Five minutes later it rested uneasily on the ground, held by wide-apart grapples, while men with pneumatic picks prodded it gingerly. The trapped men lay face down on it like fruit in a slab of cake, quite motionless, but alive. Barclay stood back, wiping the sweat from his face with a sodden handkerchief. Behind him the medical car clanged to a halt and white-coated men poured out to take over. He found his cap, dusted it off, picked a few remaining lumps from his sleeve, and met Willerby’s eye.
“No real harm done,” he muttered.
“Except to their egos,” Willerby said understandingly. “We’ll do what we can. Leave it to us.”
Barclay turned away, found the officer in charge waiting by his elbow.
“Lieutenant Miller, sir.”
“Where the hell were you?”
“On the roof, sir, monitoring the spray. I’m sorry, sir.”
“The time for that is past, Miller. Better get a patch slapped on that pipe, fast as you can, and get on...”
Barclay halted himself at the look on Miller’s face, his sensitivities at needle-pitch now. “You don’t agree? Come on, man, say it! What would you rather do?”
“New pipe, sir. We have spares all ready. A split indicates wear and weakness. Patch it and it’ll only go again, in another place.”
“Right. Good. Very well, do it your way, but quickly. Let’s not make this unfortunate affair an excuse for wasting time. Carry on!”
He climbed back into his ground-car, his mind seething with bitter thoughts. This would have to happen now, of all times. It wasn’t until he was actually mounting the steps to his quarters that something else struck him, with all the force of a physical blow. An emergency, a danger, and not so much as a murmur from Caddas! He flung into the room, surprising Caddas and Dahlia in affectionate rapport on his settee. They spread apart rapidly, but he had no time to waste on minor matters. He riveted Caddas with a glare.
“Where the hell were you?” he demanded grimly. “Two observers and Major Dannard were almost killed by a pipe-burst. Smothered in foam-crete. They were alive when I left, but the final verdict isn’t in yet. What happened to you?” Caddas stared up at him in stunned blankness for a moment, then his weak face blanched, he made a strangled moan, and slid senseless to the floor. Dahlia went down to her knees, her sympathetic hands reaching for Caddas. Her blue eyes were like flames as she glared up.
“What the devil was that for, Jack? You trying to frighten the poor man to death? You know he’s not strong! Rikki!” she cradled the limp head in her lap, patted white cheeks. “Rikki dear, come on. It’s all right now. You’re quite safe with me. Come on.”
Barclay stared down at the sight, blistering comments seething to his tongue, only to be knotted and held back as the impossibility of his position became clear to him. He knew that Caddas had failed him, but he was the only one who knew, or would believe. Flinging his cap in a corner he stalked through the room to his office, slamming the door after him.
Willerby came through on the visor-phone within half an hour, his call dragging Barclay out of a morass of gloom.
“Prognosis favourable, sir. Apparently they all had the instinctive sense to cover their faces while there was time, or they might have suffocated. Shock, indignity, and their clothing a total write-off. I’m indenting for replacement clothing immediately, of course. Apart from that, a few scratches, bruises and a blister or two from the solvent about covers it. They were very fortunate, and I’ve told ‘em so. They’ll be fit to travel by tomorrow.”
“Travel? Oh, of course, they’ll want to go back to HQ. And talk!”
“It shouldn’t be too bad, sir. Dannard has laid it on strongly that the whole affair was an unpredictable misfortune, and that it was very promptly handled. After all, he was caught too. I think they’ll forgive us.”
“That’s great!” Barclay snarled. “They might let us off, but we can wave good-bye to our star rating.”
Willerby shrugged. “You can’t win ‘em all, sir. Accidents will happen, no matter what you do. It was just one of those things.”
Barclay put his hand to the switch, but the surgeon-captain had an after-thought. “About Lieutenant Caddas, sir...”
“Eh? What about him?”
“When I first saw him I thought it was just a simple case of nervous breakdown due to shock. It takes some people like that. But there are one or two symptoms I don’t care for at all. Out of my field, I’m afraid, and I haven’t the facilities here...”
“What the hell are you blethering about, man? Who told you Rikki was in need of your attention?”
“Miss Honey called for medical service almost half an hour ago. We have him here and under heavy sedation. He appears to be mentally disturbed to the point where I can no longer hold myself responsible....”
Barclay cancelled the call, lurched up from his desk and ran out to scramble into his car once more. The late afternoon sunlight laid a blood-red mantle over his world, a world that was disintegrating about his head. The surgeon-captain met him on the steps of the Medical Centre. Willerby was nervous but determined.
“It’s pointless to go in there, sir. He’s unconscious and will be until tomorrow. Perhaps I put it a bit strongly on the visor. I was forgetting how close you two are.”
“So close it never occurred to you to call me before pumping him full of drugs?” Barclay was savage, and Willerby paled.
