John Racham Read online

  "What the hell's happening? What's wrong with the lights? Christine! Why the blazes are we in free . . . P"

  The angry bellowing cut off short as there came an enormous, eye-hurting, sear white flare that filled the control room with harsh and stark light. Query saw the black lines of the canopy frame like some giant spider's web. One figure in silhouette floated between him and it, thrashing and flailing, and he knew it was Lieutenant Evans. The edges and dials of the panels were razor sharp in that light. Everything seemed to happen in funereal slowness, as if time itself had gone wrong. The fearful glare seemed to blink, to go momentarily away, and then come back intensified, unbearably bright, and swiftly changing to a hellish, blazing red.

  The drive had blown. He knew that much. What would have been either impossible or instantly fatal in space had been so damped by this thick atmosphere as to give them that scanty time margin for escape. But there had to be a shock wave, and soon. He scrambled frantically in midair, trying to orient toward the light, the glare, the glassite canopy. The air around him shivered, and there came a gigantic booming roar that grew louder and louder until he felt his head had to burst. The canopy came to meet him fast, and he struck it on knees and flat hands, jarringly, as the scarlet flare winked out. Gasping from the pain in his knees and arms, he tried to lever himself up from the shatterproof glassite. And it wasn't there anymore. He was free floating again. He cringed, wondering what he would hit next. Free floating inside the control room like a pea in a dark pod. He felt sick, extended nervous arms and legs, ached in anticipation, and heard again the starting wail of rushing air. Falling.

  He caught something soft and resilient, clung to it; and it in turn seized him and clung crazily, painfully. Before he could form words there came a distant, faint whip crack of sound, and then another, louder and closer . . . and the lights came on, dull-flaring sodium emergency lights, just in time to show him the steel deck coming to meet him. And the hazard of panel blocks. And Lieutenant Evans clutching him in terror, ghostlike in the yellow glare. And then the bone-jarring smash against the floor, that seemed to shake loose the very teeth in his head and fire his whole body with pain. He lay absolutely still for a long, dazed moment, feeling heavy and hurt, willing to die now and put an end to it.

  Then something soft stirred under his hands. He groped, lifted his head to peer in the glare. She wasn't arrogant now. She was flat on her back and still, her eyes oddly glinting, until he craned over and saw they were covered by curiously shaped plastic. Stupidly he sorted out his tumbled memories until he had unearthed the old word—spectacles—a contrivance of optical plastic worn to correct vision defects. Old-fashioned, long abandoned, lately revived as a "fashion" symbol. He felt hysteria pushing at his throat. A weakness! This overblown, superior female had a weakness, a defect She couldn't see straight!

  A measure of sanity came back, cutting away his lightheadedness. Was she dead? He touched her, ripped at the black stuff to free her bosom, laid his palm on her full breast and couldn't be sure whether he felt the slam of her heart or his own. She heaved a great breath and groaned, and he drew back, trying to crouch on legs that screamed in protest. Trying to think. Looking about in the foul yellow glare that dazzled but hardly illuminated. A black bulk over there between the seats had to be the old man. Weight. He had weight, and the control room was the correct way up. That had to mean something, if only he could shake the bells out of his head and figure out what. He stirred, wincing again at the ache in his knees, and saw Lieutenant Evans stir and sit up. She seemed to goggle at him through the transparent windows in front of her eyes, her ample breasts spilling out of her open uniform and heaving as she breathed.

  Eject, he thought. Explosive clearance. Safety device . . . and weight. Falling, but with weight? And it came to him. Parachutes! Of course! He felt immediately better until he tried to spring up, and groaned as his knees protested and the sweat sprang out on his brow. He grabbed a seat arm and clung to it, painfully easing himself around and into it. Falling. But for how long? How far? He levered his head around to see her trying to get up, forced himself from his seat and over to lean, to offer his hand. "Take it easy," he mumbled. "Anything broken?" "I don't—think so!" she gasped in a breath, clung to his arm, got unsteadily to her feet. "What happened? What's wrong with the lights?"

