Velocity

by B. V. Larson

  “We’ve lost too many men. We’ll have to leave.”

  “But the contract—” began Dr. Beckwith.

  “They didn’t pay me enough to die here. Nobody could pay that much.”

  “It’s not that bad, really—we aren’t going to lose him,” Dr. Beckwith fought to keep the panic out of his voice. The muscles in his neck were stretched like guitar strings. When he moved his head pinched nerves twinged as if plucked by playful fingers. He rubbed and scratched his left hand through the thick material of his glove. He had to have more time.

  They were in the first Earth ship to have landed on the planet, which they had christened Jade, the name specified in the promotional section of their contract. Although the executive who had come up with the name had never seen the world, Jade deserved her name. The newly-discovered planet was vast, tangled jungle. Huge land-masses of brilliant foliage dwarfed small seas. Seen from space, the seas appeared as silver-blue islands in an ocean of greenery. Above all, Jade was a world of wet, green life. An immense, tropical hot-house.

  But in addition to the flora, particularly large and vicious insects had evolved. They buzzed and hummed everywhere. Every yard of ground rustled with them; they wriggled in ponds and darkened the skies with their bodies massed in overwhelming swarms. Some of them were as big as a man’s hand and just as powerful.

  Captain Rogers gunned the pneumatic drill experimentally. The glowing digital readings fluctuated wildly, climbing up the scale, then dropping back. Rogers was a big man with bulky arms and shoulders. His pressure suit exaggerated his size, making him look like a massive white giant with thickly wrinkled skin.

  “How did it happen?” he asked.

  “What?” replied Dr. Beckwith.

  “I mean Paul—how did the bug get into his suit?”

  Dr. Beckwith waved impatiently at the air with his gloved hands. “I don’t know—he must have been carrying eggs or larva since his initial exposure.”

  In contrast to Rogers’ build, Beckwith was a man of medium height with a bulging mid-section that barely fit into his suit. His arm muscles were like loose rubber-bands. He blinked rapidly as he brought his mind back to the present. He had been thinking about what Jade would mean to Earth. A whole planet full of living creatures men could eat without being poisoned. An entire planet to be homesteaded and explored. Back home there would be parties and bands. He could open a school of extraterrestrial biology. The colonists would name one of Jade’s mountain ranges after him.

  “Is he hemorrhaging?”

  Beckwith shook his head vigorously inside his helmet. He regretted it immediately, as fingers plucked painfully at his neck muscles. “We’ve got that stopped. He’s conscious, too.”

  Captain Rogers said nothing. He finished adjusting the drill and tossed it back on the workbench. The heavy metal drill hit the table with a clang that neither of them could hear inside their thickly insulated suits.

  Inside their suits the men were entirely self-contained. They carried nutrient pastes, air-compressors, waste-recyclers—everything. They had been living in their suits since the first day, the day they had landed, when the native insects had swarmed and killed most of the crew. That meant drinking recycled, distilled and body-warm water and breathing compressed filtered oxygen that tasted like hot vinyl. Beckwith and Rogers conversed by radio, it was either that or trying to touch helmets all the time. The only sounds that could penetrate their helmets from the outside came up through the soles of their feet, usually from vibrations in the steel-plex hull of the ship itself.

  Beckwith scratched the knuckles of his left hand by rubbing them up against the underside of the workbench. He shook his head, although no one could see him. His neck twinged. They couldn’t leave Jade now, without the conclusive proof he needed. Everything would be ruined. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably under the weight of his air tanks. Feeling a touch of nervousness, it seemed that he couldn’t get enough air. Quickly, he adjusted the oxygen-gauge on his forearm up a few hundredths. After a few moments he relaxed. For a moment longer, he listened to the hiss of his air-valves and breathed back in his own steamy exhalations.

  “Let’s have a look at him,” said the captain finally. He laid all his tools on a piece of canvas and shoved them back out of the way.

  Nodding his head sharply and ignoring the plucking fingers, Beckwith headed with hurried steps toward the bulkhead. Rogers followed at a much more leisurely pace.

