BOUNDARY(58)

The three ISMs were now positioned in such a way that they were locked together, almost entangled but in a very carefully calculated manner. Each Faerie had two manipulator arms. Three of these, adjusted to maximum power, were hooked in the just-barelyaccessible crack where door and wall met. The vacuum deterioration of the seal had helped in that respect. Had that not happened, the manipulator arms would never have been able to get a significant grip on the door. The other three arms were configured to give the Faeries support, leverage, and stability, since in microgravity there was no assistance to be had from weight.



The three Faeries synchronized their systems as directed by A.J.'s programming, and then began to pull. For long moments, nothing happened. Indicators showed the stress on parts of the Faeries rising; then, passing normal limits, entering the danger zone.



A.J. was barely aware of the tension in his own arms. His hands were literally white-knuckled as he gripped the console, lifting and pulling in sympathetic unison with his own creations.



Titania suddenly fired its chemical thrusters.



A.J. hissed. That was an attempt to utilize leverage and inertia to drastically increase the force on the door, for a brief moment. But he'd programmed that maneuver as a last-ditch effort, and the reason Titania had used it now wasn't immediately obvious to him.





The downward thrust pushed on the temporary structure formed by the Faeries in such a way as to use it as a fulcrum. Manipulator arms bowed alarmingly under the pressure.



Suddenly, the view from Rane spun crazily. The others followed suit, the emulation showing that something had broken and the three Faeries were trying to recover. Telltales blinked on.



"Damn! Lessee . . . Rane's broken both manipulators, must've gotten twisted around . . . One of Titania's still works . . . Oh, fu— farging hell, something banged into Tinkerbell's left lens!"



Rane's images steadied and she turned her cameras back. A piece of manipulator arm bounced lazily across the field of view. But the image also showed a yawning dark patch at the base of the door, fully two feet high. Large enough for a Faerie to pass through.



"Oh, yeah!" A.J.'s momentary annoyance and concern vanished. It would have been worth the loss of at least two Faeries to get that door open, in his view, and he hadn't actually lost any of them. All three were damaged, but none of them in a way that would render them useless or even tremendously impaired in their main function.



"Well, let's hope there's something in there worth looking at. I sure can't pull off that trick again. Knowing how these things go, we've probably just succeeded in breaking into the alien equivalent of the broom closet."



Rane was not able to retract or fold the remainder of its manipulator arms, meaning that it was much more likely to snag itself going through narrow spaces. Tinkerbell's loss of an imaging unit made it less effective for surveying.



That left Titania. Fortunately, the status indicators and a visual survey by the other ISMs showed that the nonfunctional arm was in fact completely missing—it had broken cleanly off at the joint connecting it to the Faerie's main body. There was nothing to prevent Titania from surveying the now-accessible room.



Nothing, that was, except the inevitable verification and programming delay engendered by the many millions of miles between Earth and Phobos. After Prybar had concluded, the change in the ISMs' status had been more than sufficient to require them to wait for instructions from A.J. on what to do next.



"Take a break, people," A.J. said, absently. "I'm going to be designating new instruction sets and getting the Faeries redistributed to maximize the bandwidth feed when I send in Titania. This intermission will probably run you about two and a half hours. If someone would like to thank me for producing this Oscar-winning film, they could grab me a couple of hotdogs with mustard and relish and a large OJ in an hour or so."





Two hours and forty-seven minutes later, A.J. sat back down at his workstation, having taken a quick bathroom break. He noticed a large number of new people had arrived to watch what was happening—some of the new scientists added to the project recently, and Madeline Fathom.



"The show should be starting any minute now, ladies and gentlemen. In . . . five, four, three, two, one . . . action!"



There was now only a single viewpoint, that of Titania, as the little ISM carefully maneuvered itself down and through the gap. It eased through and then activated its full-power lights.



There were faint gasps of indrawn breath throughout the room.



A.J. could not quite restrain another whoop of triumph. "Not a broom closet!"



"Closet, hell," Hathaway said in quiet awe. "That's a control room."