Nick took a deep breath. Now he was getting hysterical—he felt like it was getting harder to breathe. But Oscar wouldn’t have gone that far, would he? And wouldn’t the hatch to the command center close when there was a pressure drop in the kitchen?
He checked the impact point on the monitor. It was close to the hatch control. The fictitious asteroid had probably hit the engine that would have closed this connection. Oscar had plotted all of this quite brilliantly.
The flat disk came rolling in, the thin arm wobbling wildly. “Nick, the spacesuit!”
If Nick hadn’t known of the plan, he would have believed that Oscar was in a panic. “Yes, right away,” he said.
“Immediately. The pressure is already down to 87 percent. Complete pressure loss in thirteen minutes. Then you’ll be dead.”
“Can I talk?”
“Yes.”
“This is all very convincing.”
“Nick, this isn’t my doing. A rock that was about ten grams really did smash into the Eve. You should get into your suit as fast as you can.”
“What? A real meteorite?”
Nick held his breath. Suddenly it felt like a giant was sitting on his chest. Crap. A meteorite really had just missed him! If he’d woken up hungry, made something to eat...
“Asteroid,” Oscar said.
The correction brought him back to the present.
“They’re called meteorites only when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Nick, you have to keep breathing. Otherwise you’re just going to collapse right on top of me.”
Of course. This wasn’t the first dangerous situation he’d experienced. How could he lose his grip like this? Where had his years of experience gone? Pull yourself together, Nick! He forced himself to breathe deeply and deliberately as he walked to the closet where the suit was hanging, reached inside to pull it out, and put it on.
“Helmet closed,” he said.
It had taken only two minutes, which was good time. His record was 1minute and 48 seconds, but that had been under training conditions.
“And now?”
“Now we have to seal the hole. It’s best that we meet outside. I’m crawling through the tool exchange door.”
“Do I have to bring anything?”
“The sealant from the workshop. The container is too big for the tool exchange door.”
“See you soon.”
Oscar rolled quickly ahead, swung into the module below, and then retracted his arm. Nick followed him by climbing down the ladder. The hatch to the workshop was closed, and he had to open it manually. The ship warned of the associated pressure loss in the rear modules, but this was the only way he could reach the airlock. Oscar disappeared into the tool exchange door. Nick had the sealant’s location in the workshop displayed on his helmet visor. He found it and took the container in his left hand. It looked like a spray bottle and weighed about 10 kilograms.
The ship was accelerating, meaning he would be experiencing about 30 kilograms of personal weight even while outside. He’d never done an extravehicular mission without being weightless. It wasn’t entirely safe. While training at the Chinese space station, he had just floated over the modules and maneuvered easily using the nozzles on the spacesuit. But now he had to climb around the outside of a multi-story tower. His own inertia would constantly threaten to pull him down. It would be tiring, to say nothing of dangerous, to move around out there.
“Oscar? Shouldn’t we turn off the engines? I’m not trained for an EVA with gravity.”
“If it made sense to do that, I would have suggested it.”
You little smartass! “Could you please explain to me your all-wise decision?”
“Of course, Nick. The wisdom of my decision was based on the fact that the DFDs have a warm-start problem. The ILSE expedition almost failed that one time.”
This robot obviously doesn’t understand cynicism. “And RB has known this for thirty years but didn’t change anything?” Nick asked.
“It’s the principle. To get the fusion started, you need a common chemical generator that creates enough electricity. It would be a waste of material to have a separate generator just for the start of each DFD, so they all share one, and sometimes this causes problems. But if you insist, because you don’t trust the Eve otherwise, we can take the risk… of course.”
“Understood. I have to choose between the two risks.”
“If you use the safety line as instructed, nothing can happen during the outside mission, Nick.”
The inner airlock door was still open. He climbed into the airlock, turned around, and closed it. Then he hooked his two safety lines near the exit. The pressure loss throughout the ship had the advantage—if one chose to see it as such—that Nick didn’t need to wait very long for the outer door to open. He prepared to see the Earth beneath him, but this time he did not experience the sensation of falling. The Earth was already too small and gleamed like a blue basketball in the blackness of space.
Nick carefully clambered out with his right leg leading. He immediately sensed the force of inertia, which felt like gravity as it pulled him toward the stern of the ship. Without the safety lines he would have crashed into it. Getting caught in the invisible gas flow from the engines would have been a more pleasant death than suffocating in his spacesuit.
Now for the second leg. He released a line and hooked it outside, then climbed out all the way. Nick peeked upwards. There was the curve of the command capsule, which was slightly larger than the kitchen module. Then he looked down. He climbed on the upper one-third of the facade of this skyscraper with its very unusual architecture.
Nick was reassured, because there was plenty of space between him and the engines with their deadly fumes. And even if he were to fall, he would fall much more slowly than on Earth. The individual modules had so many perpendicular handrails that he could certainly still grab on. However, the rods were also just the right shape to potentially slit open his suit. The Eve was not designed to have someone clinging to her external shell during flight.
