by Hal Clement
There was another reason for haste, as well, though he was forgetting it as his nose became accustomed to the taint in the air. The fluid, which he had permitted to escape while disassembling the lighter, was evaporating with fair speed, as it was far more volatile than the rocket fuel; and it was diffusing through the air of the little room. The alga tank removed only carbon dioxide, so that the air of the cell was acquiring an ever-greater concentration of hydrocarbon molecules. Prolonged breathing of such vapors is far from healthy, as Hart well knew; and escape from the room was literally the only way to avoid breathing the stuff.
What would eliminate a metal door—quickly? Brute force? He hadn’t enough of it. Chemicals? He had none. Heat? The thought was intriguing and discouraging at the same time, after his recent experience with heat sources. Still, even if liquid fuels would not bum perhaps other things would: there was the wicking from the fighter; a little floating cloud of metal particles around the scene of his work on the magnesium door; and the striking mechanism of the fighter.
He plucked the wicking out of the air where it had been floating, and began to unravel it—without fuel, as he realized, it would need every advantage in catching the sparks of the striker.
Then he wadded as much of the metallic dust as he could collect—which was not too much—into the wick, concentrating it heavily at one end and letting it thin out toward the more completely raveled part.
Then he inspected the edges of the hole he had ground in the door, and with the striker roughened them even more on one side, so that a few more shavings of metal projected. To these he pressed the fuse, wedging it between the door and the steel bar just outside the hole, with the “lighting” end projecting into the room. He inspected the work carefully, nodded in satisfaction, and began to reassemble the striker mechanism.
He did not, of course, expect that the steel bar would be melted or seriously weakened by an ounce or so of magnesium, but he did hope that the thin metal of the door itself would ignite.
Hart had the spark mechanism almost ready when his attention was distracted abruptly. Since the hole had been made, a very gentle current of air had been set up in the cell by the corridor ventilators beyond—a current in the nature of an eddy which tended to carry loose objects quite close to the hole. One of the loose objects in the room was a sphere comprised of the remaining lighter fluid, which had not yet evaporated. When Hart noticed the shimmering globe, it was scarcely a foot from his fuse, and drifting steadily nearer.
To him, that sphere of liquid was death to his plan; it would not bum itself, it probably would not let anything else bum either. If it touched and soaked his fuse, he would have to wait until it evaporated; and there might not be time for that. He released the striker with a curse, and swung his open hand at the drop, trying to drive it to one side. He succeeded only partly. It spattered on his hand, breaking up into scores of smaller drops, some of which moved obediently away, while others just drifted, and still others vanished in vapor. None drifted far; and the gentle current had them in control almost at once, and began to bear many of them back toward the hole—and Hart’s fuse.
For just a moment the saboteur hung there in agonized indecision, and then his training reasserted itself. With another curse he snatched at the striker, made sure it was ready for action, and turned to the hole in the door. It was at this moment that Mayhew chose to take another look at his captive.
As it happened, the lens of his scanner was so located that Hart’s body covered the hole in the door; and since the spy’s back was toward him, the watcher could not tell precisely what he was doing. The air of purposefulness about the captive was so outstanding and so impressive, however, that Mayhew was reaching for a microphone to order a direct check on the cell when Hart spun the striker wheel.
Mayhew could not, of course, see just what the man had done, but the consequences were plain enough. The saboteur’s body was flung away from the door and toward the scanner lens like a rag doll kicked by a mule. An orange blossom of flame outlined him for an instant; and in practically the same instant the screen went blank as a heavy shock wave shattered its pickup lens.
Mayhew, accustomed as he was to weightless maneuvering, never in his life traveled so rapidly as he did then. Floyd and several other crewmen, who saw him on the way, tried to follow; but he outstripped them all, and when they reached the site of Hart’s prison Mayhew was hanging poised outside, staring at the door.
There was no need of removing the welded bar. The thin metal of the door had been split and curled outward fantastically; an opening quite large enough for any man’s body yawned in it, though there was nothing more certain than the fact that Hart had not made use of this avenue of escape.
His body was still in the cell, against the far wall; and even now the relatively strong currents from the hall ventilators did not move it. Floyd had a pretty good idea of what held it there, and did not care to look closely. He might be right.
Mayhew’s voice broke the prolonged silence.
“He never did figure it out.”
“Just what let go, anyway?” asked Floyd.
“Well, the only combustible we know of in the cell was the lighter fluid. To blast like that, though, it must have been almost completely vaporized, and mixed with just the right amount of air—possible, I suppose, in a room like this. I don’t understand why he let it all out, though.”
“He seems to have been using pieces of the lighter,” Floyd pointed out. “The loose fuel was probably just a by-product of his activities. He was even duller than I, though. It took me long enough to realize that a fire needs air to burn—and can’t set up convection currents to keep itself supplied with oxygen, when there is no gravity.”
“More accurately, when there is no weight,” interjected Mayhew. “We are well within Earth’s gravity field, but in free fall. Convection currents occur because the heated gas is lighter per unit volume than the rest, and rises. With no weight, and no ‘up’ such currents are impossible.”
