The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  “Jan!” My shout must have blasted Mac rigid. “Sven! Mac, they’re alive!”

  “Christ, Jeanie, I see that. Steady on, you’ll burst my eardrums.” He sounded as though he himself was going to burst, from sheer pleasure and relief.

  We scrambled around to the main hatch of the pod and I tried to yank it open. It wouldn’t move. Mac lent a hand, and still nothing would budge—everything was too bent and battered. Back we went to the hole in the ship’s side, and found them trying to enlarge it enough to get out.

  “Stand back,” I said. “Mac and I can cut that in a minute.”

  Then I realized they couldn’t hear me or see me. Their faceplates were covered again with dust, and they kept leaning together to touch helmets.

  “Mac! There’s something wrong with their suits.”

  “Of course there is.” He sounded disgusted with my stupidity. “Radio’s not working—we already knew that. They’re communicating with each other by direct speech through the helmet contact. Vision units are done for, too—see, all they have are the faceplates, and the dust sticks and covers them unless they keep on clearing it. The whole atmosphere of this damned planet is nothing more than charged dust particles. Our suits are repelling them, or we’d see nothing at visible wavelengths. Here, let me in there.”

  He stuck his head through the opening, grabbed the arm of Jan’s suit, and pulled us so that we were all four touching helmets. We could talk to each other.

  And for that first ten minutes that’s what we did: talk, in a language that defies all logical analysis. I would call it the language of love, but that phrase has been used too often for another (and less powerful) emotional experience.

  Then we enlarged the hole so they could climb out. At that point I thought that we had won, that our troubles and difficulties were all over. In fact, they were just starting.

  Their pod was in even worse shape than it looked. The battering from flying boulders that had ruined the hull should have left intact the internal electronics, computers, and communications links, components with no moving parts that ought to withstand any amount of shaking and violent motion. But they were all dead. The pod was nothing but a lifeless chunk of metal and plastics. Worse still, all the computer systems in Jan and Sven’s suits had failed, too. They had no radios, no external vision systems—not even temperature controls. Only the purely mechanical components, like air supply and suit pressure, were still working.

  I couldn’t imagine anything that could destroy the equipment so completely and leave Jan and Sven alive, but those questions would have to come later. For the moment our first priority was the return to the other pod. If I had thought it dangerous work coming, going back would be much worse. Jan and Sven were almost blind, they couldn’t step across chasms or walk along a thin slab of rock. Without radios, I couldn’t even tell them to back up if I decided we had to retrace part of our path.

  We all four linked hands, to make a chain with Mac on the left-hand end and me on the right, and began a strange crab-like movement back in the direction of the other pod. I daren’t hurry, and it took hours. Four times I had to stop completely, while the ground beneath us went through exceptionally violent paroxysms of shaking and shuddering. We stood motionless, tightly gripping each other’s gloved hands. If it was scary for me, it must have been hell for Jan and Sven. Mac and I were their lifeline, if we lost contact they wouldn’t make twenty meters safely across the broken surface. While the shaking went on, I was picking up faint sounds in my radio. McAndrew and Wicklund had their helmets together, and Wicklund seemed to be doing all the talking. For five minutes I heard only occasional grunts from Mac through his throat mike.

  “Right,” he said at last. “Were you able to pick up any of that, Jeanie? We have to get a move on. Go faster.”

  “Faster? In these conditions? You’re crazy. I know it’s slow going, but we all have plenty of air. Let’s do it right, and get there in one piece.”

  “It’s not air I’m worried about.” He was crowding up behind us, so that we were all bumping into each other. “We have to be in the pod and off the surface in less than an hour. Sven’s been tracking the surges of seismic activity and dust speed, ever since they landed and everything went to hell. There’s a bad one coming an hour and a half from now—and I mean bad. Worse than anything we’ve felt so far. A lot of the minor cycles we’ve been feeling since we came out on the surface will all be in phase. They’ll all add together.”

  Worse than anything we had felt so far. What would it be like? It wasn’t easy to imagine. Nor was the cause—but something had taken Vandell’s smooth and quiet surface and crumpled it to a wild ruin in the few hours since the other pod had landed.

  Against my instincts I began to take more risks, to climb over more jagged rocks and to walk along shelves that might tilt and slide under our weight. I think that at this point it was worse for McAndrew and me than for Sven and Jan. They could walk blind and trust us to keep them safe; but we had to keep our eyes wide open, and study all the dangers around us. I wanted to ask Mac a hundred questions, but I didn’t dare to focus his attention or mine on anything except the immediate task.

  At our faster pace we were within a hundred meters of the pod in twenty minutes, with what looked like a clear path the rest of the way. That was when I heard a grunt and curse over the suit radio, and turned to see McAndrew sliding away to one side down a long scree of loose gravel. Last across, he had pushed Sven Wicklund to safety as the surface began to break. He fell, scrabbled at the ground, but couldn’t get hold of anything firm. He rolled once, then within seconds was lost from view behind a black jumble of boulders.

