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Level_Head
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« on: June 22, 2009, 02:49:45 AM » |
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Now playing in the VIP area.Here, Eve has been asked to take Wall•E into the old Axiom and ... hah! It's a shame Hal isn't involved, because the exact command would have been "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." In any event, here are scenes related to that exercise. It has a cliffhanger -- but at this early part in the novel, it is mild enough.  Chapter 30. PlansWednesdayWall•E stood in the morning sun on the ramp of their old transporter truck home, still puzzled. This was one of those times that he wished he knew Shiptalk, the robots’ shared language on the Axiom. It was not part of his own makeup; he’d never been designed to be part of the ship’s crew. He used human words, and a private pattern of beeps and sounds that he suspected another WALL•E unit would understand, if any were still around.
Eve had learned a number of his sounds—she was so good with language!—but he still struggled with new words. And today was a new-words day.
Eve had a task to do this morning, and he was going to help. Wall•E was always ready for an adventure, but he hadn’t quite figured out what they were going to do.
Eve was patient. She always was, with him. “Couple are go to Axiom.”
“Rright.”
“Couple inside. Go up.”
“Okaaay.” He thought a moment. “No people up.”
“No people,” she agreed. “Maybe Couple are help.”
“Good! Do inside what?”
“Up high. Observation deck bulkheads 140 to 156.”
He knew she did not do this intentionally. He heard her voice change when she was reciting from her library. She had a map of the ship built in. He had only her. “Ozzz … vashun?” he queried.
This was where they’d gotten stuck before. Now she paused, and said “Oooh!”—she’d had an idea. He waited. Her torso doors opened, and she produced the projector tucked into a compartment.
Burn•E had made this rack for her storage chamber, and she was able to carry small tools inside. Wall•E had helped. She liked it, which made him happy.
She deftly placed the projector on her head, and a beam leaped from it to a space a couple of meters in front of them. A projection screen appeared in the air. It was difficult to see in the morning sun; she shut it off, and both moved toward the darker interior of the truck. One more time, and Wall•E could now see a map of the Axiom.
Maps he understood. He had a map of the city built in, much as she had of the ship. This one was sideways instead of flat, but he had figured that out long ago as they worked to unload the ship.
“Couple inside,” she began again. A red point appeared on the map, near the Carina hull where people went in and out. Eve traced a path into gangways, and to the Stem which supported the main hull of the ship above. The Carina hull at ground level was fairly small at about a kilometer and a half long, though it was full of Ship people.
Up the Stem, the point went. Into the atrium, the expanse of open space that occupied the front two-thirds of the ship, about three kilometers long and nearly a kilometer from floor to ceiling. Wall•E saw the label “Lido Deck” and shuddered, making a small plaintive noise.
Eve noticed. “Wall•E okay?”
“Wall•E okay,” he confirmed, and pointed at the screen. “Lido deck. Fight AUTO. Fight stewards. Fight …” he paused, not knowing the word.
“Holodector,” she supplied.
“Yes. Bad memory.”
Eve’s eyes registered a rapid progression of sadness and tenderness. “Wall•E good now. Auto are deactive.”
“Good.” He forced a cheerful tone. “What next?”
Eve had been displaying a view from the starboard side of the ship, the side facing the Colony. The view blinked out, and was replaced by another. After a moment, he realized that this must be looking in the front. Or the back; he could not tell. “West what way?” he said.
Her red pinpoint moved in a precise circle on the right side of the diagram, then rapidly traced out the letter “W”. From the front, then.
After a moment, it traced out more letters in succession: “W — A — L — L — E”
Wall•E chuckled loudly, then said, “Got it.”
“Couple are go Stem,” she continued, as the red pinpoint moved up into the main hull. The point continued to rise past the engineering decks. Wall•E had spent little time in the main part of the ship, but his big adventure of more than nine years ago had taken him through many of the engineering decks.
He did not really understand the concept of “robots only”; to him, the big difference was that engineering decks had letters and passenger decks and numbers. Oh, and the Carina hull at ground level had a C and then a number for its 18 decks. He did not understand that, but he accepted it as true.
