WE (23 page)

‘What's that?'

A familiar red rectangle flashed in the bottom right corner of the screen.

‘Just an alert. It can wait.'

‘What do you suppose its reaction time is?'

‘We know that. Seconds, at most, when it was jamming the crawler. Anticipation made it faster still.'

‘It's being a lot slower this time. Does it know we're talking to it?'

‘Check the field readings?' said Lewis.

Paul called them up. They danced in jiggling yellow lines against the darkness of the canyon wall on the display.

‘High!' said Lewis. ‘But we're well into the tail, of course. How high were they before we sent the message?'

Paul called up the readings of five minutes earlier and superimposed them on the wall.

‘They've jumped, haven't they?'

‘They have.'

‘We've given it something to think about, anyway … My God!'

A huge spike in the readings had flickered briefly up the wall, there and gone like a lightning flash in the storms of Earth.

‘I hope it doesn't do that too often. I'm not sure—'

Something beeped. In the bottom right of the working area another alert was flashing red. There were letters. Paul did not recognize the acronym.

‘Damn!' said Lewis. ‘Why's that happening? I'll have to sort that. Paul, for God's sake tell it not to shout!'

Paul flicked to the message screen. Nothing was showing,
except for the red alert lights flashing in the corner.
Three
lights now.

‘It is not making sense,' he said.

‘Tell it not to shout.'

Paul picked out a message.
That is too much. Be more gentle.
‘Will that do?'

‘Who knows?' said May.

‘Will that do, Lewis?'

‘He's gone to sort out those alerts,' said May. ‘It must be the strength of the thing's signal that's doing it. It's like a magnetic storm, interfering with some of our systems. Look – it's dying off now. Try sending.'

Paul sent the message. Over the microphone he could hear Lewis muttering in his chamber. Lewis must have opened the channel so that he could listen to what was going on in the common room.

‘Ah!' said May. One of the red lights had gone off.

Then it came back again. So did two more.

‘Lewis!' called May.

‘I know, damn it!' came Lewis's voice. ‘What's it doing?'

‘There is no message,' said Paul. Then he said, ‘Field readings, current.' The screen changed.

‘Oh my God!'

‘What's it doing?' snapped Lewis. ‘What the hell's it …?'

He must have called up the field readings himself then, for his voice died away.

‘It hasn't understood,' said May.

‘What's it saying, Paul?' called Lewis. ‘Any idea?'

‘I don't think it's
saying
anything. It's just—Shit! Look at that!'

A string of error messages started to mount the screen.

‘Particle readings, current,' said Paul. The screen changed obediently. Still the error messages mounted.

‘Lewis …' said May.

She was looking at the particle readings, trying to control her voice.

‘Yes,' said Lewis. ‘I see it.'

‘Is that what's damaging the systems?'

‘Shouldn't be … Maybe …'

There was a short silence. Then Lewis said, ‘If the computers are susceptible … I can't predict what will happen to the life-support functions.'

May and Paul looked at each other.

The computing systems governed everything in the station – including the heating and life-support systems. The computing systems were distributed in the outer layers, to exploit the conductivity that could be achieved at low temperatures. The outer layers were most exposed to the magnetic storm. The computers had a five hundred per cent
redundancy, in case of damage. But a storm like this might affect all the systems at once.

‘I'm increasing the density in the outer layers,' said Lewis. ‘I'm going to take it as high as I can, to give us maximum protection. That means the heat loss from the station will increase. It's going to get chilly.'

There was a short silence.

‘When you say
chilly
…' May began.

‘How low will it get? I don't know …

‘We should get into suits,' he added. ‘Just in case. Suits, both of you. Keep your helmets to hand. I'll tell you if you have to put them on.'

‘You had better get Van,' muttered May.

Paul yielded his seat to her. He skipped down the common room and through the airlock. He called at Vandamme's seal. There was no answer. He entered. Vandamme was sitting in the middle of her chamber, surrounded by the images of ice on her walls.

‘You have to come,' Paul said.

Vandamme did not answer. Only the blink of her eyes as she stared at the walls told Paul that she was still living and had not somehow taken her own life in her despair.

‘You have to come,' Paul told her. He reached and shook her by the shoulder.

Vandamme tensed. She glared, not at Paul but at a point on the distant moonscape. ‘Why?' she said.

‘We're being attacked.'

It came in waves, again and again – lines of force coinciding over the station, bringing highly energetic particles down from space. Paul felt his stomach lurch each time he saw the numbers spike on the screen. He thought of the radiation pouring out of the sky. He thought of the particles smashing into the gas molecules in the outer layers, showering into thousands more particles, bombarding, showering again … They could not penetrate far into the station, but to reach the computer units they would not have to. And those impacts would have other effects – X-rays and gamma rays. Nothing in the station would stop gamma – not gas, not chamber wall, not pressure suit or human skin. If the designers on Earth had seen radiation as a serious hazard they would have buried the station in the ice. They hadn't. And now the creature was trying to kill them with it, just as health workers on Earth would kill a cancerous cell.

Cold was creeping through the air. Paul felt it like a bar of ice pressing on his forehead. His breath frosted when he exhaled. He desperately wanted to put his helmet on, power his suit and sit in warmth and complete protection. But the power in the suits would only last so long. There was no use
exhausting it now if they were going to need it later. He sat and watched and shivered.

Vandamme was in the common room with him. They sat together on the inflated seating, with their eyes and noses peeping over the tops of their high collars and their frosty breath fuming upwards like the steam from little volcanoes. Their hands, muffled in their great gauntlets, were too clumsy for the workstation controls. They watched the screen and controlled it by voice. Behind them the seal to Lewis's chamber was open. Lewis was in there with his legs in his suit and the top half of it spilling over his knees like a clumsy blanket, so that his hands were free and he could use every possible resource that his workstation gave him. Paul had looked in to see him there, muttering over the controls, squinting at the screen while May watched over his shoulder and the brightly coloured images of long-ago Earth still changed and changed upon his walls.

