Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  The hand fell heavily on her shoulder. “No taction contact,” James barked.

  Alex shrieked and Sally joined in, wriggling free and dropping to the floor as Alex jerked back from James’s unexpected touch. With a scrabbling of claws on the smooth composition surface the dog was away and out of sight in the deep shadows at the far side of the lab.

  James reached across and touched something on the canister lid, causing it to slide slowly back into place. “I said not to touch it,” he told Alex. “I meant it.”

  Alex wanted to come back with an angry rebuke, but she knew she was in the wrong. Instead she turned away from James and moved across the lab, calling to the dog.

  Obviously Sally had seen James as he had passed through the upper nucleus after bringing in his kit from the spacecraft. The inquisitive animal had followed him down to the lab and come through the open doors behind him. But then, it seemed, he had ignored the dog’s plaintive whining to get out; and what disturbed Alex even more was that he had clearly waited in the shadows after she herself had come in, watching her without making his presence known.

  Sally had wormed her way into the narrow gap between two of the tanks, and Alex called her name to coax her out.

  “The dog has a name?” James seemed to find this remarkable. So remarkable in fact, that he came over for a closer look, and Alex wanted to back away from his approaching silhouette. But she stood her ground.

  “Of course she has a name,” Alex said. She rather wished that she’d switched on the lab’s full lighting, but the control was over by the door. “Didn’t you ever have a dog?”

  “A few times.” Without a view of James’s face, Alex was struck by the peculiar lack of feeling in his voice. “First time I’ve ever heard of one having a name, though.”

  “There’s nothing unusual in it.”

  “Obviously we’ve been looking at different menus.”

  Was he being honest, or was he baiting her? It was impossible to tell.

  “Sally’s not something on a menu. She’s a pet.” Encouraged by the mention of her name, the dog came snuffling out of her hideaway and, with a wary sideways glance at the dark form of the man who had sent her there, allowed herself to be lifted for the second time.

  “Where I come from, a dog’s a food animal. Sentiment’s a luxury we don’t allow ourselves.” The shadow turned briefly into profile, that hunted, predator-shy action that Alex had noted earlier when James had learned of the cameras around the station. The darkness of the lab seemed to satisfy his fear of being observed, and he turned back to Alex. She held the dog up before her, a soft and inadequate shield.

  “I guess we should be going to bed,” Alex said nervously.

  James spoke softly. “Ready when you are.”

  It was a moment before Alex realised what he meant. James seemed to sense her indignation, and added, “I was only looking for hospitality. I appreciate your body and I’d like to use it.”

  “No,” Alex said firmly. “I’m with the Major. I like to be with the Major.”

  “For his personal use only. That’s unsocial on Earth, you know? You could even be punished for it.”

  “Maybe. But that’s how we do things on Saturn Three.” She pushed past him, and he made no move to stop her.

  Adam was in the corridor outside their quarters when she got back, a robe like her own thrown loosely about him.

  “You seemed to be a while,” he said.

  “He was in there.”

  They walked the last few yards together. “I know,” Adam said. “I took a look.”

  “How?”

  “I used the monitor in the room and switched the cameras over to infra-red. He gave you quite a scare, didn’t he?”

  “It was my own fault. Taction contact.”

  “What? Your mistake or his request? As soon as we’re out of eclipse and he’s through with his mission, out he goes. If you get any problems, don’t forget that I outrank him.”

  “You may,” Alex said, “but I don’t.”

  They came to the door of their shared quarters. “Any problems,” Adam told her, “and you just report them in to the Major.”

  “Major,” Alex said solemnly. “I have a problem.”

  “Well?”

  “I love you.”

  Adam placed his hand over the biocapacitance sensor, and the door hissed open. “Come into my quarters,” he said, “and I’ll ease your problem.”

  FIVE

  As usual, Adam second-guessed the station’s automatic timer and was out of bed before the corridors and work areas switched over to daylight levels. This was usually a matter of no importance, as the sleeping quarters lighting systems were isolated from those of the rest of the base; but as he emerged from the bathroom towelling his hair after a refreshing hot shower he noticed that the video monitor across from the bed still carried the image of the lab from the “night” before. It was the Station Commander’s spy-eye, and Adam had never had any reason to use it when only he and Alex were about the base. He’d forgotten to switch it off, and as the lab warmed with the daytime heat rise the monitor faithfully brightened in its infra-red reproduction.

  Behind him, Alex slid out of bed and moved into the bathroom. Adam reached to kill the image and then had second thoughts, switching first from the infra-red to normal spectrum viewing, and then dialling slowly through the cameras at various sites around the base.

  James was nowhere to be seen—at least, not in the public areas that the cameras covered. Adam mechanically punched up corridor followed by corridor followed by general view of the Central Nucleus . . .

  He stopped, and went back to the camera in the outer hangar. The scene was peaceful enough, but something seemed wrong; looking more closely, Adam could see that the buggy was missing from its usual parking place. His hand went straight to the end of the rank of buttons to give him an outside view of the station.

  Alex had emerged from the bathroom and now came to stand behind his shoulder, watching the image as it frame-rolled and then steadied.

