“I’ll look after this end,” he said, “and saturate the air in the corridor while I’m at it. I’m more used to gas and can probably avoid its effects longer than you, Art.” He slid the metal portal shut with a clang, tossed the still-open gas cylinder across the hall, and set to work with the welder. He jumped up and down, kicking, dancing, and waving his free arm as he worked; but the hand holding the torch remained steady.
Reluctantly, the metal of door and frame fused and flowed under the heat. The tiny lever that had actuated the opening mechanism dripped away. Slowly a glowing line of red marked the edge of the door and extended around it, a line that did not cease its slow growth as a dozen guards raced around a corner and collapsed as one the moment they paused to take in the situation. One, at least, must have been far enough behind to signal to others; seconds later, another group, clad in transparent, baggy air suits, sped into sight. At almost the same instant the little torch expired.
Little straightened, dropping the instrument, and saw the approaching guards. He turned to run toward the elevator, and saw another group rapidly approaching from that direction. Knowing the futility of the attempt, he tried to dodge past them; one swerved, reached, and an instant later he was pinned motionless as he had been once before in the first break for freedom. But he was still in the region of geletane-impregnated air.
~ * ~
Dr. Little opened his eyes with that peculiar feeling of having done the same thing before. This time memory returned almost instantly; he struggled to his feet, helped by the men clustered around him. He was on the roof of the fort, where a stiff breeze had cleared the last of the gas from his lungs and cell walls. No guards were in evidence.
“How did it go?” he asked, seeing the grinning features of the Dennis brothers beside him. “Did you get through?”
“We did. It took them nearly an hour to get heavy tools and cut in—after all we had control of their local ‘telephone’ central. They must have called their own ship back at once; it came in ten minutes ago, and they’re rushing stuff aboard. I think they’re going to abandon this place before help arrives for us. The Ardomese I talked to promised a squadron in fifteen hours.
“I wish that starfish ship had been farther away—we might have been able to take some prisoners of our own. But I’m afraid they’ll have time to clear out.”
“You’re not annoyed, are you?” asked Little. “After all, they didn’t hurt you fellows when they found you in the communication room. I think they’re rather good sports, myself. After all, they’ve been risking all along the chance that we might do just what we did; they haven’t hurt anyone; and the Gomeisa is not seriously damaged.”
“Nevertheless, they committed an act of war against the Union,” cut in Magill, “and they have stolen a lot of valuable information. The Gomeisa carried stuff that could make them dangerous enemies.”
“They have had plenty of time to duplicate that armament, and unquestionably have done so,” returned Little, “but they seem to have no intention of staying and using it on our ships. I think their curiosity was purely academic; perhaps this was all a game to them. In any case, I can’t make myself feel anger toward them. I’m curious, myself, and personally I rather like the creatures. You can make yourself do the same, Keys; the whole thing is only a question of attitude.” The doctor traded knowing winks with the Dennis brothers.
<
~ * ~
The Ionian Cycle
BY WILLIAM TENN
T
he tiny lifeboat seemed to hang suspended from its one working rear jet, then it side-slipped and began to spin violently downwards to the sickly orange ground of the planet.
Inside the narrow cabin, Dr. Helena Naxos was hurled away from the patient she was tending and slammed into a solid bulkhead. The shock jolted the breath out of her. She shook her head and grabbed frantically at an overhead support as the cabin tilted again. Jake Donelli glared up from the view-screen where the alien earth expanded at him and yelled across the control table:
“Great gravities, Blaine, soft jet! Soft jet before we’re pulped!”
The tall, balding archaeologist of what had once been the First Deneb Expedition waved tremulous hands at the switches before him.
“Which—which button do you press?” he quavered. “I f-for-get how y-you soften those forward things.”
“You don’t press any—oh, wait a minute.”
The spaceman tore the restraining straps away and bounded out of his seat. He seized the projecting edges of the table and made his way strainingly around it as the lifeboat spun faster in great swoops.
Dr. Archibald Blaine was squeezed against the back of his chair when Donelli reached him.
“I forgot the button,” he mumbled.
“No button, doc. I told you. You jerk this toggle—like so. You haul this switch over—like so. Then you turn the little red wheel around twice. Does it. Whew! Now things are smoother!”
Donelli let go of the table as the forward softening jets caught on and straightened the vessel into a flat glide. He walked back to the main control bank, followed by Blaine and the woman biologist
“The sea?” Helena Naxos asked at last, lifting her eyes from the view-screen. “That is the sea?”
“Nothing else but,” Donelli told her. “We used up all but about a cupful of fuel trying to avoid falling into this system’s sun—if you can call two planets a system! We’re operating the cupful on the one main jet left unfused when the Ionian Pinafore blew up. Now we’ve overshot the continent and riding above the sea without a paddle. Good, huh? What’d he say the sea was made of?”
Dr. Douglas Ibn Yussuf propped himself on his uninjured elbow and called from his bunk:
“According to the spectroscopic tabulations you brought me an hour ago, the seas of this planet are almost pure hydrofluoric acid. There is a good deal of free fluorine in the atmosphere, although most of it is in the form of hydrofluoric acid vapor and similar combinations.”
