WE (18 page)

He had to get out, quickly! Once he was out, no one could stop him.

Think. Why doesn't an airlock open? Because the automatic systems pick up a danger of decompression. And the obvious danger of decompression was …

He rotated the view again. The seal behind him was still closing. That was all it had been. Calm down. He must calm down. He was not thinking clearly and he must. There was a long way to go.

There. Closed. Now hit the
Open
key. And forward. And wait, and wait and wait …

The airlock closed behind him. The readings began to tumble again. Again he heard that ominous creaking, filtering through his helmet. Now he understood what it was.

It was thermal. The synthetic hull of the crawler was contracting as the temperature dropped away. Normally it stood in a hangar heated to -80° Celsius. But in the space of a few short minutes it was being exposed to a savage change – over a hundred degrees. The crawler was actually shrinking in the grip of the cold.

Paul swallowed. His palms tingled. The display had reached 90K. The seal ahead of him was opening. He rolled forward.

Another featureless, curving tunnel; but a different shape. The chamber was shorter – he could see the end walls. The
outer layer was the most exposed to impacts and failures, and so had more compartments for greater safety. It was thick with mist. The mist flickered with light, as if tiny, silent thunderstorms were playing somewhere in the chamber, out of view of the screen. The glow came and went and left everything in darkness. A few seconds later it came again. It was the aurora of the station – the action of charged particles from space colliding with the gases trapped in this outer protective layer. The atmosphere out here was not composed of oxygen but of nitrogen and ammonia. The pressure hovered around 0.3. Even so, at ninety degrees Kelvin the gases were on the verge of liquefying. Droplets glistened where his headlights fell on the far wall.

There was a small scattering of something on the floor to one side of the seal. Fragments of a glass-like material, he thought: the remains of May's ill-advised experiment.
She was showered with shards.
It would not have been glass. May would have known better than to use glass. There probably wasn't a single item made of glass in the whole of the station. Even so, the material had shattered under the stress of unequal interior and exterior pressures. If one of those shards had punctured her suit, she would have died as Thorsten was supposed to have died.

He had one more step to go.

The seal opened. He piloted the crawler forward
and waited. The seal before him was the door to the surface.

A voice spoke in his helmet. It was Lewis.

‘Paul, do you hear me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Vandamme says you are going outside. Is that true?'

‘Yes.'

He heard Lewis's intake of breath.

‘I can't permit you to go outside. You are not properly crewed and neither are we. It isn't safe.'

‘I'm going outside, Lewis. Don't try to stop me.'

‘I will certainly stop you. You've given no justification for your actions. You're putting yourself at risk and also the station. We can't afford to lose you or the crawler. You must return at once.'

‘I am not going far, Lewis.'

‘What are you going to do?'

‘I'm going to see Thorsten.'

There was a slight pause. Paul rotated the view. The airlock seal behind him was still closing. Come
on
!

‘Thorsten is dead, Paul,' said Lewis slowly. ‘You can't see him.'

‘Yes I can.'

A faint clicking of keys came over his earpiece.

‘I'm overriding the systems, Paul. The outer door will not open. You must return and explain yourself.'

‘No.'

‘You can't go out, Paul!'

The airlock had closed. The numbers began to tumble once more.

‘Open the door, Lewis.'

‘I am not going to—'

‘Open it!'

‘I'll damn well do nothing of the sort. You're acting irrationally …'

‘Open it, damn you!'

‘… danger to yourself and to us. You can sit there as long as you like—'

‘
Lewis!'

Furiously Paul punched the key marked
Bore
. Something clicked faintly above his head. His screen showed another view – the outer door again, but this time looking down a long mechanical arm.

‘Open it – or I'll break it down!'

There was a pause.

‘You can't do that,' said Lewis. ‘You'll break the bore, more likely.'

‘Shall we see?'

He jerked the joystick. Clumsily the arm reached forward, like a long finger.

‘Paul, if you touch that door we'll restrain you when you
get back in.'

‘You're going to open it, Lewis! You're going to open it
now
!'

Through the fabric of the crawler, through the layer of his suit, he felt the
clunk
as the bore-nose came to rest against the rim of the door. There would be four bolts, he calculated. Maybe five.

He pressed
Start
. Slowly the bore began to turn. In utter silence dust began to fly.

There was a muttered curse in his ear. Other voices, more distant, were speaking in alarm. They must all have gathered around the console …
When Lewis called us into his work-chamber … He had Thorsten on his monitor … There was something odd about Thorsten's answers …

A thin stream of shavings was dropping to the floor.

‘All right! Paul, all right! Stop the bore! I'm releasing it!'

Paul jerked the joystick backwards. The arm recoiled. The drill was still spinning. He stopped it.

The last door was opening. He pressed the pedal. The crawler rolled forward, out onto the permanent ice.

The first thing was the gleam of something like water in the crawler lights. Like water? It probably
was
water, mixed with liquid nitrogen and ammonia, which kept it from freezing even as it seeped through the appalling cold of the crust and
broke out through some vent in the surface. He could not see the vent itself. It might even be under the station. The station was designed to float on such flows.

The second thing was the change in the crawler's motion. Its wheels were on an uneven surface. After the smooth floors of the station it was juddering, even bouncing in a slow, uneasy rhythm that reminded him of being in a boat. The engine was powerful, the gravity low. The wheels were splayed wide to prevent it from overturning. Even so, it would not be difficult to roll it. And that would be disaster.

If the crawler rolled he would be stuck, even if the hatch would still open. The temperature stood at 36K. Thirty-six degrees above absolute zero.
The ground out there is trying to suck your heat out through your boots.

His foot had lifted automatically from the accelerator. The bouncing motion eased. The crawler came to a halt just short of the pool's edge. How deep would it be? No knowing.

