The room was green-colored, small and bare. The lock door was directly opposite the door we’d come in. The suits had been hung on racks that apparently were designed to hold them.
Jimmy looked around in satisfaction. “Ah,” he said. “Very, very good. Let’s get the suits on, Mia.”
I looked around at Venie and Helen and Att and said, “Where’s Riggy?”
Att said, “I couldn’t talk him out of it. He brought along an extra suit. You know how he wanted to go outside, too. Well, he went.”
Looking very unhappy, Jimmy said, “Well, couldn’t you stop him, Venie? You could have kept him from taking an extra suit.”
Venie said defensively, “If you only wanted one suit between the two of you, I could have made him leave one behind. He said he had as much right to go out as you two did.”
Att said, “You know how mad he can get. We told him it wasn’t a good idea but he wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
Helen said, “He’s going to ‘surprise’ you.”
“I guess so,” Jimmy said, somewhat sourly. “Well, let’s go ahead with what’s left of this adventure.”
He was obviously quite disgruntled, but trying not to let it show. Or, perhaps, trying to let it show just enough so that he could be a good sport about it all. I’ve not been above that one myself.
We put on the suits. They were about as similar to the old-time pressure suits described in the novels I liked to read as the Ship is to that silly sailboat I once got so sick in. (In passing, I want to say that it used to strike me as odd the way nobody in the Ship wrote novels at all; nobody had for years and years and years, so that what I read dated from before the Population Wars. Right now I’m not even sure why I liked to read them. Most of them weren’t very good by any objective standard. Escapism, maybe…) Anyway, our suits were an adaptation of the basic discontinuity principle that the Ship used, too. To be analogous (and thereby inaccurate), remember that old saw about reaching inside a cat, grabbing it by the tail, and turning it inside out? The discontinuity effect, as far as the Ship is concerned, grabs the universe by the tail and turns it inside out so as to get at it better. Strictly a local effect, but in the process getting from here to there becomes a relatively simple matter instead of an intensely difficult one. The discontinuity effect doesn’t work the same way in the suits — they are more of a self-contained little universe of their own. They were originally invented, my reading tells me, to fight battles in — part of a continuing effort to render individual soldiers invulnerable — and hence were light in weight, carried their own air, heat, air-conditioning, light, etc., plus being proof against just about everything from concentrated light beams to projectiles to any of the unpleasant battery of gases that had been invented. Turned out, of course, that the suits were far more useful for constructive purposes (building the Ships) than they had ever been in wartime. Militarily, of course, they were a bust — everybody on Old Earth who fought in one was long dead — but in their peaceful adaptations they were still useful and still in use, as witness.
Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the air lock with air.
As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”
Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the air lock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.
As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button-pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”
I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”
Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were on the First Level, which was “down” as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal orientation, we had to go further “down” to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder, which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I grabbed the ladder and began to climb down. Then I remembered — two other ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was. Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of the Ship cut out and normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took over. “Down” in the ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing from one to the other. So now I was pointed head down, but my feet were outside the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around. Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and pinpoints of a black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie, washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm real world I was used to, but effectively in another dimension.
Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck up out of the hole beside me as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.
Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon. On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign — the joke, I suspect, of somebody long dead — that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some combination.
We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”
Beyond the pylon, in the distance, were a long row of giant tubes projecting above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Shin’s surface the distance to the horizon was not great.
“Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout bay.”
“Yes, I guess,” Jimmy said.
The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.
“I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well yourself.”