"I don't like what's happening, Solly." She was suddenly desperately weary, anxious to see real sunlight again, and a real ocean. The virtual expanses of Hammersmith's projection system just didn't cut it. No matter how vast the stretches of sea and beach might appear, she always knew she was inside a chamber.
"When do you expect we'll be docking?" she asked.
"About six in the morning."
It was not quite ten A.M., and they were just a few minutes from the jump. "Twenty hours?" she asked.
"That seems kind of long."
"It's because of the time differential in hyperflight," he said. "We never know quite where we'll materialize. So we want to be well away from Greenway."
"Sounds good to me."
"Check your harness."
She could hear power gathering in the jump engines. Solly activated the external sensors and telescopes.
She sat back, but kept an eye on the hypercomm lamps.
As they clicked down to one minute, Solly sighed. "You really expect something to happen, don't you?"
"I think something just did," she said. "In any case, to answer your question: Yes, I think we should contact Matt as soon as we're able. I want to tell him what's going on."
"So what are you going to say? That you think there's something on board that shouldn't be here?"
"That's right."
He grew somber. "If you do that, we may not get home anytime within the foreseeable future. You'll scare them out of their socks, and we'll spend the next few years on old Hammersmith."
"I don't know what else to do, Solly," she said.
The clock ran down to zero and he pressed the key.
A wave of vertigo passed behind her eyes. But she tried to control her breathing and think of other things.
Like how good it had been with Solly, despite the problems. Like the fact that Emily's body was downstairs and somebody was going to pay up for that.
The sensation passed quickly and the windows lit up with familiar constellations. Greenway and its moons appeared on one of the auxiliary screens.
"Transition complete," he said.
Kim nodded and kept her eyes on the hypercomm lamps.
Solly opened a channel to Sky Harbor. "This is Hammersmith. Approaching on manual. Computer out.
Request assistance."
While they waited for the signal to reach Greenway, and for the controllers to respond, Solly looked over his instruments. "Everything seems normal," he said.
Kim couldn't sort her feelings out. She wanted the problem to go away, wanted to get home with her discovery, wanted to enjoy her accomplishment. But she also wanted to be proved right, for Solly to see that the apparition had substance. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate that to herself as well. She wanted an apology from somebody.
"Hammersmith, this is Sky Harbor." A female voice. "We've been expecting you. Patrol will escort you in." They gave Solly a course and speed.
"That doesn't sound good," he said.
He brought the ship around to the prescribed heading and fired the mains. A blip appeared on the long- range navigation screen. "That'll be our escort," he said.
"How far are they?"
"Several hours."
Something caught Kim's attention. A movement, a shift in the light. She looked around the pilot's room.
Nothing seemed changed.
"Problem?" Solly asked.
"Don't know." She reached over and touched the hypercomm lamps. They were warm. "I think they're out again," she said.
He frowned and tried them for himself. And then scowled.
He removed the orange lamp and held it up to his eyes. "They sure are."
"Is there any other way to know whether we're transmitting?"
"Yes." He punched a button. "Patrol, Hammersmith. Do you read?"
"Hammersmith, this is Patrol one-one. Affirmative. Do you require assistance?" Male voice this time, Bondolay accent. Lots of r's.
"Are we showing a hypercomm transmission?"
"Wait one." He sounded as if he were being patient. Kim wiped her mouth while she waited for the response, which seemed to take an interminably long time. Then the voice was back: "Hammersmith," he said, "that is affirmative." He sounded puzzled. How could Hammersmith be transmitting and the pilot not know? "Is there a problem?"
"Computer is down," Solly said, climbing out of his chair. "And we're having some other minor malfunctions." He signed off and left the pilot's room in a dead run. Minutes later he was back, his face pale. "You were right, Kim," he said. "There is something in the works and the son of a bitch is trying to talk to the folks at home."
"The first thing it'll do," she said, "is tell them where Greenway is. Turn off the transmitter."
"I just did."
"Good."
He opened the channel again. "Patrol, this is Hammersmith. Has the subspace transmission ceased?"
"Negative." The voice paused. "Hammersmith, what is your situation?"
"I think we ought to tell them," said Kim.
"That would not be a good idea. If they believed us, we might just get a missile up our tailpipe."
"I don't believe they'd do that."
"Don't be too sure. This situation has suddenly become very scary."
Suddenly. "Solly. It's always been scary." She couldn't keep the note of recrimination out of her voice.
He tried to apologize, but she brushed it away. No matter. It's okay.
It wasn't, of course. But deep down she felt a sense of gratification that she'd been shown to be right.
He talked to the Patrol again, detailing the mechanical problems. "This is becoming a nightmare," he told her. Then he shut down the engines.