“Suppose you save some of that good news,” Donelli suggested. “I know all about hydrofluoric acid being able to eat through almost anything and its grandmother. Tell me this: how long will the Grojen shielding on the hull stand up under it? An estimate, Doc.”
~ * ~
With puckered brow, the Egyptian scientist considered. “If not replaced, say anywhere—oh, anywhere from five terrestrial days to a week. Not more.”
“Fine!” the pale spaceman said happily. “We’ll all be dead long before that.” His eyes watched the view-screen.
“Not if we find fuel for the converter and tanks,” Blaine reminded him sternly. “And we know there’s contra-Uranium on this world—a little, at any rate. The spectroscope showed it. That’s why we headed here after the disaster.”
“So we know there’s fuel here—good old compact Q. Okay, if we landed on one of the continents maybe we’d have scratched a miracle on the chest and found some Q before the converter conked out. Then we could have repaired the other jets and tried to get back to a traffic lane, powered up the transmitter and radioed for help, done all sorts of nice things. But now that we’re going to do our fall on the first island I see, what chance do you think we have?”
Blaine looked angrily at his two colleagues and then back at the small, squat spaceman with whom destiny and a defective storage tank aboard the Ionian Pinafore had thrown them.
“But that’s ridiculous!” he said. “Landing on an island will reduce our chances of finding contra-Uranium from an improbability to an impossibility! It’s rare enough in the universe, and after we’ve been fortunate enough to find a planet containing it, Jake, I demand—”
“You demand nothing, Doc,” Donelli told him, shoving belligerently up against his lean academic frame. “You demand nothing. Back on the expedition ship maybe the three of you were big-time operators with your degrees and all, and I was just Jake—broken from A.B. to Ordinary Spaceman for drunkenness when we lifted from Io. But here, I
’m the only man-jack with a life-boat certificate and the laws of space put me in supreme command. Watch your language, Doc: I don’t like to be called Jake by the likes of you. You call me Donelli from here on in, and every once in a while, you call me Mr. Donelli.”
There was a pause in the cabin while the archaeologist’s cheeks puffed out and his frustrated eyes tried to pluck a reply from the overhead.
“Mr. Donelli,” Helena Naxos called suddenly. “Would that be your island?” She gestured to the view-screen Where an infinitesimal blot upon the sea was growing. She smoothed her black hair nervously.
Donelli stared hard. “Yeah. It’ll do. Suppose you handle the forward jets—uh, Dr. Naxos. You saw me explaining them to Blaine. I wouldn’t trust that guy with a falling baseball on Jupiter. ‘I forgot which button,’ “ he mimicked.
She took her place on the opposite side of the control table as Blaine, with tightened facial muscles, went over to Ibn Yussuf’s bunk and whispered angrily to the injured man.
“You see,” Donelli explained as he moved a lever a microscopic distance. “I don’t want to hit an island any more than you folks do, Dr. Naxos. But we can’t afford to use up any more fuel crossing an ocean as big as this. We may be able to make another continent, yes, but we’ll have about fifteen minutes of breathing time left. This way, the converter should run for another two, three days giving us a chance to look around and maybe get some help from the natives.”
“If there are any.” She watched a dial needle throb hesitantly to a red mark. “We saw no cities on the Telescanner. Although, as a biologist, I confess I’d like to investigate a creature with a fluorine respiration. By the way, Mr. Donelli, if you will allow me to call you Jake, you may call me Helena.”
“Fair enough—hey, you watching that dial? Start softening jets. That’s right. Now over to half. Hold it. Hold it! Here we go! Grab something everybody! Dr. Yussuf—lie flat—flat!”
He flipped the lever over all the way, slammed a switch shut and reached frantically for the two hand grips on the control table.
An emery wheel seemed to reach up and scrape the bottom of the hull. The emery wheel scraped harder and the whole ship groaned. The scrape spread along the entire bottom half of the life-boat, rose to an unbearably high scream in sympathy to which every molecule in their bodies trembled. Then it stopped and a vicious force snapped their bodies sideways.
~ * ~
Donelli unstrapped himself. “I’ve seen chief mates who did worse on the soft jets—Helena,” was the comment. “So here we are on good old— What’s the name of this planet, anyway?”
“Nothing, so far as I know.” She hurried over to Dr. Ibn Yussuf who lay groaning in the cast which protected the ribs and arm broken in the first explosion of the Ionian Pinafore. “When we passed the system on our way to Deneb a week ago, Captain Hauberk named the sun Maximilian—after the assistant secretary-general of the Terran Council? That would make this planet nothing more than Maximilian II, a small satellite of a very small star.”
