“Rocket landing,” said Docchi when the allotted time passed. “Emergency instructions. Emergency instructions. Stand by.” Strictly speaking, that wasn’t necessary, for the frequency he was using assured him of complete control.
“All energized geepees lend assistance. This order supersedes previous orders. Additional equipment necessary.” After listing the equipment, he sat back and chuckled.
With his knee he turned on the external lights, got up and walked to the passenger lock, brushing against the switch. The airlock opened. He stood boldly at the threshold and looked out. The rocket dome was floodlighted by the ship.
“All right, Jordan, you can come down now,” he called.
Jordan appeared overhead, hanging from a beam. He swung along it until he reached a column, down which he descended. He propelled himself over the floor and up the ramp in his awkward fashion. Balancing on his hands, he gazed up at Docchi.
“Well, monster, how did you do it?”
“Monster yourself,” said Docchi. “Do what?”
“I saw you crawl in the rocket tubes,” said Jordan. “But what did you do after you got inside?”
“Cameron’s a medic,” said Docchi, “not mechanically inclined. He forgot that an emergency rocket landing cancels any verbal orders. So I took the ship up a few inches. Geepees aren’t very bright; that satisfied them that I was coming in for a landing. What Cameron should have done was splash some heat against a gravital unit, and then, having created an artificial emergency condition in the main dome, he could have directed the geepees from the gravity control center. After that, he would have had top priority, not me.”
“But they rushed off, carrying Cameron with them.” Jordan looked puzzled.
“Easy. I told the geepees that there was danger of crashing and that they must remove any human beings nearby, whether they were willing or not. You weren’t nearby and that let you out. They took Cameron because he was.”
“It’s ours!” breathed Jordan. “But what about Anti and Nona?”
“Anti’s taken care of. As far as the geepees are concerned, she comes under the heading of emergency landing material. They’ll bring her. Nona is supposed to be waiting with Anti.” Docchi frowned. “There’s nothing we can do if she isn’t. Meanwhile you’d better get ready to take the ship off.”
Jordan swung himself inside.
Docchi remained at the passenger lock, waiting. He heard the geepees first and saw them seconds later. They came into sight half pushing, half carrying a huge rectangular tank. With unexpected robotic ingenuity, they had mounted it on four of their smaller brethren, the squat repair robots, which served to support the tremendous weight.
The tank was filled with blue liquid. Twisted pipes dangled from the ends; it had been torn and lifted from its foundation. Broken plants still clung to the narrow ledge on top and moist soil adhered to the sides. Five geepees pushed it rapidly toward the ship, mechanically oblivious to the disheveled man who frustratedly shouted and struck at them.
“Jordan, open the freight lock.”
In response the ship rose a few more inches and hung quivering. A section of the ship hinged outward and downward to form a ramp. The ship was ready to take on cargo.
Docchi stood at his post. That damn fool Cameron should have stayed in the main dome where the geepees had released him. His presence added an unwelcome complication. Still, it should be easy enough to get rid of him when the time came.
It was Nona who really worried him. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He took an uncertain step down the ramp, came back, shaking his head. It was impossible to look for her now, though he wanted to.
The tank neared the ship. A few feet of it projected onto the ramp. The geepees stopped; their efforts lost momentum. They looked bewildered.
The tank rolled backward. The geepees shook, buzzed and looked around, primarily at Docchi. He didn’t wait any longer. He leaped into the ship.
“Close the passenger lock!” he shouted.
Jordan looked up questioningly from the controls.
“Vogel, the engineer,” explained Docchi. “He must have seen the geepees on scanning when they entered the main dome. He’s trying to do what Cameron should have done, but didn’t have enough sense to do.”
The passenger lock swung ponderously shut behind him.
“Now what?” Jordan asked, worried.
“First, let’s see what you can get on the telecom,” said Docchi.
