by John Brunner
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More efficient, maybe . . . but weird! I prevented myself from letting my mind wander off down an unprofitable avenue of speculation, and went on with my questions.
“When I was shown that picture of—well, of my brother last night, at first glance I thought it was a photo of a sky-monster. Are you assuming that the apparitions in the sky indicate that the aliens are looking out of their own universe into ours?”
“Well, there is a remarkable resemblance in general body structure between the sky-monsters and the present shape of the crew,” vein Camp agreed.
“But in that case the creatures must be colossal!” My nape prickled. “How big are the ones aboard the ship?”
“About the mass of a man,” Miss Tobolkin said crisply. “Their average weight is sixty-three kilos. ”
During the past few exchanges Cassiano had been showing signs of mounting impatience. Now he seized the chance to break in and address me.
“Mr. Drummond, forgive me for cutting you short, but right now we do have to reach a decision. Let me ask you straight out: on the basis of what you’ve been told, are you still prepared to act as a guinea pig for us—to go up and confront the creature we suspect of being your brother Leon?”
"Yes,” I said, as steadily as I could. I wasn’t looking forward to the experience, but I was determined to go.
“And do you think you’ve heard enough of
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both sides of the argument to keep an open mind up till the actual meeting?”
"I can’t honestly answer that,” I said after a pause. “But I will try.”
Cassiano gave a grunt and looked around the table. “At present,” he reminded his audience, “we’re empowered to act on our own discretion. It’s possible that this state of affairs won’t last, and in any case however things turn out we shall almost certainly have to justify ourselves before a UN committee of inquiry. I’d like you to bear that in mind when you vote.”
After a pause to let the point sink in, he took the vote, and it was unanimously in favor of letting me go up to the starship.
“Good, thank you. Mr. Drummond, would you go with Major Kamensky, then? We only have one launch scheduled for today, at 1650 hours, but your medical check and kitting out must be complete by 1500 at the latest.”
Except for Suvorov, who had given up the struggle to stay awake and now slumped snoring in his chair, the others were rising to their feet with expressions of relief.
“And—good luck!” Casiano said. “If that means anything any more. ”
I nodded and made blindly for the door in Kamensky’s wake. I was trying to decide which would be worse: to find my brother trapped in a monstrous body, or a monster masquerading as my brother.
Both possibilities struck me as equally horrible.
Xl?
THEY’D DEVELOPED some new wrinkles since I last underwent a prespace medicheck. The sugar booster injection into the liver no longer left behind a feeling like a day-old bruise, and that was good, but they were giving the decel- erine-cum-antinausea shot—all thirty c.c.’s of it—into the gluteus maxlmus instead of intravenously, and that was bad; it made me feel as though I’d been bitten by a mosquito two inches too far under the skin to scratch the spot. I asked Kamensky the reason, and he said the drugs had to be allowed to diffuse more slowly since the introduction of the modem slow- burning ferry fuels, which kept down the total g forces but greatly lengthened the time to brennschluss.
Otherwise the process was familiar. Apart from having gone through it twice before myself, I’d watched it on a dozen occasions and written it up nearly as often. Moreover, Kamensky’s staff were a very smooth-working team. At first, I think, they were worried about me—having had trouble, I gather, with some of the scientific high brass they’d had to process recently, people desperately needed up in orbit yet by all
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normal standards not healthy enough to stand the strain. But I keep myself in good physical shape, and when I went back into Kamensky’s office at the end of the check to learn the verdict. I found him smiling.
“I wish all our special passengers posed as few problems as you do, Mr. Drummond,” he said as he ran his eyes over the final report. “Your B-12 is down a little, so I’ve marked you for an oral supplement—and incidentally you should have that checked by your own doctor when you get back—but otherwise you’re almost up to the standard we demand of our pilots. Now how about food? Can you take a prespace dry meal, or would you rather have a glucose shot and wait till you’re in orbit before you eat again?”
“No, I’ve had dry meals both times before.”
“More than I can manage," Kamensky grunted. “To me they taste like compressed sawdust, and I don’t care how nutritious they may be. But it is certainly better to go up with your guts working on something, so you can collect one from the canteen on your way to be kitted out. Don’t drink anything before takeoff, though, will you? If you need to moisten your mouth after the meal, take a one-c.c. cube of ice at the latest possible moment. And you know about emptying your bladder and bowels before strap- down. That’s the lot, then.”
He got up and stretched his hand across his desk.
“I’ll repeat what General Cassiano said—good luck. But I share his view that this prpbably doesn’t mean much any more.”
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* * *
Medically Inspected, fed, kitted out, I emerged into the prespace briefing room. I’d taken the ice after my dry meal, but the permitted size of the lump was smaller than the end of my little finger, and I felt as though I’d just walked across the Sahara.
The room was dominated by a huge internally illuminated orrery showing the Earth, the Moon and everything in orbit around those two bodies. Over the course of the past half century, the number had reached a respectable total. At present the mechanism was set to show apparent relative motion from a fixed point in space, and it took me only a moment to figure out that the reference was Starventure.
