by Ben Bova
“Dan,” she said. “Oh, Dan, you’ve come back!”
He paused, the gold visor of his helmet regarding her like the eye of a strange god. The reflection of her own distorted face smiled stupidly in the heavily tinted glass. Then he turned back to the keyboard.
She could not believe her eyes. He was ignoring her, rejecting her, mere minutes after professing his love for her. He couldn’t be Dan. He couldn’t be the man she loved.
She dove at him, pressed her eyes against the helmet. The face that loomed out of the shadows was hard, cruel, set in anger.
Lance ripped her from his shoulders and sent her spinning. She leaped back toward him, but he swatted her backhand across the mouth. Her eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets, and then they slowly closed.
Lance shoved her down the aisle. Then he went back to the command console and continued pecking out a new program for the translation thrusters.
4 SEPTEMBER 1998
TRIKON STATION
SUSPECT KILLED IN ESCAPE ATTEMPT
COALINGA, CA—A murder suspect being transported from San Francisco to Los Angeles by sheriffs deputies was killed early this morning while trying to escape on a lonely stretch of Interstate 5 in Fresno County.
Deputy Luther Green and Deputy Hector Andujar were returning the suspect to Los Angeles to face charges in connection with the murder of a Topanga woman.
The suspect, Harold Meade, reportedly worked free of his handcuffs. He slugged Deputy Andujar, and in the ensuing struggle with Deputy Green the car overturned in a roadside gully.
Police said Meade disarmed Green and was preparing to kill him when Andujar shot him through the neck with his service revolver. The deputies sustained only minor injuries in the struggle.
Meade was arrested in San Francisco yesterday in connection with the sexual assault and murder of Stacey Hollis, a 32-year-old Topanga woman who died from a massive injection of an animal tranquilizer. Meade, a British national, was apprehended at San Francisco International Airport while attempting to board a flight to Melbourne, Australia. In a routine inspection of luggage, airport security officials found a supply of the same type of animal tranquilizer used in the Topanga murder.
— Fresno Bee, 4 September 1998
Dan and Hugh O’Donnell felt as if they were in a runaway elevator. The airlock surged with sudden weight again and they tumbled against its outer hatch in a flurry of flailing arms and legs and curses.
Dan cut his EMU comm link with the station’s alarm system. He didn’t need those damn bells and Klaxons to remind him that all hell had broken loose. The other channels were silent except for an occasional crackle of static.
“What’s that noise?” O’Donnell’s voice muttered in Dan’s helmet earphones.
Dan heard it. A low-frequency hum, like a giant bronze statue of Buddha intoning its mantra. The feeling of weight shifted again and they both slid to what had once been the airlock’s overhead.
“What is it?” O’Donnell repeated.
“The whole damned station is vibrating,” Dan replied grimly. “Like a big tuning fork.”
“Jesus! Will it break up?”
“If we let it.” Dan climbed to his booted feet. “Come on.”
He guesstimated the station’s sudden gravity to be around one-sixth g, like that of the moon. It didn’t sound like a tremendous change-theoretically, he was capable of jumping six times farther or lifting objects six times heavier than on Earth. But after nine months of micro-gee, he felt like the circus fat man.
“We’ve got to get through the hatch,” Dan said. “Give me a lift.”
Grunting, O’Donnell boosted him within reach of the inner hatch. Dan reached for the small wheel that controlled the locking mechanism. The airlock lurched again and his gloved fingers slipped from the wheel. He came banging down hard, O’Donnell sprawling painfully beside him.
The suits aren’t built for punishment, Dan knew. But they sure hand it out when you thump around inside them.
“Laurel and Hardy open a hatch,” O’Donnell muttered. Dan did not need to tell him to get up and start again.
It took two more tries, but finally the wheel turned, the lock released, and the hatch popped open. O’Donnell pushed Dan through. Then Dan reached down and hauled O’Donnell into the connecting tunnel. They were both drenched with sweat.
“Command module,” Dan said.
“I’m going to The Bakery,” responded O’Donnell. “My lab.”