The angle was impossible, so close to the ship, but they did manage to get a corner of the tank on the screen. Apparently it was resting where Docchi had last seen it, though it was difficult to be sure because the curve of the ship loomed so large.
“Maybe we’d better get out of here,” suggested Jordan nervously.
“Without the tank? Not a chance. Vogel hasn’t got complete control of them yet.” That seemed to be true. The geepees were nearly motionless, paralyzed.
“What shall I do?” asked Jordan.
“Give me full power on the radio,” said Docchi. “Burn it out if you have to. I think the engineer is at the wrong angle to broadcast much power to them. Besides, the intervening structure is absorbing most of his signal.”
He waited until Jordan had complied. “The tank must be placed in the ship,” he added.
Geepees were not designed to sift contradictory commands that were nearly at the same level of urgency. Their reasoning power was feeble, but the mechanism was complicated enough. In that respect they resembled humans. Borderline decisions were difficult.
“More power,” whispered Docchi.
Sweating, Jordan obeyed.
Marionettes. This string led toward a certain action. Another, intrinsically more important, but suddenly far less powerful, pulled for something else. Circuits burned within electronic brains. Micro-relays fluttered under the stress.
Choice.…
Stiffly the geepees moved and grasped the tank. The quality of decision, in this case, was strained. Inch by inch the tank rolled up the ramp.
“When it’s completely on, raise the ramp,” Docchi whispered to Jordan in an even lower voice.
One geepee wavered and fell. Motionless, it lay there. The remaining four were barely equal to the task.
“Now,” said Docchi.
The freight ramp began to rise. The tank picked up speed as it rolled into the ship.
“Geepees, save yourselves!” shouted Docchi.
They leaped from the ramp.
Jordan breathed deeply. “I don’t think they can hurt us now.”
Docchi nodded. “Get me ship-to-asteroid communication, if there’s any radio left.”
“There is.” Jordan made the adjustment.
“Vogel, we’re going out. Give us the proper sequence and save the dome some damage.”
There was no reply.
“He’s trying to bluff,” said Jordan. “He knows the airlocks to the main dome will automatically close if we do break through.”
“Sure,” said Docchi. “Everyone in the main dome is safe, if everyone is in there. Vogel, we’ll give you time to think about that.”
Jordan gave him the time until it hurt, waiting. Meanwhile he flipped on the telecom and searched the rocket dome. Nothing was moving; no geepee was in sight. Docchi watched the screen with interest. What he thought didn’t show on his face.
Still there was no reply from Vogel.
“All right,” Docchi said in a low, hard voice. “Jordan, take it out. Hit the shell with the bow of the rocket.”
The ship hardly quivered as it ripped through the transparent covering of the rocket dome. The worst sound was unheard: the hiss of air escaping through the great hole in the envelope.
Jordan sat at the controls, gripping the levers. “I couldn’t tell,” he said slowly. “It happened too fast for me to be sure. Maybe Vogel did have the inner shell out of the way. In that event, it’s all right because it would close immediately. The outer shell is supposed to be self-sealing, but
I doubt if it could handle that much damage.”
He twisted the lever and the ship leaped forward.
“Cameron I don’t mind. He had enough time to get out if he wanted to. But I keep thinking that Nona might be in there.”
Docchi avoided his eyes. There was no light at all in his face. He walked away.
Jordan rocked back and forth. The hemisphere that held what remained of his body was well suited for that. He set the auto-controls and reduced the gravity to one-quarter Earth normal. He bent his great arms and shoved himself into the air, deftly catching hold of a guide rail. He would have to go with Docchi. But not at the moment. He felt bad.
That is, he did until he saw a light blinking at a cabin door. He had to investigate that first.
* * * *
Jordan caught up before Docchi reached the cargo hold. In the lesser gravity of the ship Jordan was truly at home.
Docchi turned and waited for him. Jordan still carried the weapon he had taken from the pilot. It was clipped to the sacklike garment he wore, dangling from his midsection, which, for him was just below his shoulders. Down the corridor he flew, swinging from the guide rails lightly, though gravity on the ship was as erratic as on the asteroid.