A group of three people stood before the orrery’s airtight case talking in low tones. Cassiano was in the middle; on his right was a stranger in well-worn spacekit who barely came to his elbow—a pilot, I guessed, knowing that physical slightness was at a premium in that job. And on his left, looking morose, was Lenister.
They turned at my approach. I saw the pilot’s face for the first time, and checked in midstride. The face was Chinese or Japanese, finely formed with large luminous eyes, but that wasn’t what surprised me. It was the red of the lips. I was perfectly aware that many of the leading space pilots were women, but this was the first time I’d encountered a woman pilot in context.
Cassiano greeted me and introduced me to the pilot, whose name proved to be Becky Koo. She shook my hand with a firm grip.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Drummond,” she said
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in excellent English. “I know your books, of course—in fact I rely on them to keep me in touch with fields I don’t have time to study thoroughly."
I muttered something about being flattered.
“You’d better get kitted out, Dr. Lenister,” Cassiano went on. “It’s nearly 1500, and you ought to be going aboard.”
“Lord! So it is!” Lenister exclaimed with a glance at his watch. “Right, I’ll be as quick as I can.”
As he moved away, I asked a wondering question of Cassiano with my eyes, and he shrugged.
“Well, he’s fit enough to fly space—Kamensky checked him out the day before yesterday—but we had to send up some urgent equipment instead by the ferry he was supposed to be taking. And he keeps complaining about having to judge by secondhand information, so . . .”
“Who else is up there already?” I demanded. “I know more or less who’s come out here to the port—the names read like Who’s Who
In Science—but I imagine some must have failed the medicheck. ”
“Yes, that’s one of our worst difficulties.” Cassiano wiped his forehead with a large green tissue. “We have the world’s finest minds to call on, but we can’t put them into overhauled bodies.” He smiled a little at his sick joke. “Dr. Tobolkin wants to go up, and I’m sure she’d be valuable, but she has a weak heart, and Dr. van Camp suffers from acute vertigo; he’d panic in a free-fall environment. But up at the ship we have all the experts we can muster, with the
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psychologists working under Graubmayer and Sico and the physiologists under Rokossovsky.”
That would be Ivan Pavlovitch Rokossovsky, Nobel Prize in medicine two years ago. I’d known that all three were in Quito; they were at the top of the list of people I’d been trying unsuccessfully to locate.
“Has everyone who’s come to the port since Starventure’s return either stayed here or gone up to orbit?” I asked.
“Pretty well,” Cassiano grunted. “You couldn’t say we have a shortage of talent. But a more temperamental, argumentative, pigheaded bunch you couldn’t find anywhere!”
It seems to have almost the force of a law of nature that the faster the vehicle you want to travel in the longer you spend preparing for the journey. Twenty years after it had become possible to walk straight on board an intercontinental aircraft with no formalities apart from buying a ticket, here we were, an hour before liftoff, being told to make for our feriy.
Dutifully we set out—on foot, because someone had forgotten to recharge the batteries of the little electric trolley which normally would have carried us from the briefing room. I didn’t mind; in fact, in my present state of mind I preferred to walk. Becky Koo went a little ahead of Lenister and myself, humming a Chinese pop song with curious unexpected intervals.
“How are you feeling, Drummond?” Lenister muttered when we had covered about half the distance.
“I have a belly full of butterflies,” I said. “You?”
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"Terrible." He gave a harsh chuckle. “I was just wishing I had the guts to turn around and walk right back indoors. I’ve never flown space before, you know. You said you had a hundred hours’ experience, I think.”
I nodded.
“Wish I’d been up already,” he sighed. “Kamensky filled me up with gallons of tranquilizer, but I’m still shaking all over. . . . And I’m not even going to see a close relative in his—ah— altered form. How the hell can you be so calm in face of that?”
It was a good question. I thought for a while before answering. I said at length, “Well, maybe I haven’t made myself accept the idea on the emotional level. Maybe I’m subconsciously certain that when I get up there I’ll find Leon looking and acting like his old self.”
“No, I’m afraid you won’t. For a whole week, damned near, I’ve had to listen to Graubmayer on the radio, describing his findings, and . . . you know how he talks, in a voice that’s all thick, like cold porridge?”
“I've heard him at scientific congresses. I know what you mean.”
“Well, it’s not the pictures they've sent down— the photos and the tight-beam TV transmissions. They look just plain unconvincing, like model shots. But hearing stolid old Graubmayer soberly listing these utterly incredible results he’s got—that’s what really shakes the mind.” He chuckled again, with nervousness this time. “By the way, I ought to apologize to you, shouldn’t I? I mean, for blasting off at Doris Quantrell this morning.”
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“No need,” I said. “You’ve all been under terrible stress this past week, and there’s no sign of it being over.”
“Yes, but Doris is the last straw! Have you met her before?”
“Yes, I interviewed her for my syndicated science column."
