A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  The sun was not far from the horizon and was throwing elongated, jet-black shadows across the landscape. She could see no sign of the earth and assumed that it was too close to the glare of the sun. The other, larger, moon was visible, however: a big bright half circle high in the sky.

  She turned around and saw what, in effect, Rykkla and Thud had already seen some weeks earlier: a vast bowl-shaped depression, perhaps a mile or mile and a half to the opposite rim. More than half of the crater was in inky blackness. The long slope to the bottom looked not only endless but bottomless once it vanished into the shadow and she had no desire to descend into it. The lack of perspective made the distant rim and the even more distant stars look no further away than the length of her arm, the universe looked small. She suddenly had the uncanny, disorienting and disturbing compulsion to tear away the encumbering costume that separated her, even by its scant inch of thickness, from that compelling, stainless, razor-sharp immaculacy.

  “Awful-looking, isn’t it?” asked Wittenoom.

  “No! It’s beautiful! I mean, it’s never going to be a major tourist attraction, but it is beautiful in its own right. I don’t know why for sure . . . It just looks so . . . pure, I guess, if that doesn’t sound stupid. It’s like the edge of the sharpest knife ever made.”

  “Well, aesthetics is a little outside my field.”

  Bronwyn felt herself suddenly jostled and she had to regain her balance. At first she thought that Wittenoom had inexplicably given her a shove, but when she turned to face him, she saw that he was trying keep on his feet as well. It was the ground beneath their feet that was shaking and Bronwyn realized, with a sudden panic, that they were experiencing a moonquake. Then, to make certain that her discomposure was complete, came the recollection of why they were visiting the moon in the first place. She had a sudden and probably not inaccurate vision of the moon crumbling from beneath her booted feet like a disintegrating ice floe. This grim thought was vividly illustrated by a crack suddenly appearing in the plain between the explorers and the spaceship. It seemed to split the landscape in two, a yawning zigzag a dozen feet or more wide, as though some cosmic artist had just drawn a lightning bolt in black ink on the stark white paper of the moon. Little avalanches rolled away from their feet, down the slopes to the right and left, the motion looking weirdly languid in the low gravity and vacuum.

  “We’ve got to get down from here!” she cried, as the rolling motion of the moonquake gradually subsided.

  “I agree, but I don’t think that we ought to try this slope again, though,” said the professor. “The tremor will have loosened up everything and made it treacherous. There is also the possibility of hidden crevasses in the plain. Instead, I suggest that we follow the curve of the ridge until it joins that low one that descends near the spaceship.”

  “I’d feel safer down there.”

  “Maybe, but I think that we’d better follow my plan. The ridge is solid rock. It’d be like following a road right to the rocket.”

  Bronwyn acquiesced, but with glum misgivings, and followed the lanky figure. It was not difficult traversing the connecting ridges, though the going was considerably slower. Again and again, tremors joggled the ground under their feet. On the plain below, plumes of dust geysered up, only to immediately fall leadenly to the ground. Even though small landslides continued to pour down the slope on either side, Bronwyn did indeed feel more secure being above the plain, which at the moment seemed as substantial as a pot of boiling oatmeal.

  After an hour they reached a point about two dozen yards away from and slightly above the domed vehicle.

  Sweat poured in sticky rivulets down Bronwyn’s face and it was maddening not to be able to brush it from her eyes. She wished she’d tied back her shoulder-length hair before putting on the helmet; damp strands were now glued to her forehead and cheeks.

  Wittenoom reconnected their helmets. “Thank Musrum! The ship looks intact!”

  “Let’s get aboard and out of here!” she urged, all of the novelty of her visit to the moon having long since been exhausted.

  “I think that I’ve also seen all that I need to.”

  “Someone seems to agree with you! Look!”

  She pointed to the rocket which was now spouting gouts of sparks and smoke from its underside. It was strange to see what she knew must be a noisy event occuring in such dead, and deadly, silence.

