By moving along the handrails around the normally dry part of the laboratory, she was able to continue her investigation. Most of the sea creatures she encountered were dead, but at least a few hundred had survived. She avoided contact with the walls. Spiny urchins and starfish had attached themselves there, each enclosed in a growing water bubble it had scraped off the wall. Undulating spheres of water floated around her, some inhabited by tiny fish, some devoid of obvious life. She dodged around the water bubbles as best she could, especially those inhabited by gruesome-looking baby squid.
Before the incident, OceanLab was partitioned into three sections—the dry lab where she normally did her work, her high-pressure aquarium for deep-sea creatures, and the wet lab. The wet lab occupied almost three-quarters of OceanLab’s volume.
From the moment she heard of OceanLab’s collision with that debris cloud, Jeanette had been building a scenario in her mind. When she found nothing but more mist and water globules where a rigid pane of glass should be separating the dry lab from the wet, her scenario was confirmed.
She spoke her analysis aloud, hoping her suit could hear her well enough to record her notes. “The station’s dry lab must have been punctured, causing a sudden drop in pressure. It had to be the dry lab; if the wet lab had been hit, there wouldn’t be a station left. Air is compressible; water is not. I know spacers who found out the hard way what happens when a high-velocity meteoroid hits their liquid fuel tanks—the incompressible fluid transmits the full force of the collision to the tank walls, and the vessel explodes. The same would have happened to OceanLab if the wet section had been punctured.”
Repeated contact with the alien water-breathing animals had left her feeling jittery. She hoped her recorded voice would not betray her nervousness as she theorized about the events which led to the demise of OceanLab.
The glass separating the water from the dry lab had to be big and flat so video cameras could monitor all the activity in the aquarium. With the same pressure on both sides, the glass panes only needed to be strong enough to withstand an occasional bump from the human researcher. The service manual said the panes were actually cyanoacrylic, not real silicon glass. The material was several times stronger than what would be needed to stand up to the most clumsy human visitor, but Jeanette’s bumbling about in zero gravity was nothing compared to the forces acting across the surface of each pane when pressure in the dry lab suddenly dropped. Air could not flow through the pressure-equalization membranes fast enough to matter, and water would not penetrate the membranes at all. Tons of force must have built up against the transparent panes in seconds, until at least one of them blew out.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a great design after all,” Jeanette said, continuing her narrative. “Should have included some sort of blow-out valve, like we have on our fuel tanks. But—yikes!”
A sputtering sound startled her. A vague dark shape the size of her forearm was moving through the mist toward her. Her mind conjured up irrational images of aquatic horrors. There were sharks among the laboratory’s fish population, but the largest were still tiny things no more than six inches long. Even if one of the minuscule predators were stupid enough to attack her, the worst it could do would be to take a small nibble from her exposed hide. But she couldn’t stop her mind from imagining. This thing was larger than any shark she had seen in OceanLab, and it made noise.
Fingers clenched on a handrail, arm muscles knotted, she floated poised to launch herself in any direction away from the approaching menace. Another sputter sounded from the vague apparition, then suddenly it burst forth through a bubble of murky water heading directly toward her. She saw a wide gaping mouth; her mind filled in ravenous sharp teeth and slimy, gruesome gills. Without further thought she heaved against the handrail and propelled herself to the side out of the attacking creature’s path. It slid past, gurgling and sputtering as it entered another bubble.
Just before the creature slipped out of her view, she realized what it was. A snailsub. Just a snailsub, doing its best to control itself as it alternately plunged through air and water on its housecleaning rounds of the laboratory. Jeanette knew OceanLab’s equipment to the last bolt; despite her panic, her analysis of the snailsub’s plight took less than a second. There should have been no real danger, but it was best to get out of its way. Normally the snailsubs moved very slowly, using sonar to avoid running into the wet lab’s inhabitants. This one was moving too fast, probably confused because the air moving through its venturis was so much less dense than the water the snailsub expected. It should have turned away before it got so close to a creature as large as her, but perhaps its sonar couldn’t cope with the unfamiliar medium either.
Relief from her tension should have come with understanding the mysterious object, but in her panicked flight, she lost her bearings. She had induced a fast rotation; foggy mist spun about her. When she snapped her head around to see where she was going, a globule of water smacked into her face. Then she bumped into a wall.
A stabbing pain lanced her left thigh, outside, just above her knee. Her leg thrashed in reflex and the pain grew sharply more intense. She yelped, as much from surprise as from the pain. Gasping in a lungful of water, she choked, coughing out the brine. Her elbow banged into the wall, and it felt like something else bit her, worse than before, something with a thousand stinging teeth chewing into her hip. Jeanette screamed and kicked, pushing herself away from the wall. Her breath came in short bursts. Every limb quivered in tense apprehension. The thing was still biting her!
As she floated, she twisted around to find out what was attacking her. There were no marks on her thigh, just a couple dozen tiny red welts that puffed up into bumps on her skin as she watched. They hurt, pain nerves firing with every pulse of her heart. Contorting herself further, she quickly checked for the second assailant and discovered the source of her problem. There, stuck in the flesh of her hip, she found the reddish brown spines of the sea urchin. A few were driven deep, others bent and broken. She was bleeding from more puncture wounds which surrounded the spines from the luckless urchin.
Cursing herself, the Seattle Aquarium, and everything that lived in water, she began the excruciating process of pulling out the spines one by one. By the time she had them all out, her leg began to feel like it was burning at the site of her wounds. She found a handrail and, after checking for more sea creatures, clung to it until she could calm herself and get her bearings. She could hear the ventilation intake gurgling nearby, and concluded she was on the laboratory’s ceiling.
“Oscar, where are you?” she screamed.
She heard a distant, muffled squeak followed by something that sounded for all the world like a bad case of flatulence. Some creature might have responded to her call. But it couldn’t be. There were no dolphins here. Nothing in OceanLab made any sound. There should just be the fluttering of desperate fins and the burbling of the robot submarines.
“Get hold of yourself, Jeanette,” she told herself. “You came here to do a job. Now just do it.”
With the laboratory leaking and no way to find her prized octopus, she decided the best she could do was to recover as many samples as she could while there was still time. Sample collection posed another problem—the only containers she had available to transport the specimens back to Rantoul were the small transparent plastic vials they had originally come in. But the permanent residents of OceanLab had arrived as eggs; only the smallest fingerlings would fit into the vials now. She was forced to settle for bringing home the tiniest animals she could find.
With a cargo net filled with clattering plastic vials trailing behind her, she began a long methodical trek around the lab. Her primary targets were small fish enclosed in their own water bubbles; she could quickly scoop up both the animal and its environment in a single motion without having to actually touch them with her fingers. After collecting a dozen samples, she decided to be more picky and skipped easy targets in favor of searching out a more varied sample of species.