Glasshouse - Charles Stross [113]
I can’t afford to fail.
Minutes trickle away in silence before I start moving again, putting one hand above the other, then one foot, then the next hand, then the next foot. Repeat five times, then rest five beats. Repeat five times, then rest five beats makes ten. Repeat that another nine times, and I’m a hundred rungs farther up this tube of torments. Morbid thoughts plague me. I could hit a patch of grease and slip. Or just . . . not reach the top. The rungs are about twenty centimeters apart. I’m nearing five hundred, now, a hundred meters straight up. I’d hit the bottom so fast I’d splash. (Banging off the ladder on the way down, of course, gently drifting in the grip of Coriolis force. If I’d remembered to bring a plumb bob and a long enough string, I could figure out roughly how large this hab cylinder is, but I didn’t think that far ahead.) My shoulders and elbows ache like they’re in a vise. I’ve spent ages pulling and pushing on that stupid weight machine in the basement, but there’s a difference between a half-hour workout and hanging on for life. If I have another memory fugue, I’m toast. How high can I go? How far apart are the inhabitable decks? If I’m unlucky, it could be kilometers—
I can’t fail; I owe it to what Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual used to mean to me not to let this happen. If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
Six hundred rungs and my arms are shrieking for mercy. My thigh muscles aren’t too happy, either. I’m gritting my teeth and hoping for mercy when I see a shadow above me. I stop and pant for a while, studying the outline. Rectangular, set into the wall. Could it be? I resume climbing, doggedly putting one hand in front of the other until I get there, close to nine hundred rungs up.
The shadow turns out to be the entrance to a short human-height tunnel leading away from beside the ladder. It runs two meters into the wall, then there’s a thick, curved pressure door with another handwheel set in it. I’m there! I’d dance for joy except my arms feel as if they’d fall off. I step into the tunnel and switch my big flashlight to candle mode, then sit down and lean back against the wall and close my eyes for a count of a hundred. I think I’ve earned it. Besides, I don’t know what’ll be waiting on the other side of the door.
My arms feel like rubber, but I don’t dare hang around. After a couple of minutes I force myself to my feet and inspect the handwheel. It looks workable, but when I try to turn it, it won’t budge. “Shit,” I mutter aloud. These are desperate straits. Maybe if I had a lever, I think, then I remember the flashlight. It’s a big aluminum bar with a light at one end. I stick it through the spokes of the wheel and lean my weight on it, pushing against the wall, putting everything I’ve got into trying to make the thing turn.
After a couple of minutes I admit to myself that the wheel is not going to budge. It occurs to me that the builders of this hab were hot on fail-safes—what if it isn’t turning because there’s hard vacuum on the other side? Either it’s got a deadlock triggered by too high a pressure differential, or it’s just been in vacuum for so long that it’s welded shut. “Shit,” I mutter again. This could be another of Yourdon and Fiore’s half-assed security