Theroux fastened the equipment pouch to the left hip and wondered what it was that Nathan was so keen to take outside with him. He tapped the pouch. “Camera?”
“Sandwiches,” Nathan said.
The backpack was selected from the racks at random, and as Nathan watched Theroux strip the wrapping from it, he said, “A new pack, gentlemen. Check the seals are unbroken, remove the deck, discard the jokers, cut the cards and shuffle.”
“You’re a gambler?” Theroux asked, mostly just for something to say.
“It seems so.”
Nathan was conscious suddenly of just how big a risk he might be taking, and it must have shown on his face because Theroux said, “Look I know you’ve made a big production out of this solo stunt.”
Nathan interrupted hurriedly, “I don’t think so.”
Theroux raised an eyebrow. It was a wry expression he had perfected as a kid after seeing one of the old-time movie stars do it, but he hadn’t used it much since. “Right,” he said, matching the voice to the face. “Canine Megaballs launched their last concert tour with less hoopla and pre-publicity. If there’s anyone off-Earth who doesn’t know you’re going outside about now, they cannot have been paying attention is all.”
“A slight exaggeration.”
“Point is, you’re not ready, Nathan.”
“It’s now or never,” Nathan said.
Theroux sighed. “There’s no shame in delaying it for a while.”
“Yes, there is.”
Theroux slotted the backpack into place and began connecting the umbilicals. “He is very young and very proud,” he muttered in a bad Mexican accent.
Nathan said, “The graveyards are full of kids who were very young and very proud.”
“You know that quote?”
“I know The Magnificent Seven.”
“You’re full of surprises man.”
“What’s so surprising about that? Did you think you were the only person who ever saw an old movie?”
With the backpack in place, Nathan found that the suit was not much more cumbersome than before, so the instructors were partially right anyway. He picked up the helmet. It was too bulky and too small, both at the same time. He rotated it slowly, as he had been taught, and checked the locking seal for any sign of damage or deterioration.
“At least change your mind about going solo,” Theroux said. “I mean why risk going solo, for Chrissakes?”
Nathan said, “For those of you who still need the details of the plot explained to them: there’s no-one I trust to go out there with me.”
“Crap! I told you I’d go with you.”
“Then there would be no-one I trust back here. I’m relying on you to keep tabs on Brownly and Goff and make sure they don’t follow me out.”
“No problem.”
Nathan bent his head. “Exactly,” he said, and prepared to ease the helmet on, prior to seating it onto its neck rings. “No problems.”
Theroux locked the helmet into place and checked the telltales as Nathan switched to the spacesuit’s self-contained breathing system. “I said no problem,” he said, though Nathan could no longer hear him. “I didn’t say no problems.”
“Spring to base control, Spring to base control , do you copy?”
There were no obvious signs of panic in Nathan’s voice as it came over the RT. Butler did not respond, but sat listening to it with the slightest of smiles giving his face an oddly satiated look, as though he had just had a large meal, or sex.
“Base control can you hear me okay? I’m waiting to go into the airlock. Base control?”
Still Butler delayed answering.
“Base control? Shit. David? David… He…Can’t…Hear…Me.”
Butler’s smile got more pronounced. “Neither can he, you arrogant prick,” he muttered.
Theroux came over on one of the internal circuits. “Are you there, Simon?”
Finally Butler keyed the suit link and said, “Base control to Spring, hold your position please,” then switched to Theroux’s circuit and asked, “Is there a problem, David?”
Theroux’s irritation was plain to hear. “Are you getting voice from Nathan’s suit?”
Butler switched back to Nathan. “Base control to Spring, voice check please.”
“Spring to base control, do you copy?”
“Base control to Spring, I copy, thank you. If you are happy with your checks I have a green board and you are cleared to enter the airlock.”
“Very well base control.”
“No problem with the RT that I can find, David,” Butler reported. “May have got excited and missed the circuit key. He’s got some way to go before he gets his space-walker’s merit badge after all.”
“Have you given him airlock clearance?”
“Are we in that much of a rush?”
“He’s on the move. Get your rear in gear, Simon, and make sure nothing happens to him, right?”
Claustrophobia within claustrophobia. Cramped inside the suit inside the cramped airlock. Featureless, grey metal shell, water jacketed thick, smothering radiation soaking solar surges pushing at the suit, water layered trickling cold pressing at him drowning him in –
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to breathe slow, deep breaths.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
In through the nose.
Out through the mouth.
In.
Out.
Slow. Relax. Control. Smells of plastic touched the air and the sound of his own breathing, magnified by the helmet, sounded louder than normal and yet somehow faraway.
He opened his eyes. The airlock pressure gauge showed the atmosphere evacuation cycle was complete. He sucked spit into his dry mouth, swallowed and said into the helmet mic, “Spring to base control. Ready to open outer lock hatch, base control.”
“For a minute there I thought you’d gone to sleep. All that heavy breathing? Either that or you’d found a way to play with yourself in a spacesuit.”
