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CHAPTER THREE

For Hans Gibbs it was turning into a long and confusing day.

When first suggested, a Downside visit to the U.N. Institute for Neurology in Christchurch had sounded like the perfect break from routine. He would have a week in full earth gravity instead of the quarter-gee of PSS-One. He would gain a batch of exercise credits, and he needed all he could scrape together. He'd be able to pick up a few things Downside that were seldom shuttled up as cargo—how long since anyone on PSS-One had tasted an oyster? And even though Christchurch was down in New Zealand, away from the political action centers, he'd be able to form his own impressions on recent world tensions. There were lots of charges and counter-accusations flying about, but chances are it was more of the same old bluster that the Downsiders mislabelled as diplomacy.

Best of all, he could spend a couple of evenings with randy old Wolfgang. The last time they'd been out on the town together, his cousin had still been married. That had put a crimp on things (but less than it should have—one reason maybe why Wolfgang wasn't married now?).

The trip down had been a disaster. Not the Shuttle flight, of course; that had been a couple of hours of relaxation, a smooth re-entry followed by activation of the turbofans and a long powered coast to Aussieport in northern New Guinea. The landing had been precisely on schedule. But that was the last thing that went according to plan.

The Australian spaceport, servicing Australia, New Zealand and Micronesia, normally prided itself on informality and excitement. According to legend, a visitor could find within a few kilometers of the port every one of the world's conventional vices, plus a few of the unconventional ones (cannibalism had been part of native life in New Guinea long after it had disappeared elsewhere).

Today all informality had disappeared. The port had been filled with grim-faced officials, intent on checking every item of his baggage, documents, travel plans, and reason for arrival. He had been subjected to four hours of questioning. Did he have relatives in Japan or the United States? Did he have sympathies with the Food Distribution Movement? What were his views on the Australian Isolationist Party? Tell us, in detail, of any new synthetic food manufacturing processes developed for the outbound arcologies.

Plenty was happening there, as he readily admitted, but he was saved by simple ignorance. Sure, there were new methods for synthetics, good ones, but he didn't know anything about them—wouldn't be permitted to know about them; they carried a high level of commercial secrecy.

His first gift for Wolfgang—a pure two-carat gemstone, manufactured in the orbiting autoclave on PSS-One—was retained for examination. It would, he was curtly informed, be sent along to his lodgings at the Institute if it passed inspection. His other gift was confiscated with no promise of return. Seeds developed in space might contaminate some element of Australasian flora.

His patience had run out at that point. The seeds were sterile, he pointed out. He had brought them along only as a novelty, for their odd shapes and colors.

"What the hell has happened to you guys?" he complained. "It's not the first time I've been here. I'm a regular—just take a look at those visas. What do you think I'm going to do, break into Cornwall House and have a go at the First Lady?"

They looked back at him stonily, evaluating his remark, then went on with the questioning. He didn't try any more backchat. Two years ago the frantic sex life of the Premier's wife had been everybody's favorite subject. Now it didn't rate a blink. If much of Earth was like this, the climatic changes must be producing worse effects than anyone in the well-to-do nations was willing to admit. The less lucky ones spoke of it willingly enough, pleading for help at endless and unproductive sessions of the United Nations.

When he was finally allowed to close his luggage and go on his way, the fast transport to Christchurch had already left. He was stuck with a Mach-One pond-hopper, turning an hour's flight into a six-hour marathon. At every stop the baggage and document inspection was repeated.

By the time they made the last landing he was angry, hungry, and tired out. The entry formalities at Christchurch seemed to go on forever, but he recognized that they were perfunctory compared with those at Aussieport—it seemed he had already been asked every question in the world, and his answers passed on to the centralized Australasian data banks.

When he finally reached the Institute and was shown to Judith Niles' big office it was one o'clock in the morning according to his internal body clock, though local time was well before noon. He swallowed a stimulant—one originally developed right here in the Institute—and looked around him at the office fittings.