  The tiny medical ward at the heart of the ship was a tight fit. Beckwith and Rogers stayed in the corners, trying to keep out of the way. The nursing unit, named “Mom” by the crew, moved anxiously around the prone figure of Paul Foster. Her three multi-jointed arms independently, whirring and whining as innumerable electric motors and hydraulic screw-drives worked in unison. When either Dr. Beckwith or Captain Rogers got in the way, Mom politely bleeped and waited for them to move.

  Technical officer Paul Foster lay on a stainless steel table. A thin sheet of sterile white paper separated his body from the metal. Tubes and sensory wires ran from where they were taped to pale, bloodless flesh up to a panel of self-monitoring devices that hung in festoons from the ceiling. As they watched, an IV bottle dribbled the last of its liquid contents down the tube leading into Foster’s bloodstream. A soft alarm went off, which was immediately acknowledged by Mom. Within twenty seconds the robot had replaced the bottle with a fresh one.

  “He doesn’t look good,” commented Rogers. “I think—”

  “It’s just the anesthetic—don’t think that he’s dying.”

  Rogers shook his head. “Why can’t Mom just take that thing off him? Look at that—just look and think about what that must be like.”

  Foster’s eyes were half-open, but glazed and obviously unaware. His dead-white arms were strapped to the steel table, so that he would not injure himself. On his exposed right thigh crouched an earth-colored lump about the size of a golf ball. Faint red lines traced up Paul’s leg from the insect, showing where its feeding apparatus were inside his arteries.

  “Mom can’t just pull it off,” explained Beckwith. “See those cilia, those hair-like things around the base of it? If we even touch the carapace, it injects toxins.”

  His neck twinged again, a twinge of guilt. He shook his head dismally. “I warned him, I warned them all not to use repellant that first day.”

  He should have worked harder to impress the crew with his theory, but he hadn’t known what would happen. How could he have known? He squirmed inside his ill-fitting pressure suit. He rubbed the painful, itching knuckles of his left hand against the underside of the operating table, feeling the stiff fabric of his glove rasp on swollen flesh.

  “I still don’t understand why the repellants didn’t—” began Rogers.

  “The repellants did work,” snapped Beckwith. The captain was a fool, and Beckwith had little patience with fools. “As I tried to explain, the insects here have evolved to attack any creature bearing some sort of chemical defense against them. That’s partially why they are in such a dominate position in the ecological system.”

  He recalled the way the insects had swarmed in reaction to the repellants. In seconds, five crewmen had become man-shaped mounds of biting insects. Dr. Beckwith had noted that several species had swarmed in unison. There had been blue, wasp-like creatures that were about the size of a man’s index finger, with curved retractable stingers of shiny, black chitin. He remembered seeing a double-winged variety of the flying spiders as well. Even a few of the crab-sized beetles that lived in the mossy undergrowth had joined in the attack. The crewmen had screamed and stumbled blindly like men engulfed in flames. Beckwith had been quite shocked. It was very rare to have several species combine their efforts in such a manner.

  “So you’re telling me that I didn’t get attacked because I wasn’t wearing repellant?” asked Rogers.

  “Correct.”

  “Huh,” grunted Rogers. He changed the subject. “Couldn’t we just...” He made a
hacking motion in the air with his gloved hand.

  “Amputate? No—we don’t have the equipment for that here...” Beckwith stopped, remembering that he didn’t want to give Rogers any excuses to leave Jade ahead of schedule. He made a nervous fluttering gesture with his hands. “Well, of course, we could do it, but the insect’s ah—feeding tubes extend up the femoral to his heart, and...” he shook his head and then added a lie. “I don’t think any medical facility could insure the patient’s survival in such an operation.”

  For a minute or so they quietly watched Mom perform her duties. Mom clicked and whirred steadily, simultaneously monitoring Foster’s pulse, breath rate, temperature and neural responsiveness. They watched as the machine gave her patient an injection. One of Mom’s three appendages slid open a compartment and a needle with a tube attached came out of it. The skin of Foster’s upper arm dimpled in and the drug pumped into his bloodstream under measured pressure.

