Stephen Baxter - Anti-Ice

The wheel turned in my hands, mysteriously; a final fragment of rationality told me that Holden and Traveller must be working at their side of the hatch also. I released the wheel and floated into darkness.

The pain evaporated, and a soft illumination began to break through my darkness, a blue-white light like that of Earth.

I fell into the light.

When I opened my eyes again I fully expected to see the inside of my hellish copper helmet-prison once more. But my head was free; the furnishings of the Smoking Cabin were all about me. Holden’s face hovered over me, a round pool of concern. “Ned? Ned, can you hear me?”

I tried to speak, but found that my throat was as sore as if it had been scoured, and I could only whisper, “Holden? I have succeeded, then?”

His lips were pressed together, and he nodded gravely. “You have indeed, my lad. Although I fear we are not out of the woods yet.”

He offered me a globe of brandy; the hot liquid coursed through my wounded throat. I raised my head. Holden pushed me back, saying I should not try to move yet; but I saw that I still wore the air suit, save for the helmet, and was lightly bound by a blanket into my bunk. “Bourne?” I gasped. “Did he survive?”

“Indeed he did, thanks to your generosity,” Holden said. “Although if it were up to me I would have pitched the Frenchie out of the hatch…”

“Where is he?”

“The far bunk, being tended by Pocket. He went without air for perhaps a minute—but Traveller feels he will suffer no permanent damage. Sadly.”

I rested my head back on my pillow. Through the storm of the recent events my surprise at the identity of our saboteur still shone like a clear ray.

“And Traveller?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“On the Bridge.” He smiled. “Ned, while Pocket and I worked at the two of you—unscrewing your helmet and so on—our host made directly for the various instruments of the Bridge, like a child reunited with lost toys!”

I found the strength to laugh. “Well, that’s Traveller. Holden, you said we were not out of the wood; has Traveller reached some verdict already from his instrumentation?”

Holden nodded and bit at his nail. “It appears our French friend has indeed used too much water for our return to Earth to be possible. But that’s not the worst of it, Ned.”

Still stunned, I suppose, by my recent experiences, I absorbed this news with equanimity, and said, “But what could be worse than such a sentence of doom?”

“Traveller has changed. It’s as if he has been galvanized by your example of determination and action; he has now resolved, he says, that we should return to Earth. But, Ned—” Holden’s eyes were wide with fear “—In order to save us, Traveller intends to take us to the surface of the Moon, and search for water there!”

I closed my eyes, wondering if I were trapped within some dream induced by carbonic acid.

The days that followed were a blur. My perambulation through space had left my systems drained. And the strange environment of the Phaeton —the floating conditions, the rhythm of day and night marked only by the habitual routines of Pocket and Holden (Traveller, buried in his Bridge, was never to be seen now in the Smoking Cabin), the smoky, still air that made one long to hurl open a window—all of this combined to immerse me in a dreamlike state. Perhaps our isolation from the natural conditions of Earth had something to do with my distracted mental state; perhaps our human bodies are more bound than we know to the diurnal rhythms of our mother world.

I was disturbed several times, however, by a roaring sound, a gentle pressure that pushed me deeper into my cot. At such times I vaguely wondered if I had traveled through time as well as through the vacuum and had somehow been returned to those nightmare moments of the launch of the Phaeton into space. But each disturbance faded after a few seconds; and each time I relapsed into my unnatural slumber. I learned later that my connection of these events with the launch was not unfounded, for the sound I heard was indeed that of the vessel’s main rockets. Traveller, installed in his pilot’s couch, worked his motors so that we blazed through space; once more—however briefly—we were masters of our own destiny.

But this time we were not simply hauling away from Earth; this time Traveller was guiding us to a destination far stranger…

Apart from gentle washings, feedings of soup and warm tea, and other ministrations performed by the gentle Pocket, the others made no attempt to wake me, believing that it was better to let Nature take her course. And I had no wish to emerge rapidly from this womblike half-sleep; for what should I find on awakening?—only the same grisly parade of doom-laden alternatives which had driven me to my desperate jaunt through vacuum.

But at last my strange sac of sleep dissolved, and I was expelled, as reluctantly as any mewling infant, into a hostile world.

Finding myself loosely bound up in a blanket cocoon, and too weak even to extricate myself, I called feebly for Pocket.

The manservant was able to lift me from my bed as if I were an infant… although the rather mysterious Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions, as expounded by the great Sir Isaac Newton, caused him to lurch adversely through the air. He dressed me in a gown belonging to Traveller, fed me once more, and even shaved me.

The face I saw in the shaving mirror was gaunt-cheeked, with eyes red and rimmed with darkness. I was, I feared, scarcely recognizable as the young man who had joined the launch of the Prince Albert in such fine humor only days before. “Good Lord, Pocket, I should hardly sweep la belle Françoise from her feet in this condition.”

The good chap rested a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you bother with any such considerations, sir. Once I’ve fed you up you’ll be in as fine fettle as you ever were.”

His cheery, homely voice, with its base of genuine warmth, was immensely comforting. “Thank you for your care, Pocket.”

“It’s you who wants thanking, Mr. Vicars.”

Now George Holden hove into view from the Bridge; with a kind of featherlight clumsiness he lowered his girth through the famous ceiling hatch—now jammed open—and floated across the air. “My dear Ned,” he said. “How are you?”

“Quite well,” I said, rather embarrassed by his effusiveness.

“You may have saved all our lives, thanks to your extraordinary courage—I could never have faced that stroll in the dark! Even the thought of immersing my head in that copper cage causes me to shudder—”

I shivered. “Don’t remind me. In any event, I have scarcely rescued us; we are still lost in space, are we not, dependent for salvation on Traveller’s eccentric plans?”

“Perhaps, but at least we can now put such plans into operation; without your courage we would still be trapped, falling out of control into the darkness, our lives maintained at the whim of a French swine. As you lay unconscious for so long, we began to fear that the carbonic acid in that suit had done for you after all, lad; and I could have broken the throat of the Frenchie with my own hands, these hands which have held nothing more cruel than a pen for thirty years.”

I frowned, a little taken aback by this torrent of anger. “Holden, how long have I been asleep? What is today’s date?”

“According to Traveller’s instruments today is the twenty-second of August. You have slept, therefore, for a full seven days.”

“I… Good Lord.” In my still rather dazed state I tried vainly to work out how much further I had traveled from the Earth in that time, but—unable, in my fuddled condition, to recall if there were twenty-four or sixty hours in a day—I abandoned the project. “And the saboteur, Holden; the man Bourne. What of him? Has he recovered consciousness?”