Trapped in space (6 page)

But he knew what to do. He grabbed the orange-painted seahng gun off the wall beside his seat, aimed at the black hole, and fired. A fat black balloon of sealing foam popped out and flew into the hole.

"Oh-oh!" His lips moved stiffly. "Hole's too big—"

But the foam ball caught on the torn metal edges. Air pressure squeezed it wider. In a second the roaring stopped. The hole was sealed.

Glad of air to breathe, Jeff looked again at the red needle. It had come to NORMAL MASS. The screen would shield them now.

"You did it!" Leaning back in his seat, he turned to Ty. "We are safe—"

His voice stuck when he saw Ty's face. The grin was frozen on it, under a red smear. Half of Ty's face was covered with blood.

"I guess we've finished the X-space flight." Ty's voice was very soft. "But you are the pilot now, Jeff. I can't see.

CHAPTER 6

''Ben Stone Calling../'

Jeff set the star ship on auto pilot and reached under his seat for a medical aid kit

"Let's get a bandage on you/' he said to Ty. "Then we can help you down to the cabin—"

"That can wait," Ty broke in softly, "until we know what the score is."

"We are back to normal mass," Jeff said. "We can trust the screen while we take care of you."

He opened the medical kit.

"What hit us?" Lupe's dark head came up through the ladder well. "Buzz is all right again," she said. "He's back in touch with his sister-brother at the base on the moon, and the admiral wants to know what's—"

When she saw Ty's head, her eyes went blank.

"Oh! I didn't know." Her hands turned white, gripping the ladder. "Does it hurt much, Ty?"

"It hurts." Ty tried to grin.

"Buzz can help you." Her anxious eyes came to Jeff. "Let's get him down to the cabin, where Buzz will have room to work."

Jeff looked hard at her. "Is Buzz a doctor?"

"He's part of that multiple being," she said. "Its mind can see through his eyes and move his hands. It knows everything that all of his sister-brothers have learned. That makes Buzz better than most doctors."

Jeff shook his head. "We can't take a chance. Not with Ty's eyes."

"It's the best chance we have," Ty broke in. "Help me down the ladder."

Jeff guided his hands to the ladder. Down in the cabin, they helped him into a shock seat and buckled the straps. His face was gray under the dried blood.

Buzz was out of the brown cocoon. His saucer eyes and his fine fur shone softly gold again. His quick little hands with their three fingers took the medical kit from Jeff.

He bent over Ty. Suddenly he leaned closer, his golden eyes shining on the wound like two flash lights. His shrill whine startled Jeff.

"Ty is badly hurt/' Lupe said. "Buzz says what hit him was a laser bolt."

''A signal, you mean?"

Buzz whistled again, not quite so sharply.

"Lasers are bundles of light waves, all alike and all in step," Lupe said. "This bolt had millions of times too much power for just a signal. It exploded that hole in the hull. A bit of flying metal hit Ty in the face, but it was the bolt of light that burned his eyes."

"I saw a red flash." Jeff stared at Buzz. "And Ben's last message said that he was under laser attack. What I don't understand is how they could hit us so soon."

"When we cut out—" Ty's whisper was faint and broken with pain. "Coming back through the light—the ship caused a light burst. Something like a—sound boom. Rock hoppers—must have—seen the burst."

"So they were waiting for us," Jeff said. "Somewhere close. They hit us in the first minute. Long before our light burst had time to reach the ring or the star."

"Something out there—doesn't like us." Ty drew a sharp breath, and Jeff heard his teeth set against the pain. "Guess they'll hit us again—when they see us move."

"We will get to that," Jeff told him. "Just now we are taking care of you."

"Get Buzz to call the admiral," Ty whispered hoarsely. "Tell him—tell him how the hoppers shot at us. They

didn't warn. There was no excuse. Ask him what he thinks—about his peace poHcy—now!"

"We are already reporting to the admiral," Lupe said. "He isn't giving any special orders. He says he's leaving it up to us. But his policy still stands. He wants us to find the hoppers and make peace with them."

