Lifeboat

by Harry Harrison

  “That is so,” said the Engineer, looking back at Giles. “And at this moment I am sorry for it. Let my Captain speak.”

  “I did not call you here on behalf of the Munghanf,” said the Captain, addressing Giles. “I will require your help. It must be the help of you, personally. I cannot trust this effort to one of your slaves.”

  “They are not,” said Giles, speaking slowly and distinctly, “slaves. Mine, or anyone’s.”

  “They live to work and breed and die. I know no other term for such,” said the Captain. “I will show you the work to be done.” She stepped past Giles and led him back to the inner door of the lifeship’s airlock. To the left of it, the spongy wall covering had been peeled back to reveal a large panel, which the Captain pushed inward, then slid aside, to reveal a control console equipped with viewscreen and two hand-sized sockets just below it.

  “Put your hands into the control openings,” directed the Captain.

  Giles stepped up to face the console and did so. Within the dark depths of the two sockets, his fingers found and closed over a pair of upright, movable rods, pivoted at their bottom end and each grooved to fit the three fingers of an Albenareth hand. In the depths of each groove was a stud that yielded to the pressure of Giles’ grip.

  The moment he touched the bars, the screen before him lit up and he saw a section of the outer hull from beyond two mechanical extensions ending in three metal fingers each. As he moved the bars and pressed harder on the spring-cushioned studs, the arms extended, waved one way or another, and the metal fingers flexed. Clearly what he had in his grasp was something mounted on the outer hull that was the alien equivalent of waldoes—mechanical hands operating in response to the movement of his own flesh-and-blood appendages upon the controls they grasped.

  “I must stand by the general controls,” the Captain said, “and put them in various modes as the Engineer works upon the drive. I am therefore needed at the main console while you will be here. From my position, I will be able to move the unit carrying the device with which your controls connect about the hull. But it will be up to you to operate it—if necessary, use it to carry the Engineer inside if he should fail before his work is done, or before he can return to the airlock under his own power.”

  “I will need to practice with these controls,” said Giles. “I do not know them and they are not designed for my hands.”

  “There will be time for practice,” the Captain said. “Preparations must be made. I will require the stem section of this vessel beyond your second screen, as space in which to set up necessary equipment. You must keep all humans out of that area until further notice.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Giles.

  He turned, leaving the bow of the lifeship, and went back to the stem area behind the final screen the arbites had erected. This was a space containing the converter, the fruit press, and a good section of the ib vine. There were only two cots there—the cots of Frenco and Di. The young couple had been tacitly left with this place to themselves, to give them the closest approach to privacy that the lifeship afforded. It was an illusion of privacy, actually, for the screen was no barrier to sound, and the slightest movement or whisper could be heard beyond it by anyone who made it a point to listen.

  The two young arbites were alone there when Giles arrived. They were seated facing each other, each on his own cot, holding hands and talking with their heads together in low voices.

  “Frenco ... Di,” said Giles. “Forgive me, but I’m going to have to dispossess you for a little while. The Engineer has to go outside to work on the ship and this area’s going to have to be used as back-up room for that effort. I’ll let you in here again, as soon as it’s available. Meanwhile, one of you can take my cot up front, and there’s another cot across from it that’s never been pulled up.”

  The two stood up, looking shy.

  “Honor, sir,” said Frenco. “How long is it going to be?”

  “No longer than it has to,” Giles said. “But that’ll be a matter of hours. Why? Any particular problem?”

  “It’s just Di, sir,” said Frenco. “She’s been having trouble sleeping—even back here alone with me. She has nightmares— she’s always had nightmares—and she fights going to sleep. She can’t help it She probably won’t be able to rest much at all, up front.”

  “I sympathize,” said Giles. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. If this was one of our own spacecraft, we’d have a medical kit on board and there’d probably be something I could give her to help her sleep. But it isn’t, and I can’t. I’ll let you back here as soon as I can, though.”

  Defeated, Frenco and Di sidled out from between their two cots and started through the opening in the screen, obediently.

  “And tell everyone else,” said Giles, pitching his voice so that the flimsy screens would in no way block the other humans from hearing his message, “none of them are to so much as look back here until I tell them it’s all right. The Albenareth require complete privacy in this area, and I’ve promised it to them. So all our people are to stay clear. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, Honor, sir,” Frenco and Di chorused, disappearing.

  They had scarcely gone when the alien Captain stepped through the opening and stood, looking around the area.

  “No harm has been done here,” she said to Giles in Albenareth. “Good. The Engineer is busy with other preparations up front. I will prepare this space. You may go now. If I call you, you may come back.”

  In spite of Giles’ better judgment, her choice of expressions raised instinctive hackles of his temper.

  “If you should ask for my presence here,” he retorted in icily correct Albenareth, “my sense of duty would, of course, urge me to come!”

  The dark, round alien eyes locked with his. There was absolutely no way of reading expression in them. Whether the Captain was angry, amused, or indifferent was beyond the power of Giles to tell.

  “I will only call you if it is absolutely necessary,” said the Captain. “Go now.”