  James had driven the buggy right up to the ladder on the spiderleg of his spacecraft. Detail was good and clear, being picked out in crisp silhouette against Saturn’s high-level reflection. At one time, when man’s knowledge of planet-forming processes was, to say the least, sketchy, it had been believed that the brilliance of Saturn was partly due to heat that was internally generated. Fortunately for the scholars who offered this theory they never had to walk on the planet’s surface, offering as it did a temperature of two-ninety below.

  From the waist up James was swallowed by his spacecraft, leaning in through the open hatchway. Adam operated a rocket switch to tighten the field of view, and the camera obligingly began to collapse the perspective of the picture.

  “Looks like he’s not travelling light,” Adam commented as a load consisting of three bulky metal crates on the platform of the buggy slid past the field of view. James was wrestling with the mass of a fourth crate, managing it with care although its weight under Tethys’s light pull was no real problem.

  “Perhaps he’s going to build his own place,” Alex said.

  Adam was all for the idea. “Maybe we should help him.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s here to help us, isn’t he?”

  So they had breakfast, and only then went to see what James was doing. He had transferred all four of the cases through the airlock and the decontamination chamber and then carried them, one by one, down the ramp and into the lab. Although their weight under the regime of Tethys’s gravity was considerably reduced the work had obviously cost James some effort; when Alex and Adam came upon him they noticed an audible drone from the units on his pressure suit as they struggled to draw off his excess body heat.

  “That’s quite a lot of equipment,” Adam commented as James was unsealing the side-fastenings on his suit. James nodded absently, the complaints of his suit units dying as he shrugged out of the gloved sleeves and let the garment fall to the floor. He step
ped out of it and bundled it on to an adjacent bench, his interest more on the cases before him. Adam and Alex exchanged a glance. What kind of space-monkey was it that neglected basic suit safety care? And a so-called handler, no less?

  James’s undersuit was damp with effort, his hair pushed into moist spikes by a careless rub of the sleeve across his forehead. He walked around the cases, trying to decide which to open first.

  Adam said, “How long do you think this will take?”

  “I don’t know. Until I’m done.”

  With this enigmatic estimate James lifted the crates in order on to the bench. They filled it from one end to the other, and he went along the row with a metal punch. A thin covering of foil in the centre of each peeled back to reveal a strong handle, and as the handles were turned each case gave an audible sigh as the pressure within equalised to that of the base.

  James returned to the first of the cases and lifted its side away. Alex moved around behind him to take a look at the contents. The crash foam wadding was already melting and running as contact with air destroyed it, but the maze of interlocked parts meant little to her.

  “Doesn’t really look much like a robot,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t,” James replied, reaching into the case and taking a careful hold of one of the components. “This kind of organism doesn’t bear any kind of relation to the simple work-and-feedback devices you’ll have experience of. This is one of the first of the Demigod series.”

  Adam thought it a rather pretentious title for a kit that came through the mail, but he was familiar with the way in which the Survey engineers liked to dramatise their achievements. He’d once been shipped a Respiration Sentinel which was suppose to be plumbed into his pressure suit airline and would perform the invaluable task of telling him whether or not he was breathing.

  The part that James had withdrawn from the first case was undoubtedly a hand. Adam could appreciate that it was an element in a far more complex mechanism than any of their general-duty lab robots, for whilst their manipulating claws required three separate joints and servo motors to approximate the range of movement of a real hand the Demigod seemed to contain all the necessary flexibility in a single, aesthetically attractive unit.

  James turned the hand over, and the fingers fell open in a response as relaxed and natural as that of a fresh corpse.

  It took several hours for all the parts to be removed from their cases and laid carefully on the bench. Most of them were prewired and preconstructed module units, but even so it was impossible to look at them and get any impression of what the final assembly might be like. Adam soon got bored and said loudly that he had work to do; Alex seemed happy to stay and watch, and so Adam was forced to act alone on his announcement. Once outside the lab he looked around, wondering how he should now occupy himself. He’d wander up to the main social area, perhaps run a show tape, play some muzak. Although he wouldn’t admit it to himself, he was tempted to go up to the communications room and tune in to the lab camera. What a ridiculous idea. No reason for it at all.

  Alex had the feeling that James was working self-consciously. She wondered whether to ask if her presence disturbed him, but that didn’t seem to be the reason at all; it was almost as if he were aware of being watched by someone else altogether, someone from whom he had something to fear. Could it be Adam? That was silly. Adam was no ogre.

  Nevertheless, James didn’t seem inclined to make any conversation. He only spoke in reply to a direct question from her, and even then he appeared to be unwilling to meet her eye. His glance roved over the laid-out innards of the potential mechanical entity as he answered, an insecure, repetitive action that betrayed far more about his state of mind than his normally inexpressive speech.

  “Will you assemble all of this yourself?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “How, then?”

  “I’ll do the main module hookups. I can use your lab robots to do the rest.”

  “But they won’t be programmed for that kind of assembly.”