“Right,” he said, after a moment. They were to be in the main atrium. Were they going to the Lido Deck?
“Up high,” she said. The pinpoint had moved away from the center and the Stem to reach the exits into the atrium on the side. Starboard side, he understood. But now the point moved, above the Lido deck, back to the middle, and up.
“Up where?” Wall•E asked.
“Observation level access towers,” she supplied from her internal map. The point of light rose up through the center, then moved back to the starboard side again. Up against the ceiling of the main hull, there were narrow towers on the sides. Wall•E had not noticed them before.
He paused, played back a memory of a view he’d seen from the Lido deck looking aft, or “South” as he remembered it. Yes, he could see those towers now. There were so many buildings that he had seen that day, and so many people, that it was all wonderful and new and he had not paid much attention to particular shapes.
It was an amazing time, years ago. He’s clung to the outside of the ARV that brought Eve and her sisters back to the Axiom, and that only began the adventure. He met Captain McCrea, he’d nearly been killed in a life pod, and he’d been in fights and helped Eve in her directive. Wall•E had lost his memory of part of that day.
Eve had told him the parts he could not remember; apparently he had done something heroic that helped the ship come back to Earth.
But he remembered the life pod, his fear at learning that he was going to be destroyed in it, and his joy at surviving that explosion by getting out just in time. He still didn’t go near the life pods on the ground, though he never told his Eve this.
And he remembered dancing with her, in the space around the great ship. That memory was his favorite of all. It was when she stopped being mad at him.
And then they came here, to where Wall•E had lived for seven hundred years—he didn’t remember all of that early time—and started the Colony. And he could help people, which he liked. And be with his Eve, whom he loved.
The red point moved into the tower on the starboard side, then up.
It went to the level of the top of the atrium, and kept going through the ceiling.
The image zoomed in, and Wall•E could see the words “Observation Decks.” He sounded it out in his mind. “Oh!”
The view changed again, and was now from the side, zoomed in on the upper section. The red pinpoint appeared, went up the vertical column (a stairway, he guessed) into the top area, then went forward a little distance and stopped.
He could not resolve the markings there; the resolution of the projector screen was not very good for fine details. “What there? Where Couple go?” he asked.
Eve zoomed in for him. The picture expanded rapidly, then focused on shapes that he suddenly recognized: life pods!
Wall•E abruptly collapsed into a cube.
It didn’t take Wall•E long to realize that he wasn’t going to be stuck in a life pod again. Of course, he knew that, and he trusted his Eve with his life, and with everything else.
Wall•E decided that launching the life pods would be interesting. And maybe by him pushing the button, he would be done with that part of his life.
“Rready,” he said. The carry hook built into the back part of his frame popped out. Usually it carried his treasure box, into which he put valuable bits of trash he found while working. Most of his collection had arrived at his home in that box, including the green seedling he’d found in the old refrigerator nine years ago that brought him Eve. And started the adventure.
But now the carry hook was how he was carried. This arrangement seemed odd to the humans when they first saw it, but it worked well and left Eve with a free hand. And Wall•E always enjoyed being with her and going for a ride in the air and, well, just being with her. Some of their flights together were almost like dancing.
She reached down with her right hand and grabbed the hook, and the two of them lifted off. Wall•E’s treads retracted into his cube frame, and his head turned toward the Axiom as the Couple curved toward it from their home three kilometers away.
Eve was not in a hurry; they made the trip in a little over a minute. He found the whistling noise of their travel to be very enjoyable. The noise did make it harder to hear each other, though.
“Evah…?” Wall•E said, using their private radio circuit.
“Wall•E,” she replied. It warmed him all over. It always did. He could hear the smile in her voice.
“How high … ozzz…” he began, then called up the word again to work on pronouncing it.
“Observation levels?” she asked. She always seemed to know what he meant.
He nodded, but realized that she was looking toward the ship and didn’t see his head move. “Yes,” he sent.
