Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [128]
Solly nodded. “My thought exactly.”
The object clung to the hull, not far from the main air lock.
Solly got up and started for the door. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
They left the pilot’s room and walked downstairs. Solly opened a closet in the main floor entry. “Only thing we can do. Go outside and shoo it away.” He frowned. “It’s probably not dangerous, Kim. If they’d wanted to attack us, they’d have done so by now. Chances are, they’re hoping we didn’t notice we’ve got a piggyback.”
She nodded. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stay put and keep warm.” He selected an insulated bar and hefted it. “This should work.”
“How about if I go out this time?”
“How much EVA experience do you have?”
“How hard can it be?”
“It isn’t hard. But it helps to know what you’re doing.” He kissed her.
“Solly,” she said, “why would they put something on the hull that we can just go outside and remove?”
“You’re suggesting they didn’t.”
“That’s right. I’m suggesting it isn’t going to come loose.”
“Let’s find out.”
Kim had played enough chess to know the basic credo: always assume the opponent will make the best possible move. “I don’t like this,” she said.
Solly managed to look as if everything were under control. “It might be just a mind game. If it’s anything more, if something happens out there, tell Ham to head for St. Johns, okay? Don’t go home. If we have to risk losing something, let’s make it the outpost and not Greenway.”
She felt drained watching him climb into a pressure suit. And she thought suddenly of the Beacon Project. Here we are. Come get us. But no, it really couldn’t be like that. It was not reasonable.
“What irritates me about all this,” she told him over the link as he finished dressing and climbed into the air lock, “is that I never seem to be able to do anything to help.”
“So far you’ve done it all, Kim. Now sit tight and I’ll be back in a half hour.”
They ran a radio check, shut off the gravity, and turned on all the portside exterior lights. Minutes later the panel indicated the outer door had opened. She directed the AI to watch Solly with whichever imagers it could bring to bear.
“Kim,” said Ham, “he also has a camera atop his helmet.”
“Can you activate it?”
“Of course.”
“Do so.”
Pictures appeared on three screens, a side view of Solly, one from the rear, and the view from his helmet. A fourth imager locked on the object.
Solly attached his tether to a safety ring just outside the air lock and strode purposefully across the hull, secured by magnetic boots.
There were no stars, and consequently no sky. Space and time existed in this nether-universe, though the latter seemed to run at a variable rate, and the former was squeezed. This did not resemble, say, a night under thick clouds; because even the clouds would have been visible, sensible objects whose presence was felt, whose weight pressed down on an observer. This was a true void, an absence of everything, a universe which theory held to contain neither matter nor energy, save that which occasionally penetrated from outside, through the agency of jump engines.
It reminded her of the terrifying moments in the spillway, when the world had closed down on her, buried her. When the only light, cast by her wristlamp, had faded into a darkness of mind and spirit that might have gone on forever.
Solly moved among the antennas and sensors and housings littering Hammersmith’s hull. She watched him draw close to the object, watched him turn his light on it.
It had come to rest between a service hatch and a sensor mount.
“What do you think, Kim?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful.”
He touched it with the tip of his bar. There was no reaction. “I’m going to give it a poke,” he said.
“Gently,” she advised.
“Poking.”
She saw no reaction.
“It’s on pretty good,” said Solly. “Probably magnetized.”
He stooped down and tried to wedge the bar beneath it. The saddle seat irised open. Kim jumped.
So did Solly.
It was as if a dark eye looked up at them.
“Solly,” she breathed.
“I see it.