Prisoners of Tomorrow (56 page)

Borowski checked the final items and Mungabo passed them inside. Then Chan climbed out. The four figures on the floor stood up awkwardly, and working in pairs—McCain and Scanlon, Rashazzi and Koh—checked each other’s face seals one more time. The other three helped them fix webbing harnesses over the suits to carry the equipment, and switched their oxygen hoses to the smaller bottles they would be taking with them. At last all was ready. The four who were going and the three who would be staying behind exchanged final handshakes.

“You’ll do just great, guys,” Mungabo said, talking loudly to be heard through their head coverings. “Don’t forget to send us a card, huh?” McCain nodded and made a female shape in the air with his hands. Mungabo laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

Borowski checked each one’s oxygen valve and connections as they stepped up to the hatch, where Charlie Chan helped them through. “Good luck. I’m only sorry that you didn’t bring us in on this sooner. We would have liked to help more.” Rashazzi made a palms-up gesture. Borowski nodded. “It was never possible to be sure who you could trust, eh? Well, a pity all the same.”

Charlie Chan was looking somber. “Let’s hope that you can manage to do something out there, if you make it. This time I don’t have a joke.”

The four squeezed into the box, wedging themselves into the corners to avoid sticking together when they bumped. Rashazzi nodded, and the others outside lifted the coverplate into position over the hatch. The box was lit by an inspection lamp the others had used while cutting through the wall’s inner skin. McCain concentrated on his breathing. It felt smooth and trouble-free, and he had no sensations of light-headedness or reduced vision. He recited a list of arithmetic multiplications in his head, and judged his faculties to be unimpaired. When Rashazzi looked at him questioningly, he returned a nod with a thumb-up sign. Scanlon and Koh did likewise. Scanlon pulled the gas cylinders connected to the cutting torch toward him to make room, and Rashazzi drilled a close pattern of holes through the exposed wall of outer skin facing them.

Rashazzi watched a pressure gauge as plumes of white dust began appearing around the wall joint at places where air was being drawn in from the outside. Koh at one end, and Scanlon at the other, signaled to the three outside where the worst leaks were by tapping on the sides, and after some minutes the currents had diminished. Even so, it was not long before the total flow into the tank balanced the flow out, and the pressure stabilized. Rashazzi drilled more holes to increase the outflow, and the pressure dropped farther. Everyone checked their respirators and seals again, and waited for more leaks to be plugged. Because of the lack of time, the whole business was going to be riskier than it would have been with the kind of airlock they had envisaged originally: the lock they had been forced to improvise would only work one way. Had an emergency developed up to this point, they could have aborted the operation by covering the drilled holes with rubber pads and steel plates, which had been brought into the tank for the purpose, and repressurized the box by opening the large oxygen cylinder. But once they cut away the final wall and opened the box completely to the vacuum, the air pressing on the hatch coverplate would exert a force of over three tons. After that, there could be no going back.

A strange stillness came over McCain as the pressure continued falling and the world of all the sounds that he had been registering unconsciously receded. He felt completely isolated now, cut off from the light, air, and the life of Zamork, and already a part of whatever existed on the outside. Rashazzi turned out the light for a second, and a crushing, total darkness added its weight to the silence. As they had guessed, no light showed through the holes from the far side. Rashazzi turned the light on again and continued drilling. Nobody indicated experiencing any ill effects, and when the pressure had fallen to a level where the flow to the outside was diminishing, McCain began using another drill to speed things up. At the joint, the remaining leaks showed as fast, fine jets now, accompanied by faint vaporlike fans where the cooling of rapidly expanding air turned its moisture content into ice. Then Rashazzi pointed to the gauge, made an O with his thumb and forefinger to indicate zero pressure. The others acknowledged that they were okay. Rashazzi nodded, lit the torch, and began cutting away a small rectangle of metal.

When the section broke free, Koh lifted it clear and Scanlon directed one of the inspection lamps outward to reveal a vast, dark void, and on the far side of it an immense gray wall, broken at intervals by vertical supports, rushing past at what Rashazzi and Haber had calculated would be a hundred fifty miles per hour. Rashazzi commenced cutting an enlargement of the hole for them to climb through. Because of the confined space he was only able to cut half the rectangle they needed, and then he passed the torch to McCain to finish it on his side. McCain did so, but the section refused to budge. He looked out through the small hole and found that the piece he had been trying to move was attached to a diagonal rib running across a corner on the outside. He made a new cut following the line of the rib, and the section came free, leaving behind a triangular corner piece. But the hole was large enough for their purpose.

