by Dale Olausen
"It's too bad that I didn't know about that," commented Matty, eyeing her with new respect. "I could have picked up a sandwich and a drink for you."
Sarah shrugged again. "It's not important," she said. "I'll live till the end of the shift. But tell me - what did you do last night?"
"Well, I started to hunt for the Explorer ship crew just as planned, right after we left the Central Caf. First of all I didn't have much luck but then it turned out - " and Matty laughed, " - that they had been right inside the Central Caf all along.
"I located them there and brashly introduced myself, only to find out that they were already familiar with my name."
Sarah laughed. "That figures," she said.
Matty made a face at her but did not dispute the point. Instead he went on with his tale.
"We were told to get hold of you if we needed something which officially is not available on XER," Dav Castilo had chuckled after he, in his turn, had introduced the crewmembers present.
Grinning, Matty had replied that he was pleased that his publicity department was doing a good job; however, he had searched out the Beth's crew for other than business reasons.
Could he have a word with Captain Castilo in private? The matter was pretty serious.
The Captain had graciously agreed and he and Matty had found an unoccupied table for two nearby. Over cups of Central Caf's notorious coffee Matty had told Sarah's story to the Explorer and found, to his surprise, that the older man was quite prepared to take him seriously. In fact, while Matty had spoken, Dav Castilo's face had set into hard lines.
"This is just terrible," he had said, shaking his head, after Matty had finished. "When you add this to the problems we already have - ." He had swallowed a gulp from his coffee cup, grimacing afterwards.
"Two things," he had then continued, "two other things have to be taken into account. One: we delivered our ship mechanic, Kells, to the XER Hospital this morning. I'm afraid that he won't be fixing any spacecraft for some time to come."
Matty had stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Two: the Beth is in very bad shape. By the time we got to the planet we've just returned from we had already made four major omega-jumps. Under normal circumstances that would have been okay - that's why every Explorer ship has a mechanic on board. But then Kells went and cracked his head open - before he'd so much as taken a look at the ship. At two minor jumps XER was the only civilized place we could hope to get to - and we were damn lucky to get here."
A moment's silence had followed. Dumbfounded, Matty had tried to digest the implications of what he was being told. Castilo, however, soon had resumed speech.
"If we hadn't had to take that sixth hop," he had said, "I would risk leaving the Beth to be looked after by the XER Maintenance crew. She's a sturdy ship and very likely could be counted on to take one omega-jump safely even if she had been poorly maintained after five. Then she could be looked after properly on the next world. But as things stand that's out of the question."
"Kalso is a corrupt, mutated menkil-beast," Matty had burst out fiercely. "May he take a trip on one of the improperly maintained ships that he's sending out, and disintegrate in omega-space!"
A smile had flitted across the Explorer's face.
"That would be an appropriate fate for the creature. However, I don't think that there's any way we could arrange it at the moment. We do, however, have to figure out a way to get the Beth properly maintained."
Another silence had fallen between them. They had sipped their coffee absently, each trying to think of some solution to the Explorer ship's dilemma.
"Somehow we have to get your ship into Sarah's hands," Matty had finally said. "I think that she'd be quite willing to work on it even in her spare time, but after what happened this morning I doubt that Kalso would let her remain in the Maintenance Sector after her work hours."
"And after six omega-jumps I'm afraid that the Beth needs to be serviced with equipment that only a Maintenance Sector can provide," Castilo had sighed. "This is a tricky business, indeed."
"If only there was some way to get Sarah assigned to the Beth. That would be the perfect solution. But I can't think of any way either Kalso or Marchaisie - he's the Head Mechanic - could be persuaded to give the job to her. After this morning Kalso won't want to see her anywhere near a ship that he might try to cut corners on. And Marchaisie's not into doing favours for Sarah at the best of times - she is not one of his favourite people, being a working woman, and, by his standards, an uppity one at that. It's a good thing for her that she's such a good mechanic; otherwise he would be even harder on her than he already is. "
"Hey, wait a moment, Matty," Castilo had broken in. "Did you call Kalso a corrupt beast? Is he, by any stroke of luck, corrupt enough to take a bribe?"
