For some strange reason, it is very easy for things to go wrong in open space. It must be that the utter vastness of it intimidates us, makes us a little less self-assured, a little more indecisive. Perfect ingredients for promoting a volatile atmosphere in a place which has no atmosphere at all, except for the one you bring with you.
I was standing under the surreal canopy of space on the grated, dull-silver gangplank extended to one corner of the alien ship. I was the last of five, white-suited spacemen slowly making their way toward the bright yellow glow from its open hatch. I was lagging behind.
Something had happened. I could not remember how I'd come to be there. I could not recall the technicians suiting us up or R.J. buying off on the suit checks. Nor could I remember decompression, or opening the outer door. I paused on the platform with one gloved hand on the frigid, tubular hand railing and turned to look back at the airlock. At the end of the gangway, the gray-silver, oval shaped outer door in the belly of Electra was closed, as it should have been. That meant I had closed it. I could not remember doing that. Above it, the beady dark eyes of the B-deck airlock monitor cameras were staring down and I realized that probably every member of the crew was glued to a monitor somewhere, watching the team's progress, and wondering why I was lagging behind.
I turned awkwardly back around to see the fat, white helmet of the first EVA member tilt down and disappear into the open hole in the mystery ship. A rush of apprehension surged through me. I hurried along like a playful albino gorilla and caught up to the others.
We pushed free from the security of the gangway and drifted inside, emerging into a place of wonder, an arcade of lights and instrumentation as large as an auditorium. There were few familiar points of reference. The hard, uneven metal floor was an unpleasant shade of dull crimson. The overhead was low, a domed canopy that radiated olive green light. A fat, fluorescent-yellow orb hung in its apex. Attached to the base of it, a cone-shaped, ribbed anode pointed downward. Directly below, a large, low oval table mushroomed up out of the floor. Its fat base pulsed displeasing hues of green and gray at slow, regular intervals.
The chamber was pear-shaped. We had entered at the narrow end. The walls were covered by a tangle of tubes, cables, half-spheres and darkened screens. Control stations were scattered at intervals among them. Functionally, they were just as incomprehensible as everything else. The room seemed like scale model, miniature control surfaces designed for preschoolers to play with. It was an architecture which provided little comfort to its users. There were no control seats anywhere; no aesthetics of any kind. I'd begun to suspect the creatures who'd once resided here were 0-G dwellers until I spied a tubular elevator shaft on the opposite side of the chamber.
We hung together in the weightless, airless environment, holding on to each other for stability, drinking in the strangeness of it, the never-before-seen habitat of an unknown culture, one which seemed wholly incompatible with our own. There was nothing familiar, no points of commonality to identify with, no humanoid conveniences, none of the visual or sensual comforts humans deem so necessary for even a minimal existence. I allowed the moment to linger as long as possible. There was no doubt the crew back on board the Electra was just as mesmerized by the views from our helmet-cams. We were all spellbound by what we saw. I broke the spell. "Electra, this is Tarn. Are you getting this?"
The tempered voice of Commander Tolson came back, "It's very interesting, Mr. Tarn. You are cleared to continue."
Erin Starr and Frank Parker, the new guy, were carrying the hand scanners. From my position slightly behind, I could see Erin studying hers. "Erin, anything harmful?"
Even through the sterility of the suit intercom there was a touch of hesitation in her voice. "No, nothing at all that I can find. The place is a dead zone. No radiations, no fields at all. It's spooky."
"Okay, let's pair up. Erin and Pete, take the left. Nira and Frank, go right. We'll meet at the other end. You guys remember, now; hands off."
I pushed myself around in time to see the bottom of Pete's shoes as he and Erin coasted away toward a darkened console mounted against a section of green bulkhead. Erin led, keeping her scanner held out alongside her, running it continuously in search of life within the control surfaces. Pete paused and began to slowly drift over backwards in weightlessness as he fussed with the safety line on the bulky, hi-res, multi-spec camera. Its black, ribbed surface contrasted sharply against his light-colored suit.
I squeezed the suit maneuver pad by my left hip and came around to look at Nira and Frank. Nira had stopped to set camera field adjustments. Even with the cumbersome challenges presented by a spacesuit, she embraced her camera as though it were a lover. She mulled over it, fiddling with this, adjusting that, intent on getting it just so. Had the intercom not remained silent, I would have been certain she was talking to it. Someone once told me the only reason she had joined the space agency was so she would have unexplored environments to photograph. Her only official reprimand since achieving EVA status came about because of a legendary, unauthorized leap across a deep ravine on the dark side of the moon to photograph the fallen walls of an ancient alien base in the Mare Australe region.