  "Emergency sodiums," he said. "You'd better sit down. I think we're falling. On parachutes." She leaned on his arm, found her seat and slumped into it, staring dazedly up at him. Before she could grasp what he had said there came a snort and cough, and he swung away, staggered to where the old man was fighting his way up between the other two seats. His cap had gone somewhere and his hair was a bristle halo, his face stained and streaked with blood that looked black in the light.

  "Here!" Query gave him an arm. "Better get into a seat. We're falling. ParachutesI" "Eh? Oh! All right. I can make it. Christ, my head!

  23

  What the hell did we hit, eh?" Evans collapsed into the seat, shook his head carefully, growled and looked around. "Emergencies? What? Just a minute! The bloody ship blew. Didn't it? I saw it. Seen that before. Direct hit!"

  "No, sir." Query felt tired. "That wasn't it!"

  "What? Damnit man! I've seen ships hit before . . ." the angry growl faded as the old man's memory asserted itself. Query sighed.

  "Not here, sir. We're hardly away from Step Two yet. There wouldn't be a missile here. The drive overheated and blew. The heat exchangers . . . ?"

  In his own mind Query knew, positively, that it had not been that simple. He knew now what had made Michaels stop him—try to stop him—the ship had been deliberately and efficiently sabotaged. But there was nothing to gain now by telling the old man that somebody had seized a chance to pay off old scores. There was nothing to be gained by anything, anyhow, any time, not now. They were all dead. Query knew that, too, with positive assurance, and the knowledge made him curiously indifferent.

  "I don't understand." Evans mumbled, shaking his head. "The drive couldn't blow just like that. We'd all be dead!"

  "There was something wrong with the heat exchangers. But we were in atmosphere. That slowed it down a little."

  "He's right, sir!" Lieutenant Evans rotated her seat to report. She looked stark pale in the ghastly light but was obviously regaining something of her control. "The heat exchangers did go wild. I saw that. I would say we are extremely lucky to be alive. I don't quite understand how."

  "That was me." Query eyed them curiously. "I pulled the emergency eject switch. I had to scramble over you to do it, sir. Remember?"

  Evans put a shaky hand to his head. "I recall something like that. Wondered what the hell you were doing. Thought you'd gone off your head. Eject switch? I didn't even know we had one. You, Lieutenant?"

  "No, sir. I never heard of anything like that. Emergency eject?"

  "It's an obsolete fitting, sir." Query stifled the urge to laugh. A lecture on ship design, now? "They ceased fitting them years ago. This must be a very old ship."

  "Damnit, you're right there, Query!" Evans sat up a little straighter in his seat. "Used to be a private yacht. Belonged to Oberth Steinlander. Donated it to the war drive. Good thing you spotted that. Saved our lives. We wouldn't be here now!" He snorted, then scratched his head again. "But where the hell are we, anyway?"

  "That I don't know," Query admitted. "We're falling, and we have weight, so it seems reasonable to assume we're on parachutes. But that's the lot."

  "What about you, Lieutenant? Any estimates?"

  Query turned to watch her, mildly amazed at the militarism that held their minds, even now. Discipline! Efficiency! He wanted to laugh again.

  "It's not easy, sir," she frowned. "Very little to go on. We were just ten miles up, the last readings I saw. It's anybody's guess how far we were thrown by the eject, and by the blast. Or how fast we're falling, for that matter. I've no references, sir."

  "Hmm!" The old man was reverting to pattern visibly with every passing second. "N
ot out of the woods yet, eh? Bumpy landing ahead? But that's a minor matter. We're all alive and whole. Nothing broken!" He paused to lower his brows and scowl at her. "Button up, Lieutenant!" He jabbed a finger and she stared down at her generous exposure in sudden consternation, swiveled her seat around and made repairs. Evans stared at Query. "It won't take long for a search party to locate us. Just a matter of sit tight and hang on, eh? Smart thinking on your part, Sergeant, to spot that eject system. And use it. I will see that it is duly mentioned in the right places; you can count on that."

