A Day for Damnation twatc-2

by David Gerrold

  Duke moaned when I moved him, but he didn't awaken. The console suggested that I give him another bottle of glucose and I did.

  As I settled him in, I noticed that the pink luminescence in the tail of the ship was growing stronger. I glanced up at the bubble. The morning sun was pouring directly down on us; I could see it as a brighter spot beyond the seething pink. I could even feel its warmth.

  The layer of powder on the hemisphere of Plexiglas was growing noticeably thinner beneath the hungry insect-things. This cotton candy stuff was incredibly transparent to light. I could see the swarming bugs as darker bits ceaselessly churning and swirling. I wondered what they were.

  But I didn't want Duke to wonder about it if he woke up and saw them. I pulled the shutter closed.

  Lizard was busying herself with the shelterfoam. She wasn't paying any attention to me. So I took a moment to apologize to Duke. I peeled open a sani-pak and started cleaning his face with a moist towel. "I'm sorry, Duke," I whispered. "I'll get you out of here, I promise-" I wiped the dirt from his forehead.

  "McCarthy..." he mumbled.

  "Yes, Duke?"

  "Shut up."

  "Yes, Duke!"

  But he was asleep again. I didn't care. He was going to live-I knew it!

  I scrambled forward to tell Lizard. "Duke's going to make it!"

  "How do you know?"

  "He growled at me. He told me to shut up."

  Lizard grinned. "Sounds like good advice. Here-" She thrust a tank into my arms. "The weak spots will be mostly under the floor, where we hit. Especially where we broke the keel. You'll need to empty each compartment, then foam it. Just point the nozzle and press."

  "Does this stuff make fumes?"

  "No, it's jellied Styrofoam. It's safe. You do the cabin, I'll get under the controls. I want to open the floorboards and get the nose-wheel compartment. If the bugs get in there, they could get into the circuit-pipes or the hydraulics or underneath the insulation. You ever spray for cockroaches?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then you know." She looked over my shoulder and lowered her voice. "Better pay special attention to the tail. You might just want to make a big cocoon back there."

  I followed her glance. Duke. I realized how helpless he was. "Yeah. I see your point."

  "Any questions?"

  "No. "

  "All right, let's go to work."

  "Uh-"

  She stopped. "Yes?"

  "I just had a thought, Colonel." She waited patiently.

  "What if these bugs eat Styrofoam too?"

  "Will you stop thinking-" she said. "You're scaring the hell out of me."

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT TOOK us most of the morning.

  Lizard stopped only to check in with Oakland and relay a datachirp from the medi-console. Then she plunged back into her task. She opened up the whole floor of the nose of the ship and filled it with foam before replacing the deck panels.

  By then, I had finished foaming the cargo compartments and had begun outlining every seam of the interior paneling. Lizard came back to join me. We set our nozzles for narrow jets and sprayed every corner, every crack, every seam, every seal on the interior of that ship. When we finished, the chopper looked like the inside of a wedding cake.

  By the time we sat down in the nose of the ship again, the sun was high above us. And the chopper was starting to get warm. We could barely see the sun through the wall of pale powder, but we could feel its heat. I felt trapped.

  And my body hurt worse than ever. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I was keeping an O-mask close now, and taking frequent breaths from it. It seemed to help. A little.

  I forced myself to concentrate on the scientific opportunity here. The front window was a bright pink glare. It flickered with a million tiny insect bodies. They were crawling all over it, but they were thickest near the bottom, where the pink powder was still piled up in drifts. It made me feel itchy just to look at them. I thought about a hot bath, one with hundreds of little pulsing jets, all throbbing in a steady underwater massage. I decided not to share that image with Colonel Tirelli.

  "Brr!" she said. "I can't stand to look at them. What do you think they are anyway?"