Another wave. It did not seem angry or fearful. It was like the action of a huge tongue, probing and probing at something that irritated in the mouth. Each time the system registered a new peak Paul wondered how much higher it could go.

Not even the World Ear could have given him an answer to that.

More error messages appeared. Malfunction reports from
one of the computer sites, from an auxiliary transmitter, from a search crawler. Particle damage in all cases. All had had shielding. All had been overwhelmed. The loss of the computer site might be trivial, or it might be serious. Everything depended on what the effects were and how Lewis could compensate for them. It depended too on what happened next: where the next chink in the station's armour would be.

They could do nothing but wait.

Paul turned to the woman beside him.

‘Erin?' he said.

Her face – as much as Paul could see of it – did not change at all. It was as if she did not think Paul could have been speaking to her.

‘Erin. That's your name, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' she said at last.

‘Do you mind if I call you that?'

She seemed to think about it. ‘No, I don't mind,' she said.

‘Helmets,' said Lewis's voice.

Fumble. Heave the huge thing over his head and lower it onto the rigid collar. Click. Twist. Power the suit. Check the displays.
Ex: 1.0 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -1°
. (Only minus one? Surely it had been lower than that!) And reach over, already feeling the warmth beginning to build around his legs, and check her fitting, and wait while she checked his.

‘Lewis?' said Paul. ‘We have our helmets on.'

‘Good.'

‘Are you suiting up too now?'

‘Not yet. Not until I really have to. But, Paul?'

‘Yes?'

‘You have to carry on trying to get through to it. Wait until the wave has died and then de-helmet and do it by voice. I think it's dying now. Can you see what you can do?'

Paul looked at the record of messages he had sent each time the waves had died.
We cannot understand you … Your signal is too strong … You are hurting us … You are damaging us – be more gentle … You must use words that we use …

‘What do you want me to say this time?'

‘As before. Tell it that we don't understand and that it's hurting us. Get it to calm down.'

‘No,' said Erin Vandamme. ‘Don't transmit.'

‘Why the hell not?' cried Lewis. ‘We've
got
to get through to it!'

‘We
are
getting through to it! That's how it knows where we are.'

There was silence.

‘It doesn't sense the station,' she said. ‘It can't see and it can't touch. It senses the transmissions. It reacts to them.'

‘Why should it stop hitting us just because we stop transmitting?'

‘When pain goes, you stop rubbing at it, don't you?' said May.

‘The moon's orbit will carry us away from where it last sensed us,' said Erin.

‘And out of the tail,' said Paul.

‘They're right, Lewis,' said May. ‘Maybe we should give up for the time being.'

‘But we've got to talk to the thing!'

‘We can try again any time. Right now we're putting the station in danger. And ourselves.'

‘What's going to be different—Damn!'

More alerts were scrolling up the screen – a long string of them.

‘That's one of the algae tanks.'

‘It's all right,' said Lewis. ‘I knew that would happen.'

‘Won't we lose the harvest?'

‘Not so long as—Hell! What's
that
?'

Another alert. Once again the acronym meant nothing to Paul. He heard Lewis muttering to himself.

‘Lewis?' said May. ‘What do you think?'

‘Yes, all right. Paul – no transmission please. Of any sort. Shut down anything you think might be emitting. And don't use the intercom unless you have to. We'll sit this passage out and then take stock.'

‘Will you suit up now, Lewis?' said Paul.

‘I said no transmission, please.'

They sat in silence, watching the numbers dance on the screen and the relentless march of the error alerts superimposed upon them. One was from the second auxiliary transmitter again. A number were from the Knowledge Store, which appeared to be responding to a query no one had sent. Most of the others Paul did not recognize. They were things that only Lewis knew about.

Paul thought about the shielding engineers – the people back on Earth who had been given the task of estimating how much magnetic interference and radiation the systems would be exposed to and of designing equipment to tolerate the load. There would have been good minds among them, lifetimes spent in the study of particle physics, modelling programs and the properties of materials. They had had the experience of a hundred years of space exploration to draw upon. What would they have felt if they were here now? If they were ranged behind him, watching the screen with him as the numbers danced and the errors mounted? Guilt, that the magnetic field was more intense than they had allowed for? Or pride, that so far only a small proportion of the station systems had actually failed?

Or would they feel nothing at all? Would it be a fatalistic shrug of the shoulders?
It wasn't our fault. Department X provided the readings. Department Y predicted the maximum
strength of the field. We did what we were asked to do. And then Department Z insisted …
It wasn't just the shielding engineers that the crew must rely on. It was everyone – everyone who had been a part of the great network, the mini-We that had designed, built, transported and erected the station out here. And he was depending too on the great We itself, which must have imposed the resource limits that the project had worked to. One failure, one honest miscalculation that escaped detection, could mean that the whole station failed now. That he, Paul Munro, would fail with it.

And that had been true ever since he had been laid inside his transport capsule back in the warm air of Earth.

A touch woke him from his thoughts. Erin Vandamme had tapped him on the shoulder. She mimed removing her helmet.

He checked the display.
Ex: 0.9 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -6°
. Pressure in the living quarters had fallen. The cold had deepened. It was all perfectly survivable, for the moment. But things were happening that were never meant to happen. And it might suddenly get worse.

Still she was miming at him. He hesitated. Then he nodded and gently powered down his suit. He felt it sag onto his body. He felt his ears pop and the sudden increase of cold. He lifted his hands to his helmet. It came free just
as Erin removed hers. They looked at each other over their high collars.