Lifeline

Fear crept up his spine again. If the Soviets’ radio wasn’t broken and if they had all died, perhaps they had succumbed to some kind of disease, a plague. Genetic research gone wrong? That was the ostensible reason Dr. Sandovaal had come up to L-4—so he wouldn’t have to worry about unleashing a plague on Earth if his experiments went awry. And if the Soviets had contaminated their colony with a deadly virus, Ramis had just breathed a lungful of it.

He let the air out of his nostrils and swallowed hard. No good now—it is too late. I have already exposed myself. He took another breath, turned to the interior door, and pushed the release button. It slid open with a grating hiss.

Directly in front of his face was the purple, bloated body of a dead man, drifting in the disturbed air currents.

Ramis gasped and choked. The stench was powerful.

The man’s eyes were wide open, his face swollen and distorted. He was a large man, clad in a dark uniform spangled with military insignia.

Ramis backed up in horror, but he could go no farther. The back wall of the airlock chamber stopped him. The body drifted in, as if it were following him.

He screamed “Help!” in Tagalog.

He stopped, felt his pounding heartbeat, calmed his own breathing. The stench continued to seep into his pores, into his lungs. He forced himself to relax.

It was only a dead man. Someone had died on this colony. He had been prepared for that. Perhaps the entire Soviet station had turned into a huge tomb in space. Without gravity, the body had been drawn over to the door when Ramis had filled the inner airlock.

He stared at the bulging, jellied eyes of the corpse. The man’s hair was neatly combed, fixed into place with hair oil. The insignia on the dark uniform showed him to be someone of importance—a commander, perhaps—left here untended to rot.

Ramis forced himself to move. He had to bump past the bobbing corpse to enter the main command center. He touched the body with his shoulder, shielding it with the most padded portion of the space suit. He felt his skin crawl. As the firm, weightless mass moved aside, the arm bent at the elbow and the gray-green, blotched hand drifted up and down, as if waving good-bye. Ramis’s stomach flopped.

He closed his eyes and reached out with gloved fingers, grasping the corpse’s torso. He felt a rush of sweat inside his suit. He gave the body a shove toward the airlock chamber. After it obligingly floated inside, Ramis sealed the door, closing the body out of sight.

He expected to see more corpses there, all sprawled out and ripe with decay, but the command center stood empty. He swiveled his head to stare at the large, spherical room. From “floor” to “ceiling” ran a cylindrical pipe, embedded in a holotank; he realized the pipe must be the support strut for the mirror overhead and the solar shield below. The pipe would not be noticed when the central holotank was functioning.

Lighted screens and input pads covered the curved walls without any regard for standardizing the direction of up or down. Mounted chairs jutted out from beneath the control panels at odd angles to each other to maximize the working arrangement, though Ramis thought it must be disorienting. The chairs had Velcro straps to keep the workers from recoiling across the room every time they punched a keypad.

Ramis kicked off the wall and drifted in, looking at the buttons and readouts, everything in indecipherable Cyrillic characters. The individual panels were unfamiliar to him. The station seemed to be functioning still, but he couldn’t figure out how to control anything.

He searched for the radio, but the controls made no sense at all. He had taken a tour of Orbitech 1’s communications center to familiarize himself with the general layout of what the Soviets might have, but this place seemed totally alien.

He flipped on his suit radio. “Orbitech 1, are you there?” He turned off the radio at the static; the signals could not propagate out of the metal-covered hull.

He decided to try the computer, hoping that it was voice-activated. There was nothing around to indicate where the computer was, so he spoke as loudly as he could. “Computer, transmit on ninety-four point one megacycles: Orbitech 1, do you read me?”

The pounding silence around him made him feel uneasy and vulnerable. He didn’t like being where he was. When the voice of the American communications officer burst back at him, he jumped, startled enough that he had to catch himself on the corner of the chair before he drifted out to the center of the room.

“This is Orbitech 1. We are receiving you—”

Brahms’s voice broke in. “Did you get in all right, Ramis? What did you find? Have you seen anyone?”