  Giles left the stem area and went back up to the airlock and the open control panel where he would be working. He slipped his hands into the two apertures, grasped the control rods, and began experimenting, practicing with them. It was clumsy work at first The Albenareth waldo, like the Albenareth hand itself, had its three fingers all semi-opposed, so that their tips approached each other at equal angles of 120 degrees between them. They were not capable of being directly opposed in a straight line as the human thumb and forefinger are; and in spite of their normally greater strength, the clumsiness of any two fingers only in opposition made for a bad grip.

  In the end, Giles taught himself to think of taking hold of anything at all in terms of a full-hand grasp. This concept brought all of his fingers into pressure on all three studs on any one of the control bars, and the result was closer to the Albenarethian.

  He was practicing this attitude and reaction, when he felt a movement beside him and turned his head to see Biset standing beside him, as if waiting for his attention. He stopped what he was doing.

  “Did you want to see me?” Giles asked.

  “Please, Honor, sir,” she said, “continue what you’re doing.”

  She hesitated and abruptly switched languages, from Basic to the one she now named. “I understand you speak Esperanto?”

  While she had been talking he had gone back to his practicing, and, because of the distraction of her sudden shift of tongues, he completely bungled the same three-fingered pickup he had been telling himself he now had almost under control. He exploded at her, reflexively, in the same tongue she herself had used.

  “Cu, jes me bonege parloas Esperantol”

  He broke off and let go of the two rods, turning to look at her.

  “How do you know that?” he demanded in Basic, lowering his voice. “It’s an old international language. I got interested in it myself only five years ago. How did an arbite even come to hear about it?”

 
“Please, sir,” she said, still in Esperanto, “please continue working. It will be better if the others think that their lack of understanding is due to the noise, only.”

  He went back to his practice with the waldoes.

  “I asked you,” he said, in Esperanto, “how an arbite happens to know this particular old language—or in fact, anything but Basic? The earlier tongues of Earth are matters of academic study only, nowadays, unless you were born where one was spoken; and no particular territory owned Esperanto.”

  “My case is special” she said.

  He turned his head to look at her as he worked. Her thin, disapproving features were only inches away. As with the girl Mara, there were signs of some upper-class fineness of bone. This one must have had her share of good looks too, once.

  “Yes,” she went on, as if he had said out loud what he was thinking, “I’m no common woman. I was raised in a good family. But that’s something we can talk of at some other time. The important thing now is that you be told there is a member of the Black Thursday among us.”

  Giles was suddenly, icily, alert. But he kept his hands moving on the rods; and before she could say more she was cut short by the sound of an Albenareth voice calling from the back of the lifeship in Basic.

  “Human! Come now!”

  Giles swung away from the control panel, his eyes still on Biset.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  He went back through the gaps in the two screens, ignoring the questions and the somewhat frightened gazes of the arbites. He stepped into the stem area to find the Captain and the Engineer both there, the Engineer already wearing the spacesuit. On him, and semi-inflated up to the neck seal, it had become transparent enough to show his arms and legs clearly within the limbs of it. Helmetless, his head protruded from the neck seal like some dark seed being squeezed from a cluster of cloudy grapes.

  “You are in command here,” said Giles in Albenareth to the Captain. “For that reason I overlook much in the name of our common necessities. Nonetheless, outright discourtesy on your part will be met with equal discourtesy on mine. When you speak the human tongue to me in front of other humans, you will use human courtesies, or I will not respond. I have a position to maintain as leader of this human group. Is that dear?”

  “Completely clear, O human of great honors,” answered the Captain. “I will call you ‘Adelman’ in future, especially whenever I speak to you in your own language. Now assist me—we must tie off this suit in places to ensure that the Engineer can continue working even if small leaks depressurize parts of it.”

  She handed Giles what seemed to be short lengths of plastic cord with a metallic core—something partway between wire and rope. One end of each length had a small, odd-shaped clamp attached to it. The cords were long enough to go around the Engineer’s spacesuited arm or leg two or three times before the clampless end was drawn through the clamp and so secured. In theory this binding and securing should have been a simple matter, but the weakness of the grav-simulation field aboard the lifeship made it not so. Work on the Engineer was done most efficiently when that alien was lying horizontally on one of the cots, but with both Giles and the Captain pushing and tugging at him, to wind or secure a cord about one of his limbs, his body bobbed or floated away into the air. In the end Giles’ greatest usefulness, he found, was to hold the spacesuited alien figure as still as possible while the Captain worked with the cords.

  When they were finished and the Engineer was once more upright on his feet, holding himself in position like the rest with a hand on one of the hull or ceiling anchor points, he looked like a figure made out of very short lengths of fat link sausage, each tie compartmentalizing a section of his arm or leg. The ties were not so tight as to keep his suit’s interior atmosphere from circulating, but in case of a leak, the sudden lack of pressure on the down side of a He would cause the elastic material to clamp tightly enough to make a seal.

