Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  Now Hector lay against the wall, empty of life and drained of fluids, slumped and half sitting with an arm outstretched, its secret works exposed in a process of dissection.

  The shoulder joint had somehow managed to tighten itself with use. James had already come to resent Hector, and now it seemed that even his cadaver conspired to anger and frustrate him.

  “You want to kill me?” he muttered, leaning hard on the wrench to free the joint and then cursing as it slipped, skinning his knuckles on the moulding of the case. “Go ahead, kill me.” He reapplied the wrench. “Or did you want the girl more?” The wrench turned, and the joint began to loosen. “Now, what could you want with a girl? Or let me be more specific. What could a girl possibly want with you?”

  The joint opened. James dropped the wrench and gripped the arm with both hands. It remained attached by delicate loops of wire and tubing that really needed careful disconnection; but James pulled savagely, the body shell scraping a couple of inches along the wall before the contacts ripped and parted and the arm came free.

  “I needed you, Hector,” he said, and cracked the arm sharply on the edge of the workbench. “Look what you did to me.”

  TWELVE

  “How long before he goes?”

  Adam stared into the darkness above the bed and considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “He’s been working for hours to get the robot dismantled. I don’t particularly want to ask him.”

  “I know what you mean. At first I thought it was just me being hostile, but . . . well, there’s definitely something wrong with his mind, isn’t there?”

  “Something, I don’t know what. All Hector did was to pick it up and act it out. Things must have changed back at the Survey—when I was on the platform somebody like James would have been screened out by the mental tests. God only knows how he ever got to come down here on a mission alone.”

  There was a silence. “He’s a killer, isn’t he?”

  “We’ve no reason to assume that.”

  “I mean, he’s capable of it. If Hector tried to do it, James must have thought about it.”

  “They’re probably all capable of it back on Earth. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t even against the law anymore.”

  Another silence. Then: “Earth’s not really a good place to be, is it?”

  He shook his head slowly, and the movement communicated to her. “A place like that breeds men like him,” he said.

  “Is that why you left?”

  “I didn’t just leave. James was right, and I’m not ashamed of it. I ran.”

  Saturn Three, the last sane corner of the solar system. It was a frightening thought, a fragile situation. Alex found that her urge to leave it had diminished considerably over the period of James’s stay.

  “Give us a couple of weeks,” she said. “It will be like nothing had ever happened.” She almost sounded as if she believed it.

  Adam sat up suddenly as the door to the sleeping quarters slid open. The corridor outside was at night-light level, and James stood in silhouette.

  “These are private quarters, Captain,” Adam said angrily. “You’re out of line.”

  “I’m leaving.” As Adam’s eye’s adjusted to the corridor’s light he was able to see that James was in his pressure suit, unzipped and open to show the grimy coverall that he had been wearing to dismantle the robot. “I’ll be taking the girl with me.”

  “I’m ordering you out. For the last time.”

  “Face it, Major, you’re over the hill, inadequate. She doesn’t need an old man like you to give her disappointment every night. Let’s say I’m relieving you.”

  Adam slid out of the bed, came half on to his feet. “I warned you, Captain . . .”

  “I heard you, Major. Twenty years ago you might have been able to make me listen.”

  James made a good target, standing in sharp outline, and he failed to hear Adam’s barefoot approach. He reached into his coverall but too late; Adam’s weight bore him backwards on to the corridor floor, hands around his throat gripping and blocking his air. They sprawled half in and half out of the room, Alex shouting, “Stop it! Adam, you’ll kill him!”

  The Captain’s skull banged hard against the floor a couple of times. After the first hard blow he stopped resisting but Adam went on, lifting and pounding, until Alex got to him and caught hold of his wrists. He allowed himself to be restrained, releasing James and letting him fall back; then, as the panting animal withdrew and the man took over, he moved back in numb horror.

  A place like Earth breeds men like James. And Adam—but Adam runs and won’t admit it.

  She had draped a robe around his shoulders and was leading him over to the bed. He sank on to its edge and covered his face with his hands as she put her arm around his shoulders and said, “It’s all right. You couldn’t help it.”

  The wrench flashed in the darkness only inches before her eyes, and Adam immediately went limp and began to slide from her arms. She tried to hold him but he was a dead weight, pulling free and dropping to the floor as she dragged at the robe.

  James’s hand was on her arm. The wrench was in his other hand, its edge dirtied by blood and hair. “Time to go,” he said.

  “I’m going nowhere with you. Get your hand off me!”

  He tightened his grip and hauled her to her feet. “It’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t have to lie to please him any more, you’re with me now.” He dragged her into the corridor, somehow managing to ignore her struggles as they approached the first intersection of the tunnel.

  “Don’t even touch me!” she said, and finally managed to pull free, falling with the effort.

  He turned, and stretched his hand out towards her. “I’ll do what the hell I want with you,” he said, “and you’ll do as you’re told!”

  He started to step forward, and the pincers closed on his arm a couple of inches above the wrist. He stared at them in perplexity and then in alarm as they began to close, compressing the bones of his forearm together and biting deep into skin and muscle with their hard metal edge. Then a wet click, and the complete hand fell free and spurting.

