by Scott Mackay
“You’re not upset, are you?”
“Why should I be upset?”
The light swung eerily as Cody adjusted the cable.
“What I meant was … you know … you and Deirdre,” said Ben.
“What about me and Deirdre?”
“The way she looks at you,” said Ben, sounding as if he were explaining something to a child. “She talked about it … when we were out on the lake together. She likes you. She likes the way you move. She likes the way you hold a hammer.”
“The way I hold a hammer?” said Cody.
“She likes the way you talk. How do I stand a chance with Deirdre if she keeps talking about you that way?”
“I have no interest in Deirdre,” said Cody.
“How am I supposed to compete? Look at you. You’re tall. You’ve got that face. And then look at me. A guy with a tiny head who always grows a beard by noon. A guy with an overbite.”
“You don’t have an overbite, Ben,” he said.
“Will you talk to her?”
“About what?”
“Just tell her you don’t have any interest in her,” said Ben. “That should be enough.”
Cody motioned toward the next intersection, wondering how Deirdre could possibly be interested in him when he still hadn’t fully gotten over the loss of Christine.
“I’m not going to say anything,” he said. “Just go ahead and have fun together if you like. As long as it doesn’t affect your work, I don’t care. Let’s erect the next post. I want to get as far as Vector Boulevard by—”
“Will you tell her?”
“I don’t think it will be necessary, Ben,” said Cody.
“It’ll be necessary,” Ben insisted.
But Cody didn’t reply. He stopped working and peered up Vector Boulevard. Up to where the darkness swallowed the city, up to the corner of Trigonometry Avenue, where a dust-covered bus sat by the curb and an infant’s perambulator lay on its side in the middle of the litter-strewn street. The impression of sudden fleeting movement, alarming and unexpected, tantalized his eyes.
“Did you see that?” he asked Ben in a quiet voice.
Ben didn’t immediately answer. Cody glanced at Ben. Ben’s jaw was thrust forward, his bewhiskered chin sticking out. His dark eyes narrowed. “I saw,” he finally said.
“What was it?” asked Cody.
Ben’s shoulders eased. Cody heard Ben’s accelerated respiration transmitted through his com-link.
“I don’t know,” said Ben, “but it sure was running fast.”
Cody stared up Vector Boulevard, perfectly still. The light carried only so far, brightening the facades of dusty and dirty buildings, penetrating as far as a stanchion protruding from the coppery walls of a coffee shop, a flag with a coffee cup and a bagel on it drooping from the stanchion.
“It wasn’t … one of the crew, was it?” asked Cody.
“No …” said Ben. “I don’t think so. It was … blue.”
“Yes, blue, that’s what I thought,” said Cody, speaking quickly, with a slight jitter in his voice. “Definitely blue.”
Sky blue. And not wearing a pressure suit. Where could it have gone? Somewhere up Trigonometry Avenue? And how could it see, whatever it was, through such impenetrable darkness, with only bits and pieces of blue glow-moss to light the way?
“Was it running on all fours?” asked Cody.
Because he was sure it had been running on all fours, at least part of the time, rising on its haunches only to steal a quick look at them, then bolting behind the bus and disappearing.
“I’m not sure,” said Ben.
Dressed in only a pair of pants, as far as Cody could see, in a temperature that could freeze the blood in seconds, with no air to breathe. Animallike. And still prowling somewhere out there, a possible danger, maybe alone, maybe with others, its intent unknown, its next move beyond prediction.
CHAPTER 3
Cody held a meeting in the office of the pressurized dorm to discuss the sightings. He told them exactly what he had seen. Their faces were pale, still, quietly alarmed. He glanced out the pressure window at Laws of Motion Square. Something was out there, they didn’t know what, and it might possibly pose a threat. A blue thing. A visitor from beyond colonized space? He didn’t know. The air inside the office seemed thick with the implications of the discovery. The way his crew waited, worried but patient, forced Cody to acknowledge that they were, after all, counting on him, that they expected him to handle this, just as he handled the more routine situations of their general survey. He controlled his apprehension and prepared himself. His was a position of leadership, a position he was by no means a stranger to. But this was the first time in ten years that he’d exercised such responsibility in the field. An unforeseen and potentially threatening situation out in the field was different from the management glitches and personality clashes he had routinely dealt with when he’d been number-three man at the Public Works Department. But he was out here by choice, and a problem like this was far more exhilarating than eight hours a day in an office. He was back to doing real work. Physical work. He was point man for the Ceresian Reconstruction.
