Futures Past (29 page)

  
Less than five hours remained now before landing. There was still a lot of equipment that had to be shifted around in the cone, and he would have to think of a way to mix paint in weightless conditions, fasten everything down properly, do another instrument check and seal the passengers. Every second was precious....

  
Suddenly Captain Ramsey was with him in the cone, snarling, eyes glaring, no doubt attracted by the noise.

  
One arm was inside the body of his spacesuit but he kicked out toward Herdman, clawing at his face with the other hand. Herdman tried to fend him off but two of the inch-long talons at the ends of his fingers raked across his face from eye to jaw.

  
"Damn you!" Ramsey screeched thinly. "My ship! My control room! . . ."

  
Fury was giving Ramsey the strength to fight as well as speak. In vain Herdman tried to hold that clawed hand away from his face while he explained to the captain what he was trying to do. But Ramsey wasn't listening, the minutes were slipping by and Herdman was in deadly danger of being blinded. Balling his fist he took careful aim and drove it into the open face plate.

  
The opening was the wrong shape to allow him to hit Ramsey on the chin—all he could do was strike him in the mouth and nose and bounce the captain's head off the inside of his helmet. But he had to hit him five times altogether—carefully, almost timidly, at first because he didn't want to compound the other's head injury, but with gradually increasing force each time. When Ramsey was finally unconscious, Herdman was almost sobbing, and not because of the pain from his bleeding face and knuckles.

  
He returned to work, frantically trying to make up those lost minutes. Where cabinets and panels could be bolted into their new positions he used bolts, otherwise he used wire or sealing compound. Thrust during deceleration would rise little above three-quarters G and there would be vibration only when they entered atmosphere, but the sealing compound still worried him. It was an adhesive, fast-setting, strong, and should do the job. While he worked he went over in his mind the weights of the panels concerned in relation to their areas of adhesion. It was going to be very risky, he knew; if the control room fell in on him when he was trying to land, the' equipment wouldn't kill him but the resulting crash would. He had to think of a way to cut down the risk, if only by a fraction.

  
The shade of gray that he mixed and sprayed onto the bulkheads was dirty rather than warm and the rich brown on panels and trim was also on the muddy side. But the place was beginning to look very like the control room of the old Herdman, and it felt right. Logically he knew that this wasn't the Herdman, but it was emotion rather than logic that had made him Captain Herdman of Herdman and it was emotion that was making Herd-man out of Ramsey.

  
The nut couldn't adapt, he thought a little wildly, hut it had the power to adapt the bolt!

  
He was forced to stop half an hour before they were due to begin deceleration in order to cut fingernails and seal the passengers. It was then that he got the idea for increasing the effectiveness of the sealing compound.

  
The stuff was an adhesive, which meant that it worked in part by excluding air from the interfaces of the objects which it joined, and air pressure acted everywhere except on the adhering surfaces. By increasing air pressure, he reasoned, he would help to hold them together. But when he pumped all the available air into the cone and cracked the valve on the reserve tanks the pressure gauge wouldn't register the rise. It wasn't built to show increases of such magnitude. Judging roughly by its effect on his suit, however, Herdman put the pressure at four times the normal.

  
At that pressure, spit would make a good adhesive, he thought Twenty minutes later everything was holding, Herd-man was putting the finishing touches to some indicators he had painted on a bulkhead—indicators that would not have to be in detail because they were on the fringe of his vision, but that would make him feel more at home —and Mars-filled the sky ahead. He had already picked the spot where they were going to land, the vacuum outside was beginning to soften with their entry into the outer fringes of the atmosphere and Herdman was feeling quietly and intensely confident.

  
Like Gaul, their problem had been divided into three parts. They had gotten around the shortage of food and a proper pilot, and the problem of the fuel had just disappeared. Because Herdman had realized suddenly that he had been basing his weight calculations on wrong information, that one of his constants had been a variable. He had forgotten that while the passengers had been starving they had lost enough weight between them to swing the balance.

  
Herdman knew now that they were going to make it. . . .

  
Sand and steam were still rising in clouds from Ramsey's stern when Herdman blew the cone's emergency hatch and raised his suit antenna clear of the shield effect on the ship's hull. As expected, he found that someone at the settlement was calling them on the suit frequency. Herdman explained the position and was told that sand-cats and a pressurized ambulance would be at the ship within twenty minutes.

  
Herdman returned slowly to the acceleration couch and lay listening to the sound of four sets of breathing coming over the passengers' suit radios, and felt good.

  
THE great flying wing, its controls sluggish in the high, rarefied air, came slowly out of the dive and pulled its nose up in a forty-five degree climb. Booster units along the trailing edges spewed flame and smoke, adding to a velocity already twice that of sound, and it was shrewdly making use of the rotational spin of the Earth itself. In the instant before its climbing speed began to slacken, fire and fury erupted from the silver torpedo clinging to the wing's broad, triangular back, and the rocket shot free.

  
Trailing a dazzling white column of vapor—already showing the kinks knicked into it by stratospheric winds, it climbed into the black near-vacuum that was the outer atmosphere, and beyond. Still accelerating, but at a rate which would not quite kill its occupant, its flight path curved smoothly until it paralleled the planetary surface below, and continued until the precalculated velocity was attained. Then the motors shut down.

