Takeoff! (23 page)

“That wouldn’t be so bad, but it means the colonists wouldn’t have the proper proteins. We’ve got to change the ecological setup. Therefore, the ducks.”

“Why ducks?”

“Don’t ask me; I’m not an ecologist.”

“They’re sure queer looking,” MacDonald said as one of them waddled unconcernedly toward him.

“They’re mutations,” Drake told him. “Had to be. The surface gravity of Okeefenokee is half again as great as Earth’s, and the air pressure and temperature are higher—as you’ve noticed. That necessitated modification of the duck’s flying apparatus. And there were other changes; their diet isn’t quite the same as that of ordinary Terrestrial ducks. They’re still members of the
Anatidae,
but they aren’t like any other duck on Earth.”

The duck waddled closer and looked at the two men with apparent interest.

“What are you along for, Doc?” MacDonald asked. “Are you a veterinarian?”

“Yes. I also have an M.D. degree.”

The duck looked him straight in the eye. “Quack!” it said distinctly.

MacDonald almost gagged.

Dr. Rouen Drake was a scholarly man who had the unfortunate luck to look like a scholar is supposed to look. He was lean and somewhat shorter than average height. His shoulders were slightly rounded, and his eyes had the faint telltale glitter which betrayed the lenses that corrected his myopia. His hair was blond and straight and had a pronounced widow’s peak. Even his soft, measured, somewhat pedagogical voice betrayed him. It was the first time he had ever been aboard a spaceship in his life, and he felt somewhat out of place among the spacemen.

But he had a job to do, and he was determined to do it well.

After he and MacDonald left Section Five, they went back and checked over the other cargo. Item: One electric incubator, five thousand egg capacity. Item: Fifty electric brooders, one hundred duckling capacity. Item: Two hundred and thirty thousand pounds duckling rations, Types A and B. Item: Three thousand pounds adult duck rations, normal feeding. Item: Three thousand pounds adult duck breeding rations.

And, Item: Five thousand crash-frozen fertile duck eggs.

All in order.

Satisfied, Drake went up to the control blister in the nose to report to Captain Dumbrowski.

He was in a somewhat better mood now, possibly because there were still ten minutes until the scheduled take-off time. If Drake had been late—

“I’m all set, captain,” Drake said. “The cargo is in excellent shape, and the live ducks are all taken care of.”

“Good,” said Dumbrowski. He turned to the other man who had been in the control blister with him. “Lieutenant Devris, this is Dr. Drake. Doctor, this is Devris, our navigator.”

Devris was a good-looking man, quiet, efficient, and intelligent. His handshake was warm and friendly.

“All right, men,” Dumbrowski said, “let’s get settled. Take-off in eight minutes. MacDonald, show the doctor to his cabin.”

Eight minutes later, the sixty-five meter long Constanza lifted her huge mass gently and easily from her pit and accelerated toward the sky. As she left the atmosphere, her course changed slightly, aiming her nose at a point near Shaula in Scorpio. Then the mass-time converters shifted in and the ship vanished. She was moving towards her destination at nearly ten thousand times the velocity of light. Okeefenokee was eighteen weeks away.

Time plodded on. The operation of the vessel was largely automatic, requiring only occasional human judgment. Once every twenty-four hours, the mass-time converters were cut and the ship returned to normal space so that Devris could take positional readings.

Twice a day, Dr. Drake went down to Section Five to feed and care for his ducks.

Between times, the men read, played cards, or watched the new movies that had been brought along. And each night, Captain Dumbrowski issued each man a ration of two bottles of beer.

Dumbrowski himself was a storyteller of no mean ability, although the subject matter was rather monotonous.

“And then there was that time on Tripha,” he would say, pouring himself a foaming glass. “Some disease had wiped out nine-tenths of the male population. They’d whipped it finally, but even the men who were left were in pretty sad condition. Naturally”—he chuckled knowingly—”we had to do our duty. There was one little blonde who had four sisters—good lookers, all of ‘em. Well, they seemed to take a shine to me, so...”

Or: “I remember a red-headed dancer in Lunar City; she did a strip that was out of this world! What technique! Anyway, I was in this dive, and—”

And so on. MacDonald would try to top him, but he always came off second best. Neither of them ever repeated himself exactly, but after a few weeks there developed an overhanging pall of similarity about the tales.

