Open Writing

When she finally slowed her headlong flight, Holly
found herself outside the main computer room, where the
hardware of the ship’s brain was contained. Holly took
several breaths to calm herself, then entered and looked
around the room for a moment. To take her mind off the
horror she had just experienced, she drifted over to the
banks of plasma circuitry that were contained in
transparent tubes set module-like in the main computer
housing.

Forcing herself to remain calm, Holly examined the
hardware closely. To her untrained eye, there appeared to
be no damage, but she was well aware of her
shortcomings in that area. Still, she knew that the first
thing she had to do was to get the computer on-line, and
that meant removing any damaged modules and replacing
them with back-up units. She was no computer scientist,
and she hoped the job was not a difficult one. She also
hoped, and prayed, that she could do it.

With those thoughts in her mind, she retrieved the
computer manual from its place in one of the lockers in
the room and set about the task of finding the procedure
for replacing the modules. She deliberately avoided
thinking about her friends, and the control room. She
concentrated again on the task before her, moving
awkwardly in the weightless conditions. Her environment
suit was restricting her movements, and she began the
first steps that would culminate in its removal.

She turned a control on the side of her helmet and slid
the transparent visor up, the quickly slammed it down
again as air began to rush out of her suit, past her face as
she registered, for just a moment, the airlessness of space.

The computer room, and probably the rest of the ship as
well, was in near-vacuum.

Gasping for breath in a reaction that was more hysteria
than any real lack of air, Holly floated in the middle of the
room and tried to put together what had happened. When
the object, meteor or whatever, had hit, it must have
damaged the circuits that controlled life support, thereby
cutting off the supply of oxygen to the ship. She also
knew that, given such an occurrence, the fail-safe backup
system would cause all the remaining air to be re-directed
to the wall tanks, so as not to be lost into space. Hence the
lack of atmosphere.

Thinking these thoughts kept Holly from returning to
the horror at the back of her mind, the thing a part of her
knew she would have to deal with sooner or later. But not
now, she thought, not now. She took a deep breath and
pushed all thoughts of her shift companions to one side.
She would deal with it, but later. Not now.

Her suit, with its intricate oxygen supply and
rebreathing system, was good for between 130 and 150
hours, depending on the individual. In her case, it was
probably closer to the high end of the scale. So, no
problem there; she certainly had enough air to last her
until she got the computer back on-line. If she ran into
something she could not solve that quickly, she could use
the shift’s other suits and the spares. They would not be
needed by anyone… She pushed the thought away again.
If all else failed, she could simply return to her sleep
center and re-enter her compartment. There she could stay
until they reached…

Holly’s thoughts froze, and her blood ran cold despite
the warmth of the suit heater that was still set for EVA.
Ohmygod, the sleepers! I forgot about the sleepers!

Holly pushed off the bulkhead towards which she had
been drifting and used her CO2 jet to propel herself along,
something they had been cautioned not to do inside the
ship. But running into walls was the least of her worries
right now; now, she had to get to her sleep center. In a
mad, headlong dash, she swept through the corridors,
careering off bulkheads and pulling herself around
corners in her desperation.

Finally, she halted before the double doors of SC3.
These doors, like all others on board, were connected to
the ship’s brain, but Holly used her personal code to open
them. They slid aside, and she pulled herself into the
room, not using her jet this time for fear of somehow
harming those contained within. She drifted over to the
nearest cell and tried to see inside, but the plas front was
opaque. She turned her attention to the readout beside the
compartment, and her heart stumbled as she saw and
immediately interpreted the information shown there.

The sleeping body in Cell 11, one Jerczy Wolken,
environmental technician, had been without oxygen for
more than thirty minutes. If the computer had been online,
the cell’s vital sign readout would have shown that
the body inside was brain dead.

Holly drifted slowly away from the cell and looked up
and around at the others in the room, five hundred of
them.

All dead.

Nine other sleep centers. All dead.

Five thousand corpses.

The horror began to wash over her, passing her by, as
if by witnessing the fate of her shift she was becoming
inured to such things, such abominations. The oval room
seemed to be rotating; in fact, it was she who was turning,
around and around, the sleep cells moving past her field
of vision in a blur, faster and faster. Dimly, she heard a
voice screaming, and realized it must be hers. Then some
safety circuit in her brain cut in, and she passed into
blissful oblivion.