Matty had turned this over in his mind. "You mean could we bribe him into letting Sarah work on your ship?"
Castilo had nodded vigorously. "That's exactly the idea."
"No, I'm afraid that it wouldn't work," Matty had responded with a thoughtful shake of his head. "It's not that he's above taking a bribe - I'm certain that he isn't. But, knowing what these XER Authorities are like about insisting that people accept orders without a question, I would guess that he is so furious with Sarah right now that he would refuse even to listen to any such offer."
"So appealing to greed won't help us, you think?"
Matty had been mildly surprised at the ease with which the Explorer ship captain deferred to his superior knowledge of XER. But then, as he said to Sarah when he told her about it, the Explorers did not live in a world where the reliability of a person's words was judged by his caste and age.
"Just a moment." A thought had crossed Matty's mind.
"The man who makes up the work schedules in the Maintenance Sector isn't Kalso; it's Marchaisie. He has a reputation of being beyond reproach, but it just so happens that I know for a fact that his wife keeps him on the brink of personal bankruptcy with her spending habits. A chance to wipe out all his debts - it might be enough to persuade him to do a ship captain a favour.
"You see, although Marchaisie doesn't like Sarah at all, he knows that she's by far the best ship mechanic on XER. So it would make perfectly good sense to him, considering what the Beth has been through, that you would want Sarah to work on her."
"Lovely." A pleased grin had brightened Castilo's face.
"How do I get hold of this Marchaisie?"
"He'll be in his office in the Maintenance Sector tomorrow morning. Get there plenty before eight o'clock - that's when Sarah's shift begins. Marchaisie has to have enough time to make the change in Sarah's schedule before she starts work. However, you don't want Kalso poking his nose into things before Sarah is actually working on the Beth. Once she has started on the ship, although Kalso may rail at Marchaisie for giving her the assignment, he can't pull her off it without causing total chaos in the Sector."
"Thanks, Matty." Castilo had extended his hand across the table to shake Matty's. "Be assured that I will put all this information to good use."
*****
"So that's what the little scene that I walked in on in Marchaisie's office this morning, was all about," Sarah exclaimed, when Matty's story came to an end.
Quickly she outlined what had happened when she had come to work. "I guess I must have interrupted the two of them as they were haggling over the price. That's why Captain Castilo thanked me when he later came to see how I was making out with the Beth."
"Sounds like you saved the Explorers some money," Matty chuckled. He got out of the chair and stretched. "I think you're doing awfully well by our heroes, Sarah. What do you say we meet them for supper tonight?"
Sarah laughed.
"For once, Matty, I'm way ahead of you. I already have accepted an invitation to dine with the crew of the Beth 117 tonight. But I'll walk over there with you, if you want me to."
"Will do. And in the meantime, Ship Mechanic Mackenzie, if you'll get back to your job, I'm goin
g to be kind enough to rustle up a sandwich and a coffee for you." He wagged a finger at her and turned to go.
Sarah shook her head at his disappearing back, and returned to her work.
Chapter Three
"I should imagine that we'll find them in the same place where they were yesterday. There aren't too many tables big enough for a group that large, in this place."
Matty pulled Sarah past the electronic maitre d', ignoring the envious glances thrown his way from the line-up of people who had to depend on the machine to locate empty tables. He hurried her down a zigzagging aisle towards the back of the room, waving his hand to greet the many acquaintances who hailed him from the tables that they passed, pausing only to dodge the graceless servo-robots that trundled by.
"Ah! I was right!"
They came to a sudden stop beside a long table at which sat a laughing group of people dressed in spacer brown.
"Here's our company!" somebody shouted and chairs clattered as the Explorers jostled to make room for Sarah and Matty to sit down.
