Bryan Kimberly looked with satisfaction at the two-page, four-color advertisement in the magazine on his desk. He leaned back in his chair to get a better perspective. A beautiful piece of art work, the illustration showed a bulbous suited spaceman halfway inside the main tube of one of the ponderous lunar freights. The dazzling streamers of light from his torch illumined the black bore of the tube, to which he was applying an emergency reline patch.
All this against the platinum Moonscape and the black night of space above. Beside the workman stood two companions, watching.
That was nice the way they were arranged, Kimberly thought. One showed the front of the spacesuit; the other gave a clear view of the rear, showing the minimum of equipment which the wearer was required to support.
Blazoned across the bottom of the picture, like a rocket trail going up, was the caption: "Only in a Kimberly can you do this!"
Bryan Kimberly settled deeper in the chair to read contentedly. "Since the first thrust-jet reached escape velocity, Kimberly has meant — freedom! Freedom to leave the prison of the ships that carry men across space, freedom to make the Moon's surface as familiar as our own home towns. Kimberly is the suit that has made the animal, man, adaptable to an environment for which he was never meant. The first human footprint upon the lunar surface was made in a Kimberly. Since then, nearly twenty thousand of these superb spacesuits have carried the pioneers of a new age into the realms of the stars.
"Now, we announce a new and improved Kimberly suit that means even greater freedom, ease, and safely in man's eternal quest to reach out and touch the stars!"
Bryan Kimberly pinched his lower lip thoughtfully. That had looked pretty good in script when he'd first read it. Now, in his pages of "Rocket Flight," it seemed just a trifle too purple. Oh, well — nobody could blame the company for going overboard on this new suit. It was good.
He read on. "For the first time, spacemen are offered an all-fabric suit. In weight alone, this means a reduction of thirty-eight pounds, Earth. The new plastic, Cordolite, of which the carcass is constructed, is conservatively rated at an inflation pressure of three hundred pounds per square inch.
"Most important of all, however, is the tremendous, epoch-making invention, the Kimberly Joint. It is with the utmost pride that we present this new joint to the spacemen of the world.
"Gone forever are the tragic blowouts of the old ground metallic joints. Though the greatest precision has always characterized Kimberly products, we were well aware of the imperfections of the ground joint, and we have devoted the full resources of our laboratories for many years to find a better solution.
"We have it. The Kimberly Joint is a continuous connection, spring compensated joint. Four hundred metallic springs embedded within the Cordolite carcass provide a completely compensated set of joints which assures the spaceman the mobility and freedom of a trunk clad swimmer. The illustration above, taken from an actual photograph, shows the first performance of its kind in history — made possible by Kimberly.
"Note also the new size of communication and pressure compensation equipment. No longer is the spaceman a walking Gargantua with a machine shop on his back!
"Trim! Safe! Comfortable! Kimberly!"
Bryan Kimberly finished with great satisfaction and folded his hands over his just barely perceptible paunch to enjoy the picture. Twenty-seven months of the hardest work he'd ever put in were represented there. He wished there had been time to get in the announcement that Lunar Flightways had equipped their new Lunar Queen all the way through with new Kimberlys for her maiden flight that was even now being completed. They had thirty-six Kimberlys on the Queen and four hundred more ordered for the rest of their fleet.
Maybe they'd run the advertisement again next month. It wouldn't be necessary in order to get business, Kimberly knew. Spacemen had been looking for a continuous, compensated joint since before the first rocket took off.
He glanced at the clock. Time to knock off, and this was going to be one week end that was really off. Two days at their cabin. His wife, Bernice, and their son, Roy would drive up Sunday but for one day of solid sleeping and fishing he'd not see a human being. Bernice was away visiting and he planned to go directly from the office. But it was time to be going if he expected to make it by dark.
His anticipation was broken by the flashing of his secretary's light. He answered with expectant irritation. "Yes?"
"Mr. Johnson of Flightways is on the phone, Mr. Kimberly."
"Tell him I — Oh, put him on!"
Johnson appeared on the small phone panel, sputtering and redfaced, "Kimberly! Where have you been? I've been trying to get you all afternoon."
That was Johnson's customary approach and Kimberly paid no attention.
"We're canceling the order on those suits," said Johnson. "Those three dozen on the Queen are no good. Every one the boys tried out broke down with them. They stink. We're going over to Realworth's ground joints."
"Take it easy, now, Henry," said Kimberly with frozen deliberation. "You know how production is. There may be some bugs in the suits that we've overlooked, but we've tested them frontwards and backwards. We know they're good and we'll back them up."
