Takeoff!

by Randall Garrett

  “Didn’t you know the Olympics were being held in Madagascar this year?” Dumbrowski asked. “Or did you have some other purpose than trying to win the fancy-diving championship?”

  “I came down to tell you something.” The ice in the words almost liquefied the air, but Dumbrowski didn’t seem to notice.

  “Really? Well, I must say you attracted my attention. What was it?”

  Drake told him. He told him in detail and with precision. And, inside himself, he enjoyed every second of watching Dumbrowski’s expression change. Laugh at me, will you? Laugh now.

  Go ahead and laugh.

  Dumbrowski didn’t laugh. His face darkened a little, and he said: “You don’t think very far ahead, do you, Doctor? You’re supposed to take care of those ducks, not me. You wanted ‘em hatched; my orders are to co-operate. Well, you haven’t told me a thing. I don’t know what kind of orders you think you’re giving, but I’ve had just about enough of ‘em. I’m tired of walking around blind on my own ship, wondering when you’re going to come up with another half-baked idea.”

  It had the effect of an emotional thermite bomb. In a phenomenal energy gain, Drake’s nerves went from frigid to boiling. “Now, listen here, you thickheaded ape...you...you dumb lowbrow ski! You haven’t even offered to co-operate! You haven’t even asked any questions! How am I supposed to know everything when you don’t tell me and don’t ask me?”

  “Me?” bellowed the captain. “Me?” How am I supposed to know what kind of questions to ask about ducks? Who ever heard of raising ducks on a spaceship, anyway? You and your eggs, you egghead! You and your filthy rotten eggs!”

  They were on their feet now, glaring at each other. MacDonald was looking from one to the other apprehensively, wondering what was going to happen and when.

  “My eggs are cleaner than your filthy stories!” Drake snarled. “At least r don’t bore everybody to death with imaginary tales.”

  That was enough for Dumbrowski. He snarled back at Drake, then, with a bellow of mingled rage and pain, he came at him.

  He was heavier than Drake, but they were more evenly matched than might be supposed. The doctor had been working with his ducks in a one-point-five gee field for several years, at least an hour a day. His muscles were harder and tougher than they looked.

  Drake stepped aside, and the captain’s blow missed. But his other arm, flailing out, caught Drake in the ribs. The doctor grunted and drove a fist into Dumbrowski’s abdomen at short range. The spaceman’s hard-muscled middle gave a little, and his arms went around Drake. They went down together, rolling over and over on the tough plastic covering that sheathed the steel deck.

  MacDonald ran forward to break up the battle, but one of the combatants swung out a leg at just the wrong moment and caught the engineer across the shin. He staggered back, off balance, and dropped, landing hard. He got up and limped toward the intercom while the Battle of Section Seven went on.

  He jabbed the general call button and bawled: “Pete! Come down to Seven! These two blockheads are tryna kill each other! On the double!”

  Devris barreled down the stairway and tried to help MacDonald break up the tussle—without noticeable success. Both of them got punches for their pains.

  Finally, Devris ran over to the wall and pulled out the emergency fire hose. He almost turned it on before MacDonald yelled: “Hey! Pete! Water—not carbon tet!”

  Devris looked at the selector dial. It pointed at CCl4. He twisted it past CO2 to H2O and flipped the switch. A high-velocity stream of water splattered into the tangled bodies on the floor .

  They broke up, sputtering.

  “Now both of you stop,” Devris commanded, “or I will use the carbon tet!”

  But it wasn’t needed; the water had done the job.

  “How’s your nose?” Devris asked.

  Drake stood before the mirror in his room and surveyed himself. One eye was bruised a little and his nose was badly swollen. “Id hurds,” he said, “bud I thig ids gwid bleedig. I’ll dage the pagging oud.” He pulled the packing from his nostrils and reached into his kit for a little spray gun. He directed the cloud of mist into his nostrils for a second.

  “There; that’s better.”

  MacDonald stuck his head in the door. “You all right, doc? Anything broken?”