Frank did not wait for her to set up and was already quite a bit ahead. Poor EVA etiquette.
I jetted over to the dark tabletop at the center of the room. Its surface was so perfect it looked like a reflective black hole. It cast the eerie image of my wrinkled spacesuit as I floated over. The oval slab was so deep, rich, and glassy, I was tempted to see if my hand would penetrate it, but something held me back. As I hovered above it, a sudden jolt of fear arced through me, that unexplainable little panic that awakens within you when your subconscious has become aware of something frightening, though your conscious mind has not yet noticed.
Faces. Hundreds of them. Staring up from deep below the blackness. Mournful faces. My heart skipped a beat. My breathing choked off. I strained to see down into the ink, looking for what I thought had been there.
There was nothing, just the queer sight of the wrinkled, canvas, balloon-man drifting above the black mirrored slab. I took a deep breath and assured myself it had been nothing more than overactive imagination.
Excited voices began to break in over the intercom as the others continued to explore and record. Erin's had digressed into a repetitious whine about darkened consoles with dead memory. She had the wistful tone of an excited child who had accidentally found her way into a candy store, but the candy had turned out to be wax. Because her scanner was sucking up almost nothing, she had begun hounding Pete for photography faster than he could take it.
Everything was proceeding as planned, but I had a persistent feeling of wrongness, an uncomfortable, nagging sensation we did not belong there, that we should not have come. There was no way to know if the others were feeling the same, but behind the veil of professionalism they seemed to be hiding uneasiness. It was as though an unseen horror loomed nearby, waiting like an animal in the wild. Sensing a predator, my instincts were awake and alert. But one hundred and fifty people on board Electra were watching and listening. The fear had to be tucked aside and the assignment continued.
I coasted ahead until I had reached the frosty, semitransparent, tubular framework of the elevator shaft. Just inside the arched-shaped entrance, the hole in the floor dropped down into a deep recess. A triangular-shaped doorway of white light was visible at the next lower level. Repetitive, patchwork gratings with strips of dull, purple light followed the shaft down. Far down I could make out the lift, a simple platform with small, round, ash-red lamps embedded into its base forming a circle of dull light. A low handrail glowed soft-yellow fluorescence.
The chatter on the intercom had stopped. I looked up to find the other four team members hovering around the opening, staring down into the hole with me. "Electra, this is Tarn. We have access to a lower level. What are your instructions, Captain?"
There was an unusually long pause before the answer came
. I had started to repeat myself when Grey's reply finally squelched-in. "Boarding party, you are cleared to continue. You have ten minutes to RTV."
"Tarn to Electra, Understood, Captain. Ten minutes to return."
The latitude they were giving us was surprising. It was one thing to look beyond an open door and quite another to venture down into the holds of an abandoned starship. In silence, we lingered above the open shaft. The feeling of foreboding persisted. I brought myself to the vertical, pulled myself into the tube, and with a last check around tapped in enough Z thrust to slowly start down, feet first. The others followed in pairs. The ugly feeling seemed to grow with the descent. The sides of the dark, grooved shaft looked scarred and well-used. The lift had left worn and pitted places in the black metal ribs.
At the base of the tunnel, the open portal lead to a second chamber, one even less pleasant than above. Everything was sterile silver. It was much smaller than the control room we had just seen but no less arcane. A silver table was attached to the silver floor in the center, like an operating table only with pointed ends, slightly inclined at the head, slightly declined at the foot. Silver cabinets attached to silver walls, silver tools in silver trays on silver countertops. Low, flat, silver ceiling with unrecognizable silver attachments hanging from it, six low, silver-framed, triangular doors, including the one through which we had entered, evenly spaced around the oval room. A heavy darkness lay within them.
They say it is very cold in space, but in all the time I've spent outside I've never felt it. So thick and heavily insulated are the Bell Standard Spacesuits that the suit-liner heating and cooling makes you immune to almost any environment. But even through the dense layers of thermopolyurethane and environmesh I could still sense it; a feeling of doom that was almost unbearable. I wanted nothing but to leave there. It was a graveyard of nightmares. There was a subtle howling in the silence and coldness from the outside. Suit air seemed to have taken on a stale, sterile smell. The room's pressure differential felt unstable, as though the suit had to vary to compensate. I looked at the data screen on the back of my left forearm. It showed no changes in suit pressure. Chilling static electricity bristled on my arms and the back of my neck.
