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.”
“It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”
Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”
“What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”
There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy was hiding it would be no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.
Then our questions were answered for us.
Jimmy said, “What was that?”
“What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time — a horrible retching sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.
“Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t see him,” I said.
Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance, perhaps forty feet or more and then down. He landed lightly. But then he said, “I couldn’t see him at all. I couldn’t see a thing. Mia, go out about one hundred or a hundred and fifty feet toward the middle one of those big tubes and look for Riggy. I’ll go in the other direction. We’ll both make a half-circle clockwise.”
I stumbled away over the rocks toward the scout bay tubes, bouncing unevenly, slipping a couple of times, and not helped at all by the sound of Riggy and his vomiturition. I wanted to turn him off, but I didn’t because then I couldn’t hear Jimmy. When I was about the right distance from the pylon, I started making my half-circle.
Then Jimmy said, “Are you ready, Mia?”
“I’ve already started,” I said.
“Riggy,” Jimmy said. “If you don’t want to be left out here, you’d better get to your feet and do your best to be found.”
What I wanted most was to snut my eyes against the silver, just sit down and try to ease my spinning head (my eyes were beginning to ache and my ears to ring) and concentrate on quelling the nausea I felt. It reminded me of my sailing experience, but this was much worse. It was all I could do to keep walking and my feet were not going where I wanted them to. I didn’t go exactly in a half-circle, either. I tried to check on my position, to look for Riggy, and just to keep going, and I wasn’t doing very well at any of them. I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a puddled heap and puke. It would probably destroy the concept of heroics for all time.
As light as the gravity was here, I had some trouble with my traction. In jumping from one rock to another, my foot slipped, my feet tangled, and then there wasn’t a rock where I thought there was, and I took a header. Under normal gravity and without the protection of a suit, I would probably have been pretty badly hurt. As it was, I just fell. Unless you did some quiet practice first, without the distraction of this unsettling dizziness, I doubted the tremendous bounds that would be possible out here would be worth making. I lay there, fetched up against a rock that resembled nothing so much as a particularly hideous sculpture my mother once made — a distorted bust of old Lemuel Carpentier himself. The only thing that was in proper proportion was his nose, and that was his worst feature. He hadn’t been pleased. Lying still, my head didn’t clear, so I forced myself to stand up again.
Then I saw Riggy. He was on his knees, if not on his feet. He was hidden completely from the pylon by a tent-like conglomeration of rocks which had pitched together to form a sheltered area. He was still retching.
I said to Jimmy, “I’ve found him.” Then, because it didn’t matter anymore and I wanted to save my stomach if I could, I shut off my receive line.
I hardly looked at Riggy. I didn’t want to. I got him on his feet and then found that if I was careful about where I put my own feet as I walked, I could carry him. I kept my mind on reaching the pylon and then Jimmy was beside us and helping me.
We set Riggy down by the lock and Jimmy pushed the lock controls on the pylon so that we could make our way inside.