The rush of air was slowing, and a loud thump sounded; Markham looked for its source and saw that the ship’s main hatch was opening.
“Come on,” Markham shouted, “get on with it! I want to see her!”
A helmeted head appeared in the doorway. “She’s not pretty, sir,” the spaceman said.
“You think I give a tinker’s dam what she looks like? Open those shutters!”
“You can get a look at her from in here, if you want.”
“Can I?” Markham had never before had any use for Magnet, and had little idea how she operated.
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me.” Markham hurried to the hatchway, where the spaceman reached down and caught his arm, boosting him up the yard or so between the floor of the docking bay and the floor of the airlock.
Together, the two men made their way into the ship’s interior, through bare steel passages that gave no indication which of the curving surfaces were meant as walls, which as floors or ceilings. Markham remembered that when the massive gravity generators, capable of drawing in anything that would fit in the bins, were in use, they made it impossible to maintain ordinary shipboard artificial gravity. The crew had to tolerate the spillover, which would draw them toward the generators, so that “up” and “down” would be distorted all over the ship.
When that was happening, Markham judged that this straightforward corridor would become a slanting, treacherous tunnel. The grab bars along one side, he realized, would be rungs of a ladder.
“She’s in Number Four,” the spaceman said, pointing diagonally upward. He spun the wheel to undog the circular hatch at the end of the passage, swung the heavy portal open, and led the way into a peculiar space, a horizontal cylinder some thirty feet in diameter, webbed with catwalks and struts that were built at nightmarishly contradictory angles. The air here was thick and hot; Markham could sense the heat radiating from the far side.
The gravity generators were just beyond that bulkhead.
The spaceman wasn’t giving any guided tours, though; he said, “This way,” and pointed to a strangely-angled staircase leading up and to the left.
Markham followed. The spaceman paused long enough at the next hatchway to unclip a hand-held electric light from its bracket, and a moment later the two men were crawling through a narrow steel tube where that lamp’s dim glow, largely blocked by the spaceman’s body, was the only light. The air was hot and stank of sweat and machine oil.
Then the spaceman stopped and turned-Markham wasn’t sure how he managed it in the confined space of what was really little more than a large pipe. He lifted the lamp almost in Markham’s face.
“There she is,” he said, gesturing.
Markham looked up in the direction indicated, and flinched.
A face was staring down at him through a window-or rather, a ruined red and black thing that had once been a face was pointed in his general direction.
He was a scientist, Markham reminded himself, and he stared calmly back, over his initial shock.
The window was a chunk of glass, or at any rate a clear substance, roughly six inches wide, a foot long, and four or five inches thick, set into the wall of the tube; it gave a view of the interior of one of the collection bins.
The woman’s corpse had landed in the bin with the face pressed up against one end of the window; dark hair, grey dust, and a small pinkish something Markham didn’t recognize at first covered the rest. More dust was smeared on her face; so was a dark powder that was probably dried blood.
The face had been battered even before she went out that airlock, and weeks drifting in hard vacuum had not been kind; the skin was flaked and torn, the flesh dehydrated and shrunken, bone protruding here and there. Markham looked at the pink thing for a moment, just to get away from that hideous visage, and then wished he hadn’t.
The pink thing was the shrivelled remains of a finger, one that was very clearly not attached to a hand.
“She landed a bit hard,” the spaceman remarked. “Three fingers snapped right off and bounced around a bit-things get brittle when they’ve been out there in the cold for awhile.”
Markham swallowed bile.
“We got lucky,” the spaceman added. “Never had one land with the face on the viewport like that before. Makes it a lot easier to get a look at her. So, that the right one?”
“Good God,” Markham said, “you expect me to tell from that?”
The spaceman shrugged, and the little light wavered, sending eerie shadows dancing across the dead woman’s face. “She’s the only woman we found,” he said. “We’ve got dead men in two of the other bins, five of them in all, a couple in Emerald Princess crew uniform, so we’re pretty sure it’s the right bunch, and she was the only woman.”
Markham stared up at the corpse. Then he shook his head.
“It’s probably her,” he said. “I was hoping I’d be able to tell from the descriptions I got, but I hadn’t realized…well, I didn’t account for her condition. We’ll need to get Captain Cahn’s men to identify her-they knew her when she was alive.”
“Should’ve sent one with us,” the spaceman said. “I’d hate to make another trip when we could’ve done it in one.”
“I didn’t think of it,” Markham said. “I can’t think of everything.” He shuddered, all enthusiasm gone. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“After you,” the spaceman said sardonically, and Markham began working his way back out of the observation tube.
Chapter Sixteen
Best settled onto a patch of relatively dry ground and read the inscription on the little packet that the messenger had handed him. The code, still legible despite the smearing, was correct-and really, there could be little doubt that the orders were genuine, under the circumstances.
Not that he was in any hurry to read them; they’d probably mean trouble, and he’d found berry-picking to be fairly pleasant, low-stress work. It would have gotten intolerably dull eventually, but Best thought he could have handled a few more days of boredom.
“We didn’t have any trouble,” Poole said. “I just told anyone who asked that I was taking a man in purple to see Pelbrun.” Best nodded in understanding, but the messenger looked puzzled; Poole explained, “They’d all heard about this proclamation he’d issued, that he wanted all the wizards and all the strangers in purple, and nobody was about to interfere with anyone following the Brown Magician’s orders. A couple of centuries of Shadow’s rule here gave the locals a healthy respect for authority, and this Pelbrun is the man who killed Shadow. You’re on his business, you’re safe.”
“Oh,” the messenger said, comprehension dawning. “So that’s why people fed us, even when we couldn’t pay, but wouldn’t talk to us? They were scared?”
Poole nodded. “You’ve got it exactly.”
“Someone could run a pretty nice little scam that way,” Begley remarked.
“You’d need an Imperial uniform,” Best remarked, as he reluctantly tugged at the seal on the envelope. “Not that easy to come by around here. And you’d have to be careful never to be seen heading away from the fortress.”
“The direction isn’t a big problem,” Begley argued. “You could always double back cross-country. And how many of the natives know what a real Imperial uniform looks like?”
“Good point,” Best conceded. The wax broke, and he opened the flap.
Before taking the folded paper out he looked up at the others. “Sit down, all of you,” he said. “You make me nervous, standing around like that.”
“I should be getting back…” the messenger muttered uneasily, glancing out across Shadowmarsh. He had obviously picked up a few stories about the place during his nine-day hike down from Sunderland-even if the natives wouldn’t talk to him, Best was sure Poole had had a few things to say.
“Without waiting to see if I have a reply, or a report?” Best said mildly. “I don’t think they’d like that back at Base One.”