Worlds Apart Read Online Free PDF Page B

gently back against the airlock door.
    “We all have these?”
    “You and me and two others. They wasn’t time to make more.”
    “Let’s hope we don’t have to use them. That’s terrible.”
    “Yeah, awful,” Goodman said, without too much conviction. “Remember, it won’t go in a straight line on Earth. You got to aim high, for the gravity.”
    “Right.” O’Hara wondered what virtue the computer had divined in Goodman.
    The airlock opened and Berrigan peered in. “Everybody’s here. O’Hara, come give us a hand. Goodman, you have two more customers.”
    All that was left to be loaded were the spacesuits and some paper crates of food. They put them in nets and hooked the nets one at a time to a centrifuge device, to weigh them. Berrigan entered their masses into a console inside the shuttle.
    There was nothing dramatic about taking off. Pumps hammered, fading away as they drew air from the chamber. Then the outer lock irised open, there was a tiny push of acceleration, and they drifted, slower than a walk, out into space.
    “Change orbit in an hour and twenty minutes,” Berrigan said. “Let’s go over our plan, such as it is.”
    She switched on a cube and tapped in some instructions. A flat map of the Zaire spaceport came up. “All we really have to do is leave this ship here,” she said, pointing to the end of the runway, “disabling it so that it can’t be refueled and used against us. Then we just walk down this track to where the shuttle’s waiting.
    “That’s where it gets a little complicated. If it looks like there’ll be any trouble, we get aboard in a hurry and leave. Assuming the ship does work.
    “If we have free run of the place, though, there are some interesting things we might do. First, Goodman and O’Hara run up to the operations center, here, and burn anything that looks important. We don’t want to leave them with any launch capability at all.”
    “What about us?” Ahmed Ten asked. “Can this Mercedes take off without any launch support?”
    She laughed. “With a trained monkey at the controls. Everybody’ll get a chance to study the manual for it, but basically all you have to do is ask the computer for a catalog, punch in your destination and launch time, and strap yourself in.
    “While you two are having fun, the rest will be downin this building here. That’s a cryogenic storage area, and it appears to be intact. Cryogenics means nitrogen; we’ll take as much as we can. Goodman and O’Hara will keep their eyes open for a vehicle. But even if we have to hand-carry it, we should be able to move a few tonnes, to bring back to the farms.
    “I’ll go straight to the shuttle and do a systems check on it. It should only take a few minutes to find out whether it’s still working.”
    “If it isn’t, we’re all dead?” O’Hara said.
    “There’s a chance not. This isn’t a suicide mission.
    “We have enough air, tank switching, to stay in our suits for forty hours. And we can probably find compatible air tanks at the spaceport, though that’s not certain. Standard German ones won’t fit.
    “Still, we could probably make time, perhaps indefinitely. Find or make a hyperbaric chamber, keep the inside of it sterile. If the shuttle is down but repairable, Michaels and Washington and I might be able to fix it.
    “If that doesn’t work, we still have a slim chance. Antarctica.” New New was in regular contact with the scientists trapped there. “The Mercedes can land on its tail, though it takes a level surface and a steady hand. Even if we can’t get into orbit, we might be able to fly it like a floater. Or actually find a floater that could get us there.”
    “I thought there weren’t any working floaters in Europe or Africa,” Ten said.
    “There aren’t, but that’s because the power net’s been destroyed. With three good engineers we should be able to jury-rig a portable power source.”
    “What happens when we get down there?” Goodman asked.