  Hector stepped out of the side-tunnel and caught James as he fell, wrist still clamped aloft to stop the flow of blood. The Captain was lifted into the air as Hector straightened. His eye turret scanned the corridor for a few seconds, lingering on Alex as she tried to make herself as small as possible against the wall; then abruptly he turned and moved off with his unconscious burden.

  She watched him go, turning some way down in the general direction of the lab. James’s hand lay a few feet away, neat and lifelike as if its separation were some illusion. She got to her feet and ran the short distance back to the sleeping quarters.

  Adam groaned as she flicked the room lights on. He was sitting up, gingerly touching a fold of his robe to the back of his head. It came away with a superficial imprint of blood, no more. He looked up at her, eyes focusing with difficulty; and then, as the memory returned, he looked beyond her for James.

  Quickly, she told him what had taken place in the corridor. He thought for a moment, then threw the bloody robe aside and moved across to the closet.

  “James told us he’d broken that thing down,” he said. “Maybe he was lying.”

  “I don’t know why. He was in as much danger as us.”

  “I wouldn’t care to try explaining how his mind works. All I know is that we can’t be safe as long as Hector’s prowling the base. We have to get out and away from him.”

  “The buggy?”

  Adam shook his head. “He could follow us. And if he didn’t, where could we go? The only way out is in the Captain’s ship, which means we’ve got to get to our pressure suits and the airlock.”

  “That’s right over the other side of the nucleus!”

  “You said it.”

  The shattered door of the lab was now curled back to make an opening wide enough and high enough for Hector to pass through. The lab robots wai
ted in an obedient line, fresh and eager from their recently-completed task of reassembly; but now that Hector was whole again he had no need of them.

  They moved back to let him pass. Their minds were dim, barely worth the distinction of the term, but they had the bare minimum of intellect needed to respond to the Demigod’s scream from the darkness and their work, once learned, was fast and accurate.

  He laid James on the bench, arranging his limbs carefully. The symmetry was spoiled by the lack of a hand, besides which the open arm was beginning to pump and mess up the bench—but it didn’t really matter. Not for long.

  James’s eyelids flickered. His skin was grey, his breathing hoarse and laboured.

  “You want to kill me?” James said, but the sound came from Hector. It was low, almost a whisper, not wishing to be heard. “Go ahead, kill me.” The Demigod took hold of James’s remaining complete arm and lifted it, limp and slack. He ran his claw delicately along the upper arm to the shoulder joint, testing for flexibility. “Or did you want the girl more?” He found the pivotal point close to the surface underneath the muscle, and pulled. The cartilage ripped, the joint began to loosen. “Now, what could you want with a girl?” There was resistance from the sinews, they seemed to stretch and hold where the muscle parted easily. Hector squeezed at the joint with his restraining claw, shearing through the tissues and feeling as they sprang apart with a moist crackling sound.

  “Let me be more specific.” The arm came free and he banged it hard on the edge of the bench before laying it aside. “What could a girl possibly want with you now?”

  The other arm was much easier. Laying it next to the first, Hector moved around to the head of the bench.

  There was no way of telling how long Hector might occupy himself in the lab. They tried to see what he was doing on the Commander’s spy-eye monitor in the sleeping quarters, but even on infra-red there were no more than dim shapes visible as the camera tube had overloaded along with much of the other equipment.

  They needed to get to the suits and the airlock on the upper nucleus, which meant that they had to reach the upward-sloping ramp. Central Nucleus was the most obvious and direct route, but it would take them perilously close to the lab. Other tunnels could take them on a wider pass, but if Hector decided to come looking for them the slight time advantage would be lost.

  The Central Nucleus was empty, innocent in appearance. They crossed it, making as little sound as possible, and entered the corridor which would end in the ramp.

  “Oh, no,” Alex said, and Adam threw out a hand to hold her back. Hector had stepped out ahead of them, gleaming soft and golden in the tunnel’s low light.

  “This way,” Adam said as Hector stepped out towards them, and he hustled Alex back towards the nucleus. Hector was following in silence, his walk betraying none of his earlier uncertainty; perhaps that had been no more than an act.

  Several of the tunnels converged on this central area. Alex waited as Adam went back a short distance to check on Hector’s progress.

  Adam leaned out from the curve of the corridor, ready to dodge an outstretched claw or to turn and run if the Demigod was too close. He saw nothing, leaned a little further.

  The tunnel was empty. He turned and ran back to the nucleus. Alex was waiting, watching for his return and so could not see that Hector was emerging into the nucleus only a few yards behind her, striding purposefully forward and reaching out.

  To shout a warning, or to stop and try to pull Alex away—there was no opportunity for either of these courses of action. Adam opted to keep on running, grabbing Alex and snapping her round. She gave an abrupt squeak of surprise as she saw Hector’s closeness and then they were past, making the best use of the robot’s inability to make fast turns.

  Hector made no signs of dismay, no futile gestures of frustration. He paused almost thoughtfully, inwardly rehearsing the mechanics of the evasion. He would not be caught in such a manner again. He scanned the tunnels leading off from the nucleus, chose one, followed it.

