The Falcon smoothly turned to the opposite direction from where Clive and Steve were sitting and, confidently gathering speed, flew off. At the set distance, the ship gently decelerated and set course to fly round the crater. This time it sent all the power of the reactor to the turbines. The Martian desert was lit up by a bright flare of violet colour. As if hit by a gigantic invisible hammer, the Falcon shot off, gathering speed at a monstrous ten g. In obedience to Clive’s orders, and maintaining a distance beyond the horizon of twenty-five kilometres, it described an arc round the crater.
Meanwhile, hiding behind the boulder, Steve and Clive were tensely counting the seconds to the arrival of the rescue ship. The seconds passed by agonisingly slowly, time seemed to be stuck in a thick syrup. Suddenly on the horizon, Steve could make out the glow of the ship’s exhaust and a barely perceptible point of light, which rapidly approached.
“I see it!” he said, taking Clive by the shoulder and pointing towards the ship. Clive got up for a better view.
“Let’s go, we have to get down off the slope inside the crater, otherwise I’m afraid they’ll shoot us when we climb aboard the ship,” commanded Steve, putting his arms round Clive.
“On the count of three, we run. One, two, three, GO!!!”
They both vaulted over the ridge and rushed down the slope towards the rescue ship. An instant later, shots rang out.
“Good God, they’re shooting at us!” shouted Steve. This gave his feet wings.
It was much easier to run down the slope than to climb it. The approaching ship was lost from view, concealed by the mountains on the other side of the crater. They ran with all their might. Clive, stumbling over something, would have fallen, but the low gravity came to his aid; instead of falling face down on the ground, he managed to do a half-turn, striking his head, springing back, did another half-turn, landed on his feet and ran on as if nothing had happened.
Steve, seeing these acrobatics from the corner of his eye, didn’t even have time to be surprised, he just carried on running.
“If only we can get to the ship, if only we can reach it in time!” the thought kept running through his head, over and over.
Suddenly the huge shadow of the ship floated up from behind the ridge on the other side of the slope. Like a gigantic devil-fish, filling the interior of the crater with a low roar, it smoothly passed over the barrier and plunged into the depths of the crater. Having reached the final destination of its journey, it froze, suspended one and a half metres from the ground, its turbines raising a cloud of dust in all directions. Rocking majestically first to the left, then to the right, the ship obediently awaited its two pilots.
A rocket flare soared over the crater, filling everything around with a yellowish light.
“Get a move on, they’re almost on the ridge,” Steve shouted to Clive. But Clive was already running as fast as he could. However, he was still a long way behind Steve.
Steve had almost reached the cloud of billowing dust when, out of breath from running, he shouted, “Open the door!”
A bright strip of light appeared under the ship’s belly, gradually increasing in size. This was the hatch of the emergency entrance opening. Steve was only a few dozen metres from the ship when he noticed sparks from a bullet ricocheting from the gravel quite close to one side of him. The robbers had finally reached the ridge and were shooting at the runners.
The ship was raising a tremendous amount of dust, and Steve and Clive were already out of the robbers’ sight inside the dust cloud, which made aimed fire impossible, but the robbers continued shooting blindly. Steve saw sparks from bullets and realised that each minute could be his last. He might not even know what had happened if a bullet hit him in the head. That would be it, and nothing would matter to him anymore.
He carried on running towards the emergency entrance. There it was! Steve flew into the ship in a running jump, grabbing the plating to move his body faster. Even through the spacesuit, he could feel the warming heat of the hull, which had got hot during the flight. Without slowing down, he ran directly to the pilot’s seat.
Clive was less of a sportsman and was a good hundred metres behind Steve. Steve didn’t even know if he was alive; the clouds of dust prevented him finding out. But he knew very well that it would take Clive a few more seconds before he could get into the ship.
