Laughing, Karlstad said, “Relax. Put your eyes back in your head.”
His face reddening, Grant tried to erase his mental image of O’Hara and Muzorawa together in the dolphin tank. They can’t do anything! He told himself. They’re both implanted with biochips. Still he saw her sleek and naked, gliding through the water.
“They’re going into the simulation tank,” Karlsad said, obviously enjoying Grant’s unmistakable consternation.
Before Grant could reply, he added, “And Old Woeful is going to join them.”
“The simulation tank,” Grant said dully.
Nodding, Karlstad said, “The test is supposed to be strictly off-limits to everybody except the technicians running the sim.”
The way he said that convinced Grant that Karlstad had an ace up his sleeve. Sure enough, Karlstad went on, “But I have a direct pipeline to the cameras recording the test.”
“You do? How?”
Raising one hand in a gesture of patience, the biophysicist said, “I cannot reveal my sources. But if you’ll allow me…”
He turned to the computer console next to Grant’s and pulled out the keyboard. Blowing dust from the keys, he booted up the machine manually and then tapped in a long, complex string of alphanumerics. Grant watched, fascinated despite himself, as the desktop display screen flickered and glowed.
And there was O’Hara standing in the narrow corridor outside one of the dolphin tanks in a sleek white skintight suit that glistened as if it were already wet. They seemed to be looking down at her from above. Grant realized they were watching the view from a camera set into the ceiling panels in the corridor.
“Shall we put it on the wallscreen?” Karlstad asked.
“What if someone walks in?”
He shrugged. “I’ll wipe the screen before they have a chance to figure out what we’re watching.”
“All right,” Grand said, nodding.
The wallscreen image was life size but a little grainy. He must be using a microcamera, Grant thought, with a fiberoptic link. O’Hara’s slick white wetsuit clung to her like her own skin. She doesn’t have that much of a figure, Grant told himself. Slim, almost boyish. Almost.
Muzorawa stepped into view. His suit was bright green but left his powerful looking legs bare. They were studded with implants, his skin thick with them, like a leper’s sores. No wonder they wear long trousers all the time, Grant thought, recoiling inwardly at the ugliness of it.
Half a dozen technicians in gray coveralls milled around. Karlstad clicked at the keyboard and the view abruptly shifted. Now they were looking into the dolphin tank, over Muzorawa’s shoulder. But there were no dolphins in sight. Instead, the tank contained what looked like a mockup of a control panel, a broad curving expanse of display screens and rows of lights and buttons.
Grant said, “I hope Sheena doesn’t burst in on them.”
“No, no,” Karlstad assured him. “Little Sheena’s safe in her pen, sedated up to her bony brow ridges. She’s sleeping like a three-hundred-kilo baby.”
Two technicians in dark-gray wetsuits clambered up the ladder built into the partition between tanks and cannon-balled into the water with huge splashes, one after the other.
Grant watched them settle down to the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles from their face masks.
“Can’t you fugheads get into the tank without sloshing half the water outta it?” groused a scornful nasal voice caustically. The test controller, Grant thought, monitoring everything from some central location.
The pair of techs waved cheerfully as they sat on the bottom of the tank.
“Okay,” came the voice of the controller, slightly scratchy from static. “Let’s get this sim percolating.”
O’Hara nodded and pulled the hood of her suit over her bald scalp, then slipped on a transparent visor that covered her entire face. Two of the technicians helped her work her arms through the shoulder straps of what appeared to be an air tank, then connected a slim hose from the top of the tank to her face mask. They slid a belt of weights around her slender hips. O’Hara clicked its clasp shut.
Two other techs were doing the same for Muzorawa. Finally they checked that the air was getting through properly.
“I’m okay,” O’Hara said, her voice muffled by the mask.
Muzorawa asked for a slightly stronger air flow, and a tech adjusted a knob on the back of his tank. Then he nodded and made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger.
O’Hara turned and scampered lithely up the ladder to the top of the tank. Grant saw that her feet were bare.
“Radio check,” said a disembodied voice.
“O’Hara on freak one,” she said. It sounded somewhat fuzzy to Grant. He realized there must be a small radio built into the full-face mask.
But the controller’s voice said, “In the green. Go ahead and dunk.”
O’Hara swung her long legs over the edge of the tank and slipped into the water with hardly a ripple.
“Now that’s the way you get into the pool.” The controller’s voice was admiring.
The two techs already in the tank made exaggerated motions of applause.
Muzorawa climbed the ladder, considerably slower and more ponderous than O’Hara. It seemed to Grant that Zeb had some trouble getting his legs to work right. But he made it to the top, swinging both legs together almost as if they were inert lengths of lumber, and dropped gracelessly into the water.
“Now comes the boring part,” Karlstad murmured.
“What’s that?”
With a smirk, Karlstad answered, “The work, of course.”
O’Hara and Muzorawa, with the two technicians hovering behind them, glided to the control panel and slid their bare feet into loops set into the floor.
“Sim one-a,” the controller’s voice announced. “Separation and systems checkout. Manual procedure.”
The panel was chest high, Grant realized. The two scooters stood at it, anchored by the floor loops, and began working their way through a long countdown, punctuated by the controller’s check-off of each action they took. It was boring, Grant agreed. Repetitious and dull.
“You said Dr. Wo was going to be part of this,” Grant said to Karlstad.
“He’ll show up.”
“When?”
“When the dull routine stuff is finished Old Woeful will make his dramatic entrance, never fear.”
I ought to be working, Grant thought. I ought to be inserting the data points from last month’s probes into the equations to see how they affect the flow maps. But instead he watched O’Hara and Muzorawa as they patiently, methodically, went through the simulation.
“This is the separation procedure,” Karlstad said. “This is what they’ll have to do to disconnect the saucer from the station.”
“It takes so long?” Grant wondered aloud.
Karlstad grunted. “You don’t want to fire your jets and find that there’s still an umbilical linking you to the station proper. Could ruin your whole afternoon.”
“But still, can’t these procedures be automated? I mean, launch crews have automated—”
“Hold it!” Karlstad snapped. “Here he comes.”
All that Grant could see was the technicians outside the tank turning to look down the corridor at something beyond the camera’s view. He heard Karlstad clicking on the computer keys again, and the view shifted to show Dr. Wo rolling toward the test tank in his powered chair. He was wearing a bright red wetsuit, with shining metal braces over the lower half of his pitifully thin, weak legs.
Wo rolled up to the tank and the technicians made a reverential half circle around his chair.
“Dr. Wo,” said the controller’s disembodied voice. “We’ve completed the separation procedure. Ready to start ignition and entry simulation.”
“Good,” said Wo. “I will join the crew now.”
No one said a word. No one moved. Wo pushed himself to his feet and stood unsteadily on his steel-braced legs for a long, breathless moment. Then he took a step toward the ladder. Another step. My god, Grant thought,
