“What are you doing that for?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not destroying any evidence.” She saved the shavings in a clear bag. “I want to see what the hole looks like under the goop.” Beneath the plastic was the wide side of the conical hole, as big as a nickel, surrounded by an aureole of bright recrystallized metal.
“Well, that’s certainly by the book.” She photogrammed it again, then passed him the hull plate. “Let’s put all this in the sack.”
Sparta shone her hand-lamp into the blackened interior of the life support deck. In her private way she spent a moment studying what she saw. Then she took more photograms.
“Can you get your head in here, Viktor? I want you to see this.”
He squeezed his helmet in close beside hers, so that they were touching. “What a mess.” His voice was as loud by conduction through their helmets as it was by commlink.
Everything within two meters of the point of the hole in the hull was severely damaged. Pipes writhed crazily and ended in jagged mouths, like frozen benthic worms.
“Both oxygen tanks in one whack. Hardly a more vulnerable spot in the whole ship.” One oxygen sphere was torn open, while another lay in shards like a broken egg shell. Fragments of the shattered fuel cell still floated near the ceiling, where they had collected under the gentle deceleration of docking. “ ’Scuse me a minute, I’ve got to get my arm in there.” Sparta reached up and gathered glittering bits of debris from the ceiling. She carefully placed these and other samples in plastic bags. She took a final look around inside the ravaged deck, then withdrew.
They replaced the tools and the evidence they had gathered in the net bag. “That should do it here.”
“Did you find what you expected?”
“Maybe. We’ll have to wait for the analysis. Before we go back let’s have a peek inside the ship.”
They pulled themselves along the bulging cylinder of Hold C, tugging themselves from one handhold to the next, until they reached Star Queen’s midships airlock.
The midships airlock was set into the long central shaft that separated Star Queen’s fuel tanks and nuclear engines from the holds and the crew module, just aft of the holds themselves. Sparta manipulated the external controls that opened the hatch—controls that by law were standardized on all spacecraft—then entered the cramped space. Proboda squeezed in behind her, towing the tool bag.
She closed the outer hatch. From inside she could pressurize the lock, if there were no overriding commands from inside the spacecraft. But a big red sign lit up beside the inner hatch wheel: WARNING. VACUUM.
“I’m going to pressurize,” she said. “This won’t smell too good.”
“Why don’t we just stay suited?”
“We’ve got to face it sooner or later, Viktor. Keep your helmet on, if you want.”
He didn’t discuss it with her, but he did keep his helmet on. She didn’t let him see her grin. He had delicate feelings for a man of his size and profession.
She used the controls to pressurize the interior of the ship’s central shaft. After a few moments the warning indicator shifted from red to green—”Atmospheric pressure equalized”—but she did not yet open the inner hatch. First she pulled off her helmet.
Crashing into Sparta’s brain came the smell of sweat, stale food, cigarette smoke, spilled wine, ozone, new paint, machine oil, grease, human waste . . . and above it all, carbon dioxide. The air was not nearly as bad as it had been for McNeil in those final days, for it had already mingled with fresh air from the station, but it was bad enough; Sparta needed a moment of conscious effort to clear her head.
What she didn’t tell Proboda was that she wasn’t doing this for the sake of torturing herself.
Eventually she could not only directly sense the chemical constituents of her surroundings, but evaluate and bring to consciousness what she sensed. She had an urgent question to ask here, before going inside: had anyone used this lock during the voyage? The main airlock was not a problem. If either Grant or McNeil had left the ship through it during the flight, the other man would have known about it—until they went through it the last time together, of course, and only McNeil returned. But this airlock was another matter. Conceivably one of them might have snuck outside the ship through this secondary airlock while the other slept or was busy elsewhere. The question had recently assumed new importance.
The smell of the place answered her question.
“Okay, I think I can take it now.” She grinned at Pro- boda, who looked at her dubiously from within the safety of his helmet.
She twisted the wheel, opened the inner hatch, and entered the central corridor. For a moment the experience was profoundly disorienting: she was in a narrow shaft a hundred meters long, a constricted polished tube so straight that it seemed to vanish aft to a black point. For a moment she had the unsettling sensation of staring into a rifle barrel.
“Anything wrong?” Proboda’s voice was loud in her commlink.
“No . . . I’m fine.” She looked “up,” toward the bow of the ship, to the hatch of the hold airlock a few meters overhead. Above that hatch was access to the cargo hold, and then to the crew module itself.
The light beside it was green: “Atmospheric pressure equalized.” She turned the wheel, lifted the hatch, and entered the large airlock that segregated the huge detachable holds—each of which had its own airlock—from the crew module. The outer hatches of the four hold airlocks surrounded her: bright red signs gleamed on three of them.
DANGER. VACUUM.
The notice beside the hatch to Hold A, however, glowed a less frantic yellow: “Unauthorized entry strictly forbidden.”
All of them were of the standard design, heavy-duty wide spoked wheels in the midst of circular, hinged steel doors. Anyone who could strike the correct combination of numbers into the pad beside the wheel would gain quick entry.
She took a moment to bend her head close to each in turn, before Proboda clambered up from below with his bag of tools. Holds B and D hadn’t been touched in weeks, but Hold A’s keyboard and wheel showed expected signs of handling. So, less expectedly, did Hold C’s.
“A’s the only one that’s locked, Viktor,” as he climbed up beside her. “We’ll have to retrieve the combination later, or force it. Want to look in B? I’ll check out C.”
“Sure,” he said. He punched buttons to pressurize B’s airlock. She latched her helmet and entered Hold C. The ritual of closing the outer hatch behind her, evacuating the lock, and opening the inner hatch to the airless hold— restraining any temptation to impatience—had to be performed carefully. Then she was inside.
It was a steel cylinder as big as a grain silo, dark but for a worklight beside the airlock. In the dim green worklight the metal monsters, each almost six metric tons in mass, stood against the wall like a zaftig chorus line.
They were all strongly shackled to the hold’s steel-alloy ribs and stringers. In the shadows they seemed to expand as she approached them, and their compound eyes of diamond seemed to follow her like the eyes in trompe l’oeil portraits.
They were nothing but inert machines, of course. Without their fissile fuel rods, stacked nearby within shielding assemblies of graphite, the huge robots could not move a millimeter. Yet Sparta could not deny the impression they made upon her, their segmented titanium bodies made to withstand furnace temperatures, their insectlike legs made for negotiating the most abrupt terrain, their diamondedged mouth parts and claws made for shredding the most recalcitrant natural matrices . . .
And those glittering diamond eyes.
As Sparta floated closer to the nearest robot she felt a tingling in her inner ear. She paused a moment before recognizing the effects of latent radioactivity, recognizable by the same sort of induction currents—minute, in this case—that she had feared from the ship’s radiation shield.
A glance at the machine’s serial number confirmed that it was the one Sondra Sylvester had had tried at the Salisbury proving grounds three weeks before it was loaded aboard Star Queen.
She cautiously moved past the first robot and inspected the others, one by one, peering at their erect and fearsome heads. All but the first were cold as stones.
Back in the hold access, with the airlock sealed behind her, Sparta waited for Proboda to climb out of Hold D.
Apparently he had satisfied himself with whatever he saw in B and had gone on into the remaining vacuum hold while she was still admiring the robots. The top of his head stuck out of the hatch, his helmet looking like an ant’s head. She tapped his blue plastic noggin. “Why don’t you take that thing off?” she said. “The stink won’t kill you.”