Drake noticed that Devris usually listened to Dumbrowski for a while, and then got up and strolled quietly to the astronomical dome. One evening, he walked out as usual, but as soon as he was out in the corridor, he turned and made signals with his hands and fingers.

Drake realized the signals were for him, since neither the captain nor the engineer could see Devris from where he sat.

Drake nodded imperceptibly, and got up a few minutes later. He walked quietly out, mumbling something about his ducks. Behind him, Dumbrowski was saying:

“...Could be picked up without any trouble. So I...”

Drake headed for the astronomy dome. Devris was pouring a colorless liquid into a couple of glasses. He added ice and fruit juice and said: “I thought you might like to get away from Joe ‘One-Note’ Dumbrowski for a while. Here; have a drink.” He handed one of the glasses to the doctor.

Drake sipped at the drink. It was smooth, but with a strange aura of power. “Isn’t this against regulations?” he asked.

“Not exactly.” Devris’ smile was that of the triumphant loophole-seeker. ,. ‘Articles of Interstellar Commerce,…’” he quoted, “ ‘Section VIII, Paragraph 4: No beverage alcohol shall be permitted aboard Service vessels except regulation five per cent beer, which shall be rationed to personnel at the rate of twenty-four fluid ounces per day, such rations not to be cumulative.’ “ He paused for a moment, then went on: “ .Section IX, Paragraph 3: Intoxication of personnel shall be punished by the commanding officer of the ship according to Section II, Paragraphs 7 and 8, dealing with endangering the lives and/or property aboard service vessels’ “

“Then what’s this?” Drake asked, holding up his glass.

“Lens cleaning fluid,” Devris said candidly. “I find absolute alcohol to be an excellent lens cleaner.

“Naturally,” he continued virtuously, “no one in his right mind could consider lens cleaning fluid a beverage.”

“Which proves,” said Drake, taking another sip, “that I am not in my right mind.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Devris. They drank.

“Very neat,” Drake said. “ As long as you do not become intoxicated and do not have alcoholic beverages aboard, you are not disobeying the regulations. Does the captain know about this?”

“Probably. But we don’t mention it. We have a tacit agreement. He doesn’t check on my lens cleaner, and I don’t ask him why he has an extra foot locker aboard.”

“I see. No one checks on the captain. What about MacDonald?”

“He’s satisfied with his beer ration, I guess. He isn’t much of a drinker. He’d rather swap true confessions with Joe One-Note.” He finished his drink and mixed another. “you know ,” he said philosophically, “I have done a little computation. Assuming that all of Joe’s stories are true, and assuming that each of his conquests was completed in a minimum amount of time, and using Service tables to compute the average length of a voyage and the average time of stay on a planet-figuring all these in, I say, I have come up with a cubic equation.”

Drake nodded. “I follow you. So?”

“I have come up with two real and one imaginary roots to the equation.” He held up a hand and began counting them off on his fingers.

“Real Root One: Captain Dumbrowski is over nine hundred years old. Otherwise, he couldn’t possibly have done all that work in the time allowed.

“Real Root Two: Captain Dumbrowski has psionic powers and is able to teleport himself from this ship every night to some suitable planet in the galaxy and get back within eight hours.”

“Uh-huh. And the imaginary root?”

“Captain Dumbrowski’s stories are imaginary. But, being imaginary, such a root is not allowable in a real situation.”

“Naturally not,” agreed Drake. “Pour me another drink.”

As the navigator mixed, Drake asked: “I wonder why he lays it on so thick?”

“He married young,” Devris said oratorically. “His wife is a small, birdlike woman to whom he is intensely devoted. She is, as far as I can determine, a simpering prude.”

“So he tells sea stories like Long John Silver, eh?”

From then on, Drake managed to get away from Dumbrowski early and have a chat with Devris in the evening. The navigator proudly displayed his instruments, and even let the doctor compute their position one day. Drake got one of the factors confused, and Devris respectfully informed him that he had better tell the captain to turn around, because the ship was heading towards Alhena in Gemini, dead away from their target.

Drake, in turn, took the navigator to Section Five to show him his ducks.

“Why live ducks, anyway?” Devris asked. “Why not just ship them all as eggs?”

