There was, of course, more equipment packed around us. It was all secured and carefully packaged, and it wasn’t easy to see what there was.
The launch went smoothly enough, and I wasn’t particularly upset by the gradual feeling of unease that crept over me as the minutes ticked by. We would be in free fall for some time, and the long days in zero g made that condition seem quite natural. We were both dressed in specially modified sterile suits. Normal sterile suits are glorified plastic bags intended to be worn for a few hours at a stretch. Ours had been designed to be worn routinely for three or four days, and could be maintained for twice as long without actual danger to life. The main modifications, of course, were concerned with waste disposal and the availability of nourishment. We had light backpacks containing a water-recycling plant and food tubes that could be connected to and disconnected from the feed line without having to break the suit’s seal. It required the dexterity of a contortionist, but it could be done. I had no doubt that I’d get quite good at it once I got hungry enough. The air inside the suits was under pressure, and the detoxification apparatus was distributed in a peculiar collar-and-breastplate. The plastic was thin enough to talk through, but we had to raise our voices to be heard even at fairly close range. The radio mike in the capsule had to be pressed to the plastic in order to pick up the vibrations direct if we wanted to hold a serious conversation with the Ariadne. I assumed that the same would hold true for Harmall’s little recorder/transmitter, which I had put in an outside pocket.
We listened to the technician’s calm voice as he told Catherine d’Orsay when her chutes were due to open. Minutes later, he passed on the same laconic message to Zeno and Vesenkov. We knew that the lurch that would come when the drogues began to arrest our fall would be the one real stomach-heaving incident, and we were ready to steel ourselves for that when the bad news began to come through.
“Cap four,” he said, with painstaking clarity, though he no longer sounded laconic, “you have a malfunction.”
I looked sideways at Angelina. She was looking at me, too. I wondered if my complexion was the same awful color hers was. I snatched the mike from its cradle, and said: “What kind of malfunction?”
“You’re safe, cap four,” said the voice. “The malfunction is an attitude-jet. There is an error in your angle of approach that we cannot correct, but you are in no danger. Please be calm. The chutes will open in ten seconds, and counting.”
He didn’t mean that he was counting. Some silent crystal display in front of him was flickering away the seconds. I counted inside my head, suddenly very fearful that it was all going wrong, and that the chutes weren’t going to open. I was wondering how hard we’d crash, and whether or not we might burn up before hitting the ground, and whether the impact would constitute the biggest catastrophe the surface of Naxos had ever suffered, when the lurch came. It should have flooded me with relief, but somehow it failed to do so.
“Chutes are open,” reported the technician. “Descent proceeding normally, cap four. Everything is under control.”
I looked at Angelina again, and passed the mike over to her in response to a signal.
“This error,” she said urgently, “if you can’t correct it, what will its effect be?”
“Still calculating,” answered the tech. “Please hold. Cap one is now approaching touchdown. Thirty and counting.”
Sod cap one, I thought. What about us?
“Cap four,” said the voice, still enunciating clearly and refusing to give a hint of alarm, “you will miss target and drift. We are trying to calculate the drift. There is no danger—you will soft-land as normal.”
“The bastards!” I said. I tried to sit upright, but was restrained by the harness. My voice carried to Angelina, but maybe not to the Ariadne. She hadn’t depressed the transmit button. She lowered the mike in order to look at me.
“Don’t you see?” I said.
“No,” she replied.
“Malfunction hell!” I spat the words out as though they were some foul-tasting substance. “That bastard Juhasz has sabotaged us!”
The tech told cap two that it was coming in for touchdown, and we heard Captain d’Orsay acknowledge.
“Why?” asked Angelina. She was wide-eyed and didn’t want to believe it.
