The Salvagers by John Michael Godier Page B

think you can remove your helmet."
                  “It smells like the inside of a refrigerator," Neil said, as he lifted it off.
                  "And metal. It's all this frost and space-smell," I said. Something that's been exposed to space acquires a very peculiar metallic odor.
                  It took a few days for the ship to warm up. When we began to move gold, Sanjay and I served as the bucket brigade, with Neil in his moon suit manning the airlock. The job went slower than I had hoped. The airlock was designed for automatic operation, and using the handcrank was inefficient. Nevertheless, it was nice to work in a short-sleeve shirt. The only drawback was the inability to escape easily. I hadn't forgotten my dream, and the engine compartment door had been left open to release the water, allowing that eerie blue light to flicker out.
                  The water floated out in globules. There was nothing sensitive in the hold, so we just let it accumulate. It would either coalesce on the walls, or sometimes a blob the size of a basketball would jellyfish past to be captured by an engineer named Roberts. He'd net them in bags and leave them in the airlock to be disposed of when we were conveying gold. He must have done that a thousand times before the engine compartment finally stopped leaking.
                  When it did, Roberts volunteered to go in first. I don't know whether he had more guts than the others or whether they felt he deserved it for being the waterboy. Whatever it was, what happened next has bothered me ever since.
                  "He's ready to go in," Janet said as we gathered near the steel door leading to the engineering compartment.
                  The Cherenkov light was a warning. There might be more dangerous forms of radiation inside, so Roberts donned a moon suit to take advantage of its shielding. He pulled the heavy door open. The interior had the eerie look of a fish aquarium in a room with no other lights on. I grabbed a moon helmet and switched on its comms, hoping we could receive him through the thick bulkhead.
                  "It's laid out as in the ship’s blueprints," he said. "I'm in a room with three doorways. The left leads to the exhaust nozzle feeds, the center to the engine access panels, and the right to the main engineering control compartment. The Cherenkov light is coming from there. I'm going through the door. Reading no dangerous radioactivity. There is. . . ."
                  And that was it. The blue light went out, and he fell silent. Worried that he might have been injured, Neil and I suited up and charged in. We found nothing. He had disappeared without a trace.
                  We presumed him dead three days later and held a service. I never really knew anything about him other than the idle conversations you have while working on a ship with someone. We had nothing to commit to space, so we took the only thing from his quarters that seemed to have meaning to Roberts: a well-worn copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, with copious notes written in the margins. I suspected that there was more to Roberts than anyone knew.
                  In the weeks that followed we carefully explored the engineering compartment. Whatever took Roberts wasn't there anymore. There was also no trace of the crew. We had seen every part of the ship, at least at a glance, and one thing was clear: there were no crew members on that ship when it decompressed. However, if Roberts could disappear mysteriously, they might have too.
                  We were out of our league. People do not simply vanish into thin air. Janet suggested that a malfunctioning reactor could vaporize a person, but there was no evidence of that, and none of the reactors in that room had power. No one liked suggestions of a new phenomenon in nature, and all we had left that might