  “What in the world is Hughenden doing?” the professor asked.

  “It looks to me as though he were planning to leave.”

  “But we’re still out here!”

  “I think that he’s not unaware of that.”

  “We’ve got to stop him! He can’t do this!”

  “He is doing it.”

  “I’ll have him expelled from the Academy! By Musrum, I will!”

  “Professor, quick, give me your specimen bag.”

  “What? Whatever for?”

  “Hurry, please! Just give it here!”

  “All right, all right! Here.”

  She took the bag, which had been supported from Wittenoom’s shoulder by a long strap of webbing. This she unclipped from the bag itself, then made a loop about three feet across by grasping the free ends. She glanced at the rocket which was not only continuing to spew flames and sparks, but was now teetering unsteadily on its round landing pads. It looked something like a spider suffering a hotfoot.

  “Stand back, Professor!” she said, simultaneously unplugging the telephone line. Stooping, she picked a fist-sized rock from the ground. She placed this in the loop of webbing, braced her feet and began swinging the strap in a circle over her head. It spun faster and faster until her helmet seemed to be surmounted by a transparent grey disk.

  Just as the spaceship’s feet left the surface, Brownyn released one end of the strap. The stone flew from the sling like a bullet, streaked toward the rocket and shattered one of the large ports near its nose. The effect of this was immediate and not a little startling. The shards of pulverized quartz that burst from the now-vacant hole were followed by a cloud of vapor that disappeared almost as quickly as it formed. Behind this came what must have been every loose article in the cabin: papers, books, food containers, clothing, then, at last, a bulky object that for a moment plugged the porthole. Only for a moment, however; it popped from the opening like a cork, a shapeless, pinwheeling mass that described its own deliberate, lazy, individual parabola before thumping into the dust among the scattered débris of what had been the spaceship’s contents.

  The motors of the rocket had stopped firing at once and the vehicle dropped back to the ground with a jolt that almost collapsed the spindly legs.

  With a gesture intended to encourage the professor to follow, Bronwyn loped down the rubbly slope without a backward glance. She stopped when she came to the distorted bundle that had momentarily plugged the porthole. It was, or had been, as she had suspected, Doctor Hughenden. The combined effect of being forced through an eighteen-inch hole and the decompression of the outside vacuum had been hard on him and not the least bit cosmetic. She turned away just as Wittenoom came bounding to her side. She seemed to be inclined to want to vomit in inconvenient situations and the idea of throwing up inside her helmet was, well, nauseating.

  The professor plugged the telephone wire into her helmet and his tinny voice came to her ears. “Come on, Princess, let’s get to the rocket.”

  “What did he think he was doing?” she asked as she turned away from the horrible object.

  “I can’t begin to imagine.”

  Bronwyn reentered the spaceship while the professor stopped to examine the individual rockets in the base. She knew that the cabin was now airless so she did not bother to seal the hatches of the lock. The interior was dark except for the light streaming through the portholes facing the sun. The cabin looked as though someone had picked it up and given it a hard shaking.

  She was pleased to discover that the electric lights still worked, though things looked even worse when she
switched them on. The professor’s helmet appeared in the manhole and as he joined her they reconnected their helmets.

  “How are the rockets?” she asked.

  “There is a problem there,” he replied. “If Hughenden had fired the takeoff battery as he should have, we would have been marooned here. However, for some reason we’ll never know, he was firing the tubes sequentially, so was unable to produce enough cumulative thrust to take off.”

  “Go on. Do we have enough rockets left to leave here or don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do, I think, but we’ll have to recruit some of the rockets that had been earmarked for braking our return to the earth.”

  “Which means we’ll crash when we get back?”

  “Not necessarily. We’ll more likely burn up in the atmosphere.”

  “A cheery alternative.”

  “Before we can even think about taking off, we need to seal that broken port.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Can’t we crank the cover back over it, then seal it by gluing something on top with the stuff you used on the meteor puncture?”

