Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 7

A series of leaks had developed near Lock 18 and a maintenance crew had been sent into the section to carry out repairs.

Jerome’s growing tiredness with the work was aggravated by annoyance at not being able to judge time properly. The Dorrinian “day’ had nothing to do with the planet’s rotation, but was a period based on circadian rhythms inherited from the legendary home world. Jerome had been told it was roughly equal to twenty-six Earth hours. As his new body had been attuned to it from birth there should have been no problems with adjustment, yet the annoyance persisted. He was accustomed to estimating work shifts in the convenient units of hours, and saw no merit in the Dorrinian system of a day which was split into a thousand undifferentiated units called mirds.

Dorrinian clocks and watches also seemed unnecessarily confusing. They operated through molecular resonances, products of the psychic micro-engineering at which the Dorrinians excelled. Their displays consisted of two rows of squarish Dorrinian digits—the upper one showing the mird count for that day, and the lower giving the number of days since the creation of the Thabbren. Other periodicities had apparently faded from the racial consciousness. Jerome found the system too linear for his liking. He missed the comforting arrangement of cycles within cycles, by which the members of his culture disguised the realities of entropy.

He also objected to working in a poorly designed vacuum suit. In the vicinity of Lock 18 the tunnel was close to the surface, and for a lengthy portion of the planetary day the temperature inside it was uncomfortably high. His suit, primitive by Terran standards, had no cooling system and even when the wearer was at rest quickly became a dank, choking autoclave. During periods of physical activity the enclosed environment was almost unbearable, but the suit was necessary in case a sudden major rupture of the tunnel wall exhausted the air.

“How are you doing, Jerome?” said Mallat Rill Glevdane, the Dorrinian who was supervising the repairs. “Problems?”

Jerome, who had been forcing mastic into a seam, paused to dab his brow through the open faceplate of his helmet. “Yes—I can’t get a reliable seal here. The mastic isn’t doing a lot of good.”

“How much have you put in?”

“At least a kilo, and I can still hear the air going through. We ought to take the plate off and have a look at the seating.”

An amused expression appeared on Glevdane’s pinched face. “That’s your expert opinion, is it?”

“You don’t need to be an expert to see that this whole system is garbage.”

“It was built forty years ago by Tarn Gall Evalne.” Glevdane no longer looked amused. “He was a Guardian, and one of our most celebrated engineers.”

“He might have been good at carving molecules into netsuke, but he hadn’t a clue about large structures.” Jerome nodded in the direction of Lock 18. “There’s your trouble, right there. Rigid frames built into a semi-rigid tube. Those things are causing the leaks. The rest of the tunnel adapts to rock creep, but the door frames don’t—so you keep on getting sprung plates.”

“If the frames weren’t rigid the lock doors wouldn’t seal.”

“Because they go into the frames. They should he face-fitting. I could design you an airlock door which could take a distortion of five or ten centimetres in the frame and still remain airtight.”

“You must have a truly brilliant mind,” Glevdane said heavily. “I wonder why it is that a man who would presume to instruct Evalne has been assigned such ordinary manual work?”

“That was only because…” Jerome broke off, surprised at himself—after all that had happened—for allowing old preoccupations to affect his current attitudes. Towards the end of his placement interview, sixty-six days earlier, he had been astonished to learn that his lack of formal engineering qualifications were to count against him when his place in an alien society on an alien world was being decided. It seemed monstrously unfair that the same prejudices which had worked against him on Earth could hold sway even when he was in vastly different circumstances and in another man’s body on a remote planet. His youthful habit of arguing with teachers instead of listening to them was still paying a harsh return.

“Anyway,” he said, “I still think the plate should come out.”

“I bow to your expert opinion,” Glevdane said. “Our safety regulations state that, where possible, no more than two workers shall remain in an evacuated section of the tunnel. Can you handle the job with a single helper?”

“You want me to do it?”

“You’re the great practical engineer.” Glevdane’s eyes glinted in the shadowy grotto of his helmet. “Of course, if you prefer me to give the work to a more experienced…”

“I can manage,” Jerome said quickly, concealing his unease at the prospect of trusting his life to a Dorrinian-made vacuum suit. The limitations of the environment had had a profound effect on Dorrinian science and technology. Minerals were plentiful, but oxygen was a precious manufactured commodity and without an abundance of it there had been little progress in metallurgy. Similar constraints had affected the development of glass, plastics and other materials, with the result that many artifacts resembled museum pieces to Jerome’s eyes, devices in which the greater part of the designer’s ingenuity had gone into overcoming his materials’ sheer unsuitability for their purpose. The garment he was wearing was a prime example. To him there was more than a hint of a 19th century diving suit about it, and he suspected it would have been quite impracticable in Earth gravity.