On one wall was a personal sleep chart, of exactly the same type that he used himself. She was averaging a little less than six hours a night, plus a brief lunchtime nap every other day. He moved to the bookcase. The predictable works were there: Dement and Oswald and Colquhoun, on sleep; the Fisher-Koral text on mammalian hibernation; Williams' case histories of healthy insomniacs. The crash course he had received on PSS-One had skimmed through them all, though the library up there was not designed for storage of paper copies like these.

The old monograph by Bremer was new to him. Unpublished work on the brain-stem experiments? That seemed unlikely—Moruzzi had picked the bones clean there, back in the 1940s. But what about that red file next to it, "Revised Analysis"?

He reached out to take it from the case, then hesitated. It wouldn't do to get off on the wrong foot with Judith Niles—this meeting was an important one. Better wait and ask her permission.

He rubbed at his eyes and turned from the bookcase to look at the pictures on the wall opposite the window. He had been well briefed, but the more he could learn by personal observation, the less impossible this job would be.

Plenty of framed photographs there, taken with Presidents and Prime Ministers and businessmen. In pride of place was a picture of a gray-haired man with a big chin and rimless glasses. On its lower border, hand-written, were the words: Roger Morton Niles, 1941-2008. Judith's father? Almost certainly, but there was something curiously impersonal about the addition of dates to a father's picture. There was a definite family resemblance, mainly in the steady eyes and high cheekbones. He compared the picture of Roger Morton Niles with a nearby photograph of Judith Niles shaking hands with an aged Indian woman.

Strange. The biographical written descriptions didn't match at all with the person who had swept through the office on her way to her staff meeting and given him the briefest and most abstracted of greetings. Still less did it match the woman pictured here. Based on her position and accomplishments he had expected someone in her forties or fifties, a real Iron Maiden. But Judith Niles couldn't be more than middle thirties. Nice looking, too. She was a fraction too thin in the face, with very serious eyes and forehead; but she made up for that with well-defined, curving cheek bones, a clear complexion, and a beautiful mouth. And there was something in her expression . . . or was it his imagination? Didn't she have that look—

"Mr. Gibbs?" The voice from behind made him grunt and spin around. A secretary had appeared at the open doorway while he was daydreaming his way through the wall photographs.

Thank Heaven that minds were still unreadable. How ludicrous his current train of thought would seem to an observer—here he was, flown in for a confidential and highly crucial meeting with the Director of the Institute, and inside two minutes he was evaluating her as a sex object.

He turned around with a little smile on his face. The secretary was staring at him, her eyebrows raised. "Sorry if I startled you, Mr. Gibbs, but the staff meeting is over and the Director can see you now. She suggests that you might prefer to talk over lunch, rather than meeting here. That way you'll have more time."

He hesitated. "My business with the Director—"

"Is private? Yes, she says that she understands the need for privacy. There is a quiet room off the main dining room; it will be just you and the Director."

"Fine. Lead the way." He began to rehearse his arguments as she preceded him along a dingy, off-white corridor.

The dining room was hardly private—he could see a hundred ways it could be bugged. But it did offer at least superficial isolation from other ears. He would have to take the risk. If anyone recorded them, it would almost certainly be for Judith Niles' own benefit, and would go no farther. He blinked his eyes as he entered. The overhead light, like every light he had seen in the Institute, was overpoweringly bright. If darkness were the ally of sleep, Judith Niles apparently would not tolerate its presence.

She was waiting for him at the long table, quietly marking entries on an output listing. As he sat down she at once folded the sheet and spoke without any pause for conventional introduction.

"I took the liberty of ordering for both of us. There is a limited choice, and I thought we could use the time." She leaned back and smiled. "I have my own agenda, but since you came to see us I think you are entitled to the first shot."

"Shot?" He pulled his chair closer to the table. "You're misreading our motives. But I'll be pleased to talk first. And let me get something out of the way that may save us later embarrassment. My cousin, Wolfgang, works for you here at the Institute."