  “Mac!” I was glad that Jan couldn’t hear my voice crack with panic.

  “I’m here, Jeanie. I’m all right.” He sounded as though he was out on a picnic. “My own fault, I could see it was breaking away when Sven was on it. I should have looked for another path instead of following him like a sheep.”

  “Can you get back?”

  There was a silence, probably thirty seconds. In my nerved-up state it seemed like an hour. I could hear Mac’s breath, faster and louder over the radio.

  “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s a mess down here, and the slope’s too steep to climb straight up. Damned gravel, I slide right back down with it. It may take me a little while. You three had better keep going and I’ll catch up later. Time’s too short for you to hang around waiting.”

  “Forget it. Hold right there, I’m coming back after you.” I leaned to set my helmet next to Jan’s. “Jan, can you hear me?”

  “Yes. But speak louder.” Her voice was faint, as though she was many meters away.

  “I want you and Sven to stand right here and don’t move—not for anything. Mac’s stuck, and I have to help him. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

  That was meant to be reassuring, but then I wondered what would happen if I was too optimistic about how long it would take me. “Give me twenty minutes, and if we’re not back then, you’ll have to get to the pod on your own. It’s straight in front as you’re facing now, about a hundred meters away. If you go in a straight line for fifty paces then clear your faceplates, you should be able to see it.”

  I knew she must have questions, but there was no time to answer them. Mac’s tone suggested it would be completely fatal to be on Vandell’s surface, unprotected, when the next big wave of seismic activity hit us.

  I knew exactly where Mac had gone, but I had a hard time seeing him. The rock slide had carried with it a mixture of small and large fragments, from gravel and pebbles to substantial boulders. His struggles to climb the slope had only managed to embed him deeper in loose materials. Now his suit was three-quarters hidden. His efforts also seemed to have carried him backwards, so with a thirty degree gradient facing him I didn’t think he’d ever be able to get out alone. And further down the slope lay a broad fissure in the surface, of indeterminate depth.

  He was facing my way, and he had seen me
too. “Jeanie, don’t come any closer. You’ll slither right down here, the same as I did. There’s nothing firm past the ledge you’re standing on.”

  “Don’t worry. This is as far as I’m coming.” I backed up a step, nearer to a huge rock that must have weighed many tons, and turned my head so the chest of Mac’s suit sat on the crosshairs at the exact center of my display. “Don’t move a muscle now. I’m going to use the Walton, and we don’t have time for second tries.”

  I lifted the crosshairs just a little to allow for the effects of gravity, then intoned the Walton release sequence. The ejection solenoid fired, and the thin filament with its terminal electromagnet shot out from the chest panel on my suit and flashed down towards McAndrew. The laser at the tip measured the distance of the target, and the magnet went on a fraction of a second before contact. Mac and I were joined by a hair-thin bond. I braced myself behind the big rock. “Ready? I’m going to haul you in.”

  “Aye, I’m ready. But why didn’t I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn’t need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.”

  I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit’s reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That’s all that the Waltons do. I’d used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that’s why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.

  “I don’t think you could have done it, Mac,” I said. “This big rock’s the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn’t look as though it has a high metal content. You’d have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.”

  “Maybe.” He snorted. “But I should have had the sense to try. I’m a witless oaf.”

  What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two.

  They were just where I had left them. They stood, helmets touching, like a frozen and forlorn tableau in Vandell’s broken wilderness. It was more than fifteen minutes since I gone back to Mac, and I could imagine their uneasy thoughts. I leaned my helmet to touch both theirs.

  “All present and safe. Let’s go.”

  Jan gave my arm a great squeeze. We formed our chain again, and crabbed the rest of the way to the pod. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had looked, or as I suggested to Jan, but in less than fifteen minutes we were opening the outer hatch and bundling Sven and Jan into it.

  The lock was only big enough for two at a time. They were out of their useless suits by the time that McAndrew and I could join them inside. Jan looked pale and shaky, ten years older than her seventeen years. Sven Wicklund was as blond and dreamy-looking as ever, still impossibly young in appearance. Like McAndrew, his own internal preoccupations partly shielded him from unpleasant realities—even now he was brandishing a piece of paper covered with squiggles at us. But Jan and Sven had both held together, keeping their composure well when death must have seemed certain. It occurred to me that if you wanted to find a rite of passage to adulthood, you wouldn’t find a tougher one than Jan had been through.

  “Just look at this,” Sven said as soon as we were out of the hatch. “I’ve been plotting the cycles—”

  “How long before it hits?” I interrupted.

  “Four minutes. But—”

  “Get into working suits, both of you.” I was already at the controls. “I’m taking us up as soon as I can, but if we’re too late I can’t guarantee that the pod hull will survive. You know what happened to yours.”

  The ascent presented no problem of navigation—I had plenty of fuel, and I intended to go straight up with maximum lift. There would be time to worry about rendezvous with Merganser and Hoatzin when we were safely away from Vandell.

