gravity, still only a few centimeters at a time, but she had a nasty vision of him falling over the edge. Claire was developing a distaste for edges.
A robotic forklift whirred past. Claire froze, cowering in the back of their recess, clutching Andy to her, grabbing one of Tony’s hands. The whirring trailed off into the distance. She breathed again.
“Relax,” Tony squeaked. “Relax…” He breathed deeply in an apparent effort to follow his own advice.
Claire peered doubtfully out of the cubicle at the forklift, which had stopped farther down the corridor and was engaged in retrieving a plastic carton from its coded cell.
“Can we eat now?” She had been nursing Andy on and off for the last three hours in an effort to keep him quiet, and was drained in every sense. Her stomach growled, and her throat was dry.
“I guess,” said Tony, and dug a couple of ration bars out of their hoard in the pack. “And then we’d better try and work our way back to the hangar.”
“Can’t we rest here a little longer?”
Tony shook his head. “The longer we wait, the more chance they’ll be looking for us. If we don’t get on a shuttle for the Transfer Station soon, they may start searching the outbound Jump ships, and there goes our chance of stowing away undiscovered until after they boost past the point of no return.”
Andy squeaked and gurgled; a familiar aroma wafted from his vicinity.
“Oh, dear. Would you please get out a diaper?” Claire asked Tony.
“Again? That’s the fourth time since we left the Habitat.”
“I don’t think I brought near enough diapers,” Claire worried, smoothing out the laminated paper and plastic form Tony handed her.
“Half our pack is filled with diapers. Can’t you—make it last a little longer?”
“I’m afraid he may be getting diarrhea. If you leave that stuff on his bottom too long, it eats right through his skin—gets all red—even bleeds—gets infected—and then he screams and cries every time you touch it to try and clean it. Real loud,” she emphasized.
The fingers of Tony’s lower right hand drummed on the shelf floor, and he sighed, biting back frustration. Claire wrapped the used diaper tightly in itself and prepared to stash it back in their pack.
“Do we have to cart those along?” Tony asked suddenly. “Everything in the pack is going to reek after a while. Besides, it’s heavy enough already.”
“I haven’t seen a disposal unit anywhere,” said Claire. “What else can we do with them?”
Tony’s face screwed up with inner struggle. “Just leave it,” he blurted. “On the floor. It’s not like it’s going to float off down the corridor and get into the air recirculation, here. Leave them all.”
Claire gasped at this horrific, revolutionary idea. Tony, following up his own suggestion before his nerve failed, collected the four little wads and stuffed them into the far corner of the storage cubicle. He smiled shakily, in mixed guilt and elation. Claire eyed him in worry. Yes, the situation was extraordinary, but what if Tony was developing a habit of criminal behavior? Would he return to normal when they got—wherever they were going?
If they got wherever they were going. Claire pictured their pursuers following the dirty diapers, like a trail of flower petals dropped by that heroine in one of Silver’s books, across half the galaxy…
“If you’ve got him back together,” said Tony with a nod at his son, “maybe we better start back toward the hangar. That mob of downsiders may be cleared out by now.”
“How are we going to pick a shuttle this time?” asked Claire. “How will we know that it’s not just going right back up to the Habitat—or taking up a cargo to be unloaded in the vacuum? If they vent the cargo bay into space while we’re in it…”
Tony shook his head, lips tight. “I don’t know. But Leo says—to solve a big problem, or complete a big project, the secret is to break it down into little parts and tackle them one at a time, in order. Let’s—just get back to the hangar, first. And see if there’s any shuttles there at all.”
Claire nodded, paused. Andy was not the only one of them plagued by biology, she reflected grimly. “Tony, do you think we can find a toilet on the way back? I need to go.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tony admitted. “Did you see any on the way here?”
“No.” Locating the facilities had not been uppermost on her mind then, on that nightmare journey, creeping over the floors, dodging hurrying downsiders, squeezing Andy tightly to her for fear that he might cry out. Claire wasn’t even sure she could reconstruct the route they’d taken, when they’d been driven out of their first hiding place by the busy work crew descending upon their machines and powering them up.
“There’s got to be something,” Tony reasoned optimistically, “people work here.”
“Not in this section,” Claire noted, gazing out at the wall of storage cells across the aisle. “It’s all robots.”
“Back toward the hangar, then. Say…”his voice faltered, “uh… do you happen to know what a gravity-field toilet chamber looks like? How do they manage? Air suction couldn’t possibly fight the gee forces.”
One of Silver’s smuggled historical vid dramas had involved a scene with an outhouse, but Claire was certain that was obsolete technology. “I think they use water, somehow.”
Tony wrinkled his nose, shrugged away his bafflement. “We’ll figure it out.” His eye fell rather wistfully on the little wad of diapers in the corner. “It’s too bad…”
“No!” said Claire, repelled. “Or at least—at least let’s
“All right.…”
A distant rhythmic tapping was growing louder. Tony, about to swing out on the ladder, muttered “Oops,” and recoiled back into the cubicle. He held a finger to his lips, panic in his face, and they all scuttled to the back of the cell.
“Aaah?” said Andy. Claire snatched him up and stuffed the tip on one breast into his mouth. Full and bored, he declined to nurse, turning his head away. Claire let her T-shirt fall back down and tried to distract him by silently counting all his busy fingers. He too had become smudged with dirt, as she had; no big surprise, planets were
The tapping grew louder, passed under their cell, faded.
“Company Security man,” Tony whispered in Claire’s ear.
She nodded, hardly daring to breathe. The tapping was from those hard downsider foot coverings striking the cement floor. A few minutes passed, and the tapping did not return. Andy made only small cooing noises.
Tony stuck his head cautiously out the chamber, looked right and left, up and down. “All right. Get ready to help me lower the pack as soon as this next forklift goes by. It’ll have to fall the last meter, but maybe the sound of the forklift will cover that some.”
Together they shoved the pack toward the edge of the cell, and waited. The whirring robolift was approaching down the corridor, an enormous plastic storage crate almost as large as a cubicle positioned on its lift.
The forklift stopped below them, beeped to itself, and turned ninety degrees. With a whine, its lift began to rise.
At this point, Claire recalled that theirs was the only empty cell in this stack.
“It’s coming
“Get out! Get out on the ladder!” Tony yelped.
Instead she scuttled back to grab Andy, whom she’d laid at the rear of the chamber as far as possible from the frightening edge while she’d helped Tony shove the pack forward. The chamber darkened as the rising crate eclipsed the opening. Tony barely squeezed past it onto the ladder as it began to grind inward.
“Claire!” Tony screamed. He pounded uselessly on the side of the huge plastic crate. “Claire! No, no! Stupid robot! Stop, stop!”
But the forklift, clearly, was not voice-activated. It kept coming, bulldozing their pack before it. There were only a few centimeters’ clearance on the sides and top of the crate. Claire retreated, so terrified her screams clotted in her throat like cotton, and she emitted only a smeary squeak. Back, back; the cold metal wall behind froze her. She flattened against it as best she could, standing on her lower hands, holding Andy with her uppers. He was howling now, infected by her terror, earsplitting shrieks.
“Claire!” Tony cried from the ladder, a horrified bellow laced with tears. “ANDY!”
The pack, beside them, compressed. Little crunching noises came from it. At the last moment, Claire
