"Jesus," he said. "I guess you were right, Pat. That's not any human stuff."
Pat's face was glowing in triumph. "Effing well right it isn't, Dan-Dan! It's alien. And it's ours!"
"But what do those things do?"
"What's the difference? My God, Dan," she said happily, reaching out to caress the pinkly glowing surface of one of the machines, "once we get this stuff back and figure out how it works-can you imagine what it'll be worth? We'll make a bundle out of this."
"If we can move it," Rosaleen Artzybachova muttered, trying to fasten her instrument box to a handhold on the wall while, like everyone else, she was distractedly staring at everything around her. "Pat, I recommend you do not touch anything until I have had a chance to study it. The rest of you, too."
Pat pulled her hand back; beside her, Jimmy Lin was doing the same thing. "What's the problem?" he asked.
"How do I know what problem there is? Perhaps there is no problem at all, or perhaps if you touch it it will fry you to a crisp. If you want to experiment I suppose it is your right, but I would prefer that you help me."
"Me, too?" Dannerman asked, trying to keep his own instrument box from bumping into anything; in the micrograv environment it weighed nothing, but its mass made it hard to handle.
"Oh, Dan," Rosaleen sighed, "what help could you be? At least the others have some experience with instrumentation. No. Go and explore."
"I'll go with him," Pat said suddenly.
"You also want to be a tourist? And, General Delasquez, is that what you are indicating, too, with that scowl? Well, why not? If there are too many unskilled helpers here it will be worse than none at all, so go. Look for old Manny's body; perhaps we can give it a decent burial in space while we are here."
"And maybe get rid of some of the stench," Martin Delasquez growled.
The old woman ignored him. "Or perhaps you will meet some interesting stranger, and then you will come back and tell us. If you can."
A few meters down the main transverse Pat stopped and consulted a scrap of paper from her pocket. The general gave her a suspicious look, but brushed past her to go off on his own. "Let him go," Pat muttered without looking up. "Maybe he'll see something we don't. Let's see, we follow this transverse to the second junction-"
Dannerman drew the obvious inference. "You're looking for something specific."
She glanced after Delasquez's disappearing form and lowered her voice. "Right you are, Dan-Dan. I want to see where that blister was attached, from the inside. Come on, I think I know where I'm going."
The way you got around in the effectively gravitationless Starlab was by pulling yourself along by the handholds spaced along the walls, or by hurling yourself like a slow-moving projectile from point to point. Neither Dannerman nor Pat was up to projectile standards, so progress was slow.
They didn't speak. Pat was concentrating on the chart in her hand, Dannerman thinking about the implications of Rosaleen's final remark. If artifacts had been added to Starlab, as they had, someone had to have put them there. And it was at least a reasonable possibility that that someone was still there.
Dannerman kept his eyes peeled as they drifted along the passages. Ears, too, but there wasn't much to hear. Even the chatter between Rosaleen and Jimmy Lin became inaudible after the first few turns. Apart from the cryptic noises that came from the alien machines, the only sounds Dannerman heard came from Pat and himself.
When Starlab's designers planned the satellite they allowed for weeks or months of occupancy by its observers. That meant they had to make arrangements for living quarters. So they did, but they were not lavish. The residents weren't given rooms. What they had-Dannerman perceived as he pulled himself through the square-sided passages of the observatory-was no more than coffinlike cubicles. The things were doorless, though fitted with stiff fabric panels to provide at least the illusion of privacy, and they were small-smaller than any broom closet Dannerman had ever seen, and not much more elaborate.
There was more of Starlab than he had expected. For Pat, too, it seemed-when, twice, she paused to look uncertainly around and when, once, she had to retrace her steps for half a dozen meters. Dannerman assumed she was lost, and the way she muttered to herself made that assumption plausible. "But it ought… ought to be… right here, "she murmured, touching a bare spot on the corridor wall; and then, "Hell! It isl"
Is what? Dannerman asked, but only silently. He didn't have to say it out loud because Pat was already demonstrating the answer. Her fingers traced the lines that made up a hexagonal shape on the wall; the lines were new, bright metal. "They cut a patch out here. Then they entered. Then they welded it up again."
"Who 'they'?" Dannerman asked.
She gave him a look of mild surprise. "The people who brought this new stuff aboard, of course."
"Then where they?"
There was less surprise this time, but more visible worry. "Yes, that's the question all right, isn't it? Probably there wasn't a living 'they' at all, Dan, just some robot probe machinery."
Dannerman made a neutral sound. In his view, the word "robot" did not exclude some mean-tempered clanking thing that could be quite as unpleasant to meet as any of the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs. "One thing, though," he said.
"What?"
"If all the machinery we've seen came on the thing that looks like a blister-probably from the CLO, I guess-how did it all fit?"
Pat opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Obviously it was a hard question. The amount of unfamiliar gadgetry in Starlab could easily have filled a dozen objects the size of the blister. Some of them were far too large to have been squeezed through the space traced on the wall, as well.
"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe-"
But whatever the "maybe" was going to be, Dannerman never heard it. She stopped in midsentence, turning toward a sound that came from one of the corridor openings; and so did Dannerman, his hand on his twenty-shot.
What appeared in the corridor wasn't an alien. It was General Martin Delasquez-who also had his hand on his gun, and a look of alarm on his face.
His expression cleared. "Oh, it's only you," he said. "I thought it might be whatever's been eating the corpse."
"The corpse?" Dannerman repeated.
"The dead astronomer, Manny something? I found his body."
"Well, that's not so surprising; we knew that he died here, so his body had to be somewhere around."
"Sure you did. But did you also know that his head was missing?
Rats," Rosaleen Artzybachova informed them. "A headless corpse? Of course it is rats. They go wherever human beings go. It is not surprising that some managed to get aboard Starlab somewhere along the line, or that they would mutilate a corpse."
"And then disappear," Jimmy Lin suggested sardonically.
"And then die of starvation," she corrected him, "or of plague, or whatever. Or possibly they have not disappeared at all but are still aboard. Rats are excellent at avoiding attention."