"Introductions!" came another shout. Sarah tried to keep calm while at least dozen pairs of eyes scrutinized her. "Dav has to do the honours; he knows everybody," called someone else. Sarah was pleased to see the attention shift to the Explorer Ship Captain.
The respite proved to be a short one, however. Captain Castilo immediately focused everyone's interest on her again.
"As you all have no doubt already guessed," he said, indicating Sarah, "this lovely young woman is the mechanic in charge of getting the Beth spaceworthy once again."
Sarah cringed inwardly at the adjective "lovely". Dark haired, pale and skinny, she was acutely aware that her looks came nowhere near to approaching the galactic ideal of feminine beauty which favoured fair-haired, tanned and well endowed women. But as none of the Explorers paid any attention to the discrepancy, she quickly dismissed the suspicion that Castilo was being sarcastic.
"Crewmembers, meet Ship Mechanic Sarah Mackenzie, the most capable mechanic on Space Station XER."
Sarah blushed furiously while the people around her clapped. There were shouts of "Welcome, Sarah!" and "Bravo!" from here and there.
After the commotion died down Captain Castilo introduced the members of the crew. The first person he pointed out was one whom Sarah immediately knew that she would have no trouble remembering: she was Cherrie, "the ship's kid" as she was affectionately called. Spacers, the people who lived their lives on space stations and spaceships rather than on planets, loved children immensely, probably at least partly because they had difficulty conceiving them. The crew of an Explorer ship would not dream of leaving a member's child behind even during dangerous voyages. Cherrie, it was clear, belonged to the Beth as much as did any of the other occupants.
Next the Captain introduced the Beth's navigator, Ginette Maas, a very capable-looking, middle-aged woman. Sarah, who knew that on an Explorer ship as small as the Beth the navigator was in fact second-in-command, eyed her curiously. Yes, she decided, Ginette Maas did indeed have the appearance of authority.
The third person to whom Captain Castilo drew Sarah's attention was an intense-looking, dark-haired young man sitting beside the navigator. He was Jaff Gale, the ship's medic.
"Make sure that Jaff keeps his hands to himself," a girl from across the table immediately warned Sarah with a wink. "He likes to think that he has a way with women."
"And Kary over here," Castilo cut in immediately, indicating the speaker, "who likes to make sure that none of us has the opportunity to develop a swollen head, is a member of the 'planeting crews'."
The "planeting crew" members, he explained, had no set duties while the Beth was travelling through space. Their hard work began once the ship had put down on a planet that was to be explored. Sarah listened attentively while Castilo named the rest of the "planeters", anxious to remember which face went with which name.
"We do the dirty work," commented Kary cheerfully, when the Captain had finished.
"What's it like?" Sarah asked a little wistfully. "What do you actually do?" She had no idea that she was echoing questions that generations of Explorers had attempted to answer on space stations and planets across the galaxy.
There was groaning all around the table.
"Now you've done it, Sarah," Jaff complained. "You've given Kary an opening. She loves to tell stories and now she won't shut up the whole evening."
Sarah did not care. It was evident that, actually, neither did the Explorers, in spite of the good-natured insults many of them took the opportunity to toss at Kary.
"All right, everybody. Let's have some quiet so Kary can begin." Ginette Maas's interjection brought about instant order. For a moment there was silence. Then Kary spoke:
"Remember that airless rock where we mined gold?" she asked of her fellow Explorers. "Where we figured that no living thing could possibly exist?"
The sound of rueful laughter followed the question.
"It's not likely that we'd forget," somebody commented.
Kary directed her words at Sarah. "We'd been planetside for maybe two days, Standard, when we all came down with an itch. A horrible, terrible itch! It covered the whole body - I swear that every scrap of skin on me itched."
"I've never in my life been so miserable as I was then," said a woman who had been introduced as Jodi. She lay down her soup spoon, and absently clawed at her wrists. "All I wanted to do was scratch, scratch and scratch!"