"You said something about taking a wrench to it," she said.
"That's what we have to do. But it's on the lower level, back in the woodwork. It'll take a half hour or more. That's too much time."
"So what do we do?"
"Give me a moment." He handed her a wristlamp, told her to turn it on, and opened a closet. He vanished inside and she heard him moving things around, heard the sound of a panel sliding back, and then the room went dark. But it wasn't like the normal darkness in the pilot's room, where one could sit in the glow of the instrument panels. Everything died: screens, gauges, status lamps, telltales, the electronic burble of the equipment. The place had gone completely black and silent. She tried to change her position and felt herself rising out of the seat. The artificial gravity was off.
A few security lights, operating on a separate circuit, began to glow. A battery lantern snapped on behind her. "That'll stop it," he said.
"I hate to bring this up." She was afloat now. "Do we still have life support?"
"No. Everything's shut down, except the engines. They're on a bypass. But we'll be okay long enough to disable the transmitter."
They switched to grip shoes and went down to the bottom floor, where long windows looked into the cargo and storage bays. The lamps threw shadows behind stocks of food, esoteric equipment that would have been used in the Taratuba mission, the recycling units, and the gravity control system. Solly opened a cabinet and picked out some tools. Satisfied, he led her toward the front of the ship.
Twin water tanks were housed forward in bays on either side of the passageway. They entered the starboard side and knelt down beside the tank. Solly anchored the lantern, which had a magnetic base, and began removing a panel.
Kim watched him work, got up, and went back into the corridor. She could see the stairway at the rear, outlined by security lights. In the launch bay, in the glow of her wrist-lamp, the lander's cockpit looked like a fish's head, rising through the floor. Its circular viewports stared back at her.
Solly laid the panel alongside the tank and looked inside the wall at a crawl space. "It'll take a while," he said, ducking into it. "I have to remove some other stuff to get at the transmitter." He took the lantern and was gone.
The darkness pressed down on her.
She could hear the clink of Solly's tools and the occasional scrape of metal on metal. Now and then something banged. The noise lifted her spirits. She stayed close by.
After a few minutes she heard a grunt of satisfaction. "That'll do for the son of a bitch," he said.
At that moment, a circle of illumination snapped on at the top of the staircase and her weight came back with the force of a blow between the shoulder blades. Although both shoes had been in contact with the deck, it was nonetheless like stepping into an unexpected hole in an unlit room. She twisted her knee and yelped. "Solly," she cried, "warn me next time." Her voice echoed off the walls.
"Wasn't me," he yelled.
Lights were coming on everywhere, in the passageway, the individual bays, even in the crawl space.
"Power's back on!" she said.
"I can see that. This goddamn thing could have juiced me."
She smelled something burning. Then he reappeared. "One problem settled anyhow," he said. "Nobody's going to communicate with anybody."
"Solly." She kept her voice very low. "Why'd the power come back on?"
"Somebody turned it on." He was holding the wrench in his right hand.
"What do we do now?"
"We're going to get rid of our visitor."
"How do we do that? We can't even find it."
They returned down the corridor and stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up at the landing. The airtight door at the top was open, just as they'd left it.
"We need to get some help," she said.
"That might not be easy. I just finished off the transmitter."
"You mean we can't communicate locally either?"
"Not with anybody outside screaming range. I would have just disabled the hypercomm function if I'd known how. Takes a goddamn engineer to figure some of this equipment out."
"So what's next?" she asked.
Solly put his arm around her and held her for a moment. "Stick with me."
He led the way up the staircase and with noticeable reluctance put his head through the open door and looked both ways along the corridor. "Don't see anything," he said.
The doors to the various compartments were all closed, save for the rec room, which was always open.
They peeked in, saw nothing, and climbed to the top floor.
From the pilot's room came the quiet murmur of the instruments. Everything was back on line.
Kim was alarmed to see that the status board was blinking red, but Solly explained it was only a warning that there was no transmission capability.
The Patrol was talking to them, asking what was wrong, pointing out they were off course, urging them to respond, assuring them help was on the way. They would be alongside, they said, in two hours.
Solly went back into the closet and showed her the power cutoff. It was a long black handle. It was up, in the white area, designated ON. "That caps it," said Solly. "We do have an intruder."
"No way it could trip back itself?"
"No," he said. "It's not supposed to be possible for it to turn itself on or off."
"Maybe," said Kim, "we should blink our lights for the Patrol. Let them know we've no communications."
"They'll figure it out on their own." He slumped into a seat. "It's invisible. But it's solid, right? It has to be. I mean, it turns handles."
"No," Kim said. "We know it's physical. That's not quite the same thing as being solid."