Zach Hughes - Pressure Man

“Four minutes and counting,” Doris said.

“I’m in the lock and I have the charge,” Dom said. But he knew as well as they that it took five minutes to empty the lock and another few seconds to open the outer door, run down the airless corridor and send the charge into space.

“Dom,” J.J. said. “Moon Control is on. They have been warned that if the broadcast does not start exactly on time the charge will be detonated.”

“J.J., goddammit, you’re supposed to be off the ship.”

“Put me on report,” J.J. said. “You’ll make it.”

“Stall them. Tell them to stall somehow. All we need is another couple of minutes,” Dom said. The water was being pumped out of the lock with a terrifying slowness. The heavy charge in his hands seemed so inert, but it was death, not only for him but for the ship.

“Three minutes, Flash. Moon Control says stalling is out. They’ve been warned against it.”

“All right,” Dom said. “Tell them to start the broadcast on time. It should last a couple of minutes, at least. That just might give us time.”

The water was only down a couple of feet from the ceiling on the lock. Seconds ticked off his wrist chronometer.

“Those miserable bastards,” J. J. said. “Those mucking, murdering bastards. Dom, it has been decided at the top level that the service will not appease the terrorists. They will not start the broadcast. We have two minutes and—fifty seconds.”

Dom was feeling panic, but his mind worked, envisioning the layout of the ship. The hold lock and the outer hull lock were almost opposite each other across the narrow walkway alongside the hold, nothing more than a tunnel connecting the forward compartments with the engine areas.

“Paul,” Dom yelled. “Can you override the safeties on the hold lock?”

“Affirmative.”

“Do it. Outer hull lock open?”

“I’m in vacuum. Affirmative.”

“When I give the word, brace yourself in somewhere and blow the door to this lock. Don’t get in the way. A lot of water will be sucked out.”

“I’ve got you,” Jensen said. “Take a minute.”

“You have just over that,” J.J. said.

“Safety off,” Jensen said. “Clumsy. It will take a little repair.”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Dom said. “Blow this door as fast as you can, right now.”

He placed himself against the door, the charge in its watertight bag held down toward the deck. When the door started up, the vacuum in the corridor and all the space would suck the water out of the lock with tremendous force.

“Here we go,” Jensen said.

The door started upward. There was a roaring hiss as explosive decompression started in the lock, sucking water under the door opening so rapidly that Dom almost went with it, catching himself with one hand on a support as the force tore at him. The charge was ripped from his hand. It banged against the rising door and then shot out and then with the same suddenness with which it began decompression was complete and there was silence. Dom closed his eyes and waited for the explosion. The lock door continued to rise. He looked out into the tunnel and saw Jensen still clinging to supports. If there was another charge it would go about now.

He did not hear the explosion when it came, for it came in the vacuum of space fifty yards away and slightly astern of the open outer lock. The blast which would have been so deadly in the filled hold was puny in the emptiness of space. Later, an examination showed a few pinpoints of damage on the skin of the hull.

“Mr. Jensen,” Dom said, very formally and very softly, “you may close hull.”

He went forward to discover that each member of the crew was in his or her place, that the reported launchings of the escape capsules had been faked for his benefit. He was both angered by having his orders disobeyed and touched to know that each of them had risked his life to stay and do whatever was possible to save the ship.

“What can I say?” J.J. asked. “ ‘Good work’ would be a feeble way to express it.”

“You can have your say when I put you on report for ignoring a ship captain’s order,” Dom said.

He felt a sudden weakness in his knees and sat down. Doris handed him a cup of steaming coffee.

“I think I’ve created a monster,” J.J. said. “Give a junior officer a bit of authority and it goes to his head.”

“Save it,” Dom said. “You’ll need the energy. We’re going to go over this ship. I don’t want any more little surprises. I want every circuit, every component, every inch of her checked.”

Doris was watching his face, a strange little smile on her lips.

“And you,” he said. “I thought you were safe in the capsule.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t. There were several reasons.”

“Dom,” Neil said, “there was no way any of us were going to let this ship die and go back to the moon on a rescue vessel.”

Dom was thinking about those several reasons Doris had for staying on the ship as long as he was there and in danger.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose I’m supposed to be grateful. I am, personally, but as captain of this ship I want it to be known that this is the last mutiny. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” J.J. said, grinning.

“Admiral,” Dom said. “Let’s get started. You, sir, can start with the heads.”

And even the heads were checked during the next few exhausting days before they were satisfied that the Kennedy held no more unpleasant surprises for them. The guess that the circuits to the hatches in the redundant bulkheads had been burned with a delayed acid bomb was correct. The damage was minor. Within hours after the explosion of the bomb in space the men who had seized station eight-five on the moon were dead. Meanwhile, as the check of the ship continued, Mars grew from a star to a small globe on the viewscreens, and the unimpressive red disc grew rapidly as the shipboard activities settled into a routine.

In deep space a ship becomes a small world. While there is radio contact with the moon and with the more powerful stations at Houston and DOSEWEX, that contact is limited to official and functional communications. Radio messages from the Kennedy should have been less limited than those of an ordinary ship, for the Kennedy had as much computer power as either of the two main control stations. But since anyone on Earth with a powerful receiver could monitor ship channels, the Kennedy was limited in the information she could safely send.

Still when things settled down and the watches became long and boring, a favorite form of entertainment was to listen to traffic between ships in space and the home control stations.

To be in deep space was to be cut off from any accurate knowledge of affairs on Earth, for the daily broadcasts to spacers were from government-controlled stations. Much of the news content of such programs was shameless puffs of current Publicrat policies, promises of the Utopia to come. There was no mention of the attempt to destroy the Kennedy or of the death of the terrorists on the moon.

In the early days, when a few brave men were the focus of the attention of the world, nothing was too good for spacemen. On the first Mars flights the hours of boredom were partially dispelled by broadcasts on a special channel, news, music, and even long chats with relatives and friends of the men who were riding the ship through a long, tedious flight. Now, in the name of economy, broadcasts were limited and consisted mostly of propaganda.

No one aboard the Kennedy bothered to listen to the government stations. The ship carried a sizable film library and good music tapes. Because power was unlimited, there was a decent library of real books, plus a larger one of microfilm. Still, one of the favorite forms of passing time was to listen to the cool, professional voices of spacers sending reports to Houston.