Again wishing he had an Earth-style watch, Jerome counted two mirds before the sound ceased and a swelling of his suit told him the section of the tunnel had been exhausted. He imagined the unleashed molecules of air racing along the annular gap between the tunnel structure and the Mercurian rock, dispersing into crevices, and his uneasiness about the integrity of Dorrinian vacuum suits returned in force. The best that could be said for them was that they were adequate for their purpose, and he was haunted by Conforden’s casual reference to the fact that eighteen workers had died in the tunnel.
With no atmospheric pressure on it the two-metre-long plate was now easier to manipulate. They peeled it away from the underlying frames and stringers, taking care not to damage the compressible seal around the edges, exposing an area of black igneous rock. It was Jerome’s first direct look at the crust of the alien planet, but he was in no mood for wonderment. All his attention was focused on a slab-like fragment which had become dislodged from somewhere overhead. It had slid down the side of the tunnel and had jammed on a longitudinal, buckling the metal out of true and spoiling the air seal. The mastic Jerome had been pumping into the area was gathered on the rock in coprolitic blobs.
“Bingo,” he said, feeling something of the familiar satisfaction that came from seeing through a problem and knowing it would not remain a problem for long. He gripped the rock slab and tried to lift it, but without success. The considerable mass was wedged between the longitudinal and the rock face. He moved closer, changed his hold and tried again, and had just begun to sense a movement when there came a sharp popping in his ears, signifying that his suit’s internal pressure was dropping. He gave a startled grunt and leaped back from the rock as though it had stirred into hostile life. A line of brilliant red was spreading along one seam of his right gauntlet. Jerome stared at it, mesmerized, unable to breathe. After a few seconds the progress of the blood-like emergency sealant was checked and he knew that the suit had managed to heal itself. He swore bitterly and unhappily.
“What’s the matter with you, Mister Jerome?” Birkett, who had been putting the separated plate aside, came within his restricted field of view. “Are you hurt?”
“The sooner we get out of these glorified union suits the better,” Jerome replied. “I need help to shift this rock, but don’t pull too hard or you’ll pop your seams.”
“It’s all right, Mister Jerome—I’m a real skinny guy now, but that rock won’t be no problem at all.”
Birkett grappled with the dark slab, causing Jerome misgivings by putting up a great show of vigour, and helped him to lift it upwards and inwards. They set it on the tunnel floor and Jerome returned his attention to the damaged longitudinal. He was relieved to see that it had sprung back close to its original line, something he regarded as a bonus from an unsophisticated alloy. By slipping a lever between it and the rock face he was able to make further corrections, after which he began applying a run of mastic to the metal in preparation for the reseating of the plate.
As he worked he was continuously reminded that the tunnel was a full eight kilometres long, running from the Dorrinian capital of Cuthtranel to the expected landing site of the Quicksilver. To his eyes, even allowing for the difficulties under which the Dorrinians had laboured, the entire structure was crude, with engineering which would have been immediately comprehensible to a citizen of Ancient Rome. Bearing in mind the importance of the Thabbren in the Dorrinian scheme of things, he would have expected much higher standards of reliability and safety, but the project illustrated the ambivalence he had noted in the character of the Dorrinian people.
They prided themselves on being highly ethical, humane and reasonable, but at the same time they were unconsciously ruthless in any matter relating to their racial ambitions. Jerome, conditioned by his previous existence, had assumed Mercury to have a population of millions, and had been surprised to learn that the polar capital housed less than twenty thousand. There had even been periods in the millennia since the Days of the Comet when the living inhabitants of Mercury had been outnumbered by the Four Thousand whose personalities they were sworn to preserve.
Many individual sacrifices had been made in the name of the Thabbren, in pursuit of the one great objective—and the tunnel was a perfect paradigm of the racial attitudes involved. It had been constructed for the benefit of the Four Thousand, would have to serve its main function only once, and the lives of ordinary workers were expendable, provided they did not die in such numbers as to jeopardize the ultimate welfare of the Thabbren. The subterranean environment suggested an analogy to Jerome—that of soldier ants who were sacrificed for the good of the colony during the forced retreat from a nest—and in spite of the heat within his suit he could almost have shivered.
He nodded to Birkett. “Let’s try the plate now, Sammy—this place is starting to have a bad effect on my nerves.”
Birkett helped him to raise the unwieldy sheet of metal and guide it into place. Jerome was gratified to see that it fitted snugly against the underlying metal all the way around the edges. He inserted all the fixing screws and began tightening them, driving each one down until a smooth bead of mastic appeared in the adjacent seam.
“We can’t leave this hunk of rock,” Birkett said. “I’ll take it to the buggy.”
“Don’t try to lift it,” Jerome said, still concentrating on perfecting the edge seal. “We’ll get them to bring the buggy up here.”
“Goddam,” Birkett grumbled. “Nobody allows me to do nothin’ around here. I’m still strong as hell, you know.”
“Sammy, you’re not proving anything. Your present body has nothing to do with the real you.”
“It’s all right for you to talk that way, Mister Jerome. You were a brain worker and you can still do brain work. I was a gardener. What’s the good of bein’ a gardener in a hellhole like this?”
“Ay, there’s the rub,” Jerome said absently as he tightened the last screw. He took the solvent sponge out of his kit and used it to wipe the excess extruded mastic away from the edges of the refitted plate, determined to leave the job looking neat, clean and absolutely right. Work never lets you down, he thought, comforted by the fact that some sources of pleasure had survived transplantation.
Looking back over his time in the Precinct he was able to list a number of activities which had been satisfying and fulfilling in his previous incarnation, but which had lost their savour in his bizarre new circumstances and environment. Perhaps surprisingly, sex was among the foremost. There had been the sheer novelty of finding many women available to him—a sharp contrast to his former existence—and at first he had used physical relationships like a drug, one which helped alleviate homesickness and loneliness. Donna Sinclair, the woman he had noticed on the way to his placement interview, was his most regular partner. His second lease of youthfulness and virility was like a gift from an Arabian genie, but in keeping with fairytale morality the gift was flawed. At the height of every experience would come an intrusive series of thoughts: Would she have done this with the real me? Would I have done it with the real her? Is that grammatical? The real she? Who are we supposed to be anyway, she and me and me and she…?