She came back instantly. “Yes? Are you all right?”
“I am right above the Kibalchich. It is rotating quite rapidly. I intend to move down to the hub and try to enter from there.”
“That’s just what we were going to suggest,” Brahms said.
“Be careful,” Karen added.
“By the way, the Soviets have sent no welcoming committee. I see no one so far.”
“I didn’t expect anything,” Brahms said.
Making sure that he kept the braided part of the weavewire away from the superstructure, he climbed down the Kibalchich’s central axis, careful to have a good grip each time, until he reached the point where the support column intersected the hub sphere. His feet touched the metal surface. He let out a long sigh of relief as the magnets in his soles clanked against the hull.
Karen and several of the other engineers had constructed his braided weavewire belt so he could unfasten it from around his waist and use reinforced clamps to anchor it to the Kibalchich. Ramis tugged on the fiber behind him and felt a slight tension.
Fumbling, he managed to unfasten the belt, still holding it tightly. He turned, extending his arms and stepping away from the fiber. The lack of resistance and the bulkiness of his suit made his movements awkward, contrived. He started to sweat.
The support shaft rising from the command sphere looked to be an ideal place. He wrapped his feet around it and fastened the belt around the shaft, anchoring it with clamps. He plucked a self-sealing tube from his belt and squeezed liberal amounts of vacuum cement over the connection. In less than a minute the polymer resin would harden from the cold and the vacuum into a bond more powerful than the metal of which the Kibalchich was constructed.
Smiling inside his helmet, Ramis turned and looked at the tiny Day-Glo orange thread extending a hundred meters from the support column, then vanishing abruptly into its single-molecule thickness. Ramis could not see the remainder of the weavewire, but frozen in space, it pointed directly to where the bright spot of Orbitech 1 anchored the opposite end of the strand.
The bridge was established. The two colonies were joined. He tongued his radio mike. “Orbitech 1, I have successfully anchored the weavewire to the Kibalchich.”
Throughout the maneuver he had remained silent, debating whether to keep in constant, step-by-step contact with Orbitech 1. But he decided against that. If they wanted to know exactly how it was done, they could come do it themselves.
“I am now standing on the outside of the central sphere. I will search for an entrance.”
Free of the line and able to be more versatile in his movement, Ramis scrambled along the hull of the hub sphere, planting one foot in front of the other. Following the rotational axis, he tried to orient himself with “up” and “down.”
He clunked along the outside of the sphere until he found the markings of a man-sized emergency hatch recessed into the hull. He made his way to it, then stopped and stared. Strange symbols, painted in a deep dull yellow, covered the hatch. He could not understand the writing, but the mechanism itself seemed obvious enough. He flicked on his radio mike again. “Orbitech 1, I have found one of the access hatches.” He pointed his chest camera toward it. “I will attempt to enter the Soviet colony.”
Then he turned to face the sphere and, after a moment’s thought, spoke toward the metal wall. “Kibalchich, I hope you give me a happy welcome.” After all, he thought, perhaps their radio was just broken and they could not respond. Maybe it was that simple. But then why hadn’t they come out to meet him?
He fitted his bulky fingers into the red-painted lock mechanism and turned it counterclockwise. Bolts around the seal kicked back, and the door slid out and over, leading to a cramped airlock chamber. It looked like a great black mouth; he halfway expected to see fangs around the edge.
“Orbitech 1, the outer door has opened. I am stepping inside. This will be your last contact from me until I find a working transceiver inside. If something happens—” He paused, then shrugged. “The cable is connected between the two colonies. The next step will be yours.”
Brahms’s voice answered back, echoing in his ears. “Ramis, we wish you the best of luck. Our hopes ride with you. Your transmissions are being broadcast over ConComm. Everyone is cheering for you.”
Ramis shut off the mike. “Thanks,” he muttered.
When he closed the outer door, the chamber was dark, with only a red strip of phosphors on the ceiling for dim illumination.
He punched a sequence of buttons that he thought would fill the chamber with air, but his suit was so insulated he could hear no hissing. The light on the panel turned from red to green, which looked more like white to black in the reddish background light, and Ramis hesitated. His suit had relaxed, lost most of its stiffness.
He cracked open his faceplate and drew a deep breath of stale, sour air. It had a rotten smell to it.
Fear crept up his spine again. If the Soviets’ radio wasn’t broken and if they had all died, perhaps they had succumbed to some kind of disease, a plague. Genetic research gone wrong? That was the ostensible reason Dr. Sandovaal had come up to L-4—so he wouldn’t have to worry about unleashing a plague on Earth if his experiments went awry. And if the Soviets had contaminated their colony with a deadly virus, Ramis had just breathed a lungful of it.
He let the air out of his nostrils and swallowed hard. No good now—it is too late. I have already exposed myself. He took another breath, turned to the interior door, and pushed the release button. It slid open with a grating hiss.
Directly in front of his face was the purple, bloated body of a dead man, drifting in the disturbed air currents.
Ramis gasped and choked. The stench was powerful.
The man’s eyes were wide open, his face swollen and distorted. He was a large man, clad in a dark uniform spangled with military insignia.
Ramis backed up in horror, but he could go no farther. The back wall of the airlock chamber stopped him. The body drifted in, as if it were following him.
He screamed “Help!” in Tagalog.
He stopped, felt his pounding heartbeat, calmed his own breathing. The stench continued to seep into his pores, into his lungs. He forced himself to relax.
It was only a dead man. Someone had died on this colony. He had been prepared for that. Perhaps the entire Soviet station had turned into a huge tomb in space. Without gravity, the body had been drawn over to the door when Ramis had filled the inner airlock.
He stared at the bulging, jellied eyes of the corpse. The man’s hair was neatly combed, fixed into place with hair oil. The insignia on the dark uniform showed him to be someone of importance—a commander, perhaps—left here untended to rot.
Ramis forced himself to move. He had to bump past the bobbing corpse to enter the main command center. He touched the body with his shoulder, shielding it with the most padded portion of the space suit. He felt his skin crawl. As the firm, weightless mass moved aside, the arm bent at the elbow and the gray-green, blotched hand drifted up and down, as if waving good-bye. Ramis’s stomach flopped.
He closed his eyes and reached out with gloved fingers, grasping the corpse’s torso. He felt a rush of sweat inside his suit. He gave the body a shove toward the airlock chamber. After it obligingly floated inside, Ramis sealed the door, closing the body out of sight.
He expected to see more corpses there, all sprawled out and ripe with decay, but the command center stood empty. He swiveled his head to stare at the large, spherical room. From “floor” to “ceiling” ran a cylindrical pipe, embedded in a holotank; he realized the pipe must be the support strut for the mirror overhead and the solar shield below. The pipe would not be noticed when the central holotank was functioning.