McClendon's Syndrome (v1.1)

by Robert Frezza

  Catarina and I disengaged. “No, but I was learning fast,” I muttered. I looked at her. “Are we set?”

  She shrugged. Our little brown cloud was decreasing in density as it grew in size, and it was giving our outline the coverage you’d expect from a wet nightgown.

  I snapped on the intercom. “McHugh! Count to thirty aloud, dump it, and don’t forget the pin.”

  The first five numbers she sang out all seemed to start with something that rhymed with “duck.”

  “I’ll boost her twenty seconds after McHugh kicks the thing free,” I told Catarina. “You correct with the sidejet that doesn’t breakdown.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain Bligh.”

  “Just hold our course steady, Mister Christian, while I give this bucket all I’ve got.”

  “Which probably isn’t very much just now.”

  “Okay!” sang out McHugh over the intercom.

  “Dykstra, what’s Davie saying?” I yelled.

  “He’s telling them about the bomb!”

  “Oh, hell. This is going to be rough.”

  We waited.

  “Boosting,” I said. Catarina helped correct our course. “Uh, Catarina—”

  She freed a hand and messed up my hair again. “Ken, save the really soppy stuff until we see whether that thing goes off... Boost her, they’re slowing and firing more missiles! Looks like lasers, too!”

  We punched past the tinsel, leaving the alien in the proverbial cloud of dust.

  “They’re firing everything they’ve got,” Catarina observed. “They’re wide to the right.”

  “Never mind that, can you tell how fast they’re dropping off speed?”

  A small flash of light hit our rear screen. “It didn’t work,” Catarina said. The tiny explosion set up swirling eddies of toad dung and tinsel.

  “Then we’re dead.”

  “No, wait—between the eddies and the tinsel, their missiles are going every which way. One of them has reversed course, and it looks like it’s locked on to them! They’re trying to slow and reverse course.”

  A brilliant flash of light emptied out the rear screen. We left the shock wave far behind. “Not fast enough,” Catarina sang out, “how slowly the mighty have fallen.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said with awe, most likely in response to her rejoinder.

  “Ken, I don’t know how I could have doubted you,” Catarina said with just enough feigned honesty to make me feel warm inside.

  “We got them. All hands secure from action stations,” I said over the intercom. “Splice the main brace.”

  “Hot damn!” I heard McHugh say.

  “Right you are, McHugh.” I heard a burst of cheering on the other end. I shut off the intercom and looked at Catarina. “It’s a little late to ask, but do you think it would help if I brushed my teeth and took a shower with lots of soap?”

  Catarina had to turn her head to hide a grin. “No.”

  “That’s about what I thought. Oh, well. What did McLendon say, three percent of the population is susceptible?”

  “You think you might hit the jackpot twice in one day?”

  “Three times. How did you catch McLendon’s?”

  “Either from a doorknob or the stork brung it, I forget which.”

  “Ask a silly question...” I opened up the intercom. “Hey, McHugh, tell Iron-Ass and Boo-Boo to get up here. It’s still their watch.”

  “We’ll dig Boo-Boo out and send him on his way. Iron-Ass’ll be a while. He has to change his pants.”

  I turned to Catarina. “Any survivors over there, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “Negative. There’s nothing on any of the distress bands, and the pieces all look very small.”

  “All right. We need to do repairs anyway.” I opened up the intercom and told everyone, “I’m going to stop our rotation in ten minutes, make sure everything’s nailed down.” I turned back to Catarina. “This bucket is never going to make it through an escape point in the shape that she’s in. How about we go outside and fix holes?”

  She smiled and tapped her forehead lightly. “Wholly acceptable. You know we’ve got ten minutes.”

  It was closer to twenty before we got started. I figured if I was one of McLendon’s three-percenters, it was a little late to start worrying.

  The job outside was simple in theory and not particularly difficult in practice. It was just a matter of climbing out, hauling patch plates to the spot, and sealing them in place. After we suited, we clipped our lifelines into place and depressurised the inner air lock, which on a Kobold class is pretty elaborate with a retractable arm and cargo panels. I took along a pry bar, which I didn’t need to fix plates. Catarina and I climbed onto the outside of the hull to moor the plates to the side of the ship, and we touched helmets to avoid radio eavesdroppers. “Before we start, do you want to snoop around everyone’s cabins, or shall I?” she asked.