"Bugs! There're enough bugs to crawl off with the suits."
"Just tell me what the trouble is."
"The Queen landed at Copernicus Central. The passengers were let off as usual and the crew begun getting into the suits for terminal inspection of the hull and jets. Incidentally, those Iron Maidens stink, too. Why can't you figure out some kind of a dog for the joints so a spaceman won't have to get inside one of those things to put the suit on or off?"
"We're working on it," said Kimberly patiently. "We'll get it in time, but you want spacesuits now. And this is better than having to handle the old iron pants with a crane."
"Not much."
"Well, get on. What happened?"
"Twelve of the crew began the inspection. Chief Engineer Medford was watching from a port. All of a sudden one of the boys flipped back an arm like something had hit him with a ball bat. It just hung straight out. Then pretty soon another guy who was bending down on his knees to look below a tube straightened out and shot up nearly sixty feet to the top of the Queen's center deck."
"The joint counterbalances gave way!"
"You guessed it. In less than five minutes every one of those boys was spread-eagled and laid out over the landscape like gingerbread men. Some were still standing, but most were lying on their back and couldn't move a muscle. There has probably not been such a concentration of profound profanity in a location of like area since the beginning of space flight."
"I'm sure we can find —"
"Listen! Do you know how they got back into the ship?"
"I suppose they sent out some more men and hauled them back in."
"That's what Medford thought he was going to do. He sent out three more to attach lines and haul the others in. They got four hooked up and then they were laid out like a cooky cutter had run over them. Four for three — it wasn't a good deal. They still had eleven men to go. Medford tried one more and he only got one hooked up before his suit spread out on him and left him standing there."
"Well — how did they get back in?"
"They didn't. They're still there."
Kimberly sat back in his chair with a fishlike gulp. "Henry, you don't mean — When was — When did this happen?"
Johnson glanced at his watch out of sight of the screen. "Exactly thirty-three and one half hours ago. Those men are —"
"Well, you've got ground joint suits at Copernicus!"
"We'd switched over on the Queen, remember?" Johnson's teeth showed just a trifle now. "We believed in the reputation of Kimberly, and had the locks built for your new suits. We didn't have an iron pants aboard. In the terminal every blasted suit had been shipped out on an emergency call to that freight that exploded four thousand miles off course. You do read the papers?"
"And your —"
"My men are still there and will continue to be there for two hours and fifteen minutes more when Capitol's ship, Carolinia, whose owners have not been such fools as to adopt Kimberly suits, will let down and kindly assist my men back in."
"You could have —" Kimberly fumbled.
"No, we couldn't. Medford, the home office, our engineer's staff, and everybody else has been trying to figure it out for over thirty hours. A total blank. They couldn't get the men back in.
"There are just two more items, and then I'm through. Number one: Your suits are haunted."
"Haunted!"
"Screams like a built-in banshee nearly drove the men crazy for a while until they were laid out. It was so high-pitched they could scarcely hear it at first, but it was there. Is it one of your improvements? I didn't notice anything about it in this spread you have in 'Rocket Flight'."
"Look, Henry, our suits may spread eagle, but they don't scream."
"Seventeen men on the Moon say they do."
"Must have been defective radios oscillating."
"They cut them off. The suits are haunted. You know what happens to a ship or piece of equipment when something like that starts around. It doesn't have to make sense."
"Henry, we'll —"
But the screen was suddenly blank. Kimberly was saved the necessity of trying to think just what they'd do at the moment.
He put his head between his hands and groaned. He felt as if a large meteorite had rolled slowly over him. The two-page, four-color advertisement of Kimberly Suits was still spread out on the desk before him. A sudden taste like half ripe vinegar filled his mouth. He slapped the magazine shut and gave it a shove that sent it over the edge of the desk to the floor.
Haunted spacesuits! Awghhh —
And the Kimberly Joints? They had been tested under every conceivable circumstance. In the space room they had been flexed millions of times at a temperature of 0.001 degree K. The metallurgy department had come up with an alloy that looked like perfection. Hundreds of thousands of the springs had been tested without failure before a single one had been built into a suit.
And now they should fail.
And haunted to boot.
He tried to think what the screaming sound might have been. He could only suspect the communicator. And that had been cut off. Perhaps it was some psychological effect. Probably a minor matter, anyway. Of greatest importance was the failure of the Kimberly Joints. If they couldn't be perfected, the company would have to close up or start making flat irons and electric mixers.
