Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  “Are we likely to?”

  “It happens.”

  Damn right it did. Adam’s main hope was that James would find Saturn Three so unappealing that he would be spurred on to greater effort in order to leave as soon as possible. There was only one feature of the base that James could possibly hope to find comfort in, and Adam decided to drop a hint on that issue straight away.

  “You’ll need somewhere to sleep.”

  “I suppose I will.”

  “You can have Alex’s old quarters. She doesn’t use them any more, and it’ll save breaking open one of the old bunkrooms.” Adam paused as James took this in, noting that his face betrayed no change of expression. Then Adam turned to Alex. “As long as that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure.” She saw that James’s glass was empty, and added, “You want another? Or shall I show you to the quarters now?”

  James put the glass to one side. “Thanks, but there’s something I have to do first.”

  “That’s okay. You have your own bathroom.”

  He smiled at the misunderstanding, but somehow it didn’t spread to his eyes. “It’s not my functions I’m bothered about,” he said, and reached for the cylinder that he’d kept with him since leaving his spacecraft. “I want to get some power into this. I don’t want it warming up until I’m ready for it.”

  He didn’t offer any further information, so after a moment’s pause Adam said, “Standard lab power be all right for you?”

  “Is it variable?”

  “Just name your voltage.”

  James gave Adam the details of the cylinder’s power requirements, and Adam went off to the communications room to reset the links in the racks to give an exact metered flow to the appropriate socket. Alex meanwhile led James, cylinder in hand, down to Saturn Three’s research laboratory.

  There was a dim UV glow from the hydrophonics tanks at the far end of the chamber, easily the biggest enclosed space in the station. Alex reached for the lights as the tall double-doors closed automatically behind them, and one corner of the lab came into bright illumination. Glancing around as they moved towards a broad white table at the centre of this area James could see the dim shapes of a number of mechanised handling devices and the inert forms of a couple of mobile drones.

  “See?” Alex said, noting where his gaze had fallen. “We’ve got robots already. Our programme doesn’t need them.”

  James snorted, unable to disguise his contempt. “You don’t call those robots. They’re handlers, that’s all. Out of date and no damn good. You don’t need all that weight and all that mass for the simple jobs they can manage.”

  A public address speaker crackled somewhere in the twilight of the lab as James lifted his cylinder and placed it almost reverentially on the white bench.

  “I’ve reset the power level on socket number thirty,” Adam’s voice announced, ringing around the lab with a hollow echo. “That’s down the bench on your left.”

  James glanced around, surprised. “Can he see us?” he said to Alex.

  “You can see most places from the communications’ room. The old security people had cameras everywhere. Seems a shame they wouldn’t trust each other.”

  “I’m coming down,” Adam’s voice went on. “Be with you in a couple of minutes.”

  The speaker crackled and died again as Adam closed the talkback key. James reached for a red wire that was coiled and clipped to his instrument belt, but then seemed to change his mind. His hand hovered over the clip and then undid it slowly, as if he were thinking of something else; he said, without actually looking at Alex, “Must get lonely here. Just you and him.”

  “No,” said Alex, genuinely puzzled. “Why should it?”

  “You could do better,” he told her, unravelling the last couple of loops of the wire and pulling it through his hands to straighten out the kinks. “I’ll talk to you later. When he’s not around. In the meantime . . .” he reached into one of the zippered pockets on his suit and brought out a small oblong of plastic, offering it to her. “You can have these. In case it gets too much.”

  “Thanks.” Alex took the object and turned it over. Sealed into numbered transparent bubbles were about half a dozen tiny blue pills. Four of the bubbles had been broken, and the pills removed. “What are they?”

  “Blues. Blue dreamers. Put them away, now.”

  She obeyed, stowing them in the breast pocket of her jump suit. James’s eyes followed her hands, paying more attention to the backdrop than to the foreground action. Then he jerked his head away as the lab doors slid open and Adam walked in.