“Because of Harmall’s damned transmitters. He knows—he’s no fool no matter how paranoid he is. We’re being sidelined so that Vesenkov and Zeno can have first crack at the evidence. That way Juhasz gets the news before Harmall. Maybe Harmall doesn’t get it at all, but it’s certain his magic mushrooms won’t let him steal a march. Thanks to him, we’re out of the action! A hundred and fifty light-years to solve a mystery and they’re slamming the door in our bloody faces! The bastards!”
I was too overwrought even to try to snatch the mike back to let them know what I thought. Angelina, always the cautious one, probably wouldn’t have let me have it.
“We don’t know that,” she said. “And even if it’s true....” She let the sentence go.
Cap three, containing Zeno and the Russian, was just approaching touchdown. As soon as that was confirmed, Angelina opened our channel again. I had to admire her composure.
“How far from target will we strike?” she asked coolly.
“Not certain,” said the technician. “Hold on. We will fix precisely as soon as you are down. The drift is carrying you away to the southwest.”
I tried to remember the outlay of the terrain, but couldn’t One direction seemed just as good—or just as bad—as another. I cursed a few times under my breath, hoping that it would make me feel better. Then we got the countdown signal for the landing, and I started ticking off the seconds instead. It was no more productive or useful as an endeavor, but it seemed more appropriate. My mother always told me that cursing was a symptom of a lack of imagination.
My body was feeling very heavy now, and I was dreading the moment of impact, sure that my bones, weakened by zero g, would be certain to give under the strain. I clenched my fists and closed my eyes...and down we came, roaring and rocking and lurching and swinging.
For a few moments, I couldn’t think what was wrong as the capsule heaved and swung. Then I realized.
“We’re floating!” I said, too weak to shout it out. “They’ve dropped us in the bloody sea!”
The roaring died away, to be replaced by a thinner sound like the dancing of fingertips on a metal surface.
“And to make it worse,” I added, overcome by a sudden calmness, “it’s raining.”
“Hello Ariadne,” Angelina was saying. “How far from the target are we?”
“We have a precise fix,” the technician reported. “You are one hundred and sixty kilometers from target.”
I cursed again, demonstrating my lack of imagination. What else was there to do?
“We appear to have landed in water,” reported Angelina.
“You’ve come down in an area we named the everglades,” said the technician. “I think the reason will be obvious.”
“How far are we from dry land?”
“I take it that you mean continuous land—the kind of terrain where the target area is?”
She really had a firm rein on her temper. All she said was: “That’s what I mean.”
“About a hundred kilometers,” he said. “Perhaps a little more. Actually, though, the more water there is, the easier it’s likely to be for you to rejoin your companions. You have a life raft in the capsule. There’s a powered glider in cap two, but that wouldn’t have been much use to you—it’s only a one-man reconnaissance craft.”
She glanced sideways at me.
“They packed us a boat,” I said. “They even knew where they were going to abandon us.”
She shook her head, still unconvinced that we were the victims of a vile plot. She set the mike down, and for fifteen seconds we just listened to the rain. I felt very heavy, and no doubt she did too. Not a bone was broken, but I wondered how I had ever managed to carry such a hea
vy body through the years of my life.
“Lee,” said a new voice. “Are you there, Lee?”
I picked up the mike, and said: “Hello, Zee. I’m here. All in one piece. Is it raining where you, are?”
“No,” he said. “The sky’s clear.”
“Some people have all the bad luck.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Look at it this way—while you’re dissecting rotted corpses in the dome, we’ll be down here where the real action is, enjoying a vacation.”
“It can’t be helped,” he said.
“Not now it can’t,” I muttered darkly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t catch that.”
“Never mind,” I said.
The Ariadne was waiting to come in again. This, too, was a new voice. I recognized it before its owner identified himself. It was Juhasz.
“Dr. Caretta,” he said, “we’re all very distressed. I can assure you that the jets were checked before the launch. I can’t understand what went wrong, or how.”
“These things happen,” I said, catching a warning glance from Angelina. “Your technician says that we have a life raft of some kind on board. I hope it has a propeller—I’m not very good at rowing.”
