Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  Like a child on his first day at school, Adam thought, and said, “Come on, Hector. Time to strike out on your own.”

  Hector moved on into the airlock, dull gold against grey. The doors clamped together behind him and locked as the base’s atmosphere was withdrawn and conserved.

  The buggy was charged up and stacked with a selection of quarry grenades, and there seemed barely enough room for Hector to climb aboard in spite of the fact that Adam had left behind some of his usual equipment when he had prepared the vehicle for the expedition. Another black mark for the adaptability of the Demigod series, he thought, and Hector seemed to agree; he eyed the buggy with obvious trepidation, like a maiden aunt considering an offer to go hang-gliding.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Adam said, and this seemed to decide Hector. He swung around and marched determinedly back towards the outer airlock door.

  Adam voiced an appeal to heaven as he hurried over to the robot and caught it by the shoulder joints. The open articulations were at the same height as his helmet, but they were the only part of the metal colossus that his gloved hands could easily grip.

  The threat to his balance stopped Hector. The lens turret motored around, the sensor hanging level with Adam’s faceplate.

  “Look,” he said, trying to sound reasonable whilst aware of the absurdity of the need, “you have to get in the buggy. There’s enough room and it’s easily strong enough to take you. If you don’t get in the buggy you can’t come with me. And if you don’t come with me, the whole thing’s off.”

  Hector gave the matter some consideration. After a few seconds he consented to turn around and follow Adam back to the buggy.

  “Now what’s the problem?” Adam was halfway into the driving seat, but Hector was still regarding the buggy with deep suspicion.

  “Get in.” There was no response.

  Damn you, tin man, you’re starting to get to me. Adam climbed wearily from his seat and circled the framework of the open vehicle yet again. If Hector wouldn’t jump, he’d have to be pushed.

  At the first touch the robot’s arm whipped aloft and Adam ducked away from the blow, throwing himself back and blocking with his forearm; but the claw quivered as the servos fought each other, equal forces demanding blood and restraint in equal measures.

  Adam was safely out of reach, and the robot was not moving to attack him further. The clawed arm was slowly lowered, but the revelation had been made, a brief glimpse into the pit of hungry snakes that was the Demigod’s—and, by reflection, it’s trainer’s—mind.

  If it wouldn’t come, let it stay. Adam walked back to the driving seat without further comment, but as he did so Hector clambered awkwardly on to the framework and lowered his oversized bulk into the passenger seat. Now it was Adam’s turn to hesitate; but then he warily climbed aboard and reached for the remote switch to open the outer doors.

  Whenever Adam was out of the base it seemed to Alex that her perceptions of her surroundings underwent a subtle alteration. Lights seemed brighter and harder, and the odd and ordinarily comforting sounds of the station acquired a new and unfamiliar edge. Knowing that James was around did nothing to temper these feelings of disjointed isolation; if anything, his distant presence intensified them. In an attempt to find some small measure of comfort against the chill or loneliness Alex went to look for the only sympathetic life form that was left in Saturn Three.

  Sally was in one of her usual places, asleep on top of the heat-exchanger cover. A dark, slightly greasy patch on the white of the insulation betrayed her liking for its warmth and the frequency of her visits. The dog moaned blearily as Alex scooped her off and cradled her, finding some immediate primeval reassurance in the close touch of warm fur. It was a need, an obvious and inexplicable need; as inexplicable as a yearning to see just once, open skies and uncultivated green, and to feel the warm scented wash of freely moving air—the sad dream of the Spaceborn.

  She turned, murmuring to the dog of nothing in particular. James was watching her.

  “How’s the eye?” he said, not managing to make it sound like he wanted to know the answer.

  “It’s fine. No problem at all.”

  He nodded, but didn’t seem to have taken the information in. The conversation was nothing more than noise—his mind was elsewhere.