He was probably only trying to keep things upbeat, but even distorted and distanced by the suit radio, Butler’s manner grated on Nathan: what was it about the man that made him so irritating? It wasn’t just his bugging activities – assuming they were his – there was something more, something basically indecent about him. “Have I got clearance to open the hatch, base control?” Nathan snapped.
“Whenever you feel ready you can go ahead. But don’t rush it, you’ve got plenty of time.” Now Butler’s professional voice was smooth, full of calming reassurance.
“Thank you, base control.” Nathan grasped the release wheel, and began to turn it slowly.
They were scheduled for exercise, so where the hell were they? Theroux peered round the gym section as if there was somewhere in the tiny space where they might be hiding. Treadmill, press-up harness, pull straps: the technology of body maintenance had changed little since the pioneer days probably because advances in medication could now keep bone and muscle wastage under control without the need for punishing bouts of exercise. Regular short sessions were still prescribed, however, and there was a roster so that all the station personnel could get their turn with the equipment. It was one of those routines that most people followed most of the time. It was reckoned to be good for cabin fever and, if nothing else, it made returning Earthside a bit less exhausting and generally irksome.
Theroux checked his wrist-log again. Yeah, this was the time when Brownly and Goff were supposed to be working out all right. Shit. Keep tabs on them, the man said? Christ, he couldn’t even find them. For all he knew, they might be outside right now. They might be out there, waiting for Nathan. He flipped over and kicked himself off towards the
access hatch. This was no time for bullshit professional games, he thought.
When the seals were fully retracted, Nathan pushed at the airlock hatch so that it moved out onto its runners and slid smoothly aside. Although this was not as large as the cargo ’lock that the Hendvorrsen party had used, the opening was big enough for two people to move through comfortably. To Nathan it still looked cramped and narrow. Outside all he could see was blackness. And yet, bright sunlight was spilling into the airlock from somewhere. Darkness and light. Both needle sharp. The bloody place was bizarre, unnatural, no place for a man to be. Any man. Men. A small step for man… why wouldn’t Armstrong get it wrong? He pushed himself forward to the edge of the hatchway, and gingerly reached out and clipped his safety line to the first anchor point he could find. That done, he gave the line a small tug and slowly drifted out into space.
* * *
They weren’t in their quarters; they weren’t in the mess; there were only so many places you could be on a station the size of the Charles De Gaulle… so where the fuck were they? Theroux was getting desperate. He hadn’t quite believed that Brownly and Goff were crazy enough to try to kill Nathan – not while Butler was watching, him and half the station for all they knew. Now he wasn’t sure. They couldn’t hope to get away with it, could they?
Only someone had been getting away with it. Them? It must be them. “Simon? You awake, Simon?” he all but yelled into the communicator.
It was unreal. He floated, staring. It was bigger than he expected. And brighter than he expected, much brighter. And it was beautiful beyond imagining. “Christ,” he said softly.
“Are you all right, Spring?” Butler’s voice managed to convey a degree of urgency and concern without being alarming. “Spring? This is base control, do you copy?”
“I never saw the Earth before,” Nathan answered after a moment.
“Ah. Yes, of course. It’s quite a view, isn’t it?” Nathan continued to stare in silence, resenting the sound of Butler’s continuing chatter. “Everyone should see it once. Trouble is, there’s not much left to see after you have.” Nathan sighed. It was wholly involuntary, a genuine reaction.
“Nathan?” Theroux’s voice was suddenly on the base control circuit, flouting procedure and making no obvious effort to avoid alarming him. “Are your suit system readings optimal?”
Nathan pulled his eyes away from the Earth, and focused on the heads-up display reflected inside his helmet. “Yes, they are. What’s going on, David?”
“Enough with the sight-seeing. Do a three-sixty and tell me what you see.”
Nathan took a firm grip of the anchor point and turned slowly round, being careful to avoid tangling himself in the safety line. Procedure dictated that he should have unclipped before doing this sort of manoeuvre but he wasn’t ready to float free quite yet.
As he rotated he peered about him and was surprised to find how much the helmet narrowed the effective field of vision. When the Earth filled his eyes it had been deceptive. What he could see was severely limited. He had no peripheral vision at all. “What am I looking for?”
“Not what; who.”
“You stupid shit!” Butler raged. “What are you trying to do, panic him?”
Theroux’s gaze flicked from screen to screen, checking the station video feeds, then Nathan’s suit telemetry, then back to what the fixed video cameras were showing. “You were letting him daydream, Simon,” he snapped. “He can’t daydream out there, for fuck’s sake!”
“Base control decides what he can and can’t do, and I am base control,” Butler said more coolly. “Now you will behave like a professional, David or you can get the hell out of here. Right now.” He overrode the board Theroux was using and deactivated it. Flicking on his own mic he said calmly, “Base control to Spring. Sorry about that interruption. Your second-in-command had an attack of the silly buggers.”
“Any particular silly buggers?”
“He felt you needed livening up, that’s all.”
