2312

They helped as best they could. Sitting people dragged prone people a few meters and passed them along to other sitting people. The crowd had to go in groups, filling the lock to capacity every time to speed the process along. Not many people wanted to go first, but there were shouts from behind, and people in the halls still just trying to get into the changing room, so there was a kind of osmotic pressure. The lock always filled pretty quickly; then they closed the door, waited for the lock to clear and then close outside and refill with air, then open again from the inside for the next lot. Even in the locks some people couldn’t move, and there were smalls in there working hard to kick and shove people out the open door; when the inner doors reopened, they were still there, their faces under their helmets suffused with a mad joy.

There were other locks on the ship, of course, which was a good thing, because the biggest personnel locks held groups of only about twenty, and each ejection was taking five minutes or so; so it would take a couple of hours to get everyone out who was going in a suit. Most of the launches and ferries were apparently already gone.

Swan kept helping people get organized into groups before entering the lock; that speeded the process. She and Wahram worked as a pair, very effectively considering that neither of them could move more than a little bit. Sometimes they answered anxious questions. The suits had a ten-day supply of air, water, and nutrients, and a certain amount of propellant. Rescue vessels had been alerted and were already on their way, so everyone would be picked up within hours rather than days. It would all be fine.

Still it was a spooky thing to dive off an accelerating spaceship into blackness and stars, clothed in nothing but a personal suit. Many a round-eyed person entered the lock, and Swan could sympathize, even though in ordinary circumstances she liked this kind of thing.

Some lock groups jumped out together, holding hands, hoping to stay together; once the ones still inside saw this on the screens, it became something almost every group tried to do. They were social primates, they would take the risk together. No one wanted to die alone.

Time seemed slow, and yet without her really noticing, the changing room had become emptier. Wahram was looking at her; his look said they didn’t have to do the captain thing and be the last ones off. She read this, laughed, grabbed his hand.

“Shall we join the next group?”

He nodded gratefully. There were going to be only a few more groups departing from this room. He was ready.

She pulled him into the lock. The twenty people inside looked at the outer doors. It was like being in an industrial-sized elevator. Some embraced. Hand found hand, until the group was a joined circle. She squeezed Wahram’s hand hard.

The air hissed out of the room. They braced themselves. The outer doors pulled back in both directions into the hull; black space yawned before them, the stars like spilled salt. Only a faceplate between you and the stars. There were so many stars that the patterns as seen on Earth were overwhelmed; it was simply space itself, star-blasted, nameless and huge-more than the human mind was meant to confront. Or simply the night sky, a primal experience, half of life. Part of themselves. Time to sleep, perchance to dream. They gathered their strength and out they went with a Shackleton leap.

They floated in the black, and some puffed out a bit of propellant, so that they pinwheeled away from their rapidly receding ship. It was very quickly a distant white chip, lit within its whiteness by a string of diamonds firecracking in its stern. Look away, don’t burn your retinas; glance back; the ETH Mobile was maybe one of the stars there. They were on their own.

There was no sign of the other groups. Suddenly the idea that they could be found and rescued seemed impossible, a dream or hope that could not come true. They had jumped to their deaths.

But she had been out here before; she knew it could be done. Their suit transponders meant they were each beaconing like a fierce little lighthouse.

They established a group comms band on the helmet radios at 555, but as time wore on, few people spoke. There was little to say. Swan wanted to let go of the hand that was not Wahram’s, but didn’t. She clutched his right hand with her left; she held it tight. He squeezed back. She switched to band 345, heard only the sound of his breathing, steady and slow. He looked at her as he heard her too, breathing in his ear. His face was round behind his faceplate, his expression grave but fearless.

“When you do you think it will happen?” Swan said, looking at the white dot she thought was the ETH Mobile.

“Soon, I should think,” he replied.

And almost as he said it there was a flash of light in the area where Swan had been looking. “That was it!”

“Maybe so.”

After that a long time passed. An hour… two hours… then three.