The Ceres Solution

Chapter Seven

Denny Hargate was working the zero-gravity crystal farm at the sunward end of Aristotle. The circular room, located right on the colony’s longitudinal axis, was almost completely filled with feed pipes, plastic bubbles of growth chambers and monitoring equipment, but Hargate did not object to the cramped conditions. He could project himself from one point to another with the ease and accuracy of an arboreal monkey, the lack of mass in his atrophied legs proving a positive advantage when it came to beginning or ending a flight. His fingers had the ability to find secure anchorages on seemingly impossible surfaces.

The room had large windows in its inboard wall, and he sometimes paused at one of them to stare at the incredible trefoil perspectives of the colony’s interior. From his unusual vantage point there appeared to be three suns, each hanging in a tapering strip of blue-black sky which converged on the distant end-cap. Between the strips, filling in the radial geometrical design, were the colony’s three “valleys” with their compact areas devoted to industrial production, hydroponics, garden villages and grassland. It was a strange and totally unnatural prospect, an enclosed universe in the form of a stylised flower, but in his five months in Aristotle Hargate had learned to regard it with deep affection. This contrivance, this flimsy cocoon of metal and glass, had given him mobility, a useful job, the promise of something like a normal lifespan—therefore it was a habitat more natural to him than Earth could ever have been. He was at home.

Denny Hargate, he would intone while floating at the window, marvelling at the odds he had beaten in order to reach that particular point in space and time. Citizen of the solar system!

It was his affinity for the miniature world and its peculiar physics whch alerted him, almost before any other colonist, to the fact that something serious had happened. He was alone in the crystal farm carrying out routine checks on a sensitive batch, when there wasj sudden decrease in the amount of light in the room. Unexpected though the change was, it was the barely perceptible tremor accom. panying it which sent a frisson of alarm coursing through his ner. vous system. He twisted in mid-air, looked through the window and saw that the radial pattern of his environment had been radically altered.

One of the reflected suns was no longer there.

The first explanation occurring to him was that No.2 mirror had either been retracted or allowed to splay out beyond its normal maximum, then—with savagely jolting heart—he saw that the two remaining suns had begun a drunken and irregular wobbling, There was no escaping the conclusion that Aristotle had developed a serious instability. The perturbations were too small to generate any noticeable G-forces, but within a short time the mirror alignments had shifted so much that the sun reflections slid off their edges and the interior of the colony was plunged into darkness. In a compartment near to Hargate a man gave a hoarse bellow of alarm. The darkness lasted only a few seconds, then daylight suddenly returned with full intensity.

Clinging to a nylon hand-rope, Hargate saw the frightening alternations of night and day occur twice more before the twin suns raced down the sky and he realised that the No. 1 and No.3 mirrors had been retracted to reduce the eccentric forces acting on the colony. As prolonged darkness fell all the interior lights sprang into life, creating brilliant geometries the full length of the colony, but the “night” which ensued was not normal. The longitudinal strip which should have been closed by No.2 mirror remained transparent, and the Earth and the Moon could be seen batting across it twice in every minute, adding swift-changing variations to the general level of illumination.

The mirror can’t be gone, Hargate told himself. It can’t be possible to lose a mirror.

Still gripping the hand-rope, afraid to cast off in case the rootf shifted violently while he was in flight, he looked all about him and waited for the public address system to dispense reassurance. His outlook had changed. Aristotle, which only minutes ago seemed to possess the stability and permanence of a planet, had somehow been reduced to an entirely different status—that of a spaceship in trouble.

It was incredible and shockingly unfair that something as important as Denny Hargate’s continued existence should depend on something as notoriously fallible as human engineering. If something as vital as one of the huge mirrors could simply fall off, who was to say that even bigger disasters could not follow. Who could guarantee that the whole colony was not about to burst open under its internal pressures like a ripe seed pod?

Hargate’s heart had begun thudding fiercely and steadily, but with the new thought there came a change in its rhythm, a hint of a more intimate catastrophe. It missed a beat altogether, and Hargate—floating, poised on the brink of the ultimate abyss—had time to consider the possibility that his life had ended. When it came, the next beat was more like a detonation inside his chest than the action of a muscle, and close in its wake there was pain, the kind of pain that draws the mind down into it, obliterating thought.

Hanging there in the solitary dimness of the crystal farm, like a fish in a net, mouth opening and closing silently, limbs making small involuntary movements, Hargate stared down the jewelled tunnel of the space colony and waited.

All he could do was wait…