  "The Chtorran equivalent of ants maybe," I said. "But I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think we've scratched the surface of this ecology. Remember Dr. Zymph and her jigsaw-puzzle analogy?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, I think we're still at the point where we're just looking into the box. We still haven't dumped it out. We still don't even know how big the puzzle is or how many pieces there are. We just know there are a lot and none of them seems to make sense." I sipped at a water bulb and watched the seething mass of insects on the windscreen in front of me.

  "I hate that analogy," Lizard said. "It's got too much can't in it."

  "Yeah," I agreed.

  Lizard picked up her headset and flicked the radio on. "Oakland?"

  "Go ahead," said the radio.

  "This is ELDAVO. Checking in. Our situation is unchanged. Except the bugs are getting closer."

  "We copy, Colonel."

  "Is there an estimate yet when someone can come and get us?"

  "Nope. Sorry. Satellite shows that whole area is still hazy. The best we can do is pull a blimp out of Portland and let it glide over you."

  "That's a little desperate, isn't it?"

  "You want to wait a week for pickup?"

  Lizard rolled her eyes. "Get the blimp."

  "Oh, we do have some good news for you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Your patient is stable."

  "Uh huh. And what are you not telling me?"

  "Beg pardon?"

  "Stable can mean a lot of things. How bad are his injuries?"

  "Uh-is this line secure?"

  Lizard looked at me, looked back at Duke. "Is he still asleep?" she whispered. I looked and nodded. Lizard said to the radio, "Go ahead."

  "Uh-we're getting some funny readings off his legs. Like static. But we don't think it's infection. The monitor shows the antibiotics are holding. Maybe it's some effect of the dust. We won't know for sure until we get him home. Other than that, he's fine. Avoid moving him. We'll try and have a corpsman on the pickup vehicle."

  "Oh, shit," I said.

  "I copy," Lizard said. "Any more good news?"

  "Well ... it's official as of ten o'clock. The President's going to run again."

  "Thanks. Do we get the ball scores too?"

  "Dodgers lead the Braves, top of the third, two-nothing."

  "Over and out." She hung up and looked at me. "What are you so unhappy about? You an Atlanta fan?"

  "No, I'm worried about Duke." I started crawling toward the back.

  "Didn't you hear? Oakland says he's doing fine."

  "Yeah, I heard. They also said the Dodgers are winning." I sat down next to Duke. He'd been out all day. I didn't know if that was a blessing or not. Was it better to be unconscious-or in pain? If they didn't pick us up soon, there wouldn't be a choice. We were running out of supplies.

  I looked at the medi-console. It was almost time to change his IV. We had plenty of antibiotics left-those were the blue ampules-but we were on the next-to-last bubble of glucose. I wondered what I could do when that ran out. These choppers were equipped only for basic first aid. The assumption was that the patient would be in transit and wouldn't be on the medi-console for long.

  The real question was the red ampule. The painkiller. There was only one left in the kit. And I'd heard that burn wounds were the most agonizing....

  I reached for the medi-blanket, hesitated, then pulled it back and looked at Duke's legs.

  They were burned and peeling. The flesh was blistered and scabbed.

  And then I looked again. Duke's legs were-dusty. No. They were covered with a light pink fuzz. What the-?

  I stretched a finger out, carefully, and touched Duke's ankle. The fuzz didn't brush away. It was growing out of his skin.

  And it tingle
d. Like worm fur.

  I sat down with my back against the hull of the ship and my knees up in front of me. I put my fists up to my mouth and sucked thoughtfully through them, all the while staring at Duke's legs, and trying to figure out just what the hell was going on.

  I hardly noticed when Lizard came back to join me. She looked at Duke's legs and her face went gray. She pulled the medi-blanket over them again and looked at me with a question in her eyes.

  I shrugged. "I don't know."

  She picked up the medi-console and studied it. The answer wasn't there either.

  I looked across at her. "How long before we know? I mean-if the foam is going to hold?"

  She shrugged. "An hour. Maybe less."

  "What if he wakes up? Do you think we should tell him?" Lizard opened her mouth to say something.

  But Duke interrupted. "Tell me what-?" he said.

  "Duke! You're awake."

