Outward Bound, page 15
This was what he had come up here to be a part of. Perhaps something inside him had hungered for the things he was feeling now, all along. Linc didn't really understand how, but Willie said all life had evolved from fishes. Linc would no more be able to go back to his former life, he realized, than he could grow scales and return to the depths of the sea.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
LINC completed his basic course under Schultz and received his senior's stripe. Almost certainly, that meant he would be going on the next ship out—confirmed as the Neil A. Armstrong, which Angelo had mentioned. And it could be quite soon, since more vessels were being completed and commissioned in the Zone, and traffic was expected to increase dramatically. Offsetting Linc's excitement to some degree was the news that he was considered to have officer potential but on arrival would consigned to a preliminary two-year term as infantry marine—the "grunts" of the Outzone space forces. In the meantime he was posted to E Company, Construction, commanded by a Captain Ullerman.
Hermes, the transfer station being built to cycle between the orbits of Mars and Earth, would probably be the last large-scale project the Outzoners would undertake in the near-Earth region of space—at least until Earth underwent some kind of radical political and economic change. The only factor likely to result in a decision to commence another local project would be its training value for future migrants on their way out, in the same manner as Hermes was being used as a training project for large-scale space construction.
Many parts of Hermes, such as the accommodation modules, plant and storage-tank housings, required shell forms of various kinds. These were assembled from sections tens or hundreds of feet across, produced in space by depositing metal-alloy vapor on inflated plastic balloon formers of the correct shapes. Deposition was carried out by remote-controlled, jet-guided robots that traversed back and forth, round and round, adding microlayer upon layer to the growing surfaces. They were called spiders on account of both the slender feelers they extended around the working area to position themselves, and the bulbous, abdomen like reservoirs in which they melted and vaporized the metals to be deposited.
One of Linc's duties as senior cadet in his closing spell at Grayling was accompanying rookies who were still going through second-part basic on their first cautious space walks and ventures outside. Already he had graduated to the role of teacher. The basics of shell deposition was among the newly acquired arts that he found himself passing on to the newcomers.
The shell being formed was vaguely the shape of an egg cut the long way, but it would have covered the side of a six-story building. Two of them would enclose the crew module of Hermes, the skeleton of which was being assembled two miles away. The module would then be floated over to the main structure and attached as a unit. Other modules were taking shape similarly in various directions all around.
Linc and Danny, one of the second-part-basic rookies, in suits, were following the process from a "horse" hovering fifty feet off—a mobile maintenance platform consisting essentially of an open frame with an array of swivel jets and two crew stations, a carrier for tools and supplies, and a power unit. Danny updated the command file for the spider while Linc watched. It was his first excursion to any distance from the Shack, and he was still a shade apprehensive. Several yards away, their relief shift in the form of Arch and a rookie called Iram hung on a two-man scooter, waiting to move in.
"You don't need the F-normal bias so high," Linc said over the circuit. He was referring to the jet that maintained a slight force to hold the spider against the shell's surface. "Just a small bias will do it. The sensors will track any variation. It saves propellant and reduces drift."
"Okay, gotcha . . . . How's the gap?"
"About right for the curve. Watch your D reading. The nozzle's a little high."
Danny nodded behind his faceplate and made the adjustments. He was a farm boy from Washington State, always slow and methodical—but he usually got things right.
Arch's voice came through in Linc's helmet. "You guys about done yet?"
Linc ran his eyes one last time over the numbers showing on the screen pad strapped to his thigh and nodded. "It's running okay, but a little sluggish on the turns. I've logged it in. Okay, she's all yours." He used the pad to sign off the shift, verified that Arch had confirmed the changeover, and unsnapped his restraint harness on the horse. "Okay, Dan, let's get back to the Shack and hitch the next truck home to Grayling. I'm about ready for dinner."
Arch had pushed off of the scooter and was holding on with a hand, using his suit jet to steady it. Linc launched himself from the horse in a slow, turning motion that rotated him to slip neatly into the seat as he arrived. Arch took Linc's vacated position on the horse; then Danny and Iram switched places to complete the exchange. Linc detached the scooter from the safety line trailing from the structure they had been working on and used the steering gyros—quicker and simpler than juggling with jets, once you'd gotten the knack of them—to realign with the Construction Shack roughly a mile and a half away. "You on tight, Dan?"
"Secured and checked."
"Okay, see you guys back in the Tower later," Linc called as he opened up the thruster. One of the figures on the horse waved back as the scooter pulled away.
"Not me. I'll be heading straight for the pool," Arch's voice answered over the radio.
Linc and Danny moved away from the shell's reassuring bulk and out into the open star field. Suddenly the other constructions seemed far away and insignificant. Even Grayling Station was almost out of sight, partially obscured from this angle by the Construction Shack in between. Linc could remember how desperately exposed he had felt on his own first experience of this—like finding himself on the rock slab with just toeholds and a friction grip for his hands above a long drop for the first time.