“Don’t bullshit me, base control. I’m tense enough as it is.”
Theroux glared across at Butler, who pointedly refused to meet his eye. “Let me talk to him?”
“No.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“No.”
“Talk to me, base control. Who am I looking for, and why?”
Theroux said, “Okay you tell him. Tell him I can’t find Brownly and Goff.” Butler turned abruptly from his board and stared at Theroux, who said, “They could be outside with him.” Butler frowned. “Tell him,” Theroux insisted.
Butler hesitated, seeming to think about it. He turned back to his board and scanned the monitors, then he said, “Listen Spring, we want you alert because you’re on your own out there.”
“What?” demanded Theroux.
“What? Say again.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Theroux almost shouted.
Butler gestured him to be silent and went on, “There is no-one near you at present, but don’t worry about it. You have a green board and all the time in the world to get back inside in the unlikely event that it became necessary to abort the EVA.”
“Very well, base control. I’m going to take a couple of minutes to orientate myself now, then I’m going to try and retrace the last moves that the Hendvorrsen group made.”
“Not all of them, I trust,” Butler said.
“Thank you, base control.” Nathan’s voice did not acknowledge the joke.
Butler now turned back to look at Theroux. “They’re not out there, David,” he said. “There’s nobody out there. Where have you looked for them?”
“Everywhere.”
Butler thought for a moment. “Did you check the Engineering Equipment Store?”
“Yeah, I checked it.”
“Thoroughly?”
Theroux shrugged. “I looked in there.”
“If they were hiding, that would be a good place.”
“Why the fuck would they be hiding?”
Butler smiled. “If they knew you were looking for them,” he said, “why the fuck wouldn’t they be hiding?”
It was time to let go. Nathan unclipped the safety line and reeled in the slack. He had put this off as long as he could, but now there was no more time. At least the claustrophobia was under control, and minute by minute he was becoming less immediately conscious of the restrictions of the suit. He was never going to be comfortable in it. There was none of the advertised womb-like security. But he was getting less uncomfortable.
He held onto the anchor point a moment longer, and peered at the curved side of the first of the station’s modules looming over him. Like the Earth, it too was bigger than he had anticipated. It was oddly comforting. You could make a mistake on a thing this size and not be punished for it. And any mistakes he made out here would be real ones. Death was too close to risk a show of ineptitude, no matter who was watching.
With one hand he pushed himself away slightly, and with the other he gave a simultaneous tug on the thin metal bar, released his grip, and took off in a perfectly controlled drift across the surface of the station. In his ear, Butler’s voice said, “Very impressive. But don’t rush things. Remember the rule: slow out; fast back. You have forty to the outward maximum. On my mark. Do you copy?”
“Copy,” Nathan said, glancing up at the reflected chronometer display and squeezing the time-elapsed to zero plus forty minutes.
“Mark.”
He cued it, and the display began to deduct the time he had left before he must turn back. The logic was that however long it took you to get wherever you got, it must take you the same time or less to reverse the trip. Thus it was standard operating procedure to make a slow outward leg and give yourself a margin for error on the return.
Nathan had calculated that
this should not be a problem for him. The Hendvorrsen party, needing the larger airlock so that they could stay together, had approached the construction zone from the other side of the station. The smaller lock he was using was closer. He could get to where the incident occurred with plenty of margin to get back, no matter how fast he moved now.
Not that there was any reliable way for him to tell what his speed was. Watching the grey metal surface of the station fall soundlessly past his face, he lacked the physical sensation of movement. The only noise he could hear was his own breathing and that had no perceptible connection with what seemed to be happening in front of him. He lifted his eyes and looked ahead. The curve of the module was dropping away from his line of flight. Some distance beyond it, across a terrifyingly wide expanse of space, he could see the construction zone which Hendvorrsen and the others had been inspecting when things had gone wrong. If his nerve held, he need do nothing at all and his present flight path would take him exactly where he needed to go. Unless his jet pack malfunctioned, and with no way to slow up he smashed himself into the framework of girders, or cannoned off them spinning and unconscious, or missed them altogether so that he fell straight into infinity… He should test the jet pack. But then he’d lose the line of flight, might lose control completely…
“Base control to Spring.” Butler’s voice interrupted the spiralling panic. “Be advised that at your present velocity you will leave the limit of my vision in three, I repeat three, minutes. Monitoring will then be by suit telemetry. Do you copy?”
Brownly and Goff were not in the Engineering Equipment Store. Theroux moved down the central aisle and peered round the storage bins. It was a stupid notion. He felt like some fool being set up for a practical joke or dragged into a boring kid’s game. Then he saw it. The toe of a standard issue slipper was poking out from behind a double-stowed bin at the far end, where someone was hiding in the shadows. A foot shot?? Come on. What was this, some corny fucking melodrama for Chrissakes? “What is this, some corny fucking melodrama, for Chrissakes?” he said aloud. “Come out of there. I can see you, man.”
Star Cops Page 17