Ryeland looked at her thoughtfully. "What's a reefrat?"
"Here's Major Chatterji's office," said Faith nervously, and almost pushed him through the door.
Machine Major Chatterji got up, smiling blankly through his gleaming glasses, waving a copy of Ryeland's orders from the Machine. "Ready, Ryeland," he called. "We're all set for you now."
Ryeland advanced into the room, thinking. "I'll need my computer," he said. "And someone to look up all the work that's been done on the Hoyle Effect, boil it down, give me the essential information."
"Right! You can have three assistants from Colonel Lescure's section. And I've already requisitioned a binary computer."
"No," said Ryeland impatiently, "not a binary computer. My computer. Oddball Oporto."
Major Chatterji's gold-rimmed glasses twinkled with alarm. "The Risk? But Ryeland, really!"
"I need him," said Ryeland obstinately. The Machine's orders had been perfectly clear.
Chatterji surrendered. "We'll have to get General Fleemer's okay," he said. "Come along." He led Ryeland out through a short corridor to an elevator; Faith tagged after inconspicuously. The three of them went up, out, down another hall. Chatterji tapped on a door.
"All right," grumbled a voice from a speaker over the door, and it swung open. They walked into a silver room, with silver walls and furnishings plated in silver. General Fleemer, in a silver robe that he was knotting about him, stumped in from a bedroom. "Well?"
Machine Major Chatterji cleared his throat. "Sir, Ryeland wants the other Risk, Oporto, assigned to him."
"For calculation purposes, General," Ryeland cut in. "He's a natural calculator. What they used to call an idiot-savant, or the next thing to it,"
The general looked at him through his deepset eyes. "Will that help you solve the jetless drive?"
"Why," Ryeland began, "I haven't started on that yet. This is the Hoyle Effect. The Machine ordered—"
"I know what the Machine ordered," the general grumbled. He scratched his nose reflectively. "All right, give him his man. But Ryeland. The important part of your work is the jetless drive."
Ryeland was startled. "General, the Machine's orders didn't give priority to either section."
"I give priority," said the general sharply. "Get along with it, man! And get out."
In the corridor, Chatterji vanished toward his office and the Togetherness Girl took over again. "A very fine man, the general, don't you agree?" she chatted, leading him back to the elevator.
Ryeland took a deep breath. "Faith," he said, "there's something funny here. General Fleemer lives awfully well! And he seems to take it upon himself to, at least, interpret the Machine's orders. Is that customary, in Team Attack?"
The Togetherness Girl hesitated. She glanced at Rye-land, then led him down the corridor without speaking for a moment. She stopped before another door. "General Fleemer," she said, "is a fine man. I knew you'd like him. And you'll like Colonel Gottling too, don't think you won't!" And without any more of an answer than that, she opened the door to Gottling's office for him and left him there.
But Colonel Gottling proved himself very hard to like.
He was a huge man with a face like a skull, the horned helmet over it. He stood fingering the controls of his radar-horns angrily as Ryeland reported in on the teletype. "Hurry up, man," he muttered, and clumped out of his office, motioning Ryeland ahead of him. "You're next," he snapped. "Lescure had his whacks at the creature and he failed. They wouldn't let me handle it the way I wanted! And now it's up to you."
Ryeland said, "I don't understand. What creature?"
"The spaceling! The reefrat! The creature with the jetless drive."
Ryeland said humbly, "Colonel, I don't know what you're talking about."
Gottling spread his bony hands and stared at the ceiling in exasperation. "What under the Plan is this? What kind of idiots do they salvage for top-priority Teams these days? Do you mean you never heard of the reef-rats?"
"Only the word," Ryeland admitted. "But didn't you just say 'spaceling'?"
"Same thing!" Gottling stopped in an anteroom, jerking a thumb at a file cabinet. He barked: "Here! Here's everything you want to know about them. Everything from resting weight to the chemistry of what passes for blood. The only thing I can't tell you is what makes them go, and I could tell you that if they'd let me alone with the thing.”
