The Gate Is Not a Door

It was Dobbel who proved it, by doing the one thing he had been told four times not to do.

In fairness to Dobbel — and somebody should be fair to Dobbel, since the report never was — he did not touch Gate Four. He touched Gate Seven, three frames along, which he maintained for the rest of his life was a different instruction.

He put his palm flat on it at nine in the morning on day five while the others were arguing about ladders.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all. The wall was painted metal and slightly cool and a little bit dusty, and Dobbel said, “See, it’s just — ” and then every light in the corridor went amber at once.

Not an alarm. Amber is not an alarm. Amber on Nebula Station means noted.

And from somewhere behind the bulkhead, in the dead space that the drawings said was forty centimetres of insulation, there came a sound that Kappa would be able to describe exactly for the rest of their life and never once describe well: a soft, deep, unhurried clack, like a very large stamp coming down on a very large form.

Then the lights went white again.

And down in the Lower Vents, at nine o’clock in the morning, which had never happened before — because it had always, always happened at night, while they slept — four mice sitting at the grain scale in full view of nine witnesses were fitted with Krallen.

It took under a second. Nobody saw a mechanism. The bands were simply on, and the papers were simply under the collars, and one of the four, a young mouse called Oster who had been eating, was still holding a grain husk in both front paws with an expression of complete astonishment.

Queen Perrin sent a runner up to the gates. The runner arrived at a sprint, could not speak for a moment, and then said: “Four more. Just now. It happened in the light.”

Everybody looked at Dobbel's hand, which was still flat on Gate Seven. He took it off very carefully, as if the wall might take it with him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t — it’s a wall, it’s just a — ” “Dobbel,” said Mirell Kawa. “Stop. Look at me. You have just done the single most useful thing anybody has done in five days, and you did it by being an idiot, and both of those are true at once and I will be writing both of them down.”

She turned to the corridor and said it loudly enough for the fire team and the technicians and the log:

“The gates are not doors. Nothing comes through them. They are triggers.”

She held up a finger for each piece, and Kappa wrote them down, and this is the page of the log that got copied out and pinned up in three different offices afterwards:

1. A gate is touched, or approached, or crossed.

2. The touch registers as unregistered contact at a gate.

3. Schutzprogramm K issues protection to the nearest unprotected mice.

4. The mice who get the claws are not the ones who did anything.

“Forty years,” said Mirell. “Every time a mouse went near a gate to see the grey ones, the gate counted it, and four of her neighbours woke up in steel. That is why the mice near the gates are the ones who get fitted. That is why nobody could ever find who was doing it.

Nobody is doing it. It is being answered.”

“And the ghost mice?” said Kappa. “Do they set it off too?”

Mirell was quiet for a second, and then said the thing that changed the case from a mystery into something much sadder.

“Every time,” she said. “They have been walking up to those gates for forty years, trying to be let in. And every single time one of them tries — ” “— the station answers by clamping another mouse,” said Kappa.

“Yes.”

“They’re knocking,” Kappa said. “They’ve been knocking for forty years, and every time they knock, somebody else gets punished for it.”

And Brummel, who had sat down in front of Gate Four again, put his chin on the deck and sighed the enormous sigh of a dog who has known this for years and has no way at all to say it.