“How long will it take you to reach the dome?” he asked.
“A few days,” I told him. “Rather too many, in fact. I only hope the dome is safely sterilized by the time we do get there. We’ll be just about out of food and the recycling apparatus will be reaching the end of its tether. If one of the suits malfunctions, we’ll be dead. You do realize that, I suppose?”
If he noticed that I was being aggressive, he didn’t show it in his voice.
“You’ll have to carry the radio with you,” he said. “That way we can continue to fix your position, and can guide you if you lose your way.”
“We can trust you to do that properly, I suppose?”
“Of course,” he replied.
“Is Harmall there?” I asked.
“He’s right beside me.”
“Hello, Lee,” said Harmall’s voice. It sounded quite calm and neutral. “We’re sorry about the malfunction. Nobody’s fault. I’m sure that you’re in no immediate danger.”
“Probably not,” I said, “but it does hamper the mission somewhat, I fear.”
He knew what I meant, but carried on regardless. “It can’t be helped,” he said. “Do what you can to rejoin the others. In the meantime, I’m sure Zeno and Dr. Vesenkov will do the best they can.”
We’ll maybe get back in time to bury them if they fail, I said, beneath my breath. It wasn’t the kind of comment to consign to the ether.
I put the mike back in its cradle, and turned to Angelina.
“Well,” I said, “at least we’re here.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We’d seen plenty of pictures of variations on the marshland theme, but the camera never does prepare you for the reality. The world has a three-dimensional quality which cameras never capture, and I don’t mean that just in the literal sense. When you look at a film you’re an outsider looking in; when you’re there, the scene surrounds you and engulfs your consciousness.
There seemed to be more color than the pictures had implied. The water surface was covered with flat, rounded leaves whose edges curved over to create a shallow concavity. The leaves were ribbed and veined, and they seemed to extend in groups of three from central stems that also bore cuplike yellow flowers. Colored insects hovered over the flowers in twos and threes, darting back and forth as they ducked briefly into the core from which the languorous petals spread.
The nearest “island” was sixty meters or so away, and consisted of a single vast tree around which was aggregated a trailing skirt of vegetation. It was impossible to say how many individual plants were involved in the mad tangle, but there must have been at least half a hundred different species. Most of the flowers were white and yellow, but there were crimson and purple blooms too. The tree’s own blossom was pink. In the distance, similar islands and strands of grass-covered ground gathered to give the illusion that the water was a lake, completely rimmed around.
The sound of insects signaling—a muted chafing and chirring—was audible through the plastic of my suit.
The rain had stopped, but the sky was not yet clear. It looked as if it might start again soon, but the insects seemed to be making the most of their opportunity.
Mercifully, the so-called life raft wasn’t an inflatable. When we first found it, our hearts sank; it was a roll of plastic looking for all the world like a carefully stowed shower curtain. Once we released it from the wire mesh that held it in bondage, though, we had the privilege of witnessing one of technology’s, little miracles. The design of the boat was imprinted in the plastic fiber as a molecular memory, and before our very eyes the orange material unrolled itself, and patiently molded itself into the desired form. It was long, shallow-bottomed and none too wide, but very tough and sturdy considering its weight. In a supplementary kit there were curved rods for supporting a clear plastic cupola over the mid-section. Fore and aft of the cupola, once it was in position, were frames over which we could stretch rubbery membranes, to stop the craft shipping water. The membranes, like the belly of the boat, were colored bright orange. It really was a life raft—the theory was that anyone compelled to use it would be easy to spot once the air-sea rescue organization sprang into action.
Ho ho.
There was a propeller. Indeed, there was a whole motor, wired to run off an electrochemical powerpack. Powerpacks we had in plenty, but I still had my doubts about the system. The propeller was intended to run under water, and despite a mesh guard, it looked horribly vulnerable to snagging and snarling in such weed-ridden waters as these. I’d been hoping against hope that we might have gotten a motor with a big propeller to be carried aloft, but the life raft was clearly designed for crashes into Earthlike seas. The best-laid plans of mice and men somehow never seem to connect up right with the jams we get ourselves into. (At least, I assume that the mice don’t fare any better than we do.)
