by James White
"Understood, sir," said Walters. "But we would like a sample of Ship's air before we leave. Five minutes should do it."
McCullough was beginning to feel irritable and very tired and he did want the chance to analyze as soon as possible whatever atmosphere it was that the aliens breathed. But the thought kept recurring to him that he was not being very cautious about this, that he was breaking even his own rules, and that fatigue was a little like drunkenness in that it made people take chances.
Walters opened the corridor seal and the alien air roared into the lock chamber. Their suits lost their taut, puffy appearance and hung loosely against their bodies. Ship pressure seemed to be a pound or two per square inch higher than suit pressure, McCullough thought as he took the sample. The pilot was moving toward the open seal.
"I'm only going to take a look," said Walters.
McCullough joined him.
There was only one source of light in the corridor, the one switched on by Walters, so that both ends disappeared into blackness. But suddenly McCullough felt the wall netting vibrate and -- something -- was shooting toward them along the corridor . . .
McCullough flung himself back, but Walters, who had a leg and arm outside the rim at the time, fumbled and was slower getting in. The doctor had a glimpse of something rushing past the opening, something which looked a little like a heavy, leathery starfish, then Walters reached the lock actuator and the seal slammed closed.
The pilot remained floating with one hand gripping the actuator lever and the other resting ludicrously on his hip. His face was white and sweating and his eyes were squeezed shut.
"It can't get in, now -- we're safe -- " began McCullough, then stopped.
Walters was not safe. There was a large, triangular tear in the fabric of his suit at the right hip. The undergarment showed through it, also a section of the air-conditioning system looking strangely like a bared artery, although the leg itself did not appear to be injured.
The pilot was trying to hold the tear closed with his hand. But it was too big, the edges were too ragged and the pressure difference was too great to keep the alien atmosphere from forcing its way into his suit.
He began to cough.
chapter eight
More than anything else he had ever wanted in his whole life, McCullough wanted out. Never before had the cramped and stinking confines of the command module seemed so desirable and secure. And P-Two was drifting less than a hundred yards away, with Berryman on watch ready to help him inside and take him away from this suddenly frightful place. All he had to do was operate one childishly simple lever.
It would mean evacuating the chamber, of course. Walters would die of explosive decompression. But the pilot was strangling to death in an alien atmosphere anyway and the other might be quicker and more merciful .
Except that Berryman might not want to leave without Walters, and explosive decompression was not a nice way to die, and in his student days McCullough had been pretty thoroughly conditioned against mercy killing . . .
"Doctor," said Walters between coughs, "do you have -- a band-aid on you?"
"What?" said McCullough, then added with feeling, "Dammit, I'm stupid!"
A length of adhesive with its washable plastic backing would not hold the tear together in vacuo, but with pressure almost equal between chamber and suit interior it would act as a barrier to the entry of the alien air all around them -- for a time, at least. Quickly McCullough took a dressing from his kit and pressed the edges of the tear together while Walters rubbed on the tape.
When they were finished McCullough said, "How do you feel? Any pain in the chest? Nausea? Impairment of vision . . . ?"
Walters shook his head. Almost strangling himself with his effort not to cough, he said, "The -- the smell is like ammonia -- or formaldehyde. Strong and sharp but not -- a stinking smell. But you'd better tell the colonel."
McCullough nodded and laid his antenna against the metal wall.
The colonel interrupted him only once to ask what the pilot had been doing out in the corridor, then he told McCullough to continue with his report without trying to make excuses for Walters' stupidity. The doctor did so, spending less time on the incident itself than on the problems it had raised.
"Can you tie off the leg section tightly enough to avoid a lethal pressure drop for the few minutes it will take to get him back to P-Two? It would mean decompressing the leg, of course, but that would be better than . . ."
"No, sir. The tear is high on the left hip. We can't evacuate the chamber while he is in it, and I can't leave and nobody from outside can enter unless . . ."
". . . Unless Walters goes back into the corridor while the chamber is airless. Ask him how he feels about doing that."
The pilot's reply had to be edited and censored considerably. McCullough said, "He'll do it, but he doesn't feel too enthusiastic."
Morrison refused to comment on Walters' feelings. He said, "That takes care of your return, but getting him back to P-Two means putting him in another suit . . ."
There were several good reasons why the P-ships did not carry spare spacesuits. Quite apart from the extra weight and stowage requirements involved, there was the fact that a spacesuit had to be literally tailored to fit its wearer, and this would have meant carrying a spare for every member of the expedition. As well, damage to a suit usually meant death for its wearer, so that repairs were not even considered. In any case, repairing a suit was a specialist's job requiring facilities not available on the ships.
