Carita’s voice came over the intercom. “This is dull duty. I think I will turn on the searchlight while it’s still safe to do so. Might get a clue to what caused those jolts.”
“Good idea,” he agreed absent-mindedly, and continued his task. The metal around him throbbed. Small objects rattled on the deck.
“Juan!” Carita shouted. “The, the material—it’s rippling, crawling—” The hull rocked. “I’m getting us out of here!”
“Yes, do,” he called back, and grabbed for the nearest handhold. Within its radiation shield, the generator hummed. Needles sprang across dials, displays onto screens. Yoshii felt the upward thrust of the deck against his feet. It was light. Carita was a careful pilot, applying barely sufficient boost to rise off the ground before she committed to a leap.
The boat screamed. Things tilted. Yoshii clung. Loose things hailed around him. A couple of them drew blood. The boat canted over, toppled, struck lengthwise, tolled so that he was half deafened.
Stillness crashed down, except for a shrill whistle that he knew too well. Air was escaping from one or more rents nearby. He hauled himself erect and out of his daze. The emergency valve had already shut, sealing off this section. He had to get through the lock built into it before the pressure differential made operation fatally slow.
Somehow he passed forth, and on along the companionway that was now a corridor, toward the control cabin. Lights were still shining, ventilators still whirring, and few articles lay strewn around. This was a good, sturdy craft, kept shipshape. How had she failed? Carita met him in the entrance. “Hey, you sure got battered, didn’t you? I was secured. Here, let me help you.” She practically carried him to his chair, which she had adjusted for the new orientation. Meanwhile she talked on: “The trouble’s with the landing gear, I think. Is that damn stuff a glue? No, how could it be? Take over. I’m going to suit up and go out for a look.”
“Don’t,” he protested. “You might get stuck there, too.”
“I’ll be careful. Keep watch. If I don’t make it back—” She stooped, brushed lips across his, and hurried aft.
His ears rang and pained him, his head ached, he was becoming conscious of bruises, but his eyes worked. The searchlight made clear the motion in the mantle. It was slight in amplitude, as thin as the layer was, and slow, but intricate, like wave patterns spreading from countless centers to form an ever changing moire. Those nodes were darker than the ripple-shadows and seemed to pass the darkness’s on from one to the next, so that a shifting stipple went outward from the boat, across the dell floor and, as he watched, up the side. The hull rocked a little, off and on, in irregular wise.
“Do you read me?” he heard after a while. “I’m in the Number Two lock, outer valve open, looking over the lip.”
“I read you,” he answered unevenly. At least the radio system remained intact. “What do you see?”
“The same turbulence in the… stuff. Nothing clear aft, where the main damage is. The search beam doesn’t diffuse, and—I’m off to inspect.”
“Better not. If you lost your footing and fell down into—”
She barked scorn. “If you think I could, then I’m for sure the right person for this job.” He clenched his fists but must needs admit that induction boots gave plenty of grip on the metal for a rockjack-a-rockjill, she often called herself. “I’m crawling out… Standing… On my way.” The hull pitched. “Hey! That damn near threw me.” Starkly: “I think Fido just settled more at the after end.”
“But into what?” he cried. “Solid rock?”
“No, I guess not. I do know what we are deep down into… Okay, proceeding. Landing gear in sight now, straddled against the sky. It’s dark, I can’t see much except stars. Let me unlimber my flashlight… A-a-ah!” she nearly screamed.
He half rose in his seat. “What happened? Carita, dear, are you there?”
“Yes. A nasty shock, that sight. Listen, the Number Three leg is off the ground. The bottom end sticks up—ragged, holes in it—like a badly corroded thing that got so weak it tore apart when it came under stress… But Juan, this is melded steel and titanium alloy. What could’ve eaten it?”
“We can guess,” Yoshii said between his teeth. “Come back.”