  “You’re reading my mind. I’d like to do Dykstra’s and McHugh’s cabins. I think I can climb through the hole. I’ll take the inner and outer sealant and the torch with me. Give me about ten minutes. Then you shove off with the plates, and I’ll help break your descent.” She nodded. Although the plates didn’t mass much, they were unwieldy.

  I launched myself, trusting the line to bring me down on the side of the ship in a parabola. As I pushed off, I thought I saw somebody watching us through the inner air-lock door. A third of the way around the ship, I touched down soft and let out a little slack.

  The hole into McHugh and Dykstra’s common area was large enough to crawl into. The edges were pretty even, but I was still careful not to tear my suit, which is even worse luck than walking under a ladder. I went looking through Dykstra’s cubicle first. I plucked the picture of her kid out of the ether and set it gently aside. A quick search convinced me there was nothing there, so I shifted to McHugh’s cabin and used the pry bar to go through the closet. There was a bag of the white powder floating free. I snatched it up and started to work on her desk. I didn’t find anything going through her drawers, but I brushed my hand against the lip as I was putting them back, and something came loose. It was half of an old coin embedded in wax, loosened by the vacuum. I stuffed it into my pouch and tugged on the rope to let myself out the way I’d come in.

  I stayed. My lifeline came drifting toward me. I reeled it in and tried not to think about what would have happened if I had been out on the hull. The end was cut, probably from inside the air lock. I floated free over to the cabin door and secured myself to the door handle before going outside.

  Catarina came over the horizon and touched down. She immediately hugged me tight. It may have been acting on her part, but it felt good. “You left the plates,” I said.

  “Never mind, Ken. Never mind. We’ll get them later.” She looked at me. “No jokes about the end of the line. I saw it go past, and my heart almost stopped. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “No.” Whoever had a knife was still on the other end and could have just as easily made a clean sweep of it when she launched herself over the horizon after me. I couldn’t help thinking she’d risked her life to try and save mine. That is, if she hadn’t cut the line. I gave her line a jerk. “This is going to sound mushy, but let’s hold hands on the way back. Just in case.”

  As we were floating through on our short transit, I touched helmets. “I assume you knew where every one of us was the night we met.”

  “Let me think. You and I spent the evening in the Prancing Pony. McHugh was in the White Hart, Dykstra was in Smade’s Tavern, O’Day was in Callahan’s Place, and Spooner was in Gavagan’s Bar. Ironsides spent the evening in the Vulgar Unicorn.”

  “I won’t ask. The Vulgar Unicorn?”

  “It’s a little dive off Asprin Street. You can tell the men from the boys by the amount of makeup they’re wearing.”

  “Funny name for a drinking establishment. Bobo never left the ship. That leaves Frido unaccounted for,” I pointed out.

  “K
en, I’m starting to get slightly worried. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Sorry, Watson. It’s gotten personal. Where was Kundle?”

  “Difficult to say. The rest of our merry band filled up all the taverns in town, bar none. Frido left neither ashes nor footprints for me to use your methods on,” she said, affecting an English accent. “Criminals these days are so beastly tidy.”

  “You sound as if you disapprove of the Great Sherlock’s methods.”

  “Sherlock was always so busy solving puzzles that he lost a few criminals and an odd client or two. The problem with the Great Holmes of England is no one really lives in them anymore.”

  I closed my eyes. “That one was unusually bad, even for you. All right. I’ll get off the subject. But what’s bothering you?”

  She hesitated. “Ken, I don’t know how to say this, but while you were checking out McHugh’s cabin, I took a look at the latticework. They clipped it pretty thoroughly. There’s about a fifteen-meter section that’s just gone on this side.”

  “Oh, God! I didn’t think to look.”

  “There’s no way we’re going to be able to ride what we have left through a black hole and come out. Do we have any spare lattices?”