Shaping her words carefully so she could be understood through her Perseusian accent, Dina Alton spoke first.
“If there’s one, there could be more,” she said.
Cody nodded. “Yes, but so far we’ve seen only one.” He was going to keep strictly to the facts. “And we saw it for less than two seconds. It was dark, and the thing was moving fast.”
Wit said, “Huy and I got a good start on the water mains today and I’d like to keep going.” Wit’s broad face was motionless; he was the kind of man who would bury any concerns in hard work. “Let’s not let this slow us down.”
Cody glanced at Huy. Huy nodded, but his nod was tentative and he looked anything but certain about going down into the city’s water mains now.
“As long as we’re careful,” said Cody. “As long as we’re watchful. We’ve seen only the one. We have no idea what it is, how it got here, whether there are more, whether they represent a danger or are just … just harmless. I don’t want to speculate where it came from. I’m sure you all have your own ideas, but until we know more—and who knows, maybe this is the only one we’ll ever see—there’s no point in playing guessing games.”
“Our laser drills have a range of two meters,” said Deirdre, half joking, half serious.
Wolf Steiger spoke up. “Maybe we should delay the oxygen pop,” he said. “You say that what you saw wasn’t wearing any protective clothing, no pressure suit or oxygen tanks.”
“No,” said Cody.
“So how can we be sure we won’t kill it by pressurizing Newton? If we fill this place with air, moisture, and heat, we might harm the thing. Maybe it can’t survive in a higher atmospheric pressure or at a warmer temperature.”
Cody stared at Wolf. He was surprised by his crew’s varying reactions: Deirdre wanted to go out and kill the thing with a laser drill; Wolf wanted to make sure they took every precaution to save it.
Jerry said, “Let’s keep with the schedule. Let’s not let this affect us one way or the other.” The doctor sat forward, rubbed his knees, seemed irritated by the thing out there. “I’m thinking of our children,” he said. “Our children haven’t been able to grow up on Ceres for 30 years. They’ve been waiting a long time to come back. First they had to wait for the contamination levels to taper off. Then they had to wait for Council to make up its mind whether we should come back at all. Then they had to wait for the financing to become available, for the planning to be done, and for all the extensive training and preparation of all the crews. I don’t want to make them wait one second longer. They’ve had to grow up in the microgravity of the other asteroids for 30 years. And that’s done irreparable harm to at least three generations. Look at any of my pediatric charts on Juno and you’ll see a microgravity-related condition in all of them. We need the grav-core.” The doctor looked around at the crew, then gestured
toward Isosceles Boulevard. “I don’t care what’s out there. Newton belongs to us. We should go ahead and pressurize.”
Cody took stock of his survey crew. “Could we continue working in our pressure suits for just the next few days?” He was beginning to think that Wolf might have a point. “I know we’re all sick of our suits, and I know they slow the work down, but the thing we saw … I don’t know …” If the thing out there was indeed a true visitor, and was of a peaceful nature, he certainly didn’t want to be the one to inadvertently kill it. “I’m going to see what Vesta City says,” he said. “I think we need direction on this.”
Wolf shifted in his cot, disappointed. “You know what they’re going to say, Cody,” he said. “They’re going to want us to go ahead with the oxygen pop one way or the other. You know the way they think. Something like this isn’t going to stop them.”