“What a deal,” Donelli grumbled. “The last time I had to haul air out of a wreck, I found myself in the middle of the Antares-Solarian War. Now I get crazy in the head and ship out on an expedition to a part of space where humanity’s just thinking of moving in. I pick a captain who’s so busy buttering up to scientists and government officials that he doesn’t bother to check storage tanks, let alone lifeboats. I haul air with three people—no offense, Helena—who can’t tell a blast from the Hole in Cygnus and they get so cluttered up trying to seal the air-locks that, when the secondary explosion pops off from the ship, it catches us within range and blooies most of our jets and most of our Q. Then, to top it off, I have to set down on a planet that isn’t even on the maps and start looking for the quart or two of J that may be on the surface.”
She eased the scientist’s cast to a more comfortable position and chuckled.
“Sad, isn’t it? But ours was the only boat that got away at that. We were lucky.”
Donelli began climbing into a space-suit. “We weren’t lucky,” he disagreed. “We just happened to have a good spaceman aboard. Me. I’ll scout around our island and see if I can find any characters to talk to. Our only hope is to get help from the folks here, if any. Sit tight till I get back and don’t touch any equipment you don’t understand.”
“Want me to come with you—er, Donelli?” Dr. Blaine moved to the space-suit rack. “If you meet anything dangerous—”
“I’ll make out better alone. I’ve got a supersonic in this suit And Doc—you might forget which button. Great gravities!”
Shaking his helmeted head, Donelli started the air-lock machinery.
The orange ground was brittle underfoot, he found, and flaked off as he walked. Despite the yellow atmosphere, he could see the complete outline of the island from the hill near the ship. It was a small enough patch of ground pointing reluctantly out of an irritated sea of hydrofluoric acid.
Most of it was bare, little dots of black moss breaking the heaving monotony of orange. Between the ship and the sea was a grove of larger vegetation: great purple flowers on vivid scarlet stems that held them a trembling thirty feet in the stagnant air.
Interesting, but not as interesting as fuel.
He had noticed a small cave yawning in the side of the hill when he climbed it. Sliding down, now, he observed its lower lip was a good bit from the ground. He started to enter, checked himself abruptly.
There was something moving inside.
With his metal-sheathed finger, he clicked on the searchlight imbedded in his helmet and with the other hand, he tugged the supersonic pistol from its clamps in the side of his suit and waited for its automatic adjustment to the atmosphere of the planet. At last it throbbed slightly and he knew it was in working condition.
They needed favors from the inhabitants and he didn’t intend to do any careless dying, either.
Just inside the cave entrance the beam of his light showed a score of tiny maggot-like creatures crawling and feeding upon two thin blankets of flesh. Whatever the animals they were eating had been, they were no longer recognizable.
Donelli stared at the small white worms. “If you’re intelligent, I might as well give up. I have an idea we can’t be friends. Or am I prejudiced?”
Since they ignored both him and his question, he moved on into the cave. A clacking sound in his headphones brought him to a halt again, squeezing a bubbling elation back into his heart
Could it be? So early and so easy? He drew the screen away from the built-in Geiger on his chest. The clacking grew louder. He turned slowly until the flashlight on his head revealed a half dozen microscopic crystals floating a few inches from one wall.
Contra-Uranium! The most compact, super-fuel discovered by a galactic-exploring humanity, a fuel that required no refining since, by its very nature, it could occur only in the pure state. It was a fuel for whose powerful uses every engine and atomic converter on every spaceship built in the past sixty years had been designed.
But six crystals weren’t very much. The lifeboat might barely manage a take-off on that much Q, later to fall into the hydrofluoric sea.
“Still,” Donelli soliloquized, “it’s right heartening to find some so near the surface. I’ll get an inerted lead container from the ship and scoop it up. But maybe those crystals have a family further back.”
The crystals didn’t, but someone or something else did.
Four large, chest-high balls of green, veined thickly with black and pink lines, throbbed upon the ground at the rear of the cave. Eggs? If not eggs, what were they?
~ * ~
II
Donelli skirted them warily, even though he saw no opening in any of them. They were anchored to the ground, but they were unlike any plants he had seen in nine years of planet-jumping. They looked harmless, but—
“Well, grow me tentacles and call me a Sagittarian!”
The back of the cave divided into two tunnels which were higher an
d wider than their parent hollow. Smooth all around, Donelli might have taken them for the burrows of an immense worm, had he not noticed the regularly-spaced wood-like beams crossed upon each other at intervals in both shafts. The tunnels extended a good distance ahead, then curved sharply down and away from each other.
This was mining, this was engineering! Primitive, but effective!
Donelli hated to use up power in his helmet-transmitter, but he might run into trouble and it was essential that the three scientists learn of even the small amount of Q in the cave. After all, the creatures who built these tunnels might not know enough chemistry to appreciate his inedibility before they sampled him.
He turned on his headset. “Donelli to ship! Good news: I’ve found enough Q to keep us breathing until after this atmosphere burns through our Grojen shielding. We’ll be able to sit around in our space suits for at least three days after the ship is eaten out from under us. Nice? You’ll see the crystals about halfway into the cave. And don’t forget to use an inerted lead container when you pick them up.”
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 25