WE (12 page)

Compared with these, the grey colour of the harvesters made them almost invisible where they stood in a line
against the near wall. They were smaller than the crawlers, with less pronounced wheel-bases, little wheels and long limbs. Even so, they too had the same low, wide-splayed look of machines that must keep their stability in low gravity.

‘Shouldn't they be working?' asked Paul.

‘They are. The ones you see here are the spares. There's a three hundred per cent redundancy in case of failures – or an impact.'

‘Three hundred per cent?'

‘That's standard across the station, but it varies from case to case. Much of our instrumentation and computing power is in the outer layers, where the natural temperature is low enough to permit superconductivity. Of course that means the sites are hardest to get at and most at risk from impact. So the redundancy is not less than five hundred per cent. On the other hand – you see that?'

Synchronized with her words in his ear, the arm of the suited figure beside him pointed. At the far end of the hangar was another crawler, far larger than the others and coloured red. They skipped down the central aisle towards it. Close to, it seemed enormous. Its eight wheels rose higher than Paul's head. Its body was fat and featureless. It carried no solar packs. At either end it had a cluster of limbs, but these were no more and no larger than those of the utility
crawlers. They seemed ridiculously small for such a bloated thing.

‘We landed with three of those. Almost the first thing we found was that the main power packs on all three were dead. Design fault. Of course it shouldn't happen, and of course among all the million bits of design and engineering it does. It nearly finished us. We charged up the auxiliary pack on this one as high as we could and rode it into the station, watching the power gauge dropping all the time. It had reached twelve per cent by the time we docked. I had been praying aloud from thirty per cent downwards.'

‘You could have left it and walked.'

There was a slight pause before she answered.

‘We could have done. In the last resort we'd have had to try. Average surface temperature's thirty-eight K. That ground's trying to suck your heat right out through your boots. In theory these suits are capable at those temperatures. But you can't stop all conduction. And it's ice. Treacherous. You slip, you break something, you lie there, in the end you die if we don't reach you. And what are the rest of us going to do – carry you? Over the ice? We don't walk outside the station. At all. If any of us have to go out, we go in this crawler, fully pressurized, with a utility leading the way. And everyone else on standby.'

‘I see.'

‘No sightseeing trips here, Munro.'

‘No.' He frowned. ‘Earth should send another.'

‘They will – eventually. Don't forget that if we need something that isn't on the resupply schedule, it's eight years' wait before it can get here. And when its launch slot comes up, it may get bumped off by something that's higher priority – a new telmex, for example.'

She uncoupled the charging cable. She faced him.

‘Would the new telmex like a ride?'

The new telmex.
It was a strange way to say ‘you'. It was playful, in a way. He had not heard her sound like that before.

‘Yes,' he said.

The hatch on the rear of the red crawler opened on a voice command. There was a tiny airlock. Beyond it the interior was a low chamber with two forward-facing seats at one end. Two bench-seats for passengers ran down either side. There were controls at the pilot seats but no windows. Instead, a screen showed visual displays of the exterior when powered by command.

‘Hello, living quarters?' said Vandamme. ‘We're taking the red crawler.'

‘I've got you,' said Lewis's voice, as clearly as if they had all been sitting together back in the common room. ‘Have fun.'

‘Do we pressurize the cabin?' asked Paul.

‘Yes,' Vandamme replied. ‘Normally we wouldn't, just to ride around inside the station. But you need to know how it works in case you're ever part of an outside mission. The important thing is, even if the cabin is pressurized you do
not
remove your helmet or depressurize your suit. That's for safety. Of course the cabin shouldn't depressurize, but conditions here are extreme and accidents are always possible. So – to pressurize, it's this sequence …'

At first nothing seemed to happen. And then the numbers on the helmet display flickered. He watched them. The one marked
Suit
remained at 1.0. But the one marked
Ex
– the exterior pressure – rose rapidly. Now it was over 0.8 and still rising. The temperature was rising too.

