Father Tim Shannon finished combing his thinning red hair, put down his steel pocket comb, and took a good long look at himself in the mirror. Although proud of his Irish ancestry, he was glad he wasn't green any more. The two sodas he'd sucked down had quelled the worst of the rebellion in his stomach. The Neoval and G-Right he'd washed down with the first one hadn't hurt much either, like a couple extra Hail Marys for good measure.
"Admit it, Tim," he told his reflection. "You weren't cut out for space travel." That left unspoken the question of what he was cut out for.
Not this, that was for sure. When Venus Development Consortium Chairman Aloysius X. O'Malley had asked for a priest from his family's neighborhood diocese to be sent for a short visit to the Venus stations at his expense, Tim had asked Bishop Pastorelli to send him, seeing it as a way to leave all his earthly troubles behind.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
He knew that the main reason Bishop Pastorelli had chosen him over the other applicants was that he hoped such a radical change in his circumstances might shake him out of the state he had fallen into. Tim himself had seen where that might be possible, but as with so many other things, he doubted it.
Tim's faith might have become as shaky as a church built atop a major active fault line, but free-fall had made him become increasingly positive that there was indeed a devil. No one else could have devised such a torment.
He'd gotten his first awful taste of that particular hell on the Soarliner that had carried him up from Earth to the orbiting cylty of Newtonia. The long trip from there to Adonis, the huge cylstation which was the Consortium's Venus operations base, had been spent in an at least bearable half-gee.
Adonis itself had been at Earth-normal, making the marriages, baptisms, and confessions he had done there no harder to take then the ones he had performed back in Boston. He could say the words and sound like he believed them without delivering what he had come to think of as a Technicolor confession.
The craft he was on now was a small sixteen seat combination shuttlebus and tug. The liquids dispenser and the bathroom were its only amenities. If you wanted gravity, all you had to do was think about how tiny it was compared to the abyssal nothingness around it, and the hostile planet below.
Endurance was the key. All he had to do was creep carefully back to his seat, keep from blowing his lunch for the rest of the trip to the smaller--but still Earth-normal--Anteros Research station, spend a couple days there playing priest, then he could start his return trip to Earth with its solid ground and dependable gravity.
He straightened his collar one last time. Wearing it constantly gave him the comfort of good camouflage. People always saw that first and rarely looked past it, basing their assumptions of who and what he was on what was around his neck, and not what was in his eyes.
He tried on a smile. It didn't look all that convincing, but he knew everyone out in the main compartment would just see it as the face of a man trying to be brave in the face of space-sickness. A Pilate's truth.
"You're a fraud," he told the face in the mirror, then got himself turned around in the cramped bathroom and reached for the handle of the door.
A split second before his fingers grazed the handle he remembered that he'd left his comb lying on the counter. It was a going-away present from his old friend Father Hiro Ryuku, and he didn't want to lose it. There was a Latin prayer for the resurrection of his hair graven along the top in elegant Uncials, a sort of priestly gag gift to a man who was already half-bald. As always with Hiro, there was a subtle subtext to the gift; a little parable about belief and hope.
Just as he began turning back to get it the small compartment filled with a sound so harsh and deafening that he started to fling up his hands toward his ears to shut it out. He staggered as the tug shuddered from end to end, and suddenly the floor was shoving against his feet. He felt his ears pop. The sensation of weight was gone as quickly as it came, the change peeling the magnetic clips on the soles of his shoes off the steel decking.
His momentum flung him back sideways, the counter clipping him hard on the side of one knee. He glimpsed the steel mirror over the counter coming at him out of the corner of one eye and tried to get his arms up to cushion the impact, but still his head cracked into the polished metal hard enough to set off red flash-flares in his skull.
He felt himself start to half bounce, half drift off the counter. One groping hand found the sink's spoutshroud under his thigh, and he grabbed it to hold him in place. His other hand locked onto the counter's edge, arresting his motion. Gasping for breath, he shook his head to clear it, wondering what the hell had happened. The compartment lights flickered, plunging him into several seconds of terrifying darkness, then steadied.
He jumped when a voice came out of nowhere and began yelling at him simultaneously in English and Japanese.
"Warning! Pressure breach in main compartment!" it blared in a sharply commanding tone. "All passengers put on emergency pressure suits immediately! Warning--"
Pressure breach? Tim thought, his confusion warping to panic. He looked around wildly, lurching back when a flash of orange jumped at him on his left, turning before his eyes into someone standing there in the bathroom staring at him, a child under its arm.