"Both Hollis and Berryman are close to Walters in size," the colonel went on, "and Berryman is closest in distance. I'll shoot Drew across to you. While he's on the way, Berryman can place his suit in P-Two's airlock. Drew will pick it up and deliver it to you for Walters and collect your air sample.
"You, Doctor, will stay with Walters to see that his seals are tight and the suit isn't strained dangerously by forcing the fit. As well as losing one of our trained pilots, we can't afford to write off another suit. What is his condition now?"
Walters had his antenna in contact with the plating, listening. He tried to speak, broke into a fit of coughing, and made a rude gesture instead.
McCullough translated, "He has a persistent cough which may be due to throat irritation only. There are no other respiratory symptoms, no chest pain and no detectable toxic affects. His morale is good." The doctor did not know these things with any degree of certainty -- his optimism was mostly for his patient's benefit. But just in case the colonel did not realize what McCullough was doing, he added quickly, "But I'd like to give him a thorough checkup in shirt-sleeve conditions as soon as possible."
A little later Morrison told them Drew was on his way and that he was moving his own ship in to join P-Two. Tactically this was not a good move, he said, but on this occasion tactics and common sense seemed to be at variance, and in any case they could pull out quickly if it became necessary.
"And go home?" asked McCullough.
"I don't know, Doctor. There are other considerations."
As the period of high drama, the first and unfortunately violent contact with the aliens passed, the colonel began to worry over the possibility that Prometheus Control had not faded out the networks during the incident with Walters and the alien. Aware suddenly of a possible audience, they became laconic to the point of sounding ridiculous. Stiffly, the colonel wished Walters good luck. Walters said, "Thanks." Berryman suggested McCullough should make a sketch of the alien from memory while they were waiting on Drew. Morrison said it was a good idea, just in case. Nobody asked in case of what.
During the twenty minutes or so it took for Drew to reach them -- in subjective time it felt more like ten years -- McCullough sketched the alien and made a map of the vicinity of their lock chamber. While doing so he discovered a leak in one of the pipe joints. Probably the repeated opening and closing of the seal had put an unfair strain on the hydraulic system -- the joint was sweating and droplets of a clear brownish liquid hun
g around it, steaming faintly.
McCullough hoped nothing calamitous would happen when the chamber was evacuated.
Drew arrived, checked by radio on the operation of the lock, then waited while McCullough opened the inner seal and entered the corridor with Walters. As the air rushed out of the chamber and Drew swam in, a fogginess appeared around the leaking joint, but nothing else seemed to be happening.
There were no aliens visible in the lighted section of corridor.
"If one of them comes at us," McCullough told Walters, "I'll hang onto the net and kick at it with both feet. You concentrate on holding that patch in position."
He was beginning to feel that the pilot's trouble had been his own rather than Walters' fault.
The leak in the lock's hydraulic system was bothering him. It was almost certainly a recent malfunction. There was a strong probability that it had occurred because the seal actuator mechanism had been recently overstressed. McCullough had forgotten how many times exactly they had opened and closed the thing, something like seventeen or eighteen times in as many minutes, while the chances were that normal usage was in the order of twice a day.
He was assuming, of course, that these were not omnipotent aliens and that their ship might occasionally develop mechanical faults. Such failures would show in their control center and a member of the crew might be sent to check on it, or perhaps to deal with the real cause of the trouble -- the human invaders. McCullough was coming to realize that their actions, which had been meant simply to advertise their presence on board, could just as well be construed as criminally irresponsible or wantonly destructive. In these circumstances a certain amount of hostility on the part of the aliens would be understandable.
People who leaned over backward, McCullough thought grimly, frequently fell flat on their face . . .
"Walters. Doctor." Drew's voice came suddenly. "The colonel sent you a weapon of sorts. To be used only in self-defense, he says. Grip it in the middle and stab with it like a spear."
McCullough looked up and down the still empty corridor, then into the chamber. He said, "It's just a length of pipe."
"A blunt bayonet makes a worse mess than a sharp one," Drew said cheerfully, "and a length of one-inch pipe is about as blunt as a weapon can get. Just take time to aim and jab hard -- I guarantee it will discourage any man or beastie not wearing a suit of armor. I'm leaving now. Good luck . . ."
A few seconds later he was blown through the outer door by escaping air, and another eternity passed while he jetted back to the hull and closed it again. Walters and McCullough re-entered the chamber, still without alien interference.
