The three kilometer downward swoop took less than a minute. All the way to the airlock at the bottom I watched carefully for any sign that McAndrew and Anna had met trouble there. Everything was normal.
The drilling mechanism at the end of the shaft was still in position. Normally the shaft could extend itself through hard, frozen ice at a hundred feet an hour. When they came to the liquid interior, however, Lanhoff had arrested the progress of the drill and installed the airlock. It was a cylindrical double chamber about six meters across, with a movable metal wall separating the two halves.
I cycled through the first part of the lock, closed the wall, and went forward to the second barrier. I hesitated in front of it. The wall was damp with a viscous fluid. The airlock had been used recently. Anna and McAndrew had passed through here to the liquid core of the planetoid. If I wished to find them I must do the same.
Was there a port? I wanted to take a good look at the interior of Manna before I was willing even to consider going through into it.
The only transparent area was a tiny section a few inches across, where a small panel had been removed and replaced by a thin sheet of clear plastic. Lanhoff must have arranged it this way, to make an observation point before he would risk a venture beyond the lock. Despite his curiosity referred to by Anna, it suggested that he was a cautious man — and it seemed to increase the odds against me. I was diving blind, and in a hurry.
I drifted across and put the faceplate of my suit flat against the transparent plate. The only illumination in the interior was coming from my suit, and because it had to shine through the port I was confused by back-scattered light. I held my hand to shield my eyes, and peered in.
My first impression was of a snowstorm. Great drifting white flakes swam lazily across the field of view. As I adjusted to the odd lighting, the objects resolved themselves to white, feathery snowballs, ranging in size from a grape to a closed fist. The outer parts were in constant vibration, providing a soft-edged, uncertain shimmer as they moved through the pale yellow fluid of Manna’s interior.
Even as I watched, the number and density of the white objects was increasing. The snowfall became a blizzard. And floating far away from me, almost at the limit of vision, I saw two great white shapes. They were travesties of the human form, bloated and blurred outlines like giant snowmen. Every second they grew bigger, as more and more snowballs approached and adhered to their surfaces. They were swelling steadily, rounding to become perfect spheres.
I shivered in my suit. Alien. The figures looked totally alien, but I knew what I had found. At their centers, unable to see, move, or send messages, were McAndrew and Anna. As I watched I thought of the guardian white corpuscles in my own blood-stream. The feathery balls were like them, busy leukocytes crowding around to engulf and destroy the foreign organisms that dared to invade the body of Manna.
How could I rescue them? They were in no danger for the first few minutes, but the snowballs would muffle the escape of heat from the suits. Unless the clinging balls were cleared away, Anna and McAndrew would soon die a blind and stifling death.
My first instinct was to open the lock and plunge through to the interior. Another look at the feathery snowballs changed my mind about that. They were thicker than ever, drifting up from the deep interior of the planetoid. If I went out there they would have me covered in less than a minute. The laser that I had brought with me was useless. If I used it in water, it would waste its energy turning a small volume close to me to steam.
And I had no other weapon with me.
Return to the Star Harvester, and look for inspiration there? It might be too late for McAndrew and Anna.
I went across to the side of the lock. There was a dual set of controls for the drilling shaft there, installed so that drilling progress could be monitored and modified on the spot. If I started the drill, the fluid ahead would offer little resistance. The tunnel would extend further into the liquid, far enough to enclose the area where the two misshapen spheres were floating. So if I opened the lock first, then activated the drill…
The timing would be crucial. Once the lock was open, liquid would be drawn into the evacuated area around me. Then I would have to operate the drill unit so that the open lock moved to enclose the two swollen masses of snowballs, close the lock again, and pump the liquid out. But if I was too slow, the blizzard of snow would close in on me, too, and I would be as helpless as McAndrew and Anna.
Delay wouldn’t help. I pressed the lever that opened the lock, moved to the side of the chamber, and started the drill extender.
Liquid rushed in through the opening aperture. I struggled to move forward against its pressure, fighting my way back to the lock control.
There was a swirling tide of white all around me. Feathered balls hit my suit and stuck to it, coating the faceplate in an opaque layer. Within thirty seconds I could not see anything, and my arms and legs were sluggish in their movements as I clung to the lock lever.
I had not anticipated that I would become blind so quickly. Were McAndrew and Anna already swept into the chamber by the advancing drill and the opened lock? I had no way of knowing. I waited as long as I dared, then heaved at the lever. My arm moved slowly, hampered by the mass of snow-spheres clinging to it. I felt the control close, and sensed the muffled roar of the pump. I tried to thrash my arms, to shake off the layers that clogged their movement. It was useless. Soon I was unable to move at all. I was in darkness. If the snowballs could tolerate vacuum, McAndrew and Anna and I would go the same way as Lanhoff; we’d be trapped inside our suits, our communication units useless, until the heat built up to kill us.
It was a long, long wait (only ten minutes, according to the communications link on board the ship — it felt like days). Suddenly there was a lightening of the darkness in front of my faceplate. I could move my arms again. The feather balls were falling off me and being pumped out through the airlock.
I turned around, peering through the one clear spot on my faceplate. There were two spherical blobs with me in the chamber, and they were gradually taking on human shapes. After another five minutes I could see parts of their suits.
“Anna! Mac! Turn around.”
They clumsily rotated to face me. I saw them staring out of the faceplates, white-faced but undeniably alive.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait.” McAndrew was taking a bag from the side of his suit, opening it, and scooping up samples of liquid and snowballs. I decided that he was terminally crazy.
“Don’t fool with that, Mac — let’s get out of here.”
What was the danger now? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I reached out, grabbed his arm, and began to haul him back through to the other chamber. We were still sloshing in a chaos of fluid and floating feather balls.
Anna grabbed at my arm, so I was towing both of them. I could hear her teeth chattering.
“God,” she said. “I thought we were dead. I knew it, it was just like being dead, no sound, nothing to see, not able to move.”
“I know the feeling,” I grunted — they were a weighty pair. “How did you get caught? I mean, why didn’t you get back into the airlock as soon as the snowballs arrived?”
We were scooting back up the tunnel as fast as we could, McAndrew still clinging to his bucket of specimens.