“I know my job,” he said pointedly. “It was obvious to me, as it must have been to anyone, that Caddas was on the point of total collapse. He’s been living on his nerves for weeks. Physically, he’s a wreck. Mentally, I don’t know. As I said, it’s not my field. But I’ll stake my right arm and my reputation that he’s not normal. Not now, at any rate.”
“Eccentric. It’s nothing more than that. As for his physical condition, you must be mistaken. Why, he hasn’t had a day’s illness in the five years I’ve had him working for me! A good night’s sleep and he’ll be right as ever in the morning.”
“You’ll have to let me be the judge of that,” Willerby declared, and there was finality in his tone. Barclay stifled his rage, knowing there was nothing more to be said along that line.
“And Miss Honey ?”
“She’s by his bedside. Remarkable woman, that. Should have been a nurse. She has the touch for it.”
“Is there somewhere I can talk to her? Alone? I want to find out just what is going on here.”
“Certainly. If you’ll step in here, sir, and wait a moment, I’ll send her along. Nothing more she can do tonight, anyway.”
“She’s done enough, all right,” Barclay agreed, but it was to himself. The years he had schemed and contrived to keep Rikki out of the hands of the medical men, all destroyed in an instant. Bitter words were all ready on his tongue, but the look on her face as she came in killed them. She sank into the seat opposite him as if weary to death, and the radiance had gone out of her, to be replaced by a different glow, one he could find no name for.
“You know,” she said, and even her voice was weary, “I always knew you were a heartless devil, Jack. You’d drive yourself and everyone else into the ground to get what you’d set your mind on. I knew it. That’s why I had to drop you, all those years ago. I had my ambitions, I’ll admit, but they never lay over other people’s bodies. That poor boy in there has been driven until...”
“That poor boy, for your information, is only three years younger than I am, is about your own age!”
“I know. He told me. And yet he has the ways and outlook of a youth. Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder why?”
“I know he’s retarded, if that’s what you mean. The psycho-technicians will dream up a whole string of fancy names for the condition, if ever they get him into their hands, but it’s nothing more than that. He’s harmless, and pretty helpless, without me. D’you think I’ve taken care of him for the last five years without knowing that much ?”
“Taken care of him?”
“That’s what I sai
d. He has been very well looked after. If he told you such a lot about himself he ought to have told you that much.”
“You’ve used him,” she retorted. “Driven him until he’s on the point of collapse. You call that ‘taking care’?”
“Driven him?” Barclay gave a barking laugh. “Ask anyone. Don’t take my word. He doesn’t do a stroke, hasn’t turned a laboured hand in all the time he’s been with me. The only sweat he’s known has been from fear, out of his own fantasies. He has no duties. He is constantly with me, dependent on me. Without my support he wouldn’t last five minutes. Driven him! ?”
“Why do you need him, then?”
“That’s my business. Why does one feel compassionate to a cripple?” The shot was a wild one, but it scored. He saw her face, and followed it up instantly. “That’s what has got you, isn’t it? Compassion. Your maternal instincts. You want to mother him.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” She went on the defensive. “Just because you’ve never needed affection you’d deny it to him. That’s why he’s retarded, and immature. He needs affection and understanding.”
“He does ? Are you sure ? That it’s his need, I mean ? Or is it that you are looking for something to coddle, to nurse, to mother! ?”
She rose to her feet, her face twisted with emotion. “You know, all the time we were talking this afternoon, Rikki and I, it was so obvious. Every time your name was mentioned he had a violent, almost physical, sense of being smothered. What d’you think, Jack? Would he rather be mothered—or smothered? I think we’ll just wait until tomorrow and let him decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Whether he stays with you, or comes with me when I leave.” That lifted him to his feet, but she went on unheeding. “You can’t keep him here, you know. You said yourself he has no duties, nothing to do. His position, as a secretary is ridiculous. And his condition—why, he’d never pass any physical test for field work, and you know it. If he wants to leave, you can’t stop him.”
Barclay thought very fast indeed. What she had said was absolutely true as far as it went. Willerby had seen enough to make him suspicious. He could be silenced, but this woman was a different proposition. Once she talked the long deception would be in shreds. She had to be stopped. Barclay was fighting for all he valued, and no thrust was too rough to be withheld.
“You have gone soft,” he said. “You’d take Rikki with you? As what? Your ward? Or your lover?”
“You would think of something like that!”
“You’d better think of it, too, because it’s what everyone else will think. And then you’d have to keep him. D’you think you can?”
“I’m not poor ...”