  “Put the animal down,” he said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Put the animal down.” His tone suggested that he was in some way offended by the display of affection that was being given to what was, in his experience, a meat animal.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Alex said, passing him and taking her compliant furry bundle down the ramp towards the main nucleus. James wheeled to follow, and raised his voice as he called after her.

  “Wrong with me? There’s nothing wrong with me. But there seems to be one hell of a mix-up in your priorities, girl.” They came into the general living quarters with James trying to get around Alex to confront her.

  “Old men and dogs, that’s all you seem to go for. What’s so bad about me? What’s so bad that I don’t rate?”

  Alex looked through him, past him, anywhere but at him. She said nothing.

  “May I ask you a question?” Still nothing. “Do you want children, Alex?”

  She moved off, and again he followed, still talking. “Because I’m sure you’ll qualify, make the grades easily. But not with him as a sponsor.” She was stalking off along the corridor towards the sleeping quarters, her angry stamping shaking the gridirons of the floor. “They’ve got to be choosy about the ones they let through the net,” he shouted, “and rusty old spacers rate pretty low. You can do better!”

  Alex disappeared around the metalled curve of the tunnel. James hurried after.

  The buggy had cut yet another pair of irregular ruts into the wide swathe that converged on the entrance to Saturn Three, but on this trip the vehicle had covered no more than the couple of hundred yards to James’s spacecraft. As they’d drawn level with the spider-legged structure Hector had reached over and deliberately operated the buggy’s hydrogen cut-off, keeping his claw firmly clamped on the handle so that Adam had no choice but to roll to a halt.

  “Hector, what do you think you’re doing?” Adam demanded, but the robot swung his ponderous legs out of the buggy and pushed himself upright on Tethys’s ice-and-rockdust surface. Only a few feet away the gases had swamped and refrozen into a petrified tide, a mirror-molten pool around the spacecraft.

  Adam waited a moment, uncertain, but Hector for some peculiar and unfathomable reason of his own did not want to go on the journey. Another failure, and another supportive argument for the status quo; but then, perhaps, another reason for James to extend his stay.

  The issue was decided; the trip was under way, and the Demigod had backed out. Adam reopened the cutout and moved off, unsure of whether to be delighted or depressed.

  He risked a glance back before he hit the top of the ridge. The heroic caricature of Hector’s body shell had not moved, a headless Talos inhabited by a dark and lonely spirit. Then the buggy threw a wheel into the air, searching for a grip over the knife-edge, and the ridge arose to block the view.

  Hector waited for a few seconds longer. The angle-poise apparatus which was mounted on the turret between his shoulders was extended to its fullest, raising the sensory eye to watch for any further sign of movement; and when there was none, the sensor retracted to its normal angle and the robot began a careful turn.

  Testing his weight carefully on the ammoniated ice, Hector moved towards the spacecraft. It would be impossible to say whether there might have been sufficient poetry in his unhappy soul to view it as the womb that had carried him in ignorance to Saturn Three, but there can be no doubt that he was fully acquainted with the inter-related complex of parts and principles that made it a working mechanism; it was a mere fraction of the information given to him by the base computer.

  The ice cracked and split underfoot, but there was solidity ben
eath. He came within the shadow of the spacecraft’s leg and moved in to locate the maintenance panels for the drive’s ignition systems, spreading his skeletal arms wide and forming his claws into the shape of the keyed release tool that would unlock the panels and give him access.

  After a few minutes’ work amongst the conduits and pressure tubing in the spacecraft’s belly he moved around and sought out the communications wiring, tugging lengths of cable free and snipping them neatly before pushing them through the craft’s internal spaces on a new routing.

  When he had finished, Hector lifted the panels back into place before turning and walking back across the craggy ice towards the seam that was the entrance to the station. This time his claw had no trouble in grasping the servo handle and operating the release mechanism, and once inside the hangar he twisted the mirror-image internal servo to full emergency lock. The heavy door dropped swiftly and in silence, and Hector went on turning in a powerful movement that wrenched the handle out of its mounting.