"Trouble is—" Ty's whisper died, then came weakly back. "Trouble is—they found us first." He lay still.

Buzz bent over him, whistling at Lupe.

"Buzz isn't sure what he can do," she said. "But it's going to hurt, when he explores the wound. Buzz says we ought to give him something to put him to sleep, but there's nothing in the aid kit."

"I can stand some pain," Ty whispered.

"Wait!" Jeff broke in. "Can't we use a deep sleep shot?"

Buzz whistled at Lupe.

"Buzz has heard about deep sleep," she said. "He wants to know more about it."

"It was invented to help men live through accidents in space," Jeff said. "It slows life to the very point of death. In deep sleep, you need no food or warmth or even air. You can wake up from it, if you get care in time."

Buzz whistled quickly, and Lupe said, "He wants to see the drug."

JefF showed Buzz a sealed green package in the medical kit, then broke the seal to pull out a small needle and a timer.

"The needle is marked in hours/' JefF told him. "You set the slide for the weight of the patient. The smallest shot gives about three hours of deep sleep. The whole needle gives a thousand hours. That's the limit. The timer tells when care has to be started."

Buzz chirped.

"He thinks it ought to work/' Lupe said. "If Ty's willing to try it."

Ty was fumbling weakly at the straps, trying to sit up in the shock seat. He spoke too loudly, his face toward the wall.

"Jeff?"

"Yes, Ty."

"Ask Buzz to go ahead." He stopped, and Jeff saw sweat on his face. "Jeff?"

"Right here, Ty."

"You are in command till I wake up."

Ty sank weakly back. His hand reached up and found Jeff's shoulder. He hung on, his fingers cold, while they waited.

Buzz was humming fast at Lupe. They sprayed their hands to clean them. They sprayed the wound. Buzz gave Ty a careful shot of the deep sleep drug. Ty's hand

grew tight on Jeff's shoulder, trembled, and suddenly eased.

Jeff watched as Buzz began the operation. His fur and eyes had turned bright blue again. His tiny hands seemed very quick and sure. He used the instruments from the kit as if he knew all about them.

Lupe was his helper. She looked pale and weak at first. Once she dropped a pink ball of cotton. But Buzz kept purring at her, asking for what he needed next. Soon she was working calmly, too busy to think of anything else.

When he saw that he was no longer needed, Jeff climbed back to the cock pit. If he was going to carry on the rescue mission, as commander of the ship, he had problems of his own to solve.

What were those "queer kinds of life" that Ben had found here? Where did they live, if Topaz had no planets? Why had he named them rock hoppers? How had they come to attack him?

Was the admiral wrong, Jeff wondered, to send Lupe and Buzz to search for peace? Shouldn't Earth be sending fighting ships through X-space instead, to crush the hoppers before they could carry space war to Earth?

The ship was still on auto pilot, gliding at low power toward Topaz. The pumps of the screen still drummed

softly, like the beat of a great slow heart—but he knew the screen wouldn't stop laser bolts.

He wondered how far that first shot had come. Earth, he knew, had no laser weapon that could fire a shot even a thousand miles before it spread wider than the hole in the hull. Earth had no weapon of any kind that could hit such a small object as the ship in the first minute of fire.

Did that mean the hoppers were less than a thousand miles away? Or did it mean that the hoppers' weapons were far ahead of Admiral Serov's, in range and power?

With Ty in deep sleep, the answers to all those questions were up to Jeff.

He slipped into the pilot's seat and reached up to test the seal in the hull. The thick black sealing foam was already hard. He found no leak. But the next shot, he thought, might punch a larger hole.

When he looked outside, the view took his breath again. Half the sky was dusty black. The rest was filled with Topaz and its ring. The giant blue sun with its wide belt of white looked beautiful to him. Yet he knew there was danger in that strange sky.

The ship's screen showed nothing near. But there hadn't been time for that deadly bolt to come all the way from the ring.