  “That okay for you?” Adam called out as he approached. Alex turned her head and smiled a greeting.

  “Should be okay,” James said. “I’m just about to try it.” He plugged the shaped connection on the end of the red wire into socket number thirty, recessed into the surface of the bench.

  Alex touched the cylinder. The brushed metal had a silky feel, and it was noticably warmer than bloodheat. Must be a radiating surface, she thought.

  “No taction contact, please.”

  Alex’s eyebrows went up. James had snapped out the mechanical phrase as if he were quoting direct from a textbook. “You mean, don’t touch?”

  “Correct.” James plugged the other end of the red wire into a receptor at the top of the cylinder, and it began to hum gently.

  “Power okay?” Adam asked.

  James gave a curt nod. “It’s fine for now.”

  “No taction contact,” Alex said musingly.

  “That’s right.” Obviously James wasn’t about to apologise for his sharpness. Perhaps if she’d outranked him . . .

  When the readouts on the top of the cylinder had stabilised they moved away from the bench, heading as a group to the door. James indicated that he’d like to call up Survey Base and report his arrival, but Adam said, “You can’t do that.”

  James stopped before the doorway, ready for an argument. “It’s not optional. Sir.”

  Adam was about to speak when Alex interposed with, “We’re in eclipse.”

  “Oh. Yes.” James obviously felt foolish, which secretly pleased Adam.

  “We don’t get any external contact,” Adam explained, “as long as we’re shadow-locked.”

  “Of course. How long will it last?”

  “Twenty-two days,” supplied Alex.

  James was silent for a while as they moved out into the corridor. Adam said, “You want to see your rooms now?”

  “Please. I’m rather tired.”

  “I’ll show you where they are,” Alex offered before Adam could say anything.

  James followed her down the corridor. Adam couldn’t really go along with them, nor was he particularly proud when he found that he wanted to; Alex was an adult, capable of making her own decisions and looking after herself, whilst Adam was too old to be behaving like some jealous adolescent.

  Childish, hell, he thought as he watched them disappear around the curve of the station. He wasn’t being childish. Captain James was naturally unlikeable.

  FOUR

  Alex’s old rooms were bare, stripped of all fittings and obviously unused for some considerable time. James stood in the middle of the main chamber, obviously unimpressed; these appointments were spartan indeed compared to those of the platform.

  Alex said, “Dump the sheets in the laundry chute when you want a change. They come back in about four hours.”

  James nodded, and continued to look around. There was one of the ubiquitous innocent-looking p.a. speakers angled in one corner, but no sign of a camera. He made no move to suggest that he didn’t need any more help, and Alex was uncertain as to whether she should stay or go.

  “We run on a standard sixteen-eight day and night,” she said. “There’s about one hour of day to go. Of course, if you’re spacelagged or anything like that . . .”

  “A little. I’ve got things to do, first.” Best to be careful in what he said to her, until he could be sure that the Colonel
wouldn’t be watching. “My kit’s still in the craft.”

  “You want me to stay around?”

  He turned, and searched for a meaning in her face. There was nothing but an open, honest wish to be of help. “No,” he said. “I can manage for myself.”

  “Okay . . .” There seemed to be nothing left to say, so Alex backed out of the door and turned to walk back towards the quarters that she shared with Adam. She felt uneasy about leaving James, a stranger, to have a free run of a base that she was used to thinking of as a private home; and yet, she had to remind herself, the base was and always had been a military research establishment, and this hard fact overrode any personal fancy. Besides which, after a while James would be gone, leaving no more significant trace of his presence than another superfluous lab robot. The prospect of this reversion to normal would make James’s stay more bearable, and as some compensation he was from Earth. As he settled and relaxed, perhaps he would talk about his home—the sharp manner that he had displayed so far was probably no more than a symptom of his tiredness after the drop.

