As it happens, none of these omissions causes Greaves any practical difficulties. He read the track puller’s manual from cover to cover on the second week out from Beacon. He read the manuals for all the onboard equipment, even the ones that were already familiar to him from Rina’s lab. Still, it’s useful to see a live demonstration, and in this respect he has no complaints to make about Sixsmith’s instructions. She shows him how to position the pump, and the safest angle from which to fire the tapping-bit. These are useful things to know and the manual did not explicitly address them.
“A few wars ago, this was a four-man job,” Sixsmith tells him. “Tanker bar, cheater pipe, the whole frigging wardrobe. Even now, I don’t envy you doing it alone. The puller makes it possible but it doesn’t make it easy.”
“Thank you, Private Sixsmith,” Greaves says meekly. “I’ll do the best I can.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to take a gun?”
“We are not,” McQueen says, “giving this fucking retard a gun.”
Greaves doesn’t answer, since McQueen’s response has made his own unnecessary. He absolutely does not want a gun. He won’t have either of his hands free to carry a weapon, and he wouldn’t be able to use one in any case. He read all the manuals for the guns and rifles too, of course, but only in order to understand their functioning. Not because he ever seriously thought about firing one.
They all watch as he puts on the suit. Its existence seems to make Dr. Fournier very angry, though he says nothing. Perhaps he feels that he is the only one on board who should be allowed to keep secrets from the others. Perhaps secrets are meant to be a privilege of rank.
“That is grotesque,” McQueen says, shaking his head.
Greaves tries to explain that form follows function. “The principle is heat diffusion via the placement of—”
“I don’t want to know the principle, fuckwit. I just want you to get out there and do the job. Or get yourself eaten, so we know where we stand.”
Dr. Khan is not present. She has pronounced herself unwell and taken to her bunk. Greaves had thought she might try to dissuade him from going outside, but she seems to be having difficulty at the moment focusing her mind on her surroundings. When he saw her last, as she withdrew, her face was flushed and she had a visible tremor in her hands.
Greaves frets. What are these things a symptom of? Just shock, or something worse? Has his cure—or rather his desperate, ad hoc work-around—been effective or has it failed? If the latter, the infection could become active again at any moment.
But he can’t help her unless he goes outside and acquires what he needs. That’s the whole point of volunteering to repair the broken tread.
Lie.
Liar.
Not the whole point. There’s something else he needs to do. Will risk his life to do, although he has no idea why it matters so much. It ought not to matter at all.
He pulls on the facemask and hood with a sense of relief. If they can’t see his face, they can’t see his thoughts.
“Here you go, you little lunatic.” Sixsmith says this without heat, almost with respect. She hands him, one by one, the track puller, the slender cylinder of compressed air in its shoulder sling, and the toolbox.
“I’d like my sampling kit too,” Greaves mumbles. “Please.”
McQueen rolls his eyes, but they humour him. They think he is sticking to a routine, just for the comfort it brings. They think, as always, that they understand him. Acting Lieutenant Foss brings the kit, and Greaves clips it to his belt, which he has deliberately worn on top of the heat-dispersal suit.
Then Foss opens up the inside door of the airlock for him, and he steps in. Greaves is used to missing the signals other people send with their faces and making up the lost information in other ways, but he sees the moment when Dr. Akimwe looks away. Dr. Akimwe blames him for the death of Private Phillips, whom he loved. He knows, of course, that Private Phillips died before Greaves sealed the mid-section door. But the logic that is operating here is not a simple, linear one. Guilt and innocence are tangled up in each other, elided.
Foss drops back as Carlisle steps up, taking her place at the airlock controls. “Are you sure you want to do this, Stephen?” the colonel asks.
Stephen nods. He’s very sure—and very grateful for the vagueness of the word “this.” He is sure of what he wants to do, and has no wish at all to explain it.
“Be careful,” the colonel says. “And come back inside at the first sign of movement.” He knows Greaves well enough not to try to touch him, but he gives him a nod of reassurance and perhaps acknowledgement. Then he closes the inner door.
Greaves is committed now.
Inside the mask he smiles, because of the certainty. Because being committed means a reduction of randomness, a paring down of possibilities. It will be hard, and he might die, but it’s good to have a clear through-line and to depend on nothing but his own abilities.
The outer door opens. He steps through it.
It is very dark at first. The moon has filled out a little since his last night-walk but rags of cloud are racing across the sky so it comes and goes.
He is alone in the night, as far as he can tell. All the rest of the crew are inside the hull. They can’t see him or interact with him. Sixsmith had tried to fit him with a radio microphone but had given up when she saw how tightly the mask and hood fitted him. A mike that broke one of the suit’s seals would be worse than useless.
Because from another point of view, he is far from alone. The children are out here somewhere, possibly very close. Greaves has stepped out of his own world into theirs. At night, he knows, they can only see heat. Their sight in the visible spectrum is no better than his, so the suit will disguise him. But it won’t muffle the noise he makes as he works, which will be considerable. His best hope, or perhaps his only hope, is that the fire started by Rosie’s flamethrower has forced them to relocate.
He addresses himself to the repairs. This is the first time he has ever used any of these tools, but their operation is simple and the task has an algorithmic structure that appeals to him.
Locate the damaged tread blocks. There are only two, which is good.
Break the track by knocking out the end connectors on their inside and outside edges. The puller has a tapping-bit attachment like a blunt-ended road drill specifically for this. The bit is powered by the gas cylinder and delivers a colossal amount of power to an area perhaps two square inches in cross-section. It feels to Greaves as though he is swinging a sledgehammer without having to raise it. The recoil frightens him a little, but the connectors pop away with almost no resistance.
Replace the damaged blocks with whole ones. He has brought ten and uses four—swapping out both the damaged blocks and their nearest neighbour on either side.
Attach the puller’s clamps to the two loose ends of the track, then set the main gauge to 1,500 horsepower, which he has judged by eye to be sufficient. The hydraulics go to work as he operates the pump, dragging the broken ends together under higher and higher tension until at last they are where they need to be. The puller is now holding the tread together like a fingertip on a knot.