‘That's the auxiliary battery gauge,' said Vandamme. ‘You can see we're already bleeding it down.'

A bright green bar showed on the crawler display. Over it there were the figures
97%
. Even as Paul watched it dropped to
96%
. He looked away.

‘Short trips only, you see,' said Vandamme. ‘Now, to go forward …' She demonstrated. The crawler hummed into life. The display inside Paul's helmet read
Ex: 1.0 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -10°
. There was an atmosphere around him, cold and crisp, but enough to let sound travel inside the cabin. The crawler was creeping forward with astonishingly little inertia
for so massive a thing. The screen showed the far end of the hangar approaching.

‘Beyond that seal you're into the outer layers,' said Vandamme. ‘There's nothing out there – they're just for protection and maintaining the insulation–conduction balance. If you like we could step out there on the way back. It's quite a thrill the first time you see your helmet display drop into Kelvin. It can get all the way down to ninety at times.'

‘Ninety! Is it liquid out there?'

The transmission was so clear that he actually heard her grin.

‘Oxygen at normal atmospheric pressure will liquefy at about ninety K,' she said. ‘But it's not that simple. Our doctor once took a tube of air from the living quarters out there because she wanted to see what happened to it. What she forgot was that the pressure in those chambers is never more than point four, so all that happened was that the tube shattered, the gas escaped and she was showered with shards. She was lucky her suit wasn't damaged. And our station manager was furious.'

Our doctor. Our station manager.
Again she was using functions instead of names. This time the emphasis had been different. It might have been mockery.

There had been hints of this before – of friction
between the three of them.
Was it my fault she lost Thorsten?

Friction? Deep, bitter resentment, barely suppressed. Did they blame her for Thorsten's death? He remembered how they had leaped to answer his questions about Thorsten in that first meeting, as if protecting Vandamme from a suggestion he had not intended to make. What kind of a partner let her man despair? Perhaps May felt guilt that Lewis was living when Thorsten was dead. Yes! She must hate that, and she was blaming Vandamme for the blame she felt on herself. And so on, round and round, a destructive feedback loop in the heart of the station. It had been going on for years with no escape.

And then the spacecraft from Earth had brought them another man, mumbling, confused, barely able to say more than ‘Yes' and ‘No'. It had been the biggest birthday present ever, May had said. And Vandamme had walked away from it. She had shut herself in the other chambers, which must be heated and pressurized for her at whatever cost to the station's energy supply. And she prayed. And she worked. And she filled the walls with images of desolation.

His eyes flicked to the woman beside him, and away again before she could realize he was looking at her. A trickle of sympathy oozed from the icy crust around his heart.

Did she know what the others were planning for her? Had she realized what they were trying to do?

What would she think, if he told her?

The display swung as the crawler turned. Now it faced across the hangar, to a seal in the side wall. The crawler flowed smoothly towards it.

‘You can open the seals by voice, or by signal,' said Vandamme. ‘That key there. You do it.'

Paul pressed the key in the panel. The seal opened, revealing one of the small airtight chambers that linked each bubble in the station to its neighbours. Paul peered at it. It was hard to judge the size of it through the screen.

‘Will we fit in this?' he asked.

‘We will – just.'

She inched the machine forward, checked the rear display and closed the door they had just passed through. The door ahead opened automatically.

Paul let out a long sigh.

‘So – here's our farmland,' said Vandamme. ‘What do you think?'

It was like a huge, old-fashioned polytunnel, of the kind that was still used in some places on Earth to cultivate crops when the exterior temperature was too low. Paul had visited one once. He still remembered the shock of smell when he had stepped through the flaps and stood in the forest of green plants, bursting with green and reddening tomatoes, and stretching away before him under the roof of arched
plastic. It had been strong enough to break through and impose itself over all the busy messaging of his World Ear. That rich, warm scent – he could almost smell it now. It had stamped itself into his memory for ever.