“Observation level life pod deck approximately one-point-four-five kilometers above Carina gangways.”
Wall•E digested this for a moment, working to fit the human speech into his system. It was about seven times as tall as the average tower he built.
He was impressed. And impressed by his Lady’s knowledge, as always.
The Couple dropped to human height at the entrance to Gangway 16, but did not touch down. There was little traffic here; most humans came in and out further aft, but this was the closest door to the Stem stairwells.
They moved inside. Wall•E had a range of wavelengths available to his optics, as did his Eve. He thought that her range was broader than his, so he imagined that she was doing what he was—shifting to deal with the eternal red gloom on the ship. Wall•E liked bright sunlight—he literally lived off of it—and he associated this darkness with bad times in the past.
But if he’d had a chin, he’d have lifted it now: he was with his Eve, and nothing would bother him.
Or not very much.
Spiraling up the Stem staircase was uneventful. It was deadly quiet, no motion in the air at all once they got a few levels above the Carina hull. Neither of the two robots suffered from dizziness; this allowed Eve to carry Wall•E in a long helical twist that covered the vertical distance in a couple of minutes. He was confident that Eve could do this faster without him—but there was no hurry.
As they entered the lower part of the main hull, the Couple exited the stairwell into a transverse corridor. They went right, toward the starboard side, and soon entered the stairwell leading to the passenger decks above.
A moment later, they pushed through the double doors onto Deck 20. It was dark in here, and completely silent, as they moved out onto the Lido Deck. Wall•E shifted once again, magnifying red points in the distance. He matched this against his previous view of the Lido Deck looking forward from amidships, and was satisfied. And up ahead, far away, was a glare—light from outside—that matched the position in his mind’s view of the bridge, and the upper portion of the Captain’s Quarters just below. He’d spent time in both, but decided to think about something else right now.
Captain McCrea had warned him about bad smells here. He told his captain that it was okay, because he was not equipped to smell things. The captain laughed, and told him how lucky he was. He had looked over at his Eve, and readily agreed. He was very lucky.
There wasn’t much to see in the darkness here; different wavelengths revealed little. Up they went. Not toward the bridge, but angling out toward the center of this gigantic space and arcing up. Wall•E shifted wavelengths several times before finding one that would allow him to make out the ceiling far above. It was barely visible even so, but it did read as warmer than the space below them.
The red points to the side depicted the bare shapes of the obs… the place where they were going. Ob–ser–va–tion levels.
The Couple veered toward the one on the starboard side, and a moment later arrived at stairway doors leading into the structure.
Wall•E expected that they would open the doors and go in, but his Lady stopped. He extended treads, and touched down in the near darkness. There was a railing a short distance away with nearly a kilometer of drop behind it, but this did not trouble him. Not only was he unafraid of heights (though very careful!) but there was little visible height here, just red points in a distance difficult to guess at. He had no ranging equipments; his distance measurements were done optically. But they were probably three or four times as high above the Lido deck as one of his towers.
Eve was busy. In the dim light, he watched as her torso doors opened, and she took out some small wedge-shaped objects. She placed them under the open doors, propping them open.
Wall•E could have helped here, as he had lots of wedge-shaped objects in his collection and would have been happy to donate some if they were useful.
Eve moved down the row of doors, and did the same for each pair. Wall•E thought about this. They hadn’t propped open the doors that opened into the Lido Deck, and like these, they opened into the big space. He knew that the doors to the stairways in the Carina hull were propped open, but they had been like that for years. It was the only way the humans could live on the other decks in that area.
His Lady completed her work quickly, and scooped him up for another spiral up the stairwell inside. Less than a minute later, they came out through another pair of doors. It was bright here, and he quickly dialed down the sensitivity of his optics. A very long, gently curving corridor stretched—he checked his compass—forward/North away from them. The glass along the right wall provided a wonderful view. He could see their truck, kilometers away and down, and was tempted to wave. There was the Colony’s Bridge with its little office and conference room and the window facing him on the Axiom. It was located, like his truck, on an old highway bridge, but it was on the end of the bridge and had lots of open space in front. There were the fields with lots of green plants. More fields every year. And he could see a great many of the humans’ homes, a lot together and some separate like his truck. It was much like the view from their flights over the Colony.