"The planet was nothing but a giant chunk of rock," continued Kary, "so the sickness was a mystery. As far as we could tell we had carefully avoided skin contact with everything outside the ship. There was no atmosphere to speak of so we had been using Class One protecto-suits while we worked. When we returned to the ship the suits went through the sterilizer - that's just normal procedure. None of our equipment broke down. Everything seemed perfectly okay - except for the itching! It didn't make sense; we couldn't figure it out!
"Yet there we were - struggling to keep from scratching our hides raw! And with no idea as to what had happened and what could be done about it. The horror of it was that every last one of us had become infected - even Cherrie who had not so much as stepped outside the ship!"
"I sure had it," piped up the girl, shuddering. "I was scratching so much that my skin was peeling off. Jaff gave me some stuff to put on it but it didn't help for long. Just long enough that I could go to sleep - and then I'd wake up itching again!"
"Poor Jaff. We were all going crazy scratching but he was the one that we looked to for help. He was suffering as much as anyone, yet there we were, queued up at his door demanding relief. And, of course, it was his responsibility to figure out what strange disease we had, and how to cure it! We Explorers ask a lot of our comrades!
"It truly is amazing, though, what you can get used to when you don't have any choice. We scratched and took what temporary relief Jaff's potions could offer. We continued to mine the gold we had found. There seemed to be no point in stopping since there was nothing else we could do. It wasn't making things any worse than they already were. And we couldn't just leave and head for some space port - it would really have been low of us to take our disease to some port and infect a planet or a space station! Not that we knew what we were going to do with the gold - as things stood how could we sell it? It most likely was contaminated too!"
Kary paused and Jaff picked up the story. "We saw ourselves living out our days as the itch-ship of the universe," he said. "A ship filled with gold yet who would want to come near us? We'd have to stay aboard the Beth and away from civilization till we died. Like a plague ship in the old sea-faring days. And when finally I did find out what it was we had - or what had us - I was pretty scared that that was exactly how it was going to be.
"It turned out, you see, that in spite of everything - the dead look of the planet, its lack of atmosphere and all our precautions - in spite of all that, we had been infested by a living organism. It was some kind of nano-bacteria capable of survi
ving on that rock. It was able to live through almost anything, including the heat and the chemical bath of the sterilizer."
"The pesky things may have been able to stay alive on the rock," said Kary, continuing the tale. "But they liked the conditions inside the Beth much better, went nuts with the joy of real living, and multiplied like crazy. I suppose we might have been willing to be hospitable if they had stayed away from our hides. But as it was we scratched and scratched - and prayed that Jaff would figure out a way to rid us of the beasties!
"The itch-ship of the galaxy! Was that what we were doomed to be? Not exactly a bright future to look forward to!"
"So what happened?" Sarah had to know.
Kary inclined her head towards Jaff who was grinning ear to ear.
"We had finished with the gold and had lifted up from the planet to circle around it aimlessly when I stumbled upon the answer," he said. "It was - water!"
"Water?"
"Water. I accidentally discovered the little pests' one weakness. It was possible to drown them. To kill them, all you had to do was completely immerse in water whatever they happened to be attached to."
"Which must have been why washing with water had been one of the things that helped the itching a little bit," added Kary.
Sarah understood perfectly why the solution had eluded the Beth's crew for so long. Aboard a spaceship water was precious, and not to be squandered through washing. Most of the time chemical mist baths took care of personal hygiene.
"Once we knew what the solution was it was easy to decide what to do," Kary went on speaking. "We got in touch with the Merworld and of course the people there were great - they always are. 'Come on over,' they said, 'if it's water you need, we have lots.' They didn't worry that our bugs might infest their beautiful world - if water was the answer they had nothing to worry about, so they told us.”
"And we went, gladly. Straight into the sea - those good people had prepared a float for the Beth. We jumped into the water right out of ship's door! And we stayed in the water until every one of us was convinced that all the nano-whatevers on our bodies were dead!