But this tunnel had no leaves and no fruits. The light was a dull grey-blue, filtering through the translucent layers above his head. The floor of the bubble was littered with low lumps of rubble that must have been left over from the construction process. Pathways as straight as furrows carved through them. On one, halfway along the tunnel, a harvester was working. It looked like a grey, man-made insect, intent on something among the stones. Vandamme coasted the red crawler forward and switched the screen to give a side-view so that Paul could see the thing clearly.

It had stopped by a lump that seemed to Paul to be like any other lump on the floor of that tunnel. One grey arm had extended. It was moving slowly across the face of the lump, just as if it were giving the thing a shave. Paul could see how the colour of the surface had changed where the arm had already been.

‘A basic lichen, modified to grow under these conditions,' said Vandamme. ‘It provides thirty to forty per cent of our foodstuffs. A side-product of the process produces our fabrics when we need them. It also contributes to the ecological balance of the station. But it's mainly for
nutrition. That might be tomorrow's breakfast, being picked for you now.'

‘Do we grow nothing more …?' Paul fumbled for a suitable word.

‘Advanced? Eatable? Complicated?'

‘More normal.'

‘You mean, the sort of things we would normally have eaten on Earth? No. It's a question of economy. To do that you would have to heat and pressurize these bubbles to the same level as the living quarters. That would be an enormous energy demand. On top of that there would still have to be further bubbles outside them, to insulate them and also to bring down that pressure gradually so that if there's an impact we don't get a catastrophic rupture. Oh, and you would have to have a depth of soil, full of vegetable matter and nutrients – all that.'

On the screen, the harvester withdrew its arm and rolled away a few metres down the path. It stopped by another lump.

‘There are a number of high-pressure bubbles just above the living quarters,' said Vandamme. ‘Some of them we've turned over to cultivating stimulants and flavourings – the stuff that goes into our coffee, for example. It doesn't make real coffee, of course. It's a substitute. But it's not bad if you don't drink too much of it.'

‘How long will the machines function?'

‘With regular maintenance they should have an operating life of approximately fifteen years. But remember that three hundred per cent redundancy. If one breaks down early, we just replace it while Lewis works out what went wrong.'

Fifteen years, and another forty-five years from the reserve machines made sixty. The station had already lasted ten years, so it had another fifty years before anyone left in it starved, or came out to pick lichens by hand. What else would last fifty years in this place? The power plant? The waste recycling? The door seals? Some chambers had failed and were disused. The station was already trading on its redundancy. But then no one knew how long a human body would last here either.

It was madness, what they were doing. She must see that. She would have more reason to see it than Lewis or May.

‘So – would you like to drive it back?' said Vandamme.

‘… All right.'

‘You don't have to turn it. Just put it into reverse. I'll change the view … there.'

The joystick in the control panel was enormous – two to three times the size of the control on his monitor. He took it in his clumsy great gauntlet and it worked easily.

‘That's reverse,' said Vandamme. ‘Now, at your feet there are two pedals. Press firmly but don't stamp … That's right.'

Paul had a sensation of moving backwards. Confusingly, the end of the chamber on his screen was coming closer.

‘This is
fun
!' said Vandamme, with a cheerfulness that was almost eerie, springing so suddenly from her lips. ‘Byebye, breakfast. See you tomorrow. And let us thank God for his goodness. “I'll not want, for he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters …”'

‘There are no waters,' said Paul.

‘There are,' she said, and he could tell she was grinning. ‘Once we've returned the crawler I'll show you.'

The ceiling of this bubble was a blaze of light, like a roof of opaque glass on a sunny day. The glare was filtering down through at least three layers of transparent bubble-wall, so all definition was lost and it was impossible to pick out the structure of the sun mirror, poised on the roof of the station far above their heads. Even to look up was to wince. Paul tried to shade his eyes with his hand. His gauntlet bumped clumsily against the visor of his helmet and did no good.