“Very well,” Glevdane said. “You have a complete tool kit here, and I’ll send a man to work with you.” He explained that he and the rest of the crew would observe tunnel safety regulations by withdrawing beyond two locks and sealing them before Jerome disturbed any plating.

Jerome nodded, scarcely listening, as he concentrated on checking his oxygen supply and closing up his helmet. The suit became more claustrophobic than ever when he had clamped the thick face plate, an act of imprisonment which reminded him how much he hated the Dorrinian way of life. Hardly a night ever passed without his dreaming he was back on Earth, walking in the open, feeling the benison of rain on his face, and when he awoke to the sterile warrens of the Precinct it was almost impossible to control the trembling of his limbs. The nights when Donna Sinclair was beside him were easier to bear, but the only thing which gave any direction and meaning to his existence was the long-term prospect of returning to his own world. If furthering that ambition meant working for the Dorrinians, aiding their stealthy invasion of Earth, then he was prepared to push himself to the limit.

“I volunteered to help you, Mister Jerome,” said an approaching worker. “Is it okay if I help you?”

The speaker would have been practically unidentifiable in his sealed vacuum suit, but Jerome recognized the tone and mode of address. He had had a few conversations with Sammy Birkett since his arrival on Mercury, and had found them difficult and embarrassing. The young gardener appeared to have adjusted to his new circumstances with remarkable ease, but Jerome sensed an underlying confusion and terror.

One manifestation was Birkett’s desire to spend as much time as possible with Jerome, talking incessantly about local affairs back in Whiteford. reciting lists of names in the hope of discovering mutual acquaintances. Jerome could sympathize, but found it harrowing to remain long in Birkett’s company. He and Birkett were socially incompatible, whether on Earth or on Mercury, but he had an idea that his aversion for the younger man had a lot to do with the traumatic scene in Pitman’s garden. How was he to relate to a person whose face had burned outwards from the mouth, whose body had puffed and split and shrivelled in a concentration of solar fire?

“Of course you can help, Sammy,” he said, resolving to make the best of the situation. “We’ll show them how these things are done in Whiteford.”

“You bet, Mister Jerome—we’ll sure as hell show them.” The suit radio, Dorrinian micro-engineering at its best, made Birkett’s voice seem to originate within Jerome’s helmet, creating an uncomfortable intimacy. “I’m ready to bust my ass.”

“If I were you I’d avoid that kind of rhetoric,” Jerome said. “Under the circumstances.”

“Sorry, Mister Jerome—cussin’ is just a habit with me.”

“What I meant was that these suits aren’t too…Never mind, Sammy—let’s go to work.”

Jerome watched Glevdane and the other members of the nine-strong work party reach Lock 17 and go through it. They closed the circular door, breaking all radio contact, and a few seconds later an amber light appeared above it, signalling that an airtight seal had been effected. There was a longer wait until the group had retreated beyond the next lock, almost two hundred metres further down the tunnel, then the image of a green circle—the Dorrinian work symbol for PROCEED—flicked briefly in Jerome’s mind.

The simplified telepathic instruction from Glevdane reminded him that the two Dorrinians he had first encountered, Pitman and Belzor, were far from typical of their race in the matter of mind-to-mind communication. All Dorrinians possessed the talent to some extent, but at the median level they could do little more than transmit basic pictures to a known target at short range. With them, telepathy was simply a useful adjunct to verbal communication, and they were almost as much in awe of a Pitman or a Belzor as Jerome had been when first exposed to their powers.

“Check your oxygen and we’ll get started,” Jerome said. He waited until Birkett had inspected his gas tank and had signalled his readiness, then began unfastening the suspect wall plate. It was held in place by slotted screws which were not significantly different from many produced on Earth. Jerome wondered if it had been a case of similar problems engendering similar solutions, or if the Terran personalities imported by telepathy over the centuries had influenced the outlook of Dorrinian designers. Aided by Birkett, he removed all the screws, inserted a lever beneath one edge of the plate and eased it up from its seating. There was an immediate screeching whistle as air began to escape to the surrounding vacuum.

