Neptune Crossing
Page 69
*
Perhaps, if he had been clearer headed—or if Charlie had been more alert—the accident on day twenty-four would not have happened. But at the time, working on the engineering level checking some power systems with Napoleon and Copernicus, he was already having trouble distinguishing what the robots were telling him from what the fugue-voices were saying.
“Award for best leap yet across the solar system!” cried an ethereal spectator in the asteroid belt, clapping at Bandicut’s amazing feat of celestial navigation. Bandicut bowed, jumping across the propulsion deck from one instrument panel to another, puffing lightly with the exertion. The shipboard gravity was now at about one-fourth gee, but in his present dreamy state it felt like much less.
“John Bandicut,” Napoleon interrupted with a metallic rasp. “If you wish us to inspect the secondary fuel-pump assemblies, it will be necessary to move these cylinders. They are blocking our access.” The robot swiveled its head from a rack of compressed gas tanks that had been clamped up in an apparently temporary storage location during the servicing of the ship.
Bandicut peered up at the robot, hanging high on the wall, and the tank rack that it was poking at. One of the tanks was labeled “Barium”; it probably contained gases intended for injection experiments in the atmosphere of Neptune. “We won’t be needing those, I guess,” he muttered, waving his approval. “Sure, take care of it.” His decisiveness brought another wave of applause from his asteroid-belt spectators, and he leaped across the deck again, with a graceful twist.
/// John, are you sure you should be . . . ///
/What’s the matter?/ he muttered to the quarx. /Don’t you trust the robots to do their job? I thought you were the one who—/
/// No, I mean your jumping around.
Your fugue seems to be getting out of hand. ///
Bandicut snorted. /If you can’t help me control it, what am I supposed to do?/
/// I’m having trouble, John.
I’m very tired, for some reason. ///
/Then don’t mind me . . . huh?/ There was a screech of metal, and he squinted up at the robots’ efforts. Napoleon was releasing the tanks from the rack, and Copernicus had its manipulator-arms extended upward to bring the tanks down; but neither one of them seemed to have very good control.
“Pinball!” yelled someone from the audience, waving from the shadows. “All riiiight!”
“John Bandicut—!” squawked Napoleon. It was interrupted by a bang and a metallic shriek—and an avalanche of cylinders, cascading directly toward Bandicut.
He had only a momentary awareness of alarm and danger—and an abrupt shift in the gravity field, but too late to stop the fall—before the first tank glanced from his temple, and the second hit him squarely in the ribs, and everything went black.