Docchi braced himself. Locomotion was not so easy for him.
Jordan halted beside him and dangled from one hand. “We have another passenger.”
Docchi stiffened. “Who?”
“I could describe her,” said Jordan. “But why, when a name will do at least as well?”
“Nona!” said Docchi. He slumped in sudden relief against the wall. “How did she get in the ship?”
“A good question,” said Jordan. “Remind me to ask her that sometime when she’s able to answer. But since I don’t know, I’ll have to use my imagination. My guess is that, after she jammed the lights and scanners in the rocket dome, she walked to the ship and tapped the passenger lock three times in the right places, or something just as improbable. The lock opened for her whether it was supposed to or not.”
“As good a guess as any,” agreed Docchi.
“We may as well make our assumptions complete. Once inside, she felt tired. She found a comfortable cabin and fell asleep in it. She remained asleep throughout our skirmish with the geepees.”
“She deserves a rest,” said Docchi.
“She does. But if she had waited a few minutes to take it, she’d have saved you the trouble of crawling through the tubes.”
“She did her part and more,” Docchi argued. “We depend too much on her. Next we’ll expect her to escort us personally to the stars.” He straightened up. “Let’s go. Anti is waiting for us.”
The cargo hold was sizable. It had to be to contain the tank, battered and twisted though it was. Equipment had been jarred from storage racks and lay in tangled heaps on the floor.
“Anti!” called Docchi.
“Here.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Never felt a thing,” came the cheerful reply.
* * * *
Jordan scaled the side of the tank. He reached the top and peered over. “She seems all right,” he called down. “Part of the acid’s gone. Otherwise no damage.”
Damage enough, however. Acid was a matter of life for Anti. It had been splashed from the tank and, where it had spilled, metal was corroding rapidly. The wall against which the tank had crashed was bent and partly eaten through. That was no reason for alarm; the scavenging system of the ship would handle acid. The real question was what to do for Anti.
“I’ve stewed in this soup for years,” said Anti. “Get me out of here.”
“How?”
“If you weren’t as stupid as doctors pretend to be, you’d know how. No gravity, of course. I’ve got muscles, more than you think. I can walk as long as my bones don’t break from the weight.”
No gravity would be rough on Docchi; having no arms, he would be virtually helpless. The prospect of floating free without being able to grasp something was terrifying.
“As soon as we can manage it,” he said, forcing down his fear. “First we’ve got to drain and store the acid.”
Jordan had anticipated that. He’d swung off the tank and was busy expelling the water from an auxiliary compartment into space. As soon as the compartment was empty, he led a hose from it to the tank.
The pumps sucked and the acid level fell slowly.
Docchi felt the ship lurch familiarly. “Hurry,” he called out to Jordan.
The gravital unit was acting up. Presumably it was getting ready to cut out. If it did—well, a free-floating globe of acid would be as destructive to the ship and those in it as a high velocity meteor cluster.
Jordan jammed the lever as far as it would go and held it there. “All out,” said Jordan presently, and let the hose roll back into the wall. Done in plenty of time. The gravital unit remained in operation for a full minute.
As soon as she was weightless, Anti rose out of the tank.
In all the time Docchi had known her, he had seen no more than a face framed in blue acid. Periodic surgery, where it was necessary, had trimmed the flesh from her face. For the rest, she lived submerged in a corrosive liquid that destroyed the wild tissue as fast as it grew. Or nearly as fast.
Docchi averted his eyes.
“Well, junkman, look at a real monster,” snapped Anti.
* * * *
Humans were not meant to grow that large. But it was not obscene to Docchi, merely unbelievable. Jupiter is not repulsive because it is the bulging giant of planets; it is overwhelming, and so was Anti.
“How will you live out of the acid?” he stammered.