Again wishing he had an Earth-style watch, Jerome counted two mirds before the sound ceased and a swelling of his suit told him the section of the tunnel had been exhausted. He imagined the unleashed molecules of air racing along the annular gap between the tunnel structure and the Mercurian rock, dispersing into crevices, and his uneasiness about the integrity of Dorrinian vacuum suits returned in force. The best that could be said for them was that they were adequate for their purpose, and he was haunted by Conforden’s casual reference to the fact that eighteen workers had died in the tunnel.

With no atmospheric pressure on it the two-metre-long plate was now easier to manipulate. They peeled it away from the underlying frames and stringers, taking care not to damage the compressible seal around the edges, exposing an area of black igneous rock. It was Jerome’s first direct look at the crust of the alien planet, but he was in no mood for wonderment. All his attention was focused on a slab-like fragment which had become dislodged from somewhere overhead. It had slid down the side of the tunnel and had jammed on a longitudinal, buckling the metal out of true and spoiling the air seal. The mastic Jerome had been pumping into the area was gathered on the rock in coprolitic blobs.

“Bingo,” he said, feeling something of the familiar satisfaction that came from seeing through a problem and knowing it would not remain a problem for long. He gripped the rock slab and tried to lift it, but without success. The considerable mass was wedged between the longitudinal and the rock face. He moved closer, changed his hold and tried again, and had just begun to sense a movement when there came a sharp popping in his ears, signifying that his suit’s internal pressure was dropping. He gave a startled grunt and leaped back from the rock as though it had stirred into hostile life. A line of brilliant red was spreading along one seam of his right gauntlet. Jerome stared at it, mesmerized, unable to breathe. After a few seconds the progress of the blood-like emergency sealant was checked and he knew that the suit had managed to heal itself. He swore bitterly and unhappily.

“What’s the matter with you, Mister Jerome?” Birkett, who had been putting the separated plate aside, came within his restricted field of view. “Are you hurt?”

“The sooner we get out of these glorified union suits the better,” Jerome replied. “I need help to shift this rock, but don’t pull too hard or you’ll pop your seams.”

“It’s all right, Mister Jerome—I’m a real skinny guy now, but that rock won’t be no problem at all.”

Birkett grappled with the dark slab, causing Jerome misgivings by putting up a great show of vigour, and helped him to lift it upwards and inwards. They set it on the tunnel floor and Jerome returned his attention to the damaged longitudinal. He was relieved to see that it had sprung back close to its original line, something he regarded as a bonus from an unsophisticated alloy. By slipping a lever between it and the rock face he was able to make further corrections, after which he began applying a run of mastic to the metal in preparation for the reseating of the plate.

As he worked he was continuously reminded that the tunnel was a full eight kilometres long, running from the Dorrinian capital of Cuthtranel to the expected landing site of the Quicksilver. To his eyes, even allowing for the difficulties under which the Dorrinians had laboured, the entire structure was crude, with engineering which would have been immediately comprehensible to a citizen of Ancient Rome. Bearing in mind the importance of the Thabbren in the Dorrinian scheme of things, he would have expected much higher standards of reliability and safety, but the project illustrated the ambivalence he had noted in the character of the Dorrinian people.

They prided themselves on being highly ethical, humane and reasonable, but at the same time they were unconsciously ruthless in any matter relating to their racial ambitions. Jerome, conditioned by his previous existence, had assumed Mercury to have a population of millions, and had been surprised to learn that the polar capital housed less than twenty thousand. There had even been periods in the millennia since the Days of the Comet when the living inhabitants of Mercury had been outnumbered by the Four Thousand whose personalities they were sworn to preserve.

Many individual sacrifices had been made in the name of the Thabbren, in pursuit of the one great objective—and the tunnel was a perfect paradigm of the racial attitudes involved. It had been constructed for the benefit of the Four Thousand, would have to serve its main function only once, and the lives of ordinary workers were expendable, provided they did not die in such numbers as to jeopardize the ultimate welfare of the Thabbren. The subterranean environment suggested an analogy to Jerome—that of soldier ants who were sacrificed for the good of the colony during the forced retreat from a nest—and in spite of the heat within his suit he could almost have shivered.

He nodded to Birkett. “Let’s try the plate now, Sammy—this place is starting to have a bad effect on my nerves.”

Birkett helped him to raise the unwieldy sheet of metal and guide it into place. Jerome was gratified to see that it fitted snugly against the underlying metal all the way around the edges. He inserted all the fixing screws and began tightening them, driving each one down until a smooth bead of mastic appeared in the adjacent seam.

