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65.
The sky darkened and grew black as they entered space.
The stars shone in carpets all around, and the moon lay like a cool light-disk to one side. The smudge in space beside the moon twinkled with borrowed light like a lane of broken glass. That was where they were streaking with increasing speed, and Alex had a sense of foreboding. The smudge began to resolve into a terrifying picture of broken structures surrounded by miles and miles of scattered debris. This looked like a place of death.
"A space station. Or what?" With the deep black of space as a backdrop, a vast hulking form waited for their approaching boat. At first he thought it was a maze of lights, but soon he realized the lights were reflections. To one side was a slightly curved wall—the horizon of Earth at night, glowing with rainbow colors.
As the boat traveled in orbit, another sight began to emerge: the full sphere of the moon, dazzling in reflected sunlight. On the clearest day on earth, Alex had never seen the detail on its surface with such exquisite clarity. For a few moments, he gazed at the craters and rilles with hungry fascination. Then he realized the bright light hurt his eyes. The pseudo-window wasn't translating the heat involved in the reflected sunlight, but the brightness seared his eyeballs. He staggered back, rubbing his eyes. "Dim!" he said. "Dim!"
A bell chimed. A woman's voice said: "Do you require service?"
"Yes, blazes! Make the display dimmer before we fry like fish in here."
"I will adjust the settings using the default contrast values for the cabin. Please wait a moment." A woman's shape was dimly visible in a tall, narrow side panel rippling with interference. Hers was the soft, sensuous voice of ancient spokeswoman; he recognized it from Alex Kirk's memories. How he longed to be back in that lost world of comforts and mass civilization! Maryan squeezed his hand as they waited. Sure enough, the display dimmed by several shades of gray. Still, the growing station was overwhelming in its size and complexity. As they drew near, they began to see the extent of its damage and isolation.
An enormous cylinder about 20 miles long and five miles in diameter made up the vast bulk of this world orbiting a world. Capping it at one end was what looked like a city-disk a mile thick and at least six or seven miles in diameter, that might once have housed up to two million persons living on the food grown in the cylinder. Clustered around the cylinder were other mile-big structures—cubes, cylinders, spheres—and clustered around those were smaller and smaller aggregations of shapes into dizzying degrees of smallness.
He looked for signs of life, but could not find any. Not a moving body in a spacesuit. Not a moving vehicle. Nothing. Worse yet, there were broken areas where bent girders showed through. Clouds of debris hung in frozen orbit, moving with the main mass of the station. Worst of all, it appeared that one end of the cylinder had taken a massive hit of some kind...a mile-long tongue of atmosphere was slowly leaking out into space, visible by millions of tiny white specks in its debris field. The station might be a million years old.
"Will we be able to breathe in there?" Maryan said with a pale face and large eyes, holding her hands over her mouth. She didn't address the question to Alex; she was just thinking out loud. He felt helpless and frustrated, unable to protect her.
The boat flew toward the hull of the station at flash speed, and Alex instinctively closed his eyes and expected to die in a silent explosion. Instead, the boat penetrated through the station’s chaotically shattered skin, which consisted of thousands upon thousands of silvery squares that had once made one continuous, smooth surface and now resembled a puzzle falling from a table. Each square seemed to have its own shade from dark gray to gleaming silver, depending on its orientation toward the sun. Many were curling at the edges or bend double. The whole station looked as though a clumsy child had glued mirror-shade confetti all over its skin.
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