  “They don’t need to be. The Demigod contains all the programming they’ll need. They’ll be under the Demigod’s direct control.”

  And so it went on. When Adam eventually wandered back into the lab the components were all laid out and the cases had been cleared away. All attention was focused on the cylinder that James had cherished with such care since his arrival.

  Adam moved around the lab to get a better view. The overhead lights had been dimmed, and the lid of the canister had rotated away so that its internal lighting was spilling out. Alex flashed him a quick smile of greeting, too absorbed in the revelation of this small mystery to do more; James glanced up briefly but made no sign of recognition.

  Cold gases were boiling off, but the light from within the cylinder was warm. As soon as it was safe to do so James reached over and began to withdraw a transparent inner block. After he had raised it a few inches he took his hand away and it continued to ease upward under its own power, throwing out more light as it came.

  The object within the block was unimpressive, visually a disappointment were it not for the fact that its function was unmistakable. Two litres of softy grey tissue the density of water, suspended in fluid and held by a network of filaments carefully placed to put no strain on any one part of the organ. It was shaped into an oval, free of the moulding pressures of development within a skull and with a surface that was evenly crimped like the sea’s forlorn message on a deserted beach.

  “Is it human?” said Alex.

  “It was, once,” said James.

  It was as yet unborn, free of intellect and sensation; basic programming was contained elsewhere in the Demigod’s pseudo-nervous system, ready for use as soon as the tissue was brought into full awareness.

  “How long will it take to programme?” Adam asked.

  “Couple of days to fix up the body. Then, once it’s grasped the idea of what it’s supposed to be doing . . . about three, four weeks.”

  Adam was impressed in spite of himself. “As quickly as that?”

  “I told you when I arrived how long I’d be staying.”

  “Yes, but . . .” The brain tissue seemed curiously naked and powerless in the soft light of the heating element that was bringing it up to the threshold of a twilight form of life. “Three weeks . . . it takes a human baby about twenty years to become a basic space-monkey. How are you going to manage the same job in three weeks?”

  “I know what I’m doing. As soon as I get his head together he’ll take over your programme for you. All he’ll need is a regular twelve hour charge. May as well face it—one of you’s going to be obsolete.”

  SIX

  As the realisation sank in it was a time for closeness, for consolation, for intelligent reassurance. But they sat on opposite sides of the bed and stared at different walls.

  “It needn’t be a disaster,” Alex said after a while. Her voice struck her as sounding odd, too crisp in the depressive silence. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t get another mission. The two of us in the same place. Is that so unlikely?”

  “I don’t know,” said Adam.

  There was another pause as Alex tried to think of arguments to justify the proposal. “We’ve got to find a way to stay together,” she said lamely after an interval.

  “You’re too young.”

  “Too young for what?”

  “For me, among other things.”

  “You never minded it before.”

  “I don’t mind it now. But you can’t waste yourself in a place like this forever. Perhaps it’s just me that’s too old.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s the Survey’s word that counts when it comes to allocating missions.”

  Alex turned, angry at Adam’s implied dismissal of his own abilities. “You’re as good as any spacer they’ve got. Every time you test you still come out A-one, Tethys gravity or no Tethys gravity.”

  “Okay, so to you I’m ubermensch. To them I�
��m still old.”

  “But . . .”

  “They don’t go by the grading. When you reach your abort time they pull you out, wrap you up and put you carefully on one side. They don’t want decrepit spacers fouling up on the job. I thought that here they might forget about me—they seem to think so little about Saturn Three most of the time . . .”

  “. . . but old Mother Earth never seems to forget.”

  “No.” Adam’s mind began to wander, seeking refuge in alternate and momentary realities. “We could send him for a buggy ride. Rig the pumps to overpower the drive. He’d bump over the ridge and hit escape velocity without realising it. We could send his boxes of scrap along with him.” He paused, and thought a little more. “Then—when we get out of eclipse—we could enter a non-arrival on him.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  Adam considered it. “It happens all the time, all over the solar system. Procedures get skipped, precautions get ignored. A pile goes into meltdown and a moon blows. A hatch pops and there’s another ruptured space-monkey in orbit.”

  Alex couldn’t raise enthusiasm for such macabre and pointless speculation, and she knew Adam far too well to think that he might be serious. “That’s horrible,” she said tonelessly.

  “It’s not really horrible. It’s very practical when you consider it.” He sighed, watching the dream dissipate and the unpleasantness of the moment return. “It’s also murder, and I’m not really update enough for that kind of jag. If I was like James, I might be serious. Maybe it would be better if I was like James.”

  “I’m glad you’re not,” said Alex.

  Over the next few days James occupied himself with the assembly of the Demigod, and Adam wasn’t too worried about what he did as long as it kept him away from James. This left Alex somewhere in the middle; Adam was around but strangely unavailable, and James had become too self-absorbed to be drawn into conversation about his Earth home. He appeared not to leave the lab at all, a passing glance at the communications room monitors showing that he worked on as Adam and Alex went to bed at the end of that day period and returned to the occupation—if, indeed, he had ever left it for a few hours of stolen sleep—well before they awoke the next morning.