Claire settled back to wait. She could have wept with the tension of it, but Patty and Emma didn’t need the bad example.

Bruce Van Atta pressed a finger to one side of his nose, squeezing the nostril shut, and sniffed mightily, then switched sides and repeated the procedure. Damn free fall and its lack of proper sinus drainage, among its other discomforts. He could hardly wait to get back to Earth. Even dismal Rodeo would be an improvement. He wondered idly if he could whip up some excuse—go inspect the quaddie barracks being readied, perhaps. That could be stretched out to about five days, if he worked it right.

He drifted over and shored himself across one corner of Dr. Yei’s pie-wedge-shaped office, sighting over her desk, his back to a flat inner wall and his feet braced where her magnet-board curved, thick with stuck-on papers and flimsies. Yei’s lips tightened with annoyance, as she swivelled to face him. He hitched his feet to a comfortably crossed position, deliberately letting them muss her papers, out-psyching the psycher. She glanced back to her holovid display, declining to rise to the bait, and he mussed a few more. Female wimp, he thought. A relief, that they had only a few weeks left to work together, and he didn’t have to jolly her up any more.

“So,” he prodded, “how far along are we?”

“Well, I don’t know how you’re doing—in fact,” she added rather venomously, “I don’t even know what you’re doing—”

Van Atta grinned in appreciation. So the worm could wriggle after all. Some administrators might have taken offense at the implied insubordination; he congratulated himself upon his sense of humor.

“– but so far I’ve finished orienting about half the staff to their new assignments.”

“Anybody give you a hard time? I’ll play bad guy, if necessary,” he offered nobly, “and go lean on the non-cooperative.”

“Everybody is naturally rather shocked,” she replied, “however, I don’t think your… direct intervention will be required.” “Good,” he said jovially.

“I do think it would have been better to tell them all at once. This business of releasing the information in bits and dribbles invites just the sort of rumor-mongering that is least desirable.”

“Yeah, well, it’s too late now—”

His words were cut short by the startling hoot of an alarm klaxon, shrilling out over the intercom. Yei’s holovid was abruptly overridden by the Central Systems emergency channel.

A hoarse male voice, a strained face—good God, it was Leo Graf—sprang from the display.

“Emergency, emergency,” Graf called—where was he calling from?—”we are having a depressurization emergency. This is not a drill. All Habitat downsider staff should proceed at once to the designated safe area and remain there until the all-clear sounds—”

On the holovid, a computer-generated map sketched itself showing the shortest route from this terminal to the designated safe modules—module, Van Atta saw. Holy shit, the pressurization drop must be Habitat-wide. What the hell was going on?

“Emergency, emergency, this is not a drill,” Graf repeated.

Yei too was staring bug-eyed at the map, looking more like a frog than ever. “How can that be? The sealing system is supposed to isolate the problem area from the rest—”

“I bet I know,” spat Van Atta. “Graf’s been messing with the Habitat’s structure, preparatory to salvage—I’ll bet he, or his quaddies, just screwed something up royally. Unless it was that idiot Wyzak did something—come on!”

“Emergency, emergency,” Graf’s voice droned on, “this is not a drill. All Habitat downsider staff should proceed at once—son-of-a-bitch !” His head snapped around, winked out, leaving only the urgently pulsing map on the display.

Van Atta beat Yei, whose eye was still caught by the map, out the door to her office and through the airseal doors at the end of the module that should have been sealed and weren’t. The doors seemed to sag half-opened, controls dead, useless, as Van Atta and Yei joined a babbling stream of staffers speeding toward safety. Van Atta swallowed, cursing his sinuses, as one ear popped and the other, throbbing, failed to. Adrenalin-spurred anxiety shivered in his stomach.

Lecture Module C was already mobbed when they arrived, with downsiders in every state of dress and undress. One of the Nutrition staff had a case of frozen food clutched under her arm—Van Atta rejected the notion that she had inside information about the duration of the emergency and decided she must have simply had it in her hands when the alarm sounded and not thought to drop it before she fled.

“Close the door!” howled a chorus of voices as his and Yei’s group entered. A distinct breeze sighed past them, rising to a whistle cut to silence as the doors sealed.

Chaos and babble ruled in the crowded lecture module.

“What’s going on?”

“Ask Wyzak.”

“He’s out there, surely, dealing with it.”

“If not, he’d better get the hell out there—”

“Is everybody here?”

“Where are the quaddies? What about the quaddies?”

“They have their own safe area, this isn’t big enough.”

“Their gym, probably.”

“I didn’t catch any directions for them on the holovid, to the gym or anywhere else—”

“Try the comm.”

“Half the channels are dead.”

“Can’t you even raise Central Systems?”

“Lady, I am Central Systems—”

“Shouldn’t we have a head-count? Does anybody know exactly how many there are up on rotation right now?”

“Two hundred seventy-two, but how can you know which are missing because they’re trapped and which are missing because they’re out there dealing with it—”

“Let me at that damned comm unit—”

“CLOSE THE DOOR!” Van Atta himself joined the chorus this time, semi-involuntarily. The pressure differential was becoming more marked. He was glad he wasn’t a latecomer. If this went on it would shortly become his duty to see the doors stayed closed at any cost, no matter who was pounding for admittance from the other side. He had a little list… Well, anybody who lacked the wit to respond quickly to emergency instructions shouldn’t be on a space station. Survival of the fittest.

If they hadn’t amassed the whole two hundred seventy-two by now, they were surely getting close. Van Atta pushed his way through the bobbing crowd toward the center of the module, stealing momentum from this or that person at the price of their own displacement. A few turned to object, saw who had nudged them, and bit short their complaints. Somebody had the cover off the comm unit and was peering into its guts in frustration, lacking delicate diagnostic tools doubtless dropped somewhere back in the Habitat.

“Can’t you at least raise the quaddies’ gym?” demanded a young woman. “I’ve got to know if my class made it there.”

“Well, why didn’t you go with ‘em, then?” the would-be repairman snapped logically.

“One of the older quaddies took them. He told me to come here. I didn’t think to argue with him, with that alarm howling in our ears—”

“No go.” Grimacing, the man clicked the cover shut.

“Well, I’m going back and find out,” said the young woman decisively.

“No, you’re not,” interrupted Van Atta. “There’s too many people breathing in here to open the door and lose air unnecessarily. Not till we find out what’s going on, how extensive this is, and how long it’s likely to last.”

The man tapped the holovid cover. “If this thing doesn’t cut in, the only way we’re going to find out anything is to send out somebody with a breath mask to go check.”

“We’ll give it a few more minutes.” Damn that overweening fool Graf. What had he done? And where was he? In a breath mask somewhere, Van Atta trusted, or better yet a pressure suit—although if Graf had indeed caused this unholy mess, Van Atta wasn’t sure he wished him a pressure suit. Let him have a breath mask, and a nasty case of the bends for just punishment. Idiot Graf.