The airlock's outer hatch stood open. Susan stepped in, then keyed the helmet chronometer with her tongue. The digits projected on her visor: 0812.
She waited for the outer hatch to close, but nothing happened. Then she realized that only manual airlocks existed when the mining camp was built. This was the oldest still-operating facility on Luna.
Yet the mining camp had been in nearly continuous use since its construction, almost a hundred years ago. It had brought more than its share of wealth to the lunar colony. Wouldn't the facility have been updated in all those years?
And again she wondered at the camp's lack of light and life.
She pulled the outer hatch closed and turned its locking ring. The red airlock light should have come on, casting its customary sight-adjusting glow, but it did not. She tongued her helmet lamp on and blinked in the sudden glare.
Within a few seconds her vision adjusted, and she turned in the small airlock to face the inner hatch. The light that should have glowed green when the airlock attained full pressure was broken-slivers of glass littered the floor, covered with a thin layer of dust. Obviously, the airlock had not been used in some time.
Again she felt the unnaturalness of the place. It seemed as if the camp had been deserted for years.
But that couldn't be. She remembered…
She pushed the thought away and reached to the manual air valve on the wall beside the door. Turning the handle, she waited for the hiss of air rushing into the airlock. For nearly half a minute she stood listening to the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart in her ears before she realized the airlock was not working. She turned the inner hatch's locking ring and pushed the heavy door open, then stepped through.
Danger clanged in her thoughts as her ability warned her. Someone waited here.
Slowly, she turned her head, directing the helmet lamp in a wide arc, sweeping the single large room with its beam. The metal frames of more than two dozen triple-tiered bunks were bolted to the floor, many twisted or broken. At the far end, in the corner to her right, stood the galley. The microwave oven's door laid on the floor. In the left-hand corner stood the toilet. It, too, was in ruin.
Empty metal brackets that had once supported communications equipment were bolted to the wall on either side of her. A tangle of wires and electrical couplings dangled from the overhead beside her right ear.
The light's beam fell on a patch of blue beneath a bunk frame in the center of the room. She shuffled to it, keeping the helmet light trained on it. It was a human figure, laying face down, wearing a Survey Service life-support suit. A blaster burn blemished the suit at mid-back, a dusting of crimson ice crystals feathered out around an opening as small as a thumb nail.
Susan squatted and took the suited figure by the shoulder, then rolled it over. A face stared up at her through the fog of ice crystals on the inside surface of the helmet's visor, eyes frozen wide in shock and pain.
It was Hyatt.
She stood and staggered back a step, coming up hard against the bunk frame behind her. Catching a stanchion with a wildly thrown arm, she leaned against it for a few seconds, trying to clear her thoughts.
Hyatt had told her to meet him here. He had arranged for her to be brought out to the mining camp.
And now he was dead.
Sudden movement to her left brought her around in a defensive crouch. The beam from her helmet light caught a red-suited form as it stepped from behind the ruined galley. The other held a blaster pistol trained on her.
She could not tell who it was. The light from her helmet caught the other's visor just right and was reflected back.
Susan felt suddenly dizzy, and her would-be attacker disappeared, just like that other had done in the corridor outside the curio shop on Fleet Base. The headache came and the pendant burned beneath her suit. Both lasted only a few seconds, then were replaced by the snowflake pattern. Without thought, she began mumbling the healing mantra.
She panned her helmet lamp back and forth over the smooth, undisturbed layer of dust. Hyatt's body was gone, too.
On impulse, she again keyed the chronometer in her helmet with her tongue. It read 0814-exactly what it should have read, and not at all what she had expected.
If only I had my LIN/C, she thought. With it, she could at least verify the sequence of events. Perhaps she hadn't jumped back in time outside the curio shop on Fleet Base, as she had started to suspect. Maybe she was going insane.
She forced those thoughts down. They were dangerous; they could actually cause insanity.
Besides, she didn't have time for them now. She had to think about getting back to Luna City. She would get into her crawler and away from here as quickly as possible.
Turning, she shuffled to the airlock, stepped into and through it, and out onto the lunar surface. Sweeping her helmet's lamp in wide arcs, she searched for the crawlers that should have been there-both her own and Hyatt's. And perhaps a third crawler she had not seen before: the one belonging to the man who had killed Hyatt.
The crawlers were not there. Not even her own.
Somehow, that didn't surprise her. She had almost been expecting it.
She stood unmoving, trying to decide what to do. She couldn't wait for someone to come out for her. The only one who might do that was Clayton, and by the time he missed her, then pieced together where she had gone, her suit's air tanks would be exhausted and she would be long dead. Her only hope lay in starting for Luna City on foot.
Of course, she didn't expect to make it; it was much too great a distance. The walk back would take a full ten or twelve hours, and she had less than half a tank of air now. Still, if she could get near a well-traveled lane, she might be spotted by a passing floater. It was a slim chance, but all she had.
She thought she remembered the way her guide had come. They had approached the camp from the north. She tapped the appropriate switch with her tongue, took a bearing, then started walking.
Although she knew it would drain her suit's batteries, eventually disabling the cooling system, she left the helmet lamp on. Unlike during the crawler drive out from Luna City, she now wanted to be seen. Her life depended on someone spotting her.
She trudged through the lunar landscape, over small rises and down into impact craters. The scenery that had seemed so tranquil and beautiful only three days before, on the floater trip out from Fleet Base, was now horribly monotonous.
Soon a fog of non-thought settled down around her mind.