In microgravity the tunnel had been a long corridor that they could swim through. Now it was a long slanting tube that they had to climb up. Laboriously, on their hands and knees, they started up opposite sides of the tunnel. The space suits felt as if they weighed tons.
“Like climbing Mt. Everest,” Dan grunted.
O’Donnell’s panting voice answered, “Look out fur the Abominable Snowman, pal.”
For Chakra Ramsanjawi, the first indication that something was amiss occurred when an orange-colored liquid spilled out of a vial. Rather than separate and disperse into a thousand orange beads, the liquid held together like a tongue-shaped river and streamed toward the bulkhead. It formed a puddle into which Ramsanjawi, suddenly drifting himself, splashed belly first. The lab door, still held by its padlocked hasp, slammed shut against its disconnected hinges.
Alarms clanged over the intercom system. A synthesized female voice calmly intoned: “Emergency. Emergency. Major malfunction. All personnel to CERV stations. All personnel to CERV stations. Prepare to abandon the station.”
“What the bloody hell is this?” Ramsanjawi grumbled to himself. He tucked the satchel under his arm and scrambled upright. He found himself standing on the bulkhead nearly perpendicular to the module’s usual vertical. Several vials cascaded slowly out of the compartments that once corralled them. They tinkled around his feet.
He felt heavy. Ramsanjawi tried pushing the door with one hand. He had not bothered with Trikon’s suggested exercise regimen, and he was unpleasantly surprised to learn how much his muscles had atrophied. He placed the satchel in a nearby compartment and used both hands along with a slight bend in his knees to throw open the door. Grabbing the satchel, he climbed out.
The Bakery looked even more a mess than before. Every loose object had slid to one side of the module. No one seemed concerned; gravity only added to the fun of Lethe. Scientists and technicians tumbled and frolicked in the multihued mayhem.
Ramsanjawi hoisted himself through the hatch. Something was very wrong. He could not imagine the exact cause of the problem, but he knew one thing very clearly: he was getting the hell out of The Bakery.
Lance stared through the command module’s viewport. The Earth had slipped completely out of view and now the stars slid across his field of vision.
He had done it—seized control of the command module, blasted the station into a cartwheel that would tear it asunder. But there was one minor problem, one detail he hadn’t foreseen: no one seemed to care. Where were the Trikon scientists, the Martians, his fellow crewmen? Why weren’t they jamming the command module, whimpering, pleading, begging for their lives?
He stole a glance at Lorraine, hovering in the area between the command center and the utilities section. Her face was pretty in repose. And she had been so kind when he was sick and when he was troubled. Damnation, why did he always go for the bad ones, the Beckys, the Carla Sues, the ones who looked so fine and talked so fine and stabbed you in the back. Maybe he should save her. There would be more than enough room in the lifeboat.
Suddenly he realized why everyone was avoiding him. They were using psychology. That was it. They were ignoring him. Ignore him and he’ll go away. Ignore him and he’ll stop fussing. Ignore him and he’ll go to sleep. His parents had used that psychology whenever his stomach hurt him. He would hear them from his bed, carefully raising their voices so he would hear. Ignore him and he’ll go to sleep.
He fired off more commands to the translation thrusters. Let them ignore this one!
Ramsanjawi’s eyes, above the breathing mask, popped wide as he recognized O’Donnell through the tinted visor of his helmet. He scuttled along the wall, one hand clutching a black satchel, the other groping for handholds. O’Donnell tried to tackle him, but the Indian slipped free.
Fuck him, thought O’Donnell as he bent himself through the hatch. The Bakery looked like the aftermath of a fingerpaint fight. In any other context, the sight of grown adults gamboling among the drifting and sloshing wads of color would have been hilarious. But O’Donnell felt cold terror clutching at him. Then he caught sight of his lab and his heart stopped.
The vials, the culture dishes, the test tubes—all of them—broken, smashed. Their contents oozed along the bulkhead in a purplish-gray mass. And someone had tampered with the plants. Each was missing exactly one leaf.
