by Unknown
‘I don’t know,’ said Paul stiffly. ‘I only asked for one that worked with speech.’
‘And we were sent a face from a million years ago. So speech isn’t just history. It’s gone into the fossil record.’
‘Is that what they’re telling us?’ gasped May. ‘God, that’s rude!’
‘Have you seen enough?’ said Paul. And when no one answered he said, ‘Proceed, Hunter.’
The Hunter turned and walked heavily away into the sunlit grasses. Lewis watched it go, rubbing his chin softly with one hand. ‘A Hunter,’ he murmured. ‘Well, well.’
‘You said Thorsten had one,’ said Paul.
Lewis looked at him. Paul could not read his eyes. ‘Yes. It didn’t find anything.’
‘This one will be more capable,’ said Paul.
‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Lewis.
‘Why did you delete Thorsten’s?’
‘Because …’ said Lewis with a tight, secret smile, ‘because I was wasting far too much time playing with it. Well, thank you, Paul, for showing this to us. Best of luck with it. When you’re not using it, perhaps you’d turn it over to me and we’ll see if it knows any duets.’
‘Shit!’ said May, following him out of the chamber. ‘Must I put up with you singing as well as snoring now?’
‘I promise I won’t sing in my sleep. Where’s Van? That thing’s probably carrying all the scripture that was ever written. Shall I tell her, do you think?’
‘She’s hiding, I guess. And you know damned well she won’t take any help from a thing like that …’
When they had gone, Paul muttered aloud, ‘Stupid!’
He meant himself. Lewis would know that Hunters were for malicious programs. He would wonder why Paul had not said so. And the answer would be obvious: because Paul thought that one of them might be the author of whatever was affecting the communications. Lewis would have guessed that. And he had said nothing.
Stupid! It had been stupid to show it to May! And he knew why he had done it – because he was angry. Anger was making him stupid.
He turned to his controls, meaning to reset the displays. To his surprise he saw that the Hunter was back, looking at him from the wall of his chamber, even though Paul had seen it walk into the long, pale grasses only moments before.
And now he realized that the creature was not exaggeratedly thickset and heavy, as it had first seemed. Its muscular neck and limbs were no more than a man would need to support his frame in the gravity of Earth. To the Earthbound eye the creature might even have seemed graceful. But his own had adjusted to the physiques of the station and the way that a body moved in low gravity. It no longer saw his companions as hideous. It saw Earth-things as fat and ungainly. Even the meaning of beauty had changed up here.
‘I said, proceed, Hunter,’ he repeated.
‘I have finished,’ said Hunter.
‘Finished? Already?’
‘I have searched all the local systems.’
‘And?’
‘There is nothing.’
Paul’s hands dropped to his sides. ‘What do you mean, “nothing”?’
‘There is nothing.’
‘You have found no irregular entries affecting the radio communications?’
‘There are many entries that do not conform to the required standards. I have assessed all of them. They are benign.’
Paul fell slowly into his chair. He put his fist to his mouth. After a moment he bit it, hard enough for it to hurt.
‘Keep looking,’ he said. ‘Look for different things. Look for anything that might be intelligent interference with the radio communications.’
‘Define “intelligent” for this purpose.’
Paul thought.
‘It can see something, react, see what happens and learn to do better,’ he said.
‘I have already applied this parameter.’
So the Hunter had conducted its search, found nothing, and reset its criteria automatically before trying again – and all in the time it had taken for Lewis and May to leave his chamber.
It was indeed capable. And it had still found nothing.
‘There will be something,’ said Paul. ‘Try again.’
Wordlessly the Hunter stomped off into the grasses.
X
The display reflected inside his pressure-suit helmet included a temperature reading. It stood at minus eighty degrees Celsius: as cold as an Antarctic winter. The exterior pressure was about one half of an atmosphere. He was standing within fifty metres of the living quarters.
Vandamme was taking him on his first tour of the outer layers of the station. According to the schedules, it should have been her rest period. But Lewis had found some reason to shuffle the watches, and when he looked at them again he had said that Paul’s companion must be Vandamme. Paul had not been surprised.
Her face was invisible inside her helmet. Her voice, however, came over the intercom as clearly as if they had been back in the living quarters together. Her words were clipped and dry. He wondered if she knew why Lewis had chosen her for this. It infuriated him that she might know, and that even so she could be so passionless. But his anger was not at her. It was aimed at May and Lewis. Of the three of them now, Vandamme was indeed the most tolerable.
‘This is the hangar for the mobile equipment,’ she was saying. ‘Surface crawlers and harvesters, mostly. The crawlers are of three types, Search, Construction and Utility. Searchers are for ST2. Constructors were used to erect the station and will do the repairs if we have an impact. Utilities do everything else.’
The hangar was a great grey bubble, far larger than the main living-quarter chamber. The curving roof rose to three times the height of Paul’s head. Ranked down the centre of it were lines of crawlers, each two to three metres long and roughly a metre high. Their wheels were big, set so wide that their wheel-base must have been almost square. The bodies were brightly coloured, so that they would be visible on the moon’s landscape if it were ever necessary to search for them by sight. The utility and construction crawlers were yellow, angular machines with small solar packs and numerous limbs folded up together like the legs of ungainly spiders. The searchers were orange. These were meaner-looking things, with a high clearance and even wider axles than the utilities. They had big wheels that rose above their bodies, long antennae and large solar packs to give them range.