  The professor thought that this sounded like a fine idea and the two went to work repairing what they could of the various damages inflicted by the sudden decompression. A gravity barely one-seventh that of the earth’s was an immense aid in getting the overhead port repaired. Bronwyn was able to stand on the professor’s shoulders, which were considerably more than five feet above the floor. Added to her own two yards, she had no problem reaching the ceiling and the professor had no problem supporting her for the time it required, although they looked like an exceedingly peculiar vaudeville act.

  They had both been sealed in their suits for half a day and the air inside them had finally gone stale . . . to say nothing of developing overwhelmingly individual odors. As soon as the plate had been glued over the porthole, Wittenoom opened the valve of a liquid air tank. It seemed to take hours, but Bronwyn finally heard a faint hissing. This grew gradually louder until she discovered that she could hear the professor as he moved around the cabin. She caught his attention and pointed to her helmet with a questioning gesture. He shook his head, then said, “Not for a minute or two yet. The pressure is still just a little bit too low.” She was startled when she realized that she had heard him even though their helmets were not yet connected by the telephone wire.

  Finally, she saw the professor unscrew his helmet and wasted not a second in removing hers, which she threw to the floor in disgust. She gratefully sucked the clean, icy air into her lungs even though it was so cold that it stung. A cloud of condensed vapor puffed from the collar of her suit, and from her mouth at each breath.

  “It’s freezing in here!”

  “I’ve turned on the heater, but the sun will probably warm us faster, now that there is air in the cabin to convect heat from the walls.”

  The cabin shuddered and Bronwyn had to cling to the central column in order to remain on her feet.

  “How long before we can take off?” she asked.

  “Only a matter of minutes.”

  “Sounds like a matter of minutes too long to me.”

  There was another shock, a prolonged one that made the spaceship rock sickeningly. As the professor worked feverishly at revising the firing sequence, bypassing the spent tubes and adding new ones, Bronwyn stripped off her suit, which slipped from her sodden body like the skin of a scalded tomato. Her coveralls were soaked with perspiration and clung to her like papier-mâché.

  “I’ve been thinking, Professor, and I have an idea.”

  “What’s that, my dear?”

  “All of the tubes that Hughenden fired are useless now, aren’t they?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, why are we taking along their dead weight? Isn’t there some way we can jettison them? Wouldn’t that save enough weight to make the difference in getting back?”

  “I’ve been incredibly stupid! Of course, you’re perfectly correct! It’s exactly the step principle that the main rocket was based upon. How could I have forgotten that?”

  “That’s all right, I know that it’s not your field.”

  “True enough. But I still don’t know if we will have enough rockets to brake sufficiently when we reach the earth.”

  “Well, we’ve got to have a better chance then we had before.”

  “And we really have no choice, unless we want to remain here.”

  “Not likely. Especially since here might not be here much longer.”

  “I’m glad that I haven’t yet removed my vacuum suit.”

  “Why’s that?” she asked warily.

  “The only way to jettison the spent tubes is to manually unscrew them.”

  “But weren’t they designed to be automatically disconnected?”

  “Yes, but Hughenden fired them randomly. We’d be jettisoning unused tubes along with spent ones.”

  “Oh Musrum . . . ”

  With disgust, she slipped back into her repellently clammy suit while the professor recharged their air cylinders from the main tank. It took another hour to remove the spent rockets, but it was not particularly difficult work and she was soon back in the now-comfortably warm cabin and out of her vacuum suit once again, though not nearly soon enough to satisfy her.

  “Strap yourself in,” said the professor. “There’s no reason that I can see for us not to take off immediately.”

  “Fire away,” she replied, throwing herself onto her couch and buckling her belts. She pushed wet strands of hair from her eyes and asked, “What can I do?”

  “I’d ask you to pray, but I don’t know that Musrum is all that receptive to deathbed repentances.”

