As if on cue, the intercom loudspeakers in the corridor started blaring, “SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE. SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE.”
They had found T.J. was missing and had called security. The panic was on.
You know, the more you hurry the slower things seem to go. Felt like an hour before I had the suit sealed up, the helmet screwed on, and was opening the emergency airlock.
But once I popped outside, I got that rush I always get when I’m back in space, on my own. My suit was old and smelled kind of ripe, but it felt homey inside it. And there was the big curving ball of Earth, huge and blue and sparkling in the sunlight. I just hung there for a minute or so and watched the sunset. It happens fast from orbit, but the array of colors are dazzling.
Now we were in shadow, on the night side. All the better to sneak around in. The controls to my maneuvering pack were on the equipment belt of my suit. I worked them as easily and unconsciously as a pianist playing scales and jetted over to the laboratory airlock on the innermost wheel.
I kept my suit radio tuned to the station’s intercom frequency. Plenty of jabbering going on. They were looking for me and T.J. Starting a compartment-to-compartment search. There would be plenty more disgruntled customers before this night was through, but most of them were Rockledge people staying at my hotel at a ruinous discount, so what the hell did I care?
I got to the lab’s emergency airlock with no trouble. The light was dim, and I didn’t want to use my helmet lamp. No sense advertising that I was out here. Over my shoulder the lights of night-side cities and highways twinkled and glittered like a connect-the-dots map of North America.
I was just starting to work the airlock’s control panel when the station shuddered. At first I thought I had hiccupped or something, but almost immediately I realized that the airlock hatch had shaken, shivered. Which meant that the whole damned station must have vibrated, quivered for some reason.
Which meant trouble. The station was big, massive. It wouldn’t rattle unless it had been hit by something dangerous, or somebody had set off an explosion inside it, or—
I spun around and my eyes damn near popped out of my head. An escape pod had just fired off. Somebody had set off the explosive separation bolts and detached it from the station. It was floating away like a slow-motion cannonball.
And I knew exactly which pod it was. Pete must have figured out how to override my disconnect and booted up the pod’s mother-loving systems. Now he was riding off into the sunrise, on an orbit of his own, with T.J. aboard. Son of a motherless she-dog!
I jetted after the goddamned pod. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just went out after it. Everything else dropped out of my mind. All I could think of was that little T.J. and Pete were in there and they stood a better than even chance of getting themselves killed if somebody didn’t get to them before they sailed out beyond reach. And it was all my fault.
If I had been really smart, I would have just reported the loose pod over my suit radio and gone about my business of burglarizing the Rockledge lab. The security people would have fired up another pod to go out and rescue the kids, everybody in the station would be plastered to the view ports or display screens to watch the scene, and I could pilfer away inside the lab without being disturbed.
But I’m not that smart. I went chasing after the damned pod. It was only after I had been barreling toward it for a few minutes that I realized I had damned well better reach it because I didn’t have enough juice in my jet pack to get me back to the station again.
Pete must be scared purple, I thought, floating off into his own orbit. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to reconnect the radio, because I heard nothing from the pod when I tapped into its assigned frequency. Maybe he was yelling himself hoarse into the microphone, but he was getting no response. Poor kid must have been crapping his pants by now.
Fortunately, he hadn’t lit off the pod’s main thruster. That would’ve zoomed him out so far and so fast that I wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching him. He had just fired the explosive disconnect bolts, which blew the pod away from the station. If he fired the main thruster without knowing how to use the pod’s maneuvering jets, he’d either blast the damned cannonball down into the atmosphere so steeply that he’d burn up like a meteor, or he’d rocket himself out into a huge looping orbit that would take days or even weeks to complete.
As it was, he was drifting in an independent orbit, getting farther from the station every second. And I was jamming along after him, hard as I could.
I knew I had to save enough of my fuel to slow myself down enough to latch onto the pod. Otherwise I’d go sailing out past them like some idiotic jerk and spend the rest of my numbered hours establishing my own personal orbit in empty space. I wondered if anybody would bother to come out and pick up my body, once they knew what had happened to me.
Okay, I was on-course. The pod was growing bigger, fast, looming in front of me. I turned myself around and gave a long squirt of my maneuvering jet to slow me down. Spun around again and saw the pod coming up to smack me square in the visor. I was still coming on too fast! Christ, was my flying rusty.
I had to jink over sideways a bit, or splatter myself against the pod. As the jets slid me over, I yanked out the tether from my equipment belt and whipped it against the curving hull of the pod as I zoomed by. Its magnetized head slid along the hull until it caught on a handhold. The tether stretched a bit, like a bungee cord, and then held.
As I pulled myself hand over hand to the pod, I glanced back at the station. It was so far away now it looked like a kid’s toy hanging against the stars.
Grunting, puffing, totally out of shape for this kind of exercise, I finally . got to the pod’s airlock and lifted open its outer hatch. I was pouring sweat from every square inch of my skin. Got the hatch shut again, activated the pump, and as soon as the telltale light turned green I popped the inner hatch with one hand and slid my visor up with the other.
There sat Pete at the controls, ecstatic as a Hungarian picking pockets. And little T.J. was snoozing happily in the arms of Senator Jill Meyers.
“Hello, Sam,” she said sweetly to me. “What kept you?”
It was then that I realized I had been nothing but the tool of a superior brain.
Jill had reconnected the pod’s systems and blown the explosive bolts. She had known exactly what I was doing because she had stuck a microminiaturized video homing beacon on the back of my shirt when she had clutched me so passionately there in the doorway of her suite.
“It’s standard equipment for a U.S. Senator,” she quipped, once she had plucked it off my shirt.
For once in my life I was absolutely speechless.
“When you told me you were babysitting—voluntarily—I started to smell a rodent,” Jill said as she almost absently showed Pete how to maneuver the pod back to the station. “I knew you were up to something,” she said to me.
I just hung there in midair, all my hopes and plans in a shambles.
“I’ve got to be invisible now,” Jill said as we neared the station. She glided over to the equipment locker built into the pod’s curving bulkhead and slid its hatch open. “It’ll be a snug fit,” she said, eying it closely. “Glad I didn’t have dessert tonight.”
“Wait a minute!” I burst. “What’s going on? How did you—I mean, why—what’s going on?” I felt like a chimpanzee thrown into a chess tournament.