “Pat, I recommend you do not touch anything until I have had a chance to study it. The rest of you, too.”
Pat pulled her hand back; beside her, Jimmy Lin was doing the same thing. “What’s the problem?” he asked.
“How do I know what problem there is? Perhaps there is no problem at all, or perhaps if you touch it it will fry you to a crisp. If you want to experiment I suppose it is your right, but I would prefer that you help me.”
“Me, too?” Dannerman asked, trying to keep his own instrument box from bumping into anything; in the micrograv environment it weighed nothing, but its mass made it hard to handle.
“Oh, Dan,” Rosaleen sighed, “what help could you be? At least the others have some experience with instrumentation. No. Go and explore.”
“I’ll go with him,” Pat said suddenly.
“You also want to be a tourist? And, General Delasquez, is that what you are indicating, too, with that scowl? Well, why not? If there are too many unskilled helpers here it will be worse than none at all, so go. Look for old Manny’s body; perhaps we can give it a decent burial in space while we are here.”
“And maybe get rid of some of the stench,” Martin Delasquez growled.
The old woman ignored him. “Or perhaps you will meet some interesting stranger, and then you will come back and tell us. If you can.”
A few meters down the main transverse Pat stopped and consulted a scrap of paper from her pocket. The general gave her a suspicious look, but brushed past her to go off on his own. “Let him go,” Pat muttered without looking up. “Maybe he’ll see something we don’t. Let’s see, we follow this transverse to the second junction-“
Dannerman drew the obvious inference. “You’re looking for something specific.”
She glanced after Delasquez’s disappearing form and lowered her voice. “Right you are, Dan-Dan. I want to see where that blister was attached, from the inside. Come on, I think I know where I’m going.”
The way you got around in the effectively gravitationless Starlab was by pulling yourself along by the handholds spaced along the walls, or by hurling yourself like a slow-moving projectile from point to point. Neither Dannerman nor Pat was up to projectile standards, so progress was slow.