At 6.30 when he went to the commissary for his evening meal, he found that he was a quarter of an hour late.
‘Your meal time was changed this afternoon,’ Baker told him, lowering the hatchway. ‘I got nothing ready for you.’
Francis began to remonstrate but the man was adamant. ‘I can’t make a special dip into space-hold just because you didn’t look at Routine Orders can I, Doctor?’
On the way out Francis met Abel, tried to persuade him to countermand the order. ‘You could have warned me, Abel. Damnation, I’ve been sitting inside your test rig all afternoon.’
‘But you went back to your cabin, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out smoothly. ‘You pass three SRO bulletins on your way from the laboratory. Always look at them at every opportunity, remember. Last-minute changes are liable at any time. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until 10.30 now.’
Francis went back to his cabin, suspecting that the sudden change had been Abel’s revenge on him for discontinuing the test. He would have to be more conciliatory with Abel, or the young man could make his life a hell, literally starve him to death. Escape from the dome was impossible now — there was a mandatory 20 year sentence on anyone making an unauthorized entry into the space simulator.
After resting for an hour or so, he left his cabin at 8 o’clock to carry out his duty checks of the pressure seals by the B-Deck Meteor Screen. He always went through the pretence of reading them, enjoying the sense of participation in the space flight which the exercise gave him, deliberately accepting the illusion.
The seals were mounted in the control point set at ten yard intervals along the perimeter corridor, a narrow circular passageway around the main corridor. Alone there, the servos clicking and snapping, he felt at peace within the space vehicle. ‘Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun,’ he mused as he checked the seals, ‘and the whole solar system is travelling at 40 miles a second towards the constellation Lyra. The degree of illusion that exists is a complex question.’
Something cut through his reverie.
The pressure indicator was flickering slightly. The needle wavered between 0.001 and 0.0015 psi. The pressure inside the dome was fractionally above atmospheric, in order that dust might be expelled through untoward cracks (though the main object of the pressure seals was to get the crew safely into the vacuum-proof emergency cylinders in case the dome was damaged and required internal repairs).
For a moment Francis panicked, wondering whether Short had decided to come in after him — the reading, although meaningless, indicated that a breach had opened in the hull. Then the hand moved back to zero, and footsteps sounded along the radial corridor at right angles past the next bulkhead.
Quickly Francis stepped into its shadow. Before his death old Peters had spent a lot of time mysteriously pottering around the corridor, probably secreting a private food cache behind one of the rusting panels.
He leaned forward as the footsteps crossed the corridor.
Abel?
He watched the young man disappear down a stairway, then made his way into the radial corridor, searching the steelgrey sheeting for a retractable panel. Immediately adjacent to the end wall of the corridor, against the outer skin of the dome, was a small fire control booth.
A tuft of slate-white hairs lay on the floor of the booth.
Asbestos fibres!
Francis stepped into the booth, within a few seconds located a loosened panel that had rusted off its rivets. About ten inches by six, it slid back easily. Beyond it was the outer wall of the dome, a hand’s breadth away. Here too was a loose plate, held in position by a crudely fashioned hook.
Francis hesitated, then lifted the hook and drew back the panel.
He was looking straight down into the hangar!
Below, a line of trucks was disgorging supplies on to the concrete floor under a couple of spotlights, a sergeant shouting orders at the labour squad. To the right was the control deck, Chalmers in his office on the evening shift.
The spy-hole was directly below the stairway, and the overhanging metal steps shielded it from the men in the hangar. The asbestos had been carefully frayed so that it concealed the retractable plate. The wire hook was as badly rusted as the rest of the hull, and Francis estimated that the window had been in use for over 30 or 40 years.
So almost certainly old Peters had regularly looked out through the window, and knew perfectly well that the space ship was a myth. None the less he had stayed aboard, perhaps realizing that the truth would destroy the others, or preferring to be captain of an artificial ship rather than a self-exposed curiosity in the world outside.