  I thought. “Just short sections.”

  “Then we can’t repair it. I think we’re going to have to turn back to Schuyler’s World.”

  “God, what a mess. This will bankrupt the ship.”

  “Probably. I don’t know Davie Lloyd’s finances as well as you do.”

  “We’re going to have enough trouble finding parts and a replacement for Frido on Schuyler’s. We might be able to scrape by if we all kick in crew shares, but it’s going to be tight. You got any idea why we got shot at?”

  “I wish I did. All I have is a long list of questions that will hold until we get back to Schuyler’s.”

  When we touched down, I went over to the intercom. “Where is everybody? Report in!”

  Spooner and Clyde were in stores. McHugh was in the galley celebrating. Dykstra was tidying up the lifeboat. Bobo had the bridge, and Ironsides was in his cabin.

  “I’ll bet none of them have alibis,” I told Catarina disgustedly and fingered the intercom again. “Okay, I need everyone to meet me on the bridge in five minutes.”

  When we got up to the bridge, I let Catarina explain about the lattice, then I explained about the long walk I had nearly taken off a very short pier. I looked from face to face and watched the elation everyone felt disappear.

  “But we have to get to Brasilia Nuevo,” Ironsides said doggedly. His cheeks had absolutely no colour. Bernie was the only one who looked worse.

  “Davie, we can’t,” Catarina told him gently. “Going through a black hole is as safe as riding a bus, but going through without a functioning lattice is about as smart as riding a bus with no brakes. We’ll lose profits, but the insurance will cover the damage and the lost cargo.”

  Bernie shook his head. “Davie dropped the casualty insurance three months ago.”

  I shrugged. “Look, Davie, if you can’t get an extension on the loan, maybe we can all kick in six months’ pay. But we’ve got to go back.”

  We let Clyde vote, and the vote was six to two in favour of returning. None of the ayes wanted to be stuck on Schuyler’s, but none of the ayes wanted to be dead either.

  Then I asked a few less-than-polite questions about who had been standing near the air lock. Spooner said that she and Clyde had been in stores the whole time we were out. Judging from the marks she’d left on Clyde, it was possible, but Clyde admitted that they’d been apart for a few minutes. Any one of the others could have done it easily.

  Bernie suggested, “Maybe it was an accident.”

  Everybody stared at him pointedly until we broke up.

  I went back and stared at the sharp spur on the thumb of the mechanical arm. “How long would it have taken, do you think?”

  “A minute or two,” Catarina replied.

  “You know, this would make a lousy detective story. In a good story, there are at least one or two people who tell the truth occasionally,” I remarked.

  Bernie wandered by and stopped. “Uh, Ken. I just wanted to tell you... uh, that I appreciate what you did.” He waddled off.

  I turned and looked at Catarina. “Do you think he was trying to thank me for saving his life?”

  She nodded, and I shook my head in resignation.

  I hid the powder in my locker and taped the half coin to the back of my mirror. We went back out about an hour later, with Spooner and Dykstra watching the lock, and patched the holes without incident. After that, Catarina and I both crashed. It had been a hectic day. I slept until my stomach told me it was time to get up.

  I usually don’t snack, but my stomach had a point. I went down to the galley and began rooting around in my corner of the refrigerator. Some of the stuff had floated free when we stopped spin, and it needed rearranging. I pulled out an apple and was starting to section it when I noticed that there was a little pinhole in the peel staring at me. I cut away a small piece and sniffed.

  I’m not good at describing smells, but the apple smelled like almonds. I wrapped it up in foil, stuck it in the freezer, and began examining the rest of my fruit. Two pears and a grapefruit showed obvious signs of tampering. I pitched everything. Somebody wasn’t keen on having me finish out the trip.

  I started looking through the other stuff and was stopped by a whiff of a peculiar odour. It seemed to be coming from the milk cartons in the back, and I pulled them loose and began examining them, one by one. Two were slightly creased. I opened the first one. It was filled to the top with something red and going bad, and the other was the same.

  Whoever had sealed the cartons hadn’t done a thorough job. I froze them both without leaving too many fingerprints. Even if Catarina liked blood, this stuff was sour.

