The lock performed flawlessly every time. Only once did it do something unexpected. That was when she tried to throw a bucket of water through it.
The water came out the other side as a smooth black eight-liter balloon, the liquid coated with a thin layer of enties. Since the lock enties were distantly related to Hydrofilm type enties this made a certain amount of sense.
I came in to consult with them on this one, but couldn’t see how it could cause a safety problem unless someone shot a firehose through it long enough to take away enough enties to weaken the barrier past the point where it would hold pressure.
Gloria, Anna and Manny put their heads together for a few minutes, and shortly afterwards they tried just that.
An hour later the bottom half of the evacuated chamber was filled with a bulging black sack of water, and the barrier was still well over three centimeters thick. Manny reported a slight rise in resistance as the barrier thinned. Sorry extrapolated the trend and predicted that the lock would become completely impermeable before it thinned to the two-centimeter mark.
When we brought that first water balloon back in to examine it the enties reabsorbed themselves into the lock itself, and it turned back into a bucket of water—sans bucket—in Gloria’s hands. We wouldn’t have been able to run this test if Anna hadn’t figured out how to run a hose through the lock and into the water bag to pump it dry.
The plan was for the testing to continue for ninety days—longer if there was some sort of mishap. That had evolved into the rule of thumb for abnotech testing. If an item didn’t go abnanas in that period of time then it was probably perfectly safe for the general public.
The mishap occurred at 1:19 AM local of day 43.
At this point Gloria and I were still together. Normally before a month had passed we’d have some sort of fight that knocked us off on mode. Our working relationship was always ready to provide that kind of deal-breaker. Even if we somehow avoided that pitfall there was another argument cycle we’d repeat, a variation on our working relationship.
We are two very different people. I like things stable and certain, with identifiable rules and goals. Gloria gets bored easily and resists commitment. What I find comforting, she finds confining. The more seriously I’d treat her and our relationship, the more she’d treat it—and me—as a joke. Friction would build. The process had started again, but hadn’t reached the blow-up point yet.
43 days together was an all-time record for us.
Records are, as they say, made to be broken.
I was spending that night with Gloria in her messy cubby at one end of the Testing section. She’d gotten all heavy-eyed and yawny not long after dinner and gone to bed early. I read and ignored the tube until almost midnight, then turned in myself. She never stirred when I crawled under the covers beside her.
We were both sound asleep when just over an hour later our wristlets began to shrill the emergency signal and Sorry’s voice came blaring from every output device in the cubby.
“CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CO—”
“I hear you!” I yelled, trying to get out from under the arm Gloria had flung over my chest and sit up. “Report!” Beside me she groaned and stirred groggily, more asleep than awake.
“It’s Jenny Montez! She’s in the test chamber and I think she’s choking to death!”
“Oh God no,” I whispered, kicking the covers aside and leaping out of bed. Behind me Gloria was trying to struggle to a sitting position with a drunken slowness. I wasn’t going to wait around for her to get her shit together. “Did you Code 1 Bob and a medical team?” I asked as I bolted for the door.
“I’m trying!” He wailed, sounding as desperate as I felt. By the time I reached the cubby’s front door he had it already open for me.
“What about the tech on duty?” I demanded as I went out the door and started running down the corridor, barefoot and bareassed. Staying at Gloria’s had been a stroke of luck. The test chamber was barely a hundred meters away.
“He doesn’t respond to the alarm!” I could already hear it in the distance.
Vowing to have the duty tech’s head on a platter I ran as fast as I could, not even wasting breath on cursing. Crater Billy is like a small town. You know all of your neighbors. Jenny Montez was eleven years old, a 7, the only child of Pete and Luz Montez, and too goddamned young and pretty to die.
Once again Sorry already had the door open when I reached the outer test chamber. I flung myself inside and tried to get a handle on the situation.
I recognized the testing-tech on duty. It was Gabriel Delaney, a fussy, waspish black number-cruncher I’d worked with several times before. Exarmy and a real stickler for rules, he was about the last person I’d have ever expected to find asleep at his post.
But there he was, suited up without his helmet, sacked out in a chair with his cheek resting on its neck-ring.
The alarms were deafening. I might have tried to wake Gabe, but decided if he could sleep through that racket he could sleep through anything.
“Cut the damn alarms!” I bellowed, whirling around to look at the screen which had been set up so the tech on duty could monitor the reads and observe what was happening in the vacced chamber.
The alarms died.
Something like a small sharp sliver of death pricked my heart at what I saw on the screen.
A small pressuited figure lay facedown on the stone floor near the terminal at the far end, its arms and legs twitching spastically. The helmet’s faceplate was turned away, but it didn’t matter. I could see Jenny’s face all too clearly in my mind.
I wasted a couple precious seconds looking at and thinking about the spare pressuits racked on one wall. There was no way in hell I could get into one in less than a minute.
It was then that I saw the fatal flaw I’d left in the test setup. There was no fast, easy way to manually dump air into the other chamber—at least that I could think of right then. The enties could be reset to let air though, but only slowly. Too slowly. The lock couldn’t be simply shut off while there was a pressure differential on either side. For safety’s sake.
I’d known all along that vacuum was the enemy.
I turned to face the lock, took a deep breath, lowered my head and ran full tilt at the shimmering black wall of the airlock.
“Dave!” I heard Sorry yell. “What are you do—”
I never heard the rest. I remember thinking you got my name right! with a sort of detached amazement, then everything went black as I hit the barrier.
It was like running into a wall of thin glue, that weird feeling of resistance sweeping over me, all the more acute this time because I was stark naked.
Then it sort of gave and I was through.
I came out off-balance, stumbled and fell, landing badly and feeling something give in one leg. I lost half of the air in my lungs to a scream the vacuum ate soundlessly. The next thing I knew I was curled on my side on the floor. I was blind. The only thing I could hear was the thump of my heart slamming blood against my aching eardrums. My whole body felt strange and numb, all except for one leg. That felt like it had been chopped off at the knee and the stump nailed shut.
You’ve killed yourself, stupid! I thought, but clung to the hope that dying would take long enough to let me save Jenny.
I couldn’t stand on my messed up leg, so I began scrabble-crawling blindly toward the other end of the chamber on two hands and one knee, every motion setting off a fresh firework of pain in the other. Other than that hotspot I was cold, and getting colder by the second.