“No, I need to see the rest. Don’t worry, I’ll creep down the curve like a cat burglar… I’m at the socket of Number Two. I’m shining my light along it. Yes. Nothing left of the foot. Seems to be sort of absorbed into the ground. Number One—more yet is missing, and, yes, that’s the unit which pulled partly loose from its mounting and made the hole in the engine compartment. I can see the skin ripped and buckled—”
The boat swayed. Her nose twisted about and lifted a few degrees as her tail sank. Groans went through the hull.
“I’m okay, mate. Well anchored. But holy Finagle! The stuff is going wild underneath. Has it come to a boil?”
Yoshii could not see that where he was, but he did spy the quickening and thickening of the wave fronts farther off. Understanding blasted him. “Douse your flash!” he yelled. “Get back inside!” He grabbed for the searchlight switch as for the throat of a foeman.
“Hey, what is this?” Carita called.
“Douse your flash, I said. Can’t you see, bright light is what causes the trouble? Find your way by the stars.” He clutched his shoulders and shivered in the dark. The boat shivered with him, diminuendo.
“I read you,” Carita said faintly.
Yoshii darkened the cabin as well. “Let’s meet in my stateroom,” he proposed. The sarcastically named cubbyhole did not give on the outside. He groped till he found it. When again he dared grant himself vision, he bent above the locker where a bottle was, shook his head, straightened, and stood looking at a photograph of Laurinda on the bulkhead.
Carita entered. Her coverall was wet and pungent. Sweat glistened on the dark face. “Haven’t you poured me a drink?” she asked hoarsely.
“I decided that would be unwise.”
“Maybe for you, sonny boy. Not for me.” The Jinxian helped herself, tossed off two mouthfuls, and sighed. “That’s better. Thank you very much.”
Yoshii gestured at his bunk. It was roughly horizontal, that being how the polarizer field was ordinarily set in flight. They sat down on it, side by side. Her bravado dwindled. “So you know what’s happened to us?” she murmured.
“I have a guess,” Yoshii replied with care. “It depends on my idea of the supermolecule being correct.”
“Say on.”
“Well, you see, it grew. Or rather, I think, different ones grew till they met and linked up. There must have been all possible combinations, permutations of radicals and bases and every kind of chemical unit. Cosmic radiation drives that kind of change. So does quantum mechanics, random effects; that was probably dominant in intergalactic space. So the chemistry… mutated. Whatever structure was better at assimilating fresh material would be favored. It would grow at the expense of the rest.”
Carita whistled. “Natural selection, evolution? You mean the stuffs alive?”
“No, not like you and me or bacteria or even viruses. But it would develop components which could grab onto new atoms, and other components that are catalytic, and—and I think ways of passing an atom on from ring to ring until it’s gone as far as there are receptors for it. That would leave room for taking up more at the near end. Because I think finally the molecule evolved beyond the point of depending on whatever fell its way from the skies. I think it began extracting matter from the planet, whenever it spread to where there was a suitable substance. Breaking down carbonates and silicates and—and incorporating metallic atoms too. Clathrate formation would promote growth, as well as chemical combination. But of course metal is ultra-scarce here, so the molecule became highly efficient at stealing it.”
“At eating things.” Carita stared before her. “That’s close enough to life for me.”
“The normal environment is low-energy,” Yoshii said. “Things must go faster during t
he day. Not that there is much action then, either; nothing much to act on, any more. But we set down on our metal landing gear, and pumped out light-frequency quanta.”
“And it… woke.”
Yoshii grimaced but stayed clear of semantic argument. “It must be strongly bound to the underlying rock. It was quick to knit the feet of our landing jacks into that structure.”
“And gnaw its way upward, till I—”
He caught her hand. “You couldn’t have known. I didn’t.”
The deck swayed underfoot. The liquor sloshed in Carita’s glass. “But we’re blacked out now,” she protested, as if to the devourer.
“We’re radiating infrared,” Yoshii answered. “The boat’s warmer on the outside than her surroundings. Energy supply. The chemistry goes on, though slower. We can’t stop it, not unless we want to freeze to death.”
“How long have we got?” she whispered.
He bit his lip. “I don’t know. If we last till sunrise we’ll dissolve entirely soon after, like spooks in an ancient folk tale.”
“That’s more than a month away.”