He turned his attention back to his partner. Eve looked down the corridor for just a moment longer, then moved back into the stairwell and went up a few more levels.
This time, the corridor did not go forward, but inward. They went past several corridors; the ship was still very wide even at this part of the hull.
They were moving slowly enough that he could use his vocoder. “Evah?”
“Wall•E,” she replied aloud, and smiled at him.
It took him a moment to recover from this. “How wide ship ob-ser-va-tion levels?”
Her smile grew, then she glanced along the corridor. “Here, approximately six-hundred-sixty meters.”
He spent a moment in thought. Big. It was three tower-heights wide.
The corridor ended, and they swung right—forward. This space had no windows. Too bad; Wall•E liked the view.
The row of doors on the left looked familiar. Not in a happy way—yes, comparing his remembered images, these were the doors that led to life pods. He steeled his nerves; he was fine. He did not notice that his arms and treads had retracted completely.
They paused at the first door on the left, and Eve and Wall•E touched down. Wall•E rolled backward a couple of meters and looked down the hallway. His counting process was not like hers, he knew, though he could work it out eventually. “How many … ?”
She glanced back at him, then turned to follow his look down the row of life pod doors. “Thirty life pods,” she said.
Her right hand went back to touching places next to the door. With an odd noise that reminded him of his old parts, it slid open. The room was mostly dark, except for various lights on panels and along the sides. Yes, he remembered this. There was a source of light he did not remember, though, and his head and treads elevated and looked sideways around her so that he could see it better. There was a small patch of light visible through the window in the life pod doors. This had been a starry night sky before; later he learned that it was an area called “Kuiper Belt.” The Axiom had been cruising there for 700 years, waiting for the Earth to be able to support life again.
He rolled into the room boldly, right behind his Lady. She moved to the right, next to a panel of lights, and began work programming the life pod as he had seen her do years ago. She used her right hand for such things; as before, her left hand dangled at her side unused.
He rolled up next to her. “Evah?”
She turned and smiled at him sort of absently; she was concentrating. But then she realized what he was doing, as Wall•E reached out and took her left hand in his own. “Wall•E,” she said, warmly.
Already he felt better. This was not like last time at all.
A moment later she was done. The life pod door did not open. Wall•E had expected it to, like last time, but was happy that it did not. Still …
“Evah? Door okay?”
“Door okay,” she agreed. “Couple launch life pod together?”
“Ooh!” His metal hands tapped together. He liked this idea. “Where switch?”
Her delicate white finger indicated a round button, and rested gently on it. He gazed up into her eyes for a moment, and reached out for the button with a broad gray finger.
Abruptly, he stopped. “Whoa!” he said. She looked at him, concerned. He asked, “People down? Where life pod go?” He remembered Burn•E’s rather awkward exit from the ship in one of these. He’d just come back to himself after Eve repaired the damage done by Auto, and didn’t know everything that had happened yet, but he was looking at the ship when one of the life pods shot out of it and hit the ground. Hard.
“People okay,” she assured him. “Captain are warn people. Life pod launch okay. Captain are say okay.”
That was enough for him. He trusted the captain almost as much as he trusted his Eve.
They reached for the button again, locked eyes, and pressed in unison.
“Whoa!” he said again, as a loud sound and a hard shake hit the room. He’d been expecting something, so he did not cube up.
There was more light coming through the windows in the life pod doors now; he rolled over to the door to look through its window. Beyond the door, the little room he remembered with some discomfort was gone. It was a little round space now, with nothing in it. The empty space was about five meters across. His head spun back to watch Eve, still at the control panel to the side.
