by Kir Bulychev
“Where are the captives?” The Captain asked. From the way he asked it there was now no doubt the Fat Man would answer everything.
And the Fat Man immediately minced his way toward the tunnel. He was muttering.
“I quite forgot… That was all Ratty’s idea. I always told him…. I was always against it…”
“I’m sorry, Captain.” Alice said, hurrying after us. “I would have certainly remembered, but so many things were going on I forgot. But I would have remembered.”
“Don’t worry, kid.” The First Captain said and stroked the top of her head with his enormous hand. “You did great, and no one can blame you for anything. It’s these pirates that we’ll have a strong talking to.”
“Ah, here it is.” The fat man said. “Let me turn the light on now. Everything will be fine. How could I have forgotten. It’s all Ratty’s fault.
The light fluttered into existence and we looked down a small chamber that housed a pirate ship; the other end turned into a longer tunnel partitioned off not far from the entrance by a thick metal grating. The fat man ran to the grating and tried to push the key into the keyhole with unwilling fingers. The First Captain and seized the key from him and pushed the grating aside; the grating slid into a niche in the wall.
“I could have… I mean…” The fat man muttered, but no one was listening.
It wasn’t surprising the fat man didn’t want us to see that tunnel; both sides were lined with rooms stuffed with loot, precious gems, and other trophies.
“No,” I said, glancing into one of the rooms as we went, “We can’t just blow up this place; there must be enough wealth hidden here to build a hundred cities.”
“Stop a moment.” The First Captain said.
We all stopped, listening.
Far away, from somewhere below, we could make out an almost inaudible groan of pain.
We hurried in that direction. The door to one of the rooms was locked.
“The key!” The Captain ordered.
The fat man already had the key in his hand.
The room turned out to be a stairway landing; a narrow stairway led downward, the steps cut into the rock. At the end there was yet another grating. The Captain aimed the light of his flashcaster forward and we saw something sitting behind the grating on a pile of rags on the floor; chained to the wall. It was a Fyxxian, huge eyed and fragile.
The Fyxxian was dying. One glance was enough to tell me that. He was at the edge of extinction. Even more, they had subjected him to torture.
“I’ll kill him now!” The First Captain said; he was looking at the fat man.
“Seva…” The Second Captain whispered. “Don’t you recognize…”
“That can’t be!”
And the First Captain suddenly pulled on the steel grating with such force that the metal groaned and tore from its slots in the walls. He hurled the steel wreckage to one side hurried to the dying Fyxxian, picked him up, and carried him to the exit in his arms.
“Who is that?” Alice whispered a question.
I shook my head. I did not know.
The fat man had wormed his way beside us. He held his tears back for a second and answered:
“That is the Third Captain. They are thinking he died long ago.”
And immediately, as though remembering something very important, the fat man started to hurry down the corridor after the Captains, braying:
“It was allo his doing! It was all Ratty’s fault!”
The Third Captain was unconscious. The First placed him on the floor and turned to me:
“Professor, tell me.” He asked. His voice trembled. “Is there anything we can do?
“I don’t know. I doubt it.” I said. I bent low over the Fyxxian. They had been killing him with hunger and torture.
“They’ve been doing this to him for four years.” The Second Captain said. “And we were so certain that he was long dead! If it hadn’t been for Alice we would have left him here! He never told them anything, Professor; please, do whatever you can to save him!”
“You don’t have to ask me.” I said. “First thing, we’ll need nutrients. Alice dear, run to the Pegasus and bring the portable Auto-Doc.
Alice shot down the corridor like an arrow.
“I’m with her.” The First Captain said.
“Don’t!” Alice shot back over her shoulder. “I know where to look you don’t.”
“Listen to me, Third.” The Second Captain said. “Listen. Don’t give up. Just a little while longer, hold on! You can’t give up when we’re almost made it. Where here for you…”
Suddenly the Fyxxian opened his eye. It was very hard for him to do it because his body had already died; only his brain still fought with death.
“It’s all right now.” He whispered. “It’s all right. I didn’t say anything. Thank you for coming, my friends…” He closed his eye and his heart stopped.
I immediately began to apply artificial respiration to the Fyxxian, but it did not help. The situation was hopeless; I had no surgical instruments, no diagnostic machinery, not even a robot doctor. I was in the same position was a doctor from a hundred years ago.
“I’m going to have to take a really big risk.” I said to the Captains. “I’m afraid there’s no way out of this.”
“We believe you, Professor. The Captains answered me.
Then I took out my knife and made an incision into the Third Captain’s chest, placed my hand around the stopped heart and began to massage it. It seemed like hours passed; my hand became numb, and I did not see it when Alice ran up with the portable medical kit, instrumentation and drugs. The First Captain himself made the injection into his friend’s vein. I do not know which helped more, my efforts or the First Captain’s application of drugs, But the Third Captain’s heart shuddered once, again, and then it was beating.
“More adrenalin!” I ordered.
Alice handed the ampule to the Captains.
“He’s an immensely strong Fyxxian.” I said. “Anyone else in his place would have died.”