“Well, remember, these aren’t going to be domestic ducks; they’ll be allowed to go wild on Okeefenokee. One of the most important things a duck can learn is how to be a duck. It isn’t all instinct, you know. So we have a live adult duck for every hundred eggs. The old duck teaches the younger ones the duck business.”

“Been in the family for generations, eh?” Devris asked.

“We hope so. Believe me, we hope so.”

“You hope so? I’d think any duck could learn the duck profession. It ought to be easy as duck soup.”

Drake winced. “Not necessarily. These ducks, like most domestic ducks, are descended from the
Anas boschas
—the mallard. But domestic ducks have been inbred and crossbred for meat and egg qualities. In several strains, the brooding or nest-sitting instinct has been bred right out. Such a species wouldn’t survive in the wild; the duck would lay her eggs and then walk off and leave them.

“We went back to the original wild mallard to get
Anas okeefenokias
, here. The genetic engineers worked hard to get the bird they wanted, but a couple of strains turned out to be absolutely worthless. One strain was a failure because the opposite sexes refused to have anything to do with each other-no mating instinct.”

“Tell that to Captain Dumbrowski. He’ll have a duck fit,” said Devris calmly. He ducked just in time.

Seventeen weeks slipped by. It was on the fourth day of the eighteenth week, two days’ flight from Okeefenokee, that Drake found a sick duck.

It wasn’t really very ill; it had managed to get a scratch near one eye, and the scratch had become slightly infected. It took him a couple of minutes to snare the duck, then he picked it up and looked at it.

“Not too bad at all,” he said. “I’ll take it up to my cabin and put something on that. And I guess I’d better take a good look at the others; they may have been fighting.”

Devris mopped the perspiration from his dripping brow. “You want me to take it up, doc? I have to go make my positional check, anyway. MacDonald is going to stop the ship in a few minutes.”

“Sure. Thanks.” Drake handed the duck to the navigator. “Keep her close to your body, and when you get her up to my place, put a blanket around her. These ducks have a higher body temperature than normal, and that air out there is pretty cold to them.”

“Can do,” said Devris. And he left, with the duck cradled securely in his arm.

Fifteen minutes later, a loud-speaker blared in the room. The dense air, coupled with Dumbrowski’s booming voice, made a thunderous noise in the compartment. Squawking, flapping ducks fled from the voice.

“DRAKE! GET UP HERE TO THE CONTROL BLISTER! AND I MEAN
FAST!”

Drake made it fast. There must be something badly wrong for Dumbrowski to give an order like that.

The first thing that struck him oddly when he entered the control blister was the peculiar odor. There was the acrid smell of burnt insulation, the biting, metallic effluvium of vaporized copper, the stench of burnt feathers, and-beneath it all-the tasty, tantalizing aroma of roast duck.

Devris was standing at rigid attention in the middle of the room, listening to Dumbrowski bellow.

“...and I don’t give a damn what the doctor asked you to do!”

“He didn’t ask me, captain; I volunteered.”

“Shaddup! You had no right to volunteer! He—”

“What about me, captain?” Drake asked.

Dumbrowski whirled. “Oh,
there
you are! What do you mean, letting one of your blasted ducks out of their Section ? You dumb cluck, do you realize you’ve wrecked a multi-million dollar spaceship?”

MacDonald was kneeling over an open panel from which heavy clouds of smoke were still pouring.

It seemed that MacDonald had been inspecting the circuits, giving them a final check before the last two days of the drive. The mass-time converters had been shut off so that Devris could make the daily position check.

MacDonald had had the panel open, and had stepped across the room to get a meter of some kind.

And a duck walked in.

MacDonald had tried to shoo it out, but the duck, stubborn to the end, had shooed in the opposite direction. Instead of fleeing through the open door, she had headed for the darkened cabinet which housed the control circuits.

She had landed across a couple of leads which came directly from a high-voltage, high-amperage, direct-current generator. MacDonald had been afraid to try to get her out, and afraid not to. She had flapped and quacked and fluttered about, jiggling loose wires and cracking other equipment. Then the insulation on the DC leads had broken, and all hell busted loose.

The unfortunate thing was that the leads had been between the generators and the circuit breakers. There was no load on them at that point and no reason to think there would be a short. But short there was.