"I wondered at the coincidence of name."

And did you follow up with a check on us? Hans Gibbs nodded and went on. "Wolfgang is completely loyal to you, just as I work for and am loyal to Salter Wherry. I gather that you've never met him?"

Judith Niles looked up at him from under lowered brows. "I don't know anyone who has—but everybody has heard of him, and of Salter Station."

"Then you know he has substantial resources. Through them we can find out rather a lot about the Institute, and the work that goes on here. I want you to know that although Wolfgang and I have talked generalities from time to time about the work here, none of my specific information, or that of anyone else in our organization, came from him."

She shrugged in a noncommittal way. "All right. But now you have me intrigued. What do you think you know about us that's so surprising? We're a publicly funded agency. Our records are open information."

"True. But that means you are restricted in the budget available to you. Just today, for example, you have learned of additional budget cuts because of the crisis in U.N. finances."

Her expression showed her astonishment. "How in the name of Morpheus can you possibly know that? I only found out a couple of hours ago, and I was told the decision had just been made."

"Let me postpone answering that, if you don't mind, until we've covered a couple of other things. I know you've had money problems. Worse still, there are restrictions—ones you find hard to accept—on the experiments that you are permitted to perform."

The lower lip pushed forward a little, and her expression became guarded. "Now I don't think I follow you. Care to be more specific?"

"With your permission I'll defer discussing that, too, for the moment. I hope you'll first permit me a few minutes on another subject. It may seem unrelated to budgets and experimental freedom, but I promise you it is relevant. Take a quick look at this, then I'll explain exactly why I'm here."

He passed a flat black cylinder across to her. "Look into the end of it. It's a video recorder—don't worry about focus, the hologram phases are adjusted for a perceived focal plane six feet from the eye. Just let your eyes relax."

She wrinkled her brow questioningly, put her unbroken bread roll back on her plate, and lifted the cylinder to her right eye. "How do I work it?"

"Press the button on the left side. It takes a couple of seconds before the picture comes."

He sat silent, waiting as a waitress in a green uniform placed bowls of murky brown soup in front of each of them.

"I don't see anything at all," Judith Niles said after a few seconds. "There's nothing I can focus on—oh, wait a minute. . . ."

The jet-black curtain before her took on faint detail as her eyes adjusted to the low light level. There was a backdrop of stars, with a long, spindly structure in the foreground lit by reflected sunlight. At first she had no sense of scale, but as the field of view slowly shifted out along the spider-net of girders other scene elements began to provide clues. A space tug lay along one of the beams, its stubby body half hidden by the metal. Farther down, she could see a life-capsule, clamped like a tiny mushroom button in the corner of a massive cross-tie. The construction was big, stretching hundreds of kilometers away to a distant end-boom.

The camera swung on down, until the limb of the sunlit Earth appeared in the field of view.

"You're seeing the view from one of the standard monitors," said Hans Gibbs. "There are twenty of them on the Station. They operate twenty-four hours a day, with routine surveys of everything that goes on. That camera concentrates mostly on the new construction on the lower boom. You know that we're making a seven-hundred-kilometer experimental cantilever on PSS-One? Salter Station, most people down here apparently call it, though Salter Wherry likes to point out that it was the first of many, so PSS-One is a better name. Anyway, we don't need that extension cantilever for the present arcologies, but we're sure we'll use it someday soon."

"Uh-uh." Judith did not move her eyes from the viewing socket. The camera was zooming in, closing steadily on an area at the very end of the boom where two small dots had become visible. She realized that she was seeing a high-magnification close-up from a small part of the camera field. As the dots grew in size, the image had begun to develop a slight graininess as the limit of useful resolution was reached. She could make out the limbs on each of the space suits, and the lines that secured the suits to the thin girders.

