This time Ben was going to walk if it killed him. He didn’t know who to thank for getting him this far, but he moved with the others to the Have-It-All’s luxurious conference room. And if everyone’s suit was coming off, so was his. It took him three times as long as anyone else, but finally he was done and could ease himself into a seat.
He was sitting opposite Darya Lang. She gave him one look and said to Louis Nenda, “Medical treatment.” Then, to Ben, “You have as much right as anyone else to know what’s going on. But right after this meeting, that arm and those ribs receive expert attention.”
Fixing me up so we can all die together? Ben saw Nenda’s grim look as the other man sat down at the end of the table.
Nenda began, “Conditions are bad out there, an’ I can’t see ’em gettin’ anythin’ but worse. You may think it’s no problem, we’ll be up an’ out of here in ten minutes. That’s not true. Here’s where we stand.”
He described the problems of the ice loading and the reduced efficiency of the engines that had to take them to orbit. He concluded, “So unless somebody has a brilliant idea, there seems to be only one answer: we have to lighten ship in a big way. Anything that can go, must go. Things like this, for example.” Nenda tapped the tabletop in front of him. It was a gorgeous expanse of smooth alabaster, into which dust or even crumbs of food were absorbed leaving no trace. “Beautiful, an’ valuable. But when things get desperate, in a pinch it’s expendable. We’ll make an inventory. If you’re in doubt, ask me. I know what we need to fly. I also know what we need to survive in space. Reducing us to a minimum is goin’ to be a long job—three or four days, I’d say. An’ at the end of it we still may not know what our chances are. Also, we’ll need a party to go outside again an’ clear ice and snow off the engines and the control surfaces, an’ make us a runway in case we fly atmospheric. I’ll accept volunteers for that in fifteen minutes.”
He looked down the table at Ben. “You’re not on that list. You come with me now, and we’ll fix you up.”
Ben forced himself to his feet. His legs felt as though they belonged to someone else as he followed Louis Nenda out of the conference room and along the upper corridor of the Have-It-All.
“You don’t think we’ll make it, do you? Even with everything inessential stripped away, you don’t think that in these conditions the ship can reach orbit.”
Nenda shrugged. “What I think don’t matter. I’ve been wrong before. Main thing is, we do what we can. Anythin’ we can leave on Marglot, we do. Up on the table now, an’ slide into the opening.”
They were in the ship’s medical center, the main part of which was shaped like a horizontal cylinder. Ben went in feet-first and inched forward until he was lying full length and flat on his back.
“That’s good. The doc will tell us if you’re ready to go dancin’ again. Don’t worry about the farmyard noises an’ all the spaghetti. It’s non-invasive. Have fun, an’ I’ll leave you to it.”
Ben looked up. Hundreds of multi-colored tendrils were descending from a sphere suspended from the ceiling of the cylinder, homing in purposefully on his body. Clucking and chirping came from all around, accompanied by a dazzling array of lights. Ben felt touches in a hundred places at once, delicate pressures in combinations that were never the same twice. This might be a robodoc, but it was like nothing that Ben had ever seen. He wondered for which type of being the unit had originally been intended. It would easily accommodate something far bigger than a human.
He started to turn his head, until an admonishing voice said. “Lie still. It is beginning.”
The gentle touches of the tendrils went on, accompanied by small chills here and there on his body as though a cool spray was being applied for a second or two. Ben was beginning to wonder how long this would go on—and just what was going on—when the same dispassionate voice said, “It is finished.”
The array of tubes, fibers and wires retreated into the medusa from which they had emerged. The sounds ended, the lights went off. The voice said, “Please wait here for at least five minutes before you leave.”
That was it, the whole thing? Ben was mightily unimpressed. There had been no examination, no imaging of his arm or ribs, no adjustment of bones, no careful assessment of torn muscles or ligaments. He said, aloud, “That has to be the most stupid medical procedure I’ve ever heard of. What did it do?”