He got up slowly and went out through the now empty outer offices. All the hired help had gone home. He supposed there'd still be a few of the boys puttering around in the labs, but he didn't want to see anybody.
He went down to the main floor where production lines were frozen in mid-motion. Scores of suits in all stages of production hung on the movable racks. He walked slowly down the line, from the point where the plastic came from the molds, past the subassembly sections where the intricate regulator valves and communication sets were put together, past the optical section where the circle of hundred and eighty degree lenses were set into the headpieces.
He walked by the test chambers where each plastic carcass was tested for pressure and cold after the Kimberly fastener, an air-tight pressure zipper had been installed. He glanced through a peephole at a score of pressure regulator valves on test. At the end of the line, he reached out to touch a completed suit, set up in its Iron Maiden, ready for shipment.
When he was a kid he'd read stories of space flight, and that was just before space flight had actually begun. Invariably, in the stories, the clean-cut young physicist or engineer would have occasion to hastily don his pleated, gabardine space suit and rush out into the vacuum of interstellar space on some urgent mission. Anyway, it looked like gabardine or something of the sort the way it was drawn by the illustrators. In total vacuum, the material hung in manly looking folds that made the hero look like a champion skier about to take off. Always, of course, the headpiece was a uniform, transparent globe. Kimberly wished he knew what material the artists had in mind for those globes, especially when the neck opening was too small to permit removal.
He glanced wryly at the thick headpieces of his own suits with their ugly semicircle of hundred and eighty degree lenses, and the stubby antenna sticking straight up. Maybe some day they'd get to the transparent globe stage — but it looked a long way ahead, especially in view of Johnson's complaint.
He trundled a carrier up to the nearest finished suit and mounted it, then wheeled slowly towards the space chamber down the line. An "icebox", the engineers called it. There was only one way to find out what was wrong with these suits —
He entered the lock of the chamber and closed the door. He chucked the Iron Maiden off the carrier and stripped off his clothes. From a closet he took a special liner and put it on. It resembled very closely a pair of ancient red flannel drawers.
It used to be that it took at least two other men to get one into an iron pants suit. For the first time now a man could get into a suit by himself — if the suit was a new Kimberly, and provided the Iron Maiden was there to hold it. Without her, six men and a boy couldn't put the suit on him.
Burton, the young engineer who was chiefly responsible for the new joints, was working on a system of dogs to make the Maiden unnecessary, but so far they weren't quite practical.
The Maiden was necessary because the tension of the counterbalances in each of the joints would otherwise have folded the suit into an intractable wad. It was surprising how many newcomers in the various branches of engineering associated with space flight did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem of joints and pressure regulation. So many of them thought all you had to do to build a spacesuit was make a man-shaped balloon, put a man and some air into it and turn him loose. They never realized that a man in such a rig would be spread-eagled by the air pressure that forced the suit to maximum volume and held it there. It wouldn't permit a man to bend an arm or move a leg. And if he could move, the changing volume would introduce such a violent change of air pressure in the suit that it would be uninhabitable.
The springs of the Kimberly Joint were ingeniously built into sheaths in the fabric in such a way as to counterbalance this spread-eagling force, thus leaving the spaceman free to move his body in a somewhat normal fashion.
But the springs, in turn, made the ungainly contraption nicknamed the Iron Maiden necessary to hold the uninflated suit.
So far, all means of dogging the counterbalances made it impossible to get into the suit, properly inflate, and then remove the dogs. In the Maiden, the suit was held rigid and the right arm dogged so that the openings could be closed and the suit inflated. Afterwards, the left hand was used to undog the right arm.
It was cumbersome, complicated, and ungainly, a lot different from the boyhood heroes Bryan Kimberly had read about, those dashing engineers who were forever shucking on a spacesuit at the drop of a ray gun and clearing the void of all that stood in their way.
But it was an improvement over the old ground joint, iron pants outfits, with their continual blowouts and violent deaths. So far, space flight had become useful only to the degree that suit engineering had freed men from the confines of the ships to explore the surface of the Moon.
And some day a Kimberly would make the first human footprint on the surface of Mars —
Kimberly slid his legs into the suit, then hunched down and drew himself into the rest of the carcass. He stood up straight sliding his arms into place and raising his head into the dark, tight cavern of the headpiece. More than ever, he wished those writers and illustrators of thirty years ago had left proper specifications for those beautiful suits and transparent helmets they designed. A suffocating, claustrophobic sense filled him momentarily. As good as they were, the lenses gave the impression of looking between fantastic bars as his sight shifted from one to another. It was difficult to get used to the distortion of field that they presented to his eyes — but some day there'd be transparent headpieces.
