“You must return to the harvester,” Baker was saying. “All of you, and at once. There are developments here that dwarf the space farm’s problems. How soon can you leave?”
“I’ll have to go and tell the others.” Sylvia replied immediately, but she could imagine Baker at the other end, chafing at the transmission delay. “So far as Leo and I are concerned, we can leave at once. But Aybee and Wolf are reviewing the farm’s data bases. That may take a while.”
There was a pause that felt more like half an hour than half a minute. “You can’t wait for that.” It was the voice of command. “When you get back here, you’ll understand why. Leave now, as soon as you can. I’ll explain when you get here. One more thing. Have you been able to get closer to Wolf?”
“Not in the way you mean.” But somehow I got turned on watching him eating, Sylvia recalled. Would you call that progress? Fortunately it was a voice-only link. Sylvia was sure her face would have betrayed her—if her voice was not already doing that. “I’ll see what happens on the way back,” she said. “But I’m not optimistic. I’m sure he finds me as revolting to look at as I find him. And Leo told me Wolf is still infatuated with a woman he left on Earth.”
There was a final annoying delay. “He didn’t leave her on Earth,” Cinnabar Baker said at last. “She left him, to run off with somebody from the Halo. Big difference. Keep trying. Link ends.”
New problems on the harvester, Sylvia thought. What’s happening to the Solar System? It’s one damned thing after another.
She hurried out of the room. She was heading for Bey’s quarters in the higher-gravity region of the habitation bubble when the impact occurred.
Chapter 13
No recording instruments on the Sagdeyev space farm survived the impact. The whole encounter had to be deduced from other evidence.
The object hit the southern hemisphere of the habitation bubble, close to the pole. It was a jagged brown chunk of the primitive solar nebula, mostly ammonia and water ice, and it massed about eighty million tons. With a relative velocity of a kilometer a second, it smashed clear through the bubble and emerged from the side of the northern hemisphere. It also missed by thirty meters a collision with the shields of the power kernel and so failed to assure the immediate death of all humans on the farm.
The momentum that the impact transferred to the habitation bubble did three things. It broke the bubble loose from the farm’s billion-kilometer collection layer. It left the bubble with a new velocity vector and a new orbit, sharply inclined to its old one. And it set the bubble spinning around the central power kernel as it caromed away into space.
Two thousand machines were left behind on the detached collection layer. After the first confusion they managed very well. The smarter ones herded the others into tight little groups, then settled down to wait for instructions or rescue. Whether that took place in one day or in one century made little difference. The smart machines knew enough to keep things under control for a long time. Not one of the two thousand was damaged.
The humans on the farm were less lucky. Four of the farmers were in chambers on the direct path of the intruding body. They died at once. Two others were left in airless rooms and could not reach suits. The rest of the farmers followed the standard emergency procedure and were into the lifeboats and clear of the bubble in less than a minute.
The visitors from the harvester were both more and less fortunate. Their chambers were not on the main line of the collision, and the impact was felt at first as no more than a short-lived and violent jerk of acceleration. Leo Manx, Sylvia Fernald, and Aybee Smith did not know the emergency routines specific to the farm, but they had been trained to react defensively. High acceleration of a habitation unit equaled disaster. They did not wait to see if the integrity of the bubble’s outer hulls had been breached. As soon as they picked themselves up after the first shock of collision, they headed for the survival suits. They could live in them for at least twenty-four hours. Aybee had a mild concussion. Leo had five cracked ribs and a broken leg, but his deep-space training allowed him to override the pain until he was safe in his suit.
Bey Wolf was in much deeper trouble. His room was closest to the line of destruction. Worse than that, he lacked the right reflexes. He knew there had been a major accident, but he had to attempt by thought what the others did by instinct.
He had been thrown headfirst and hard against the communications terminal. Drops of blood from deep cuts on his cheek and forehead were already drifting across the room when he came to full consciousness. His head was ringing, and he was nauseated. He wiped at his face with his shirt and staggered to the door. It was closed. Beyond it he heard a hiss of air, and he could feel the draft at the door’s edge.
The sliding partition was tight-fitting but not airtight. He had maybe a couple of minutes before the pressure dropped too low to be breathable. Just as bad, a faint plume of green gas was seeping into the room, and the slightest trace was enough to start him coughing. Wall refrigeration pipes must have ruptured. He might choke before he died of lack of air.
Suits. Where the devil were they kept? Bey hauled himself across to the storage units on the other side of the room. He jerked them open, one after another. Everything from chess boards to toothbrushes spilled out. No suit.
He caught another whiff of gas, coughed horribly, and mopped again at his bleeding face. What now? Where else might a suit be kept? Don’t panic. Think!
He realized that if the data terminal were still working, it could tell him what he needed to know in a couple of seconds. He was moving across to it when the knock came on the door.
The sound was so unexpected that for a moment he did not react at all. Then he had a terrible thought. If someone out there in a suit were to try to come in…
“Don’t touch the door!” he shouted, but already his voice sounded fainter in the thinning air. Asphyxiation, not poison gas, would get him. He was aware of pain in his ears and the cramping agony of trapped gas being forced out of his intestines.
“Bey?” The cry from outside was muffled. It was Sylvia. “Bey, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Don’t open the door.”
“I know. Do you have a suit?”
“Can’t find it.”
“By the data terminal. In the footlocker.”
He did not waste air replying. The suit was there, but he had to fight his way into it. He was growing dizzy, panting uselessly. He got his legs and arms in and pulled the suit up around his shoulders. But the helmet was too much. He concentrated all his attention on the smooth head unit and managed to place it roughly in position. But he could not seal it. Anoxia was winning. The room was turning dark. At the edge of unconsciousness, Bey realized how much he wanted to live.
He was fighting the seals—and losing—when there was a crash behind him and a rush of escaping air. His lungs collapsed as the pressure dropped to zero. When Sylvia arrived at his side he was almost unconscious, still groping single-mindedly at the helmet. She slapped it into position and turned the valve. The rush of air inside the suit began.
She bent to look into the faceplate. Bey’s face was a mottled nightmare of fresh red blood and cyanotic blue skin. As she watched, the oxygen-starved look faded. The chest of the suit gave a series of shuddering heaves. Alive. Sylvia grabbed Bey’s suited arm and began to drag him. She had come at once, as soon as her suit was on, and she did not know the cause of the problem. Another crash or explosion might happen at any moment. Like any Cloudlander, she fled for the safety of open space.