Eve reached for the panel again, tapped a few more times. A noise started which he interpreted as a warning, and she tapped more. The life pod doors hissed open, and he turned back to the doorway. Wall•E stared out, fascinated. “Oooh!”
At that moment, a noise sounded behind him. He spun in place, wondering at the sound, as a great roar of wind pushed at him. He tried motoring forward, but despite his weight and horsepower, the wind pushed him backward to the edge of the life pod door and tumbled him through it.
Wall•E was surprised to find himself propelled backward. His first instinct was to grab on to something, and his arms and legs flailed outward. He hit once inside the space occupied a minute before by the life pod, but missed his grab; there was nothing within reach to grab on to.
His reflexes were fast. His luck was not up to speed.
As he launched out into the air, he cubed up. He was now going fast enough to do serious damage when he hit; the cube was the best protection. Wall•E knew, though, that a fall from any significant height on one of his towers would destroy him. He was always very careful when stacking those trash cubes, and the programming he had from his creation enabled him to build a two-hundred-meter tower every two years safely. He’d never had a serious fall, let alone one from the top of one of his towers.
Wall•E hissed through the air, remembering that he had started from seven times that high up.
Eve heard the same groaning wind noise from her position at the control panel, and turned toward the corridor at precisely the wrong moment. The sudden wind was punctuated with a loud bang of metal upon metal, and she spun back toward the life pod door.
Wall•E was gone.
Eve shot to the door. Nothing. She spun once, target acquisition systems coming instantly online. He was not in the room. An instant later, neither was she, leaving the echo of an angry “Drr-eck!” in the air behind her.
She launched out from the ship, scanning out and below. She had shot past him; he was close to the ship wall, falling fast to the ledge below. Eve was retrieving the distance from plans as she measured it with her ballistics software. It was only about thirty meters to the ledge.
She knew she would not get there in time.
Wall•E was heavy; his metal frame weighed tens of kilos. He’d been too heavy to be propelled very far away from the ship, and he had dropped instantly out of the airstream.
Retracted, he could not see, but he knew that he was tumbling; his compass and azimuth readings spun wildly.
As frightened as he was, his mind still processed data. In his mind’s eye he pictured his Eve rushing to catch him. He knew that she would not be able to grab his handle; it had retracted along with his other components. He could extend it, but in his mental picture it seemed to be a very small target. What would be better?
He overrode his safety reflexes, and extended his arms. He was happy—or at least less terribly frightened out of his wits—to sense that his tumbling slowed as a result.
Eve dove desperately back at the wall of the ship and her falling lifemate. Her ballistics calculator kept reprocessing the scene; he would hit the wall in less than a second now, and hit the ledge below the observation decks less than a second later.
The first impact she was not too worried about; the wall was nearly vertical anyway. But that ledge, even though the fall was modest, could still be deadly.
She kept working the data as she dove. She would sacrifice herself to save him, and if her diving straight into the wall was what it would take, she would do it. But she had no notion of how this could help.
Wall•E’s arms suddenly popped out. Surprise mixed with her horror as she watched him scrape into the nearly vertical wall a moment later. With a burst of speed, she could hit that ledge before he did. She could not stop, or catch him, in time.
There had been no time yet to blame herself for the situation; her ballistics and flight computers saved her from that by demanding the processor resources for themselves.
In anguish and fear, she watched him hit the ledge as she rushed toward him. Her eyes had closed to near slits—she must see this, but she barely dared to.
Then her eyes opened wide, and a “Huh?” was lost to the wind of her passage.
Wall•E hit.
To his surprise, he was not only still functional, he was still intact. A loud intermittent scraping against his frame told him that he continued to fall but now was in contact, more or less, with the steeply sloping hull. The tumbling, at least, stopped, and the scraping sound now came only from the front of his cube.
He had just had time to decide that this wasn’t so bad when he reached the point where the near-vertical hull ended at the horizontal ledge.
It took Eve most of a second to figure out what happened. Where the vertical hull wall reached the ledge, a large radius blended it into the hull. Wall•E shot through this curve, translating his downward speed into horizontal.