Reaching the captain’s seat, Steve flopped into it from the run, turned to the control panel and pulled the control column to one side. The ship obeyed punctiliously, without an instant’s delay. Steve took off vertically, turned the tail towards the ridge from which the robbers were firing, and dipped the nose. It looked as if the robbers understood his plan. Bullets were desperately clanging against the hull. Steve, without a moment’s thought, pressed the brake pedal to the floor, at the same time moving the control column forward.
“Take that, you bastards!” snarled Steve.
Violet flames shot out, raising a fountain of dust for a good hundred metres ahead. The cockpit was filled with the deafening roar of the exhaust passing through the open flap. The nose jets shot out flame, compensating for the thrust of the main engines, which, in turn, ejected columns of violet fire backwards from the tail end, hitting the mountains at a tangent. The whole ship was shaking enough to make Steve’s teeth rattle.
Steve calmly waited a few moments, then pressed on the brake pedal and the control column at the same time. The terrifying noise of the exhaust stopped at once. Steve turned the ship and threw a glance at the ridge from which, seconds ago, the bullets of the robbers had been flying.
A crescent-shaped recess thirty metres wide had been torn out of the ridge at the place at which the tail turbine nozzles were directed. If anyone had been standing there, they were now dispersed into millions of molecules by the hundred-metre plasma fire of the gigawatt turbines.
Steve released the control column, and the onboard computer immediately took over the piloting.
“Descend for exit. Personnel in landing zone,” shouted Steve. His animal instincts, sleeping under the fine layer of dust laid on them by civilisation, had awakened. At that moment he was a different primeval Steve, not the civilised one who weighed arguments for and against. The primeval Steve knew clearly without a shadow of doubt that up there on the ridge were enemies. And the only argument that would convince them to stop shooting was the plasma fire from the tail nozzles.
Obeying Steve’s command, the ship descended and went into waiting mode. Knowing that there were people in the immediate vicinity of the ship, it reduced the intensity of the turbine exhaust sufficiently for people in the landing zone not to be in danger.
Steve jumped out of the pilot’s seat and ran to the exit. The dust blew about outside when Steve made the main engines flare. The rear edge of the tail jets glowed a dark raspberry colour. Steve switched the connection to Clive from the laser channel to the radio one.
“Clive, answer me!” shouted Steve desperately, as if trying to shout over the noise of the ship’s nozzles roaring next to him. There was no response.
Surely Clive hadn’t been hit? Steve felt a dark foreboding. He looked up towards the bitten-out ridge and mentally drew the trajectory of the plasma exhaust. No, it couldn’t be; even if Clive were a hundred metres from the ship, the tail end was angled too sharply upwards to have done him any harm. And Clive had to be nearer the ship, probably already somewhere under the belly, where there was no flame at all. Outside the zone of direct contact with the exhaust, his costume would have taken the sonic and heat shock, saving Clive from harm. It was well able to do that.
Steve jumped out of the ship and set about searching for Clive. With each second, his despair became more unbearable. Surely the beacon would have been visible, even through the remains of the dust! Steve gritted his teeth in desperation. Surely I didn’t hit him?
He ran towards the nearest boulder to climb up on it so that he could see the area round the ship better. Looking a little to one side, Steve caught the flashing
of a beacon, a little to the left of the place where he had just been looking. He at once ran towards the pulsating signal. There, face down, lay Clive. The beacon was on top of his helmet, which Clive had pressed against the ground as he fell. That was why Steve hadn’t noticed the beacon at once.
Externally, the spacesuit had no heat damage, or at least it wasn’t melted, only thoroughly covered in dust. Steve lifted Clive, who was unconscious. Steve threw him over his shoulder and hurried back to the ship as fast as he could.
Once inside, he gave the command to seal the hatches, and carried Clive to the medical compartment himself. Laying him on the operating table, Steve activated the automatic reanimation programme.