"But—"
"You fool, stop saying 'but'!" howled Colonel Gottling. "Look here!"
He opened a door. Beyond was a big room, once a repair shop attached to one of the rocket pits, now hastily improvised into a laboratory. There were unpainted partitions, unconcealed electric wiring. Chemical lab benches held glassware and flasks of reagents, reeking acidly. There were transformers; an X-ray generator; various bulky devices that might have been centrifuges, biological research equipment—heaven knew what
And the lab was busy.
There were at least two dozen men and women in scarlet Technicorps smocks working at the benches and instruments. They glanced up only briefly as Colonel Gottling and Ryeland entered and checked in, then quickly went back to their work without speaking.
Evidently the cheery good will among the brass didn't extend to the lower echelons.
Colonel Gottling, in a good humor again, lighted a long, green-tinted cigarette and waved at the room. "It's all yours now," he grunted. 'Temporarily."
Ryeland looked at him.
"Or permanently," grinned the colonel, "provided you can tell us what makes the spaceling fly. Me, I think you can't. You look soft, Ryeland. The collar has not hardened you enough. Still—Do you want me to tell you something about the spaceling?"
"I certainly do," Ryeland said fervently.
"All right, why not? It's fairly intelligent. Lower primate level, at least. It is a warm-blooded oxygen-breathing mammal which—why do you look that way, man?"
Ryeland closed his mouth. "It's just that I thought it lived in space.”
Colonel Gottling guffawed. "And it does! An oxygen-breather, living in open space! Amusing, is it not? But it possesses some remarkable adaptations."
"Such as what?"
Colonel Gottling looked bored. "You should have asked Lescure these questions. I am a rocket man. But. first, of course, there is the jetless drive. Then there is something else—a field of force, perhaps, which enables it to hold a little cloud of air around it, even out in interstellar vacuum."
Ryeland said thoughtfully: "Could the two effects be linked?"
"Could they? Of course they could, idiot! But are they? I do not know," But Gottling was mellowing; treating Ryeland like an idiot had put him in a good humor. He said condescendingly: "It is possible, of course. I have thought that myself. If the reefrat can accelerate its own body without reaction, perhaps it can also accelerate gas molecules centripetally, also without reaction. How can one know? But—
"But let us look at the spaceling," he said abruptly. Then we can talk better."
He led the way through the laboratory and out the other side.
They went through a steel door into a sort of airlock. Racks in the walls held bulky protective suits and red-painted emergency gear. A warning sign glowed on the inner door of the airlock:
DANGER!
LANDING PIT—WAIT
FOR DECONTAMINATION
"It is safe," Gottling assured him. "The pit was de-conned months ago, before the spaceling was brought In."
He pulled a lever. Motors groaned; the inner door, an . enormous lead-lined mass of steel and fire-brick, inched slowly aside.
Like a Viking in his radar horns, the colonel stalked into the landing pit. Ryeland following.
The pit was an enormous circular cavern. Floodlights blazed on the blackened concrete floor. Even the decon crews, with all their foamants and air-blasting, had failed to remove the black breath of the jets.
Ryeland recognized it at once. It was the pit of which he had caught a glimpse the night before, with the T
ogetherness Girl. He lifted his eyes, looking for the sky and a settling rocket instinctively; but the dark armored walls lifted up into shadowy mystery. The cranes and the stages above were dark shapes in the dimness. No light passed the enormous doors, hundreds of feet up, that closed off the sky.
Gottling touched his arm and pointed.
Out in the black concrete stood a room-sized cage. Inside the cage was a pale cloud of greenish light; and in the center of the cloud lying motionless on the bare steel floor—
"The spaceling," said Gottling proudly.
It had struggled.
At close range, Ryeland could see how frantically fierce that struggle had been. The steel bars of the cage were thicker than his wrist, but some of them were bent. Red blood smeared them, and matted the spaceling's golden fur. It lay gasping on the stainless steel floor.
"She's skulking now, but we'll put her through her paces," Gottling bragged.