He was still intact, as nearly as she could tell. Now she needed to change direction. She curved to intersect his path as he slid toward the sloping edge of the main hull.
Wall•E felt a tremendous swooping, like being with Eve when she was turning at high speed. The scraping along his front became instantly loud, then gradually diminished. A few seconds later, the very surprised trash compactor came to a stop.
His head peeked out from his frame just as his lifemate alighted next to him. “Evah!” he said, still shaken, as he pushed himself from face down to upright upon his treads. He was still tilted forward; the surface here was not flat. As he glanced past his Lady, he stared down over the white curved horizon—out into empty space and more than a thousand meters of drop. “Whoa!”
Eve grabbed him and hugged him hard. She lifted him up, and in their spinning embrace she got him tens of meters away from that slope, setting him down back by the vertical wall at the base of the curve that had broken his fall.
They sat on the sunny ledge with the observation decks rising behind them, and simply held each other. Many seconds passed before Wall•E realized that they could have used their radio, not that it would have changed anything.
And many more seconds passed before either noticed that clouds had formed over their heads.
Wall•E looked straight up the near-vertical wall at their backs. Above them, a vapor plume had formed, streaming out from the side of the Axiom and floating hundreds of meters out into space.
The Couple stared in wonder for a full minute.
By now, Wall•E had recovered from his fright; if anything he seemed in better shape than his Lady. She would not let go of him; this suited him fine, but he was worried about her.
She kept staring at his frame, eyes fearful. Wall•E finally craned his neck to its full forward extent to see what she was looking at.
Well, that was different. Almost all of the paint was missing from his front door, including his name. That was okay; he checked, and he still knew his name. He still had new doors at home that he could replace this with. And most important to him, he still had his Eve.
“Evah,” he said, reaching out to gently lift her chin. Her eyes rose reluctantly from his damaged panel to look into his eyes. She smiled a little bit, finally.
“Wall•E not here,” he said, tapping on his front panel. She glanced down again, then looked back into his eyes. “Wall•E here,” he continued, tapping the compartment door on the top of his cube just forward of where his lenses dropped in. Both of them knew his anatomy, and where his cognition and memory circuits were.
He paused, and his eyes changed shape, smiling at her the best way he knew how. “And Wall•E maybe not here,” as he tapped the compartment again. He reached out and gently touched her chest. “Wall•E here, always.”
Under the wavering shadow of the new cloud, the Couple had a little picnic. They did not eat, of course, but they held hands, talked, enjoyed each other’s company, and finally relaxed enough to go on with their day.
It was time to go back to work.
Eve gripped his carry hook firmly, and the Couple lifted off. They approached the gap where the life pod had been. Wall•E was not surprised to see that this was the home of that long narrow cloud. He could not judge distances as accurately as his partner, but obviously the hole was a new thing, like the strange new cloud.
The movement of the cloud reminded him that a strong wind was coming through that hole. They almost had their own private sandstorm, minus the sand.
“Wall•E,” came over his radio circuit.
“Evah!” he replied, happy to hear her voice.
“Big wind!”
“Rready!”
He retracted completely, except for a bit of his optics peeking out from the top of his frame. They entered the cloud. The cloud became clear air next to the hull, but the wind here was sandstorm-strong.
His Eve was stronger. Air screaming around them, she flew them carefully back through the opening, and sped tens of meters up the corridor before touching down.
The wind here in the wider corridor was not as bad. Carefully, they retraced their path back past the first life pod door to the second, and were surprised that the wind almost stopped as they got beyond the open life pod door. Eve worked the second door’s controls one-handed again, but kept the other on Wall•E’s carry hook just in case. He did not object.
This door opened into a view identical to what the other had first shown. There was no wind at all, just the keening noise behind them in the corridor.
One minute later, another loud boom echoed from the ship as the second life pod launched and shot away to the west. The two stood together at the panel, the fingers sharing the button converting to clasped hands. Eve’s other hand was still firmly gripped on his carry hook, he knew. He watched her tap more buttons, then felt his frame’s slight movement as her grip on him adjusted. With her final tap on the panel, the second life pod access door hissed open.