With his right arm, he closed the belly opening through which he had entered. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, he thought. The inch and a half thickness of Cordolite felt cold and clammy even through the liner. He turned up the heat control by means of the switch at the end of the left sleeve.
The swirl of air began to fill the suit as he began inflation. The fabric was a close fit in most areas except for the helmet and sleeve terminals where the controls and digital manipulators were located.
The warmth made him more comfortable, but didn't dispel the conviction that he'd rather manufacture the suits than wear them. As the air pressure rose to normal, the suit became free in the Iron Maiden and he stepped out, undogging the right sleeve. He went to the controls of the air lock and started the pumps that would evacuate the lock and reduce the temperature to that inside the icebox. While he waited, he checked the row of tiny meters just inside the lower range of vision at chin level. Temperature, pressure, tank pressure, voltage of the power pack — they were normal. Except for the tank: it wasn't up to full capacity. He wondered if he should fill it. But there was no need. He wouldn't be in the lock more than an hour at the most.
The door automatically swung open as the pumps completed the evacuation. He stepped through into the test room and closed the door behind him.
The score or more of hanging, bulging suits in their racks across the room seemed like waiting corpses for some reason. The utter silence, the knowledge of the absolute cold and vacuum beyond the thickness of the suit always depressed him. He knew he'd never have made a spaceman. They got used to it, they said. But this was the nearest he'd ever get to the thrill of space adventure, he was certain.
He reached up above his head to check the door clamp again and scowled at the peephole transmitter and mike just below it. These were for the operators setting up the chamber for a test, but they were automatically on whenever the door was closed. Safety precaution some bright lad had devised, Kimberly thought. Some safety for a guy in a spacesuit in there with no air, though.
Yet it gave him an absurd, comforting sense of connection with the world of the living, even though no one but the watchman would be out there somewhere in the building.
He walked over to the row of suit carcasses. They looked all right. Their telemeters showed pressure and temperature being maintained at normal in all of them.
Kimberly felt a surge of growing irritation. There was nothing wrong with these suits. It must have been something to do with the Queen or conditions on the Moon that broke down those others. It made no sense at all. And he'd never get to the cabin by dark, now.
But though there was nothing wrong, how could he take the week end off until he had proven positively that it was so? In a burst of anger he hauled back and punched the nearest carcass in the belly. It jolted back and sent the whole rackful reeling in their hangers like, like — dead men swinging in the wind, Kimberly thought morosely.
Then he heard it.
A slow, shrill screaming in his ears. Trilling up and down the scale, it escaped momentarily beyond the range of audibility, then slid down in wild, despairing crescendo.
The hair prickled on the back of his neck. He turned the heater up a notch and whirled about, as if to find the source of the wailing behind him.
There was nothing, of course. And Johnson's words came back to him. "Your suits are haunted."
Of all the incredible nonsense! But where did the sound come from?
He realized now that it had been there all the time just on the verge of perceptibility. But his senses had not recorded it until the cold, depressing surroundings began to weigh on him.
Psychological.
He listened hard, straining his ears with all the voluntary effort he could muster. Even his heartbeat began to sound loud inside the suit.
It was there. Actual, physical sound waves were producing that sensation. It was no mere delusion of the senses. He was certain of that.
He looked at the row of carcasses that had almost stopped swaying. Fiercely, he jabbed out again.
A wild scream pierced his ears. Simultaneously, his arm snapped back as if it had been hit with a club. In half numbing pain, he regarded his arm. It projected straight out at his side — immovable.
For a moment he looked at the swinging carcasses. It was almost as if they had struck back.
But he knew what it was. The elbow and shoulder joints had broken down completely.
Springs, he thought, that could withstand five million flexings in the test machines in the icebox, yet they failed with a few flexings when in a suit.
He made a tentative gesture to bend the stiffened arm. It only made his bruised muscles ache worse. The sleeve would not move — as he well knew.
He tried the left arm, flexing it slowly. It seemed all right. He dug his manipulators into the thick plastic of the right sleeve to feel of the springs in the joints. There simply weren't any. He rubbed the fabric back and forth between the manipulators. Lacking a sense of touch, he couldn't be sure, but it seemed as if there were fine metallic shards in the thin sheaths where the springs should have been. They had shattered to bits.