He expected no answer, but the voice said, “All bones were placed into perfect alignment. Instantaneous hardeners were applied to break points. Intercostal muscular inflammation was eased and five hematomas dissipated. There will be no more pain.”
Ben reached across with his left hand to feel his ribs and right upper arm. There was indeed no pain. Also, there was none of the mental numbness and disorientation that normally went with painkillers.
“However,” the calm voice continued, “despite a feeling of well-being, the recovery process is far from over. For the next several weeks, body stresses should be kept to an absolute minimum. New trauma must be avoided at all costs.”
Ben took little heed of that. He felt like a new man. And that new man could, at last, began the action that had formed in Ben’s mind as he listened to Louis Nenda in the conference room.
* * *
He headed back through the ship to locate his suit. On the way he passed Kallik and Archimedes, but the aliens were busy and gave him scarcely a glance. The conference room had its own terminal and display. Ben decided he wanted something closer to an exit. He found another terminal in a room next to the chamber where he had first entered. Rivulets from melted snow still pooled on the floor.
The message he left had to be fairly short and simple. He didn’t want someone to come in and catch him in the middle of writing it.
To all of you—and especially to Sinara. I am going outside again, but it is certainly not my intention to seek death in the cold and snow. Nothing could be more inconsistent with my training as a survival specialist. I am going because I believe that all the measures proposed will prove insufficient to raise the Have-It-All into orbit from the surface of Marglot.
I want to help, and I have something in mind. It is a long shot, but it is different in kind from everything else that you are doing. It can certainly do no harm to anyone except possibly me. Do not come looking for me; that would be a waste of time that you should devote to your own plans as stated. Although I do not expect to return, you will know if I succeed. Good luck to all of us, whatever happens. Ben Blesh.
He climbed into his suit and went through to the next room. He opened the hatch and looked down. It was a long drop, but into deep snow. He would suffer no injury. A bigger worry was the hatch. If he left it open when he jumped, freezing air would invade the inside of the ship, which needed all the warmth it could get.
The hatch could be raised upward. If he stood on the edge, grasped the top in both hands, and stepped out backwards, then he could snap the hatch closed as he dropped.
Ben stood for a long time before he moved. If he was wrong he would die a drawn-out and lonely death as his suit ran out of air, water, and warmth. If he was right he might die even less pleasantly. Not the greatest of options.
But waiting would not improve them. Ben opened the hatch, grasped the top, and stepped out backwards for the blind drop to the surface.
* * *
The snow had stopped falling, and for the first time the sky was cloudless. It was full daylight. All around Ben stood a frozen wonderland of pure and dazzling white. He stared up. Light reflected from the surface and scattered so intensely in the atmosphere that M-2 was invisible in the bright sky.
The drifted snow changed the appearance of everything. There was a real danger that he might lose his way. That would be the ultimate failure, a journey that ended not in tragedy but in farce.
Ben studied the faint line that marked earlier movements between the cone-house and the ship. It should be easy to go that far. Beyond the cone-house he saw a lumpy hummock that must be the wa
lking car. It had not moved since its arrival with Ben and Darya aboard, and it ought to provide the bearing that he needed.
He followed the half-covered track to the cone-house. With no wind and with his improved condition, it was hard to believe that he had been unable to cover this short distance just an hour or two ago. He continued into the unmarked wilderness beyond. With snow so deep and a hardened crust of ice, this was much harder going. He told himself that he would only need to do it once.
Snow had drifted against the car. He stepped close and brushed one side clear to provide a line of sight up the hill. He fixed that vector in his suit’s locator and began to plow his way up the shallow incline.