I pulled the robot pocket surgeon from the medicine chest and a minute later the small device had resealed all blood vessels and sewn up his chest. We very carefully carried the Fyxxian to the Blue Gull where he could be placed in the ship’s Auto-Doc and get real treatment. It was there that Doctor Verkhovtseff joined us, and, after half an hour, I was able to say that the Third Captain’s life was out of danger.
We left the Second Captain keeping watch by his bed and went down into the cavern to rest ourselves. The First Captain went with us.
The fat man sat on his haunches at the entrance under Zeleny’s gaze.
“Is he going to live?” Veselchak U asked with a timid smile, as though they were talking about his favorite brother.
“Yes,” Verkhovtseff answered curtly, “Despite your doing everything to see that he died.”
“No, not, you have us all wrong.” The fat man oozed. “That was all Ratty’s doing. You have no way of knowing what sort of corrupting role he has played in my life until now, how he has dragged me into desperate adventures by deception and lavish promises? What do I need with riches and power? I’m happy to live and let live; I have all my heart desires. But Ratty? He needed power. Like other people need soup and sandwiches Ratty fed on power. If he wasn’t able to exercise power over someone it didn’t matter who, anyone would do then the day was wasted. And he wanted power over whole planets, over the whole Galaxy. What was that to me. I just wanted to have a little fun. I’m really a very harmless sort of being; I’ve just had the misfortune of falling under Ratty’s baleful influence.”
We turned away from the fat man and he continued to talk, addressing Zeleny now, as if he really wanted to convince us that he was no more than a jolly, harmless lamb.
“Oh well,” Doctor Verkhovtseff said, laughing until his face consisted of thousands of fine lines, “at last the Three Captains meet again. Like in the good old days. For a while you were consigned to history pardon me, to the his
torical reliquaries, but now…”
“Yes.” The First Captain agreed with him. “Everything will be just like in the Good Old Days.”
And I, looking at him, realized he wasn’t all that old. Perhaps he could even go back into space again, all the more now that the Venus Project was coming to an end.
The First Captain guessed my thoughts. “I’m going to have to get used to it all again. While I was flying here I realized just how much I’ve forgotten.”
“But you’re planning to go back into space anyway, right?” Doctor Verkhovtseff was delighted.
“We will have to change the name of the planet and museum.” The Captain continued without answering the Doctor’s caisson directly. “Now it’s rather awkward. We’re alive, healthy, not really famous for anything in particular, and our stone copies stand in a museum as if we had died ages ago.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The End Of The Voyage
After a couple of hours the Third Captain had improved enough for us to be able to take him up to the surface. Afterwards the Captains extracted the Blue Gull from the underground world as well. The concrete slab which had covered the entrance to the pit they left in place.
Now three starships stood around the field where the mirror flowers had been smashed to smithereens. The Pegasus, the Blue Gull, and a service tender from the Venus project which lacked a name and only possessed a long alphanumeric ID string.
“Da,” Alice asked, “Can I go down to the forest?”
“Why?”
“I want to find an intact mirror. There’s no way we can show our faces back on Earth without a new bouquet.”
“Just be careful.” I warned her. “You’re not in your yellow jumpsuit now and the Crockadee won’t mistake you for one of its chicks if you’re in blue.”
While we readied our ships for their return to space I let the Skliss have the freedom of the meadow. The Skliss jumped about heavily on the grass from joy, clicked its hooves high above the ground, fluttered its wings but point-blank refused to fly.
“That must be the happiest cow I’ve ever had the chance to see.” Doctor Verkhovtseff mused. “But keeping a whole herd of them would be rather awkward.”
“They told us from the start they were difficult to herd.” I agreed. “Given that they can fly over deep rivers if there’s forage on the other side.
The fat pirate was still sitting on the ground beside the Pegasus; he had convinced us that he had an old, bad heart that demanded fresh air. No one wanted to argue with him and, let alone hold a conversation, especially after the Third Captain had told how it had been Veselchak U himself who had tortured him in a vain attempt to gain the secret of galaxion.
“Zeleny!” I called. “Would you look after the cow while I feed the other animals; just make certain the Crockadee doesn’t carry her off.”
As I looked up I saw still another starship descending on this planet.
Now, that really was too much! This wasn’t a planet as much as a space port! Where had this one come from?
In the end I came to the conclusion that it was reinforcements for the pirates and desired to raise the alarm, but then I realize the ship was in trouble.
The pilot wasn’t flying straight, but was twisting and turning from side to side oddly, and along his tail stretched some sort of greyish mass which acted as a break and prevented a normal landing.
At my cry everyone came running from the ship and looked up at the new arrival.
“Turn on the transmitter, Zeleny!” Poloskov called.
Zeleny hurried to the Pegasus, hunted through the emergency frequencies and turned the radio on full so that those of us outside the ship could hear.
“Incoming ship!” Zeleny called. “What is going on? Are you in trouble. Reply!”
A very pleasant, very feminine voice answered: “I’m in no trouble worth mentioning, no. So long as I can hold on to this thing little else matters.”
“Now that voice is familiar.” I said. Somewhere I’ve heard it before.”
