MIRROR LAB
Grant was on his way to intercept Anita Halleck before she could get away from Farside on the lobber that had brought her in.
“EMERGENCY. AIR PRESSURE DROP IN MIRROR LAB. EVACUATE MIRROR LAB AT ONCE.”
He spun around and sprinted along the corridor toward the mirror lab. Grant could hear the emergency airlock hatches that were located every hundred meters along the corridors slamming shut, like a drumbeat warning of disaster. He had to stop at each one of them, punch out the unlocking code on each keypad, and proceed to the next.
By the time he reached the entrance to the mirror lab, half a dozen technicians were standing in the corridor, looking bewildered, frightened.
“What happened?” Grant demanded.
Phil Rizzo, chief of the mirror lab’s crew, shook his head. “I dunno. The emergency alarm went off all of a sudden and we scooted out.”
Rizzo was small, wiry, with the narrow face and oversized nose of a rodent. His eyes were wide with fear, edging toward panic.
“Everybody out?” Grant asked.
Rizzo looked around, counting. “Yeah. Everybody.”
Yanking out his pocketphone, Grant called the Farside life-support center. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
The monitoring technician’s dark face looked troubled. “Air pressure started nosediving, Grant. All of a sudden. There’s a leak in the lab someplace, probably the airlock.”
More people were coming down the corridor. Just what we need, Grant thought. Half the staff rubbernecking while there’s a leak in that damned oversized airlock.
“Get an emergency team down here, quick,” he said into the phone.
“They’re already on their way. With suits.”
“Good. Thanks.”
The tech broke into a grim smile. “Just doin’ my job, boss.”
Grant clicked his pocketphone shut, then raised his voice to the growing crowd: “Go on back to your workstations. Everything’s under control here.”
The crowd began to break up slowly, reluctantly. Rizzo asked, “What about us, Grant?”
Looking down at the diminutive technician, Grant answered, “You guys can take the rest of the day off.”
Rizzo didn’t laugh at Grant’s weak attempt at humor. He didn’t even grin.
“Okay, people,” he said to his crew. “You heard the man.”
As the lab crew started down the corridor, Grant grasped Rizzo by the shoulder. “Anything special going on in there when the alarm went off?”
Rizzo shook his head. “Naw. Just polishing the mirror, like we have been for the past month.”
“Okay,” said Grant, releasing his grip. “Take it easy, Phil.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Rizzo headed down the corridor, passing the emergency crew coming up. An automated cart trundled along behind them, loaded with three space suits. Harvey Henderson was leading them. Grant remembered that Harvey had rotated to the emergency team because usually they had little to do but monitor the station’s life-support equipment.
“How’s your foot, Harvey?” he asked.
“Still hurts. Dr. Kapstein says it’s psychosomatic, but it still hurts.”
“Well, you got your gang down here in good time.”
“It hurts, but I’m not crippled.”
Grant shooed the remaining onlookers out of the section of corridor that ended at the mirror lab entrance.
“We’re going to seal this section off,” he told them. “When we open the lab door, this area will probably go down to vacuum. You don’t want to be here unless you’re in a suit.”
As they grudgingly headed for the emergency hatch up the corridor, Grant and Henderson started pulling on space suits. The other techs of the emergency team checked them out.
Once they were fully suited up, Grant waved the rest of the team down the corridor, past the emergency airlock hatch. Then he and Harvey went to the lab’s door and slid it open.
They stepped out onto the balcony that circled the laboratory, where the monitoring consoles stood unattended but still working, their displays flickering. Below the balcony’s railing was the big turntable, still slowly revolving, polishing the mirror that would probably never be used in a telescope. Unless the Ulcer builds a ’scope right here in the Sea of Moscow, Grant thought.
As he and Henderson began to power down the consoles and stop the turntable, Grant called to the life-support monitor, “Give me a reading on the air pressure in here.”
“Low, and getting lower,” she responded.
“Numbers, kid. I need numbers.”
“Six p.s.i. Sinking steadily.”
“Not a total blowout,” Henderson said.
“Slow leak,” said Grant.
“Not all that slow,” the life-support monitor corrected. “Just sank past five p.s.i.”
Grant clomped over to the central console and pulled drawers open until he found what he wanted: a pad of legal-sized notepaper. Ripping out a handful of sheets, he tossed them over the railing of the balcony.
“What…?” Henderson started to ask, then realized what Grant was up to.
The sheets of paper fluttered slowly downward. As Grant and Henderson watched, they drifted toward the airlock, skittering across the top of the massive turntable and along the concrete floor of the laboratory.
One by one, the sheets of paper plastered themselves against a single spot on the wide airlock, like birds returning to their nest.
“There’s the leak,” Grant said.
“Yeah,” Henderson agreed. “Must be.”
“How much you want to bet that it’s a pinhole drilled by nanomachines?” asked Grant.
Henderson merely grunted.