“How really unobservant some men are,” said Anti loftily. “I anticipated our little journey and prepared for it. If you look closely, you will notice I have on a special surgery robe. It’s the only thing in the Solar System that will fit me. It’s fabricated from a spongelike substance and holds enough acid to last me about thirty-six hours.”
She grasped a rail and propelled herself toward the corridor. Normally that was a spacious passageway. For her it was a close fit.
Satellites, one glowing and the other swinging in an eccentric orbit, followed after her.
* * * *
Nona was standing before the instrument panel when they came back. There was an impressive array of dials, lights and levers in front of her, but she wasn’t interested in these. A single small dial, separate from the rest, held her complete attention. She seemed disturbed by what she saw or didn’t see. Disturbed or excited, it was difficult to say which.
Anti stopped. “Look at her. If I didn’t know she’s a freak like the rest of us, the only one, in fact, who was born that way, it would be easy to hate her—she’s so disgustingly normal.”
Normal? True and yet not true. Surgical techniques that could take a body apart and put it back together again with a skill once reserved for the repair of machines had made beauty commonplace. No more sagging muscles, wrinkles; even the aged were attractive and youthful-seeming until the day they died. No more ill-formed limbs, misshapen bodies. Everyone was handsome or beautiful. No exceptions.
None to speak of, at least.
The accidentals didn’t belong, of course. In another day most of them would have been candidates for a waxworks or the formaldehyde of a specimen bottle.
Nona fitted neither category; she wasn’t a repair job. Looking at her closely—and why not?—she was an original work as far from the normal in one direction as Anti, for example, was in the other.
“Why is she staring at the little dial?” asked Anti as the others slipped past her and came into the compartment. “Is there something wrong with it?” She shrugged. “I would be interested in the big dials. The ones with colored lights.”
“That’s Nona.” Docchi smiled. “I’m sure she’s never been in the control room of a rocket before, and yet she went straight to the most curious thing in it. She’s looking at the gravital indicator. Directly behind it is the gravital
unit.”
“How do you know? Does it say so?”
“It doesn’t. You have to be trained to recognize it, or else be Nona.”
Anti dismissed that intellectual feat. “What are you waiting for? You know she can’t hear us. Go stand in front of her.”
“How do I get there?” Docchi had risen a few inches from the floor, now that Jordan had released him from his grip.
“A good engineer would have enough sense to put on magneslippers. Nona did.” Anti grasped his jacket. How she was able to move was uncertain. The tissues that surrounded the woman were too vast to permit the perception of individual motions. Nevertheless, she proceeded to the center of the compartment, and with her came Docchi.
Nona turned before they reached her.
“My poor boy,” sighed Anti. “You do a very bad job of concealing your emotions, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Anyway, stop glowing like a rainbow and say something.”
“Hello,” said Docchi.
Nona smiled at him, though it was Anti that she came to.
“No, not too close, child. Don’t touch the surgery robe unless you want your pretty face to peel off like a plastiwrapper.”
Nona stopped; she said nothing.
Anti shook her head hopelessly. “I wish you would learn to read lips or at least recognize written words. It’s so difficult to communicate with you.”
“She knows facial expressions and actions, I think,” said Docchi. “She’s good at emotions. Words are a foreign concept to her.”
“What other concepts does anyone think with?” asked Anti dubiously.
“Maybe mathematical relationships,” answered Docchi. “Though she doesn’t. They’ve tested her for that.” He frowned. “I don’t know what concepts she does think with. I wish I did.”
“Save some of that worry and apply it to our present situation,” said Anti. “The object of your concern doesn’t seem to be interested in it.”
That was true. Nona had wandered back and was staring at the gravital indicator again. What she saw to hold her attention was a puzzle.
In some ways she seemed irresponsible and childlike. That was an elusive thought, though: whose child? Not really, of course. Her parents were obscure technicians and mechanics, descendants of a long line of mechanics and technicians. The question he had asked himself was this: where and how does she belong? He couldn’t answer.
The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 10