“We can’t leave this hunk of rock,” Birkett said. “I’ll take it to the buggy.”

“Don’t try to lift it,” Jerome said, still concentrating on perfecting the edge seal. “We’ll get them to bring the buggy up here.”

“Goddam,” Birkett grumbled. “Nobody allows me to do nothin’ around here. I’m still strong as hell, you know.”

“Sammy, you’re not proving anything. Your present body has nothing to do with the real you.”

“It’s all right for you to talk that way, Mister Jerome. You were a brain worker and you can still do brain work. I was a gardener. What’s the good of bein’ a gardener in a hellhole like this?”

“Ay, there’s the rub,” Jerome said absently as he tightened the last screw. He took the solvent sponge out of his kit and used it to wipe the excess extruded mastic away from the edges of the refitted plate, determined to leave the job looking neat, clean and absolutely right. Work never lets you down, he thought, comforted by the fact that some sources of pleasure had survived transplantation.

Looking back over his time in the Precinct he was able to list a number of activities which had been satisfying and fulfilling in his previous incarnation, but which had lost their savour in his bizarre new circumstances and environment. Perhaps surprisingly, sex was among the foremost. There had been the sheer novelty of finding many women available to him—a sharp contrast to his former existence—and at first he had used physical relationships like a drug, one which helped alleviate homesickness and loneliness. Donna Sinclair, the woman he had noticed on the way to his placement interview, was his most regular partner. His second lease of youthfulness and virility was like a gift from an Arabian genie, but in keeping with fairytale morality the gift was flawed. At the height of every experience would come an intrusive series of thoughts: Would she have done this with the real me? Would I have done it with the real her? Is that grammatical? The real she? Who are we supposed to be anyway, she and me and me and she…?

The gasp from Sammy Birkett was mingled with an explosive hiss which hurt Jerome’s ears. He turned and saw Birkett, some thirty paces along the tunnel, doubling over like a man who had been shot in the midriff. The slab of rock, which he had been carrying alone, was still executing a low-gravity tumble on the floor.

“You…idiot!” Jerome ran towards Birkett, hampered by his suit, watching him sink to his knees.

“I’m sorry, Mister Jerome.” Birkett’s words were faint articulated sobs. “I guess…I guess I…

“Get in here, Glevdane,” Jerome shouted. Belatedly remembering that radio contact had been lost, he tried visualizing a red triangle—the Dorrinian work symbol of an emergency—then decided it was superfluous. A man who was asphyxiating, as Birkett appeared to be doing, was bound to be telepathically conspicuous on his own. Drawing closer, Jerome saw that Birkett was clutching his left arm and was doubled over it. Judging by the quantities of crimson emergency sealant visible the material of his vacuum suit had split from the wrist to above the elbow.

Birkett looked up at Jerome and the light from a white overhead globe penetrated his face plate, revealing contorted features. His lips were moving, but so little air remained in his suit that he was producing no sound for his radio to transmit, and a second later he lost consciousness. Jerome caught the slumping body and eased it to the floor.

“Where are you, Glevdane?” he called in panic. “We need air in here!”

He unbuckled his equipment belt and, working clumsily because of his gloves, bound it around Birkett’s upper arm with the intention of constraining the oxygen which would still be trickling from the fallen man’s tank. The slick plastic material of the belt was difficult to knot tightly. He cast about him in desperation and noticed a fist-sized blob of mastic still adhering to the slab of rock. Swearing savagely all the while, he scooped up the dark grey mass, smeared it thickly around the upper end of the split in the suit’s fabric and clamped down on it with both hands. He was now almost certain that Birkett’s suit was airtight again and that he was in no danger as regards a supply of oxygen, but he had a grim suspicion that the principal threat lay in the complete absence of atmospheric pressure. What happened to human tissue when all external pressure was removed from it?

Jerome’s alarm and feelings of helplessness grew as he realized he was dealing with a subject upon which he was quite ignorant. Were vital cells in Birkett’s body invisibly rupturing? Was his blood already beginning to boil?

My God, Jerome thought strickenly, don’t tell me I’m going to have to watch the same man die twice.

He fixed his gaze on the door of Lock 17, willing it to open or give some indication that air was being returned to his section of the tunnel. The Dorrinians had a pathological fear of vacuum and he expected them to be sluggish in reacting to a situation which involved emergency opening of any of the tunnel’s multiple airlocks, but not as slow as this. Minutes were going by and there was no sign of help arriving.