  I believe in being careful, even on the simplest takeoff, so all my concentration was on the control sequences. I could hear Jan, McAndrew and Wicklund babbling to each other in the background, until I told them to get off my suit frequency and let me think. Vandell was still a complete mystery world to me, but if the others had answers, those, like the problem of ship rendezvous, could wait until we were off the surface.

  Wicklund’s predictions for the timing of the next wave of violence proved to be unnecessary. I could see it coming directly, in the values provided by the pod’s field instruments. Every gauge reading in front of me was creeping up in unison as we lifted off; ionization levels, surface vibrations, dust density, electric and magnetic fields—readouts flickered rapidly higher, and needles turned steadily across their dials like the hands of an old-fashioned clock.

  Something big was on its way. We lifted into a sky ripped by great lightning flashes, burning their way through the clouds of charged dust particles. The ascent we made was rapid. Within a few seconds we had reached three kilometers. And then, as I was beginning to relax a little and think that we had been just in time, the readings in front of me went mad. External field strengths flickered up so fast in value that the figures were unreadable, then warning lights came on. I heard the screech of a fatal overload in my suit’s radio, and saw the displays in front of me blank out one after another. The computer, after a brief mad flurry of a binary dump across the control screen, went totally dead. Suddenly I was flying blind and deaf. All the electronic tools that every pilot relied on were now totally disabled.

  It was useless information, but suddenly I understood exactly what had killed the signal beacon from Jan and Sven’s pod without also killing them. Before the displays in front of me died, the electric and magnetic field strengths had risen to an impossible level. Even with partial shielding from the pod’s hull, their intensity was enough to wipe magnetic storage—that took care of computers, communications equipment, displays, and suit controls. If the suits hadn’t been designed with manual overrides for certain essentials so that Jan and Sven could control their air supply, that would have been the end.

  Now our pod had the same problem as theirs. We hadn’t been pelted with boulders, as they had when they were sitting on the surface of Vandell, but we had no computer control of our flight and we were being whipped around the sky by the changing magnetic fields.

  It wasn’t necessary for me to change to manual control. When the computer died, it dumped everything in my lap automatically. I gritted my teeth, tried to keep us heading straight up (not easy, the way we were being tilted and rocked) and refused to decrease thrust even though the pod shuddered as though it was getting ready to disintegrate.

  I’m blessed with an iron stomach, one that doesn’t get sick no matter how much lurching and spinning it takes. McAndrew isn’t, and Jan takes after him. They couldn’t communicate with me, but I could take their misery for granted.

  It was worth the discomfort. We were getting there, rising steadily, while the pink glow around the pod’s ports faded towards black. As our altitude increased I looked at the internal pressure gauge—thank God for a simple mechanical gadget. It was showing normal pressure, which meant that the hull hadn’t been breached on our ascent. I allowed myself the luxury of a quick look around me.

  McAndrew was slumped forward in his straps, head down as low as he could get it. Sven and Jan were both leaning back, arms linked. All the faceplates were clear, so that I knew none of them had vomited in their suit—no joke, since the internal cleaning systems that would usually handle the mess were out of action.

  The turbulence around the pod grew less. Stars were coming in
to view outside the ports as I turned us into an orbit that spiraled outward away from Vandell. I was looking for Hoatzin. Our orbit was clumsy and wasteful of fuel compared with what the navigation computer would have provided. But give me some credit, I was receiving no reference signals from the ship. All I had was instinct and experience.

  Scooting along over the clouds I could now see a pattern to the lightning. It moved in great waves over the surface, reaching peaks in places, fading elsewhere. We had lifted from a point where all the peaks had converged, but now it was fading to look no different from the rest. Or almost so; the faint shadow of the black funnel still dipped down into the murk.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. Mac was gesturing at me, then at the helmet of his suit. I nodded and broke the seal on my own helmet. We were outside the danger zone, and it was important to reestablish contact among the group. The search for Hoatzin and Merganser might take hours, with no assistance from automated scan instruments or radio receipt of homing signals. Meanwhile, I wanted some explanations. It was clear that McAndrew and Wicklund between them had more idea than I did about what had been happening.

  Three miserable, greenish-yellow faces emerged from the helmets. No one had thrown up, but from the look of them it had been a close thing.

  “I thought it was bad when the storm hit us on the surface,” said Jan. “But that was even worse. What did you do to us, Jeanie? I thought the pod was coming apart.”

  “So did I.” Suit helmet off, I reached back to massage the aching muscles in my neck and shoulders. “It almost did. We lost the computers, the communications, the displays—everything. What is this crazy planet, anyway? I thought the laws of nature were supposed to be the same all over the universe, but Vandell seems to have a special exemption. What in hell did you two do to the place, Jan? It was quiet as a grave until you got at it.”

  “It damn near was one,” said McAndrew. “If you hadn’t…”