The other side of the hill led down to the valley with the stream, now frozen and snow-covered. The road had vanished. Ben could see no landmarks at all. He was forced to operate from memory—unreliable memory, from a time when he had been strongly and continuously medicated. He walked, stopped, hesitated, started again, and finally halted. This was as good as he would get. He cleared a place big enough to sit, then used packed snow to make a steep little bank against which he could lean. He sat down. The scene had an eerie tranquillity and beauty. As far as the eye could see, the valley was an undisturbed white. Above it the cloudless sky shone greenish-blue.
Now there was nothing more that Ben could do. And precisely because he could do nothing, he relaxed for the first time since his injury on the surface of Iceworld. He had been unconscious for much of that time, but those medicated periods had not rested him. He leaned back against the little wall of snow. He adjusted his suit’s thermal setting to its most comfortable level. As the long day drifted on, he drowsed.
What woke him was no more than a shadow, a patch of darkness sensed through closed eyelids in a place where no shadows should exist. He came fully awake, opened his eyes, and scrambled to his feet in a panic. Thirty meters away from him a black sphere hovered above the snow. He had no idea how long it had been there, but already it was beginning to sink down into the surface.
Would he be too late?
Ben made the effort of his life, scrambling and sliding toward the sphere. When he came to it he did not hesitate or slow. He hurled himself forward. The dark heart of the sphere swallowed him up, and one minute later it too was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Stripping the ship
Sometime, someplace, humans and aliens might discover practical telepathy. Until they did, there was always a chance that whatever you said might be misunderstood.
If Louis had not been convinced of this before, the point was emphasized as he was walking along the Have-It-All’s lower corridor and happened to glance into the conference room. He had just come from the lowest level, where Torran Veck, Teri Dahl, Atvar H’sial, and J’merlia were beginning to clear packed snow from the drive unit. Now Louis was looking for Kallik and Archimedes to set them to work.
He certainly found them, though what they were up to was another matter. Kallik stood by the conference room table, her round head level with the polished white top. Archimedes was sprawled along the length of it, his blue tentacles wrapped around each end. They flexed as Nenda watched, and the table top warped upward under a mighty force.
“I don’t suppose you two would like to tell me what the hell you’re doin’?”
“It is the table, Master Nenda.” Kallik touched it with a forelimb. “Although we can pass it through the biggest of the cargo hatches, it will first be necessary to remove it from this room. That requires that it be broken into pieces. Indeed, although I had never thought about it before, it is a mystery how it was ever brought in.”
“It wasn’t. It was secreted on the spot by a bunch of Doradan Colubrids, an’ for the moment it stays here. Archie, get down off that table or you’ll be lookin’ for a new set of guts.”
“Master Nenda, you specifically declared the table to be expendable.”
“If, Kallik. Didn’t I say if? If things get desperate, an’ we’re not there yet. What I want is an inventory. We need to know the mass of everything that’s not nailed down, plus a bunch of things that are. But until that’s done, we throw nothin’ overboard. Clear enough?”
“Master Nenda, it will be done exactly as you command.”
“An’ you, Archie, shape up an’ get useful. If that table has to go outside in bits, maybe you go with it.”
Nenda hurried away double-time through the ship’s interior. Kallik was smart, and if she could get it wrong, so could anybody.
Claudius would not be a problem. Louis found the Polypheme coiled down tight in one of the cabins in a trance of terror. Neither useful nor ornamental—now there was a candidate to throw overboard when you needed to reduce mass. Louis hurried on. He was approaching the hatch through which they had all entered, and this part of the ship was colder than everywhere else. That was surprising. The air circulation system should have taken care of that long ago. Even more surprising was the sight of a group of figures in one of the nearby cabins.
Hans Rebka, Darya Lang, Sinara Bellstock, E.C. Tally, and Julian Graves. Almost half the available work force. And doing what? Not one damn thing, so far as Louis could see. They were clustered around a display terminal.
Louis was about to say, “It must be nice to be a guest on board, an’ not have to work,” when he saw the message on the display.
Sinara came over to him and grasped his arm. “Ben is outside. We must go after him.”