“I’d estimate that well before then, the hull will be eaten open. No more air.”
“Our suits recycle. We can jury-rig other things to keep us alive.”
“But the hull will weaken and collapse. Do you want to be tossed down into… that?” Yoshii sat straight. Resolution stiffened his tone. “I’m afraid we have no choice except to throw ourselves on the mercy of the kzinti. They must have arrived.”
Carita ripped forth a string of oaths and obscenities, knocked back her drink, and rose. “Shep is still on the loose,” she said.
Yoshii winced. “Man the control cabin. I’m going to suit up and get back into the engine compartment.”
“What for?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The energy boxes are stored there.”
“Oh. Yes. You’re thinking we’ll have to take orbit under our own power and let the kzinti pick us up? I’m not keen on that.”
“No! But I don’t imagine they’ll be keen on landing here.” He rejoined her an hour later. By starlight she saw how he trembled. “I was too late,” dragged from him. “Maybe if I hadn’t had to operate the airlock hydraulics manually. What I found was a seething mass of—of—The entire locker where the boxes were is gone.”
“That fast?” she wondered, stunned, though they had been in communication until he passed through into the after section. And then, slowly: “Well, the capacitors in those boxes are—were fully charged. Energy concentrated like the stuff’s never known before. Too bad so much didn’t poison it. Instead, it got a kick in the chemistry making it able to eat everything in three gulps. We’re lucky the life-support batteries weren’t there, too.”
“Let’s hope the kzinti want us enough to come down for us.”
Shielding a flashlight with a clipboard, they activated the radio, standard-band broadcast. Yoshii spoke. “SOS. SOS. Two humans aboard a boat, marooned,” he said dully. “We are sinking into a—solvent—the macromolecule—You doubtless know about it. Rescue requested.
“We can’t lift by ourselves. The drive units in our spacesuits have only partial charge, insufficient to reach orbital speed in this field. We can’t recharge. That equipment is gone. So are all the reserve energy boxes. We can flit a goodly distance around the planet or rise to a goodly height, but we can’t escape.
“Please take us off. Please inform. We will keep our receiver open on this band, and continue transmission so you can locate us.”
Having recorded his words, he set them to repeat directly on the carrier wave and leaned back. “Not the most eloquent speech ever made,” he admitted. “But they won’t care.”
She took his hand. Heaven stood gleamful above them. Time passed.
Occasionally the vessel moved a bit.
A spaceship flew low, from horizon to horizon. They had only the barest glimpse. Perhaps cameras took note of theirs.
Carita choked. “Alien.”
“Kzin,” Yoshii said. “Got to be.”
“But I never heard of anything like—”
“Nor I. What did you see?”
“Big. Sphere with fins or flanges or—whatever they are—all around. Mirror-bright. Doesn’t look like she’s intended for planetfall.”
Yoshii nodded. “Me too. I wanted to make sure of my impression, as fast as she went by. Just the same, I think we have a while to wait.” He stood up. “Suppose I go fix us some sandwiches and also bring that bottle. We may as well take it easy. We’ve played our hand out.”
“But won’t they—Oh, yes, I see. That’s no patrol craft. She was called off her regular service to come check Prima. We being found, she’ll call Secunda for further orders, and relay our message to a translator there.”
“About a five-minute transmission lag either way, at the present positions. A longer chain-of-command lag, I’ll bet. Leave the intercom on for me, please, but just for the sake of my curiosity. You can talk to them as well as I can.”
“There isn’t a lot to say,” Carita agreed.
Yoshii was in the galley when he heard the computer-generated voice: “Werlith-Commandant addressing you directly. Identify yourselves.”
“Carita Fenger, Juan Yoshii, of the ship Rover, stuck on Prima—on Planet One. Your crew has seen us. I suppose they realize our plight. We’re being… swallowed. Please take us off. If your vessel here can’t do it, please dispatch one that can. Over.”
Silence hummed and rustled. Yoshii kept busy.