They were not surprised by the noise and wind, this time. The Couple moved back into the corridor and to the next door. As soon as they moved away from the open doors behind them, they were out of the wind again.
Neither had any experience with such a phenomenon. It did not stop them from working.
In less than an hour, twenty-eight more life pods joined the first two, scattered over several kilometers to the west. It was time to go.
But now there was a problem. Eve, with Wall•E in tow, was at the far end of a row of thirty doors. As they went past each door, the wind got worse. It was not faster than she could fly, Wall•E felt sure—he knew that she could go so fast that the air cracked. Captain McCrea called it a “sonic boom,” and it was tucked in his memory as the sound of his Lady having great fun. It was a happy thing for him to hear.
This was not so fast, but it was very erratic. Each door they flew past in the strange wind made it harder to stay in the middle of the corridor.
It was far too loud for audio. “Evah?” Wall•E asked, alarmed at their veering path.
An angry “Oooooh!” was the response he got. Abruptly, she turned and shot downwind past the twenty doors they had already past. Ten more had remained ahead of them.
He knew that tone, and cringed slightly, expecting her to simply blow a hole in the side of the ship and leave.
Eve did not need to. Instead, she ducked through life pod bay 30, the last one they had launched, and dove through the open access door out into the clear air.
Almost clear. A continuous blanket of cloud now poured out of thirty openings just above the observation deck windows.
But at least there was no wind here. Eve and Wall•E dove out over the ledge, and dropped rapidly down the curve of the hull to the ground, covering the kilometer of altitude in seconds.
She did not stop at the base of the ship, but arced outward and away toward the Colony.
Wall•E knew where she was going. It was time to make a report to the Captain, and tell him about their exciting day.
Inside the Axiom’s main hull, it was as dark as ever. It was no longer quiet.
A person equipped with infrared vision—a planetary probe, for example—would be able to see the changes. From near the top of this space, bigger than any natural cavern on Earth, air went screaming through the jammed-open doors.
Down below, at the Lido Deck levels, these doors needed no help. They opened into the space, and air rushing up the multiple stairwells on both sides pushed its way in and left the doors standing open. This air was all the way from the gangway levels far below, roaring in a spiral up the vertical spaces and rushing outward along the transverse corridors in the engineering decks.
Much further down, in the Carina hull, the stairwell doors that had been propped open for years remained open, mostly. When one closed, the slam reverberated through the area, and it took many Shippers pushing together from inside to force it open again. They were only successful because there were many other doors the wind could get through.
Upstairs in the great atrium, a giant pair of artificial tornadoes formed, reaching from near the Lido Deck doors on each side and stretching to the starboard observation tower above. They writhed in the dark, breaking and reforming, shifting crazily from spot to spot on each side based upon vagaries of airflow. The roaring tubes of air twisted across the deck, sweeping up bits of debris to be ejected out the port side of the Axiom seconds later.
These tornadoes, driven by the sun’s work on hundreds of acres of even well-insulated hull, would run for the next few days.
On later days, especially bright sunny ones, they would start again, though they would never be so fierce as now.
There was no longer any need to worry about dead air in the Axiom.
Captain McCrea and Dave Grayson sat in the conference room, pondering the Couple’s report of the day’s doings. The men were old friends; there was no need to speak when nothing needed to be said.
Through the window facing the Axiom, the cloud that had formed behind it continued to rise from amidships. The origin point of that cloud was on the side away from their viewpoint; there seemed no need to open the life pod doors facing them, a more dangerous step. From what the Couple said, the wind seemed quite enough to make the air in the great hull breathable again.
It had been many years since the hull had been accessible, almost a decade since Captain McCrea had seen his old home. And both men thought about the resources of the currently disabled spaceship, stranded without power—and without control—on the ground.
Both wondered how much their worlds might change … if a single button on the great ship’s bridge were pressed.
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