"Installing one of the experimental antennas," Hans Gibbs said. He obviously knew exactly what point the display in front of her had reached. "Those two are a long way from the center of mass of the Station—four hundred kilometers below it. Salter Station is in six hour orbit, ten thousand kilometers up. Orbital velocity at that altitude is forty-eight-eighty meters a second, but the end of the boom is travelling at only forty-seven-sixty meters a second. See the slight tension in those lines? Those two aren't quite in freefall. They feel about a hundredth of a gee. Not much, but enough to make a difference."

Judith Niles drew in a deep breath but did not speak.

"Watch the one on the left," said Hans Gibbs quietly.

There was enough detail in the image to see exactly what was happening. The lines that secured one of the two suited figures had been released, so that a new position on the girder could be achieved. A thin aerial had opened up, stretching far out past the end of the boom. The left-most figure began to drift slowly along the length of the aerial, a securing bracket held in its right glove. It was obvious that there would be another tether point within reach along the girder, where the securing line could be attached. The suit moved very slowly, rotating a little as it went. The second figure was crouched over another part of the metal network, attaching a second brace for the aerial.

"In thirty seconds, you drift away by nearly fifty meters," said Hans Gibbs quietly. His companion sat as still as a statue.

The realization grew by tiny fractions, so that there was never one moment where the senses could suddenly say, "Trouble." The figure was within reach of the tether point. It was still moving, inching along, certainly close enough for an outstretched arm to make the connection. Five seconds more, and that contact had been missed. Now it would be necessary to use the suit controls, to apply the small thrust needed to move back to contact range. Judith Niles suddenly found herself willing the suit thrusters to come on, willing the second figure to look up, to see what she was seeing. The gap grew. A few feet, thirty meters, the length of the thin aerial. The suit had begun to turn around more rapidly on its axis. It was passing the last point of contact with the structure.

"Oh, no." The words were a murmur of complaint. Judith Niles was breathing heavily. After a few more seconds of silence she gave another little murmur and jerked her body rigidly upright. "Oh, no. Why doesn't he do something? Why doesn't he grab the aerial?"

Hans Gibbs reached forward and gently took the cylinder away from her eye. "I think you've seen enough. You saw the beginning of the fall?"

"Yes. Was it a simulation?"

"I'm afraid not. It was real. What do you think that you saw?"

"Construction for the boom on Salter Station—on PSS-One. And they were two of the workers, rigging an antenna section."

"Right. What else?"

"The one farther out on the boom just let go his hold, without waiting to see that he had a line secured. He didn't even look. He drifted away. By the time the other one saw, he was too far away to reach."

"Too far away for anything to reach. Do you realize what would happen next?"

Neither of them took any interest in the food before them. Judith Niles nodded slowly. "Re-entry? If you couldn't reach him he'd start re-entry?"

Hans Gibbs looked at her in surprise, then laughed. "Well, that might happen—if we waited for a few million years. But Salter Station is in a pretty high orbit, re-entry's not what we worry about. Those suits have only enough air for six hours. If we have no ship ready, anybody who loses contact with the station and can't get back with the limited reaction mass in the suit thrusters dies—asphyxiates. It was a woman in that suit, by the way, not a man. She was lucky. The camera was on her, so we could compute an exact trajectory and pick her up with an hour to spare. But she'll probably never be psychologically ready to work outside again. And others haven't been so lucky. We've lost thirty people in three months."

"But why? Why did she let go? Why didn't the other worker warn her?"

"He tried—we all tried." Hans Gibbs tucked the little recorder back into its plastic case. "She didn't hear us for the same reason that she released her hold. It's a reason that should really interest you, and the reason why I'm here at your Institute. In one word: narcolepsy. She fell asleep. She didn't wake up until after we caught her, fifty kilometers away from the boom. The other worker saw what had happened long before that, but he didn't have the reaction mass to go out and back. All he could do was watch and yell at her through the suit radio. He couldn't wake her."

Hans Gibbs pushed his half-full plate away from him.

"I know there's a desperate food shortage around most of the world, and it's a sin not to clear your dish. But neither one of us seems to be eating much. Can we continue this conversation back in your office?"

 

 

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