When you have eliminated the impossible, Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It wasn't an aphorismI particularly subscribed to, mainly because in real life eliminating all thevarious impossibles was usually a lot trickier than in Holmes's fictionalsetting. However, in this particular case, the list of directions the answercould be hiding in was definitely and distressingly short. In fact, as Iturned the problem over in my mind, I found there was exactly one of Sherlock'simprobables left.
Ixil had mentioned earlier that he'd looked over the full schematics for the Icarus. It was a fair assumption that he'd gone ahead and kept a copy, so Iwent back to his cabin, ungimmicked the door, and went inside. The room lookedexactly the way I'd left it except that Pix and Pax were now up on the middlebunk with Ixil, nosing around the hip pouch where he habitually kept some ofthe little treats they especially liked. I put them back on their bunk where theywouldn't get rolled over on if Ixil shifted in his sleep, raided the pouch andgave them two of the treats each, then checked his locker. The schematics werethere, a sheaf of papers rolled tightly together. I tucked the roll under myarm, regimmicked the door on my way out, and returned to my cabin.
I looked first at the main overview, noting in particular the diameter of themain sphere that made up the forward section of the ship. The number listedwas forty-one-point-three-six meters—a strangely uneven number, I thought, but oneI trusted implicitly. Ship dimensions were critically important when landing-pitassignments were being doled out, and no one ever got them wrong. Not morethan once, anyway.
Two sheets down was the one I was most interested in: the schematic for the mid deck. Digging a pen out of my inside jacket pocket, I turned the first sheetover for some clean space and started jotting down numbers.
Even given the inherent problem of fitting mainly rectangular spaces into agiant sphere, the Icarus's various rooms were quite oddly shaped, and thesemirandom placement of storage lockers, equipment modules, and pump andair-quality substations only added to the layout mess. But I was in no mood tobe balked by a set of numbers, even messy ones, and I set to work.
And in the end, they all matched.
It was not the answer I'd been expecting, and for several minutes afterrechecking my math I sat in silence scowling at the schematics. I'd been sosure that Sherlock and I had finally been on the brink of figuring this one out.
But the numbers added up perfectly, and numbers don't lie.
Or do they?
One page farther down was the lower-deck schematic, the deck I was currentlyon.
A few more minutes' work confirmed that these numbers, too, matched just fine.
But that was just the theoretical part of this project. Now it was time tomove on to the experimental work.
A laser measure would have been the most convenient, but after what hadhappenedto Ixil I was a bit leery about scrounging tools out of the Icarus's mechanicsroom. Fortunately, I didn't have to. I'd seen the printer up in Tera'scomputerroom, and I knew the size paper it used. Laying the schematics out on thefloor, I set about using them to measure my cabin. It took just over two minutes, andwhen I was done I took a couple of the sheets out into the corridor andmeasured that, too.
And when I was finished, the numbers had stopped matching.
Each of the inner-hull plates was about a meter square and held in place bysixteen connectors. The average spacer's multitool isn't really the propergadget to use for removing hull plates, but mine was a somewhat better modelthan the average and had a couple of additional blades those missed out on. Bythe time I was down to the final four—the ones in the corners—I was gettingpretty adept at the procedure. I paused long enough at that point to dig outmyflashlight and set it on the deck where it would be handy; after a moment'sthought I drew my plasmic and put it down beside the light. Then I removed thelast four connectors and eased the plate out of place.
And there, dimly seen by the reflected overhead light from my cabin, was thegray metal of the outer hull. Not twenty centimeters beyond the inner hulllike it was supposed to be, but a solid meter and a half away.
Plasmic in one hand and flashlight in the other, I leaned my head cautiouslyinto the opening and looked around. The pipes and cables and conduits thatnormally ran through the 'tweenhull area were all in evidence, fastenedsecurelyto the inner hull just the way they were supposed to be. The rest of the spacewas completely empty except for the series of struts that fastened the twohulls together. Struts, I decided, that would provide a strenuous but workablejungle-gym walkway for anyone who wanted to move unseen about the ship.
As well as a convenient work platform for, say, someone desiring to tap intothe coax cable from an intercom. Specifically, my intercom. I turned my light onthe spot off to the left where the relevant wires emerged, but it was too far awayand my angle too shallow to see with certainty whether or not anything hadbeen tampered with.
The nearest support strut in that direction was nearly half a meter away.
Layingmy gun and light on the deck beside me, I gathered my feet under me, gaugedthe distance, and leaped carefully toward it.
And with a sudden stomach-twisting disorientation, I jerked sideways andslammed hard onto my right shoulder and leg against the outer deck.
It says a lot for the shock involved that my first stunned thought was thatthe Icarus's grav generator had malfunctioned again, shutting off at the precisemoment I jumped—this despite the fact that I was now lying flat on my sideagainst the outer hull. It took another several seconds before my brain caught up with the fact that I was, in fact, lying against the outer hull, the term"lying" automatically implying a gravitational field.
Except that this gravitational field was roughly at right angles to the oneI'd just left in my cabin. The only one that the Icarus's generator could create.
The only one, in fact, that had any business existing here at all.
Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to what was now "up" from my new frame ofreference. There was my cabin, a meter above my head, with my plasmic andlightclinging unconcernedly to what was from my perspective a sheer wall. Even morecarefully, I leaned my torso up away from the hull, half expecting that thismagic grip would suddenly cease if I let go of the hull and send me slidingdown to the underside of the Icarus.
I needn't have worried. Except for the total impossibility of its vector, thisfield behaved more or less like the one created by a normal ship's gravgenerator. I reached up toward my cabin, and because I was paying closeattention I was able to feel where the two gravity vectors began to conflictwith each other a few millimeters my side of the inner hull. At least now Iknew what the anomaly was that Pix and Pax had detected while scampering beneath mybunk, and why neither they nor Ixil had been able to interpret it.
It also explained how our mysterious eavesdropper/saboteur had been able tomove around so easily. No dangerous or athletic strut-leaping required; all he hadto do was crawl around like a spider on a wall. I snagged my light and gun andbrought them to me, nearly dropping the plasmic when its weight suddenlyshifted in my grip. It might not take great athletic ability to move around in here, Iamended, but it did take some getting used to. Holstering the weapon, Ishifted myself cautiously toward my intercom, still not entirely trusting thisphenomenon.
I was easing up to get a closer look at the wires when I heard a smallscrapingsound in the distance.
For a moment I thought I'd imagined it, or else that it had merely been somenormal ship's noise distorted by the echo chamber I was lying in. But then thesound came again, and I knew I'd been right the first time.
There was someone else in here with me.
Silently, I shut off my light and put it in my pocket, at the same timedrawingmy plasmic. Then, not nearly as silently, but as silently as I could manage, Iset off down the curving hull.