“I didn’t think they could,” Doug said.
“They are medical, metabolic,” Zimmerman went on. “They can heal injuries quickly. But that is all they can do for you.”
“Okay,” said Doug.
“Do not think you can perform superhuman feats. You cannot”
“Okay,” Doug repeated, feeling slightly exasperated “Thanks for the warning. I’ve got to get going now.”
“Yah. I know.” Zimmerman stood there fidgeting for a moment, men said in the softest voice Doug had ever heard out of him, “Good luck, my boy.”
Grinning, Doug replied, “Thanks.”
Brudnoy handed him the power drill they had brought with them. Doug grasped it, men started to worm around for his trek down the vent.
“Turn on the transponder,” Brudnoy reminded.
“Yeah, right.” Doug reached for the little black box clipped to his chest pocket and pressed its stud. Now they could track his progress back at the control center. If I get killed, he thought sardonically, at least they’ll know where to find the body.
“One more thing,” Brudnoy called.
“What?” Doug asked, getting irritated at the delay.
“I want you to remember something your father often said. Every time he had a difficult job to do, he said it”
“My father?” Doug asked, more gently.
“If it is to be, it’s up to me,” Brudnoy said. “That was your father’s motto.”
“If it is to be, it’s up to me,” Doug repeated.
“Yes,” said Brudnoy.
“Thanks, Lev. That’s good to know.”
“Good luck.”
“Right.”
Brudnoy and Zimmerman watched the young man disappear into the darkness of the overhead vent.
“Come on,” said Brudnoy to the professor. “Time for us old men to go wait with the women.”
Zimmerman shook his head, glanced up at the ceiling, then let Brudnoy lead him back toward the control center.
Doug tucked the hand drill into the thigh pocket of his coveralls and undipped the penlight from his chest pocket. The pencil beam seemed feeble as he swung it back and forth. The vent was barely wider than his shoulders, and caked with dust. Should’ve brought a breathing mask, he said to himself. At least there won’t be any rats or bugs. Shouldn’t be. All the inbound cargoes are checked Earthside and on arrival here. There won’t be anything in this vent to surprise me. Couldn’t be.
But he knew he was trying to convince himself of something he was really unsure of.
Joanna almost threw herself at Brudnoy when he and Zimmerman came back into the control center.
“He’s in the vent?” she asked, her voice high with tension.
Brudnoy said as soothingly as he knew how to, “He’s on his way. He’ll be at the EVC in half an hour, at most”
Anson muttered, tight-lipped, “They can do a lotta damage in half an hour, I betcha.”
Brudnoy shrugged. “As long as they don’t damage the recycling equipment too badly…”
“Good thing they don’t have any explosives in there,” Anson said, turning back to the wall screen.
“It’s a question of time now,” Brudnoy said to Joanna. “Can Doug get there soon enough to stop them from doing too much damage.”
Joanna fought to keep back her tears. Doug was going to have to fight Greg. At best, only one of her sons would come out of this alive, she knew.
“We’re picking up his transponder signal,” called one of the technicians from his monitoring station.
“Put it on the big screen,” Anson commanded.
A blinking red dot showed up on the wall screen, halfway down the gray line marking the vent running atop tunnel three.
Zimmerman, sitting on one of the little wheeled console chairs like a walrus perched on a beach ball, pointed and asked, “That is him?”
“That’s him,” Anson replied.
“Can we speak with him?”
“He’s got a pocket phone,” she said. “He’ll call in when he hits the first partition.”
Joanna stared at the blinking red dot as it moved slowly along the gray line. Brudnoy stood beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him, grateful for the support.
Roger Deems unconsciously gnawed on a fingernail as the eight others — three women among them — filed into the security office. Just my luck, Deems thought, to be tapped for the security job this month. The others looked equally unhappy.
The security assignment was rotated among the long-time Lunatics. Usually the job required nothing more than keeping the base’s surveillance cameras working. Drugs were a minor problem, but the long-timers usually policed themselves pretty well and kept the short-timers under control. The still that produced rocket juice was an open secret and seldom made problems for anyone. The toughest moment Deems could remember had been when two short-timers got into a fistfight in The Cave over a woman they both coveted. By the time that month’s security chief had arrived on the scene, like the sheriff in an old west barroom brawl, the other Lunatics had already ended the fight simply by dousing the combatants with all the fruit juice they could grab from the dispensers. Wet and sticky, the two young men felt foolish and embarrassed. Wyatt Earp was not really needed.
Deems had been at his desk, performing a routine check of the surveillance cameras, when the automatic emergency announcement blared from the overhead speakers. The sound of the airtight hatches slamming shut all along the tunnel startled him, but he didn’t get too worried until Jinny Anson’s voice came on the speakers and ordered everyone to stay put, then ended with an ominous, “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
Before Deems could get out of his desk chair Anson was on the phone, telling him tightly what had happened and what she expected him to accomplish. Deems swallowed twice to keep down the bitter bile that was suddenly burning its way up his throat, nodded once to Anson, and got busy. He punched into the loudspeaker system, startled to hear his own voice booming out in the tunnel as he said:
“THIS IS THE SECURITY CHIEF. WE NEED VOLUNTEERS TO HELP CLEAR UP THIS EMERGENCY. ANYBODY IN TUNNEL TWO WHO ISN’T INVOLVED IN LIFE SUPPORT WORK AND DOESN’T HAVE TO GET PAST ONE OF THE CLOSED HATCHES, REPORT TO THE SECURITY OFFICE RIGHT AWAY.”
Volunteers. Deems almost laughed. Anybody who could reach the security office without going through one of the closed hatches was a volunteer. By definition.
Now the three women and five men stood crowded, worried and uncertain before his desk.
“The base director’s locked himself in the EVC and is threatening to cut off our air,” Deems said to the assembled ’volunteers,” without preamble.
They gasped, shocked.
“We need to open the EVC’s hatch,” he went on, running a hand through his thinning hair, “and we don’t have time for prebreathing.”
“Whaddaya mean, “we?” Why do we hafta do it?”
“Yeah, aren’t there specialists for a problem like this?”
“Like who?” Deems asked, trying hard to scowl at them.
No one had an answer.
“Listen,” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his chest, “we can sit here on our rumps and let the cuckoo sonofabitch choke off our air or we can try to do something about it. Which is it gonna be?”
“You mean we need to get into suits?”
“It’s that bad?”
“Air pressure in tunnel four is ’way down, unbreathable,” said Deems, actually beginning to enjoy the feeling of authority, “and the pressure’s dropping in tunnel three.”
“Christ! My wife’s in three!”
Deems raised a chubby hand. “Don’t panic. We’ve already got safety people evacuating three. She’ll be okay.”
“But we have to get into suits?” one of the women asked, not certain she had heard him correctly.
“That’s right. No time for prebreathing, either.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not if we do it right,” said Deems. “We’re going to the suit rack at the end of this tunnel and purge a half-dozen backpack tanks. Get rid of the low-pressure mix that’s in ’em and refill them with regular base air. Then you won’t need prebreathing and there’s no danger of the bends.”