In the suburb of Actinium, on the outskirts of Newton, there stood perhaps the oldest Oxygen Production Utility in the whole Belt; two hundred years old, decommissioned seventy-five years ago, and preserved up until the time of the evacuation as a museum. Cody looked around the old control room. Through the years, a succession of curators had refurbished the plant so that the OPU, if supplied with the necessary kilowatts, might in a pinch still produce oxygen; this was done more out of historical interest than any real practical need. Cody brushed dust off one of the panels. The original power plant for the OPU consisted of a solar-power generating station located directly above, on the surface. In its heyday, the station had produced enough current to power a good portion of Newton, as well as much of the surrounding area, sending electricity over the cratered surface of Ceres by means of a microwave converter. Wolf sat in a chair, still easily tired by what to him was a strong gravity. Cody wanted to make enough power with the solar-power generating station to get the OPU working again. He turned to Ben.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Planners for this initial phase of the reconstruction had decided to revamp this particular antiquated utility because it did indeed run on solar power; the Gerard Kuiper didn’t have the cargo space to bring the large fusion cell units needed to power the more modern Oxygen Production Utilities.
Ben was their power specialist in this area. “I think it can be done,” he said. “At least to a limited degree. This panel here, when it was running, indicated which cable conduits were on-line. Remember, this plant is two centuries old. That means cable. We can repair a lot of the impact-compromised cable on the surface. Once we get some power, we can at least make Newton livable for the cleanup crews and the contractors, make it so they don’t have to keep popping the place with oxygen.”
“What’s this panel for?” asked Wolf.
“Solar panel calibration,” said Ben. “There’s going to be a lot of cleaning to do, especially in those calibration beds.”
“Look at this,” said Cody. “Transom valve indicators.”
Ben took a closer look at the panel. “For rerouting the oxygen to emergency shelters. An old safety measure.”
Cody pondered this. “Why don’t we see if we can reroute oxygen to the emergency shelter across the street from Operations, in Laws of Motion Square? At least for starters. Then we’ll be able to spread out a bit, have more of a headquarters.”
Ben considered. “It’s possible,” he said.
“It’ll be a good way to test the system before we go full-scale,” said Cody.
“Then we should check the cable upstairs,” said Ben. “Out on the surface.”
Cody looked around. “I really like this old place,” he said, patting the control panel affectionately. “If we could clean off some of the panels on the surface, fix some cables, and get this utility up to maybe three or four percent output by Monday, I’d be really happy.”
They climbed seven flights of stairs, then two different companionway ladders to get to the surface. Wolf was so tired by the time he got to the top that he had to sit down on the control deck floor.
“You two go ahead,” he said. “My knees are killing me. I’ll be out in a minute.”
Cody and Ben went out onto the surface by themselves, using a power pack to cycle the airlock.
Solar panels, each ninety meters square, stretched as far as the eye could see, a neat checkerboard of solar-gathering silicon arranged in photovoltaic cells. The transmission tower stood half a kilometer away, rising white and dusty from the carbonaceous surface. On top was a large object—the microwave converter—like a radar dish, with a transmitting baton rising from its center like the stamen of a hibiscus.
“Look at these cells,” said Cody. “Silicon. We haven’t used silicon on Vesta for a hundred years.”
They walked across the surface. It wasn’t like the surface of Vesta, which was studded with igneous rock and shone like a rough-cut gem in the sunlight. Ceres was dark. Gray. Monochromatic.
“What about the microwave converter?” asked Ben. “Have we come up with a plan to target the current to the various intake grids yet?”
Cody nodded, thinking of the powerful beam of current that the microwave converter would generate once the solar panels were collecting sunlight again, how that beam would cause a lot of damage if it weren’t targeted properly toward the designated intake and conversion grids. “Claire has a program for it,” he said.
He heard Ben sigh through his com-link. “Claire has a program for everything,” said Ben.
“I don’t think she has one for your overbite,” Cody replied.
“Funny guy,” said Ben.
“She says once we get it interfaced, the targeting accuracy should be within one square meter.”
“Good,” said Ben. “I’d hate to be hit by that thing when it starts transmitting.”
