“Tina, can you hear me?” Sasha yelled.
“Mommy!” Tina wailed, her voice coming in clearly from the vestibule through the open outer door to the microphones in the air lock. “Get away from me! Mommy, the which is chasing me!”
“Tina,” Sasha said as calmly as she could, wishing she’d never shown the classic video to Tina. “Inspector McCarthy is not a witch. She’s just trying to bring you to me. Please go with her.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Pretty please, Tina. Help the inspector and I’ll give you some ice cream.”
Seconds went by, then Tina said in a tentative little voice, “OK.”
“Tina, please come here,” Inspector McCarthy said. “Quickly, child, we have to go quickly.”
“Don’t hurt!”
“I won’t hurt you, Tina. You can ride on my back where I can’t even see you.”
Quiet. Then, in a small voice, “OK. But don’t hurt.”
“I’ve got her,” Inspector McCarthy finally announced, “and we’re heading back into the air lock.”
Tina laughed. “This is fun. Giddiup, horsey!”
Eons of seconds passed, McCarthy grunted and said. “Dolph, I can’t move the outer door—the hinges must be bent.”
“The air distribution system has repressurized to normal,” Hopper announced.
“Hopper,” Dolph quickly commanded, “push the pressure up to the red-line limits and start venting the habitat.” They had to reduce the pressure differential to a minimum, if not get it going the other way. It would be many seconds before venting the large volume of habitat would have much effect. His ears, though, told him it had started—and they could help it. “Sasha, help me with the inner door.”
If they got it open, he realized, and the vestibule blew, they’d be sucked into the vacuum as well as Tina and Inspector McCarthy. But neither of them wasted a moment reaching for their helmets. They crouched on opposite sides of the oval door and pulled on its wheel handle in. They strained, the motors strained, metal squealed, air whistled by going out, and gradually the door swung open.
McCarthy shoved Tina through and Dolph hooked a tool tether to her belt.
“Internal pressure down to point two one.” Hopper announced. He felt the rush of air out increase second by second, and quickly reached down for the inspector’s hand, but she slipped away and slid toward the outer door in the slipstream, frantically trying to slow herself by grabbing pieces of equipment on the wall of the air lock.
Without really thinking, he dove through the inner door past the struggling Inspector McCarthy and grabbed the rim of the outer door with his hands. Straining muscles he hadn’t used in a long time, he pulled himself back in against the air flow and moved to help her.
He was just in time. The inspector lost her last handhold and was blown into him. They untangled and he tried to help her up toward the inner door. But the position was awkward and the air flow was too strong for even their combined efforts to get her anywhere. He had to cut that wind down, if only for a few seconds.
“Dolph!” Sasha screamed. “Hopper, put full reservoir pressure into the suit lines. Now!”
Nothing happened. His luck, Dolph thought. The remaining pipe must have been good. When you wanted something to give, it was rock solid. The operating principal seemed to be that whatever he wanted wasn’t going to—
Dolph heard a pipe burst behind him like a cannon shot. Air rushed into the vestibule and, momentarily, the wind through the air lock abated. He pushed the inspector through the inner door and pulled himself in, with both Sasha and Inspector McCarthy helping.
As soon as his feet were clear, Sasha slammed the inner lock door shut behind him with a force that made the whole habitat ring. They had the barest moment to look at each other before a great rending boom echoed through the habitat. The leak through the incomplete seal of the inner door now became a scream.
“Vestibule air pressure is now one microbar and falling,” Hopper informed them.
Dolph reached for the emergency seal foam, but Inspector McCarthy stopped him.
“There’s no way the outer air lock door can be shut against that, and we still have to get out,” she yelled. “Best get Tina in a bag and our helmets on, then tell the computer to recover as much air as it can. With vacuum on both sides, getting out will be easy.” Inspector McCarthy put a hand on his arm as he moved to get her. “Let me help her.”
“It’s OK,” Sasha said. Dolph nodded.
“Tina, let’s go for another ride,” McCarthy suggested.
Tina giggled, obviously no longer afraid of the older woman. “Where’s my ice cream?”
“It’s back in the Hopper, young lady. You’ll have to get in your rescue tube now.”
“Are we going to go there now?”
“Soon.”
Dolph checked his seal as Inspector McCarthy tried to coax Tina into a rescue tube.
“This is different,” Tina whined. “It’s not my ball. I want my ball.”
“It’s OK, Tina,” Sasha said. “This will get you to the Hopper and your ice cream. We have to wait a while for the air pressure to go down, though. You can wait for ice cream, can’t you?”
“OK. I like ice cream.”
“Are you OK, Inspector?” Dolph asked when they all had their helmets on.
“All sealed. And in much better shape than your habitat, I’m afraid.”
They hadn’t had time to prep the inside for decompression. Bottles were bursting, wet towels boiling, partition panels blistered here and there.
Three hours later, Tina was fed, changed, and asleep in her compartment. The haggard adults faced each other across the boardroom table.
Inspector McCarthy raised a bushy gray eyebrow and sighed. “I estimate that it’s going to take you six months to repair the damage. Exposing the interior to vacuum won’t have done any good. Most of your water pipes went. You’ve got paint flecks, ice, and other floating debris everywhere including all the places that should be kept free of it. So I’d guess another six months of work before it’s ready to inspect again.”
“A year to get ready for another provisional?” Dolph tried to adjust to the shock.
But for maybe the second or third time since he’d met her, Inspector McCarthy smiled. “Not a provisional, a final. I’m going to pass you on provisional and move those items left on the fix-now log to the fix-later,” she shot Dolph a look. “Except for one—a simple remove and dispose item.”
“We get the asteroid?” Sasha exclaimed, wonder in her voice.
“Provisionally. And I have another proposition.”
Dolph tensed. Too good to be true usually was. “Yes?”
“I happen to have a number of things in my cargo tanks that you can use. I’ll have to collect their cost from you, so that I can replace them and be ready for the next newcomers that get in trouble. With my provisional, the Pallas branch of the Asteroid Development Fund should give you a loan.”
He set his mouth. At exorbitant terms no doubt. What they give with one hand, they take… no. No, that attitude was a one-way ticket to more trouble, he told himself.
Sasha looked at him, clearly worried. Was she more worried about undertaking a loan, or at his potential reaction? Probably both.
“Darling,” he said, “we have to trust someone. Inspector McCarthy just risked her life for Tina.”
Sasha exhaled and grinned, eyes glistening.
“Good, Dolph.” Eileen McCarthy said, smiling. “It won’t be that much compared to what you should get out of this rock in water alone in the next year, and you won’t have to pay until you’ve been self-sufficient for a couple of years. Now, one more thing. Could you do without Tina for that time? I think I can teach her a thing or two on Pallas about how to live in space, follow instructions and so on.” Then she got a little glint in her grandmotherly eye. “And don’t worry about Jaynes Femrite hooking her on something. Anyway, it was a gang initiation thing and he was only thirteen at the time. He didn’t know what he was eating.”