Compared with these, the grey colour of the harvesters made them almost invisible where they stood in a line against the near wall. They were smaller than the crawlers, with less pronounced wheel-bases, little wheels and long limbs. Even so, they too had the same low, wide-splayed look of machines that must keep their stability in low gravity.
‘Shouldn’t they be working?’ asked Paul.
‘They are. The ones you see here are the spares. There’s a three hundred per cent redundancy in case of failures – or an impact.’
‘Three hundred per cent?’
‘That’s standard across the station, but it varies from case to case. Much of our instrumentation and computing power is in the outer layers, where the natural temperature is low enough to permit superconductivity. Of course that means the sites are hardest to get at and most at risk from impact. So the redundancy is not less than five hundred per cent. On the other hand – you see that?’
Synchronized with her words in his ear, the arm of the suited figure beside him pointed. At the far end of the hangar was another crawler, far larger than the others and coloured red. They skipped down the central aisle towards it. Close to, it seemed enormous. Its eight wheels rose higher than Paul’s head. Its body was fat and featureless. It carried no solar packs. At either end it had a cluster of limbs, but these were no more and no larger than those of the utility crawlers. They seemed ridiculously small for such a bloated thing.
‘We landed with three of those. Almost the first thing we found was that the main power packs on all three were dead. Design fault. Of course it shouldn’t happen, and of course amo
ng all the million bits of design and engineering it does. It nearly finished us. We charged up the auxiliary pack on this one as high as we could and rode it into the station, watching the power gauge dropping all the time. It had reached twelve per cent by the time we docked. I had been praying aloud from thirty per cent downwards.’
‘You could have left it and walked.’
There was a slight pause before she answered.
‘We could have done. In the last resort we’d have had to try. Average surface temperature’s thirty-eight K. That ground’s trying to suck your heat right out through your boots. In theory these suits are capable at those temperatures. But you can’t stop all conduction. And it’s ice. Treacherous. You slip, you break something, you lie there, in the end you die if we don’t reach you. And what are the rest of us going to do – carry you? Over the ice? We don’t walk outside the station. At all. If any of us have to go out, we go in this crawler, fully pressurized, with a utility leading the way. And everyone else on standby.’
‘I see.’
‘No sightseeing trips here, Munro.’
‘No.’ He frowned. ‘Earth should send another.’
‘They will – eventually. Don’t forget that if we need something that isn’t on the resupply schedule, it’s eight years’ wait before it can get here. And when its launch slot comes up, it may get bumped off by something that’s higher priority – a new telmex, for example.’
She uncoupled the charging cable. She faced him.
‘Would the new telmex like a ride?’
The new telmex. It was a strange way to say ‘you’. It was playful, in a way. He had not heard her sound like that before.
‘Yes,’ he said.
The hatch on the rear of the red crawler opened on a voice command. There was a tiny airlock. Beyond it the interior was a low chamber with two forward-facing seats at one end. Two bench-seats for passengers ran down either side. There were controls at the pilot seats but no windows. Instead, a screen showed visual displays of the exterior when powered by command.
‘Hello, living quarters?’ said Vandamme. ‘We’re taking the red crawler.’
‘I’ve got you,’ said Lewis’s voice, as clearly as if they had all been sitting together back in the common room. ‘Have fun.’
‘Do we pressurize the cabin?’ asked Paul.
‘Yes,’ Vandamme replied. ‘Normally we wouldn’t, just to ride around inside the station. But you need to know how it works in case you’re ever part of an outside mission. The important thing is, even if the cabin is pressurized you do not remove your helmet or depressurize your suit. That’s for safety. Of course the cabin shouldn’t depressurize, but conditions here are extreme and accidents are always possible. So – to pressurize, it’s this sequence …’
At first nothing seemed to happen. And then the numbers on the helmet display flickered. He watched them. The one marked Suit remained at 1.0. But the one marked Ex – the exterior pressure – rose rapidly. Now it was over 0.8 and still rising. The temperature was rising too.
‘That’s the auxiliary battery gauge,’ said Vandamme. ‘You can see we’re already bleeding it down.’
A bright green bar showed on the crawler display. Over it there were the figures 97%. Even as Paul watched it dropped to 96%. He looked away.
‘Short trips only, you see,’ said Vandamme. ‘Now, to go forward …’ She demonstrated. The crawler hummed into life. The display inside Paul’s helmet read Ex: 1.0 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -10°. There was an atmosphere around him, cold and crisp, but enough to let sound travel inside the cabin. The crawler was creeping forward with astonishingly little inertia for so massive a thing. The screen showed the far end of the hangar approaching.
‘Beyond that seal you’re into the outer layers,’ said Vandamme. ‘There’s nothing out there – they’re just for protection and maintaining the insulation–conduction balance. If you like we could step out there on the way back. It’s quite a thrill the first time you see your helmet display drop into Kelvin. It can get all the way down to ninety at times.’