  Adam was stretched out on the bed when she arrived. She hadn’t been certain that she would find him here, but it seemed that they shared the feeling that, as long as James was around, this small complex was the only place where they could be assured of privacy.

  He flexed his arms over his head as he heard the door slide, giving a groan of luxury as the muscles stiffened by his quarrying work earlier in the shift quivered and tensed before subsiding into relaxation. Tethys’s gravity was far too kind to him, as he well knew; although he did the regular isometrics prescribed for all low-gee station personnel he could expect to have a tough time re-adapting to standard density at his age—that is, if he ever had to.

  “How’s our houseguest settling in?” he asked.

  “He seems okay. He says he’s got things to do.”

  “He probably told you that to stop you quizzing him about Earth.”

  “I didn’t, Adam, honest.” But there was a playful tone in his voice that suggested he wasn’t really serious, so she went on, “But you couldn’t blame me if I did. Not when you never tell me anything about it.”

  “What’s to tell? Too many people, all shouting for privileges they won’t earn. Sitting in their own filth because they won’t stoop to clean it up. Always looking for someone to hand them a ready-made answer—and at this moment they’re looking at the Surveys. But don’t expect them to be grateful if we give it to them.”

  “That’s just your view,” Alex said, opening the fastenings on her jumpsuit. “You’ve always told me I should try to get more than one side of a story before I go making up my mind. That’s all I’m trying to do. You seem to forget that I’ve never really breathed.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve got all the freedom you can want here, believe me.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about . . . just breathing.” There was a hard and unfamiliar shape in one of her pockets, and she reached inside for it. “And I don’t mean machine air, either. Real air, outside, without being shut in.”

  Adam seemed to be amused by the idea. “That’s no big deal. Breathing out of doors on Earth is something only disease-freaks do for pleasure.”

  “I know. It’s just that . . .”

  “What do you think of him?” Adam phrased the question as casually as he was able, but it was still false to his own ears. Alex seemed to have trouble coming up with an answer.

  “He’s . . . funny,” she said at last rather lamely, as if her thoughts had not yet coalesced to give her anything more definite.

  “Funny? I must have missed his best lines.”

  Adam wondered if he should try to draw her further, but he told himself it wasn’t necessary. He wouldn’t want to keep her if she didn’t want to stay, and if all it took was some jumped-up young space-monkey to shake his confidence—well, he didn’t deserve to keep her.

  “Adam, what are blues?”

  Alex’s remark and the half-forgotten name started pulling his mind into reluctant focus. He lifted himself on one elbow; she was sitting on the end of the bed, half out of her jumpsuit and holding up a slim oblong of a type that he had not seen for some years; a six-month supply of blue dreamers, the spacer’s analgesic for fear and loneliness. Take one a week for a hallucinatory trip of such pleasurable credibility that the discomfort of temporal reality paled and became bearable — as long as you had another trip to look forward to. To Adam they were a crutch for an inadequate mind.

  “Where did you get those?” he said, sitting up and reaching for the pills. Alex handed them over.

  “He gave them to me.”

  “He had no business. These things are dangerous.” There were four missing, but obviously Alex hadn’t taken any—she’d have been hovering several inches off the ground. It was hard enough for Adam to face that he might lose Alex in open competition with the society beyond Tethys; all he had to offer was himself, and he could hardly bear to think that his trade goods of modest worth might be further devalued in a drug-clouded judgement.

  Alex couldn’t understand his anger. They were a few blue tablets, that was all. “What do they do?” she asked, bewildered.

  “If they send someone out alone, they give him some to keep him from going over the top.” There was a further insult in that James obviously thought Alex might need them.

  “Did you ever use them?”

  “Me?”

  “You told me you were on your own sometimes when you were on the Venus slingshot. Didn’t you have them then?”

  “No.” Then he admitted, “But I had them once.”

  “Really? When?”

