Dark Benediction

“Get your suit sealed!” he yelled. “Get it sealed!”

The runabout lurched to a sudden stop. The cabin pressure stayed up. He sat panting for a moment, then started the motor. He let it inch ahead and tugged at the steering bar. It was locked. The bug crept in an arc, and the clanking resumed. He cut off the motor and sat cursing softly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Broke a link and the tread’s fouled. We’ll have to get out.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was glowering. She looked back toward the sentrybox entrance to the substation and smiled thoughtfully.

It was chilly in the vault, and the only light came from the indicator lamps on the control board.’ The pressure gauge inside the airlock indicated only eight pounds of air. The construction crew had pumped it up to keep some convection currents going around the big transformers, but they hadn’t planned on anyone breathing it soon. He changed the mixture controls, turned the barostat up to twelve pounds, and listened to the compressors start up. When he turned around, Giselle was taking off her suit and beginning to pant.

“Hey, stay in that thing!” he shouted.

His helmet muffled his voice, and she looked at him blankly. “What?” she called. She was gasping and looking around in alarm.

Relke sprinted a few steps to the emergency rack and grabbed a low pressure walk-around bottle. When he got back, she was getting blue and shaking her head drunkenly. He cracked the valve on the bottle and got the hose connection against her mouth. She nodded quickly and sucked on it. He went back to watch the gauges. He found the overhead lighting controls and turned them on. Giselle held her nose and anxiously sipped air from the bottle. He nodded reassuringly at her. The construction crews had left the substation filled with nitrogen-helium mixture, seeing no reason to add rust-producing moisture and oxygen until someone moved into the place; she had been breathing inert gases, nothing more.

When the partial oxygen pressure was up to normal, he left the control panel and went to look for the communicator. He found the equipment, but it was not yet tied into the line. He went back to tell the girl. Still sipping at the bottle, she watched him with attentive brown eyes. It was the gaze of a child, and he wondered about her age. Aboard ship, she and the others had seemed impersonal automata of Eros; painted ornaments and sleekly functional decoys designed to perform stereotyped rituals of enticement and excarnation of desire, swiftly, lest a customer be kept waiting. But here in stronger light, against a neutral background, he noticed suddenly that she was a distinct individual. Her lipstick had smeared. Her dark hair kept spilling out in tangled wisps from beneath a leather cap with fleece ear flaps. She wore a pair of coveralls, several sizes too large and rolled up about the ankles. With too much rouge on her solemnly mischievous face, she looked ready for a role in a girls’ school version of Chanticler.

“You can stop breathing out of the can,” he told her. “The oxygen pressure’s okay now.”

She took the hose from her mouth and sniffed warily. “What was the matter? I was seeing spots.”

“It’s all right now.”

“It’s cold in this place. Are we stuck here?”

“I tried to call Joe, but the set’s not hooked up. He’ll come looking for us.”

“Isn’t there any heat in here? Can’t you start a fire?”

He glanced down at the big 5,000 kva transformers in the pit beyond the safety rail. The noise of corona discharge was very faint, and the purr of thirty-two cycle hum was scarcely audible. With no trucks drawing, power from the trolley, the big pots were cold. Normally, eddy current and hysteresis losses in the transformers would keep the station toast-warm. He glanced at a thermometer. It read slightly under freezing: the ambient temperature of the subsurface rock in that region.

“Let’s try the stationman’s living quarters,” he grunted. “They usually furnish them fancy, as bunk tanks go. Man has to stay by himself out here, they want to keep him sane.”

A door marked PRIVATE flipped open as they approached it. A cheery voice called out: “Hi, Bo. Rugged deal, ain’t it?”

Giselle started back in alarm. “Who’s there?”

Relke chuckled. “Just a recorded voice. Back up, I’ll show you.”

They moved a few paces away. The door fell closed. They approached it again. This time a raucous female squawked at them: “Whaddaya mean coming home at this hour? Lemme smell your breath.”

Giselle caught on and grinned. “So he won’t get lonesome?”

“Partly, and partly to keep him a little sore. The stationmen hate it, but that’s part of the idea. It gives them something to talk back to and throw things at.”