  "I've been awake for some time. Listening to you birds jabbering. What'd you drug me with anyway? My legs itch."

  Lizard shot me a concerned glance. Duke didn't see it. I said, "I don't know the name of it. It's the red cartridge."

  "Oh," he said. "Where are we?"

  "Near Red Bluff. As soon as the weather clears, they'll be coming to get us."

  "The weather?"

  "The dust."

  "Is it still coming down?"

  "No." And then I added, "But-we're buried. And there's haze."

  Duke's face was puffy, but I could still see his eyes narrowing as he looked back and forth between me and the bag. "The light in here is pink," he said. "How deep is this shit?"

  "Up to our ears, Duke." That was Lizard.

  "Mmm," he said. "Then don't make waves."

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Cloudy." He reached up and grabbed my sleeve. "Jim?"

  "Yes, Duke?"

  "Do me a favor."

  "Name it."

  "Pull the red cartridge. Take me off the sleepytime."

  "Sorry, Boss. No can do. Anything but that."

  "I can handle the pain. I want to be awake."

  "I can't! It's procedure! It might kill you!".

  "Jim-" He coughed and for a moment I was terrified. It sounded like a death rattle. "Jim-will you pull that cartridge?"

  "No, Duke, I won't."

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. I had almost started to think that he had gone back to sleep when he opened them again. When he spoke, his voice was very faint.

  "Jim?"

  "Yes, Duke?" He was fading fast, I had to put my face close. It came out a whisper. "Then fuck you...." His eyes closed and he fell asleep again.

  Lizard looked up from the console. "The machine put him out. He was straining."

  "He hates drugs. I'm going to have a lot of apologizing to do." I realized what I'd said and looked up at her. "Sorry. Force of habit."

  She didn't smile. "There's something else you want to watch out for."

  "Huh?"

  "You could have pulled that cartridge, you know."

  I shook my head. "No, I couldn't. It's those bugs. If we're going to be eaten alive, he's better off not knowing."

  Lizard looked at me sharply. "That's what I'm talking about. That kind of thinking is the first step."

  "What kind of thinking?"

  "Making other people's decisions for them. The next step is deciding whether or not they should continue living. And you know where that leads. I seem to remember you had a button on that."

  "Yeah, well-" I stood up and climbed into the turret above Duke. "It's different when you're the person who has to do the deciding, isn't it?"

  She didn't say anything immediately. She just studied me with an introspective look on her face.

  Finally I glanced down at her. "Well, go ahead. Say it."

  She shook her head slowly. "I don't have to. You already know what I would say."

  "No, I don't."

  "Yes, you do."

  "God!" I said. "I hate conversations like this."

  She sighed. "It's not important. I just wondered if you would have accepted that justification?"

  I didn't answer. I turned away from her and pulled the shutter back. I stared at the uneasy surface of the bubble. The creatures were more active than ever in the afternoon sunlight. I could feel the sweat dripping down my sides. I didn't want to continue this conversation any more. I knew she was right.

  And my chest hurt worse than ever.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WASN'T until late afternoon that the bugs finally cleaned off the turret bubble well enough so I could see them clearly.

  The sunlight was slanting directly into the rear of the chopper and there were only pink streaks left on the clear canopy of the bubble to suggest that the ship had once been covered with the dust.

  The insect-things were very tiny. Most of them were nothing more than little white specks. Few were big enough to have features. I had to strain my eyes to see them at all.

  I called to Lizard, "Have you got a surveillance camera?"

  "I've got a couple of electronics."

  "That'll do. Let me have one, please."

  She passed it up.

  "Ah, good-it's a Sony. For once the army didn't buy cheap. I'll show you a trick I learned. You can dial these down for incredible closeups. We used to use them in school as portable microscopes." I braced myself and focused the camera on the insect-things on the surface of the bubble. The lighting was perfect. The afternoon sunlight was coming in sideways. The detailing on the image was perfect. The little bugs were white and powdery and-when the instant of recognition hit me, I felt my relief like a shot of Irish whiskey.