Scanlon leaned out and pointed the lamp sideways, down, and up. McCain peered out with him and found himself staring out of the sheer face of a monstrous precipice of metal. The wall was reinforced by a square grid of heavy stiffening members spaced ten feet or so apart horizontally and vertically, with thinner tension bars running diagonally and crossing at riveted gussets in the centers—one of these diagonals partly crossed the section that McCain had tried to cut first, which was why he had been unable to move it. Rashazzi had estimated that above them this wall would extend at least two hundred fifty feet vertically before it began curving over to form the roof.

Looking down, they were about forty feet above the platform supporting the colony, which, McCain recalled from Rashazzi’s sketches, was in the form of a tilted circular track, like the rim of a dinner plate. The wall they were looking out of, however, was straight, cutting across an arc of the platform’s circumference like the outer edge of a strip of ribbon laid along the dinner-plate rim—in fact it was one of the long sections connecting the spoke-base zones. Hence the floor at the base of the wall was an exposed part of a circle, with the enclosing tunnel forming the far side and roof. To the left, the floor narrowed toward tunnel-side; immediately below them it was about a hundred feet wide; and to the right it continued to broaden beyond the range of their lamps as the tunnel-side receded. According to Rashazzi’s drawings, the exposed arc of floor would reach a maximum width of about two hundred feet at its midpoint.

McCain had to force himself to remember that since the supporting platform was banked at twenty-five degrees and they had emerged at its upper edge, the wall they were looking out of was in reality tilted back from vertical by that amount, with respect to the Earth’s surface. But the combination of gravity and centrifugal force generated a “local vertical” within the spinning reference frame of the colony, and that was what the senses responded to—as indeed they had been doing for six months on what was, after all, simply the other side of the same wall.

Scanlon was to lead the first pitch of the climb. He attached one of the lines to a snaplink on his harness, and McCain ran the line around his shoulder and back, bracing himself to be ready should Scanlon fall. Scanlon clipped a satchel to his harness at one hip, one of the drills to the other, then turned around on the edge of the drop and leaned back the length of his arms to inspect the area overhead. Then he selected one of the S hooks, attached a sling to it, and stretched to reach sideways along the outside. One foot remained visible, and the fingers of his other hand curled around the edge of the opening. The foot vanished, then the fingers, and he was gone. Koh stood by, ready to pay out the cable of the drill, and Rashazzi moved into the now-vacated opening to shine a light upward for Scanlon.

The line moved intermittently through McCain’s hands and around his body. He could read Scanlon’s progress from its motion: stationary while he worked at preparing holds, then moving up onto them, then stopping again to survey the next part. When about twenty-five feet had run out, there was another halt. Then the line went taut, and after a short pause, jerked three times. Scanlon was signaling that he had anchored himself to the structure and wanted to bring McCain up—they had decided to move in short pitches if they found the outside in darkness, to stay within range of each other’s lamps. McCain gathered a coil of extra line and the second satchel, and Rashazzi squeezed out of the way to let him move forward. McCain tugged twice on the safety line, and Scanlon drew in the slack from above. Then McCain turned around, grasped the sides of the opening, and backed himself out.

Scanlon’s lamp was sending down enough light from above to show the first sling, which he had hung as a stirrup from one of the gussets where the diagonal ribs crossed. McCain leaned sideways as Scanlon had done, leaving one foot in the opening and a hand gripping the edge, and stretched out his other leg to find the stirrup with his foot. He grasped the gusset and pulled himself across, transferring his weight slowly until he could crouch in the stirrup. A moment later Rashazzi reappeared in the opening behind him with another light. Scanlon had drilled a hole into the skin above the crossover and hung the next sling from an eyebolt. A snaplink was also attached to the eyebolt, with the safety line and drill cable running up through it. Scanlon would have placed “runners” like this at intervals as a safeguard. Thus, had he fallen, he would only have dropped through twice his height above his last runner before McCain checked the fall from below. Without threading the line through the runners, he would have dropped through twice his height above McCain before the line tightened.