I became aware of the rest of the team hanging behind me. Normally, they would have dispersed around the area to investigate. Their reluctance told me they were experiencing the same unexplained dread.
I turned in place and found Langly. "Pete, switch on your camera's spot. Let’s take a look through one of these other doorways. Erin, let me have your scanner."
We floated to the nearest door and took positions on either side of it. I scanned the darkness while Pete set up. He twisted open the light on the top of his camera and switched it on. We hung side by side as he pointed the light into the blanket of blackness beyond the open door. The more we saw the less we understood. The bright beam from the camera's light became a narrow tunnel disappearing down a corridor that went on forever, a corridor that looked like a giant intestinal tract. It seemed to be constructed from some sort of gray-brown jelly substance that climbed upward in some places and oozed out from openings in others. It absorbed light. It seemed almost ...alive. I jumped when the Captain's voice cut in over the intercom.
"Grey to boarding party. One minute to RTV."
"Tarn here. We're starting back."
I rotated to face the exit. Just inside the low V-cut of the elevator door, Erin was holding to Nira's right arm. They were floating no more than a meter above the floor as though they were ready to leave quickly. Frank had remained outside in the shaft, bracing himself against the weightlessness by keeping one gloved-hand clutching the top of the open entranceway.
Pete killed the spotlight and we gathered near the exit. I bent over backward and looked up in time to see Frank crossing over and out. I shook my head and motioned the others to ascend. They were eager to go.
I sometimes have this sixth sense when things are about to go to hell. It is a talent more conditioned than instinctive, a byproduct of the tears and punctures of the flesh that have resulted from taking too much for granted. Over the years I have come to trust it.
As I approached the top of the shaft, that familiar little misgiving crept over me. At first, I guessed it to be part of the unpleasant influence of the place, part of the sick little feeling that had been bouncing around in the pit of my stomach. Then I heard Nira, above me, in an unusually strict tone say "Frank, what are you doing?" I pushed off of the hard wall and hurried up.
He was upright with his back to us, floating in a kneeling position near the floor on the opposite side of the room. He'd found some kind of luggage-sized, heavily-engraved, copper box attached to the wall near a bulkhead. It had not been there on the way in. It glimmered almost like gold in the odd, fluctuating light. As I tapped at my suit controls to halt my ascent, a small gold handle deployed from the box in response to something Frank had done. I called out quickly as he gripped it in his right hand. "Hey, Frank; you scan that thing yet?"
With a quick sideward twist of his wrist, the box blew open explosively as though a bomb had gone off. A blast of high-intensity light erupted from the container and engulfed Frank. At the same instant, the concussion from the blast hit us. It flattened my suit against my chest. My ears popped and began to ring. The suit pumps whined as they struggled to compensate. In vacuum there was no sound to it, but Frank's cry echoed in over the intercom in a stifled, distorted scream which lasted only a fraction of a second and then squelched off. He plunged over backward, his arms and legs kicking and flailing frantically. Halfway across the room he crashed hard into Nira who'd been on her way to stop him. The impact slammed her aside and sent her tumbling over backwards towards me. I was driven back toward a bulkhead, groping at the suit thruster controls. As the concussion passed, the torso of my suit popped back out and overinflated slightly. Whatever mass had been ejected from Pandora's Box quickly lost most of its intensity. Nira's camera, taken by the collision, was spinning away toward the big, oval table at the chamber's center. Instead of glancing off its glossy, black surface, it smoothly disappeared into the tabletop as though it were an open portal. As I struggled to regain control, I caught sight of Frank in his burned-out suit racing by me on the right. He was face down, limp, and coasting backwards in a slow turn. I lunged and managed to catch him under the left arm and together we locked into a slow vertical turn. A second later someone began grappling with my legs to help us. Pete quickly pulled up beside me, still tangled in his camera's safety line, and together the two of us held Frank's motionless figure steady. Erin jetted over and grabbed Frank’s backpack to help.
I called to Nira and craned my neck inside my helmet to find her. In a breathless but reassuring tone, she replied, "I'm okay. I'm just caught on something. Take care of Frank."
I waved myself around and spotted her by the elevator shaft. She was working on her left sleeve, tangled in the dirty-brown cables within the shaft.
We turned Frank's lifeless body over and steadied him to check the damage. Pete broke away and worked to free himself from his camera.
"Pete, when you get loose, ditch the camera and go help her."
A harsh and demanding voice came over the com. "Boarding Party, this is Grey. Report."
