'Stay put, you people,' Delasquez called from up front. 'We're checking the life support.'
But Starlab's systems were apparently working, even after all these years; the internal pressure and. temperature were all right-a bit chilly, maybe, Jimmy Lin suggested, but they wouldn't need the suits. ('Thank God,' Rosaleen muttered gratefully. 'I hate trying to get in and out of those things.') Even the lights were working-some of them, anyway. Enough.
Then the arguments started. Pat wanted somebody to stay behind in the Clipper, preferably one of the pilots. 'For Christ's sake, why?' Jimmy Lin snarled.
Just in case.
'Just in case, screw that. Nothing's going to happen here, and anyway Dannerman can stay on board if you want him to. I'm going in.'
And he did, Pat right behind him; even encumbered with one of the instrument boxes Rosaleen Artzybachova squirmed ahead of Delasquez, who was angrily stuck with going through the shutdown checklist. In spite of Lin's suggestion, Dannerman was not far behind. As he squeezed through the docking port, tugging his own massive toolbox, he heard Rosaleen's shocked voice-'Do your mother! Everything's all different.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dan
It wasn't what he had expected. He hadn't expected Starlab to be so warm, but it was. That was passive heating, Rosaleen said, only sunlight. He certainly hadn't expected it to stink. But it did, a rancid, pervasive odor, part chemical, part almost like cinnamon. Was it the decaying body of the abandoned astronomer? Not likely. It wasn't really a spoiled-meat smell, and besides the mortal remains of the lost Manny Lefrik must have long since finished all the decay that was possible to him.
But that was not the greatest shock. Rosaleen Artzybachova had been right. It was all different. The views of the Starlab interior he had studied displayed gray metal cabinets, sunshine-yellow and warm red walls, patterned wall hammocks. Those things were still here, most of them, but to them had been added objects that the schematics had never displayed: green-flecked lumps of transparent matter, like lime Jell-O, with glittering sparks of gold and diamond light flickering within it; a great copper-colored pillar, six-sided, that gave out perceptible warmth; a huge cupboard sort of thing with a door that slowly swung closed when Dannerman tried to peer into it- things for which he had no easy name. There had been structural changes, too. Even some of the walls were gone. The partitioned space of the original had been opened up, and here and there, all about, stuck at crazy angles from the remaining walls, were the machines that were like nothing Dannerman had ever seen before. The more he looked the stranger they got. He saw some that were palely luminous, some velvet black; they were rounded or jagged-edged, some with brightly glowing dots on the surface that flickered and changed as he watched, some faintly crackling or humming. None of them looked normal.
'Jesus,' he said. 'I guess you were right, Pat. That's not any human stuff.'
Pat's face was glowing in triumph. 'Effing well right it isn't, Dan-Dan! It's alien. And it's ours!'
'But what do those things do?'
'What's the difference? My God, Dan,' she said happily, reaching out to caress the pinkly glowing surface of one of the machines, 'once we get this stuff back and figure out how it works-can you imagine what it'll be worth? We'll make a bundle out of this.'
'If we can move it,' Rosaleen Artzybachova muttered, trying to fasten her instrument box to a handhold on the wall while, like everyone else, she was distractedly staring at everything around her. 'Pat, I recommend you do not touch anything until I have had a chance to study it. The rest of you, too.'
Pat pulled her hand back; beside her, Jimmy Lin was doing the same thing. 'What's the problem?' he asked.
'How do I know what problem there is? Perhaps there is no problem at all, or perhaps if you touch it it will fry you to a crisp. If you want to experiment I suppose it is your right, but I would prefer that you help me.'
'Me, too?' Dannerman asked, trying to keep his own instrument box from bumping into anything; in the micrograv environment it weighed nothing, but its mass made it hard to handle.
'Oh, Dan,' Rosaleen sighed, 'what help could you be? At least the others have some experience with instrumentation. No. Go and explore.'
'I'll go with him,' Pat said suddenly.
'You also want to be a tourist? And, General Delasquez, is that what you are indicating, too, with that scowl? Well, why not? If there are too many unskilled helpers here it will be worse than none at all, so go. Look for old Manny's body; perhaps we can give it a decent burial in space while we are here.'
'And maybe get rid of some of the stench,' Martin Delasquez growled.
The old woman ignored him. 'Or perhaps you will meet some interesting stranger, and then you will come back and tell us. If you can.'
A few meters down the main transverse Pat stopped and consulted a scrap of paper from her pocket. The general gave her a suspicious look, but brushed past her to go off on his own. 'Let him go,' Pat muttered without looking up. 'Maybe he'll see something we don't. Let's see, we follow this transverse to the second junction-'
Dannerman drew the obvious inference. 'You're looking for something specific.'
She glanced after Delasquez's disappearing form and lowered her voice. 'Right you are, Dan-Dan. I want to see where that blister was attached, from the inside. Come on, I think I know where I'm going.'
The way you got around in the effectively gravitationless Starlab was by pulling yourself along by the handholds spaced along the walls, or by hurling yourself like a slow-moving projectile from point to point. Neither Dannerman nor Pat was up to projectile standards, so progress was slow.
They didn't speak. Pat was concentrating on the chart in her hand, Dannerman thinking about the implications of Rosaleen's final remark. If artifacts had been added to Starlab, as they had, someone had to have put them there. And it was at least a reasonable possibility that that someone was still there.
Dannerman kept his eyes peeled as they drifted along the passages. Ears, too, but there wasn't much to hear. Even the chatter between Rosaleen and Jimmy Lin became inaudible after the first few turns. Apart from the cryptic noises that came from the alien machines, the only sounds Dannerman heard came from Pat and himself.
When Starlab's designers planned the satellite they allowed for weeks or months of occupancy by its observers. That meant they had to make arrangements for living quarters. So they did, but they were not lavish. The residents weren't given rooms. What they had-Dannerman perceived as he pulled himself through the square-sided passages of the observatory-was no more than coffinlike cubicles. The things were doorless, though fitted with stiff fabric panels to provide at least the illusion of privacy, and they were small-smaller than any broom closet Dannerman had ever seen, and not much more elaborate.
There was more of Starlab than he had expected. For Pat, too, it seemed-when, twice, she paused to look uncertainly around and when, once, she had to retrace her steps for half a dozen meters. Dannerman assumed she was lost, and the way she muttered to herself made that assumption plausible. 'But it ought… ought to be… right here, 'she murmured, touching a bare spot on the corridor wall; and then, 'Hell! It isl'
Is what? Dannerman asked, but only silently. He didn't have to say it out loud because Pat was already demonstrating the answer. Her fingers traced the lines that made up a hexagonal shape on the wall; the lines were new, bright metal. 'They cut a patch out here. Then they entered. Then they welded it up again.'
'Who 'they'?' Dannerman asked.
She gave him a look of mild surprise. 'The people who brought this new stuff aboard, of course.'
'Then where they?'
There was less surprise this time, but more visible worry. 'Yes, that's the question all right, isn't it? Probably there wasn't a living 'they' at all, Dan, just some robot probe machinery.'
Dannerman made a neutral sound. In his view, the word 'robot' did not exclude some mean-tempered clanking thing that could be quite as unpleasant to meet as any of the Seven Ugly Space Dwarfs. 'One thing, though,' he said.
