A section of corridor was split below him like a length of rubber tubing. As he swung his viewscope around the depths of the Sigma-9, he stopped. Deep in the marine blue was a faint red. He looked over the dials. No particular radiation to worry about. Double-checking, he found it higher to the left. He wondered again what that shimmering had been. He sank farther into the ship. Once he switched to natural light, but immediately the screen went black.
The computer was chuckling away but so far had arrived at no conclusion. He got out a pressure gell as the ship finally anchored itself to a strut. The gell was a mobile force bubble composed of a complex arrangement of geodesically crystallized plasmas. It held about six hours’ worth of air, could be moved from his power belt, as well as be adjusted to become opaque to almost any frequency of radiation. Delicate work could be done at the edges of the gell by forming the skin into gloves.
The bubble wavered on the floor, growing. He stepped forward, and it surrounded him with just a tingle on his skin before the plasmas sealed.
He walked toward the door, the bubble rolling with him. It was like walking inside a balloon. The sphincter of metal wings that was the airlock pulled away in a circular opening on total black. He touched his belt and the light-frequency differential plunged into far violet: the ship behind him darkened at the same time the scene outside the lock began to glow like blue, milky mist.
The ship had anchored on a wall of girders that jutted out three hundred yards into the body of the wreck in a huge octagonal web. A bank of corridors twisted out into the cavity like arteries severed in meat. Raising his eyes, Joneny saw a sectioning of the ripped outer hull. Lowering them, he could see where the red glow leaked from behind twisted girders and burst chambers.
Launching from the lock and hovering in the blue, he looked at his own cruiser, a thin, seamless, silver-blue oblong. But when he glanced over the octagonal web floating beside him, he grabbed his belt and brought himself to a quick stop, banging into the bubble’s transparent wall. Something was climbing over the girders.
It stood up and waved at him.
The boy, still naked, seemed to have no protection from the hard vacuum of the gutted starship. The shifting of his fine hair increased the submarine illusion. The boy was about thirty feet away, and from this distance (and under this particular frequency of light that the pressure gell was translating), his eyes were black. He waved again.
Joneny’s mind jutted toward half a dozen different conclusions, several of which involved doubts of his own sanity. He rejected them all and at last merely waved back — because there was nothing else to do. Just then the boy left the girder and sailed through the space between them. With hands and feet he caught the surface of the gell and perched there like a frog. Then he was — half inside; and then all the way in. “Hello.”
Joneny’s back was pressed against the curved inside of the gell and his hands spread-eagled over the transparent plasma. And he was sweating. “What — ” he began. Impossibilities fluttered in his mind like moths. He tried to shake them clear. People leaping across hard vacuum, climbing through pressure gells, disappearing, appearing: impossible —
“Hello,” the boy repeated, green eyes blinking.
Now Joneny repeated: “Wha — ”
“You okay?”
“What are you!” Joneny finally got out, and peeled himself from the wall.
The boy blinked again and shrugged.
Joneny wanted to scream, “Get out of here”; cover his eyes until the apparition went away; go home. He didn’t. The same passion that made him collect impossibly cumbersome books in a world of recording crystals made him look closely at the impossibilities around him now.
He saw fifteen of them right off. They were standing on the web of girders, some upside down, some sideways, all naked, all watching him and, from what he could make out, all duplicates of the boy who shared the gell with him.
“I figured you were going to come out here,” the boy said. Then he asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“My adrenaline count I’m sure is way above normal,” Joneny said as calmly as he could. “But that is because I am in a situation in which lots of things are happening I don’t understand.”
“Like what?”
“Like you!” Some of Joneny’s calmness went.
“I told you, I don’t know what I am. I don’t know.” It took Joneny a moment to see through his own upset and realize there was genuine perturbation in the boy’s face. “What are you?” the boy asked.
“I’m a student of galactic anthropology. I’m a human being. I’m flesh and blood and bone and hormones and antibodies that can’t jump a hundred miles of cold space without protection, that can’t disappear and reappear, that can’t walk through a crystallized pressure gell. I answer to the name of Joneny Horatio T’waboga, and I may be stark, raving mad.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to give it a try now?”
The boy looked blank.
“Well what’s your name?”
The boy shrugged.
“What do people call you?”
“The people call me the Destroyer’s Children.”
Joneny, as has been pointed out, was not semantically alert enough to catch all he had been told by that statement; it floated on the surface of his mind, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the red glow in the labyrinthine ruin. “What’s that?” he asked, again because he could think of nothing else to do.
“A Death’s Head,” the boy told him.
Now his eye caught again the boy’s duplicates on the webbing. One leaped off and sailed by ten feet away, peering back over his shoulder until he grew too small to make out. “What about them?”
“Huh?”
“Are they Destroyer’s Children too?”
The boy nodded. “Yeah. They’re the rest of me.”
Again Joneny turned his mind away from the syntactical discrepancies that would have given him many of the answers he sought. Now he looked back at the Death’s Head.
He touched his belt and the gell began to drift toward the glow, gaining speed. He wouldn’t have been shocked if the boy had simply slipped out of the gell once it started moving, but he came along predictably inside the bubble.
“Incidentally,” Joneny said, “how much air do you breathe? This has only got six hours for one person, and I didn’t bring a renewer.”
“It depends,” the boy said. “I don’t have to breathe any.”
“Then don’t.”
“All right. But then I won’t be able to talk.”
“Well, breathe when you want to say something, okay?”
“Okay.”
They neared a wall of refuse. The junk floated closely, but there were paths through. “Which way?” Joneny asked.
“You can go through a corridor,” the boy said. Then he added in a strangled voice, “I…just…used…up…two…seconds…of…air.”
“Huh?” asked Joneny. “Which corridor?”
“You can go through that one,” the boy said. “One…and…a…quarter…seconds…more…”
Joneny moved the gell into the end of a tubular corridor that had been crushed and broken open. The walls were bare and set with free-fall handholds. They passed a place where another corridor had joined this one. The intersection was ripped raggedly at the seam.
“Where are we heading for now?” he asked again over his shoulder.
“We’ll be coming to the Mountains soon.” The strangled voice once more: “One…and…a…”
“Oh, cut it out,” Joneny said. “I don’t care what you use up. I don’t intend to stay that long anyway.”