Frank looked very bad. It was the type of bad that gives you the bottomed out feeling that maybe you should just go ahead and figure this one's dead so you won't have to be so flatly disappointed when you find out he is. But you can't do that. You must hope. You can't risk feeling such utter devastation; on the outside chance you're wrong. He wasn't moving. His face shield was melted and shriveled like a dried raisin. It had no transparency left. I wondered if that was just as well. The front of his suit was blackened and sticky from the waist up, but still inflated. The left arm still had the balloon-feel.
As carefully as possible I held his wrist and wiped the soot-like material from the display screen on his forearm. I tapped the dingy-bright orange L
.S. button and to my surprise the life support title appeared on the screen. His suit pressure was holding. Once again the Bell Standard had lived up to its reputation. But there was a critical problem. O2 was available but the little blue vertical bar on the graph showed the storage level slowly bleeding off and approaching the yellow warning line. The suit silhouette on the right side of the screen was flashing a red O2 icon, showing a leak within the backpack. It couldn't be patched. I called up his vital signs. Pulse and respiration were erratic and the thin little red graph lines for both had hit the ceiling several times.
Grey's voice came booming back over the com as Pete continued to unwind himself. In the melee, his camera had spun like a propeller blade and wound the harness tight enough to affect his life support, also.
"Tarn, report, immediately!" It suddenly dawned on me Grey was getting my helmet-cam view of Frank. I wondered how many others were. I opened my mouth to answer but never got the chance. A desperate cry from Nira made me jump in my suit.
"Oh God, it's coming up!"
We looked up just in time to see Nira barely get out of the way as the luminous handrail of the alien elevator popped up through the shaft as though it had been called. The empty car stopped abruptly. Though Nira had avoided being struck by it, the sleeve of her suit remained caught at a spot where the car's framework passed very close to the shaft's edge. As the car came up, a section of the railing hooked her sleeve just behind the bright red, glove coupling ring. The fabric of the suit did not slow the platform in the least. The railing ripped through the material at the forearm as though it were paper. The gaping tear freed Nira from her entrapment in the worst possible way.
There is nothing quite like a bad suit tear in the vacuum of space. It is the ultimate occupational veto. Whatever you're doing, you'll stop. The absolute terror of it is the way most victims die. No one ever succumbs to suffocation from a cut suit. It's usually the boiling blood that gets you. You freeze on the outside while you explode on the inside. Very messy bodily eruptions mark the end of it. And when it is over the offending suit has suddenly become more of a bag than a piece of apparel.
I jerked away from Frank and jetted toward her. Somehow she managed to push off the elevator shaft with one foot while wrestling frantically with the gaping rip in her suit sleeve. She met me halfway, clutching the tear with her left hand, a small stream of vapor spraying from the wound. There was a faint tinge of red near the base of it. Vaporized blood. Her eyes were wide and her teeth clenched, like a child who had just been bitten by something. She was too frightened to speak but she refused to scream. I grabbed her left upper arm roughly and pulled her to me. I wrapped my legs around her waist and together we went into a slow, frantic turn. Globes of suit glue were escaping from between her fingers as the Bell Standard tried to seal itself. Little balls of it formed and floated in my way. With my right hand I reached behind my waist and yanked out the octopus, and in the same motion jammed it into the receptacle on her backpack. My suit sagged and the pumps wined as air rushed to her. I tore open the pocket on my right thigh and pulled out the flat-pack of suit tape and stuck the red start line on her forearm just above her death grip. As terrified as she was, she worked the problem with me. As I wrapped, she inched her glove away. The suit tape melted into the dwindling flow of glue. Bubbles formed and popped but at a much slower rate. Our suit pressures began to make gains. I realized someone had taken hold of my left arm and was steadying us. Erin's voice came in over the com.
"Captain, we have two medical emergencies. We're on our way back. We'll need a med team in the airlock." The voice that acknowledged Erin's transmission was that of an ensign. It meant Grey and Tolson were already on their way.
We hurried from the hurtful realm of the alien spacecraft and traversed the cold gap of space without ever touching the gangway. Erin and Pete guided Frank's sleeping form through the emptiness using skillful, complementary suit maneuvering techniques. No one spoke. Nira and I clung together like lovers. And in those fearful seconds in the empty, blackness between ships, she became the most precious thing I had ever held. Her heart was beating in my chest; her fear was in my mind.
We crossed over like a wounded pack of stray dogs who'd ventured down the street and into the neighbor's yard only to be run off by buckshot. We were hurrying home now, to lick our wounds in a place that was familiar, safe and warm.