  I started giggling. "What's so funny?"

  I closed the shutter and dropped out of the bubble. I was laughing so hard I started coughing. I had to sit down on the floor of the chopper to catch my breath. I hadn't realized how tense and anxious I'd been. Now, it was all pouring out of me at once.

  "McCarthy!" Lizard was getting annoyed. "What is it?"

  "Come on up front, I'll show you." The bugs were clearly visible at the top of the windscreen. I handed her the camera. "Look-do you recognize them?"

  She peered up at the windshield through the eyepiece. "No."

  "You should. You saw Dr. Zymph's slides."

  "Will you just tell me what they are?"

  "Those are baby pipe cleaner bugs! They are absolutely harmless to human beings! These and the cotton candy are the only two Chtorran species that are not directly dangerous to us-and we've been hiding here in the chopper terrified all day! By tomorrow morning, they'll have cleaned this entire ship off. There won't be a speck of pink anywhere on this aircraft." I sat down in the copilot's seat again, feeling terrific, a big silly smile on my face. "We're going to be all right."

  Lizard sat down across from me, looking relieved and relaxed for the first time today. "We're really not in any danger?"

  "Not in the slightest. I feel like such a jerk."

  Lizard laughed. "We should celebrate. You want a beer?"

  "You got more beer?"

  "That cooler by your feet."

  I pulled the top open. "Jeez-you don't travel light, do you?"

  She spread her hands apologetically. "You never can tell when you're going to be buried in cotton candy. Hand me one, thanks." We sat back in our seats and watched the bugs work on the windshield. We passed the camera back and forth.

  Lizard said, "You're a biologist, aren't you?"

  "I never got my degree."

  "That wasn't the question."

  "All right, yes, I'm as much a biologist as anyone is these days."

  "Thanks. So, tell me-what s going on?"

  "I can make a guess. The pipe cleaner bugs hatch on the same day as the puffballs explode. The puffballs are their primary food."

  "But why so many? The scale of this-it's enormous."

  "Uh huh," I agreed. "It's a good breeding strategy for bugs. Have zillions of offspring. That guarante
es that enough will survive to breed the next generation." Another thought occurred to me then. "Of course ... that's a Terran explanation. The Chtorran explanation could be something else entirely."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Just a guess. Remember how Dr. Zymph said that what we were seeing was really the advance guard-that some extraterrestrial agency was obviously trying to Chtorra-form this planet?"

  "Yeah, so?"

  "Well, I've been thinking. Suppose we humans were going to Terra-form Mars or some other nearby world. Would we take our entire ecology? Probably not. No, we'd only take those creatures suited for the kind of climate and terrain we'd be moving into. In fact, we wouldn't even take the full spectrum of creatures, we'd only fill the ecological niches that we need to support our own survival. "

  "What are you getting at?"

  "Okay-we'd take a couple species of grass and grain, earthworms, rabbits, foxes to keep the rabbits in check, cows, ducks, chickens, and so on. That is, we'd take only those species immediately useful to us. We wouldn't bother with mosquitoes, termites, rhinoceroses, or three-toed sloths. I'll bet the Chtorrans have done the same thing. That's why the puffballs and the pipe cleaner bugs have experienced population explosions. There aren't the usual wide range of predators present to feed on them. At least not yet. Maybe they'll be here later."

  "Mm," said Lizard. She took a drink from the can of beer, then leaned forward and tapped the window. "What's this?" she asked. She was pointing at a larger, darker speck.

  I looked. The speck was round and black and very busy. "That's the creature that feeds on the baby pipe cleaner bugs," I said.

  "Well that didn't take long," she said. "There's your first predator." She peered through the camera. "It looks like a spider-only it's got too many legs."

  "If it's Chtorran, it's a mouth on wheels. Here's another. And another. It's nearly dusk-the night feeders are coming out. I'll bet we'll be seeing a lot more of them."

  "And this?" pointed Lizard. "What are these?" She passed me the camera.