Fifty yards away, an enormous dark spot on the hull, one of the ship’s vision devices, swelled and darkened. Tommy looked up with interest. He could see nothing in that direction, but evidently the Captain had spotted something. Tommy watched and waited, growing colder every second, and after a long time he saw a new pinpoint of light spring into being. It grew steadily larger, turned fuzzy at one side, then became two linked dots, one hard and bright, the other misty.
Tommy looked down with sudden understanding, and saw that another wide area of the ship’s hull was swollen and protruding. This one showed a pale color under the green and had a dark ring around it: it was a polarizer. The object he had seen must contain metal, and the Captain was bringing it in for fuel. Tommy hoped it was a big one; they had been short of metal ever since he could remember.
When he glanced up again, the object was much larger. He could see now that the bright part was hard and smooth, reflecting the light of the nearby sun. The misty part was a puzzler. It looked like a crewman’s voice, seen against space—or the ion trail of a ship in motion. But was it possible for metal to be alive?
II
Leo Roget stared into the rear-view scanner and wiped beads of sweat from his brown, half-bald scalp. Flaming gas from the jets washed up toward him along the hull; he couldn’t see much. But the huge dark ovoid they were headed for was still there, and it was getting bigger. He glanced futilely at the control board. The throttle was on full. They were going to crash in a little more than two minutes, and there didn’t seem to be a single thing he could do about it.
He looked at Frances McMenamin, strapped into the acceleration harness beside his own. She said, “Try cutting off the jets, why don’t you?”
Roget was a short, muscular man with thinning straight black hair and sharp brown eyes. McMenamin was slender and ash-blond, half an inch taller than he was, with one of those pale, exquisitely shaped faces that seem to be distributed equally among the very stupid and the very bright. Roget had never been perfectly sure which she was, although they had been companions for more than three years. That, in a way, was part of the reason they had taken this wild trip: she had made Roget uneasy, and he wanted to break away, and at the same time he didn’t. So he had fallen in with her idea of a trip to Mars—“to get off by ourselves and think”—and here, Roget thought, they were, not thinking particularly.
He said, “You want us to crash quicker?”
“How do you know we will?” she countered. “It’s the only thing we haven’t tried. Anyhow, we’d be able to see where we’re going, and that’s more than we can do now.”
“All right,” said Roget, “all right." She was perfectly capable of giving him six more reasons, each screwier than the last, and then turning out to be right. He pulled the throttle back to zero, and the half-heard, half-felt roar of the jets died.
The ship jerked backward suddenly, yanking them against the couch straps, and then slowed.
Roget looked into the scanner again. They were approaching the huge object, whatever it was, at about the same rate as before. Maybe, he admitted unwillingly, a little slower. Damn the woman! How could she possibly have figured that one out in advance?
“And,” McMenamin added reasonably, “we’ll save fuel for the takeoff.”
Roget scowled at her. “If there is a takeoff,” he said. “Whatever is pulling us down there isn’t doing it to show off. What do we do—tell them that was a very impressive trick and we enjoyed it, but we’ve got to be leaving now?”
“We’ll find out what’s doing it,” said McMenamin, “and stop it if we can. If we can’t, the fuel won’t do us any good anyway.”
That was, if not Frances’ most exasperating trick, at least high on the list. She had a habit of introducing your own argument as if it were not only a telling point on her side, but something you had been too dense to see. Arguing with her was like swinging at someone who abruptly disappeared and then sandbagged you from behind.
Roget was fuming, but he said nothing. The greenish surface below was approaching more and more slowly, and now he felt a slight but definite tightening of the couch straps that could only mean deceleration. They were being maneuvered in for a landing as carefully and efficiently as if they were doing it themselves.
A few seconds later, a green horizon line appeared in the direct-view ports, and they touched. Roget’s and McMenamin’s couches swung on their gimbals as the ship tilted slowly, bounced and came to rest.
Frances reached inside the wide collar of her pressure suit to smooth a ruffle that had got crumpled between the volcanic swell of her bosom and the front of the transparent suit. Watching her, Roget felt a sudden irrational flow of affection and—as usually happened—a simultaneous notification that his body disagreed with his mind’s opinion of her. This trip, it had been tacitly agreed, was to be a kind of final trial period. At the end of it, either they would split up or decide to make it permanent, and up to now, Roget had been silently determined that it was going to be a split. Now he was just as sure that, providing they ever got to Mars or back to Earth, he was going to nail her for good.
He glanced at her face. She knew, all right, just as she’d known when he’d felt the other way. It should have irritated him, but he felt oddly pleased and comforted. He unstrapped himself, fastened down his helmet, and moved toward the airlock.
He stood on a pale-green, almost featureless surface that curved gently away in every direction. Where he stood, it was brilliantly lighted by the sun, and his shadow was sharp and as black as space. About two thirds of the way to the horizon, looking across the short axis of the ship, the sunlight stopped with knife-edge sharpness, and he could make out the rest only as a ghostly reflection of starlight.
