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“My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”

“Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”

She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”

Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”

How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got hara.s.sed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with s.h.i.+t like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.

“Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”

“Like I could miss it,” Tim said. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”

He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a s.h.i.+p.

On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.

Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical a.n.a.lysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.

“Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”

He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”

Three trailers, each capable of comfortably supporting four or five people working simultaneously, and yet Tim was the only one here. And along the same lines, the facility had ten bedrooms — nine of which had been empty before Margaret and Clarence had arrived.