  James caught up with Alex and even managed to get in front of her, hopping backwards as he tried a new angle of attack.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got no reason to be getting angry with you. I’m making a fool of myself, I know.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You know I’m under tension . . .”

  “I said forget it.” They were coming level with the sleeping quarters entrance; Alex suddenly wished that she’d given more thought to her route.

  “I’m not talking about Hector,” James said, blocking the doorway as the panel slid aside behind him, “I’m talking about you and me. You’ve got me so messed up about nothing—nothing at all—that I’ve even ballsed-up Hector’s training. And it’s your fault, Alex. Back on Earth nobody would even think twice about this but you—you hold back and beat me off like I was some grubby kid.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said tersely, and tried to push past him. He caught her by the shoulders, and Sally dropped yelping to the ground.

  “I’m not trying to cut the old man out,” he said quickly. “He wouldn’t have to know. You wouldn’t have to know—I could give you a blanker and wipe the whole thing.”

  He was strong and intense, and he was holding her, his eyes pleading with her own. The dog was no longer an interfering obstacle between them, and Alex found that she could not longer resist her own impulses as propriety deserted her. She belted James with all her strength, and walked away.

  James fell back against the doorway, his head ringing with the blow. The dog was backed off a few feet and barking at him, so he aimed a kick at her. His foot missed but Sally turned and ran, barking all the way.

  As Alex emerged into the living quarters she could hear Sally’s shrill anger, and it mirrored her own. The sounds of canine temper receded as she scampered off down the corridor that circled the Central Nucleus; in a few seconds the noise would begin to approach, this time from the opposite side of the quarters as the dog came around to complete the circuit.

  The noise fell away, moving into transition at the furthest part of the circle, and Alex hesitated as she unconsciously waited for it to resume; then she smiled through her annoyance as she realised what she was doing, like counting the chimes of the clock when you already knew the time. Sally had probably dashed into the lab and made for the sheltering warmth of the hydroponics tanks.

  The scream came then, distant but impossibly loud and distressingly short, and Alex began to run. If James had taken out his bitter resentment on the dog she was sure she would kill him, regardless of his size, his strength, or his rank. The corridor seemed to snake on forever, although she knew it was really no distance at all; turning, rising and falling to take account of the folding of Tethys’s subsurface structures, branching and broken by doors and offshoots until suddenly she was at the lab.

  The doors were wide open. Hector’s eye turret spun around to bear on Alex and then he began to turn to her, raising his hands. Look, he seemed to say, I have a gift for you.

  What had been Sally was now two pieces of bloody fur and meat, broken and crushed by Hector’s tearing grip. His golden armour had been splattered by the small explosion of gore. He took a step towards Alex, holding out his dripping offering, but she backed away; another of the robot’s heavy steps and she backed away again, realising too late that she had allowed herself to be pushed out of reach of the lab’s only doors.

  The Demigod came on, and Alex retreated further, her mind racing. Hector was back in the base when he should have been out with Adam—why? Had Adam given up and abandoned the robot to find his own way home, or was their separation due to some less innocent cause? Hector had torn the dog open and he could easily do the same to a man, pressure suit or no pressure suit. The idea horrified her but she was able, as she backed around the lab, to consider it with logic and clarity. The blood was starting to coagulate on Hector’s body shell, forming thick droplets on the clean metal. Tethys’s surface was vacuum, and if Hector were to treat a man under those conditions as he had treated Sally in the fifteen pounds psi pressure of the station, the resultant explosion would surely drench him from head to foot with a sticky mess that would resist even the cleansing winds of the decontamination chamber.

  The blood on Hector was on his arms and chest, nowhere else apart from where it had run and begun to dry in thin rivers down his legs.

  Assuming Adam to be alive, how could she call him? The robot had effectively blocked her off from the door, so she had no hope of making it to the communications room; there was no way that she could even call James, that most unlikely of allies.