The problem now was to get Walters out of his damaged suit and into the replacement quickly enough to keep him from being gassed. McCullough started by opening the pilot's face-plate, taping up his nostrils and making him breathe slowly through his oxygen line. Then he wrapped his legs around the pilot's waist and began cutting away the damaged suit.
It was hard, painstaking work. The plastic and metal foil was difficult to cut with a scalpel and McCullough was all too aware of the skin and blood vessels lying just a fraction of an inch below. The drying unit in his own suit refused to cope with the increased flow of perspiration, his visor was fogging badly despite its special coating, and he wasn't dissipating nearly enough of his body heat.
This would be a great time to pass out from heat stroke.
Quickly he slit the legs, arms and chest, peeling them away to leave only the shoulder section which contained the air supply and hinged-back helmet. There followed a weightless adagio dance and he drew the new suit onto the pilot's legs and arms while the tatters of the old one hung out from his back. Walters could not give him much help because the alien atmosphere was making his eyes stream and no matter how hard he tried he could not stop coughing -- which drew more of the stuff into his lungs. By the time he told Walters to hyperventilate and hold his breath while the changeover was completed, McCullough was afraid that he had already breathed in too much of it.
Finally they were ready to leave. The discarded suit twisted slowly, like some shredded, dismembered corpse, in the mist which was growing visibly in the area of the leak. McCullough wondered what the aliens would make of it, what they would infer and deduce regarding the human race. The thought made him look toward the transparent panel in the door.
There were three of them.
McCullough pushed himself toward the corridor door without thinking -- the reason for doing it seemed to come after the action rather than before. To Walters he said quickly, "If they open that door the outer one won't open -- there's sure to be a safety interlock system -- and if they see us trying to leave they will surely open it. I'll move close to the window and block their view while you open the outer seal -- the suction will pull us out. Where's that blasted pipe?"
He couldn't see it. Probably it was hiding in plain sight against a background of Ship plumbing, a tree hiding in a forest.
His idea was to hold their attention somehow while blocking their view of what Walters was doing. To do so he had to get close to the transparent door panel and either arouse their interest or frighten them away. McCullough did not know of anything he could do which would prove fascinating to the aliens, but he just might be able to worry them a little with his camera.
It was a beautiful instrument which fairly bristled with supplementary lenses and attachments. It might very easily be mistaken for a weapon.
In some deep recess of his mind a small voice was reminding him insistently of the need to consider the alien point of view, and to do nothing to give them the wrong idea about humanity and human behavior. McCullough felt a moment's shame, but he was really much too frightened to listen.
There was no perceptible reaction from the e-t's as McCullough drifted up to the window, still aiming his camera. One of them was drifting in the center of the corridor, a stubby, dumbbell shape covered with long spikes. Each half of its body was roughly the size of a football, and there were no sensory or manipulatory organs visible. A second alien clung to the opposite wall net like a great, fleshy spider, giving him a perfect view of the starfish body with its thick tentacles and leathery tegument. The tentacles ended in bony pincers, like white, miniature elephant tusks. McCullough estimated its physical mass to be approximately half that of a man, with the tentacle length between four and five feet.
The third alien was of the same species as number Two. It covered part of the window with its body so that McCullough and his camera had a perfect view of its underbelly, which was soft and pinkish-brown and convoluted into folds and openings which were evidently mouths or gills or sensory equipment of some kind, all grouped around a large, sharp, centrally placed horn or sting . . .
McCullough swallowed hard. He thought that on the purely physical evidence these were not nice people.
Then suddenly the aliens began to move. McCullough still wasn't sure where their eyes were, but somehow he knew that their focus of attention had changed. Something was approaching along the corridor. He could not get his eyes close enough to the window to see, although he could hear low, gobbling sounds being transmitted through the metal of the door to his helmet. Quickly he stopped down his lens and aimed it along the dark corridor. It had a wider angle of view and might see more than he could.
The first three aliens were leaving.
Walters opened the outer seal at that moment and the rush of escaping air drew him away from the door, spinning him slowly end over end. But not before he had a glimpse of something covered with white fur, or perhaps clothing, which flicked past the window.
chapter nine
"I feel an awful fool," said McCullough, looking apologetically at Walters. "I should have realized it in the Ship. At very least I should have suspected it when I examined him here . . ."
"Granted that changing suits in the corridor would have been easier on Walters' throat and eyes, I doubt if you would have been allowed to complete the operation when the aliens arriv
ed. So you have nothing to reproach yourself with, and those photographs you took -- well, altogether it was a very nice job."