Cold?
They had been tested for months in the icebox. Stationary, flexed at a hundred cycles per minute, heated, cooled again — everything the test engineers could think of had been done to those springs to break them down. And they held.
Until now.
He moved towards the swaying carcasses.
"How are you boys doing? Let's feel that muscle." He flexed the arms of the nearest suit with his left hand. The legs. The joints seemed satisfactory. He went on down the line. As he reached for the next to the last one, his left arm snapped back.
He stood there like some fantastic scarecrow, arms outstretched — swearing very softly to himself.
With impotent rage, he tried to bring his arms together. It was like trying to squeeze a block of cement. That was the physical factor behind his rage. But the psychological was greater. The inability to even guess at what was going on right under his nose. It was almost as if the springs were allergic to man. They withstood every physical torture that engineering could devise. But mounted in a suit and worn by a man, they failed.
Kimberly gave a shrug of disgust. He'd be suspecting somebody of hexing the suits next if he kept up that line of reasoning. There was a perfectly logical, physical explanation for the failure of the springs. It was right under his nose. It must be fatigue that kept him from seeing it, he thought. At any rate, there was nothing more to be done, now. He couldn't accomplish anything with his arms sticking out like boards.
He might as well get out of the suit and have some dinner. Then he'd call the engineers down for an all-night session if necessary. The week end vacation was off. He'd have to let Bernice know he hadn't left. He started for the door.
And nearly fell on his face.
He hadn't even heard it or felt it. But while he'd stood there the entire set of springs in the left leg of the suit had collapsed and left him stifflegged.
Sweat suddenly formed a moist film on his face. If the right leg should also go, he'd be in one sweet jam!
Cautiously, he tested it. He raised one foot slowly and carefully, making sure to maintain his balance on the leg that couldn't be shifted if he needed its sudden counteraction.
All the joints of the right side were still good. But it was a gamble how long they would hold. More than seventy-five percent of the springs in the suits were gone now. He couldn't expect the rest to last much longer at that rate.
Irritation gave way to apprehension lest he fail to make it to the door of the chamber. Carefully, he put his foot down and gave an awkward hop. His instinctive dependence on both legs nearly undid him. He tottered in the heavy suit and fell against the row of carcasses.
That saved him long enough to regain balance. Sweating heavily now, he turned the heat lower and made another try. That one was more successful. He gained about a foot on that hop. The door was —
Suddenly, it seemed a vast, incredible distance away. The twenty feet that separated him from it loomed like a journey of pioneering proportions. He cut off that line of thought and concentrated on the next hop.
He soon had to leave the protecting lee of the line of carcasses that had twice served to balance him. They were like old friends whose sudden departure now was tragic.
He hopped away. One slow step, and another. At midpoint he half stumbled, then recovered. He paused. His breathing was coming hard and fast. The muscles of his leg ached to the point of collapse.
Calm down. Take it easy, he told himself savagely. There was nothing to get excited about. He wasn't stranded on some barren desert of the Moon. This was his own factory where he spent ten or twelve hours of nearly every day. This was home territory. He could hop another ten feet and jerk that handle that would open the door and let him into the lock.
He resumed the slow maneuvering. Nine more. Eight. Almost there wouldn't be good enough. If the remainder of the springs gave way with just two feet to go, it was still no better than when he started out. He had to make every single one of those hops. And each one lessened the chance of making the next. And all the while the ghost screamed in his ears.
When he finally reached the wall he almost cried. With outstretched arms, he leaned close against it, hugging the chill, imprisoning surface. The pain in his leg was sickening, but he forced it to hold him up while the aching muscle cells slowly recovered.
He was safe, now, he thought. Safe. What had he ever been afraid of? He knew the answer to that well enough. It had always terrified him. The emptiness, the cold. He'd never get to the Moon. He'd never be a spaceman.
He looked up at the door lever just above his head. One pull on that and he'd —
One pull —
The chill of space seemed to filter through the Cordolite. One pull on the lever was all it would take. And how was he going to reach the lever?
He moved sideways and glanced from the tip of his sleeve to the lever — about twenty-four inches. It might as well be twenty-four feet.
Instinctively, he looked around. There was nothing to stand on. He cursed the futility of his thought. As if it would do any good to find something to stand on.
He looked again at the two-foot vastness between his hand and the lever. Involuntarily, his body contorted in an attempt to twist upwards towards that key to freedom. The whispering, screaming sounds mocked the futility of it. Almost, he screamed back at it.
