Allen Steele - The Great Galactic Ghoul

Because the Woman ’s reactor boom jutted out at right-angles from the rest of the ship, there was no way the freighter could hard-dock with the rig. To make matters more difficult, the Explorer ’s primary docking hatch was occupied by its skiff, thereby preventing the Woman from sending over her own skiff; compounding the mystery was the fact that the Explorer ’s two three-person lifeboats were still in their berths as well. So reaching the rig wouldn’t be simple.

After a brief discussion, Henry Zimmerman consented to let Quon Ko make an untethered spacewalk over to the rig. It was a dangerous task; Ko would be using an EVA maneuvering pack, and the slightest misfire of its control thrusters could mean that he’d mismatch his spin relative to those of both the Woman and the Explorer and either tumble away into space or, worse, smash headlong into Eros at hundreds of feet per second. Ko had logged hundreds of hours in spacewalks, though, and had practiced this particular ship-to-ship jump before.

Lesley would later confess to biting her nails to the quick, but Ko made the jump without incident. “The trick is, you don’t look where you’re going,” he says. “If you did, you’d get dizzy and screw up. So you keep your eye on the heads-up the whole time and just do it.”

He came down near a small service airlock located on the Explorer ’s starboard side, just above one of the four massive anchor pods on the rig’s underside that held the rig to the asteroid. Not far away was the hollow shaft of the primary drill; within the dim illumination of the formation lights, Ko could see that the drum-like shaft was sunk within the asteroid, a certain indication that the chemical laser bore had been deployed.

Ko found the airlock hatch, and it was then, within the halogen beams of his helmet lamps, that he noticed a safety line tethered to a rung next to the hatch. The slender rope lay limp from the hatch, falling down the adjacent ladder until it reached the ground, where it trailed away into the darkness. Ko used a flashlight from his belt to give the safety line a quick glance; there was nothing at the end of the line except another tether hook, but he also noted footprints scattered along the dark gray regolith beneath it. Little more than two dozen impressions, they went away from the rig and didn’t come back. There appeared to be more than one set of footprints, but it was hard to tell for sure whether more than one person was responsible for them.

“I had a hunch all this was significant,” Ko would later tell the board of inquiry, “so before I went in through the airlock, I took plenty of pictures. Particularly of the footprints, before they got messed up by anyone else.”

To avoid disturbing what might be a major clue, Quon Ko clung to the ladder as much as possible while he opened the airlock, setting his own feet on the ground only once. That was made possible by Eros’s very slight surface gravity. At less than .002-g, one would have to remain still for a long time in order to stand erect; even a dropped object took a minute or more to slowly drift to a rest.

Once he entered the airlock, the first thing Ko did was to check the interior pressure gauge. He was startled to find nothing but hard vacuum on the other side. It appeared that the Explorer had suffered a catastrophic blowout that had voided even the lower decks. “Automatic pressure doors should’ve come down,” he says, “unless the explosion was such that the comps were instantly knocked offline. In that case…” He stops, shakes his head. “When something like that happens, there’s no hope. You’re dead before you even hear the alarms.”

There seemed to be emergency power, though, so with Henry’s permission, Ko disengaged the airlock fail-safes, then pried open the inside hatch. An emergency ceiling lamp had been lit in the adjacent ready-room, and beneath its amber glow Ko found another clue. Two skinsuits were missing from the lockers; the other four were still in place, and when Ko checked their name patches, he saw that they belonged to David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley and Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley. Which meant it was Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley who’d left through the airlock and not come back.

“When Ko found this,” Lesley says, “I figured, ‘Okay, that’s it. We’re going to find everyone else’s bodies somewhere in the rig.’ In fact, I started bracing myself for just that… even grabbing the med kit so that I’d have a sedative patch handy.”

For Ko, the situation was different. Professional spacers speak of moments of surrealism that sometimes occur during stressful EVAs; they become hyperconscious of the fact that they’re seeing the world through a helmet faceplate, and it suddenly seems as if they’ve become living cameras. “Distancing” is the expression most often used; you’re there, but it’s as if you’re not quite there.

This is what happened to Quon Ko as he made his way through the Ritchie Explorer . Climbing up the ladder from the airlock, he found the passageway that led him to the crew quarters. As he’d suspected, the emergency pressure doors hadn’t dropped; one by one, he entered compartments completely absent of atmospheric pressure. In the sanguine red tint of the ceiling lamps, he saw the damage caused by the blowout: food cans torn from galley shelves and strewn across the deck, clothes ripped from closet hangers, shredded paper thrown everywhere like confetti… and across it all, a thin layer of frost, where water vapor had instantly frozen out and become a patina of ice.

One small detail he’d come to remember: On the floor of one of the staterooms lay a paperback book, its cover torn and frosted-over but its title still readable— Basics of Rock Climbing . Perhaps because the book was so out of place, it stuck in his mind.

Yet there were no bodies. Like Lesley, Ko expected to find corpses. Even if two of the missing crewmen had been on EVA when the disaster occurred, it still meant that the remaining four should have been inside the rig; the lifeboats were in place, as was the skiff, so it was clear that no one had abandoned ship. Yet just as it was apparent that the rig had lost internal pressure before the emergency hatches could be sealed, so it also became obvious that no one would be found belowdecks.

Leaving the crew quarters, Ko crossed the short passageway that took him into the rig’s industrial section. When he came to the place where the ladder to the command module should have been located, though, he found himself at the edge of a gaping hole. A blast crater yawned in the center of the rig: nearly a dozen feet in diameter, it was practically bottomless, or at least as far he could tell from the beams of his helmet lamps. This was the site of the onboard explosion, the effects of which the Woman ’s crew had seen from above. Judging from the way the torn metal edges of the crater were bent upwards, it appeared that the blast had happened somewhere below.

As Ko peered into the abyss, Henry and Lesley hastily pulled up the Explorer ’s schematics from the Woman ’s database. It was then that they discovered that the rig’s primary drill was positioned directly below the command module. It looked as if the drill had hit something deep underground that had caused the explosion, the force of which had blown straight upward into the rig itself.

There was nowhere else to search for survivors except the bridge. Rather than spend time searching for another ladder, Ko took the most direct approach: firing his EVA backpack, he carefully used its jets to glide up the crater to the top deck. “I could’ve left the rig entirely,” Ko says. “The ceiling was almost totally gone. When I got up there, I saw almost nothing but stars above me.”