“I met her here for the first time. I've been at the Sorbonne for several years, of course, and though I think we’ve attended the same congress a couple of times I never actually talked to her there. I find her absolutely insufferable. I’m not usually prejudiced against women, but after what Doris has done to me lately I’m not even very happy about going into space with a woman pilot!”
“Has she applied to go up to Starventure?”
“Yes, but Kamensky vetoed the application, thank God. He wasn’t going to tell her why, but she insisted, and finally he lost his temper and told her straight out she’s a hysteric and he wasn't going to answer for the consequences if she was allowed aboard a spaceship. Naturally, when Kamensky proceeded to pass me as fit, her dislike of me turned to actual hatred— and you saw some of the effects of that this morning.”
I nodded, but didn’t answer. I was suddenly distracted by the terrifying vision of all the petty personal feuds and irritations which stood between us and a rational solution to this mystery.
The ground crew had finished loading the crates of equipment which the ferry was taking up in its hold. Now their balloon-tired vehicles
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were backing away from the sleek Wallis-winged form of the ship, and the crew escalator was being eased toward the airlock. I was disappointed at having to wait even for a couple of minutes, and passed the time in noting the minor design improvements they’d adopted since I was last this close to a space ferry, two years ago.
Like all the ferries operating out of Quito— and indeed ninety per cent of those in service anywhere on Earth—this was an RRR: rocket- ramjet-rocket. The nose now was slanted at seventy degrees above the horizontal, and the longitudinal axis of course was aligned parallel to the equator. On either side of the tail there stuck out tubby shapes like coke bottles—the kickpots, which in one flaming burst would hurl the ship through the dense lower layers of the atmosphere. At ninety thousand feet, with Mach 6 showing on the instrument board, they would reach brennschluss and detach themselves; they would fall thirty thousand feet and then a thermite charge would ignite to ensure they never returned to the surface except as dust. Meantime, the single huge ramjet around which the hull of the ship was assembled would come into operation; the nosecone would be blown off, to suffer the same fate as the kickpots, and with a scream too soft to be heard in the thin upper air the energy from ozone and free radicals would whip the vessel clear to orbital velocity. When the air became too thin for the ramjet, pure rockets would serve to make our rendezvous with Starventure.
“I never realized these things were so big!"
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Lenister exclaimed as we awaited the okay signal from the man steering the escalator into position.
“This is the S-class ferry,” I said. “About two hundred seventy feet overall. Weight about a thousand tons without the kickpots.”
“Fantastic.” He stared up, craning his neck, toward the distant nosecone.
Normally I’d have been more forthcoming, given him as long a rundown on the technical data as he could stand. It was part of my stock in trade to feel excitement about our ingenuity and communicate it on paper. But right now . . .
“How do they land them? I’ve been here a week and I never had time to watch it done.”
"I’m sorry—what?”
Lenister repeated his question, and I said, "Oh, it’s fitted with Wallis wings. Variable configuration. It glides back down, losing speed against the rotation of the Earth, and makes its approach at about four hundred miles an hour. Then it gets a signal from the ground which fires the forward rockets—you can just see the nozzles, but they’ve got fairings over them, of course. And the same signal triggers the wings into the drag position. It has to be done automatically because the exhaust from the forward rockets completely covers the ship. Don’t tiy watching a landing without dark glasses; all you can see is a red-hot ball of gas diving on to the port. It touches down on retractable skids at about a hundred and twenty and brakes to a dead stop in less than
a mile.”
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“Sounds uncomfortable.” He tried a smile, but the effect was ghastly.
“No, in fact it isn’t, provided your pilot sets up a really accurate approach, so ground control doesn’t have to make any sudden course adjustments, and these things touch down as smoothly as a civil airliner.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lenister said, his eyes wandering back to the dominating bulk of the ship. “I hadn’t realized they’d brought space travel down to such a fine art.”
I finished what I’d been telling myself when he interrupted my train of thought. I’d been reflecting that whereas I was usually enthusiastic about our own cleverness, right now I was apparently faced with creatures who could not only “borrow” human bodies and “lend” others of their own making to the displaced proprietors, but could then place those bodies on Earth’s surface zephyr-gently, without benefit of ships, or rockets, or a spaceport like this one.
I recalled my conceited ant, who had just found out about human beings.
x?
ONE THING nobody had warned me about was the smell. It hit me the instant I cracked my suit on the in-ship side of Starventure's personnel lock. It wasn’t the submarine staleness of air used and reused past the ability of the conditioners to cleanse it, though that was there too. It was am alien smell: a hint of ammonia, of formaildehyde, of incompletely oxydized fats, plus too mamy other things for my nose to analyze.
Lenister, very pade amd clinging to the straps on the bulkhead as though aifraid to cast off into free fall, noticed it a moment after I did.
“Like a zoo!” he exclaimed.
But that wasn’t quite right. It hadn’t been our decision to bring strange creatures here and pen them up.
“You mean the stink?” said the girl who had been waiiting to see us through the lock. She looked and sounded West African, but she hadn’t offered to introduce herself. “Oh, you’ll get used to it in am hour or two. Which of you is Dr. Lenister?”