“I’m already here,” Oscar reported via radio.
“Don’t rush me.”
Nick grabbed the canister with the sealant and pulled himself half a meter up, where he found a hold on a strut. But now he had no hands free to loosen the lower safety line and hook it up again. He clamped the canister between his legs, held on with his left hand, and moved the line with his right hand. He tried this again for the next step, but the canister slipped from between his legs. He barely caught it with his foot and pressed it against the outer wall of the Eve. Then he bent down, grasped it with one hand, and brought it back up. His heart was racing.
Nice and easy. Fix the canister between legs and wall, unhook the end of the line from down below, and hook it again up higher. Take hold of the sealant, climb up one step, do it all over again. Nick had almost immediately started to sweat. A backpack would have been handy. But he managed to move fairly quickly once he had the pattern down. Fortunately, the workshop and kitchen modules were about the same size. To get to the command module at the top, he’d have needed to acrobatically tackle an overhang.
Oscar’s bright disk was shining right ahead of him. How did the robot make it with just one arm? Oscar moved aside as Nick reached him, and as he did so, Nick discovered Oscar’s trick. The robot could easily extend and tilt his four wheels to hook into projections.
“I’ve already prepared the affected area and cleaned the edges,” said Oscar. “By the way, if you’re interested, the asteroid came from Mars. The dust analysis is quite clear.”
“So there was a Martian throwing rocks at us?”
“The Mars Station crew doesn’t have the resources to get a rock into a solar orbit.”
“Oscar, that was a joke.”
“Ah. You should have said so. The sealant, please.”
Oscar extended his hand and skillfully gripped the canister by the neck, moved it to the point of impact, and released the foam to make the seal. Everyt
hing transpired in complete silence.
Nick saw a gray mass swell out of the canister and flow into the hole. “How does this stuff know where it’s going?”
“It doesn’t know. In a vacuum, it has a tendency to ball up. As a result, it seals the hole over time. You just have to inject enough of it.”
“And it will hold?”
“Yes, it hardens within thirty minutes and is then immovable. I can grind it smooth from the inside and put a plate over it.”
“And the rest?”
“Ah, the rest. Yes, I’ll do that right now.”
Oscar was obviously pleased with the repair. He swept the canister in Nick’s direction with his gripper arm. He apparently underestimated the strength of this motion, as the empty container was released from his fingers. But instead of letting it fly away, Oscar fully extended his arm to grab it, and his wheels slipped loose. He’d probably picked up too much momentum.
“Oops,” said Oscar.
Nick had barely a second to decide. He loosened the top line and pushed off. Now everything depended on how well the other safety held. He trusted the line itself. It was made for this. But what about the strut he’d attached it to? Nick reached for the robot’s wrist. “Gotcha,” he said.
Then there was a sharp jerk. The leash stopped his movement. He tried to turn away from the ship, so as not to hit the Eve with the front of his body. The suit was mostly safe, but he couldn’t bounce against the spacecraft wall with the helmet. A piece of metal drove into his ribs. Nick moaned, but he didn’t let Oscar go. The robot was surprisingly heavy. Nick bounced off the side of the spacecraft. He swung briefly to the side and then pushed against it again until he could stop the movement with his legs.
They came to rest. Nick was hanging safely on the line, just above the airlock on the workshop module. Nevertheless, he decided he should recover the second line. The weight of the robot tugged at his arm.
“Let go of my neck,” said Oscar.
“The place under your hand? Because you’re choking?”
“Nonsense. If you don’t let go, I can’t clamp on.”
Of course. He released what the robot had called his neck. Oscar’s arm chose a pole and clung tightly. Then the robot pulled himself back up to the kitchen module.
“You haven’t had enough yet?” Nick asked.
“We aren’t finished yet.”
Right. The plan. As if that were really important. He’d just risked his life to save a stupid robot. What was wrong with him? Could it be that he didn’t feel like spending the rest of the journey alone?
Maybe he didn’t really want to be alone after all… Perhaps it had just been a reflex. You couldn’t ever abandon someone to a certain death, even if it was only a robot and even if you had to put yourself at risk. Good that this reflex was still working for him.
“Can I help you?” Nick asked.
“No, not with this job.”
“Then I’ll slip inside again. I’m pretty much done in.”
“Me too,” said the robot. “Me too.”
“Would you be upset if we waited until tomorrow to try out my maneuver?”
“Not at all, Nick. We have too much time on our hands anyway.”
6/9/2080, the Eve
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure. No problem, Nick.”
“What are we going to write to my ex-boss?”
“To please perform the attached database queries and send the results back to us.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why? Does it cost him anything?”
“We didn’t part on amicable terms. I nearly destroyed the company’s property. It uses the spaceship to make its money.”
“The VSS Freedom?”