* * *

When she came around, Holly had no idea how long
she had been out, or even whether her escape into
unconsciousness had been short or long. She was aware of
a slight feeling of nausea, and opened her eyes to find the
room still spinning, although not as much as before. She
couldn’t have been out for long, she reasoned, otherwise
the resistance from the small amount of air remaining in
the room would have slowed her down and eventually
stopped her spin completely.

Her earlier assumption had not been totally accurate,
she realized; the occupied parts of the ship were not in
vacuum, only those through which the meteor, like an
invader, had passed on its path of destruction and death.
Some of the air from those rooms had leaked into the
normally airless sleep center, although still not enough to
support life. Now that she had patched the holes in the
hull, the ship would be able to return to something
approaching normal. However, for the moment she only
had the air that was present now. The computer had to be
brought on-line in order to ensure a permanent supply of
air, and she would need to patch the holes in the
bulkheads across the width of the ship.

With nothing to be done for the sleepers, Holly used
her CO2 jet to send her drifting out of the sleep center and
back towards the carnage of the control room. As much as
she feared returning there, she knew she had to take care
of her friends before anything else. Her inner sense of
decency, of rightness, would not allow her to do the
obvious thing and simply seal the room and leave one of
the holes open, thereby returning it to vacuum and
preserving the remains in the cold of space. She had to do
right by them, the right thing, in honor of what they had
once been, and had meant to her. Regardless of whether
she had liked them in life or not, in death they were all the
same, all deserving of equal consideration, of her
complete and impartial respect.

Holly stopped by one of the medical rooms on her way
and collected four body bags, their silvery-gray surfaces
gleaming dully, the seals gaping partly open, giving the
bags an air of macabre expectancy, like open graves
waiting to receive their grisly tenants. Then she continued
on, drifting through the ship, her senses dulled; she was in
no hurry to arrive now, and did not use her jet.

Vaguely, she realized that she would have to clean the
room after she got what she could into the bags; having
removed the bodies, she could hardly leave the room
looking like an abattoir. So Holly made another stop, this
time at a small closet and searched through the cleaning
materials. All the latest technology of her time was there,
but after a thorough search, she concluded that for
cleaning up your basic blood and gore, there was still
nothing to replace good old soap and water and old-
fashioned elbow grease.

Armed with mop and bucket, she continued on until,
finally, she found herself outside the control room again.
She took a deep breath, reached out and opened the door
and pulled herself inside, and the door closed with a
muted thud behind her.

An hour later, Holly sat white-faced at the bar in the
main lounge, a small bulb of brandy hooked into her suit
that she now sipped at through the tube inside her helmet,
having first taken half of its contents in a single gulp.
Dully, she tried to come to terms with what she had had to
do during the last sixty minutes, the horror of which
would, she knew, haunt her for a very long time, more
than likely for the rest of her life.

She took more brandy and pushed the thoughts away;
her friends’ bodies were safely stowed in an airless
compartment, and there were other things to consider
now, not the least of which was getting the computer back
on line. The air in the suits would not last forever, a
month at most, all told, and she had to do something
about it soon. As she had already admitted to herself, she
was no computer tech; like all of her generation, she knew
how to use even the most sophisticated model, but she
knew next to nothing of its workings.

Holly left the lounge and made her way through the
silent pastel-hued corridors back to the main computer
room. She did not expect the task to be as simple as
merely unplugging one module and replacing it with
another. Once she was there, she searched the lockers and
drawers until she found the rest of the printed manuals.
Meant only as a last resort, these archaic tomes
nevertheless contained complete schematics of the ship’s
brain; all she had to do was decipher them. Mentally
girding her loins, she opened the first book and set to
work.

* * *

It took her almost two hours to find the answers she
required, and another thirty minutes checking to establish
that it really was as plain and straightforward as it
seemed. The manuals spelt it out in terms that even the
basest of laymen could understand, and Holly could not at
first believe how simple it was.

Following the printed instructions, she selected the
appropriate parts, all neatly stored and numbered, from
the ship’s stores. Installing them was a little more
complex, and it was going to take time. Each damaged
part had to be replaced and the new part tested; the life-
support system was compartmentalized to such a degree
that the oxygen could not be returned to all of the sleepers
at once. Nor could it be returned to even one sleep center
at a time; the system was a random one, and unfortunately
had not considered the full implications of this kind of
breakdown.