  "Yes, sir." Query said, but there was no heart in it. In his mind the big picture had opened out in detail, filling in and underlining his first assumption that they were dead already, all three. There were details that Evans didn't know, couldn't know, nor would he understand if told, not all of them. Take the base, for instance. So far as Step Two was concerned, the staff ship had gone away, straight up on the beacon. That was all they could know. Radar ears could pick up a little through that soup but not much. Enough to know when a ship was corning in. Pos-

  sibly enough to follow a ship on the way out, but why would they bother. And even if they had, just out of curiosity, and even if they had detected the explosion and tried to guess what it was, they would automatically assume that the ship and contents were lost. With varying emotions, depending on who was doing the feeling, they would write off one staff ship, one unloved admiral, one lieutenant, and one recently promoted technical sergeant All dead.

  As for a search party, well, Evans obviously had no idea at all just what that atmosphere out there was like. Completely enclosed in a suit, a man could endure for as long as his lung-pack would hold him. Four hours. Two hours out and two back. And if you got more than a mile away from the Dome in that time, you were doing extremely well. Query sagged in his seat, wondering at the primitive survival instinct that had driven him to pull the emergency switch. How frail the barrier was between intellect and the push of animal instinctl Sitting like this, passably calm, he could contemplate death with indifference, although it might have been faster, more merciful if he had kept still before. But should another explosive moment come, he mused, he would probably do something like that all over again. Flesh and blood, glands and guts, they ruled in the crunch.

  "Don't we have any outside sensors at all?" Evans growled, stirring Query out of his reverie. "Strikes me we ought to have something on battery power. Air-conditioning, if nothing else. It's like a furnace in here!"

  It was hot. Query felt the sweat trickling down his face and chest. But the mention of battery power stirred something else in his mind.

  "My instruments are all dead, sir." Lieutenant Evans was turned away still, leaning over her panel. She craned her head around now. "Sergeant, would you know if there's any way of switching to emergency power?"

  "Might be." Query rose, his suit sticking to him, and went to lean over her shoulder, noticing that she had undone her front again, that the white globes of her breasts were sheeny with sweat. More primitive instincts, he thought, as he reached past her and moved a switch or two, pushing her hand aside. "Three position switches," he murmured.

  26

  "That has to mean something. That's power. That's off. So . . ." and he twisted the switch backward, to hear it click, to see a needle lift and shiver. "That seems to be it. . ."

  The control room lurched suddenly, throwing him against her so that he had to grab to keep his balance. And to let go again, hurriedly.

  "Atmospheric turbulence," he muttered. "You have an airspeed reading now. And outside temperature. Nothing on direction. No, that's dead. No lift or thrust readings, either. But the proximity gauges work, see?"

  "Thank you." She tilted her head back to smile at him, and she was very close, very inviting, so that he had a wild urge to touch her . . . and her eyes were suddenly fathomless brown wells under the transparent plastic of her spectacles. Then the control room bucked and lurched and swung, and the moment passed. He staggered back to his seat and fell into it.

  "So far as I can read them," she sounded unsteady, "the outside temperatures are crazy, in the nineties. Must be friction. Guessing between airspeed and the proximity gauges, we seem to be falling at about eighteen/twenty miles per hour, with about a mile to go . . ."

  The derelict bounced again and spun crazily. Query hung on, saw her shove back from her panel with blood suddenly streaming from her nose. Pain and suffering, he thought, and abundant beauty . . . and all for nothing. He saw her grope in an upper pocket of the tunic top that gaped free to get out a tissue and dab at her nose. So futile and purposeless. What a way to die! He recalled his earlier promise—it seemed a lifetime away now—I'll be back. That strange humanlike creature, out there in the jungle. He would never know, now. And that was the real loss. Not death, but the end of knowing. So many things he had never done or seen or known; whole areas of life left untouched. He wondered if she felt anything like that? She looked to be about his age, within a year or two, and there probably were all kinds of things she had never seen or done, too. But, he ridiculed himself, she wouldn't think of it, because she didn't know, yet, that she was dead!

  "This is all rather pointless, sir." She'd found an edge for

  her voice from somewhere. "I've only indications, none too reliable. No kind of operational controls at all. We're quite helpless to do anything except watch and wait for it."