Their ship was lying on its side, with the pointed stern apparently sunk a few inches into the green surface of the alien ship. He took a cautious step in that direction, and nearly floated past it before he could catch himself. His boot magnets had failed to grip. The metal of this hull—if it was metal—must be something that contained no iron.
The green hull was shot through with other colors here, and it rose in a curious, almost rectangular mound. At the center, just at the tip of the earth vessel’s jets, there was a pale area; around that was a dark ring which lapped up over the side of the ship. He bent to examine it. It was in shadow, and he used his helmet light.
The light shone through the mottled green substance; he could see the skin of his own ship. It was pitted, corroding. As he watched, another pinpoint of corruption appeared on the shiny surface, and slowly grew.
Roget straightened up with an exclamation. His helmet phones asked, “What is it, Leo?”
He said, “Acid or something eating the hull. Wait a minute.” He looked again at the pale and dark mottlings under the green surface. The center area was not attacking the ship’s metal; that might be the muzzle of whatever instrument had been used to pull them down out of their orbit and hold them there. But if it was turned off now . . . He had to get the ship away from the dark ring that was destroying it. He couldn’t fire the jets otherwise, because they were half buried; he’d blow the tubes if he tried.
He said, “You still strapped in?”
“Yes.”
“All right, hold on.” He stepped back to the center of the little ship, braced his corrugated boot soles against the hard green surface, and shoved.
The ship rolled. But it rolled like a top, around the axis of its pointed end. The dark area gave way before it, as if it were jelly-soft. The jets still pointed to the middle of the pale area, and the dark ring still lapped over them. Roget moved farther down and tried again, with the same result. The ship would move freely in every direction but the right one. The attracting power, clearly enough, was still on.
He straightened dejectedly and looked around. A few hundred yards away, he saw something he had noticed before, without attaching any significance to it; a six-foot egg, of some lighter, more translucent substance than the one
on which it lay. He leaped toward it. It moved sluggishly away, trailing a cloud of luminous gas. A few seconds later he had it between his gloved hands. It squirmed, then ejected a thin spurt of vapor from its forward end. It was alive.
McMenamin’s head was silhouetted in one of the forward ports. He said, “See this?”
“Yes! What is it?”
“One of the crew, I think. I’m going to bring it in. You work the airlock—it won’t hold both of us.”
“... All right.”
The huge egg crowded the cabin uncomfortably. It was pressed up against the rear wall, where it had rolled as soon as Frances had pulled it into the ship. The two human beings stood at the other side of the room, against the control panel, and watched it.
“No features,” said Roget, “unless you count those markings on the surface. This thing isn’t from anywhere in the solar system, Frances—it isn’t even any order of evolution we ever heard of.”
“I know,” she said abstractedly. “Leo, is he wearing any protection against space that you can see?”
“No,” said Roget. “That’s him, not a spacesuit. Look, you can see halfway into him. But—”
Frances turned to look at him. “That’s it,” she said. “It means this is his natural element—space!”
Roget looked thoughtfully at the egg. “It makes sense,” he said. “He’s adapted for it, anyhow—ovoid, for a high volume-to-surface ratio. Tough outer shell. Moves by jet propulsion. It’s hard to believe, because we’ve never run into a creature like him before, but I don’t see why not. On earth there are organisms, plants, that can live and reproduce in boiling water, and others that can stand near-zero temperatures.”
“He’s a plant, too, you know,” Frances put in. Roget stared at her, then back at the egg. “That color, you mean? Chlorophyll. It could be.”
“Must be,” she corrected firmly. “How else would he five in a vacuum?” And then, distressedly, “Oh, what a smell!”
They looked at each other. It had been something monumental in the way of smells, though it had only lasted a fraction of a second. There had been a series of separate odors, all unfamiliar and all overpoweringly strong. At least a dozen of them, Roget thought; they had gone past too quickly to count.
“He did it before, outside, and I saw the vapor.” He closed his helmet abruptly and motioned McMenamin to do the same. She frowned and shook her head. He opened his helmet again. “It might be poisonous!” “I don’t think so,” said McMenamin. “Anyway, we’ve got to try something.” She walked toward the green egg. It rolled away from her, and she went past it into the bedroom.
In a minute she reappeared, carrying an armload of plastic boxes and bottles. She came back to Roget and knelt on the floor, lining up the containers with their nipples toward the egg.
“What’s this for?” Roget demanded. “Listen, we’ve got to figure some way of getting out of here. The ship’s being eaten up—”
“Wait,” said McMenamin. She reached down and squeezed three of the nipples quickly, one after the other. There was a tiny spray of face powder, then one of cologne (Nuit Jupiterienne), followed by a jet of good Scotch.
Then she waited. Roget was about to open his mouth when another blast of unfamiliar odors came from the egg. This time there were only three: two sweet ones and one sharp.
McMenamin smiled. “I’m going to name him Stinky,” she said. She pressed the nipples again, in a different order. Scotch, face powder, Nuit Jupiterienne. The egg replied: sharp, sweet, sweet.
