He had been waiting for that noise--a faint rustling and scratching from outside the hatch of his shipboard compartment--for a long time. Endless hours. It seemed like endless years.And suddenly he had only a few seconds. He threw back the cover and swung his feet out of bed to sit there in his underwear. There was no time to get properly dressed, let alone shower or shave. He pulled his pants on, stepped into his shipboard slippers, pulled on yesterday's--or was it the day before's?--badly rumpled work shirt, and stepped into the tiny cramped refresher unit.He splashed some water on his face, gargled for a moment, ran wet fingers through his hair, and stepped back into the main compartment. He stripped the sheets off the bed, stuffed them and the pillow in their storage box, and refolded the bed back into its other incarnation--a semicomfortable one-person couch.He just barely managed to sit down when the scraping stopped. Thank God it took a while to peel off that tamper-detect stuff--and more thanks that the chief engineer had warned everybody going into confinement that it had to be removed completely for fear of jamming up the doors.Suddenly he remembered another bit of evidence that needed to be concealed.