  “That bug—it doesn’t really look like a bug. It’s too big,” Rogers said. Beckwith noted the familiar tone of disgusted fascination in his voice that non-biologists always used when discussing insects. “It looks more like a hermit crab, maybe, but with a tougher shell.”

  Beckwith decided to try again to impress the Captain with the importance of the mission. He had tried many times in the past few days and he knew he had begun to annoy Rogers with the point, but he had to try again.

  “As horrible as it is, Captain,” he began making an effort to start from a point that the man could understand. “And it is a terrible thing, I agree... But the mere fact that these insects can co-exist with us, with human beings, is actually a great discovery.”

  Rogers made a dismissing gesture. “Yes, yes, I know. Their proteins—”

  “That’s it exactly, Captain,” interrupted Beckwith, unable to contain himself. He rubbed the joints and flesh of his left hand, letting the rough fabric of his pressure suit do the scratching for him. “The proteins. Of all the thousands of molecular structures for proteins life can take, Earth has evolved only a few—”

  “And this planet has more or less the same set,” Rogers finished for him. “I told you I know.”

  Beckwith was not to be stifled, however. “Jade is in fact, the only planet yet to be found that has organic compounds so closely compatible with ours. Think of it! Men can live here without being poisoned by every living thing they come in contact with. You can roast a bird or dig up a root and chew on it without expecting a dozen fatal allergic reactions.”

  Inside his suit, Beckwith thought of it, and his face twisted with a grin. Just a little adapting to be done, and then an entire planet waited to be molded into a new world. A million new species of life to study in the field. A biologist’s dream.

  “Bleep, Bleep,” Mom applied a tiny amount of pressure to the doctor’s ankles with a foam-padded fender. Startled, Beckwith hopped out of her way and let the machine pass.

  “You’re talking about colonization, Beckwith.”

  “Yes, certainly,” he replied, steeling himself for another round of an old argument.

  “But colonization on any realistically large scale is impractical. Everyone knows that.”

  “Wrong. Everyone is told that. And they are told that because there has never been a planet suitable for mass colonization,” here Rogers started to retort but Beckwith overrode him, unusually assertive due to his excited state. “Of course there are miners on several high-ore planets and numerous scientific stations and outposts strung out within thirty light-years of Earth. There even a few large stations on bleak rocks called colonies,” here he paused to drag in a gasp of breath, “But there is nothing compared to what Jade could become.”

  “Look, Beckwith,” said Rogers, turning to face him squarely. A large gloved finger extended toward the doctor’s faceplate, jabbing at him in time with Rogers’ words. “I know how important this discovery is, I know how much you need to complete your tests—to get your proof—but I have a mission to run. Out of a crew of eight, you and I are the only men still standing—”

  “But without conclusive proof, we’ll have trouble getting a fully equipped survey vessel to come out here.”

  “And with a dead crew, doctor, Earth would never learn about this planet. Besides, I find it difficult to believe that if you bring back enough samples, Earth labs could not come to the same conclusions that you have just as quickly. I am beginning to believe that you want to hog the credit for the discovery.”

  Beckwith shook his head vehemently. “False, sir. Positively false. Personal notoriety is my last concern,” he lied. He quickly decided that he must switch the topic of the discussion to something else. Rogers was quite correct about not needing to collect additional samples to prove that the proteins were compatible. But he had another reason for waiting. A vital reason. “Besides which, we now are out of reach of the insects and are in no further danger. There is no reason to leave prematurely.”

  “I do not relish the idea spending another several weeks living in this pressure suit. With only two of us left, the grounds for aborting the mission are surpassed. We’re leaving as soon as we stow the equipment.”

  Dr. Beckwith shook his head sharply inside his helmet. A droplet of sweat flew from his forehead to strike the inside of his quartz faceplate. His neck muscles pulled and twinged violently. He wanted to tell the Captain why they didn’t need to leave. He was all but bursting with the facts, but he contained himself. He knew that the truth would be misunderstood, that it would get him nowhere. He said nothing.

