“Can’t see a frosted thing,” muttered Derec. His helmet light bounced off the shiny underside of the hatch and again off the huddled machinery exposed, but without air to scatter the light, what he saw was a collection of parallel and crossing lines of light against velvet blackness. After a moment, however, he made out a handle. These things weren’t meant only for doctorates in mechanical engineering to understand, after all. There was a release in the handle.
Squeezing the release, Derec pulled up on the handle. Nothing happened. There wasn’t room on the handle for Mandelbrot to help him. Gripping it tightly, Derec stood on the hull and put his back into it. It came free with a creaky vibration he felt all the way up through the soles of his feet, an odd sort of hearing.
“Trouble?” Ariel asked, concern in her voice. Perhaps she had heard his breathing and the gasp when it broke free.
“Stuck, but I got it loose. I think a little ice had frozen around it.”
With the help of the robot, who had released the hatch and now stood upright on the hull, Derec pulled out a mass of cunningly nested pipes all connected together, rather like unfolding a sofa-bed. Mandelbrot reached down and pulled a heavy cord, and a mass of thick, silvery plastic unfolded. As soon as the plastic balloon was sufficiently unfolded not to suffer damage, Derec peered down at its root.
He had to move around to the side, but there was the valve, looking uncommonly like a garden faucet on far-off Aurora. For a moment Derec was shaken by a perfect memory of a faucet in some dewy garden on the Planet of the Dawn. He’d had indications before this that he was from that greatest of Spacer planets, but very few specific memories leaked through his amnesia, fewer still were as sharp as this one.
After a few moments, though, he realized he was not going to remember what or where that garden was. All he knew about it was that it was a pleasant memory. He had liked that garden. Now all he had of it was the memory of its faucet.
It isn’t wise to shrug in freefall, so Derec reached carefully inside the hatch and, bracing himself, twisted the faucet. There was a hiss he heard through his fingers and the air in the arm of his suit, as steam under low pressure rushed into the balloon. In a moment, Mandelbrot was out of sight behind it.
That wonderful flexible arm came into view, Mandelbrot twisted the return valve, and in a moment there was the faint murmur of a small pump. Water, too, was moving through the pipes by now.
The radiator and vacuum distillation sections of the water-purification-and-cooling system was in operation. They had settled down for a long stay in space.
Should have done this days ago,Derec thought but didn’t say aloud. An optimist, he had hoped a ship would have come by before now. Ariel, who tended to be pessimistic, had doubted.
“I’m coming back by way of the sun side,” he said. “The light’s better.”
Ariel didn’t answer. A punch on a button made his safety line release itself and reel in from the forward airlock. He reattached it to a ring near the hatch; the robot mimicked his movements. Feeling better about standing upright on the hull, Derec strode slowly and carefully around the rather narrow cylinder until the tiny red lamp of their current “sun” came into view, then on around until it was overhead.
A class M dwarf, the red star was no doubt very old. It was certainly very small and it had no real planets. Its biggest daughter was an ancient lump of rock barely four hundred kilometers in diameter, its next biggest less than half that in size. Most of its daughters were fragments that ranged from respectable mountains down to fists-and there weren’t many of any size. A star that old was formed at a time when the nebulas in the galaxy had only begun to be enriched with heavy elements. This was not a metalliferous star; no prospector had ever bothered to check out those lumps of rock for anything of value; none ever would.
Dim and worthless though it was, the star lit the way… somewhat. Under its light, the silvery hull looked like burnished copper-a pleasing sight. Shadows still were sharp-edged, his own shadow an odd-shaped, moving hole, it seemed, in the hull, a hole into some strange and other-dimensional universe.
Mandelbrot followed him gracefully.
“Detection alert,” said Ariel, sounding bored. “Rock coming our way. Looks like it might be about a mouthful, if you were hungry for rocks.”
“I’m not,” said Derec, but it made him think of baked potatoes. He was getting hungry.
Had there been any danger, Ariel would have said so; Derec assumed that the rock would miss them by a wide margin. They were well out from the star, sparsely populated though its space was with junk. This was only the second thing they’d detected in two days, and the first was merely a grain of sand. Probably both objects were “dirty ice”-the stuff of comets.
Danger or no, Mandelbrot moved closer to him, scanning the sky without pausing. Derec didn’t notice, and didn’t bother to look for the rock. The sun drew his eye instead. At this distance, dim as it was and weak in ultraviolet light, it could be looked at directly.
Pitiful excuse though it was for a star, poor as its family was, still it made an island of light in a vast sea of darkness where stars hard and unwinking as diamonds cut at him with their stares. He thought of the space around the red star as a room, a warmly lit room in an immensity of cold and darkness.
After the circumscribed life of Robot City, he felt free. Space, Derec thought, is mankind’s natural home.
There came a bark from inside the vessel, and he was reminded with a sudden chill that others than men used space. One of those others was within this ship: Wolruf, the doglike alien with whom he’d made alliance on Aranimas’s ship. She had escaped first from Aranimas with him, then from the hospital station, then from Robot City.
Things had been worse for them in the past, he thought. If they had to wait here for a week or two…
Then he thought: I’mworried about Ariel, though.
He moved forward, found the airlock, and crowded in to make room for the bulky robot.
Frost condensed on his armor as soon as he entered the ship, but Derec ignored that, knowing that it wasn’t too cold to touch yet; they’d only been out for minutes. It seemed even more cramped inside after having been out…
“We should spend more time outside,” he said. “It’s not exactly fresh air, but at least there’s a feeling of freedom.”
Ariel looked momentarily interested, then shrugged. “I’m all right. “
Mandelbrot looked keenly,at her, pausing in his ridiculous motion of scraping frost off his eyes, but said nothing. He had said nothing to Derec yet, but Derec knew that he was worried, too. Ariel had a serious disease. A fatal disease, she had said; It had caused her occasional pain before this, stabbing muscular aches, and she frequently seemed feverish and headachey and generally out of it; sometimes she even had hallucinations. But this prolonged gloom was new, and worrisome.
“So there’s water for showerr, yess?” said Wolruf. She was the size of a large dog and not infrequently went on all fours, but usually walked upright, for her front paws were clumsy-seeming hands, ill-shaped by human standards but clever with tools.
“Give it half an hour,” Derec said. The furry alien needed showers daily in a ship where there was no escape from each other.
“Derec, shall I prepare food?” Mandelbrot asked. “It approaches the usual hour for your meals.”
Ariel roused herself, said, “I’ll do that, Mandelbrot. What do you want, Derec, Wolruf?”