  I found a short length of pipe and put it in my pocket to carry around. Then I went back to my cabin so I could have a real case of the shakes.

  Catarina was waiting and gave me a startled look when she saw my expression. I explained.

  “It looks like somebody poisoned my fruit. I’ve got an apple in the freezer with a pinhole in it that smells like almonds. We’ve either got a snake or a wicked witch. I also found what looks to be two litres of sour blood, probably Frido’s. Am I getting paranoid?”

  She thought for a minute. “No, Ken, you’re not. Go call Dykstra and have her weld me in.” I must have given her a funny look, because she rubbed my cheek. “I’m going back into solitary. We’ve taken enough chances.”

  Gradually, it began to make sense. If Catarina was supposed to take the fall for one or more murders, icing her away minimised my chances of acquiring an undeserved halo.

  She explained, “This is a rougher trip than I’d planned on, Ken. You’re going to join me in finishing it on Leopard Milk and chocolate chip cookies unless you’d like to go the way of all rats and have them try to pin it on me.”

  It finally started to make enough sense so that I agreed with her. I nodded and went off to find Ironsides.

  To his credit, Davie Lloyd tried to talk me out of walling her up until I explained about the fruit. After that, he didn’t make any comment.

  I slipped Catarina the emerald and some powder, just in case. Then I watched Rosalee and Davie Lloyd weld her back in. After she was taken care of, Clyde came by and found me.

  “What’s up, Clyde?” I snapped.

  “Rosalee told me what was going on with Catarina.” He looked a little sheepish. “Uh, Wyma Jean and I were just wondering if you still wanted to play poker.”

  I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry, Clyde,” I finally said, wiping my eyes. “It’s been a rough day. Sure, we’d love to. It’ll be a good way to unwind.”

  Dykstra and McHugh volunteered to take the swing watch from me, and poker turned into a nightly routine on the trip back.

  It gave me some insights into my shipmates. I
noticed that Clyde’s poker was aggressive and methodical. He was also a pretty slick politician—I noticed he was quick to fetch Spooner drinks and otherwise attend to her wants. Spooner was more erratic; sometimes she’d fold quickly, and sometimes she’d hang in well past the point of prudence. She liked the game of baseball. We didn’t quite clean out her pile of raisins, but we made a dent. I did okay; I usually dropped a few raisins, but never many.

  Catarina was usually the big winner—after all, they were her raisins. She was quiet rather than flashy, but I did notice that once a night she’d bluff me out of my shoes, regular as clockwork, probably for the sheer joy of it—which was not reassuring, given my record.

  We let Bernie sit in once with Sasha Louise. Bernie’s head looks like it’s mounted on a gimbal. His Adam’s apple is the ball joint, and it bounces up and down like a racketball when he gets excited, which isn’t conducive to successful poker. Bernie lost his raisins quickly, which is pretty much what people have been saying for years.

  Periodically, I stopped by the refrigerator to look longingly at the food there. In a day or two, the apple and the blood vanished from the freezer.

  I was beginning to wish that Frido had been hit by a train.

  Congratulations.

  Whom Do you Suspect?

  Three days later we began our descent back to Schuyler’s World. I managed to get a day off, but the watches were rough on me, and they were also rough on Spooner even though she had Clyde to help. The Scupper doesn’t fly well one-handed, and she had taken a beating. I suffered through on Leopard Milk and some other tinned stuff. The Leopard Milk actually eased my stomach somewhat.

  Ironsides seemed to fade into the woodwork, and Bobo asserted himself more and more. He put out his long-awaited SOP, which eclipsed Number Two hold for sheer volume of manure, and began wearing his mate’s cap all over the ship.

  As far as finding a culprit, none of my facts seemed to go anywhere.

  I spent a lot of free time by Catarina’s door, and we talked about things we’d like to do and things in general. I forgave her when she explained that a Chinese voyeur was a Peking Tom. The one about the Chinese voyeur was almost as bad as the one about the carrot. The one about the carrot was “a pretty low hoe.”