“I don’t mean in that way,” he interrupted harshly. “I dare say you would be able to keep him like a pet, in a cage, fed and watered regularly. But could you keep him— from other women? You’re not the only one with the mothering instinct, you know.” He watched the pain and indecision on her face, and chose his next blow with careful timing. “Not that it will ever arise. You’ve dropped him into the hands of the medicos. That’s something I’ve been sheltering him from for years. You heard him say he’s afraid of doctors. You care for him so much that you delivered him into their hands the moment my back was turned. As of this moment, I can get him back. Willerby is under my command. But once let him lift off this planet, and the medicos have got him. To play with. To try their tricks on. Do you think you’d ever see him again ? Do you think he’s going to love you when he wakes in the morning and finds out where he is, and that you put him here ?”
“But he was ill! Unconscious! What else could I do?”
“You could leave him alone. Just that. Leave him alone. Clear out. Stick to your job. Let me handle this. I can get him out of here in the morning, and talk him back into an acceptance of my concern for him. If you only leave him alone there’s a chance the damage can be repaired.”
“Does he mean that much? To you?”
“It’s not that!” Barclay was brusque. “I told you you wouldn’t understand. I can take care of him, protect him from life. I can do that a lot more efficiently if this project goes through successfully. Dally, I need just one more commendation, one more star, and I can count on elevation. Give me that, and I can, and will, take Rikki out of this for good. I can do it. You can’t. You can help to make it possible. When you and your colleagues go back to make your report, a word from you might make all the difference. Say it, and Rikki’s future is safe and assured, with me. Say the other thing, let your maternal emotions sway you, and you’ll break him. And you’ll do yourself no good at all. You think about it.”
He went away and left her at that, to drive back to his own quarters and do some thinking of his own. Without knowing it, she had given him one more rare clue to the way Rikki’s sensitivity worked. Whenever the conversation had turned to himself, Barclay, the boy had felt smothered. He had, in fact, known what was going to happen. Had it not been for Daily’s pernicious presence, that accident would never have happened. It would have been averted. But she had focused the lad’s mind on something else. Barclay ground his teeth in impotent rage. The damned interfering bitch.
Then he fell to wondering whether he had managed to sway her, and he had doubts. He couldn’t afford them now. He reached for the buttons, got the Medical Centre, and the orderly in charge.
“Inform me the moment Lieutenant Caddas regains consciousness. No one else is to see him until I do, is that clear?”
With that much assurance he sought his bed, there to rehearse various arguments he would put to Rikki in the morning. And there would be Willerby to persuade. And perhaps a word or two might help with the two observers. So many angles, all to be handled just right. Sleep was a long time coming.
The buzz came at six, half-an-hour before general reveille, but the spare severe form of Willerby was there at the bedside when Barclay arrived. The surgeon-captain’s as grave, but he stood aside willingly enough.
”Rikki! How d’you feel, lad?” Barclay had no need to feign anxiety. The weak face was puckered into near-panic and gleaming with fear-sweat.
“What am I doing here, with him? Why did you send me here?”
“I didn’t, believe me. It was that woman, Miss Honey.”
“I don’t believe you.” Caddas sat up. “She wouldn’t. She’s kind.”
“I don’t doubt it. But she’s just like all the rest. She thinks there is something wrong with you. You had a little black-out yesterday. You’ve had them before. But I wasn’t there. I turned my back on you for just a moment. I’m damned sorry about that, believe me. But there it is, it’s done. Before I knew anything about it, she’d called in the medicos, and here you are. But not to worry. We’ll soon have you out of here, now that you’re fit again.”
“What have they done to me, Jack?” Caddas moved gingerly, trying his arms and legs, throwing back the covers.
“So far as I know, nothing except give you something to make you sleep. How d’you feel? All right?” He spun and stepped to where Willerby stood and glowered. “That’s all you did, wasn’t it? Sedation?”
“That’s all. Colonel, I shall protest this. I’m the medical authority. This is my province, my responsibility.”
“You yourself said this was outside your field. I’ll take full responsibility. You attend to your other patients. Lieutenant Caddas comes with me, and let’s hear no more about it.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.” Willerby had an almost frightened grin on his lean face now. “You see, I took the liberty of requesting a berth for Lieutenant Caddas in the shuttle ship that will be coming to retrieve the observers. A message had to be sent, if only to account for their accident, and to ask for special facilities. I thought it advisable...” He broke off, quailing under Barclay’s glare.
“You thought it advisable? You sent a message, without my authority?”
“Major Dannard authorized it, in your stead. He agreed with me...”
“Dannard! The shambling idiot! By God, Willerby, I’ll break the pair of you for this! You dressed, Rikki ? Good. Come on. This is a sick man, Willerby? Take a good look. And then go and take very good care of your real patients. Do the best you can for them, because they might well be the last you’ll attend for a long while. You’ll be swilling out latrines when I’m done with you. As for Dannard...!
I’ll get to him, later. Come on, Rikki!”
New Writings in SF 6 - [Anthology] Page 18