In the morning, Peter Wooster, in charge of stores, discovered oxygen tanks were missing. Cody stared at the remaining bright yellow tanks, standing like little soldiers braced one next to the other in a steel rack; only seventy-five left now, enough to last twelve people six days.
“And they were all here yesterday?” he asked Peter.
“Yes.”
Cody looked at Deirdre. Deirdre gazed at the tanks through her visor with wide speculative eyes. Cody looked at Jerry, who shrugged, and then at Ben. Finally he stared down Isosceles Boulevard. They had temporary lights running for three blocks, small lights, harsh lights, ones that did little to dispel the gloom, a small finger of incandescence truncating abruptly at Decimal Place.
“Those tanks are heavy,” said Cody.
His words sounded small and distant, scraping through the near-vacuum on brittle radio waves, riding the open channel into everybody’s helmets.
“I say we pop the oxygen with or without Vesta City’s go-ahead,” said Deirdre. “They took our tanks. They’re compromising our life support. They can’t go around stealing our stuff.”
They. But who were they? Cody stared up the street to Decimal Place as if he thought he might find an answer somewhere out there in the darkness. Twenty-seven tanks gone. He had to conclude that the theft, because of its magnitude, had been perpetrated by more than one individual.
“There’s 12 of us,” continued Deirdre. “We’re here on our own for the next 10 days. We have no weapons. Vital supplies have been taken from us. We have to guard what’s left. We have to conserve it. And in order to do that we have to pop the oxygen.”
“But why did they steal just our oxygen?” asked Jerry. “Why didn’t they take our biotherm canisters as well? Why didn’t they steal some of our shovels, or our cable, or our lubricant? Why steal just our oxygen? Especially when the one Cody saw wasn’t wearing a pressure suit or using an oxygen tank? Why would they need oxygen when they live in a place that doesn’t have any?”
Cody didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but he feared that whoever had stolen their oxygen in fact realized that oxygen was vital to human life and that stealing it would undermine his crew’s life-support capability. Before he could offer any thoughts on thi
s, a holo-image of Joe Calaminci appeared in the upper right corner of his visor.
“I just received word from Vesta City on the oxygen pop,” said Joe. The image flickered for an instant; Ceres had a small and occasionally disruptive magnetic field. “They want us to go ahead.”
“Did everybody hear that?” Cody asked his crew. He thought that Council back in Vesta City must be having conniption fits by now.
Everyone nodded. For several seconds no one said anything. Were some of them thinking, as he was, of Wolf Steiger’s oxygen pop concerns, how if they filled the place with heat and air they might kill whatever happened to be out there?
“It’s about time,” Russ Burke finally said. “I’m getting sick of my own stink. I want to get out of this suit.”
Cody stared at Russ. His shoulders felt suddenly heavy. He was relieved that the decision had been taken out of his hands—he was a builder after all, and he wanted to get on with the practical side of things—but he couldn’t help feeling at least some concern about the possibly fatal consequences of the Council’s go-ahead.
“Then that settles it,” he said. “As for the missing tanks … we post a guard. We go in shifts of three, four if necessary, round the clock. Anne-Marie, could you draw up a shift schedule, please? I guess we have to get out of these suits sooner or later. We can’t work effectively when we’re in them, and work is what we’re here for.”
CHAPTER 4
The oxygen pop, or Portable Atmospheric Release Tank, contained a magnetically pressurized parcel of 80 percent nitrogen, 20 percent oxygen, and a few other trace gases. In other words, air. Cody watched the pop at the foot of Isosceles Boulevard hiss and steam, white jets billowing like the huffing and puffing of a dragon. Each tank released 2.5 million cubic feet of air at a pressure of 1,000 millibars. The Public Works crew had ten such units, spherical tanks twenty meters across, white, with the green Public Works emblem—trees and clouds—painted on two sides. Cody watched water vapor, meant to humidify the air, crystallize as it left the release valve. Ice particles floated upward, refracting in the lights, breaking into the colors of the spectrum.