O’Donnell tried to jump out of the lab, but a sudden surge of gravity sent him crashing against the bulkhead. He tried again, and this time managed to claw his way first through the lab door and then out the hatch and into the connecting tunnel.
Across the tunnel, a space-suited figure dangled from the open door of a locker.
“Dan, is that you?” O’Donnell called.
In his helmet earphones he heard, “Yeah.” Dan was breathing hard, trying to climb up the tunnel wall toward the command module.
“You okay?” O’Donnell asked.
Dan grunted. “Yeah.” And kept struggling up the tunnel wall.
Ramsanjawi, meanwhile, was nothing but a saffron dot diminishing toward the other end of the tunnel.
“Bastard stole my work,” huffed O’Donnell as he lurched after him.
Dan had been climbing laboriously. With each upward lunge, he ticked off a possible reason for the station’s predicament. Thruster misfire. Gyroscope damage. CERV engine ignition. Collision with the errant Mars module. But there was another possibility, and given the weird behavior already evident it was also the most likely: someone was trying to destroy the station.
Then came the surge.
It blasted him off the wall and sent him tumbling ass over teakettle down the tunnel until he managed to catch hold of a swinging locker door. Even through his helmet he could hear the station’s metal frame groaning. Roberts, Oyamo, and the four Japanese techs somersaulted past, screaming like a sextet of banshees until they landed in a series of thuds against the bulkhead at the end of the tunnel.
O’Donnell emerged from The Bakery. “Dan, is that you?” he called.
“Yeah.” Dan acknowledged, starting up the tunnel wall again toward the command module.
“You okay?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bastard stole my work,” O’Donnell growled. He disappeared down the tunnel.
Alone again, Dan scrambled around until he was belly on the wall, heading for the command module once more. Climbing was tougher, which meant the station was spinning faster. More g-forces, more weight. He heard something go ping! like a taut steel cable snapping. Dan moved a foot, then a hand. Then the other foot and the other hand. Like the old comic-book hero Spiderman scaling the face of a skyscraper. He paused to catch his breath. The force was weakening. A little. He was almost at the command module.
Ramsanjawi felt a sudden giddiness as he scurried past the command module’s hatch. He knew that he was weightless again. But then, just as suddenly, his guts surged and he was bumping headlong toward the far end of the tunnel as if sucked into the maw of a giant vacuum cleaner. Petrified, he clawed at the storage compartments winging past him. Scrambling, fingernails screeching along metal, he banged and thumped against walls and doors until he finally managed to stop himself, bruised, battered, bleeding. But the satchel bounced crazily down, down, down.
“No matter,” he breathed as a bead of sweat rolled down between his eyes and paused itchily at the rim of his oxygen mask. There were lifeboats in that direction as well.
O’Donnell glided through the micro-gee zone where the command module joined the connecting tunnel and felt the artificial gravity grab him from the other side. He could see Ramsanjawi’s kurta bobbing in the distance. No time to rappel down the face of the tunnel, he decided. He tucked himself into a ball and let himself fall like a bomb.
Dan gripped both of his gloved hands securely on the lip of the command module’s hatch. He swung his feet out toward the far end of the tunnel, the momentum ripping one hand from the hatch. Clinging desperately with the remaining hand, he painfully mustered the strength to pull himself inside.
The module was spinning like a fun-house barrel. Lorraine floated limply in the narrow aisle alongside the utilities section. Her eyes were closed and a thread of blood curled away from the corner of her lips. But she was breathing and a pulse was visible in her neck.
A flash of motion reflected in Dan’s helmet visor. Someone clad in an EMU was banging at the keyboard of the main computer. The sonofabitch is deliberately wrecking the station. My station! Deliberately! I’ll kill him!
Dan barreled down the aisle like a heat-seeking missile and struck the EMU solidly in the shoulder, tearing it out of the anchoring loops and sending it crashing against the viewport. Quickly bracing himself with his hands against the console behind him as the space-suited figure righted itself, Dan jackknifed and, with all the fury burning within him, kicked both legs into the soft area of the suit’s midsection. He could feel muscles and ribs giving way beneath the impact of his kick.