Ryeland said: "Wait, Colonel! The thing's injured. In the name of heaven, you can't—"
"Can't?" blazed the colonel. "Can't?" His finger reached up and touched the buttons of his radar-field suggestively. Under the triggering radar horns, his skull-like face glowered. "Don't tell me what I can't do, fool! Do you want me to expand my field radius? One touch of this and there won't be enough of you left to salvage!"
Ryeland swallowed. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the collar, with its eighty grams of high explosive.
"That's better," grunted Gottling. He clapped his hands and called: "Sergeant, get busy! Goose her!"
A Technicorps sergeant in red came trotting out of the shadows. He carried a long pole tipped with a sharpened blade. Black wires led from it to a battery box on his shoulder.
The spaceling rolled its battered head.
Its eyes opened—large, dark, limpid eyes—a seal's eyes; and they were terrible, it seemed to Ryeland, with suffering and fear. A shudder rippled along the creature's smooth featureless flanks.
"Goose her in the belly!" Gottling shouted. "Mr. Ryeland wants to see her do her tricks!" The spaceling screamed.
Its cry was thinly edged with terror, like the voice of a hysterical woman. "Stop it," Ryeland gasped, shaken.
Colonel Gottling blared with laughter. Tears rolled out of his piglike eyes, down the bony cheeks. Finally he got control of himself. "Why, certainly," he gasped. "You're next, as I said, eh? And if you believe you can tell us how the creature flies without even seeing her do it—" he Shrugged.
Writhing on the floor of the cage as though it had already felt the prod, the spaceling screamed in fright again.
Ryeland said hoarsely: "Just make him take that prod away."
"As you wish," the colonel nodded urbanely. "Sergeant! Return to duty. And you, Ryeland, I will leave you alone with your friend. Perhaps if I am not here to eavesdrop, she will whisper her secret in your ear!" Bellowing with laughter, Colonel Gottling shambled out of the pit.
After an hour, Ryeland began to appreciate the difficulties of the problem.
Back in the file room, he found a summary of the existing knowledge of the spaceling; he took it to the landing pit and read through it, watching the spaceling, trying to allow it to become accustomed to his presence.
The creature hardly moved, except to follow Ryeland with its eyes.
The notes on the spaceling showed a fruitless and painful history. The spaceling had been captured by an exploring Plan rocket retracing the steps of Lescure's Cristobal Colon. A section of notes, showing how the capture had been effected, was missing; the account took up the story with the creature being brought into the hastily converted rocket pit. It had been chained at first, so that the first investigators approached it with impunity. Then the chains had been taken off—and, in quick order, I half a dozen investigators had been bashed rather severely against the bars. The spaceling did not seem to have attacked them; they simply were in the way of the thing's terrified attempts at escape. However, after that the observations had been conducted primarily from outside the cage. And mostly—at least in the last two weeks, since Colonel Gottling had taken over charge of the specimen —with the help of the goad. Or worse.
There were reports of blood tests and tissue samples. Ryeland glanced at them, frowned and put them aside; they meant nothing to him. There were X-ray studies, and reams of learned radiologists reports. Also of no value to Ryeland, whatever they might have meant to Colonel Pascal Lescure.
Then there were physical tests. Dynamometers had measured the pull against the chains. Telemetering devices had registered the change in the recorded curves of its vital processes under various conditions—at rest, as it "flew," and "under extraordinary stimulus,” as the report primly put it. Meaning, Ryeland supposed, under torture.
No radiation of any sort had been detected. And someone had thought to surround the creature with plumb-bobs to test for an incident side thrust; there was none; the plumbs were undisturbed.
No thrust!
Then this nonsense that everyone had been spouting so glibly was not nonsense after all!
For if there was no measurable thrust against its environment to balance its measured dynamometer pull-then the spaceling had, indeed, a true jetless drive.
Ryeland looked up from the notes to stare at the spaceling, slumped in the bottom of its cage, its great eyes fixed on him. Jetless drivel
He suddenly felt very small and, for all the Togetherness and the Teamwork, for all the joint effort embodied in the Plan of Man, very alone. Jetless drive—here in this creature lay the seeds of a fact which would destroy Newton's Third Law, change the shape of the Solar System. For unquestionably, with such a drive, the scope of the Plan of Man would widen beyond recognition. Out past the useless, frozen methane giants, the Plan would drive to the stars!
