An urgent bleep on orchestral A, hitting a harmonic of pulse rhythm, had Mark Chevron out of his deep foam sack reaching for his equipment belt in a count of three. He had moved halfway to the hatch, kicking himself into some kind of life before he was fully oriented to his current position in space and time.
Except for the gymbol-mounted bed and the brilliance of the stars through the curved observation port, he could have been in any small functional hotel room, but a glowing panel beside the door reminded him that outside was different in some key respects.
It said baldly Life Support System and punched the message home with a small picture of a man in full space gear for the benefit of any nonreaders who might have strayed onto the set.
Chevron veered off to the left, whipped open a locker and in ten seconds of concentrated effort converted himself into a bulky zombie.
As the self-sealing casque snapped shut he was isolated in his own personal acoustic shell, and the bleeps cut off until he had switched in for sound. Then they were back, amplified if anything, and somehow more urgent--as though they were beamed personally to him.
Recall was total. He was where he had been for the last week, on Satellite N5, which was holding its carefully judged course along the fifth parallel, marking a fellow traveler on the other side of the equatorial line and watching the interests of Northern Hemisphere Government with unsleeping zeal.
Also the bitter question mark was still there. As an assignment for a top rank operator, this mission did not jell. Somebody in the higher echelons had looked over the record of his last mission and judged he needed a rest. "What shall we do with Chevron, then? Post him to a satellite. Even a genius at it can't louse anything up in a satellite."
Facing the door, he was checked again by his own reflection on the inside of his plexiglass facepiece: high forehead, short-cropped brown hair, gray-flecked eyes, unsmiling--a hard, sardonic face when you got right down to it.
He bared his teeth at it, as one somber dog to another, and ducked his head to take his two meters under the lintel.
Outside, he was on an open gallery in the dormitory quadrant of the wheel. Other hatches were flipping open and a chorus line of bulky figures was stepping out for the soft-shoe shuffle to the nearest gravity trunk. Then one after another they were clawing along its steel-net sides, like so many grotesque spiders.
Three watches of twenty apiece kept N5 in continuous service. Visiting specialists of one kind and another knocked the complement to sixty-eight. For Chevron's money, there could have been a couple of hundred wedged in the operations globe when the station director plugged himself in on the general net and made an all-hands call.
When it filtered through the channels, it was a request for a head count and there was an edge on some voices as they checked in. If the old bastard only wanted to know they were there, he could have chosen a better time. There was, anyway, no place else to go.
Chevron let the rattle of responses flow on over his head. He had wedged himself between two circular ports on the raised gallery that ran around the full circumference of the globe and could look down on the action on the operations floor.
A large scanner was monitoring the launch of a squat recovery module. As it came out of the trap glowing bright orange, there was a gap in the report sequence and he filled it with his own reference.
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