Perhaps nobody is going to come! The idea was patently ridiculous, but in Jerome’s state of mind it was enough to make him glance anxiously at his own oxygen meter. There was sufficient for almost forty mirds, approximately one Terran hour, so there was no real reason to fear for his own life. It was, however, hard to feel any reassurance.

On a far-off morning back in Whiteford he had taken what appeared to be a minor decision—to visit the Starzynski home in person—and it had proved to be the most unfortunate action of his life. It would be quite in keeping with the pattern of events since then if he were to be unlucky enough to die as the result of an entirely avoidable accident in the tunnel which had offered his only hope of a return to Earth. The fact that the Quicksilver was due to touch down in only another twenty-two days, and only a few hundred metres from his present location, seemed a final and entirely appropriate touch of irony…

A wrinkle appeared in the taut material covering Jerome’s forearm, signifying that air was at last being bled into the tunnel section.

He had been staring at it for several seconds, cautiously withholding a sigh of relief, when it occurred to him that his improvised repair of Birkett’s suit was now depriving the unconscious man of air. He released his grip and with mastic-covered fingers gently released the clamps on Birkett’s face plate, at the same time becoming aware of a roaring sound from the valves of Lock 17. Birkett’s suit almost immediately lost its collapsed appearance and a moment later his limbs began to twitch. His eyes opened, fixing Jerome with the bright amiable stare of a small baby.

“Sammy?” Jerome spoke uncertainly. “Are you all right?”

“I thought Doctor Bob was my friend,” Birkett whispered. “He shouldn’t have tricked me…shouldn’t have done this to me…he just shouldn’t…

“I think he was your friend,” Jerome said, less concerned with defending Pitman than with reassuring Birkett. “I’m sure he wanted to help you.”

“But I’m a gardener. Mister Jerome, do you really believe we’re up in the sky somewhere? On Mars or some place like that?”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt that this is Mercury.” Jerome, suddenly aware of the depths of Birkett’s confusion, felt a pang of compassion. He had been feeling sorry for himself, but at least he had the consolation of being able to understand all that had happened to him and of knowing exactly where he was in the physical universe. It had not occurred to him that Sammy Birkett, blinkered by limited intellect, was little better off than a Dark Ages peasant for whom the translation to Mercury would have been a prolonged trip to hell.

Birkett’s gaze drifted over the tunnel ceiling. “I sure hate this place.”

“So do I, Sammy.” Jerome forced confidence and optimism into his voice. “But some day we’ll be going back to Whiteford.”

“Is that the truth, Mister Jerome?”

Jerome nodded vigorously. “Why don’t we make a definite arrangement to see each other every week in Cordner’s and put away a pitcher or two?”

“That would be great!” Birkett struggled up to a sitting position and dabbed at a trickle of blood which appeared at his nose. “You and me can sit in Cordner’s front bar and talk about old times.”

“That’s a date, but I think you’d better rest until…” Jerome broke off and got to his feet as the door of Lock 17 swung open. Glevdane, distinguished by his supervisor’s blue helmet, came through the opening, followed by the others of the work party. He looked down at Birkett and the nearby slab of rock, then turned to Jerome.

“This is a serious incident,” he said, his face hard and unfriendly. “I hope you have a good excuse.”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think of one,” Jerome snapped. “Where the hell were you?”

“We returned as quickly as possible.”

“The door of Lock 16 was jammed,” said a Terran member of the group, Urban Pedersen. “We had a job getting through, and the air supply in any section can only be controlled from an adjoining section. If you ask me the whole system is…

“Nobody is asking you, Pedersen,” Glevdane cut in, then turned back to Jerome. “Now…what is the great practical engineer’s excuse for almost letting this poor fool kill himself?”

“Who are you callin’ a fool?” Birkett stood up, nearly fell and was restrained by two other workers.

“Sammy isn’t a fool,” Jerome said quietly. “The only mistake he made was to trust one of your vacuum suits.”

“The suits were designed by Guardians.”

“All that proves is…” Jerome paused, sensing uncharted dangers in voicing any kind of criticism of the keepers of the Thabbren, and decided to change the subject. “Shouldn’t we be getting Sammy to a doctor?”

“A medic has already been summoned,” Glevdane said. “A mere Dorrinian, of course, but no doubt you will be kind enough to instruct him in his work.” He turned and strode away, showing his anger by stamping the tunnel floor.

“I used to notice the same thing back on Earth,” Jerome said to the other “Terrans before Glevdane was out of earshot. “The more you try to help people, the less gratitude they show.”