Rite of Passage

Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the air lock with air.

As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”

Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the air lock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.

As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button-pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”

I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”

Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were on the First Level, which was “down” as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal orientation, we had to go further “down” to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder, which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I grabbed the ladder and began to climb down. Then I remembered — two other ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was. Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of the Ship cut out and normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took over. “Down” in the ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing from one to the other. So now I was pointed head down, but my feet were outside the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around. Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and pinpoints of a black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie, washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm real world I was used to, but effectively in another dimension.

Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck up out of the hole beside me as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.

Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon. On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign — the joke, I suspect, of somebody long dead — that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some combination.

We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”

Beyond the pylon, in the distance, were a long row of giant tubes projecting above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Shin’s surface the distance to the horizon was not great.

“Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout bay.”

“Yes, I guess,” Jimmy said.

The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.

“I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well yourself.”

“It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”

Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.