There had to be some way to reach that handle. He squirmed, tipped, tipped farther —
That was it!
Spread-eagled against the wall, he slowly tilted on one leg like some fantastic windmill. Inch by inch, his hand neared the handle. Half the distance was closed. Then he saw the arc of his arm would not intersect the position of the handle. He straightened and moved more directly under it.
He tipped again. This time he would make it. Glancing through the lens of the headpiece, he saw the gap narrowing. That image was all that was real in the world. He concentrated on it, willing the gap to close.
That concentration cost him his sense of balance for a bare instant. Only an instant, and disaster swept upon him. He tottered, felt the sickening sense of lost orientation.
Soundless in the vacuum of the test chamber, the heavy suit crashed to the floor.
Bryan Kimberly cried then. Cried of exhaustion, frustration, loneliness and terror. He lay on his back seeing only the ceiling, a gray mass of steel in which were set the thick lenses that barred even the faint infrared radiation of the chemical lights which illumined the chamber.
How long he lay there looking up at that gray, hypnotic field with its glowing white spot he didn't know. He knew that he could not get to his feet again, and knew equally well that sooner or later he would begin struggling. But not just yet — not just yet.
This would work out all right, he tried to reason with himself. Someone would find him and relieve the ridiculous situation he had placed himself in.
Who? When?
This was Friday night. He glanced at the little clock face in the headpiece. It was after ten p.m. In the morning someone would miss him. But who? He thought carefully. Bernice expected him to be on his way to the cabin now. She wouldn't expect any communication from him. No one would.
Roy was driving her to join him Sunday morning. That meant not before ten o'clock, anyway. Thirty-six hours away. And it would take them time to become alarmed over his absence. They would make calls. There would be investigations by the police, fumbling, bumbling, wild guesses. Someone would finally think of checking clear back to the plant. His secretary, Doris, would remember that he hadn't left when she had.
But who would finally think to look for him in the icebox?
It would be Monday at least before they got around to searching the plant in such detail.
By then it wouldn't matter. He had been watching the air gauge for a long time now. There was only enough air for thirty-two hours at the most.
He lay there for another hour without moving. His mind seemed stunned beyond functioning by the calamity of his fall.
But after a time he wondered idly what had happened to the ghost. Perhaps it had taken pity on him and wasn't going to haunt him in his present predicament, anyway. Whatever the reason, the absence of that high-pitched screaming was one small blessing to be thankful for.
Or was it? Even as he thought about it he shifted his one free leg and the sound piped faintly in his ears. The irritating, knifelike vibration channeled through every nerve path and shook his body. He kicked out violently in an effort to shift position and ease the aching spots of contact between his body and the suit.
The sound surged to a higher, more racking pitch, then passed beyond audibility.
Ghosts.
In a spacesuit. In an icebox. He laughed sharply without humor. Our suits may spread eagle, but they don't scream. Johnson would be pleased to have his confirmation that they did scream. As if Johnson would ever know what he found out -
He clenched his teeth. If he was going to die here, he could at least die sane. And if his brain were still functioning he should be able to figure out that scream.
What makes sound? Vibration. Of what? He thought of all the elements of the suit that might vibrate. There weren't any. Unless —
Air columns vibrate. But there weren't any air columns. No — but there was air going through an orifice. That made a whistle. Suddenly he laughed out loud. He kicked his leg sharply and listened to the resulting shrill scream.
"Hello, ghost," he said.
It was the pressure regulator valve in the back of the suit. Every time a joint of the suit moved the volume decreased or increased with a change of air pressure inside that might be as much as a hundred percent. The regulator valve took care of that. As the volume decreased the valve drew off some of the air to a low pressure tank. As the volume increased, it passed back some of the air from a high pressure tank, thus maintaining constant air pressure within the suit regardless of the contortions of the occupant. When the low pressure tank was filled, an automatic pump evacuated it to the high pressure tank.
This complex arrangement could, of course, have been eliminated by a simple exhaust valve — but that would have been too wasteful of the suit's air supply which was even freed of carbon dioxide and excess water vapor by chemical means and reused.
So, from some accident of design or construction, the regulator whistled and screamed at the occupant every time it was called upon to adjust the pressure. It was very nearly a supersonic vibration. Certainly it had harmonics way up in that region.
Kimberly moved his leg slowly and listened to the sound. He jerked sharply and the valve squealed with horrible insistence. Almost made it talk, he thought. He moved jerkily in imitation of spoken words. The valve responded with weird cries and chilling screams.