“Yes, the tourist ship.”
“What if you apologize?”
“That won’t be enough.”
“Is this how humans behave with one another?”
“I must also admit that my life was a little... unstable. The alcohol, you know... I’m afraid I wasn’t very reliable.”
“Then we have to give him proof that the transmission really comes from space.”
“We could enclose some dust from the asteroid that hit yesterday.”
“That was a joke, right?”
“Yes, Oscar.”
“It wasn’t good.”
“Why?”
“Because even I realized you were trying to make a joke.”
“Then come up with a better suggestion.”
“A timestamp.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Earth’s gravitational potential, clocks run a little differently than here in space. If we send a timestamp, your boss will be able to compare its value to the value for Earth and will realize that the mission must come from space.”
“Well, I suppose that works.”
“How so?”
“Because you suggested it, Oscar.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“But give me some time to think about what to write.”
“Hello Bill,” Nick read aloud. “I’m guessing this message will land on your desk somehow. After all, it seems like it’s coming from your ship, and my successor will surely claim to not have sent it. And you’re the one responsible for solving such problems. So far, you’ve done it every time.”
First, a little bit of buttering up. That never hurt.
“This time, though, it’s a bit more complicated. Because what I’m going to tell you will sound utterly incredible. Already, the fact that I, Nick Abrahams, am the one to compose this message may seem unbelievable to you. Nevertheless, please read it to the end, because the end is where you can find a way to clearly confirm the content.”
He hoped Bill wouldn’t be pressing the delete button now.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be brief. The fact is that I’m aboard a Russian spaceship taking me to Neptune. You may still find the job posting on the internet, but I’m guessing my employer has left no traces and deleted everything thoroughly. The whole mission is top secret. This is why I’m using this form of communication. However, it seems to me that I haven’t been told everything I need to know. Hopefully the attached database queries will shed some light on the issue. This is where you come in. Once upon a time we were friends. I ask you, in the spirit of our old friendship, to help me. I would be very grateful if you could run the attached queries on the internet and send me the results under the VSS Freedom ID.”
How else should he reel Bill in, if not with friendship? They had never done anything together, but at least he once had a kind of friendship with Bill. All the same, Nick couldn’t imagine that his boss would help him. Would he himself respond to such a message? Probably not.
So as a precautionary measure he added, “If you find this message too bizarre, please at least do me the favor of not sharing it with anybody. That could get me into trouble, which I’ll have enough of anyway.”
Now it was up to Bill.
“Oscar?”
“Yes?”
“You can relay the message to Earth.”
“Consider it sent.”
“When will we get a response?”
“NASA’s Deep Space Network will receive it in a few minutes. But then it will have to be passed on. Your boss’s company is not accredited there. Someone has to analyze the code, identify the sender, and then still feel like putting the message into the right hands. And then, your boss will have to read everything, fulfill the request, and write a response that will reach us via NASA. I expect we’ll have to wait at least three days.”
6/13/2080, the Eve
Nick felt a belch building. Probably too many onions, which he liked so much that he’d packed a thick layer of them on his burger. They’d been produced by the food preparation device—a new high for nanofabricated sustenance. Nick remembered all too well the training at the Chinese space station, where the diet had been almost entirely rice from the bag. The technology had really evolved since
then.
“Grrgl.” There I go again! At least he was alone and didn’t have to worry about anyone else.
“Nick, I’m sorry to disturb your digestion, but I have something for you.”
He got up. “Did Bill answer?”
“It’s an answer to your message, but I’m afraid you’re not going to love it.”
“Did you read it?”
“I had to decrypt it, and as I did so I automatically read the contents.”
“All right. Then show me.”
His screen turned on and Nick moved closer. The very first word told him who the sender was.
“Darling!” The only one to call him that was Rosie, and it was always followed by an exclamation mark, which made it sound less sweet.
“Bill was kind enough to pass on your message to me. He’s anxious, and I have to admit that I am too. I hope you know that I still love you. I only separated from you because I couldn’t live with you anymore. But your message shows me that it’s hit you harder than I had anticipated. Nick, I’m worried about you. I went to our house yesterday and it’s deserted. Where are you? I’m afraid that you’ve become delusional, and I’m not sure what to do.
“They say that sometimes people suffering from delusions don’t even recognize themselves, so I’m concerned that this message won’t reach you at all. But if you still have any feelings for me, please grant me this one request. Seek professional help! There are institutions that know their way around the psychological consequences of depression, alcohol, and drugs. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, and you probably don’t, either. Please just listen to me one last time. Get yourself checked out and get help.
“It’s never too late. I’m praying for you.
“Yours, Rosie.”
She was praying for him. Great! And Bill, the old bastard, apparently hadn’t followed through with a comparison of the time stamps. He’d just written him off as crazy, thought about who was to blame, and went to his wife.
The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction (Solar System Series Book 4) Page 8