‘Ninety! Is it liquid out there?’
The transmission was so clear that he actually heard her grin.
‘Oxygen at normal atmospheric pressure will liquefy at about ninety K,’ she said. ‘But it’s not that simple. Our doctor once took a tube of air from the living quarters out there because she wanted to see what happened to it. What she forgot was that the pressure in those chambers is never more than point four, so all that happened was that the tube shattered, the gas escaped and she was showered with shards. She was lucky her suit wasn’t damaged. And our station manager was furious.’
Our doctor. Our station manager. Again she was using functions instead of names. This time the emphasis had been different. It might have been mockery.
There had been hints of this before – of friction between the three of them. Was it my fault she lost Thorsten?
Friction? Deep, bitter resentment, barely suppressed. Did they blame her for Thorsten’s death? He remembered how they had leaped to answer his questions about Thorsten in that first meeting, as if protecting Vandamme from a suggestion he had not intended to make. What kind of a partner let her man despair? Perhaps May felt guilt that Lewis was living when Thorsten was dead. Yes! She must hate that, and she was blaming Vandamme for the blame she felt on herself. And so on, round and round, a destructive feedback loop in the heart of the station. It had been going on for years with no escape.
And then the spacecraft from Earth had brought them another man, mumbling, confused, barely able to say more than ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. It had been the biggest birthday present ever, May had said. And Vandamme had walked away from it. She had shut herself in the other chambers, which must be heated and pressurized for her at whatever cost to the station’s energy supply. And she prayed. And she worked. And she filled the walls with images of desolation.
His eyes flicked to the woman beside him, and away again before she could realize he was looking at her. A trickle of sympathy oozed from the icy crust around his heart.
Did she know what the others were planning for her? Had she realized what they were trying to do?
What would she think, if he told her?
The display swung as the crawler turned. Now it faced across the hangar, to a seal in the side wall. The crawler flowed smoothly towards it.
‘You can open the seals by voice, or by signal,’ said Vandamme. ‘That key there. You do it.’
Paul pressed the key in the panel. The seal opened, revealing one of the small airtight chambers that linked each bubble in the station to its neighbours. Paul peered at it. It was hard to judge the size of it through the screen.
‘Will we fit in this?’ he asked.
‘We will – just.’
She inched the machine forward, checked the rear display and closed the door they had just passed through. The door ahead opened automatically.
Paul let out a long sigh.
‘So – here’s our farmland,’ said Vandamme. ‘What do you think?’
It was like a huge, old-fashioned polytunnel, of the kind that was still used in some places on Earth to cultivate crops when the exterior temperature was too low. Paul had visited one once. He still remembered the shock of smell when he had stepped through the flaps and stood in the forest of green plants, bursting with green and reddening tomatoes, and stretching away before him under the roof of arched plastic. It had been strong enough to break through and impose itself over all the busy messaging of his World Ear. That rich, warm scent – he could almost smell it now. It had stamped itself into his memory for ever.
But this tunnel had no leaves and no fruits. The light was a dull grey-blue, filtering through the translucent layers above his head. The floor of the bubble was littered with low lumps of rubble that must have been left over from the construction process. Pathways as straight as furrows carved through them. On one, halfway along the tunnel, a harvester was working. It looked like a grey, man-made insect,
intent on something among the stones. Vandamme coasted the red crawler forward and switched the screen to give a side-view so that Paul could see the thing clearly.
It had stopped by a lump that seemed to Paul to be like any other lump on the floor of that tunnel. One grey arm had extended. It was moving slowly across the face of the lump, just as if it were giving the thing a shave. Paul could see how the colour of the surface had changed where the arm had already been.
‘A basic lichen, modified to grow under these conditions,’ said Vandamme. ‘It provides thirty to forty per cent of our foodstuffs. A side-product of the process produces our fabrics when we need them. It also contributes to the ecological balance of the station. But it’s mainly for nutrition. That might be tomorrow’s breakfast, being picked for you now.’
‘Do we grow nothing more …?’ Paul fumbled for a suitable word.
‘Advanced? Eatable? Complicated?’
‘More normal.’
‘You mean, the sort of things we would normally have eaten on Earth? No. It’s a question of economy. To do that you would have to heat and pressurize these bubbles to the same level as the living quarters. That would be an enormous energy demand. On top of that there would still have to be further bubbles outside them, to insulate them and also to bring down that pressure gradually so that if there’s an impact we don’t get a catastrophic rupture. Oh, and you would have to have a depth of soil, full of vegetable matter and nutrients – all that.’
On the screen, the harvester withdrew its arm and rolled away a few metres down the path. It stopped by another lump.
‘There are a number of high-pressure bubbles just above the living quarters,’ said Vandamme. ‘Some of them we’ve turned over to cultivating stimulants and flavourings – the stuff that goes into our coffee, for example. It doesn’t make real coffee, of course. It’s a substitute. But it’s not bad if you don’t drink too much of it.’
‘How long will the machines function?’
‘With regular maintenance they should have an operating life of approximately fifteen years. But remember that three hundred per cent redundancy. If one breaks down early, we just replace it while Lewis works out what went wrong.’