The main problem we faced—or, to be strictly accurate, the most problematic decision we had to take—was the question of what to take with us in the boat. We had the duty officer on the Ariadne read us an inventory of what we had aboard, and then we began to haggle over it. It was heartbreaking to leave behind items of apparatus transported from Sule by the Earth Spirit, but the more complicated items were simply too bulky. Once we had an adequate supply of powerpacks and the materials to replenish our suit supplies there was little enough room left. We had to take the radio, of course. For emergencies we took a couple of paddles, a rifle and a flare-pistol. It didn’t seem to me to be enough, but as Angelina pointed out, how many emergencies do you expect to meet in a hundred and some kilometers?
How little she knew.
By the time we had everything ready it was late afternoon. It might have made sense to leave our departure till morning and spend the night on the padded seats that would give us a better chance of enjoying a good night’s sleep than we’d be likely to find in the next week. We were too impatient, though—and we did want to reach the dome before living inside our suits became too intolerable. We sealed up the capsule and set sail. We reported this event to Zeno—the Ariadne was below the horizon and out of contact.
The boat was better than walking, but it wasn’t very fast, and the course we were obliged to steer was a very complicated one. There was no hope of sticking fairly close to a straight line—we were stuck in a labyrinth and the only way to get out was to turn and turn again, always trying to get a little closer to the northeast. We took turns at the tiller.
We’d been going about an hour when the propeller first clogged up with thin green strands of algae. I knew as I cleaned it that it was going to be a regular task. How long it would be before the thing gave out altogether was impossible to guess.
While the boat bobbed silently among the
leaf-rafts, Angelina watched the frogs that moved about on them. They were mostly fairly small, patterned in bright colors. Some had pointed snouts with which they probed the veins and cracks in the leaves. Others had their eyes set high, like Earthly frogs, so that they could search for insects and catch them on the wing with whiplash tongues. I saw one bring down a particularly large fly by spitting at it. I’d seen much bigger specimens on the islands we passed, but they couldn’t operate out here on the leaf-rafts because they were too heavy.
“How many different species of frogs can we see from this one spot?” asked Angelina, as I lowered the propeller back into the water and secured the motor in its bed with the clamps.
“How the hell should I know?” I retorted. Cleaning propellers is not my idea of a good time.
“Hardly any two are alike,” she observed. “Even when the form is similar the colors vary.”
“Frogs back home vary their color,” I said. “They have all kinds of different patterns, and they change color to camouflage themselves.”
“These frogs aren’t colored to blend in with the background,” she said. “It’s more like warning coloration. Though who’s being warned off is anyone’s guess.”
“There’s certainly a great deal of variety,” I admitted. “But the colors may be significant of courtship displays rather than a warning to predators.”
As the boat moved on again, the frogs made themselves scarce, most of them hopping into the water as they saw the orange prow moving toward them. It was sensible behavioral programming—if in doubt, get the hell out.
“You know,” said Angelina, “it’s rather pleasant here.”
With that, of course, it began to rain again.
When darkness fell, we decided to tie up at one of the islands. We picked a large one, which was actually possessed of some solid ground, in the hope of stretching our legs. I tried to guide the boat into a muddy hollow in the shadow of a slanting tree trunk, where there were no matted rafts of vegetation. After a couple of minutes of trying to direct the boat in by means of the tiller, I passed that to Angelina and got one of the paddles, hoping to lever us into position. I wedged it against an overhanging branch, but that just bowed under the force, so I tried pushing it down into the water, knowing that it must be very shallow. That allowed me to maneuver the boat as I wanted, and Angelina moved to secure it. I lifted the paddle clear of the water, and nearly got the fright of my life.
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