Here and there were larger holes, actual punctures, and Linc began to understand why some sections of the Living Wheel were closed off. No air. It leaked out of the holes.
In one place there was a gaping wound in the Wheel’s side. He could peer inside and see an empty room; nothing in it except a few tables welded firmly to the floor. There were some viewing screens built into the tabletops.
And then Baryta’s sunlight glinted off the rounded hump of an airlock hatch. Linc felt a surge of joy warm his innards. He shouted to himself and dashed toward the airlock as fast as he could.
It wouldn’t budge. He pushed the buttons a dozen times, but the hatch refused to move. Then, remembering what Jerlet had taught him, he tried the long lever of the hatch’s manual control. It too remained frozen in place.
Linc wanted to cry. He sank to a sitting position as Baryta slid out of sight. The stars looked down impassively on. the figure of alone, exhausted, frightened young man as he sat and felt the warmth of life ebbing out of his body.
Then Linc remembered. The hole in the ship. Maybe I can get through there.
He backtracked and found the ragged hole again. It was barely big enough for his shoulders to squeeze through. Praying that he wouldn’t rip the suit’s fabric. Linc crawled through and put his booted feet down on the room’s bare metal flooring. The tough suit fabric held up. His backpack stuck in the opening for a scary moment, but Linc managed to worm it through. He stood up.
I’m inside, but it’s just as bad as being outside unless I can get past this room.
There were two doors in the room. Linc saw in the light of his helmet lamp. One of them looked as if it opened onto a corridor; it was heavy, airtight, as all the corridor doors were. But the other, on a side wall, looked as if it were made of plastic rather than metal.
Linc tried to pull it open. It refused to slide as it should. He leaned against it, and it bowed slightly. He backed off a step, then kicked at the door with the metal sole of his boot with all the strength he could muster.
The door split apart.
Linc stepped through the sagging halves.
Into the Ghost Place.
Despite himself he shuddered. Inside the ghosts were mute and immobile, their faces frozen in twisted soundless screams of horror and pain. Their eyes stared; their bodies slumped or sagged; their hands reached for control buttons, the hatches leading out of the bridge, or just groped blindly. Most of the ghosts still sat at the bridge’s control stations, in front of instruments that were mostly dead. Only a pitiful few of the screens still flickered with active displays. Linc saw.
He noticed that a couple of the ghosts were staring up overhead. Linc looked up and saw that several pipes were split up there, hanging loosely from broken brackets. From the faded colors, Linc knew that the pipes at one time must have carried liquid oxygen and liquid helium.
They must have been frozen where they stood, when whatever tore the hole in the next room broke the pipes.
Suddenly, they weren’t ghosts anymore. They were people like himself, like Jerlet, like Slav or Magda or Jayna or any of the others. Real people who died at their posts, trying to save the ship instead of running away.
There was no fear in Linc now. But his eyes were blurry as he realized that these people had given their lives so that the ship could continue living.
Slowly, Linc made his way past the dead bridge crew, heading toward the hatch that opened onto the passageway outside. They protected the bridge with airlocks, so that a loss of air outside wouldn’t hurt the crew in here…and then the disaster struck from inside the bridge itself.
The airlock hatch was frozen shut, of course. It took Linc several moments to remember that there were tools here on the bridge. He found a laser handwelder, plugged it into the bridge’s power supply, and grinned with relief when it worked. He set the tool on low power and played its thin red beam across the hatch mechanism.
The metal creaked and ticked and finally, when Linc tried the handle for the eleventh time, clicked open. Linc stepped into the airtight compartment between the two hatches, closed the inner hatch and opened the outer one. Warm air from the passageway rushed in, making it hard to push the hatch open.
But it did open, and Linc stood out in the familiar passageway once again. He started toward the library, hoping that the meeting was still going on. He unsealed his helmet as he clumped along the corridor, after clamping the hand-welder to a clip on the side of his suit.
No one was in the corridor. That meant they were all in the library, at the meeting. Linc passed his own empty room, and a sudden idea came to him.
He ducked inside and looked at the tiny screen set into the wall above his bunk. Since he had been a child, it had been untouched. Was it workable?
He pulled his gloves off and touched the red ON button. The screen glowed to life. He tried several different buttons and got nothing but views of other empty rooms. Finally, just as he was about to give up, the screen showed the library, crowded with all the people.
“He still hasn’t shown up,” Monel was saying. He was sitting beside Magda, who held her rightful place on the central pedestal. “He’s scared of the truth, scared to face us all with his wild stories.”
The crowd was muttering, a dozen different conversations going on at once.
“How long are we going to wait for him?” Monel demanded of Magda.
She looked down at him from her perch and said, “It’s not like Linc to run away.”
If Monel felt any guilt at her remark, he didn’t show it. He merely insisted, “Linc demanded that we ask Jerlet’s guidance. I say we should call on Jerlet now, and see what he has to say. Either that, or call an end to this meeting. Linc isn’t going to show up. He’s afraid of Jerlet’s truth.”
Smiling in the glow of his viewscreen. Linc punched the buttons that activated the computer tapes he had programmed earlier. All the screens in the Living Wheel, including the huge wall screen in the meeting room, suddenly blazed into life.
A view of old Earth, brilliant blue and dazzling white, swimming against the blackness of space.
Jerlet’s rough, unmistakable voice rumbled, “That’s Earth, the world where we all came from originally…”
The view abruptly changed to show an ancient city on old Earth. And Jerlet said, “I’m not sure which city this is, but it doesn’t make much difference. They all got to be pretty much the same--” The crowds and noise were overwhelming. The sky was dark and somehow dirty-looking. Millions of people and vehicles snarled at each other along the city’s passageways.
Then the scene shifted to show mountains, rivers, oceans of pounding surf. And Jerlet’s voice continued:
“This is the world of our origin, where our ancestors came from, where this ship came from. It was a good world, long ago. But it turned rotten. Our ancestors fled in this ship… seems they were driven away by evil people, although they were glad enough to leave Earth; it had gone sour. They came out to the stars to find a new world where they could live in happiness and peace.”
The scene changed abruptly once again, showing a telescopic view of Beryl.
“This is the new world,” Jerlet said. “We can reach it, if we’re lucky. But there’s a lot of work ahead of us if we’re going to make it there safely—”
Linc left his helmet and gloves on the bunk and strode out toward the meeting room.