Like any other ship of similar class, the Falcon was fully equipped with a robotic medical system capable of reanimating several of the members of a crew simultaneously. Without outside help, the complex could carry out operations of great complexity, and after the treatment of open wounds, the patient was placed in special capsules filled with a viscous fluid, inside which he was connected up to an artificial life support system fully replacing the functions of the internal organs. Within the capsule, the blood circulation system was filled with nano-assemblers, which, in a multi-billion swarm, studied the human body entrusted to them cell by cell, in order to find and correct the damage. If a patient didn’t have serious injury to the nervous system above the brain stem, you could be confident that he would survive.
Clive lay on the operating table in his dirty spacesuit, showing no signs of life. There was no heartbeat. A transparent glass cupola was lowered over him, sealing him off in isolation from the effect of the world outside. Having realised that the patient was still in a spacesuit, the complex, equipping itself with dozens of laser scalpels, cut it off and removed it in the blink of an eye. Superfine manipulator feelers worked with such speed that their movements were not visible to the naked eye. From outside, it looked as if the spacesuit had been placed in a container full of an invisible acid, in which it had simply dissolved.
When Clive was left lying naked, the complex scanned his body from head to toe with a tomograph. A second later, a large screen showed a diagram of a human body with different-coloured markers denoting the position and degree of the injuries. The computer only took milliseconds to make an accurate diagnosis.
Clive had suffered numerous wounds incompatible with life. The robbers had managed to hit him with several bullets. One of the bullets had pierced his arm, fractured the humerus and damaged the brachial artery. The spacesuit had easily recognised the injury and had compressed the arm firmly, fixing the trauma and preventing loss of blood. A second bullet had passed through his heart, severely damaging it. A third had gone right through the liver, making a wide channel through it. In addition to all that, Clive was suffering mild cerebral concussion and numerous scratches and bruises.
Without waiting for further orders, the complex went into the reanimation procedures. The first requirement was to save the brain, because this organ is the first to die. Having determined the blood group, the complex introduced catheters into the carotid arteries and the jugular vein and fixed them. A dark green fluid, a blood substitute, flowed through the transparent tubes leading to the arterial catheters. Artificial blood circulation was restored to the upper part of Clive’s body.
The next step was to restore the integrity of the circulatory system, which had been breached by the bullets in the heart, liver and arm. Making several rapid movements with a scalpel on the chest, the complex cut the skin and ribs, and, immersing its feelers in the incision, opened the rib cage with a characteristic crack.
Watching the process, Steve felt slightly giddy and weak at the knees. The crack of the chest being opened shook him. He suddenly remembered that they had to urgently leave the crater. They had to leave this ill-omened hole as soon as they could. Some of the gang of robbers might have survived, and could at any moment open fire on the ship with a more substantial weapon than an ordinary automatic pistol. The Falcon had quite a strong body shell, and standard bullets were like bees to a bear, a nuisance, but not deadly. But it would not be able to withstand a shot from a powerful weapon. It was not a military ship; it did not have the necessary protection systems. Secondly, sooner or later the forces of law and order could appear here, and this was also something Steve would rather avoid, given their mission.
Steve sat in the pilot’s seat and pointed the ship’s nose almost vertically upwards. A few seconds later, the entire crater was engulfed in a dense sandstorm. Standing in the crater, a man would hardly be able to see the fingers of his own hand. After raising enough dust, Steve turned the ship back to the horizontal, and gave the command to the onboard computer, “Automatic altitude control, minimum altitude.”
The ship obediently fulfilled the command, pressing its belly as close to the ground as its design permitted.
Now, whatever Steve did, whatever flight regime he selected, whatever speed he flew at, the onboard computer would regulate the altitude to keep it as low as possible.
Steve turned the ship in the opposite direction to the chewed-up mountains and moved the control column slightly forward. Inside, the deafening roar of the turbines was barely audible. The ship moved gently forward and slipped out of the crater, easily passing round the mountains. Steve pushed the control column harder. This time the acceleration perceptibly pressed Steve back into his seat, and the Falcon, gaining speed, began rapidly to put distance between it and the crater.