  “A long time ago and a long way away.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that, once, blue dreamers had been the only way that he could bear to stay on her precious Earth, and that even these had, in the end, been inadequate.

  “What was it like?”

  He shrugged, trying to play it down. “Interesting.”

  “Why don’t we try it? Together, I mean.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Please?”

  He had to remember that she had been starved of the unusual, whilst he on the other hand had been more than sated by it. “After James has gone,” he promised, secretly hoping that she would forget. “But you mustn’t be disappointed.”

  “Disappointed? Why?”

  “They’re not a patch on taction contact.”

  They both laughed. James was an odd outsider and would stay that way. “I’ll try to make sure he doesn’t stay any longer than necessary,” Adam said, “but remember he’ll have a report to make. Do your best to make him feel at home, won’t you?”

  “Not my best,” Alex said with exaggerated coyness, and leaned across the bed to place a light kiss on Adam’s forehead. Then she rolled over to kick off the legs of her jumpsuit before sliding under the sheets.

  There was a howling, a thin strained sound from somewhere down the corridor. Adam sighed and closed his eyes in irritation—the damn dog had got herself shut in the lab again.

  Sally was the most complex organism they had for the testing of any proteins that their experimentation produced. So far they’d never tested on anything higher than the most simple one-celled animals, but they had a range of frozen embryos that they could revive and grow to test the metabolic acceptability of any promising-looking molecules. If it didn’t kill the amoebae, try it on the fish; and then from the fish to the gecko, and then the frog, the rat and finally the dog. If an experiment reached the dog stage it was big news, and the Survey would start pulling primates from routine maintenance tasks and shipping them down for further tests.

  Strictly speaking, Sally should have remained as an embryo in stasis until she was needed, but Adam found dogs to be inoffensive, occasionally appealing animals, and he suspected that Alex might feel the same way. He had broken out the embryo block and hooked it into an amniotic tank without telling Alex, and then presented her with the puppy as a surpr
ise.

  Now Sally was exhibiting her happy knack of demanding attention just when they were least inclined to give it.

  “I’ll go,” Alex said, sliding off the bed.

  Tut something on,” Adam warned her. “Remember we don’t have the place to ourselves right now.”

  She took a light robe from her locker and pulled it around herself, knotting the waist cord as she stepped out into the corridor. The whining came from the direction of the lab, a place where Sally often wandered in with one of them to curl up in a quiet corner as they worked; when she woke up alone, her small body was insufficient to trigger the door-opening sensors.

  Halfway around, the corridor lights died. At least, that was Alex’s momentary impression as the day effect faded without warning to the nightsight setting, but after she’d paused for a moment as her eyes readjusted she was able to go on.

  The dog was definitely trapped in the laboratory, as the sounds of canine anguish became closer and more easily localised. Alex was puzzled; the last time she’d seen Sally had been while Adam was out in the buggy, and then the dog had been stretched out on top of the insulated cover of the heat-exchanger in the upper Nucleus. She hadn’t followed any of them into the lab later, so how did she come to be there?

  The lab doors whisked open as Alex approached, and a dim slice of light from the corridor speared in and startled the whimpering animal that had been pawing at the unyielding exit. Alex made meaningless placatory noises as she gathered the small mongrel into her arms and then turned to go.

  James’s mysterious canister still hummed on the bench that had been allotted to him. Alex hesitated for a moment, the dog now quietened by getting what it felt to be its just measure of attention, and then moved across the lab for a closer look. The doors hissed shut as she moved out of sensor range.

  The UV glow of the hydroponics tanks was enough for Alex’s night-tuned eyes to make out the detail of the cylinder. Shifting Sally’s weight mainly on to her left arm she reached out with her free hand and touched the silky facing of the metal.

  The cylinder reacted immediately. Its top eased out an inch or so and began a silent rotation through one hundred and eighty degrees. As the hollow interior of the canister became exposed a soft light formed a haze over the opening, and Alex stood on tiptoe to look inside.