  Or at least, thought Giles, gazing at the Engineer when they were done, that seemed to be the theory of the two aliens. But he could not really believe that the cord seals would be that efficient in case of spacesuit rupture. The thought came to him suddenly that perhaps this tying was only a ritual—merely a matter of going through some form of protecting the Engineer in a hopeless situation. Some such impractical gesture on the part of these members of a death-worshipping race might make sense to them. But still, thought Giles, it was odd.

  “All right, Adelman,” said the Captain. “Come forward with us now. I will let the Engineer out the airlock, then move to the main controls. You will return to work your own console.”

  They moved through the openings in the screens, past the stares of the arbites as the two of them helped the Engineer, now with his fishbowl helmet in place and completely sealed in the suit, to walk clumsily past.

  The Captain punched the airlock controls, and the inner door of the lock swung open. Frost formed instantly on all surfaces within the lock now exposed to the interior warmth and atmosphere of the ship. The Captain wrapped plastic around his three-fingered hands to protect them from the icy metal surfaces, and set about connecting the umbilicals—the flexible tubes that would provide atmosphere, power, and heat—to the Engineer’s suit.

  At last it was done. The Captain stood back, and the inner lock door closed again. Without a further word to Giles, the alien turned and stalked forward behind the screen that hid the main controls. Giles himself turned back to his own console and reached in to take control of the rods.

  On his screen, which had come alive again the moment he had touched the rods, he could now see a section of the opened outer door of the airlock and the spacesuited figure of the Engineer emerging slowly on the outer hull. There was a grating sound beyond the wall Giles faced as the magnetic-soled boots of the Engineer took hold on the hull and alternately slid forward one by one, with each step the alien made. The Engineer headed toward the stem of the vessel, his full figure now showing in Giles’ screen with the lines of the umbilicals trailing behind him. A moment later there was another grating, and the figure of the Engineer, which had been diminishing in size, began to swell again as whatever vehicle supported the waldoes and camera eye of Giles’ control console began also to slide over the hull in pursuit.

  This movement across the hull surface was plainly being controlled by the Captain. Giles found he had nothing to do, and simply stood, waiting. His vehicle eventually caught up and stopped just behind the Engineer, who was now at the very stem of the vessel and slowly unhousing the shielding over the propulsion motors there.

  Tentatively, Giles advanced one of his mechanical hands to help the spacesuited figure.

  “Stop!”

  It was the voice of the Captain, speaking in Albenareth from a grille in the console before Giles.

  “Do nothing until I order it, Adelman,” the Captain’s voice went on. “You are unfamiliar with our mechanical and more likely to do damage to the motors than help. I repeat, do nothing until I order you to.”

  “Very well,” answered Giles.

  He released his grip on the rods, but continued to hold them lightly and stood watching what went on in the screen. The Engineer, clearly, needed to tear down a good part of one of the motors in order to reach what he had to repair. It was a slow business—not merely because of the amount of work involved but because every movement the Engineer made was made under the clumsiness imposed by his spacesuit and the lack of gravity.

  “Sir,” said Biset’s voice at Giles’ elbow, in Esperanto.

  He had dropped his earlier conversation with her from his mind entirely. It came flooding back to him now, and he turned to look at her without taking his hands off the rods.

  “Oh, yes,” he answered in the same language. “You were going to tell me how you came to know Esperanto.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “I was going to warn you that on board here—”

  “First things first,” he interrupted her, quietly
but with an edge to his voice that should check any impulse on her part to argue the point. “First, I want to hear how you can speak this language—and, more important, how you happened to guess I could, too.”

  “As for the language,” she answered, “I was given a special course in it. As for knowing you, yourself, could speak it, Honor, sir, I was informed of that. Both things were done so that I could communicate with you privately as I’m now doing. Now, if you will allow me to tell you—”

  “Oh yes, about the Black Thursday matter.” He had had a few seconds now to gather his wits since this second appearance of hers, and it occurred to him that the best defense here might be to meet her halfway—or better. “Something about one of their group being aboard, here.”

  Her eyes were small and sharp.

  “You know about the Black Thursday revolutionaries, then?” she asked.

  “I’ve heard a good deal about them in the past,” he said lightly. “I was something of a revolutionary myself in my younger days when I was still putting over fifty percent of my time in study.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re aware you were a friend of Paul Oca’s, and a member of his so-called Philosophical Group. But you parted with that group some years since, didn’t you?”

  He looked at her grimly.

  “Biset” he said—and now his tone was wholly that of an Adelman speaking to an arbite—”I think you’re forgetting your manners.”

  But she did not cower. She stiffened.

  “Pardon me, Honor, sir,” she said, “but that is one thing I never do. I told you, I was raised in a good family. Under different conditions I... might even have been part of that family.”

  So that explained it—as it could as well have explained Mara’s differentness and signs of good breeding. Giles took a more compassionate look at the tight face opposite. If life was not easy on an arbite brought up as the pet of some Adelborn, it was a great deal less easy on a half-caste, some arbite born on the wrong side of an Adelborn blanket. There was no place for anyone like that among the Adelborn themselves, and rumor had it that the ordinary arbites hated and despised anyone of their own who carried Adelborn blood in her—or him.