Then his misfiring brain made sense of what he was seeing. It was a bright orange emergency pressure suit, and it had come from an overhead compartment. The child was a half-sized suit tucked under one arm.
He swallowed hard, tasting blood from where he bitten his tongue. "Easy, Tim," he told himself, hardly able to hear himself over the dual computer voice and the ringing in his ears. "Stay calm. Remember the drills. Put the suit on and you'll be all right."
Biting his lip, he levered himself down off the counter and onto shaking legs. The mags on his shoes gripped the floor reassuringly. He took hold of the suit and pulled it free of its clamp. The suit's big clumpy magnetized boots thumped to the floor and stuck. The computer voice stopped mid-word.
In the ensuing silence he heard a new sound. He turned his head toward its source.
"Oh Lord," he whispered, his eyes widening and his face paling as all the blood drained out of it. The bathroom door was bulged outward, literally humming with the strain on it. The sound he was hearing was that hum and the whistle of air escaping around it. He stared at it in numb horror, knowing that if the door let go he was going to be meeting his maker only seconds afterward.
He tore his gaze away and stared down at the suit in his hands. If he didn't get this thing on, and fast, he was going to die.
"Stay calm now," he whispered to himself, trying to banish the afterimage of that ready-to-blow door from his mind and remember at least one of the three or four emergency suit procedure demonstrations he had seen. They ran together in his mind like rivulets into a storm drain; muddy swirling, chaotic, inseparable. He thumped his forehead to jar something loose.
That seemed to help. "Legs first." The rest started to click into place.
His hands damp and trembling, he peeled the child's suit away, pulled the front of the oversized adult suit open, and slid first one foot and then the other inside. Even with his shoes on the gigantic boots were far too big for him. Next he shrugged his arms into the sleeves, his sweaty hands slipping into the gloves at the ends. After that he pulled the hard clear plastic bubble over his head and settled the stiff neck-ring onto his shoulders. The whistle of escaping air muted.
"Front closure." He panted, grasping the ring just below his navel and pulling it upward, sealing the baggy suit's front. All sealed now. What next?
"Size it." There was a covered box attached to one hip. He fumbled the cover back, then slapped the large red button underneath.
There was a weird crawling sensation as the suit shrank to fit him, the fibers contracting and stiffening. Bladders in the boots inflated, snugging around his feet. The collar tightened around the neck-ring, an electrically activated sealant making the seam airtight. Then there was a hiss and whisper as the small backpack life-support unit kicked in.
Tim sagged inside the suit, breathing a sigh of relief. He was safe now. He reached up to wipe away the sweat beading his face, his gloved fingers thumping against the hard bubble over his head.
"All right, now what?" he asked, his voice sounding strangely hollow inside the helmet.
But he already knew the answer to that. Having the suit on made it a bit easier. The stiff fabric made him feel like he had on a suit of armor.
He turned toward the door. He couldn't be sure, but it didn't seem to be bulging out as badly as before. If it was still whistling, he couldn't hear it through the bubble over his head.
He tried to think the situation through. Obviously something bad had happened. Real bad. It felt like the tug had hit something, but he couldn't imagine what. All he could know for sure was that if there had been some sort of accident, then the other passengers might be injured and need help. They were out there and he was in here. He started to open the door, but hesitated at the last second, gloved fingers hovering over the handle.
The door bulging outward. Pressure in here ... vacuum out there?
He stared at the door, biting his lip. What would happen if he opened it? Wouldn't all the air in here rush out there?
Maybe taking him with it?
He let his hand drop, chilled by how close he had come to making a possibly--quite probably--fatal mistake. He was in a hostile environment, and he had to consider his every action carefully.
So what should he do? He frowned. Maybe this was the sort of thing they taught at the two off-Earth seminaries, but all he knew about this sort of situation would fit on the head of a pin with plenty of room left over for dancing angels.
Even though his knowledge of physics was pretty hazy, he tried to work it out. The air was leaking out around the doorframe. Sooner or later it would all be gone, and he could safely leave. How long would that take? He had no idea. But he did know a bit of first aid, and all the time he waited in here the people on the other side of that door might be dying for want of his help.
So what he had to do was figure out a way to let the air out faster. He looked around, searching for something that might help. Unfortunately this was a bathroom, not a toolshed.
A metal gleam caught his eye. There on the floor was the steel comb Father Ryu had given him.
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