  
The first orbital rocket circled Earth, telemetering a constant stream of data to ground control. Everything from cosmic, gamma and solar radiation to the respiration, perspiration and—sometimes—the desperation of the vehicle's occupant. Everything worked perfectly. After a short—or very long, depending on the viewpoint—time, an inconspicuous mechanism connected to the air supply plumbing functioned briefly.

  
The world nearly ended at that moment.

  
Protected by its invisibility screen and very little else, the Execution Ship slowly paced the orbiting rocket. It was an incredibly crude and antiquated mechanism, the captain thought; he was surprised that it had been made to work at all. But what surprised him even more was that the equally crude and grossly formed creature strapped in its nose section was capable of building such a device. A biped, hairy, and with five stumpy appendages growing from each of its upper limbs ... the captain thought of the twelve strong, sensitive, and highly flexible manipulatory organs possessed by the Srilla, and his yellow-gray hide puckered in distaste.

  
In a control cupola near him, the ship's last remaining weapons officer interrupted his thoughts with urgent, whistling speech.

  
"We've enough energy left to peel them. Why are we wasting time?"

  
The weapons officer was in pain. Hard radiation had caused tissue breakdown in his four speaking orifices, making it difficult for him to modulate properly. He had to shrug and wrinkle his pelt so as to clarify by signs what some of the slurred phrases meant, which also added considerably to his pain. Obviously the weapons officer's approaching death was making him angry, and very impatient.

  
The captain was about to reply when the third occupant of the control room saved him the effort.

  
"Our arrival here was purely by chance," the ship's biologist began evenly, "and the ship was so badly damaged that we lacked both the ability to land and the instruments to make the usual long-range investigation. Yet on little more than a few radiation tests of its atmosphere, we had decided to destroy all life on this world. Then this space vehicle came, allowing close observation of the creature aboard and of an artifact which must be one of the ultimate products of the being's technology." He paused and swung an eye toward the captain. "I think our decision should wait until this new data is properly evaluated. We are, by necessity, merciless. We are also just."

  
Apparently the coming end had not affected the biologist's personality pattern at all, the captain noted, envy briefly tinging the admiration he felt at the other's composure. And neither of them for an instant thought of just leaving and heading for home. Planets like this were their job, and a subtle blend of hypnotherapy and brain surgery made their job more important to them than things like eating, breathing, or any other actions or evasions likely to prolong life.

  
With a curt twitch of back muscles he signaled that he agreed with the biologist. He returned his attention to the object in his view-screen.

  
His ship's scanning beam penetrated the rocket's hull, showing the almost empty fuel tanks, the simple reaction-motor, and the intricate mass of electronic equipment packed solidly into what space remained. The living section was incredibly small and cramped, and the being occupying it was strapped in with only its upper limbs free to move. Pneumatic pads protected various parts of its body against acceleration pressure, and a maze of wires and tubing led from other parts to instruments which telemetered the data received down to the planet below.

  
The biologist spoke again.

  
"You will notice that this being is low on the evolutionary scale, with a crude digestive tract, and that no provision for the disposal of body wastes is incorporated in the vehicle's construction. The flight, therefore, will be of fairly short duration. But one thing puzzles me . . ." He indicated what • appeared to be a cylinder and timing device hidden behind the air inlet grill above the creature's head, and fell silent.

  
More than one thing puzzled the captain. The being's behavior, for instance. Sometimes passive, then for no apparent reason, as it was doing now, flailing its arms about as if in panic. Still, he reasoned, if this was one of the first flights of this race into space, a certain amount of fear would be normal. But what was that dry spongy substance floating about the compartment?

  
Suddenly, something happened in the being's rocket.

  
Vapor exploded into the tiny living space. The being's head and arms jerked convulsively, then became still. The captain began, "What . . . ?" but stopped, too sick with shock and disgust to trust himself to speak.

  
He had no need to be told that the being was dead. Murdered.

  
The weapons officer spoke first.

  
"It is obvious what has happened," he said, their present plight making his T told you so' expression seem very childish. "A dominant life-form divided into two or more ideologically opposed groups, each trying for the military advantage of a space platform. One group succeeds in sending up this vehicle as a preliminary, but spies or sympathizers sabotage the attempt by killing the pilot— which must ultimately cause the destruction of the vehicle. Or possibly it was the work of a being jealous of the fame this ascent would bring the pilot, presupposing this to be the first flight of its kind." His voice rose impatiently. "I repeat, we should exterminate—"

  
"Please," the biologist broke in. "We must not jump to conclusions." He rolled forward in his cupola, hissing with the effort it cost him, and began setting up a localized attraction field on the control panel before him. "We are not sure that the being was killed deliberately. But there is a way to find out."

  
So that was it, the captain thought with wry amusement. The biologist was, without doubt, concerned about the fate of these bipeds, but he was primarily a biologist, and biologists, the captain knew, were happy only when they had strange life-forms and processes to dissect and investigate. But let him have his fun. The captain was sure that it would make no difference in the end. Judging by this specimen, that was not a nice race down there.