David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“We’ll all have to get decontaminated before returning to any pressurized zones, I’m sure of that,” Carl said.

—Well, do the best you can. I’ll get some sample bottles to you.—

“I’ll make do. Don’t let anybody into this section.”

—You think it’s that dangerous?—

“Damn right.”

He broke off and kept searching. His team spread around, checking intersections for signs of buckling. Something was nagging at him but he had no time to stop and think. The purple chunks had drifted far and wide and he had only a few people to retrieve them all.

At the tunnel leading horizontally to Central, Samuelson found a purple tip just sticking through the plastaform. He called Conti and the two of them took a sample.

They were careless.

When Carl got there a few minutes later, both of them were slapping patches on themselves and yelping with startled pain Through their faceplates each looked surprised, white-faced, eyes big and jerking around.

“What happened?”

—I snagged this piece and it got away from me,—Samuelson said. —Conti grabbed it and it… ate through his glove.—

There was a big, awkward patch on Conti’s right hand. “I suppose you brushed the piece with your arm?” Carl asked.

—Yeah, and the damned thing stung me.—

Conti’s face was twisted into a self-involved grimace of agony. —Getting’ worse.—

“Samuelson, take him. The two of you go to the emergency entrance lock. I’ll call Malenkov and let him know you’re coming.”

—Wh…what you think it is…doing? —Conti asked.

Eating , Carl thought, but kept it to himself. “Get to the doctors.” He gave them both a push inward. “Hurry!”

In the next hour Malenkov sent him reports on their condition. The purple thing had eaten through fiber covering their suits, probably reacting to it as potential food. —Maybe it just likes long chain molecules,—Malenkov had suggested. Once inside, it burned the skin. Some probably had gotten into the bloodstream. Conti and Samuelson reported a spreading, dull ache. They were sedated and under observation.

Carl warned Lani and kept searching. Nearly an hour later he suddenly had an idea.

“Saul! Lintz! You there?”

The cross-link clicked and hummed, and then, —Yes.—

“This purple stuff is light, moves easy. Most of what we cut away got sucked into the holes.”

Carl visualized the alternating layers of inert material and vacuum that made the wall insulation. Beyond the insulation was a full two centimeters of helium, intended to isolate the wall from ice. It also provided a route for boiloff to swarm upward to the surface and escape. “Where’s this shaft’s venting go?”

—Shaft Three vac line funnels everything from sleep slot one to the surface. That’s not my department, though. You’d better ask Vidor.—

“No, listen. We always think of boiloff escaping upward, right? But the wind we had here, it was strong.”

—Yes. We lost a lot of air.—

“Point is, that air gusher was big enough to blow some back inward.”

—Maybe. It’ll leak out pretty fast, though, even… Oh, I see. You’re worried about…—

“Right. The purple stuff. It’s been carried by the air back toward Central.”

—There are storage vaults along there, and…—

“Right.” Carl hesitated, then decided. “Saul! I’m overriding Malenkov during this crisis. As of now, you’re out of quarantine. Shanghai Quiverian and anybody you can find. Get down to Three J. You bio guys better think fast. I bet these things’ve got into sleep slot one.”

Saul blinked wearily through a double-antihistamine haze as he finished wiping the last green traces from the edges of the filter unit. Reduced from high science to scut work, he thought grumpily. Mama took in washing to send her little boy to college—to do this?

Of course his real “mama” had done no such thing. She had been a colonel in the Israeli army, a hero of the ’09 liberation of Baghdad, and probably would have approved of her intellectual son’s being forced to use a bucket and mop, from time to time.

Still, the ironic fantasy amused Saul, so he nursed it. He gritted his teeth and pounded the filter back into place. Thirty years of education, and a half-billion-mile trip into space—all to be a janitor. It confirmed his long-standing belief that there was, indeed, such a thing as progress.

At least the present crisis appeared to have taken him off the pariah list. Every hand was needed to fight the Halleyform infestations, and few begrudged him an occasional sniffle.

Done, at last.

Saul sealed his sponge inside the bucket and stripped off his gloves. He looked over the rows of coffinlike sleep slots, foggy from internal chill and condensation, each showing a dim, hibernating form within. For two days he had been down here in the chilled chamber, trying to keep the infestations out of the slots.

Beyond the rows of sleepers, a workbench lay strewn with bits of glass and electronics torn from a half-dozen gutted instrument panels. A tall form stooped over the clutter.

“You about finished with those lamps, Joao?” Saul called. “I promised them to Carl soon.”

The sallow-faced Brazilian shook his head and muttered sourly, “I have only unpacked and mounted four bulbs since you last asked, Saul. Give me time!”

Quiverian obviously did not like being dragooned into doing “Stoop labor” out here in sleep slot 1, where it was cold and dangerous. Saul had been forced to go down in person to Central and drag the man away from a long, rambling, time-lag conversation with an Earthside planetologist colleague. Until then, Joao had behaved as if the total mobilization had nothing to do with him.

First job had been to go over every inch of the sleep-slot chamber, cataloguing infestations. Then had come long, grueling hours of scraping, wiping, disinfecting. The air-circulation inlets had fouled with the threadlike lichenoids, nearly choking off a whole row of lots. Except for one brief sleep period, the two men had been at it nonstop for almost forty hours.

Thank a merciful heaven Virginia ’s mechs report few problems in the other two sleep slots!

At last, when Quiverian had seemed on the verge of rebellion, Saul had put him to work assembling the hydrogen lamps, an easier job than stoop-and-swab labor.

“If you’re in such a damn hurry,” Quiverian groused, “why don’t you wake up lazybones over there. Put him to work doing something more useful than snoring and warming the whole cave with his electric blanket!”

Saul glanced at the recumbent form of Spacer Tech Garner, lying on the fibersheath floor in a dark corner. Garner had been on duty for four days straight. The man was just catching a few hours’ shuteye before going back out to join the battles once again. In comparison, Joao’s work here had been a holiday.

“Leave him alone, Joao. I’ll take the first four lamps and test them. You just keep working on the others.”

He paused, then added, “Only please, Joao, be careful, will you? Try not to break any more of those bulbs. It’s a long trek back to the supply store.”

Quiverian shrugged. “First you say to hurry, then to be careful. Make up your mind.”

Saul realized the man would wear him into the ground it he remained here. “Just do the best you can.” He picked up a set of the spindly beacon lamps—meant to flash navigation/location reference to astronauts working on the moon or asteroids. He had an idea they might be useful in another function, here.

We’ll see if they’re any good against a form of life that lives in space.

He set forth in a low glide toward the entrance to Tunnel J, an amber-colored exit from the great chamber containing sleep slot 1. Right now the place was eerie with the lights dimmed low. The vaulted recesses seemed deeper, more mysterious, like naves in an ancient tomb. Fibercloth rounded the edges, but the vast cave was still an irregular hole deep under the ice. One didn’t dwell on how many tons hung overhead, in the kilometer or more to the surface.