Something was waiting out there, closer.

A dull, cold feeling sank into Jeff. He saw no way to find the lost ship. Not even if it were still whole. Not even if the rock hoppers would let him look for it.

In all the unknown space around Topaz, Ben's ship was less than a grain of dust. Jeff's naked eyes could see anything its size, perhaps a hundred miles away. The laser screen could find the lost ship at ten thousand miles.

But ten thousand miles was nothing here. The nearest edge of that strange ring was still tens of millions of miles away.

The figures mocked him. Even one million miles was a thousand thousand miles. A billion miles was a thousand million. When he tried to grasp those figures, and the distances they stood for, he felt like a tiny insect trapped in some great web.

He was still trying to think of a plan, when Lupe came up the ladder behind him. Her face showed the strain, but her eyes remained bright.

"We have finished," she told him. "Ty was worse than Buzz first thought. The damage went behind his eyes, to the nerves. Buzz gave him another deep sleep shot, to last until the tissues heal. We set the timer at a hundred hours."

"Will he—see?"

"Buzz isn't sure." Her voice was slow with trouble.

"He hopes the eye nerves will heal, but he has never done this operation on a human being. We won't really know until we can wake Ty and take the bandage off."

"We need him now."

"I know we do," Lupe said. "We've been reporting to the admiral on the moon. Buzz says he's worried about us. He isn't giving any orders, because he isn't on the spot, but he wants to know everything that happens. He has some questions for you."

"All right," Jeff said.

Lupe whistled, and Buzz ran up the ladder. Lively as a monkey now, he chattered to her, hopped into the empty seat beside Jeff, and sat there looking out at Topaz. In the blue glare of the star, his big eyes turned bright green.

"The admiral wants your description of Topaz," Lupe said.

"It's twice the size of our sun." Jeff tried to put his facts in the exact way that the admiral would approve. "We've found no planets. The stuff that might have formed planets is still scattered all around the star, in a flat ring like the rings of Saturn.

"Really;" he added, "the ring is three rings. We can see two dim circles that almost separate it. If it had formed planets, I think there would have been three of them.

"The ring system extends about a billion miles from Topaz," he went on. "That makes it somewhat smaller than our sun system. We cut out of X-space above the plane of the ring. We are moving now about 60 million miles from the outside edge of the ring."

"The admiral wants to know what the ring is made of."

"Dust, I guess," Jeff said. "Or maybe crystals of ice. It is stuff that never collected into planets. At this distance the screen doesn't show any individual parts."

"He wants to know if we've found any possible place for life to exist."

"None except the ring itself," Jeff said. "If life did begin in a ring, instead of on a planet, I don't know what it would be like. My brother's message mentioned rock hoppers. I don't know what they are."

Buzz whistled.

"The admiral has received your report," Lupe said. "Now he wants to know your plan of action,"

Frowning, Jeff took another 30 seconds to finish making up his mind.

"We are going to place the X-space station at once," he said. "That will make the ship lighter. It will save fuel and give us more freedom of action. I hope that Ben and his men will see the station beacon and signal us. I see no better way to begin the search for them."

Buzz chirped sharply.

"The admiral has your reply," Lupe said. "He suggests that the beings of Topaz are likely to consider the dropping of the beacon as an enemy action. He suggests that you may draw their fire."

"I think we have to accept that risk/' Jeff replied. "We still have a long flight through common space to reach the ring. Loaded with the station, we would be a sitting duck for any attack. If we let the station loose with the beacon dead, so far out here, we would never find it again."

Buzz made a sound like a trapped fly.

"The admiral has no advice for you," Lupe said. "He repeats that you are in full command. He wants us to keep him fully informed."

Buzz gave another whistle.

"Buzz doesn't think much of your plan," Lupe said. "But even his multiple mind can't suggest a better one."

"So we will try this," Jeff said. "We will drop the station and run. The hoppers may shoot at it. If they do, we may have a minute or so before their bolts get here. Try to see anything you can."