  Thirty-one hours later Dr. Beckwith and Captain Rogers were working outside the ship. They had stowed approximately three-quarters of the scientific equipment and supplies. Dr. Beckwith looked up through the shielded face-plate of his helmet. The shimmering image of the K-class star overhead burned purple blotches in his retina and glowed on his eyelids when he blinked. They would be finished before nightfall, which was less than nine hours away. He knew that if he was going to act, it must be soon.

  He removed his helmet. Rogers was safely out of sight, packing the meteorological mini-lab on the other side of the ship. With his helmet off, the world he had watched from the inside of it came to full color and life. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to Jade’s daytime glare. His other senses, too, were overwhelmed by the surging, frothing ocean of life that assaulted them.

  A hundred as yet unclassified beasts roared, screamed, and growled, sounding as if they crouched behind every bush. Flying cold-blooded bat-like creatures screeched in the trees and unseen things rustled under moldering leaves. The air was heavy with odors that seemed particularly powerful to him. He had had nothing to smell other than his own moist body trapped in his pressure suit for days. His nose detected rotting fruit, various types of dung, and pleasant scent like that of crushed grass mingled with the smell of danker vegetation. When the ship had landed it had burnt a steaming wound in the foliage, and the smell of it still hung in the air. Dr. Beckwith stood in the midst of this black wound, but he hardly noticed it. His eyes were only focused on the vibrant forest that engulfed him and his tiny ship. He filled his lungs with the cleansing, oxygen-rich air.

  He watched as an animal about the weight and height of a large dog investigated the unprecedented phenomena of open ground. It sniffed with an elongated trunk-like protuberance at a blackened and twisted plant. Fires were rare things on Jade’s wet surface. The creature acted uncertain and cautious. Dr. Beckwith watched quietly as it tested the air and picked at clods of blackened ground.

  Like all the animals that had been discovered on Jade thus far, it lacked fur of any kind. Dr. Beckwith had speculated that furred creatures had probably died out because of the prevalence of parasites: on Jade, fur did little other than provide homes for insects. Inside the animal had a tough hide of layered, armor-like gray skin, similar to that of Earth’s rhinoceros. Parasites resembling barnacles were visible on one of its flanks and in clusters about its throat.

  Dr. Bec
kwith took an immediate interest in the insects it carried. He did not recognize the species. He pondered killing the animal and examining them. He fingered the pistol on his hip, but rejected the idea. There was no more time.

  He set down his helmet and began searching a rubbish pile of scorched bushes and trash from the ship. He found it difficult to use his left hand, as it was now stiff and throbbing all the way up to his elbow. Fortunately, he believed it had now reached its worst stage and would soon begin to heal. He dug through discarded cartons and used bits of plastic that held pockets of wriggling larvae. When he moved the cartons they broke one and he found himself holding two moving handfuls of pinkish scavenging insects, about the size of twelve-year molars. Finding them to be of a familiar species, he shook them unconcernedly from his gloves and continued his search. At last he found what he was looking for, a hefty length of steel-plex with a solid core.

  Holding the piece of steel-plex like a club, he approached the hull of the ship. He stood before the microwave navigational sensor. The sensor was a four-pointed dish with gold foil wrapped around it. The delicate instrument was presently exposed in its pod as Captain Rogers planned to check it before lift-off.

  Dr. Beckwith had discarded his helmet, but not his radio headset. He had only to speak to be heard by Rogers.

  “Captain, could you give me a hand with this?”

  “With what?”

  “One of my experiments, I need your help to get it aboard.”

  He heard Rogers sigh. It sounded like a wind storm over the mike. “Shit. Alright, sure.”

  He glanced about furtively before beginning. He felt a slight movement in the humid air, not quite enough to be called a breeze. It touched and cooled the sweat on his brow and lifted a few locks of his hair. To have this world, to live in the open on Jade as men should, it was something that he knew would mean much to his race.