Meanwhile, the medical complex, without wasting a second of precious time, gripped the bullet lodged in Clive’s heart, and, with a sucking sound, pulled it out and threw it into a metal container. Having assessed the nature of the injuries to the heart, without a second’s doubt, it gripped the embedded organ with its feelers, lifted it, and in the blink of an eye, cut round the upper and lower veins, the aorta and the pulmonary veins, and pulled the heart out of the body. Having done a rapid scan of the damaged organ, the complex calmly threw the heart in the waste bin.
Before the amputated heart had finished falling into the bin, the computer had already created an exact replica of it and sent the data to a 3D printer, which set about creating a new organ from artificial connective tissue. Millimetre by millimetre, layer by layer, a human heart grew inside the printer. Having finished, the printer took the elastic heart skeleton and placed it in an incubator. There, from Clive’s stem cells, directly on the freshly-printed blank, the muscle tissue was created, forming a new fully functional human heart. In a mother’s womb, before its first heartbeat, a human embryo has to grow for about five weeks. In a lifeless machine, it takes less than six hours.
While the new heart was maturing in the incubator, the complex would undertake its functions. Now it was time for the liver. Although it was badly damaged, it did not require replacement. Nano-assemblers could restore the destroyed tissue. The complex’s fine feelers gripped Clive’s liver, penetrating the bullet hole. Each tentacle had a microscopic aperture in the centre through which a bio-glue was supplied to seal the damaged tissue. It looked as if the feelers were only massaging and stroking the liver, restoring its integrity. A few minutes later, the liver stopped bleeding.
The wound in the shoulder was child’s play by comparison to the damage in the liver and heart. The complex did not even need to make an incision in the skin; the tentacles simply penetrated the bullet hole, felt the pierced sector of the artery, stretched the edges of the gap and stuck them together. This completed the reanimation procedures.
The table and the transparent cupola pressed to it formed a capsule, hermetically sealed, in which Clive was to undergo the third and last phase of treatment. The capsule began to fill with a viscous syrup-like fluid teeming with nano-assemblers. The fluid completely enveloped Clive. To enable the minute robots to penetrate into each cell, they were mixed with the blood substitute circulating through Clive’s body. The rest of the tissue restoration work would be done by the nano-assemblers.
S
teve was sitting in the captain’s seat gathering his thoughts when the soft female voice of the onboard computer brought him out of his reverie.
“The reanimation process is completed; the patient is in a stable condition. Provide detailed information?”
“Yes, do that,” said Steve sharply as he woke from his stupor.
The computer shifted the image on the main screen to the centre of the cockpit to report on Clive’s state of health.
“The patient arrived in a state of clinical death. The concentration of oxygen in the blood indicated that the time elapsed from the heart stopping to the patient entering the clinic was three minutes. An analysis of brain activity shows that the possibility of irreversible damage as a result of the heart stoppage and the subsequent oxygen starvation can be excluded.”
On hearing this, Steve closed his eyes and lowered his head onto his chest. The adrenaline had gone, and intense fatigue had taken its place. Noticing Steve’s reaction, the computer remained silent for a second before asking, “Do you wish to break off the report?”
“No, continue.”
“At the time of arrival, the patient had numerous injuries to the soft tissues and bones, including injuries incompatible with life. Operations were carried out to remove the heart, and also restorative procedures on the liver, arteria brachialis and humerus. The patient has been put into an artificial coma awaiting the replacement of the heart. When the maturation process of the replacement organ is completed, the patient will undergo a transplant operation. Estimated time until the heart is ready: five and a half hours. Estimated time for the patient to regain consciousness after the operation: seven hours. Estimated time to complete recovery: three days. After recovery, the patient will require a course of physiotherapy with the aim of exercising the new heart. Estimated duration of rehabilitation period: not less than one year.”
The Contact Episode Two Page 7
