Jealous—again?? Stop this, Helen!
"What do you think of that?" A.J. demanded.
The main display showed a hugely enlarged version of the alien artifact, shadowy like an old-fashioned X-ray image. Inside the sculpted, ridged "bowling ball" were three well-defined hollows. Two showed nothing inside them, but the middle one was nearly full with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny dots. Small lines ran from the empty hollows to the base of the hollow tube, which had some kind of complex mechanism at that point. The mechanism also connected, via a much larger opening, to the central hollow.
"Looks very interesting," said Glendale. "What exactly do you think we're seeing?"
"Well, the first important point is these little dots. If I blow one of them up a bit and check the scale, how large do you think they are?"
No one said anything for a moment. Then Helen smiled.
"four point six five millimeters?"
"On the nose."
"Ah, yes." Glendale nodded. "The mysterious 'pebbles' that Mike Jennings argued were cysts of some kind in several papers. Shotgun pellets, then?"
"Right. And these two chambers—they were using a binary propellant design, probably two liquids that have leaked away over the ages. This mechanism meters the amount of propellant and ammunition—I'll bet you could adjust it for volume of fire and so on. I suppose someone else might find another explanation, but I wouldn't bet on it. This is a gun. Nothing else I can think of that would fit."
Glendale looked at Helen. "And this verifies one of your other hypotheses, if I'm right."
"What? Oh, yes. We tend to use large single bullets rather than shotguns, but with the way Bemmie's muscles and skeleton connected, or rather didn't really connect, something like a shotgun would be a lot more devastating to them. So it makes sense that their side arms would also be based on shotgun designs. Unfortunately for poor Bemmie, an elephant gun or even a thirty-ought-six would have been a better choice for blowing away raptors. The shotgun hurt them and eventually killed them, but not fast enough."
"Neat," A.J. said. "I hadn't thought of that before. Guess I didn't read your papers carefully enough. Anyway, let's see what else we can get out of this before I have to go off to today's training session."
"Right!"
Chapter 22
Helen gave vent to a mild curse as she realized her hammer had slid away from her. She leaned reflexively to get it and found herself floating away, scattering sample containers and her other tools in a slow-motion catastrophe across the room. "Oh, dammit, not again!"
The voice of Walter Myles, the microgravity operations training expert, spoke in her ear. "Sorry, Dr. Sutter, but you should be past simple mistakes like that. I'm not resetting it. You'll have to clean up and recover."
"Yes, I know. It's just so hard to remember."
"Well, ma'am, you have to learn somehow. Phobos has barely any gravity, around one two-thousandth that of Earth. That's enough to make things settle eventually, but from your point of view it might as well be nothing. Tidal effects are actually noticeable on that scale."
Helen didn't answer, as she already knew the numbers. The problem wasn't on the intellectual level, but the level of instinctive reflex. She was trying to retrain a body that had spent four decades in a one-g field to properly react in the almost total absence of gravity.
Helen checked herself against the far wall, absorbing the impact and grabbing one of the handholds spotted about the room. Thus secured, she was able to survey the situation and decide the best method to address the scattered clutter.
"You know, in the real situation, I'd have tools and things attached to me, right?"
"Correct, Doctor, but you'd also be in a real microgravity situation instead of a simulation. We would prefer that you learn to do your work well enough that you won't notice, nor care, whether the tools are attached to lanyards or not."
"Simulations are pretty damn impressive these days, though. I have to admit that I can't really tell I'm not on Phobos, except that if I concentrate I can tell up and down. But you confuse that by making 'up' be in the direction that it looks like one of the walls should be, instead of the ceiling."
In actuality, Helen was floating in a huge water tank inside the NASA training facility. The tools and such were, relatively speaking, real; but the exact way she perceived them, and the background against which the action took place, was all being generated for her inside the watertight spacesuit she had on. The spacesuit was also attached to actuators to assist her in moving in a fashion that would feel fairly close to the way real microgravity would feel—minus, as Helen had noted, the absence of an internal method for referencing up and down. That she'd get to experience later.