“In any case, he must have decided we were fooling him with noncombustible liquids.”
Mayhew replied slowly: “People are born and brought up in a steady gravity field, and come to take all its manifestations for granted. It’s extremely hard to foresee all the consequences which will arise when you dispense with it. I’ve been here for years, practically constantly, and still get caught sometimes when I’m tired or just waking up.”
“They should have sent a spaceman to do this fellow’s job, I should think.”
“How would he have entered the station? A man is either a spy or a spaceman—to be both would mean he was too old for action at all, I should say. Both professions demand years of rigorous training, since habits rather than knowledge are required—habits like the one of always stopping within reach of a wall or other massive object.” There was a suspicion of the old chuckle in his voice as Mayhew spoke the final sentence, and it was followed by a roar of laughter from the other men. Floyd looked around, and blushed furiously.
He was, as he had suspected from the older man’s humor, suspended helplessly in midair out of reach of every source of traction. Had there been anything solid around, he would probably have used it for concealment instead, anyway. He managed at last to join that laughter; but at its end he glanced once more into Hart’s cell, and remarked, “If this is the worst danger that inexperience lands on my head, I don’t think I’ll complain. Bruce, I want to go with you on your next leave to Earth; I simply must see you in a gravity field. I bet you won’t wait for the ladder when we step off the rocket—though I guess it would be more fun to see you drop a dictionary on your toe. As you implied, habits are hard to break.”
THE END
NEEDLE
First of two parts. A detective always has a tough job; the criminal is a needle in a haystack of people. But this detective of an alien world had a terrible task indeed; his needle could become a wisp of hay in a haystack!
The Hunter suddenly realized tha
t the ship ahead of him had become visible without the aid of instruments, and the vague alarm that had been nibbling at the outskirts of his mind rocketed into the foreground. He had been unable to understand why the fugitive should go below the speed of light at all, except in the hope that the pursuer would overrun him sufficiently to be beyond detection range; and when that failed, the Hunter had fully expected a renewed burst of speed.
Instead, the other ship had continued to decelerate. It had kept dead between the Hunter’s machine and one of the planets of the system through which they were passing, so it was dangerous to overhaul it too rapidly; the Hunter had thought that preparation was being made for a break back to the Allane or Tordel systems; and he had not realized how close they both were to the looming planet until the appearance of the fugitive’s hull as a spark of red against the blackness of the great world below showed he had actually entered its atmosphere.
That was enough for the Hunter. He flung every erg his converters could produce into a drive straight away from the planet, at the same time pouring the rest of his mass into the control room as a gelatinous cushion to protect his perit from the savage deceleration; and saw instantly that it would not be sufficient. He had just time to wonder that the creature ahead of him should be willing to risk its ship and host in what would certainly be a nasty crash, before the outer fringes of the world’s gaseous envelope added their resistance to his flight and set his outer hull glowing a brilliant orange.
The ships had dived straight down the shadow cone; they were plunging to the night side. With an effort, the Hunter kept an eye on the instruments that revealed the other vessel’s whereabouts; and it was well he did so, for the glowing cylinder abruptly vanished from sight into an enormous mass of water vapor that veiled the dark surface below them. A split second later, the Hunter’s ship plunged into the same mass; and as it did so there was a twisting lurch, and the right-line deceleration changed to a sickening spinning motion. The pilot knew that one of the drive plates had gone, probably cracked off by undistributed heat; but there was simply no time to do a thing about it. The other vessel, he noted, had stopped as though running into a brick wall; now it was settling again slowly; and he himself could be only split seconds from the same obstacle, assuming it was horizontal.
It was. The Hunter’s ship, still spinning wildly, though he had shut off the drive plate at the last moment, struck almost flat on water, and at the impact split from end to end along both sides, as though it has been an eggshell stepped on by a giant. Almost all its kinetic energy was absorbed in that blow; but it did not stop altogether. It continued to settle, comparatively gently now, and the half-conscious Hunter felt it bring its shattered hull to a gentle rest on what he realized must be the bottom of a body of water, a few seconds later.
At least, he told himself as his wits began slowly to clear, his quarry must be in the same predicament. The abrupt stoppage and subsequent slow descent of the other machine was now explained—even if it struck head on instead of horizontally, there would have been no perceptible difference in the result.
It was almost certainly unusable, even though not quite so badly damaged as the Hunter’s.
That idea brought the train of thought back to his own predicament. He felt cautiously around him, and found he was no longer entirely in the control room—in fact, there was no longer room for all of him inside it. What had been a cylindrical chamber some twenty inches in diameter and two feet in length was now simply the space between two-badly dented sheets of inch-thick metal, which had been the hull. The seams had parted on either side—or rather, seams had been made and forced apart; the hull was originally a single piece of metal worked into tubular shape—and the top and bottom thus formed had been flattened out and were now scarcely more than an inch apart, on the average. The buikbeads at either end of the room had crumpled like tissue. The pent was very dead—not only crushed by the collapsing walls, but the hydrostatic shock transmitted through the Hunter’s semifluid body, in which it has been suspended for protection, had ruptured most of its more delicate organs. The Hunter, realizing this slowly, withdrew from around and within the little creature. He did not attempt to eject its mangled remains from the ship; it might be necessary to use it as food later on, though the idea was unpleasant. The Hunter’s attitude toward the little animal resembled that of a man toward his dog.