“His message tells us just the opposite.” Louis was still reading. “Besides, we have no idea what he thinks he’s up to or where he might have gone.”
Darya said, “We don’t know what Ben is doing, but Hans has his suspicions.”
Rebka nodded. “I asked myself a couple of simple questions: What could Ben possibly hope to gain by going outside? And where could he go on the surface, with Marglot in its present condition? The answers are, nothing and nowhere. Most of the time Ben was here he was doped up, so he’s seen even less of the planet than we have—and that’s only about one square kilometer. But back in the middle of Iceworld, Guardian of Travel told us that a transport system would open now and again, to let us return there if we wanted to. I think Ben went outside to try to find it. He thinks he can use it to get back to the middle of Iceworld.”
Louis stared at Darya Lang and Hans Rebka. “An’ do what if he gets there? Things don’t look great for us, but his chances are better here than they would be on Iceworld. Does he imagine that Guardian of Travel will drop everythin’ an’ hustle on over to give us a hand? We don’t know much about what Builder constructs do, but we’ve learned a few of the things they don’t. They don’t leave places they’ve been sittin’ in for millions of years—’specially to help a bunch of recent arrivals like us.” He turned to Sinara. “As for us goin’ outside to look, that’s a bad idea. It’s colder than ever an’ the wind is startin’ up again. Hope I’m wrong, but we may be in for another storm.”
“And there are new potential troubles of quite a different kind.” Julian Graves had been listening in silence, but now he turned to E.C. Tally. “Tell them what you told me, just before we came in here.”
“It is the beetlebacks. Ever since I first encountered them, I have struggled to comprehend their meaning and their mission. This has been a frustrating task, but also a fascinating one. It appears as though there is a complete sharing of information. What one knows, all know. Long ago, I came to the conclusion from their speech that they had been placed on this world for a specific purpose. It is also clear that our arrival came as a total surprise to them. I conjectured that they operated on the assumption that Marglot would lack animal life of every kind. But what were the beetlebacks themselves supposed to do next? From the data available, extensive as that is, I was still unable to determine the nature or timing of that new act. However, it occurred to me that the sudden and surprising cooling of M-2, and hence of Marglot itself, might be a trigger. In the hope of confirming or denying this theory, one hour ago I tun
ed the equipment of the Have-It-All to the frequency employed by the beetlebacks. I hoped for at best a distant signal, provided perhaps by reflection from a high ionized atmospheric layer—although the weakness of incident radiation from the distant solar primary was not encouraging for the formation of such.”
Nenda glared at Julian Graves, who said, “I think, E.C., you might dispense with certain explanatory details.”
“At the risk of a possible reduced understanding? Very well, if you insist. What I discovered was not a weak signal, but a very strong one. It emanates from forty or fifty kilometers away, and is just one of several similar but weaker signals. Since we saw that the beetlebacks possess no means of ground or air transportation, I am led to another conjecture which I see no way to confirm. Colonies of beetlebacks were placed all over Marglot, before our arrival. Those on the warm hemisphere were completely quiescent until the precipitating event of M-2’s cooling. The beetlebacks thrive in a world of cold. They find cold essential to their very existence. This world, together with M-2 and the central star, are all headed toward cold extinction. We, as sources of heat, are now an anomaly on Marglot. The beetlebacks, judging from the changes in their radio signals, are heading this way, and I cannot believe that they come for the purpose of assuring our well-being. They are coming here to advance their cause. They are servants of the Masters of Cold.”
Masters of Cold? Louis wanted to burst out laughing, except that no one else showed that inclination—and he himself could feel the sudden chill in the pit of his belly.
Julian Graves turned to Darya Lang. “Not Voiders, Professor, or Destroyers. Masters of Cold, able through a variety of measures to draw out and banish heat wherever it may be found. To remove the warmth of animals, the latent heat of gases and liquids, even to end the phoenix reaction within the stars themselves.”
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