“Before,” I screamed, “Before, before, before, before—”
It felt good to scream: pressure change was trying to explode my lungs, and emptying them that way probably saved them serious damage. He already had his own hood off, he was quick; no, he was better than quick, because he instantly solved the puzzle that had baffled me; he yanked his hood back over his head, oriented himself and kicked off, and within seconds he was pulling the most beautiful pressure patch I’d ever seen out of Compartment B-4.
By then I was so dizzy from spinning my head back and forth I felt as though my eyeballs were about to pop out of their sockets—as indeed they probably were—and I had to pull my hood back on and let my seatmate haul me back down into my seat…where I spent some minutes concentrating on not soiling my p-suit. The internal suit pressure rose quickly, but at least as much of it came from my intestines as from my airtanks, and it got ripe enough in there to steam up my hood and make my eyes water for a few moments.
I became aware that my seatmate was shaking my shoulder gently. I opened my eyes, and some of the dizziness went away.
She was pointing to her ears, then to her belt control panel, and shaking her head. I nodded, and fumbled until I found the shutoff switch for my suit radio. The babbling sound of dozens of frightened passengers went away. I noticed for the first time that all the blinking seatback signs were saying, not “FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS,” but “MAINTAIN RADIO SILENCE.”
She touched her hood to mine. “Are ya right?” she called.
“Occasionally,” I said lightheadedly, but I got it. Several weeks in Australia, even in the multilingual environments of Suit Camp, will give you a working familiarity with Aussie slang. She was an Aborigine. Now that I thought about it, I had noticed her once or twice in Camp, had wondered vaguely why, in the midst of one of the largest remaining Aboriginal reserves in Australia, she seemed to be the only Abo who was actually taking Suit Camp training. All the others I’d seen had been outside the Camp, in town and at the Cairns airport.
“You took an awful bloody chance,” she said.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I called back.
“Too right! You saved us all, I reckon—you and the Chinese bloke. Fast as a scalded cat he was, eh? Hold on, here he comes.”
The Chinese rejoined us. He was moving more slowly now that the emergency was past. The delicate grace with which he docked himself back in his chair, without a wasted motion or a bounce, pleased my dancer’s eyes. I resolved to ask him at the first opportunity to tutor me in “jaunting,” the spacer’s term for moving about in zero gee.
He joined his hood to ours. “Thank you,” he said to me.
As our eyes met I felt the old familiar tingle in the pit of the stomach that I had not felt in ages.
And suppressed it. I thanked him right back—but without putting any topspin on it. I’m too old to climb these stairs again, I told myself, even in zero gee…
“I thank you both,” the Aborigine girl said. “Best put our ears on, but. I think they’re getting it sorted out.”
The seatbacks were now flashing, “MONITOR YOUR RADIO.” We separated, and I switched my radio back on in time to hear the surviving attendant say, “—xt person that makes a sound, I am personally going to drag aft and cycle through the airlock, is that fucking well understood?”
She sounded sincere; the only sound in response was dozens of people breathing at different rates.
“Passenger in seat 1-E: is Mr. Henderson dead?”
“Uh…no. I’ve got my hand over the leak and the…the entry wound. His chest is still—”
“Jesus! Wait…uh…ten more seconds for cabin pressure to come back up and then get his hood off. Gently! Passenger 1-F, there’s a first-aid kit in Compartment D-7 in front of you; get a pressure bandage and give it to 1-E; then try to get a pulse rate. Is anyone here a doctor or a paramedic?”
Breathing sounds. Someone grunting softly. A cough.
“Damn. Passenger in 6-B, answer yes or no, do you require medical assistance?”
Breathing sounds.
“Dammit, the woman who passed the word!—do you need help?”
Whoops—she meant me! I started to reply…and my body picked that moment to finish restoring equilibrium, with prolonged and noisy eructations at both ends of my alimentary canal.
“…no-o-o…” I finished, and everyone, myself included, began to howl with tension-breaking laughter—
—everyone except the attendant. “SILENCE!” she roared, loud enough to make my earphones distort, and the laughter fell apart. “It is past time you started acting like spacers. A real spacer is dying while you giggle. We all nearly died because none of you could read a flashing sign six inches from your face! You in 1-E—” That passenger was muttering sotto voce to someone who was helping him remove the injured attendant’s hood. “—switch off your radios and chatter hood to hood if you must. Does anyone else need medical aid? No? Then listen up! I want all of you to keep your hoods on—even after you’re certain the pressure has come back up. I’m going to switch to command channel now and report. You won’t be able to hear it. I’ll fill you all in the moment I am good and God damned ready…but not if I hear one word on this channel when I come back on. And if you switch off your radio, for Christ’s sake watch your seatback signs this time.”
The moment she switched frequencies, several people began chattering. But they were loudly shushed; finally even the most determined—the loudmouth who’d been making jokes before takeoff—had been persuaded to shut up. The attendant’s anger had sobered, humbled us. Despite weeks of training, we had screwed up, in our first crisis. Now we had to sit in silence like chastened children while the grown-ups straightened things out.
I switched my own mike off, and huddled with my seatmates until our three hoods were touching. There was an awkward silence. We all grinned at each other nervously.
“What happens now?” I said finally. “Losing all that air must have pushed us off course, right? Spoiled our vector, or whatever?”
“So we miss our bus,” the Aborigine girl said. “Question is, how many go-rounds does it take to match up with it again—and how much air have we got to drink while we wait?”
“I think we’ll be all right,” the Chinese said. “The pilot maneuvered to correct, and I think she did a good job.” His voice was a pleasant tenor. His English was utterly unaccented, newscaster’s English.
“How do you reckon?” she asked.
“She didn’t blast too quickly, and she didn’t blast too slowly. And it was one short blast. I think she’s good. We might make the original rendezvous, or something close to it.”
His confidence was very reassuring. I thought again about asking him to teach me how to jaunt. And decided against it. There would be plenty of qualified instructors around…and I was here to simplify my life, not complicate it again.
The attendant came swimming down the aisle past us as he spoke. We sat up to watch. She checked the pressure patch first, popping a little round membrane of blue sticky between her fingers and watching to see if any of its droplets migrated toward the patch. Only when she was satisfied did she turn and check on Mr. Henderson, holding a brief hood-to-hood conference with the passenger who was taking care of him. Then she drifted aimlessly in a half crouch, talking to the pilot on the channel we couldn’t hear. Finally she nodded and did something to her belt. The seatback signs began flashing “MONITOR YOUR RADIO” again. I switched mine on.
“Make sure your neighbor has his ears on,” she said. “Is everybody listening? Okay, here’s the word. Captain de Brandt is going to attempt to salvage our original rendezvous window. In about fifteen minutes the main engines will fire. You can expect about a half gee for about two minutes. There may be additional maneuvering after that, so remain strapped in and braced until I tell you otherwise. Expect acceleration warning in twelve minutes; until then I want you to take your hoods off to save your suit air. But be ready to seal up fast!”