  “Then we’ll just have to take our chances. Do what you have to do, Professor.”

  He did and with a tremendous roar, the rocket leaped from the surface of the doomed moon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NO JOKE

  Rykkla was not at all surprised when she was awakened early the following morning by Bobasnyda bearing a summons from the Baudad. It was scarcely dawn, yet she arose with sprightliness and breakfasted in a chamber empty except for the mute attendants. When she returned to her sleeping quarters she found that a new costume had been neatly laid out for her, something not surprisingly all of tranparent gossamer, gauze and diaphane. She swathed herself in it, arranged her hair and had only just begun to wonder What next? when the eunuch returned and asked if she was ready for her audience.

  “No,” she replied.

  Bobasnyda raised a thinly penciled eyebrow. “No?” he fluted.

  “No,” she repeated, “I’m not ready. I need my attendants.”

  “Attendants? What attendants?”

  “I am a world-renowned artiste. I do not appear without my attendants.”

  “You do not have any attendants.”

  “I didn’t yesterday, but I do now. Gravelinghe and Thursby are my attendants.”

  “No, they are not. They were here before you. How could they be your attendants?”

  “They are my attendants because I made them my attendants. I am a world-renowned artiste. It disturbs me that I must keep reminding you of that. I can chose whomever I like to be my attendant. I like Gravelinghe and Thursby. Please get them, we’re late.”

  “You can’t have anyone with you.”

  “Then I’m not going.”

  “You must go! The Baudad has commanded it!”

  “So what?”

  “You will go to him whether you like it or not.”

  “I haven’t refused to see your famous Baudad. I have just refused to see him unattended.”

  “You saw him already, alone!”

  “That was a social call. It was perfectly proper. Now I am expected to perform. That makes everything different.”

  “You can’t have anyone in the Baudad’s chambers with you!” argued Bobasnyda and Rykkla recognized the capitulation; her mind’s eye smirked, if that is possible.

  “I don’t require them to be insepar
able, for heaven’s sake. Only to be in attendance. Even you ought to know that much. I have to tell you that I am thinking of mentioning your ignorance and poor memory to the Baudad. For the nonce, my attendants can await me outside the Baudad’s chambers.”

  The eunuch heaved an oboe--like sigh and agreed that the two other women could accompany Rykkla, but that they would have to wait in the anteroom until her audience was completed.

  “That will do,” said Rykkla. “I’m not just any female that some wandering band of halfwit soldiers happened to come across and picked up like a souvenir ashtray. The Baudad’s is not the first royal court before which I have performed, certainly not my first command performance generally speaking, by any means, and I am unaccustomed to anything less than the treatment due my status.”

  “Ummyess. Well, then, you are ready, provided that these other two . . . ”

  “Gravelinghe and Thursby.”

  “ . . . Gravelinghe and Thursby . . . are prepared to join you?”

  “Certainly.”

  Gravelinghe and Thursby were ready when Rykkla and Bobasnyda searched them out and, in fact, had been impatient with the delay.

  “We’ve been ready for an hour, Miss Woxen. Is there anything wrong?” asked Thursby with petulant formality.

  “Just Bobasnyda,” sighed Rykkla. “I will have to speak to the Baudad about his presumptiousness.”

  “I certainly would, if I were you, Miss Woxen,” sniffed the younger girl.

  A eunuch who was not only vastly annoyed but not a little apprehensive bid the three women to follow him and he led the now familiar way to the Baudad’s chambers. The quartet entered an anteroom where Bobasnyda instructed Gravelinghe and Thursby to wait.

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Rykkla, turning her back to the eunuch, facing her attendants. “Gravelinghe and Thursby . . . ”

  “Yes, Miss Woxen?”

  “You will await me until I return or until I otherwise require you.”

  “Yes, Miss Woxen.”

  “Now I am ready, Bobasnyda. You may announce me.”