“Good show, Solly.”
“Thanks.”
Solly pushed the bar into his belt and retreated into the air lock. He switched over to the AI’s channel. “Ham, where’s the object?”
“Still outbound, Solly. At three kilometers per hour. Showing no sign of internal power.”
She glanced up at the screen dedicated to Solly’s helmet imager and watched the lights come on in the air lock. The door swung shut and gravity returned throughout the ship. She could see the bench opposite the one he was sitting on. And part of the control panel, a blinking amber lamp, a hand rail, and one of Solly’s feet.
“Ham,” he said, “Track the object as long as you’re able. If there’s any change, let us know.”
“I’ll do that, Solly.”
The amber lamp would continue to blink until air pressure reached normal. Then it would turn green.
Kim was wrestling with the problem. It was possible the Hunter had blundered the first contact, and it might be that she was now doing the same thing. “We might wind up being a laughingstock for future historians, Solly,” she said.
“I just don’t like any of this, Kim. We’ve established there’s something here. Now I think we need to turn the whole thing over to a team that can come out here prepared to—”
The amber light dulled.
And brightened.
It wasn’t supposed to do that.
“—To do the thing systematically,” Solly concluded.
Behind the lamp, the wall and the control panel wrinkled. In the way of a strip of pavement on a hot day.
It was gone almost before the sensation had registered. “Solly,” she said, “are we having an imager problem?”
“No,” he said. “I saw it too.” The silence in the ship was overwhelming. She left the pilot’s room and was waiting by the air lock when it opened. Solly came out.
She put all the lights on in the entryway and looked into the air lock. Everything seemed normal.
“Ham,” she said. “Rerun the sequence from the helmet imager, beginning about four minutes ago. Put it on one of the entry windows.”
There were two large windows in the entryway. Both had carried images of the skies as they might have been seen from Greenway. Now one went dark and then lit up with Solly entering the air lock.
“Too recent,” she said. “Back it up another couple of minutes.”
“It was just a power dip,” said Solly.
“Maybe.”
She watched him moving rapidly backward, saw the saddle in reverse flight, watched it sail in toward him, saw him put it down on the hull. Use the bar.
Solly-in-the-window worked backward furiously on the saddle. The circular opening in the seat closed.
“Okay,” she said. “Stop, Ham. Run it forward.”
Solly laid his helmet down, peeled off the suit, and sat down to get out of the boots.
The sensor mount rippled again.
“Ham,” said Kim, “hold it.”
Solly’s brow creased. They ran it several times. Then she took him to the sequence in the air lock, and they watched the amber lamp fade and brighten and the control panel lose its definition. It seemed to fold slightly, and darken, as if something had passed in front of it, as if the space it occupied had changed in some indefinable way.
“Does that—” she stared at the image on the monitor, “—normally happen out here?”
“No.” He switched over to the forward hull imager, backed up the record, and they watched the entire scenario from another angle.
The sensor mount was in the foreground. Solly was behind it. And this time, it was Solly who rippled.
“I don’t understand that,” he said.
Kim’s heart had picked up a beat. “It scares me, Solly.”
When they peeled away her jumpsuit, they saw that something had cut Emily almost in half at the waist. The flesh was charred, the trunk partially severed, but there was no blood.
“They cleaned her up before putting her out the airlock,” said Solly, pulling a sheet over the mutilated body.
“What could have happened to her?” asked Kim.
“A laser, maybe.” Solly looked puzzled.
They returned the corpse to its container and Kim kept reminding herself that at least now she knew. But it wasn’t much consolation.
Analysis of the recordings provided no clue as to what, if anything, had happened on the hull or in the air lock. A trick of the light, perhaps. Or disturbances in the space-time continuum. After all, Solly had been outside the ship. Maybe there were side effects when you opened up air locks to hyperspace. Indeed, no other explanation offered itself. So they put it out of their minds, as best they could, and resumed their normal shipboard routine.
And as the days passed with no recurrence of the effect, they forgot about it altogether.
Meantime, the conversation centered on the kind of reception they’d receive when they got back to Greenway. Police or a parade? Kim was unwaveringly optimistic. You cannot prosecute the person who answers one of the great all-time scientific and philosophical questions. Solly, who’d been around longer, suggested that their accomplishment would only serve to anger Agostino even more. “We might look good to posterity,” he said, “but the locals may take a different view. Remember Columbus?”
“What about him?”
“Died in a Spanish prison.”
On the other hand, Kim thought Agostino could be relied on to milk the mission for all it was worth, to make it sound as if it had been an Institute initiative from the start. In that case, their careers would be safe as long as they cooperated.
Kim believed her interest in the sciences to be generally selfless, spurred primarily by a desire to push the frontiers of knowledge forward, to be part of the collective effort. She didn’t think she’d been in it for herself. But she resented the prospect that someone else might try to grab the credit after she’d gone through so much.
Five nights out of Alnitak, Kim, absorbed in these thoughts, was showering for dinner.
Because there were only two people on board, there was no pressing need to conserve the water supply. She had just rinsed her hair and was using a towel to dry her face before opening her eyes. But she sensed movement in the washroom.
“Solly?” she asked.
Once before he’d slipped in while she was in the shower, and had taken advantage of the opportunity, wrapping the curtain around her and fondling her through the translucent plastic.
But he did not answer and when she looked no one was there.
She dismissed the incident and the mild disappointment, dressed, and went down the hall for dinner, which included chicken, a fruit salad, and hot bread. They were talking about inconsequentials when Ham broke in: “Solly,” he said. “I am losing control over some of my functions. They are being rerouted elsewhere. To an alternate manager.”
“That can’t be,” said Solly. “Are you reporting a virus?”
“It is difficult to say precisely what the cause is, Solly.”
“Which systems are you losing?”
“I am having some difficulty with communications, diagnostics, life support. The deterioration is continuing as we speak.”
“Ham, what can we do to rectify the situation?”
“I do not know. You might wish to consider going to manual. If the process continues, I will shortly become unreliable.”
“Can we do that?” asked Kim. “Can we get home on manual?”
“Oh, sure,” said Solly. “It just means we’ll have to throw all the switches ourselves. And we might chip a little paint at the dock. Otherwise it’s no problem.” Nevertheless he looked worried.
They finished dinner, somewhat at less leisure than they’d begun, and went across to the pilot’s room. Kim took some of the hot bread with her.
Solly removed a wall panel marked AUTO OFF. “Ham,” he said, “I’ll check with you periodically. Try to locate the problem and eliminate it.”