He rotated the screen.

The floor of the canyon gleamed faintly with ice and pools, all bathed in a faint light like the last half-hour of twilight back on Earth, before the true night set in. The light would be coming from overhead, from the distant, star-like Sun. There would be more light once he got out of the canyon. Here, everything was enveloped in the shadowy walls of ice that rose above him.

The screen did not seem to do an upward view. Without it he felt very blind.

His lights showed him tracks in the ice, leading away to his left along the edge of the liquid flow. They would have been made by the utility crawlers. Crawlers went out from the station on various missions, but most involved climbing up the side of the canyon, up the natural ledge towards Thorsten's cairn.

He moved the joystick and pressed gingerly on the pedal. The crawler lurched forward, swinging to follow the tracks. As long as he stayed in the tracks his chances of getting stuck or overturning were far less.

And his chance of coming back safely was far greater.

‘Paul?'

It was May's voice.

‘Hello.'

‘Paul, what are you doing? Please tell us.'

You talk to him
, they would have said to her.
Maybe he'll listen to you. You try.

‘I'm going to see Thorsten.'

‘Paul, we don't understand! Why?'

‘Because there must be someone else!'

Pause. He could imagine the crew members looking at one another down in the station. Wondering, frightened …
He's mad
, they would be thinking.
He's gone mad
.

And Lewis? Had he understood yet what it was that Paul had guessed? What was he thinking now? And what would he say to the others?

Would he give in, as he had given in at the door?

But even if he did, Paul would not believe him. He could confess the truth now, then later he would claim he had only said it to get Paul back inside the station. There was just one way to be sure.

‘Paul?'

It was May again. There was a tremble in her voice.

‘Paul – please. Whatever you are going to do, you have to come back. You understand? Please.'

She thought he was going to kill himself.

‘I'll come back.'

‘Paul. Please come back
now
. If you have an accident we'll lose you, and the crawler as well!'

‘I'm going to see Thorsten.'

Silence.

The crawler had begun to climb. To his left was the ice wall. To his right, a drop. The way was narrow – comfortable enough for utility crawlers but not for the big red crawler. He was hugging the cliff as closely as possible.

It was steep too. It was far steeper than such a road on Earth would have been. Of course there was less gravity to combat, but at the same time it made the risk of
overturning seem greater. It was mostly natural, the crew had said. The constructors had only had to improve it. Improve it? What did that mean? Pile rubble into the cracks, he supposed. They hadn't had much choice about its course – or its width.

‘Damn!'

‘Paul, what happened?' That was Lewis, tense. They must be following his every move down there.

‘It's just narrow!'

‘Paul, you mustn't take this kind of risk! Come back now. If you like we'll pilot a utility up there—'

‘The hell with that!'

He had never used the word
hell
before. He had an idea that it was supposed to be a very hot place. Bitterly, he laughed aloud.

‘Paul. We do not understand. Tell us why you are doing this!'

‘Because there must be someone else! There must be! And it has to be Thorsten.'

There was silence for a moment. Paul supposed they were digesting what he had said, absorbing it, understanding his accusation. And then they would deny it.

But what Lewis said was: ‘Paul, repeat that last, please. You broke up. It has to be …?'

‘Get out of my ear, Lewis!'

‘Paul, you must help us!'

‘Get out of my ear and let me drive this thing!
Damn!
'

For one horrible moment he thought a wheel was spinning in empty space. But the crawler lurched onwards, upwards. He could see the rim of the canyon, ahead and above him. Two, three hundred metres? Impossible to tell. The sky was nearly as black as the ice. Only the gleam on the canyon rim showed him where it might be. And the shape of a spar, catching the light.

The way was widening. It was becoming a slope of ice – luminous, fissured ice. The big wheels bounced but maintained their grip. He was getting more used to this. His power indicator read
67%
.

The cairn was a little way ahead of him, set back from the natural line of advance, just as if it were an old roadside shrine on Earth. It was built of debris from the station, coated over the years with thin layers of frost. If it had not been for the spar planted in its cone it would have been just one more icy hummock in all that waste of ice, silvered with the thin ammonia frost that fell from the sky.

The crawler heaved itself up to the ridge beside the cairn.

Brake. Lower and lock the legs.

Legs locked
, said the screen.

And look around, because he might never come out here
again. Slowly he rotated the camera. The images traversed his screen.

He was looking across ridge after ridge of ice, dark where it fell steeply and silver-purple where the light fell upon it. The sky was a dull blue-black, streaked here and there with thin greys. As the camera turned, Paul saw a man-made radio antenna, sited about half a kilometre away. That was one of the auxiliaries. Its dish was pointed to the sky.

And now other things were coming into view: the edge of the canyon, frighteningly close and deep, it seemed. The screen would not look down into it, just as it would not show him the planet overhead. And what was that? Another man-made structure, a little along the canyon edge. It stood like a radio antenna, with some kind of dish pointing to the sky. But it was not an antenna. And the angle of the dish was curious.

There was another one beyond it. And another. There was a long row of them on the lip of the canyon. And there were more on the far side, again with their angled dishes … Yes, those were the outer ring of the Sun-gathering system, tilting their mirrors to spill the weak rays down into the bottom of the canyon where the secondary and tertiary mirrors would focus them onto the baths of algae below the insulating layers of the station. Plus twelve Celsius, the temperature had been down there, in the glare gathered from forty-eight huge mirrors combined.

The display on his screen read
37K
.

Now the screen was completing its tour, looking up the length of the canyon along another line of standing mirrors to where the cone of ‘Humperdinck' heaved itself into view in the background. And here, sliding into view again before him, was the cairn of rubble with the pylon poking up out of the top of it. The feature the station crew called ‘Thorsten'.