Danny was evidently going through the same thing. "I remember when I went swimming out from the shore once as a kid and found I was in the middle of the river," his voice said in Linc's helmet. "It felt kinda like this."
"You'll get used to it," Linc told him.
"How long does it take?"
"How long did it take before you could swim across the river?"
"I did swim across—that first time. The trouble was that by then I was too scared to swim back."
"Well, out here it's easier. You won't drown if you get tired. The trouble is just in your mind." A year before, although he would never have admitted it, Linc had found guys like this intimidating, with their social backgrounds and education. Much of the tough exterior he'd maintained, and believed to be himself, had been overcompensation. Now he was teaching these guys.
"What made you decide to go out to the Zone?" Danny asked.
"At the time, I didn't know I was going there. It was one of those things, like, you know—you don't have much choice. One of those offers you can't refuse."
"Is it right you came through that place called Coulie in California, that some of the guys talk about?"
"Uh-huh."
"Is it like they say . . . that all of the people who went through there were in some kind of trouble?"
"I don't know. Nobody there ever talked about it." And Linc didn't especially feel like answering the questions he sensed were about to follow. "How about you?" he asked, heading Danny off instead.
"Oh . . . my folks broke up, and when I was asked which one I wanted to go with, I couldn't honestly answer either way. You know how it is—each of them used me as a sort of weapon against the other when they got in a fight, and I ended up terrified of both of them. Then one of the lawyers who was involved introduced me to someone who talked about opting out of it all and heading for the Outzone . . . ."
"It wouldn't have been a guy called Dr. Grober, by any chance, would it?" Linc asked. "White hair and a pink face. Always wears one of those dicky bow ties."
"No. It was some woman. Her name was Zeipel. Why?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Anyhow, it sounded better than anything else anyone was talking about. My parents both signed me off . . . . And here I am riding this thing with you up here, like the cow that jumped over the Moon."
The Construction Shack was now looming closer, its bulk throwing them suddenly into shadow from the Sun.
"So why the military?" Linc asked curiously.
"I was more interested in the computers—maybe getting into something like piloting one day too. They said a few years of this would be a good grounding in all of that. I think they want to put as many people as they can through this. The discipline probably helps later—you know, like how different it all must be out there."
"You should talk to Willie. He's got it all set up to be a pilot. He's got an uncle out in the Zone already who knows about all that. Willie's got the angles figured."
"Do you think—" Danny's voice cut off suddenly. A moment later, Linc felt and heard two urgent raps from behind on his helmet.
"What?"
Danny's voice came through, sharp with urgency. "To your right—-four o'clock!"
Linc turned awkwardly to peer back past his shoulder. The main structure of Hermes lay in the direction that Danny had indicated. Part of it—a support pylon and a portion of girder work at its base—had torn away and was cartwheeling crazily, trailing lines convulsing in slow, whiplike motions. As Linc watched, one of them snagged around another nearby object, capturing it and pulling it into the tumbling pattern. Linc gave the scooter a power burst and gunned for the cover of the Shack. Seconds later, the site controller's voice barked in his helmet on the emergency band:
"Emergency! Emergency! We have a structure failure on the skeleton. A rotator is loose. Evacuate the area. Unshielded personnel be alert for debris."
Although the main mass of gyrating cables and metal seemed, if anything, to be shrinking, there was no telling which way detaching fragments might be thrown. Linc held a steady course for the homing beacon on the Shack's dark side, cutting in reverse at maximum only when he could see the inside of the bay, already opened and waiting. "This never happened in rivers!" Danny yelled as he thudded against Linc's back.
Linc took the scooter straight in, ignoring the outside parking rack. Suited figures helped them off and into one of the locks, shunting the scooter into a loading bay to keep the entrance clear for other vehicles converging outside. Once through the lock, Linc de-suited in the antechamber and hauled himself rapidly through corridors and connecting shafts to the communications area where the telecontrol consoles were located, which was where E Company was detailed to report.
Many of the other personnel seemed to be gathering there as well. Danny, not as accustomed yet to getting out of suits in a hurry or negotiating labyrinths of metal geometry in zero-g, arrived breathless and sporting a few bruises shortly after.
Linc sought out Captain Ullerman, who, for reasons not immediately clear, had been joined by two of the Construction Shack's senior officers from the Control Room. What were they doing here? A situation of this nature would be dealt with there, where all site operations were directed from. What was the relevance of a company-size outfit of cadets learning construction engineering? Willie and Flash were there; also some second-part rookies. They looked tense and pale—more so than the circumstances should have warranted.