Ryeland shook his head, confused.
For suddenly he didn't want the Plan of Man expanded to the stars. That word that Pascal Lescure had used— "Freedom!"
It did not seem to live under the Plan.
Abruptly his reveries were ended; there was a rumble like thunder in the pit.
Ryeland leaped to his feet, astonished, while the space-ling mewed worriedly in its cage. A blade of light split the dark above. He looked up, and a slit of blue sky widened.
There was a confused clattering behind him and someone came running into the pit. The Technicorps sergeant, shouting: "Mr. Ryeland, Mr. Ryeland! Get out of the way. Some crazy fool is coming in for a landing!"
The sergeant raced over to the cage and began frantically trying to unbolt its heavy fastenings, to push it on its tiny wheel to the side of the pit. There was a wild cataract of flame thrusting into the opening gates of the pit overhead, radio-triggered; and a tiny rocket came weaving in, settling on a cushion of bright white fire.
Ryeland thought grimly: "Thank God it's only a little one!" A big one would have been the end of the spaceling —and of himself and the Technicorps sergeant as well. But this little speedster had plenty of room to land without incinerating them all. It was a one-man craft, built for looks and play; it dropped to the black concrete on the far side of the pit, a hundred yards away, and though heat washed over them like a benediction, it did them no harm. A sudden gale roared through the floor ducts, sweeping the rocket fumes away.
A ramp fell.
A slim figure in white coveralls ran lightly down the ramp and across the concrete, confusingly half-familiar birds fluttering about its head.
Ryeland was galvanized into action. "Stop it!" he shouted, "Keep away from that cage!"
The intruder ignored him. Swearing, Ryeland raced to intercept the stranger. He took a dozen angry strides, caught a slim arm, swung the intruder around—and gasped. Silvery doves tore fiercely at his face and head.
"Get your hands off me, Risk!" It was a girl—that girl! He could see now that her white coveralls did not disguise her sex. Her eyes. were a greenish blue, and very familiar eyes; her voice, though charged with indignation, was a familiar voice.
Ryeland gulped. It was the Planner's daughter, Donna Creery. "I—" he began. "I—I didn't know it was you! But what do you want here?"
"Want?" The ocean-water eyes flashed. "I want to know what you people are doing—what you think you're doing by torturing my spaceling!"
Chapter 6
The girl stood staring at Ryeland. She was an entirely different creature from the lovely girl in the bubble bath, almost unrecognizable. The Donna of the Planner's private subtrain car was a teen-ager in the process of becoming woman, with the sad shyness of youth and its innocence. But this girl was something else. This was the Planner's daughter, imperious. And not a child.
Ryeland took a deep breath. Planner's daughter or no, this girl was in his way. The only way he had of getting the collar off his neck lay through the creature in the cage. He said sharply: "Get out of here, Miss Creery. The spaceling is dying. It mustn't be disturbed."
"What?" The Peace Dove, settling on her shoulders, whirred and muttered.
"You aren't allowed here," he said stubbornly. "Please leave!"
She stared at him incredulously; then, without a word, turned to the cage. "Here, sweet," she whispered to the great seal-like animal. "Don't worry, Donna's here." The spaceling lifted its head and stared at her with great, limpid eyes.
Ryeland said harshly: "Miss Creery, I asked you to leave."
She didn't bother to look at him. "There's a good girl," she cooed, like a child with a puppy. "Where's the damned door?"
Ryeland was angry now. "You can't go in there!" He caught at her arm. It was like catching a tiger by the tail; there was a quick movement, too fast to follow, and she caught him a stinging blow across the face with her open hand. Sheer astonishment drove him back; and by the time he recovered his balance the Planner's daughter had found the catch and was inside the door of the cage.
The spaceling came heaving seal-like toward her, whimpering.
The Reefs of Space Page 6