I’ll kill you, you sonofabitch, Dan snarled inwardly. But the figure folded into a fetal position and went limp, drifting slowly upward above the instrument panel.
His hands shaking with barely controlled rage, Dan unfastened its helmet and yanked it off the EMU. Lance Muncie’s head lolled around in the collar of the suit, his youthful face almost cherubic in unconsciousness.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dan said out loud. The anger drained out of him. Muncie. He must have gone berserk.
Dan shoved Lance out of the command center and anchored himself at the control panel. The instrument panel was ablaze with warning lights. Even with the alarm channel shut off, the whooping and ringing seeped into his helmet. His fingers tapped out a set of commands. The data readout showed that the tumble had begun with a short burst from the port zenith translation thruster at 1015 hours. The control moment gyroscopes had automatically tried to contain the torque generated by the burst, but they were quickly saturated and shut off automatically. A second firing command was issued seven minutes later. That’s what caused the surge that knocked me back through the tunnel, Dan realized. The computer indicated that the thruster was still firing. The station wasn’t only spinning. It was twisting and twanging like a paper kite caught in a high wind.
Can’t abandon the station, he realized. The whole damned crew is too high to even hear the warning signals.
Muncie hadn’t done that, he knew. One of the wiseass scientists had put something in the station’s air. That was the only explanation.
“You’re going to have to bring her back under control, mister,” he muttered to himself. “You used to be a flier. Let’s see if you still have the good stuff.”
Strangely, he felt no fear. No more anger. He was as calm inside as he had ever been in the cockpit of an airplane or spacecraft. There was no room for emotions when he had his hands on the controls of a dangerously careening craft. There was hardly any room for Dan Tighe to think about himself. He was one with the vehicle he was trying to control; he and this beautiful piece of machinery beneath his hands merged into a single being, nerves melding with electrical circuits, mind and machine, flesh and metal becoming one living entity.
Dan looked out the viewport and located the nadir trailing edge of the diamond against the dizzying sky. The solar panel and radiator were flapping like slow-motion bird�
��s wings. The blue-and-white curve of the Earth slid past, then disappeared from his view. He could see a few stars in the darkness out there, whipping by so fast it almost made him dizzy.
Got to work fast. The solar panels were useless without proper orientation. Once the station lost power there would be no hope of regaining control. The station would spin and spin until it tore itself apart.
Something flashed in the corner of his vision. Leaning forward to get a better look out the window through his helmet visor, Dan saw the RMS arm weaving back and forth against the black background of space like the long, thin, bony arm of a gigantic Halloween skeleton. It’s pulled loose of its restraint, he realized. Soon it would wrench free altogether and start bashing the station like a battering ram.
The Earth spun into view again. Dan keyed in a command for a display of attitude rates calculated by the inertial measurement unit. If the spin rates haven’t already exceeded the ACS’s limits, Dan told himself, maybe we can bring this Tinkertoy to heel. If not…
For a brief moment, the spin rates flashed—one revolution per minute, one point two—then the numbers exploded into garbage characters. The ACS’s limit had been exceeded; the primary system was out of commission. The station was in a three-axis tumble.
Dan disengaged from his foot restraints and frantically rummaged through a nearby tool compartment. The cabin lights winked out. The command module darkened as the viewport spun away from the glow of the Earth. Dan whirled to the computer. A warning flashed: “Solar panel drive failure.” Then the screen died.
Ramsanjawi lay flat on the bulkhead next to the rumpus-room hatch. With his lungs heaving and his legs as shaky as rubber, he struggled upright. His hands just reached the hatch of the CERV port.
The hatch seemed as heavy as a bank vault’s. His first pull yielded nothing. The second opened the hatch briefly before it slammed shut again, nearly taking his fingers. He took a deep breath and steeled himself for one monumental pull. Slowly, the hatch peeled back. One inch, two inches, six inches. Then gravity was on his side, and the hatch snapped open.