  She had been pushed over by the bacterial tanks now, as far back into the lab as she could go, and still Hector was moving in slow strides towards her. The door was now impossibly far away but the lab was wide, and Hector was slow; his turret could swivel with speed and his arms could move like whips, but as long as she stayed beyond his reach she could outrun his rocking gait.

  If she feinted to his left, she could put the bulk of one of the lab’s handling robots between them. The lab robot was like a wheeled spider, bristling with grabs and pincers, and there was even a chance that Hector could get tangled up in it; at the worst he would have to move it aside before he could follow, and then the route to the door was a narrow alley between the lab benches and a number of the other robots stacked against the curving wall. The final obstacle was the massive handling crane, left out of place as James had discarded it when assembling his malevolent child. Hector was big and would manoeuvre with difficulty through this simple labyrinth of furniture and metal, and Alex might even have time to rip James’s improvised control box from beside the door, trapping the Demigod in the lab as he laboriously retraced his steps down the open centre.

  Closer he came, and she braced her hands on the glass panels of the tank behind her to push for a fraction of extra speed. Then she dived, and was under the sweep of his arms before he realised what she was doing, running for the gap and dodging through it as Hector began his slow turn to follow.

  Alex was banged hard against the edge of the bench as her leg was pulled from under her, and as she kicked to regain her balance she found that the spider robot had flicked out an arm and caught a grip on her pants leg. It was a weak arm intended for delicate assembly and she knocked it aside easily, but as she did so another came out and took its place; and as she fought this one, two more.

  The supposedly safe path ahead was lined with waving grabs and pincers as the lab robots all became active. Some were microgrips that, even if they could reach her, could give her no more than a playful nip; others could bite through a limb in an easy movement. Hector had commanded them all as they had assembled his body, and he was commanding them now. Alex didn’t dare to run their deadly gauntlet, and now Hector had moved into place to seal her into the alley.

  She pushed the spider robot free and launched it at Hector’s legs, realising the futility of the action as she did so; the spider was a light
alloy on rubber wheels, enough perhaps to trip a man but nothing to worry Hector’s metal mass. The spider bounced from his shin and spun as he stepped over it, clearing it out of his way with a savage backward kick.

  The spider skittered out of control across the jointed panels of the lab floor. It came up hard against the ground-level glass of one of the tanks, and was immediately pushed away by the outrush of boiling fluids as the glass gave way and the contents dumped in a re-enactment of an earlier accident.

  Hector’s turret swung around at the noise, away from Alex. Although the spillage offered him no threat it seemed that he looked on it for longer than was necessary, perhaps remembering his indignity under James’s imperfect control.

  Alex saw her chance, and jumped on to the lab bench by her side. There was a mass of wire and packing material on it that she swept away as she scrambled across, diving for a headlong fall into the open space at the far side. Hector’s right claw shot out and closed around her wrist.

  James was in the Central Nucleus as the lights began to flash in the bacterial alert signal. He looked around in confusion for a moment and then began to move, slowly at first, towards the lab. As his confusion cleared he began to run, and when the lab doors zipped open and he sprinted through he nearly fell as his foot slid across drying blood.

  He steadied himself as he looked down the lab. Hector was holding Alex with a claw around each wrist. The robot had nearly hoisted her into the air, and her contact with the floor was obviously slight; he had brought her almost level with his sensory eye, and this hovered before her face.

  “Hector,” James said, trying to muster a tone of confident command, “put her down.”

  The eyestalk moved aside for a moment, taking him in. Then it motored back to Alex.

  The buggy nearly took off as it hit the ridge and bounced on to the long slope for the last stage of the return to the station. Adam had been out of the vehicle for some time and so had no idea how long the red alarm light had been glowing on the dashboard, Saturn Three’s quiet cry of danger. It could be an accident, it could be a fault, or it could be an improvised plea for help. He boosted his helmet radio receiver to the top of its power, putting his life-support systems at risk, but there was no broadcast from the com room, no easy reassurance from Alex that everything was under control.