Oscar! Is he all right? She wanted to hurry into the lab to find out, but disciplined herself to complete her survey of the exterior. It was easy to find the punctures. Even where hairy icicles had not formed, streamers of mist and snow showed each point where a meteorite had violated the integrity of the pressure vessel. It soon became obvious to her that patching the leaks was hopeless; there were so many punctures. She did not have enough material to even begin the job. She dismissed that part of the mission from her mind and became intent on collecting as many samples as possible before she ran out of time and had to return to Rantoul High Colony.
When her survey was complete, she flew to the service module’s single hatch. A telltale indicated the module was still at zero pressure, just as she had left it at the end of her last visit. Reassured that the hatch between the service module and lab had not been breached, she entered.
With her backpack latched into its donning rack, she activated the service module’s status displays and waited for the atmosphere to come up to normal pressure. Salinity measurements in the wet lab were all over the scale; not one of the gauges agreed with another. A major shift in the lab’s center of gravity soon after the incident matched her theory that one of the fish tanks had broken open suddenly. And the time history of pressure in the lab was exactly as the folks at the Seattle aquarium had told her—normal up until the meteorite puncture, then gradually tapering off after the incident. There was a series of breakpoints in the curve where the rate of pressure drop suddenly slowed. By the time she got there, the lab was back up to its normal pressure, but the repressurization gas supply was dangerously low. Even at its normal leak rate, the lab would not hold out more than a few weeks.
The service module’s pressure display leveled out and a valve on the inner hatch popped open with a tiny cloud of mist. Normal pressure. She wiggled out of her suit, glad that the system included heaters for the atmosphere. The bulky long underwear Duke had made for her had a slippery, almost obscenely soft fabric that simplified the job of doffing her space suit in zero gravity.
Immediately, she moved to the window in the hatch separating her from the lab, but it was misted over. Her own reflection grinned back at her, a clown face of smeared makeup. She tried to scold herself for not taking a few seconds to wash her face once she’d canceled her dinner date with Beverly, but a new observation brought back her mirth. The odd bulges of her padded underwear and the Medusa cloud of hair surrounding her face added even more clownishness to her appearance. Still, she was happy Duke had done such a good job on the underwear; in addition to keeping her cool, it kept her from floating around and chafing on every joint in her suit.
“Can’t let Oscar see me like this!” she said aloud. She slipped out of her longjohns and scrubbed off her makeup with a wet towel from OceanLab’s tiny personal hygiene station. She rummaged through storage lockers for something to wear in the lab, but knew the search was futile. She didn’t store clothing at OceanLab, and no one else ever came there. A couple towels might serve as a makeshift bikini, but it didn’t seem worth the bother. She regretted not taking the time to grab some shorts and a T-shirt before leaving Rantoul, but when she left the space colony, she didn’t know how much time she would have before her launch.
Oh well, personal prudishness aside, nobody will see me, she reminded herself.
She had not even brought a ribbon to tie her hair back, but a wire tie would suffice. Then, with a snap of her chin toward her suit, she thought of something. She hurried to the donning rack, reaching up inside to her helmet’s neck ring, and switched off the video recorder. She could edit out any interesting parts before transmitting the data to the Seattle Aquarium. As an afterthought, she turned the recorder back on, in audio-only mode.
“Well, I’ve learned all I can from the instruments. Let’s see what the lab looks like.”
Gray fog enveloped her as soon as she had cranked open the laboratory door. Droplets of water coalesced and clung to her skin. The larger water bubbles wiggled as she moved, giving her an itchy tickling sensation. OceanLab normally smelled faintly of lubricants and ozone, but the mist surrounding her had a fishy odor. When she inhaled the vapor, its salty taste reminded her of the Japanese restaurant on Rantoul. Beverly often praised that restaurant, saying it smelled like the breeze blowing onshore from the Gulf of Mexico in her native town of Galveston. That was just one of those things where Jeanette could not agree with her friend; she thought the restaurant’s odor was repulsive. Besides, some of the things they served there gave her the creeps.
The hatchway felt slippery, and seemed to be vibrating under her touch. She puzzled about the vibration for a moment until she realized it wasn’t OceanLab doing the shaking; it was her fingers. In all the time she had been working on OceanLab, she had never actually had to touch the fish. Now, with no knowledge of what really lay beyond the door in front of her, she was about to enter their domain.
She couldn’t see much past her reach, so she carefully groped her way through the hatch into the laboratory. The mist was everywhere, but she found she had no problem breathing. That was a relief; she didn’t need her suit. To get the suit into the wet lab, she would have had to take it apart and push the pieces through the inner hatch one by one, only to waste more time reassembling it.
The foggy atmosphere forced her to work from memory. She got her bearings by following a series of handrails to the control panels and electronics racks. Some of the displays glowed fuzzily through a coating of water. A faint gurgling sound came from the direction of the air conditioner intakes.
Spherical globules of water floated about, forming into larger globs when they collided. One of them touched her hip. When she unconsciously reached down to brush it away, her hand contacted something solid. She looked. It was a fish, quite dead. The fish’s gills were puffed out, a slimy mess of red tissue. Jeanette shrieked in surprise. She batted the dead fish away from her and waited for a wave of revulsion to pass. Only after the fish was lost in the mist did she think to wonder about its species.
“Oscar, where are you?” she called in frustration. Her voice sounded oddly muted, with none of the immediate echoes she was used to hearing in OceanLab. There was no response, but she didn’t expect one—even if the octopus recognized her voice, he had no organs for making sound.
Something fluttered near her ear. She turned and found a tiny fingerling pompano inches from her nose. The fish was quite alive, frantically waving its fins and tail as it tried to swim through the humid air. Jeanette had no better idea, so she delicately tapped the pompano with her fingertip, keeping the physical contact as brief as she could. This time she felt only a brief shudder of squeamishness from having to actually touch one of the sea creatures. Her aim was good; the fish drifted off with a gentle spin until it entered a water bubble the size of her space helmet. Once inside the bubble, the pompano momentarily circled and then settled down, apparently content with its return to a more familiar environment.