  "That's what I said," Evans growled. "All we have to do. Just hang on. Ride it out."

  "Yes, sir. We should touch down in about a minute from now!"

  "Shed some of this damned heat. Like an oven in here!"

  "Getting close," she warned, turning her head . . . and a monstrous hammer hit the deck under them. Query sank, winded, into his seat, grunting against the impact. The lights winked out. In the dark came the squeal and grind of tortured metal and plastic. He surged upward as the weight went away for a moment, then sagged back again. Everything seemed to have torn loose and be bouncing around, even the control room itself, creating a bedlam of noise to which Evans added his roaring protest. Query clutched his seat frantically. It felt as if it was rocking under him like a seesaw. Then came a teeth-chilling creak, a crack like doom, and the sudden hissing roar of water. Query gasped as hot spray struck his face and brought strange and pungent smells with it. His seat lurched, tossing him forward across the power panel console. Hot water smashed down on his head, making him gasp again, and struggle frantically to get clear, to draw back and stand, knee-deep in water. Hot water!

  There was a faint blue green glow through the canopy, enough to let him see that the glassite had split or burst under impact and that dark water was spurting in.

  "We're sinking!" Lieutenant Evans scrambled out of her seat and clung to his arm fearfully. "We're sinking! We have to get out!" Her voice was shrill over the roar of water and her clutch desperate.

  "How?" he shouted back at her. "All the hatches are self-sealing . . . and they're underwater anyway, by now!"

  "Through the roof!" Evans roared. "Have to break it and get out that way! Need a bar, something to bash with!" He looked wildly about, grabbed at a scribble table that stood by the radio board on a single upright pole, and tried to tear it loose by main force. That got him nowhere. Query watched, again in that curiously indifferent mood. He was marginally aware of the girl who clung to his

  28 arm, irrelevantly puzzled that no vapor came from water so hot—but of course, the air temperature was just as high—and he saw Evans sweat and strain and go scarlet in the face.

  "Try unscrewing it, sir!" he called, and the old man grunted, twisted savagely, and the tabletop spun, came free and dropped with a splash into the water. Waist deep now. Evans wrestled with the tube, got it free and in his fist, brandishing it like a symbol of triumph. A titanium alloy tube not quite five feet long, tough but feather light. A fat lot of good he was going to do with that! Query watched him scramble unsteadily up on the radio console, swaying against the roll of the water, to p
oise and jab up at the dim green glassite. All he got was a noise. Snarling, he drew back and did it again, harder. With the same negative result Furious, he took the tube in both hands, half turned to where the glassite sloped, took aim and swung, clouting the panel fair and square.

  Query winced in sympathy as the tube rebounded and spun away out of the old man's grasp, glinting in the blue green glow. Almost without thought he stuck out his hand and caught the thing, as Evans teetered, flailed the air, and fell backward with a mighty splash into the water. The girl threw herself at him urgently, angrily.

  "Aren't you going to do anything?" she screamed.

  "No. Not yet. Not until we've settled below the level of that split, below the inflow. Then we might have a chance to swim out."

  Her face set into stark terror as she stared up at him. "But—but I can't swim!" she cried. "I can't swim!"

  IV

  HE TOOK HER SHOULDERS, pushed her away to stare at her in wonder. Her dark hair was plastered down over her head and framed her pale face; the absurd spectacles still miraculously clinging, bridging her nose; the swirling water now coming up under her breasts, lifting them as she panted in fear.

  "You can't swim," he said, and wanted to laugh. The ultimate absurdity. The origin of all life—didn't they say that?—in the sea. And she couldn't swim! He shoved her away, heard the old man snorting and spluttering his way to his feet and turned to him.

  "We're settling fast," he said, and it was true. The inrush of water was no more than a turbulence over there. "We have a trapped air pocket here that ought to keep us up awhile. Not for long, but enough to give us a chance to swim out. Can you swim?"

  "Eh?" Evans wiped water away from his face and blew hard. "That damned rube's no good. No weight to it. Couldn't dent the stuff."

  "I said, can you swim?"