Using his deadened left hand as a convenient hammer, Rob went again around all the walls, rapping them and listening to the tone that his blows produced. It confirmed his first impression. No escape that way. The seamless planes of walls, floor and ceiling offered no chance of penetration to anything short of a drill or a power laser.
Rob sat down to think again. He needed a different angle.
After half a minute, he went to the wall control and dimmed the lights. Morel would not be fooled by darkness, but Rob wanted to take a better look at what lay outside in the quiet aquasphere. He knew it could not offer an escape. Even if he reached it, he would drown long before he could swim around to any entry point of the living-sphere. If he lived long enough to drown… Where was Caliban?
The water-world was usually illuminated only by the lights of the grid within it. Now, the extra radiation from the approaching Lutetia provided an added dim glow through the whole interior. Rob could see past the nearest nutrient dispensers, with the tangle of vegetation that grew around them. For ten minutes, he waited in the dark and silence. Was it imagination? He thought he could see a hint of a great, dark shape, hovering just beyond the fringe of plant growth. It was close to the place where he had seen Caliban on his first foray into the aquasphere. Was it too unlikely that he would be there again, watching one of the big display screens that gave him his knowledge of the external world? The distant form was tantalizingly vague and unresolved.
Rob went back to the wall control, turned the lighting up a fraction, and returned to examine the window panel. It was a standard form of construction for space use, employed wherever a vacuum seal was needed. A single sheet of tough plastic was secured to the wall opening by twelve heavy bolts, with a thick strip of adhesive seal covering them to make the fit watertight and airtight. The sealing material was designed for easy replacement. Rob peeled back an inch or two and examined the bolts beneath. As he expected they were hardened aluminum, their heads about two inches across and tightened flush with the wall.
Rob pulled all the sealing strip away from the perimeter of the window, using his left hand and forearm as a simple lever. He tried to turn one of the bolts, using the end of an electronic picklock applied to the central groove in the bolt.
It was useless. The tool had never been intended for heavy use and it bent under even a slight force. Rob swore. He needed something with a head about a quarter of an inch thick and two inches wide, something able to stand all his strength in turning it. He made another search of the room. There was nothing, no fitting that he could pry loose to use as an improvised screwdriver.
He glanced again at his watch. Morel had been gone for more than half an hour. He could return at any moment. Whatever Rob did, it had to be quick.
He went back to the wall with the restraining braces mounted close to the floor. One of the collars had a sharp edge on its metal rim, and it was set firmly enough to permit decent leverage. He squatted down and began to use the sharp rim to gouge away the soft synthetic skin of his left hand. With the input sensors to his nervous system switched off there could be no feeling of pain, but there was still an indefinable sense of discomfort as he mutilated his own surrogate flesh. Rob ignored it and pressed harder. After ten minutes of effort he had worked his way down to the hardened metal stringers that formed the skeleton for his artificial fingers. He examined the under-structure with great care. To get the straight edge that he needed, the fingers would have to be broken off in a uniform line close to their meeting place with the palm. The metal was tough, too flexible to break with a blow or a single flexing. Rob took the bared joints of his left forefinger in his right hand and forced the base of the finger as hard as he could against the sharp edge of the metal brace.
The result was a small nick in the metal. Rob repeated his action at different angles until he had a similar mark all the way around the finger. He began to twist it hard towards the thumb, using all the strength of his right hand. It gradually bent at the weakest point, by the gash that he had made. Ten minutes more of flexing, and metal fatigue had developed enough for the break to occur.
Rob examined the broken edge. It would do. It would have to. He patiently repeated the procedure for the middle finger, and then rather more quickly for the other two thinner fingers. When he was done he had four ugly ends of metal, each about a quarter of an inch thick and extending across the end of the palm of his left hand.
He paused for a few seconds. He was perspiring heavily in the close atmosphere, and blood was trickling from a cut in his right elbow where a slip as he was pressing down had brought it into contact with the sharp metal of the brace. He felt exhausted.
Don’t even think about rest.
He hurried back to the window and inserted the crude screwdriver that now formed the end of his left arm into the slit in the head of one of the bolts. He tried to turn it. His lack of weight in the low gravity of the interior of Atlantis made it difficult to get useful leverage, but he found after some experiment that he could wedge his feet firmly against the angle of floor and wall. Gripping his left forearm in his right hand, he turned it with all his strength.
After a minute of desperate effort, the head of the bolt made its first reluctant quarter turn. Rob took a deep breath, rested his forehead against the cool plastic of the window, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again and peered out into the cool green water of the aquasphere, he fancied that he could see the faint outline of Caliban, lurking within the fronded vegetation. He gritted his teeth and went back to work, wondering if desperation was forcing him to see visions in the waving weeds.
In another three minutes he could remove the first bolt. When he took it out he was relieved to see that no water entered. There must be another layer of adhesive seal on the outside of the window. Bathed in a cold sweat he worked on, bolt after awkward bolt. The work was boring and backbreaking. After the first ten minutes it became automatic, a ritual that robbed him of all sense of the passage of time. His labor began to seem more and more pointless as it grew nearer to its doubtful conclusion.
Where is Morel? How long do I have?
He worked on, blindly persistent.
Lack of sleep took its toll. Rob was semi-conscious and slumped by the wall opposite the big window when the clang of bolts from the heavy door brought him abruptly to attention. He moved across to the light control and turned it from its dimmed setting to maximum illumination. As he did so, the door slid open. Joseph Morel stood in the entrance.
He did not come inside at once. His cold grey eyes scanned the room carefully before he stepped forward. Rob thanked his own thoroughness in replacing the adhesive sealing strip at the edge of the window, and hiding the bolts he had removed in his pockets. It would take a close inspection to discover his work on the window.
Morel was taking no chances. He was carrying a heavy cylinder with a crosswired blue end piece. As he stepped cautiously inside the room he held it pointed straight at Rob’s chest.
“I presume that it is not necessary for me to describe this to you?” Morel’s voice was soft and precise.
Rob nodded. “Surgical laser.”
“Correct. If you have never seen one in operation, let me point out that this is a heavy-duty model and it is now set at maximum intensity. A full pass across your body — which I trust will not be necessary — will take maybe one fiftieth of a second. The result will be a perfect and cauterized separation.”