  “I know where he can’t follow,” Adam said as they ran along a section where the tunnel humped to follow Tethys’s strata.

  “Where?”

  At the uppermost part of the bulge there was a gap between wall and floor where the preformed sections did not meet. There was barely enough room to squeeze through and crawl into the cableway that ran beneath the floor.

  There was light, a fine checkerboard filtered by the grating above. The even blocks of squares spilled and stretched over the bunched cable and tubing, a geometric warping that made it seem that they had been pressed from a single sheet of squared plastic. The clearance was small, and Adam and Alex wormed through with difficulty.

  Adam hoped that he would be able to remember his way around the station when seeing it from this unusual perspective. It was fortunate that he had been under the floors only a few days before when checking the pumps that were part of Saturn Three’s life-support. If they didn’t attract Hector’s attention they might even make it as far as the ramp without emerging and risking capture.

  At the first intersection Adam reached back and touched Alex, warning her to be quiet and still. Hector was approaching, and even if he did not hear them there was a slim chance that he might detect a movement through the grating.

  Hector turned the corner, came towards them. From this angle he looked more massive and dangerous than ever. They held their breath as he lumbered up and right over them, the floor section actually sagging a little as his weight bore down on it; then he had moved on, and Alex let out her breath in a sigh of relief.

  Hector stopped. His eye turret swung around—they could see its shadow ripple across the pipes only a few feet from them—probing, searching and then, very slowly, lowering. He moved back, scanning through the floor, and came to stand over them.

  He looked at Alex, and then he looked at Adam. Then he took a step back, and reached down.

  Adam saw the prongs of the claw pass through the open grill and close in a grasp. “Move it!” he shouted to Alex, and started to scramble backwards as the entire floor section was lifted and the corridor light spilled in. Hector held the section up and leaned in with his free claw, reaching and snapping, trying to get a hold on flesh, cloth—anything that would enable him to drag one of them back.

  They were barely out of reach, and Adam had to pull his legs in fast as he felt the brush of the claw on his shin. The robot reacted immediately, returning and snatching, but his target had moved.

  The Demigod was at a disadvantage; stooping and lifting complete floor sections made little demand on his strength but gave him difficulties of balance, and the need to be close to the grating restricted his vision. Furthermore, he could only lift one section at a time, and would have to drop it back into place before he could walk across it and raise the next.

  Adam and Alex were still moving, following the course of the tunnel. Some stretches were quite open and most of the heavy cables could simply be pushed aside to make a bigger gap. Only the rigid conduits which carried water and steam offered any real problem; some of them went straight across their path, cutting into and through the tunnel wall on either side, and they had to be negotiated with care.

  The next intersection was coming up, and Adam hoped that he would be able to remember which way to turn. He tried to visualise as he crawled, imagining the tunnel as it had appeared before they had gone underground. Come on, he told himself angrily, this is the place where you spend every day of your life. You mean to say you’ve never really looked at it before?

  The panel above bent as Hector caught up. The section ahead lifted abruptly and they almost ran into the claw that appeared in the shaft ahead of them. Almost immediately the claw withdrew and the section was dumped back into place, and Adam could see Hector’s outline, fragmented by the grating, as he quickly reached for the next panel.

  Hector lost a couple of seconds in striding forward, by which time Adam and Alex were under him. They already knew that he wou
ld be unable to reach very far underneath the panel that he was standing on, and to have moved in the opposite direction would have entailed a risk of being swept into some dead end.

  The panel slammed down, and Hector stepped on to it and turned. “Time to back off,” Adam said.

  Four evenly-spaced conduits blocked their way, horizontal bars with only inches between them. Adam wasted no time with expressions of dismay but wormed across to where the conduit met the wall, eyes straining at the broken patches of light, looking for a joint of a seam in one of the thick tubes. Alex got the message, worming her way to the opposite wall to do the same.

  A groove ran around the third pipe, a tight fitting that was almost invisible. He took hold of the pipe in both hands; it was hot but not unbearable, obviously one of the steam conduits. He started to call over to Alex, asking her to see if there was a shut-off handle at the far end of the pipe to cut the supply of steam as he moved it aside; but then he thought better of it, taking hold and twisting to undo the joint.

  The conduit broke away from the wall, and steam immediately poured out and began to back up around him. Alex wasted no time in sliding through the gap that the loose pipe had created, but instead of following, Adam manhandled the open end around and thrust it up against the grating. The underfloor channel was already filled with a thick, uncomfortable fog and now this started to boil up into the passageway around the robot.

  Alex turned back to look for Adam. All she saw was a grey-white nothing, a damp and sticky swirl that obscured everything beyond a couple of yards.

  Adam crawled through the gap in the pipes and tried to see around him. He’d reached the intersection, he could guess that much; but out of three possible directions, which had Alex taken?

  Hector turned around in the steam. Condensation was beaded all over his body and on the lens of his eye turret, and there was no way he could wipe it off. He shook the mechanism from side to side, and it re-clouded almost immediately.