And so he knew the answer to that one.
But there was no pleasure in it. For a moment it had distracted his mind. Distraction, however, would have to be extremely powerful to draw attention from the kind of death he was facing. At the end, he supposed it would be simplest to just open the exhaust valve as quickly as possible.
His eyes, wandering aimlessly, settled on the communications panel directly above his face. The mike there, connected to the outside world, mocked him with its ability to carry a cry for help that might be heard sooner or later by a watchman. But nothing on earth would carry his voice through the thick fabric of the suit and across the five and a half feet of vacuum between him and the mike.
A carrier. He had the radio set in the suit. Useless in the metal walled room.
Carrier -
He trembled suddenly. He had a carrier — maybe. A ghost could carry a message for him.
He laughed a little hysterically and it relieved his tension. He couldn't be sure it would work, he told himself. No use building hope until he knew. This solemn rationalisation couldn't still the hard beating of his heart. He wanted to live, and the involuntary muscles of his body refused to be stilled in the face of reviving hope.
He moved his free leg until his knee came into his sight. Slowly, he shoved himself backwards until he could touch the wall with the digital manipulators of one hand. He spread them until they made the greatest possible contact with the metal wall.
Then he raised and lowered his knee slowly. The faint, high scream of the valve pierced his audio nerves.
He opened his mouth and called with a voice that thundered in his own ears. "Open up! Open the icebox. Bryan Kimberly — in the icebox. Open —"
A carrier — and a modulation. The one point of contact between the inside and outside of the suit was the manipulators. Though they had an intermediate section of heat inert plastic, they were rigid. They would carry the supersonic vibrations from the valve to the wall. His voice alone would never pass through the manipulators in force sufficient to reach the mike. As he called, the vibrations of his voice produced pressure changes within the suit and the valve responded at like frequency, modulating the high-pitched sound it generated. And those narrow fingers might be able to carry that spear of inaudible sound with his voice riding its back out to the wall.
He pictured the rest of the pathway — up the metal wall to the mike chamber where the supersonic component would be lost on the condenser element. Would his voice component be strong enough to activate it?
He couldn't know. He could only try. And the still active Kimberly Joints would not remain intact indefinitely. Already they were moving on borrowed time.
He remembered that George, the watchman passed the assembly line on his hourly rounds at about ten minutes after the hour. He'd seen him only a couple of nights ago checking the watch station near the icebox.
He adjusted his calls to half minute intervals except for six or seven minutes before and after that critical time when George ought to be in the vicinity.
The hours stretched past dawn and rawness grew in his throat. The deafening, insistent roar of his own voice echoed in his head. And no response had come. He felt that there had been moments of unconsciousness during the night, and he dreaded that he might have missed a single chance for rescue. He glanced at the clock face. George was gone by now. Kimberly wasn't sure how the day watch was handled on week ends. He gave up the continuous calling and maintained the intermittent schedule as nearly as he could.
How could it be such torture to simply lie still? A beating with a club would not have made his body ache more. He tried to cut his mind off from the sensations of pain and concentrate on the mechanical routine of his calling. He found that too easy to do. His mind wanted to slip completely into forgetfulness under the burden of pain, fatigue and monotony.
He dared not go to sleep. He fussed with the pressure and heat controls. Perhaps a little more cold would keep him awake -
George was not a very bright boy. He heard Kimberly's voice on three successive rounds before it made an impression. He didn't know much about the equipment he was supposed to watch. It didn't seem quite plausible that he should hear the top boss' voice in the silence of the assembly floor and he didn't know anything about the communication panel for the icebox. So he put the whole thing down as imagination.
Twice, anyway. The third time he gave in and called Kimberly's house.
It was long after midnight Saturday when they found him. The Kimberly Joints had given way hours before and he lay inert and unconscious. He had turned the heat much too low in an effort to keep awake and his body was chilled. But he was still very much alive. Revival was accomplished with little difficulty.
On Monday morning an uneasy dozen engineers sat in the small conference room off Bryan Kimberly's office. They had heard rumors, vague and terrifying rumors that the boss had got into some jam that was their fault. They had heard rumors of a rage that was unmatched since the days of Kimberly, Senior, who used to turn over his whole engineering department before lunch about once a week. They wondered where they would be working by the end of the week — if they were working at all.