McCain slipped the lines out of the snaplink—if
he
fell, Scanlon would catch him from above, now—and grasped the higher sling to straighten himself up, which brought his face level with the first of the horizontal ribs. There was a bolt inserted immediately below this rib, attached to a short loop of rope threaded through another snaplink. The end of a longer sling hung down from above the rib. Scanlon must have stood in the sling that McCain was clutching and clipped the loop above it to his waist to hold him while he leaned out around the overhanging rib to attach the sling above. McCain pulled himself up as high as he could using the loop, then stepped out into the long sling, found another one above as he had expected, and moved up to stand on the rib itself, where he could reach the next diagonal crossover. From there the sequence of movements repeated itself. After the next panel, the light from above showed him he was getting close to Scanlon, and one more panel later they were side by side.

Scanlon was standing on a horizontal rib with his harness fastened to two separate bolts. He passed the drill across and McCain took over the lead, now threading the line as Scanlon had done on the previous pitch, since his protection was now from below and no longer from above. The psychological effect was to make him feel less secure, and as soon as he was more than a few feet above Scanlon, he found himself perspiring and breathing heavily. Physically he was beginning to feel the strain, too. The routine became a torment of forcing aching muscles to stretch and pull, fighting to gain every inch of movement against the drag of the suit. Fatigue dulled his mind and sapped his concentration. He placed the next bolt and attached a sling, but even as he began hauling himself up on it, he remembered too late that he hadn’t tested it before trusting his weight. The thought had barely formed in his mind when the wall and the surrounding void merged into a blur. There was a sensation of falling, then a jolt as if he were being cut in half, and almost simultaneously he felt a painful blow to his shoulder and a crack on the head that set lights exploding before his eyes . . . and the next he knew, he was hanging limply in his harness against the wall, his ears ringing.

He stirred, and looked about him in a daze. His lamp was hanging a couple of feet below him on the loop of line attached to his harness, still lit. He pulled it in and shone it upward. From him the line went up about five feet to the runner that had caught him, and from there back down past him again to where Scanlon was. So he’d fallen about ten feet. He hung for a few more seconds to regain his breath, then pulled himself back into the nearest sling and climbed laboriously back to the place where he had fallen from. He replaced the bolt that had come out, testing it thoroughly this time, and carried on. And then, when he stretched up to start on the next hole, the drill seized up with a burned-out motor.

They had expected it. The drills were designed to be air-cooled, and hence overheated rapidly in the vacuum. That was why they had brought several spares and why McCain had brought an extra line. He tied the drill and lowered it to Scanlon, who in turn lowered it on down to Rashazzi at the opening. One drill gone in less than fifty feet, McCain reflected as he waited for a tug on the line to tell him that a replacement was ready for him to pull up. They had over two hundred feet to go, and only three more drills. The odds weren’t reassuring.

The next drill did even worse. McCain continued to the end of his pitch after the replacement came up, and anchored himself as Scanlon had done; then Scanlon came on up and took the drill to leapfrog as McCain had before and lead the next pitch. He was halfway up it when the second drill burned out. They had planned on getting both of them a full hundred feet above the opening before Rashazzi and Koh moved up to join them—that was how long the rope ladder was. The seriousness of the situation was enough to change that, however, and a series of violent tugs on the line from below told them that Rashazzi wanted them to hold everything right there and to come up himself, now.

A cardinal rule of roped climbing is that only one person moves at a time. Unable to progress farther, Scanlon secured himself where he was above McCain and lowered the auxiliary line again, this time to pull up the coiled rope ladder. Scanlon secured the top of it at the high point where he was, McCain guided the rest down as it unrolled, and Koh climbed right on past him to join Scanlon, carrying one of the remaining two drills, plus some of the extra gas cylinders and bags. Finally Rashazzi came up, similarly loaded. He stopped when he reached McCain, and, standing on the rope ladder, beckoned urgently for McCain to follow what he was doing. Rashazzi pointed at the vent inlets on the drill he had with him, then held the nozzle from one of the gas cylinders close and with his other hand made the motion of opening the valve. McCain understood. Rashazzi was telling him to use the cooling effect of high-pressure gas expanding into a vacuum. Rashazzi jabbed a finger at the wall, then held it up. Cool the drill after every hole. McCain nodded that he understood. Rashazzi resumed climbing, and vanished around the next horizontal rib above.