Screens on the walls showed views from different directions of turning tangles of debris and lines. The initial configuration was coming apart. Another screen was open to the Control Room, showing the face of Director Earle, the Construction Shack's operations chief. Garbled reports were coming in over several audio channels at once. Several of the views, Linc realized as he tried to follow, seemed to be concentrating on one rotating form in particular: three masses connected by two lengths of line, the whole oscillating and rebounding as it spun. It seemed to be receding.
Then the view snapped into clearer resolution as the recording camera zoomed closer in. The center mass was a mangled confusion of girders and metal latticework. One of the cables flailing from it was attached to a piece of machinery of some kind. The other was wrapped around a shape that Linc recognized as an effector capsule—an enclosed, mobile unit carrying up to four persons, used around the construction area to permit working in shirtsleeves via external manipulators.
At that moment an engineer at one of the consoles looked around at Ullerman and the two officers from the Control Room and indicated the picture that had stabilized on his screen. "We've got a connection now," he told them. The picture showed the head and shoulders of a girl wearing a cadet tunic. She seemed to be pinned against an instrument panel visible in the background. Her face had a vacant, bewildered expression. Blood was oozing from her nose and mouth, spreading all ways over her face in a ghastly pattern.
"What's happening?" Linc asked the others crisply.
"It's Nancy," one of the rookies gasped, horrified.
"Nancy! Nancy Powlin! Can you hear me in there?" Ullerman snapped into a mike.
Willie gestured first at a screen showing the lines and three masses tumbling, then at the internal view from the capsule that had just appeared. His eyes were wide with shock. "It got caught in the open," he told Linc hoarsely. "The shell's buckled and has to be compromised. Arvin's in there with two of the rookies. We're not getting any response. And it's heading away from us fast!"
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE pylon was a structural component designed to impart rigidity in a way somewhat like tent pole. To achieve this, it was held in a flexed state by tension lines while its mountings and connection to the structure were secured. One of these; lines had parted, and in recoiling had whiplashed through the partly completed supports, causing the pylon and some of the structure to break away. Arvin and the two rookies, Nancy and another called Cliff, had been snagged on their way out to haul materials from a floating supply dump left by the Constellation. Three emergency craft were in pursuit and one was closing in, but the pilot was baffled as to how to match course with such a wildly cavorting target. The masses and the two cables bounced like connected weights and springs as they spun, setting up complex wave motions that propagated back and forth, defying prediction.
"Nancy, now listen to me. I want you to take a long breath, and then concentrate on what you have to do. Okay? Don't look at any shiny surfaces. You're not hurt as bad as it seems. The force pattern is making it look worse. Do you understand, Nancy?" A doctor from the Construction Shack's Emergency Room had arrived in the communications area. Nancy had recovered her faculties partly, but she panicked when she saw a reflection of herself in a panel escutcheon. Now she was calming down again. Cliff had taken a knock on the head and seemed to be out cold. Arvin had been flung against the pilot's console, and according to Nancy was conscious but only semi-coherent. She described his arm as being in an odd position and said he was in too much pain to move. Apparently the station director, Kelsoe, at Grayling, was now in touch with Director Earle, in the Shack's Control Room.
"She needs to enable the capsule's diagnostics for remote access so we can read them from here," the engineer who had gotten the view from inside said over his shoulder. "That capsule has to have taken some damage. We need a report on it."
"How does she do that?" the doctor asked.
"She has to activate the engineer's panel, then feed in some commands. Let me direct her."
The doctor looked back at the screen. "Nancy, do you hear me? . . . Nancy?" Nancy nodded once, blankly. "I want you to listen to Mr. Quine now. There are some things you have to do there for us. They're simple but very important. Now listen carefully. Okay?"
"Okay, Nancy, first, locate the System Mode switch, and make sure it's at 'CMD/MON.' Got that? Now go to your panel, and hit Reset. You should get the System Initialize screen . . . "
Ullerman and the CR officers were watching another screen showing a transmission from the emergency flier trying to maneuver in. The capsule was visibly deformed and buckling where the turn of cable snaked around it. It grew larger, seemed to steady for a second or two, and then vanished suddenly in a different direction. On the engineer's screen, Nancy lurched to one side and clutched at a piece of bracing. A cry of pain, recognizably Arvin, sounded in the background. The view from the flier showed the piece of snarled wreckage enlarging suddenly as it hurtled toward the camera—"Jesus!"—then sliding away as the pilot evaded.
The pilot's voice came through again. "This is no good! It's like trying to second-guess two elastic yo-yos tied together."
Finally, the diagnostics of the capsule's systems came up on an auxiliary screen on Quine's console. "How's it looking?" Ullerman asked him.
The engineer scanned the numbers, then shook his head gravely. "Not good. Their main power's out. They're on emergency . . . And the air reserve is way down. The shell is breached somewhere. Frankly, I'm surprised it's still in one piece. That cable wrapped around it might be all that's holding it together. But it can't take much more of this."
