Ramis noticed medical supply carts, packages neatly stacked, five used hypodermic syringes on a stainless-steel counter. He sniffed, but the air had been long purged of any odor that might have hinted at what the inhabitants had done with themselves. They had left no signs, no notices, nothing to indicate where they had gone.
At the end of the mess hall the side walls appeared again, enclosing additional private work spaces. The inner curved wall showed a bright red hydraulic door that marked another of the spoke-shaft lift platforms. He had traveled a quarter of the way around the station, and had still found no sign of people. In the air in front of his face a cloud of fruit flies flitted like static in a faulty holotank; they must have escaped from some biological experiment.
Ramis walked ahead. On the floor he found several access hatches. When he stomped his feet, he heard a hollow echo. Looking at the ceiling and where the floor met the curved wall, he realized that there must be another entire level below him.
The next set of rooms appeared to be laboratories cluttered with experimental paraphernalia. Sketches and equations were scrawled on magnetic-imprint boards. The markings had not been degaussed, but were beginning to fuzz out from the passage of time.
He passed another section of living quarters, this one more austere than the others. In each cabin the beds were neatly made and empty. On some of the bureaus, he found stereocubes with pictures of families, which had been left activated. Beside them he found occasional messages or data cubes. In one instance he even picked up a note written by hand, but he couldn’t read any of the Russian.
Everything was silent. The Kibalchich held its breath.
As the curve continued, the side walls dropped away again. A red cross on a field of white signified that the large room ahead would be the infirmary.
By now, Ramis had grown accustomed to the dim light. He moved as if he were one of the shadows, not an enemy of them. His eyes were wide. His bare feet made no sound as he crept forward.
The walls opened up around him, and the infirmary ahead seemed like a vast empty space, broader and colder than the gulf between the two colonies. The soft light glowed, and he blinked his eyes, staring and trying to gather in as much detail as he could. He took a deep breath.
Spread out in front of him lay all the Soviets, row upon row upon row.
His throat was dry. He stood still.
They looked like legions from an ancient Roman army, all lined up side by side, motionless and cold. Each body was encased in a glass coffin, a crystalline chamber flecked with frost on the inside and lit up by a mixed glow of monitor lights.
The cubicles lined the entire infirmary, crammed together.
He took a step forward and placed his hand on the top of the nearest coffin. The man inside looked waxen, expressionless, at peace. The glass felt cold.
Ramis raised his eyes and stared in front of him at all of them. They had all come here. Forsaking hope, had they all just given up and died?
He moved forward between the cubicles, feeling numb and awed. He didn’t know what to think or do, but part of the fear had melted from him.
He had found the inhabitants of the Kibalchich.
Part Three
Interaction
Chapter 34
CLAVIUS BASE—Day 41
Clancy’s job-site headquarters felt more like a locker room than a survival hut. Stuffed with ten people in a space meant for five, the airtight shanty provided Clancy’s crew a chance to take a break from the excavation and construction. It reminded him of those quaint little Quonset huts the old British soldiers had used in India or Africa. Another team had set up similar huts out by the mass driver.
Clancy stared outside through the quartz inset plate. He could make out three other enclosures in the distance; the job site had fifteen units total—half again as many as necessary to house his crew. But that margin didn’t seem like much when everybody crammed in the central dwelling—the powwow tent, Shen called it. Clancy felt as if he had to breathe in whenever anyone breathed out. But he insisted on having an open door policy during any construction operation. He wanted his people to feel free to talk over problems and share ideas.
The radio-telescope project was about to take off, big time. Clavius Base had systematically provided all the necessary items—air, water, food, and now housing. At least now they didn’t have to worry about funding problems or maddening permits—the Earth bureaucracy was one welcome casualty of the War.
Clancy’s people had constructed the huts in record time, ferried them out on the six-packs, and erected them just outside the crater, where the gigantic telescope dish would sprawl. The Lunatics back at the base had reacted with such enthusiasm to the expedition that it had Clancy convinced they wanted his construction crew out of there.
Tomkins had come up with a name for his baby. He had proudly announced that the crater-sized telescope would be dubbed “Arecibo II.” Clancy and his people thought the name sounded much too pretentious, and decided to call it “Bigeye” instead. The engineers and the Lunatics insisted on using their preferred names whenever referring to the project, each side hoping the other would give up.
Clancy tried to push his way through the crowd in the headquarters hut. The regular ConComm broadcasts of news from the other colonies always generated a lot of interest, but this time, Orbitech 1 seemed to be up to something spectacular. All the senior engineers had gathered in the powwow tent to watch on the portable holotank there, normally used for communicating back with Clavius Base.
Laughter rose around him as three of the excavation crew related an incident that had occurred earlier in the day. As Clancy squeezed past, a hand snaked out and grabbed him around the waist.
“Hey, boss.” A body pressed against him.
“Hello, Shen.”
“Kind of tight in here, isn’t it?” She rotated him around until they faced each other. He felt off balance in the low gravity; he preferred either full-G or nothing—none of this fractional-weight ballet. The top of Shen’s head came just to the middle of his chest. He had to look straight down to see her. Long black hair framed her face.
Clancy nodded. “See what happens when I call the foremen together. Can’t expect them to work now, can I?”
“You’ll have to have these meetings more often.”
Clancy overacted a grimace.
Shen pushed a finger in his stomach. “Come on, Cliffy—you love it. How else could you get a group of intelligent, talented women to throw themselves at you?”
“Thanks a lot, Shen.”
“Wiay,” she corrected him. “After all this time—my first name is Wiay. Some compassionate boss you turned out to be.”
“All right … Wiay. Thanks a lot.”
Wiay Shen had started to retort when the room grew-quiet. People crowded around the holotank image. Clancy steered Shen toward the receiver. He stepped up on the single-cast table to see above people’s heads, and pulled Shen up to join him.
When he was finally able to look down on the three-dimensional image, he saw pitch black around the edges. Seconds passed before he could make out stars. Suddenly, the view swung around to encompass a spacesuit and a stretch of gleaming surface on which the figure stood.
“Where’s this coming from?” Clancy asked.
“Orbitech 1,” someone said. Someone else shushed him. Clancy scowled.
A sober voice from the tiny speakers described Ramis’s heroic journey from the Aguinaldo and his odyssey to the Soviet colony. Coming over the ConComm, it sounded like a propaganda film. As Ramis bent to start his fifty-mile Jump, Shen slipped her arm around Clancy’s waist.