Not that it mattered, thought Holly as she worked. The
sleepers had been without oxygen for almost five hours
by that time, and the re-connection of their life-support
was no more than a formality, a token gesture that was a
by-product of the real purpose of her labor: getting
oxygen to the rest of the ship. In fact, had she known
how, she would have by-passed the sleepers, in order to
conserve air that she herself would no doubt need later.

But she didn’t know how, so she worked steadily,
concentrating on each task, replacing each module in turn,
keeping her mind on the job and off her predicament, and
the future. So absorbed was she in her work, she did not at
first notice that the air had returned to the computer room.
Then she saw the lights on the console before her flicker,
then move into the green, signifying the presence of
oxygen. Holly first checked the pressure readings, then
cautiously lifted her faceplate. The oxygen was back; the
air was good. Still, she kept the suit on, just as a
precaution.

As much as a person can while wearing an
environment suit in zero gravity, Holly slumped against
the bulkhead. Now that she was assured of a continuing
air supply, she could begin to give some thought to her
situation. Bringing the rest of the computer’s functions
back on line was simply a matter of following the manual,
and she could complete that task at her leisure.

She had decided to set up her quarters on the ship’s
bridge, from where the ship would normally be controlled
at the beginning and end of the mission. As things were,
however, she would have to somehow find a way to
control it. There were a few personal items she wanted to
collect from her sleep cell; after that, she would move to
the bridge, and try to think what to do next. Holly thought
again of her friends as she drifted through the ship, sick in
her heart and soul.

* * *

Holly floated into Sleep Center three and drifted to a
halt in the middle of the oval room. The silence pervading
the ship was eerie, and more than once she had caught
herself looking over her shoulder on her way there. She
realized that the ship, with the computer properly on line,
must make small sounds that were, by themselves,
inaudible, registering only on some subliminal level.
Taken all together, they were sensed rather than heard,
but you noticed when they were not there.

She looked around the room for a moment, then
touched the CO2 jet to nudge herself over to her cell on
the second level. Afterwards, she could not explain why
she hadn’t noticed the readings immediately. She could
only assume that she saw what she expected to see; dead
bodies in their coffins, being fed oxygen unnecessarily.
So it took a moment or two for her to realize that the
oxygen was being consumed.

She was drifting slowly up to her cell when she passed
the LCD readout of the compartment below hers, and she
had passed it completely before the figures registered.
Grabbing a handhold, she stopped her ascent, pulled
herself back down to level one, and stared at the readout.
All the systems were in the green! All of them; heart,
respiration, temperature… and alpha waves! The colonist
in this cell was not only alive, his brain was functioning!

Bewildered, Holly pushed herself along the wall to the
next cell; it also showed its occupant to be alive and
apparently well. With a growing feeling of hope, Holly
went from cell to cell, faster and faster, feverishly
checking one alpha reading after another, then moving on
to the next. Finally, she pushed herself away from the
wall, her momentum carrying her out towards the center
of the room. They were alive! Alive!

* * *

When the first rush of euphoria died down, she sobered
quickly and tried to think. How could this possibly be?
The sleepers had been without oxygen for between about
eight and eleven hours, that was undeniable. No one could
survive that, even if they were frozen in suspended
animation, even…

The truth hit her like a thunderbolt. They were frozen!
Their metabolic rate was slowed to about one
hundredfold. Therefore, it followed that they only
required one hundredth of the normal rate of oxygen
supply. Holly hung in the center of the large oval room,
her pulse racing as the enormity of the revelation hit her.
My God, she thought. They were all alive!

Holly activated her jet again, then turned and sped
through the ship to the computer center. When she
arrived, she punched keys frantically, and brought the list
of the senior people up on the screen. They had to be
awakened at once, and informed of what had happened to
the others on her shift. She began feeding the details of
the first sleeper into the wakeup program, then hesitated.
Wait a minute, hold on, she thought. You have to do this
right. She thought for a moment. Perhaps she had better
only awaken one at a time. He would then be able to take
charge, and could wake any others he might need.

Holly completed the sequence and activated the
system. It would take about two hours for Senior
Councilman Jacob Rattray to regain consciousness, and
there was nothing else for her to do. She decided she had
earned a long shower and bath after her gruesome labors
of the day, so after making sure all the systems were
functioning properly, she headed for the nearest shower
tower. The councilor would know what to do, and she
would be freed of the responsibility. A great weight began
to lift from her as she made her way through the ship;
despite the terrible events of the day, she felt better than
she had before.