He was returning when the voice struck again: “We lost two boats with a total of eight heroes aboard before we established the nature of the peril. I will not waste time explaining it to you. Most certainly I will not hazard another craft and more lives. On the basis of observations made by the crew of Sun Defter, if you keep energy output minimal you have approximately five hundred hours left to spend as you see fit.”
A click signaled the cutoff.
Werlith-Commandant had been quite kindly by his lights, Yoshii acknowledged.
He entered the control cabin. “I’m sorry, Carita,” he said.
She rose and went to meet him. Starlight guided her through shadows and glinted off her hair and a few tears. “I’m sorry too, Juan,” she gulped.
“Now let’s both of us stop apologizing. The thing has happened, that’s all. Look, we can try a broadcast that maybe they’ll pick up in Shep, so they’ll know. They won’t dare reply, I suppose, but it’s nice to think they might know. First let’s eat, though, and have a couple of drinks, and talk, and, and go to bed. The same bed.”
He lowered his tray to the chart shelf “I’m exhausted,” he mumbled.
She threw her arms around him and drew his head down to her opulent bosom. “So’m I, chum. And if you want to spend the rest of what time we’ve got being faithful, okay. But let’s stay together. It’s cold out there. Even in a narrow bunk, let’s be together while we can.”
The sun in the screen showed about half the Soldisc at Earth. Its light equaled more than 10,000 full Luna’s, red rather than off-white but still ample to make Secunda shine. The planetary crescent was mostly yellowish-brown, little softened by a tenuous atmosphere of methane with traces of carbon dioxide and ammonia. A polar cap brightened its sintered northern hemisphere, a shrunken one the southern. The latter was all water ice, the former enlarged by carbon dioxide and ammonia that had frozen out. These two gases did it everywhere at night, most times, evaporating again by day in summer and the tropics, so that sunrises and sunsets were apt to be violent. Along the terminator glittered a storm of fine silicate dust mingled with ice crystals.
The surface bore scant relief, but the slow rotation, 57 hours, was bringing into view a gigantic crater and a number of lesser neighbors. Probably a moon had crashed within the past billion years; the scars remained, though any orbiting fragments had dissipated. A sister moon survived, three-fourths Lunar diameter, dark yellowish like so many bodies in this system.
>
Thus did Tregennis interpret what he and Ryan saw as they sat in Rover’s saloon watching the approach. Data taken from afar, before the capture, helped him fill in details. Talking about them was an anodyne for both men. Markham entered. Silence rushed through like a wind.
“I have an announcement,” he said after a moment.
Neither prisoner stirred.
“We are debarking in half an hour,” he went on. “I have arranged for your clothing and hygienic equipment to be brought along. Including your medication, Professor.”
“Thank you,” Tregennis said flatly.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Ryan sneered. “Keep the animals alive till the master race can think of a need for them. I wonder if he’ll share in the feast.”
Markham’s stiffness became rigidity. “Have a care,” he warned. “I have been very patient with you.”
During the 50-odd hours of 3-g flight—during which Hraou-Captain allowed the polarizer to lighten weight—he had received no word from either, nor eye contact. To be sure, he had been cultivating the acquaintance of such kzinti among the prize crew as deigned to talk with him. “Don’t provoke me.”
“All right,” Ryan answered. Unable to resist: “Not but what I couldn’t put up with a lot of provocation myself, if I were getting paid what they must be paying you.”
Markham’s cheekbones reddened. “For your information, I have never had one mark of recompense, nor ever been promised any. Not one.” Tregennis regarded him in mild amazement. “Then why have you turned traitor?” he asked.
“I have not. On the contrary—” Markham stood for several seconds before he plunged. “See here, if you will listen, if you will treat me like a human being, you can learn some things you will be well advised to know.” Ryan scowled at his beer glass, shrugged, nodded, and grumbled, “Might as well.”
“Can you talk freely?” Tregennis inquired.
Markham sat down. “I have not been forbidden to. Of course, what I have been told so far is quite limited. However, certain kzinti, including Hraou-Captain, have been reasonably forthcoming. They have been bored by their uneventful duty, are intrigued by me, and see no immediate threat to security.”
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