The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [134]
“There’s a small emergency aboard, Mr. Renner. You’ll have to ask the Moties to send up all our personnel. Yourself included.”
“Dr. Horvath won’t want to come, sir,” Renner said. His mind raced furiously. There was something very wrong here, and if he could read it, so could the Moties.
Blaine’s image nodded. “He’ll have to nonetheless, Mister. See to it.”
“Yes, sir. What about our Moties?”
“Oh, they can come up to the cutter with you,” Blaine said. “It’s not all that serious. Just an OC matter.”
It took a second for that to sink in. By the time it did, Renner was in control of himself. Or hoped he was. “Aye aye, Captain. We’re on the way.”
He went back to his bunk and sat carefully on the edge. As he put on his boots he tried to think. The Moties couldn’t possibly know the Navy’s code designations, but OC meant top military priority . . . and Blaine had been far too casual when he had said that.
OK, he thought. The Moties know I’m acting. They have to. There’s a military emergency out there somewhere, and I’m to get the hostages off this planet without letting the Moties know it. Which means the Moties don’t know there’s a military emergency, and that doesn’t make sense.
“Fyunch(click),” his Motie reminded him. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t know,” Renner replied. Quite honestly.
“And you do not want to know,” the Motie said. “Are you in trouble?”
“Don’t know that either,” Renner said. “You heard the Captain. Now how do I go about getting everybody moving in the middle of the night?”
“You may leave that to me,” said Renner’s Motie.
The hangar deck was normally kept in vacuum. The doors were so huge that a certain amount of leakage was inevitable. Later, Cargill would supervise as hangar deck was put under pressure; but for now he and Sinclair carried out their inspection in vacuum.
Everything seemed in order, nothing out of place as they entered. “Now,” said Cargill. “What would you fiddle with if you were a miniature Motie?”
“I would put the boats on the hull and use the hangar deck as a fuel tank.”
“There are ships like that. Be a big job for a swarm of Brownies, though.” Cargill strolled out onto the hangar doors. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, and was never sure why he looked down at his feet. It took him a moment to realize that something was wrong.
The crack that separated the two huge rectangular doors...wasn’t there.
Cargill looked about him, bewildered. There was nothing. The doors were part of the hull. The hinge motors, weighing several tons apiece, had vanished.
“Sandy?”
“Aye?”
“Where are the doors?”
“Why, y’re standing on them, ye bloody— I don’t believe it.”
“They’ve sealed us in. Why? How? How could they work in vacuum?”
Sinclair ran back to the air lock. The air-lock door controls— “The instruments read green,” said Sinclair. “Everything’s fine, as far as they know. If the Brownies can fool instruments, they could have had the hangar deck under pressure until just before we arrived.”
“Try the doors.” Cargill swung up onto one of the retractable bracings.
“The instruments show the doors opening. Still opening . . . complete.” Sinclair turned around. Nothing. A vast expanse of beige-painted floor, as solid as any part of the hull.
He heard Cargill curse. He saw Cargill swing down from the huge retractable brace and drop onto what had been a hangar door. He saw Cargill drop through the floor as if it had been the surface of a pond.
They had to fish Cargill out of the Langston Field. He was chest deep in formless black quicksand, and sinking, his legs very cold, his heart beating very slowly. The Field absorbed all motion.
“I should have got my head into it,” he said when he came round. “That’s what all the manuals say. Get my brain to sleep before my heart slows down. But God’s teeth! How could I think?”
“What happened?” Sinclair asked.
Cargill’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. He managed to sit up. “There aren’t words. It was like a miracle. It was like I was walking on water when they