There was a pretty irony about the probe. Less than a meter in diameter, it was equipped with sensitive radar, very good visible-light camera eyes, and a dim awareness. Its sentient qualities came from a walnut-sized lump of human brain tissue cultured in a lab. This was the cheapest and simplest way to endow a machine with certain human qualities that were often useful in spying devices. The part of the brain used was the part humans use to appreciate beautiful things. While the probe watched, it dreamed endless beautiful dreams. No one knew this but the probe's control, which was a computer that had not bothered to tell anyone about it. The computer did think it was rather sweet, though.
There were many instructions the probe had to follow. It did so religiously. It was never to approach the wheel more closely than five kilometers. All objects larger than one centimeter leaving the wheel were to be pursued, caught, and examined. Certain categories were to be reported to higher authorities. All others were to be vaporized by the probe's small battery of lasers. In thirty years of observation, only a dozen objects had needed reporting. All of them proved to be large structural components of the wheel which had broken away under the stress of rotation. Each had been destroyed by the probe's larger brother, on station five hundred kilometers away.
When it reached the corpse, it immediately identified it that far: it was a dead body, frozen in a vaguely fetal position. From there on, the probe got stuck.
Many details about the body did not fit the acceptable parameters for such a thing. The probe examined it again, and still again, and kept coming up with the same unacceptable answers. It could not tell what the body was... and yet it was a body.
The probe was so fascinated that its attention wavered for some time, and it was not as alert as it had been these previous years. So it was unprepared when the second falling object bumped gently against its metal hide. Quickly the probe leveled a camera eye at the second object. It was a single, long-stemmed, red rose, of a type that had once flourished in the wheel's florist shop. Like the corpse, it was frozen solid. The impact had shattered some of the outside petals, which rotated slowly in a halo around the rose itself.
It was quite pretty. The probe resolved to compose a thought-poem about it when this was all over.
The probe photographed it, vaporized it with its lasers—all according to instruction—then sent the picture out on the airwaves along with a picture of the corpse, and a frustrated shout.
"Help!" the probe cried, and sat back to await developments.
"A puppy?" Captain Hoeffer asked, arching one eyebrow dubiously.
"A Shetland Sheepdog puppy, sir," said Corporal Anna-Louise Bach, handing him the batch of holos of the enigmatic orbiting object, and the single shot of the shattered rose. He took them, leafed through them rapidly, puffing on his pipe.
"And it came from Tango Charlie?"
"There is no possible doubt about it, sir."
Bach stood at parade rest across the desk from her seated superior and cultivated a detached gaze.
I'm only awaiting orders, she told herself. I have no opinions of my own. I'm brimming with information, as any good recruit should be, but I will offer it only when asked, and then I will pour it forth until asked to stop.
That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.
"A Shetland..."
"Sheepdog, sir." She glanced down at him, and interpreted the motion of his pipestem to mean he wanted to know more. "A variant of the Collie, developed on the Shetland Isles of Scotland. A
working dog, very bright, gentle, good with children."
"You're an authority on dogs, Corporal Bach?"
"No, sir. I've only seen them in the zoo. I took the liberty of researching this matter before bringing it to your attention, sir."
He nodded, which she hoped was a good sign.
"What else did you learn?"
"They come in three varieties: black, blue merle, and sable. They were developed from Icelandic and Greenland stock, with infusions of Collie and possible Spaniel genes. Specimens were first shown at Cruft's in London in 1906, and in American—"
"No, no. I don't give a damn about Shelties."
"Ah. We have confirmed that there were four Shelties present on Tango Charlie at the time of the disaster. They were being shipped to the zoo at Clavius. There were no other dogs of any breed resident at the station. We haven't determined how it is that their survival was overlooked during the investigation of the tragedy."
"Somebody obviously missed them."
"Yes, sir."
Hoeffer jabbed at a holo with his pipe.
"What's this? Have you researched that yet?"
Bach ignored what she thought might be sarcasm. Hoeffer was pointing to the opening in the animal's side.
"The computer believes it to be a birth defect, sir. The skin is not fully formed. It left an opening into the gut."
"And what's this?"
"Intestines. The bitch would lick the puppy clean after birth. When she found this malformation, she would keep licking as long as she tasted blood. The intestines were pulled out, and the puppy died."
"It couldn't have lived anyway. Not with that hole."
"No, sir. If you'll notice, the forepaws are also malformed. The computer feels the puppy was stillborn."
Hoeffer studied the various holos in a blue cloud of pipe smoke, then sighed and leaned back in his chair.
"It's fascinating, Bach. After all these years, there are dogs alive on Tango Charlie. And breeding, too. Thank you for bringing it to my attention."
Now it was Bach's turn to sigh. She hated this part. Now it was her job to explain it to him.
"It's even more fascinating than that, sir. We knew Tango Charlie was largely pressurized. So it's understandable that a colony of dogs could breed there. But, barring an explosion, which would have spread a large amount of debris into the surrounding space, this dead puppy must have left the station through an airlock."
His face clouded, and he looked at her in gathering outrage.
"Are you saying... there are humans alive aboard Tango Charlie?"
"Sir, it has to be that... or some very intelligent dogs."
Dogs can't count.
Charlie kept telling herself that as she knelt on the edge of forever and watched little Albert dwindling, hurrying out to join the whirling stars. She wondered if he would become a star himself.
It seemed possible.
She dropped the rose after him and watched it dwindle, too. Maybe it would become a rosy star.
She cleared her throat. She had thought of things to say. but none of them sounded good. So she decided on a hymn, the only one she knew, taught her long ago by her mother, who used to sing it for her father, who was a spaceship pilot. Her voice was clear and true.
Lord guard and guide all those who fly Through Thy great void above the sky.
Be with them all on ev'ry flight, In radiant day or darkest night.
Oh, hear our prayer, extend Thy grace To those in peril deep in space.
She knelt silently for a while, wondering if God was listening, and if the hymn was good for dogs, too. Albert sure was flying through the void, so it seemed to Charlie he ought to be deserving of some grace.
Charlie was perched on a sheet of twisted metal on the bottom, or outermost layer of the wheel.
There was no gravity anywhere in the wheel, but since it was spinning, the farther down you went the heavier you felt. Just beyond the sheet of metal was a void, a hole ripped in the wheel's outer skin, fully twenty meters across. The metal had been twisted out and down by the force of some longago explosion, and this part of the wheel was a good place to walk carefully, if you had to walk here at all.