of the room and found another door—one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed; I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried the wheel anyway, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, then took the flashlight off my belt and aimed it into the interior. It looked safe, so I stepped through. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me.
The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—
A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying to get rid of the rats—and cockroaches and silverfish and other vermin that had somehow made it here from Earth—for mears.
I turned back around and headed deeper into the ship. The floor wasn’t quite level: it dipped a bit to—to starboard, they’d call it—and I also felt that I was gaining elevation as I walked along. The ship’s floor had no carpeting; it was just bare, smooth metal. Oily water pooled along the starboard side; a pipe must have ruptured at some point. Another rat scurried by up ahead; I wondered what they ate here, aboard the dead hulk of the ship.
I thought I should check in with Pickover—let him know where I was. I activated my phone, but the display said it was unable to connect. Of course: the radiation shielding in the spaceship’s hull kept signals from getting out.
It was growing awfully cold. I held my flashlight straight up in front of my face and saw that my breath was now coming out in visible clouds. I paused and listened. There was a steady dripping sound: condensation, or another leak. I continued along, sweeping the flashlight beam left and right in good detective fashion as I did so.
There were doors at intervals along the corridor—the automatic sliding kind you usually find aboard spaceships. Most ships used hibernation for bringing people to Mars, but this was an old-fashioned spaceliner with cabins; the passengers and crew would have been awake for the whole eight months or more of the journey out.
Most of the door panels had been pried open, and I shined my flashlight into each of the revealed rooms. Some were tiny passenger quarters, some were storage, one was a medical facility—all the equipment had been removed, but the examining beds betrayed the room’s function. They were welded down firmly—not worth the effort for scavengers to salvage, I guess.
I checked yet another set of quarters, then came to a closed door, the first one I’d seen along this hallway.
I pushed the open button but nothing happened; the ship’s electrical system was dead. There was an emergency handle recessed into the door’s thickness. I could have used three hands just then: one to hold my flashlight, one to hold my revolver, and one to pull on the handle. I tucked the flashlight into my right armpit, held my gun with my right hand, and yanked on the recessed handle with my left.
The door hardly budged. I tried again, pulling harder—and almost popped my arm out of its socket. Could the door’s tension control have been adjusted to require a transfer’s strength to open it? Perhaps.
I tried another pull and, to my astonishment, light began to spill out from the room. I’d hoped to just whip the door open, taking advantage of the element of surprise, but the damned thing was only moving a small increment with each pull of the handle. If there was someone on the other side and he or she had a gun, it was no doubt now leveled directly at the door.
I stopped for a second, shoved the flashlight into my pocket, and—damn, I hated having to do this—holstered my revolver so that I could free up my other hand to help me pull the door open. With both hands now gripping the recessed handle, I tugged with all my strength, letting out a grunt as I did so. The light from within stung my eyes; they’d grown accustomed to the darkness. Another pull, and the door panel had now slid far enough into the wall for