Blair glanced quickly at the gauges beside the bulkhead door. “Pressure’s up,” he said. “Looks like it didn’t break all the way through.”
“No way to tell yet,” said Mendel. “It might be a slow leakage.”
“Then we have time to move the cargo.”
Mendel shook his head. “Sorry, Glenn, no can do. Open this door here, it might joggle the air pressure just enough to make a slow leak a fast one. If that happens, it won’t be this door that slams shut, it’ll be the one way over there, between Three and Four.”
“So you wait in Three. I’m willing to take the chance.”
“I’m not. And it isn’t your pearly white skin I’m worried about, it’s my pearly white Station. If we have one Section in vacuum, we’ll have trouble enough keeping equilibrium. With two Sections out of whack, we’ll wobble all over the damn Solar System.”
“Irv, my whole cargo’s in there! The cargo for QB is in there!”
“I can’t help it. Besides, vacuum won’t hurt that stuff for QB”.
“Irv, if there’s a break through the inner hull, and that meteor shakes loose, the QB cargo won’t be in the Station any more, it’ll be scattered halfway from here to Mars. Did you ever see stuff come flying out of a room that goes suddenly to vacuum?”
“Yes, I did. Did you ever see a man that’s gone suddenly to vacuum?”
“Irv, look at your blasted pressure gauge!”
“It’s down.”
“It’s down less than half a point, Irv, and that’s because you’ve stopped pumping air in there. Listen, that QB cargo isn’t hermetically sealed. If it doesn’t get good air, it can rot.”
“It can rot right now, for all of me. I’m not touching Section Five or anything in it. We’ll get in touch with QB, and let them send a couple of reps up here. It’s their job, not ours.”
“Irv, don’t you realize what that cargo means to the boys at QB?”
“Sure, I do. But do you realize what this Station here means to me? The boys at QB can re-order another batch. I can’t go out and re-order another Station.”
“Irv, listen. The ground-pounders don’t realize how important that stuff is. Without it, the crew at QB will be at each other’s throats in a month. This is no exaggeration, Irv, the whole QB operation will fall apart within a month. And if QB falls apart, the whole system falls apart, because it’s QB’s job to run maintenance for the rest of us.”
“I know that,” said Mendel, “I know it well. Every word you say is absolutely true. But I still say they can re-order.”
“And I say it’ll take three months at the very least to fill the new order! We can’t even put the order in until we can prove to the ground-pounders’ satisfaction that this batch is destroyed, and we won’t be able to do that till the reeps get here and patch the hole. So that’s ten or fifteen days right there. Then they’ll fool around another half a month or more, figuring out costs and tax breaks and whatnot, wanting to know why QB can’t make do till the next regular shipment, and bogging down in a lot of red tape. Then they have to put the order in, out of sequence, so it’ll take longer to fill it. And every single item has to be doublechecked and approved by the psycho department and half a dozen other departments. It’ll be more than three months!”
Mendel doggedly shook his head. “I’m not going to argue with you, Glenn,” he said, “I’m going to tell you. That cargo is your responsibility, but this whole Station is mine, and I’m not going to risk this Station for you or QB or anybody. Period, finish, end of discussion. Now, I’m going to go on up and call QB and have them send us a couple of reeps. Want to come along?”
“I want to boot you in the rump, Irv, I swear.”
Mendel grinned. “I feel like doing some rump-booting myself. Take it easy, Glenn. It’ll all work out.”
“Hot diggity,” said Blair sourly.
“Want to come up to the office with me?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
Mendel left, and Blair stomped angrily back down the corridor to Section Two, where he found the three engineers still waiting by the elevator. He glared at them and snarled, “What the devil are you clowns doing? Get out of those idiot clown suits, the party’s over.”
The three of them stared at him in astonishment. Ricks looked as though he might smart-talk, and Blair waited hopefully, fists clenched, but something about his stance gave Ricks second thoughts and he turned away without a word, red-faced and frowning.
QB was the Quartermaster Base, a large satellite in permanent orbit two hundred miles above the surface of the Moon. It was shaped somewhat like the three Space Stations, though with a thicker outer ring and a less intricate inner section. This base held all of the equipment for maintenance and repair of the entire General Transit system, the three Space Stations, the two barbells, and the Moon-based lighters.
Attached to QB by a simple hook-and-ring mechanism were six repair ships, familiarly known as reeps. Reeps were small blunt rounded one-man ships, with payloads made up exclusively of fuel. Protruding from the front of each reep were four jointed arms, operated by the arms and legs of the pilot. The reep had one large rocket exhaust at the rear, which swiveled to allow turning maneuverability, and four small swiveled exhausts around the body, permitting the reep complete close-range maneuverability. An experienced reep pilot could operate his ship as though it were an extension of his body, backing and sidestepping, working the four arms as readily as he used his own arms and legs.
There were two kinds of reeps, and three of each kind. There was the gripper reep, with arms designed for holding and manipulating, and the fixer reep, with arms for welding and cutting.
When the call came in from Station One, QB was three-quarters around the Earth-side of its orbit. The radioman on duty got the approximate dimensions of the meteor now jammed into the outer edge of the Station, and its approximate placement, and passed this information on to the Dispatcher Office. A call then went down to the Supply Department for Part X-102-W, outer hull replacement panel. This piece, eight feet by eight, was delivered to the Dispatch Delivery Point, at the inner rim of the doughnut.
Meanwhile, fixer reep 2 and gripper reep 5 were fueled and piloted. Spacesuited QB crewmen put the replacement panel in position for the gripper reep to get hold of, and the two ships broke away from the satellite, headed toward Earth.
The radioman at QB got in touch with the radioman at Station One and told him to expect the two reeps in fourteen days, approximately twelve hours before the Station was scheduled to make contact with the barbell from Station Three.
For everyone concerned, it was a long fourteen days. Irv Mendel watched the air pressure creep downward in Section Five, and gnawed his lower lip. Glenn Blair thought of the cargo for QB, and snarled at everyone he saw. Harvey Ricks thought of his two moments of panic, and waited for the chance to shove Blair’s superior attitude down his stinking throat.
Time in space is arbitrary. There are no seasons in the gulf between the planets, and there is no day and night. The sun, incredibly bright and fierce when seen without the protection of miles of atmosphere, glares out eternally at its domain, heating whatever it touches, leaving to frigid cold whatever lies in shadow. The twenty-four hour day is a fact of Earth, not a fact of the universe. In the void between the planets, the day is singular, and will end only with the death of the sun.
No matter how much he wills it otherwise, Man is a parochial creature, a native of a planet and not of all space. Whatever else he leaves behind him when he roves beyond his own globe, he takes with him his ingrained ideas of night and day. In every room and office of Space Station One there was a clock, and every clock pointed simultaneously to exactly the same time. The time was that of the Greenwich Meridian, the time of England and Ireland and Scotland and Wales. When Big Ben tolled twelve o’clock noon, the spacefarers of Station One ate lunch. When Big Ben, thousands of miles away in London, struck twelve o’clock midnight, the spacemen obediently went to bed.