“When we were lost near the empty planet.” Alice suggested.
“Hold it.” The First Captain cut us off. “I could swear that’s my wife Ella.”
The Captain turned white and rushed into the ship to join Zeleny at the com console. A moment later we heard his voice:
“Ella, is that you? What’s going on?”
“Who’s speaking, please? The woman’s voice asked firmly. “Is that you, Seva? Why aren’t you on Venus? You know how worried I get when you gad about the cosmos.”
The Second Captain laughed.
“She can never get used to the idea that her husband is a space explorer.” He told me. “Even though she herself has circled the Galaxy.”
“That doesn’t matter.” The First Captain said. “Have you forgotten your ship’s in trouble? Do you need assistance. What is that thing you’re hauling?”
“Can’t you see it?” Ella sounded surprised. “It’s a living gas cloud. I’ve only been chasing after it for the last three weeks. I caught it in a force screen net, but now it’s trying to break out and get away. So I have to set down on the first planet that I came to strengthen the net field. Seva, darling, you wouldn’t by any chance have a ship of your own on hand?”
“Of course I do.” The First Captain answered. “And don’t hurry in landing, not while that thing. is fighting you. You might crash.”
“Everything will be all right. Just get up here and we’ll land it together.”
The First Captain hadn’t yet finished his conversation with his wife before the Second Captain was on the ship’s bridge; three minutes later they had the starship into the air where Ella was fighting with the obstreperous living cloud that was known across the space ways as a legend, but which no one had managed to capture alive.
The two ships merged their force fields into a common net and after half an hour the living cloud, tightly grasped by the two ships, lay on the grass not far from us. We all ran over to them. I have to admit that I was the first tor each the scene; after all, I understood what a service Ella had done for biology.
The living nebula was…. well, interesting. In interstellar space once it had expanded to fill several million cubic kilometers the effect must have been overpowering, but here on the grass, confined by the occasionally glittering force scene, it really looked like a thick, grey, pulsing cloud.
The air lock to Ella’s ship slid wide and she ran down the extending steps. Her husband, the First Captain, ran to meet her. He stretched out strong arms and Ella jumped up to meet him. The Captain held her in the air a moment and carefully let her down to the ground.
“You’re not injured?” He asked.
“No.” Ella answered, laughing. “And anyway none of that was really important.
Ella was breathtakingly beautiful and all the men fell in love with her at once. Even the empathicator had become transparent from the feelings that filled it.
“Nothing else matters.” Ella repeated, shaking her long blond hair. “The gas cloud is captured, and now all that remains is to get it to Earth to convince the skeptics that it really does exist.
I kept my silence, in as much as under skeptics she, naturally, would include me. I even remembered our last meeting of sorts at the conference and had ridiculed her for chasing after Science Fiction. There exist in the universe so many real, perfectly natural and ordinary animals the study of which costs time and effort, such as the Dragonette minor, wander bushes, and empathicator, that the very concept of a living gas cloud struck me as a fantasy. And I had said so at the time.
“Where have you been hiding?” Ella exclaimed when she saw the Second Captain. “I haven’t seen you for several years. How are you getting on? Are you still flying?”
“No.” The Second Captain answered, “basically I’ve been sitting in one spot.”
“That’s perfectly fine.” Ella supported him. “You can get an enormous amount of work done sitting in one spot. And whose is this ch
arming little girl.”
“I’m called Alice.” The charming little girl answered.
“Alice. What an unusual name.”
“It’s perfectly ordinary. Alice Selezneva.”
“Wait a moment. Does your father not work in the Moscow Zoo?”
“He does.” Alice answered. She knew nothing about our scientific disagreements.
“That’s great, Alice; when you see your father I’d like you to tell him that living gas clouds are not biological nonsense, they’re not fantasies or fairy tale imaginings as he likes to say, but totally real.”
“You can tell him yourself.” Alice said. “My father is here. There he is.”
No escape was possible for me now; I stepped forward and introduced myself.
“I beg your pardon.” I said. “Rather clearly I must acknowledge my error.”
“This is marvelous.” Ella answered. “Now you can help me study the cloud.”
“With pleasure.”
Then Ella turned toward her husband.
“And how did you happen to be here?”
“The Second got into trouble,” Seva answered briefly, “and we had to get him out of it. And we did, with the help of our new friends.”
“And just what sort of trouble did you get into, Captain?”
“I was held captive by pirates.”
“By pirates. I thought you defeated them long ago.”
“We did, but they came back. You know what happens if you leave one weed in the ground.”
“Well, I really don’t understand it.” Ella threw up her hands. “Who in our day and age ever has to spend four years in jail?”
Ella had come to us from another world, the world we were familiar with but from which we had been gone for the last few days. And, in fact, she should it difficult to believe when we told her about torture, caverns, and treachery. For the nonce no one bothered to argue with her.
“And what have you done with the pirates?” Ella asked.
“One’s in a cage. Two are in the hold. The fattest and worst was just here a moment ago.” The Second Captain answered. “Where has he gotten to?”
The Fat Man had vanished. A moment ago he had been sitting on the grass, laughing timidly. Then he was gone.