Alien Emergencies - James White [175]
They digested that for a moment, then Tyrell’s Captain said, “I still say a space station way out here is impossible, especially one traveling at such a clip that its wreckage will reach the sun, there, in eleven weeks. It is far more likely that the survivor is in a lifeboat with suspended animation extending the duration of its consumables.”
Fletcher glared at his fellow Captain, then he noticed Prilicla beginning to tremble. He visibly calmed himself as he said, “It is not impossible, Major Nelson, although it is unlikely. Let us suppose that the survivor’s race, which is at the interplanetary flight level of technology, was beginning to experiment with hyperspace generation on its space station and inadvertently performed a random Jump and found themselves very far indeed from home, and subsequently went into hibernation for the reason you have stated. Many such accidents have occurred during early experiments with hypertravel. In any case, I think we are drawing too many conclusions from what is, after all, only one small piece of a very large jigsaw.”
Conway decided to join in before this spirited exchange of technical views could devolve into a quarrel. He said placatingly, “But what conclusions, however few and tentative, can we draw from the piece you have examined, Captain? And what, however vaguely, can you see of the complete picture?”
“Very well,” said Fletcher. He quickly inserted his vision spool from the wreck into the Recreation Deck’s display unit and began to describe everything he had observed and deduced during his examination of the distressed vessel, which he preferred to think of as a simple, pressurized container rather than a ship. It was a cylinder just over twenty meters in length and approximately three meters in diameter, with ends which were flat except for a set of eight couplings which would enable it to be connected at either end to other similar containers. The couplings had been designed to break open before any external shock or force applied to adjacent structures could damage or deform the container. If the dimensions of the other containers or space station sections were the same as the one examined, and if the longitudinal curvature was uniform in all of them, then approximately eighty of these sections would form a Wheel just under five hundred meters in diameter.
He paused, but Major Nelson still had his lips pressed tightly together, and the others, knowing that a reaction was expected of them, kept perversely silent.
The section had a double hull with only the inner one pressurized, Fletcher resumed, but it possessed no control, sensor, or power systems other than those associated with the suspended animation equipment. The level of technology displayed was advanced interplanetary rather than interstellar, so the station had no business being where it was in the first place. But the most puzzling feature of the container was the method used to enter and leave it.
They had already seen that there were no openings on the hull large enough to allow entry or exit by the survivor, which meant that it had to enter and leave via the flat, circular plate at each end of the cylinder. In Fletcher’s opinion the creature went in one end and came out the other because physically it was too massive to turn itself around inside its container. But there was nothing resembling a door at either end of the cylinder, just the two large circular plates whose edges were set inside the thick rims which supported the couplings.
“So far as I can see there is no operating mechanism for these endplates,” Fletcher went on with the hint of an apology creeping into his tone. “There are only so many ways for a door to open, and there has to be a door into and out of that thing, but I can’t find one. I even considered explosive bolts, with the extraterrestrial sealed in until it arrived or was taken by its rescuers to an environmentally suitable position—either a planet or the hold of a rescue ship—whereupon it would blow the hatch fastenings and crawl out. But there are no hatch