She gave him the remaining combination, and he echoed it; then she put a record cylinder on the floor and squirted the face powder. She added another cylinder and squeezed the cologne. She went along the line that way, releasing a smell for each cylinder until there were ten. The egg had responded, recognizably in some cases, to each one. Then she took away seven of the cylinders and looked expectantly at the egg.
The egg released a sharp odor.
“If ever we tell anybody,” said Roget in an awed tone, “that you taught a six-foot Easter egg to count to ten by selective flatulence—”
“Hush, fool,” she said. “This is a tough one.”
She lined up three cylinders, waited for the sharp odor, then added six more to make three rows of three. The egg obliged with a penetrating smell which was a good imitation of citron extract, Frances’ number nine. He followed it immediately with another of his own rapid, complicated series of smells.
“He gets it,” said McMenamin. “I think he just told us that three times three are nine.” She stood up. “You go out first, Leo. I’ll put him out after you and then follow. There’s something more we’ve got to show him before we let him go.”
Roget followed orders. When the egg came out and kept on going, he stepped in its path and held it back. Then he moved away, hoping the thing would get the idea that they weren’t trying to force it but wanted it to stay. The egg wobbled indecisively for a moment and then stayed where it was. Frances came out the next minute, carrying one of the plastic boxes and a flashlight.
“My nicest powder,” she said regretfully, “but it was the only thing I could find enough of.” She clapped her gloved hands together sharply, with the box between them. It burst, and a haze of particles spread around them, glowing faintly in the sunlight.
The egg was still waiting, somehow giving the impression that it was watching them alertly. McMenamin flicked on the flashlight and pointed it at Roget. It made a clear, narrow path in the haze of dispersed particles. Then she turned it on herself, on the ship, and finally upward, toward the tiny blue disk that was Earth. She did it twice more, then stepped back toward the airlock, and Roget followed her.
They stood watching as Tommy scurried off across the hull, squeezed himself into it and disappeared.
“That was impressive,” Roget said. “But I wonder just how much good it’s going to do us.”
“He knows we’re alive, intelligent, friendly, and that we come from Earth,” said McMenamin thoughtfully. “Or, anyhow, we did our best to tell him. That’s all we can do. Maybe he won’t want to help us; maybe he can’t. But it’s up to him now.”
III
The mental state of Tommy, as he dived through the hull of the ship and into the nearest radial corridor, would be difficult to describe fully to any human being. He was the equivalent of a very small boy—that approximation still holds good—and he had the obvious reactions to novelty and adventure. But there was a good deal more. He had seen living, intelligent beings of an unfamiliar shape and substance, who lived in metal and had some connection with one of those enormous, enigmatic ships called planets, which no captain of his own race dared approach.
And yet Tommy knew, with all the weight of knowledge accumulated, codified and transmitted over a span measured in billions of years, that there was no other intelligent race than his own in the entire universe, that metal, though life-giving, could not itself be alive, and that no living creature, having the ill luck to be spawned aboard a planet, could ever hope to escape so tremendous a gravitational field.
The final result of all this was that Tommy desperately wanted to go somewhere by himself and think. But he couldn’t; he had to keep moving, in time with the scanning waves along the corridor, and he had to give all his mental energy to the problem of slipping past the search party.
The question was—how long had he been gone? If they had reached the hull while he was inside the metal thing, they might have looked for him outside and concluded that he had somehow slipped past them, back to the center of the ship. In that case, they would probably be working their way back, and he had only to follow them to the axis and hide in a chamber as soon as they left it. But if they were still working outward, his chances of escape were almost nil. And now it seemed more important to escape than it had before.
There was one possibility which Tommy, who, in most circumstances, would try anything, hated to think about. Fuel lines—tubes carrying the rushing, radiant ion vapor that po
wered the ship—adjoined many of these corridors, and it was certain that if he dared to enter one, he would be perfectly safe from detection as long as he remained in it. But, for one thing, these lines radiated from the ship’s axis and none of them would take him where he wanted to go. For another, they were the most dangerous places aboard ship. Older crew members sometimes entered them to make emergency repairs, but they got out as quickly as they could. Tommy did not know how long he could survive there; he had an unpleasant conviction that it would not be long.
Only a few yards up the corridor was the sealed sphincter which gave entrance to such a tube. Tommy looked at it indecisively as the motion of the scanning waves brought him nearer. He had still not made up his mind when he caught a flicker reflected around the curve of the corridor behind him.
Tommy squeezed himself closer to the wall and watched the other end of the corridor approach with agonizing slowness. If he could only get around that comer . . .
The flicker of motion was repeated, and then he saw a thin rind of green poke into view. There was no more time to consider entering the fuel line, no time to let the scanning waves’ movement carry him around the corner. Tommy put on full speed, cutting across the next wave and down the cross-corridor ahead.
Instantly the Captain’s voice shouted from the wall, “Ah! Was that him, the dirty scut? After him, lads!”
Tommy glanced behind as he turned another corner, and his heart sank. It was no cabin boy who was behind him, or even an Ordinary, but a Third Mate—so huge that he filled nearly half the width of the corridor, and so powerful that Tommy, in comparison, was like a boy on a bicycle racing an express train.
Great Stories of Space Travel Page 14