He extended his explorations a little, reaching out with slender pseudopod through the rents in the hull. He already knew that the wreck was lying in salt water, but he had no idea of the depth other than that it was not excessive. On his home planet, he could have judged it quite accurately from the pressure; but he had not obtained a reading of this world’s surface gravity before the crash.
It was dark outside the hull. When he constructed an eye from his own tissues—those of the perit had been ruptured—it told him absolutely nothing of his surroundings. Suddenly, however, he realized that the pressure around him was not constant; it was increasing and decreasing by rather marked increments, with something like regularity; and the water was transmitting to his sensitive flesh those other pressure waves which he interpreted as sound. Listening intently, he finally decided he must be fairly close to the surface of a body of water large enough to develop waves a good-many feet in height, and that a storm of considerable violence was in progress. That he had failed to notice any storm during His catastrophic descent meant nothing whatever.
Poking into the mud around the wreck with other pseudopods, he found to his relief that the planet was not lifeless—he was already pretty sure of that fact, since there was enough oxygen dissolved in the water to satisfy his needs, provided he did not exert himself greatly; there must consequently be free oxygen in the atmosphere above. It was just as well, however, to have confirmation; and he was well satisfied to locate in the mud a number of small, bivalve mollusks which upon trial proved quite edible.
Realizing that it was night on this part of the planet, he decided to postpone further outside investigation until there was more light, and turned his ‘attention to the remains of his ship. He had not expected to find anything encouraging as a result of the examination, but he got a certain glum feeling of accomplishment as he realized the completeness of the destruction. Solid metal parts in the engine room had changed shape under the forces to which they had been subjected. The nearly solid conversion chamber of the main drive unit was flattened and twisted. There was no trace remaining of certain quartz-shelled gas tubes; they had evidently been pulverized and washed away by the water. No living creature handicapped by a definite shape and solid parts could have come through the crash alive, no matter how well protected. That thought was some comfort to him; he had done his best for the perk even though that had not been sufficient.
With these facts determined, the Hunter felt that he had done all that was possible for the time being.
No really active work could be undertaken until he reached open air; and the lack of light was also a severe handicap. He relaxed, therefore, within the questionable shelter of the ruined hull, and waited for the storm to end and the day to come. With light and calm water, he felt that he could probably reach shore without assistance; the wave noise suggested breakers, which implied a beach at no great distance.
He lay there for several hours. The darkness remained unbroken, and it occurred to him once that he might be on a planet whose rotation matched its revolution; but the presence of liquid water made that most unlikely, as he quickly realized. It was probable, that storm clouds were shutting out the daylight.
Ever since the ship had first settled into the mud, it had remained motionless. The terrific disturbance overhead was reflected in currents and backwashes, along the bottom which the Hunter could feel, but which were quite unable to shift the half-buried mass of metal. With this conclusion reached long since, the castaway was suddenly startled when his shelter quivered as though to a heavy blow, and changed position slightly.
Instantly he sent out an inqu
iring tentacle. He formed an eye at its tip, but the darkness was still intense, and he returned to a strictly tactile exploration. Vibrations suggestive of a very rough skin scraping along the hull were coming to him; and abruptly something living ran into the extended limb. It demonstrated its sentient quality by promptly seizing the appendage in a mouth that seemed amazingly well furnished with saw-edged teeth.
The Hunter allowed the portion of himself in direct contact with those unpleasant edges to relax into a semiliquid condition; and at the same time he sent more of his body flowing into the arm toward the strange creature. He was a being of quick decisions, and the evident size of the intruder had impelled him to a somewhat risky activity. He left his wrecked spaceship entirely, and sent his whole four pounds of jelly-like flesh toward what he Hoped was a more useful conveyance.
The shark—it was an eight-foot hammerhead—may have been surprised, but in common with all its tribe it lacked the brains to be afraid. Its ugly jaws snapped hungrily at what had at first been satisfyingly solid flesh, only to feel it give way before them like so much water. The Hunter made no attempt to avoid the teeth, since he was immune to mechanical damage of that nature, but he strenuously resisted the efforts of the fish to swallow that portion of his mass already within its mouth; he had no intention of exposing his flesh to gastric juices.
As the shark’s activities grew more and more frantically vicious, he sent exploratory pseudopods over the ugly, rough-skinned form, and within a few moments discovered the five gill slits on each side of the creature’s neck. That was enough. His actions were no longer directed by a spirit of inquiry; he knew, with a precision born of long experience, what to do.
He was a metazoan—a many-celled creature—in spite of his apparent lack of structure, but the individual cells of his body were far smaller than those of most life forms: they compared in size with the larger protein molecules. Consequently, he could put forth and control a pseudopod fine enough to enter the very capillaries of a more orthodox organism without interfering seriously with its blood circulation. He had, therefore, no difficulty in insinuating himself into the shark’s relatively huge body.