They didn't look much at each other, and they didn't talk at all. There was Conners, the metallurgist; Jenkins, the plastics man; Randolph, the mechanical engineer; and Brown, who had been chiefly responsible for the final design of the new suit. Burton, the joint designer was also there as was Lane, head of Test Engineering.
They stared mutely at the gadget Kimberly had rigged up in the center of the conference table.
"Wonder what —" Lane finally began.
"New model of an improved guillotine," suggested Jenkins.
"Shut up! Here comes the boss," Brown hissed.
They hunched down, looked towards the door expectantly.
Bryan Kimberly entered and closed the door softly. He looked the same as far as they could tell. They wondered just what had happened to him.
"Gentlemen," said Kimberly. They sank still lower. This was going to be worse than they had thought.
"Gentlemen," he repeated. "I don't know much about what they teach in college these days, but when I was a kid they required all engineers to have G.S. 1, fundamentals of general semantics. In that course I remember learning one great lesson: The whole is not the sum of its parts. Ever hear of that, gentlemen?"
The circle of glum engineers nodded, and they wondered where the devil he was heading for.
"I have discovered that in spite of the fact that this company is supposed to have a test department and has a number of test engineers on the payroll we, nevertheless, turn over untested spacesuits for sale to our customers."
Lane bristled, terrierlike, and squirmed out of the chair to a standing position. "If there have been complaints against my department, I'll back up every suit that's got my inspectors' stamps on — and none go out without them."
"No — none go out without them," said Kimberly with slow, even precision, gently dangling the hook he had them on. "But there is one other great lesson of general semantics that you seem to have forgotten, Mr. Lane. The word is not the object. Remember?"
"But what -"
"It simply means that because a suit bears an inspector's stamp there is no reason to assume the suit is tested and perfect."
"Then what does it mean?" asked Lane.
"It means that we have a test department manned by thick-headed, vacuum-brained imbeciles," roared Kimberly. "Kids who play like engineers —"
Lane trembled before the blast, but remained standing. "Mr. Kimberly, we are engineers with reputations to maintain. We back up our reputations with our work and —"
"Would you like to back them up — on your back for a day or two in one of those blasted tested suits of yours?"
"I would appreciate knowing what factors we overlooked in our test procedures."
"That's simple. You forgot to put a man inside."
Lane swallowed. The others looked baffled.
"You don't expect us to give each suit an occupation test, surely," said Brown, "It's not practical and ... and surely not necessary. We test for operation, durability. We test the final suit for pressure. It seems to be there's nothing omitted."
"Piece by piece!" growled Kimberly, his fist banging the table. "And the whole is not the sum of the parts! Will you get that through your heads? A suit is not tested until it's shown that a man can wear it. Your tests do not show that. Look at this."
He pressed a button connected to the apparatus on the table. A projected silhouette flashed on the wall.
"A spring from a Kimberly Joint," said Bryan Kimberly. "Those wonderful Kimberly Joints! I took this off the production line. The test sample out of this bunch flexed four million and was still good. Now, watch."
He pressed another button. "This box is near zero, Kelvin. The spring is cooled with liquid helium to near operating temperatures. There it goes!"
As they watched, the silhouette shattered. The pieces seemed to explode, then trickled out of sight and there was nothing where the spring had been.
The engineers sat as if stunned. They knew the strength of that bit of metal, the implications of the force that could shatter it like glass.
"What did you do?" breathed Lane.
"Ghost," said Kimberly. "Don't you hear it? Our suits are also haunted, you know."
They listened. Then they heard — the high-pitched screaming that came out of the apparatus.
"One of our tested valves," said Kimberly.
"But they don't squeal like that," said Lane.
"How do you know? Do you test for squeal?"
"No, but -"
"Supersonic, mostly," said Kimberly. "At operational temperatures that vibration will shatter those springs to bits. Seventeen men of Flightways were left spread-eagled for a day and a half on the Moon. Your tested suit almost killed me when I tried one on in the icebox. Now, does anybody want to claim these suits are tested before they go out?"
"But a squeal —" Lane protested weakly.
"A squeal. You test the valves in an icebox. Nobody learns whether they squeal or not because the sound is too high for the mike in there. You put them in a suit and test the suit for pressure — constant pressure where there's no squeal. But when a man puts the suit on and the valve starts working, the springs go to pot. We gave the suits a thorough occupational test when the springs were designed, and then we changed the valves after such tests were made. Any questions now, gentlemen?"
He looked them over with savage enjoyment of their discomfiture. "Good, then we may expect a revision of the test procedures and a correction of the valve design."