When we exited the airlock, Sheila was standing there in shorts and a T-shirt, holding onto one of the thrusters and looking as puzzled as anyone I had ever seen. She had no clue as to what happened and might have been a little frightened by the close call.
As Sarah and I shed our spacesuits, Sheila asked, “Just what happened?”
“Tether anchor plate came loose,” I said. “One bolt apparently failed and the others, somehow, came loose so that the line was not attached to the station.”
Sheila looked from me to Sarah and back again. “You’re both all right?”
Sarah nodded and said, “Mike grabbed the tether and hauled me back, jerked me back actually, toward the hatch. Followed me in.”
“How’d this happen?” asked Sheila.
I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Sarah started to say something, but I stopped her. I didn’t know how closely Sheila was working with Jason. I didn’t know if he’d formed some kind of alliance with her and if she would tell him everything we said. This wasn’t fair to Sheila, but when the secrets begin, people begin to mistrust one another. It was a sure fire way to destroy morale of a unit and to ensure that unit’s failure. In this case, that might have been the reason.
Sheila stood watching us for a few minutes more and then said, “If I’m not needed here anymore, I guess I’ll get back to my work.”
I didn’t ask what that might be. She had taken on a few tasks and I think it was more of a way to keep busy and not think about our looming fate. Anything to occupy the mind at this time was welcomed.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Sarah said, “What do you think, Mike?”
“If it was a murder attempt, it was a damn poor one. Too many ways for us to recover from it.”
“True,” she said, “But if it had worked, I’d be drifting off and would soon be running out of air. You’d hear me swearing and cursing for the next hour or so and it is so improbable that it would be considered an accident.”
“Actually,” I said, having thought about it, “Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Look, we don’t even know if it was an attempt. If you had drifted far enough away and I hadn’t noticed, by the time we could have gotten one of the thrusters out, it might have been too late. Probably not, but it might be. Then, in an attempt to save you, I might have gotten so far out that I wouldn’t be able to get back. Both of us gone. And we’d be hard pressed to think of it as anything but an accident because of the way it happened if we did survive.”
“But how did he know it would get me?” she asked.
And that was the critical question. The answer was, he couldn’t know which one would be caught in his trap and that meant he didn’t care which one of us died, as long as one of us did. And it meant that he was making his move to reduce the size of the crew once more. With luck, he’d have gotten both of us. Without it, we both survived. Now I was on guard and any further attempt would have to be very subtle. More subtle than the last one.
I said, “He set this up. He wanted us outside the station.”
“Why not just seal the hatch and be done with it?” asked Sarah, her face very pale. “He could have kept us out and he wouldn’t have had to listen to us. Just turn off the radio while we ran out of air.”
“Because,” I said, thinking rapidly, “he has plans for Sheila and if she knew he had killed us, those plans would fail. He had to keep her innocent in this. And, because while we were alive out there, knowing what happened, we could do some damage to his shuttle. We might be able to wreck it enough that he couldn’t use it.”
“So we tell Sheila what happened.”
“Just what did happen?” I asked. “A piece of equipment failed, but it was no big deal. We take it farther than that and she’s going to think that we’re trying to get rid of Jason for some reason. She’s going to think that we’re paranoid and won’t listen to us.”
Sarah sat down on a metal bench and pulled on her socks. She sat there, looking as if she had just run a marathon and had no energy left. She was too tired to move, too tired to think.
“We have to operate as if this was an accident and we think it nothing more than that.”
“What if we let him know our suspicions as a way of forcing him into some kind of action?” she asked.
“That could backfire on us,” I said. “He just might try to kill one or both of us to end the threat.”
“But we’d be ready for him.”
I didn’t like the thought of warning him. Right now he thought that we were both on his side and that each of us believed that he was going to take us with him. If we changed that, he might react with violence and that was something we had to avoid.
Still, there was merit to the idea. It would end the problem, one way or another. He might be alerted, but we’d be ready for his tricks. We were already on alert so we didn’t gain much.
We got the equipment stored and the suits put away and left the pod, making our way down to the living area. Sheila was sitting in the lounge, staring at the Earth as seen on the flat panel. The clouds had recovered slightly, but not all of them were brown now. There were white clouds swirling over a bit of ocean that might become a hurricane. And there were a couple of small areas over oceans that were clear. To me it seemed a shame to waste all that sunlight on the ocean where it wouldn’t be appreciated, except by whatever sea creatures that had survived.
Of course I knew that it would be rehabilitating the plankton and the other plants at the bottom of the food chain, which would mean the little fish would survive and then the bigger fish. What I didn’t know was how much damage had been done to the ocean.
Then I wondered what had happened to the ocean currents and how had that upset the balance on the surface. Warm water currents from the tropics had kept England and Europe warm for centuries, but those currents had to have been disrupted. I didn’t know how long it took to establish an ocean current and how long it would take for the effects of the current to be felt along the land. That sounded to me like something that would take decades, if not centuries and would do no one any good for the present.
I did know that once, a quarter of a billion years ago an impact of something maybe thirty miles across had nearly wiped out all life on Earth and by one estimate, ninety-five percent of the sea life. Our impact was considerably smaller but it seemed that the affect on the higher forms of life would be just as dramatic.
Sarah sat down next to Sheila and together they watched the Earth. Sheila leaned close to Sarah and said, “I’ll be glad to get home.”
I didn’t think of the Earth as home anymore, but I could see some white clouds mixed in with the dark and dirty. Slowly, Earth was healing.