Then there came a snapping noise. A micrometeorite. His shoe-soles had picked up the sound from the plating. It didn’t mean much. He passed an air-lock door, a small one for personnel. Even on liners such air-locks were used with extraordinary reluctance. They were convenient in space ports aground, but not many merchant spacemen would go to their ship’s outer skin in space suits. For painting or inspection or possible repairs, yes. But aground. Not in space itself.
Another snapping, and almost immediately another. The second made a microscopic blue-white flame in the shadowed part of the hull. It wouldn’t have punctured Scott’s suit, and if he felt it at all it would have been the tiniest of tappings. He went on.
Then there was a harsher sound, equally sharp but many times louder. Something considerable, perhaps as large as a grain of sand, had hit the buoy. The metal rang. The impact flare was visible even in the sunlight, brighter than the sunlight.
More noises, some of them mere cracklings—impalpable particles called cosmic dust—but some ominously violent. At least one was violent enough to mean a possible puncture of a hull plate, and such encounters were to be avoided. But there’d be no loss of air from within the ship. Plastic bubbles, formed into foam and shrunken by pressure, lay behind each hull plate. A puncture released the pressure and the foam crowded into the opening and sealed it. It would handle only punctures, of course, of not too large a size. But there were relatively very few large objects in space.
More cracklings. More snaps. They were becoming more frequent. But this wouldn’t mean that Lambda was nearing the comets’ central masses. The frequency of the impacts was increasing too suddenly. It was probably a minor globular cluster of tiny meteoric objects floating about some larger object and that in turn circling the comet-mass itself. Such a cluster might be fifty or a hundred miles across, and it might consist of tens of thousands of rushing rocky morsels, and still contain no more than ten or fifteen to the cubic mile. But near the center of the cluster they’d be denser. And larger.
Scott plodded heavily, alone in a vast emptiness with mist to wall away the stars. To his right, a spout of flame. Twenty yards ahead, another. They were massive enough to kill a man. They were larger than pinheads.
There were four such impacts almost simultaneously. Lambda was plainly nearing whatever the meteor alarm had told of. It could be something no larger than a baseball, or something as big as a house. It need not be on an actual collision course. It could be headed for a near miss which could be anywhere within a radius of ten miles of Lambda.
In any case there was nothing to be done. If it hit, it hit. If it destroyed Lambda, it destroyed Lambda. The number of cracklings and louder sounds grew greater, plus one or two harsh detonations that would probably test the puncture-sealing qualities of the plastic foam. Scott headed for an air-lock door. He wore space armor and could live where there was no air for a certain period of time. But outside the buoy he could be killed by particles which the buoy’s plating would stop or seal off.
He used the key that made lifeboats available and unlocked air-lock doors. He pulled out the small personnel port. He was in the act of entering when the number of crackles and snappings increased to a roar. Even through his space gloves he could feel the tappings and harsher impacts of sand grain morsels. But the pulled-out metal port protected him, and downstream, as it were, he could see the sunlit plating spouting venomous spots of incandescence. It was oddly like the still surface of water in a rain. And then something went by overhead. It went much too swiftly for him to look at it, but it was the size of a hogshead.
The roaring of innumerable impacts diminished as rapidly as it had begun. In seconds the frequency of small tappings decreased. Presently it was only one now and then. The stray cluster of racing missiles had gone by.
Scott went all the way into the air-lock. He put his helmet against the inner wall. By solid conduction he heard what noises there were inside. The meteor alarm had stopped, but he heard sounds which could have been shoutings. He heard something which could have been an explosion. He was sure that he heard a blaster. All of which could add up to pure insanity from terror, or could have been equally insane obliviousness while wreaking destruction upon places where someone suspected Janet or Scott might be hid.
Either event could produce a highly useful state of affairs. Scott went back to the outside of the hull again. Automatically, he tried to look at his watch. It wasn’t possible through the sleeves and gloves of his space suit.
He tried to move faster. He estimated that he was just about as far from the stern as the engine room. He’d performed the elaborate maneuvers of which this walk in emptiness was a part, to convince Bugsy that he’d gone to Janet’s hiding-place, which supposed to be somewhere near the stern. The idea was to have Bugsy kept busy searching for it—and him. Bugsy was sure he was near the buoy’s bottom level. It would never occur to anyone but a spaceman to put on a space suit and return to the control room by the outside plating of the hull. While Bugsy was busy tearing the stern apart to find him—and Janet—he might get back to the control room with time to spare for what needed to be done there.
He was a small and lonely figure trudging forward on Lambda’s outer plating. He seemed to wade in darkness up to his thighs, while the upper part of his space suit glittered in the malevolent glare of Canis Lambda.
That blazing monster flung up prominences and flares. It produced spots and faculae of enormous size. It was a sun, and it would not be defied and made use of by minute creatures like men! One man in a space suit, trudging on the gilded hull of a derelict without drives, floating to destruction in empty space … one man in a space suit was a wholly contemptible antagonist for the sun Canis Lambda. But that yellow star waited impatiently to see the buoy turn to flame; burst into incandescence, become mere droplets of metal and shreds of ionized gases and even ultimately a short-lived comet itself, which would dissipate to nothingness and be gone forever.
Scott reached his destination, the air-lock through which he’d first entered the space buoy. He opened the outer door and went in. A spouting blue-white flame leaped upward from a place he’d just vacated. It vanished. He closed the outer door behind him. He opened the inner door and entered the ship.
He heard Thallian mood music when he opened his helmet’s face plate. It startled him. But it was only hours since he’d boarded Lambda, and it was custom for spacecraft to have some sound produced continually. One didn’t notice the sound, and the total silence of space would be nerve-racking. Here where there should be passengers there was music. Elsewhere there was random noise at the very threshold of audibility. Here solidograph films ran continuously in the tiny theatre, whether anyone watched or not. Scott, though, had been hearing quite other sounds for some time now, and music seemed very strange.
He went across the lobby and up the stairs to the control room. He opened the door and Chenery started up with a gasp. He’d been staring at the meteor-watch dial with fascinated, frightened eyes. The indicator needle quivered and swayed. It summed up the reports of all the meteor watch antennae at their different positions outside.
But it reacted only to approaching objects. Departing ones or those not coming nearer did not affect it. The dial needle indicated the moment-to-moment probability that a nearing meteor of sufficient size to be dangerous would pass within ten miles of the buoy. A five per cent probability was negligible. But a globular cluster could be bad! It had just been proven. Chenery watched. He quivered almost in unison with the needle of the meteor watch instrument. But the danger Scott anticipated wouldn’t lie in the lower percentages of probable close passings. He knew grimly that presently the instrument would tell of plunging masses of the comets’ cores rushing toward Lambda with a total impact-probability of one, when destruction would be inevitable and at hand.