  “I’m O.K.,” Drake told him. “For a while I though I’d busted a hand on Dumbrowski’s head, but I took a look at it under the transparency, and it’s only bruised.”

  “Well...uh...You sure you feel, O.K.?” MacDonald’s tone was hesitant. “Oh...the...uh ...the captain has a pretty bad eye. I wonder if you’d take a look at it.”

  Drake hesitated. “I doubt it he’d let me in the room.”

  MacDonald grinned and relaxed a little. “He said that if you didn’t come, I was to tell you that you caused the damage and you had better get up there and fix it or the skipper will confiscate your med kit, report you to the TMA, and personally come down here and beat you in a fair fight.” He shrugged. “I’m quoting, you understand.”

  In spite of the fact that it hurt his lip, Drake grinned. “I’ll be right up. And you tell him that if he gives me any trouble I have a hypo here that will put him to sleep for a week.”

  “Righto!” MacDonald vanished.

  As the doctor packed his kit, Devris said: “I see you’ve learned one thing about Dumbrowski.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “That he doesn’t expect anybody to believe what he says when he exaggerates.”

  Drake paused to let that sink in. “You mean—”

  “Yeah. Those stories of his. They bore me, but he and MacDonald have a lot of fun with them. Everybody doesn’t have the same tastes, Doc.”

  Drake closed his kit slowly. “You’re right; they don’t.” He picked up his kit and headed toward the captain’s room, wondering what he was going to say.

  When he went in, Dumbrowski was sitting in a chair with his shirt off, scratching his hairy chest. His face was a mess. He’d obviously washed it once, but there was still blood pouring from a cut under his eye. With his free hand-the one that wasn’t scratching-he was holding a gauze pad to the cut, but it had already become blood-soaked.

  The two men looked at each other without smiling. “You hurt?” Dumbrowski asked levelly.

  “Yeah.” Drake pointed at his nose. “Slightly busted,” he lied. “You?”

  Dumbrowski removed the pad, and blood poured from an inch-long cut directly over his cheekbone. “I’m bleedin’ to death, you butcher.”

  Drake walked over and looked at the wound. “I’ll put a tourniquet around your neck.”

  “You would.”

  Drake took antiseptics and healing agents from his bag and did things with them. Dumbrowski sat stolidly through it all. Finally, the doctor sprayed dermiseal over the cut and pinched it together while the proteinoid plastic polymerized, sealing the edges of the wound.

  The eye was badly swollen and purpling. Drake took a hypogun out of his case and fired three minuscule shots into the tissue around the eye and then stood back.

  “You’ll live,” he said.

  “Thanks, Doc.” He turned to MacDonald. “Mac, go down and get Pete, and you two put that Section Six peegee unit back together. We’ll have to work on the main generator coils instead.”

  When MacDonald had gone, Dumbrowski got up and walked over to his foot locker, from which he extracted a one-liter bottle of amber fluid. “I hope you like Irish,” he said. “It’s as good for settling a brawl as it is for starting one.” He poured two and added ice water. Then he said: “We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to handle these ducks.”

  He never mentioned the fight again.

  “I really don’t think I can stand this much longer,” Devris said. “I’ve gone along this far just for the gag, but I have almost reached my limit.”

  The heat was oppressive. The air was so wet that it seemed to splash as they slogged through it. And at one and a half graviti
es, even the effort to lift a foot was annoying and tiring.

  Drake took a scoopful of duckling food from a fifty-kilo drum and dumped it into the feeding troughs near the brooder.

  “Wakwakwak!” chortled a hundred little balls of feathers as they scrambled around the heating unit of the brooder.

  Devris poured water into the drinking pans. It ran” abnormally fast and splashed queerly under the extra pseudogravitational acceleration. “Yes, sir ,” he repeated, “just about reached my limit.”

  “What are you griping about?” Drake asked.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing. It’s just that for the past two weeks, I have been bumbling around under a gee pull that makes me feel like I was made of lead. I seem to have spent all my life feeding ducklings stuff that acts like bird shot and pouring them drinks that flow like mercury.”

  “There’s not that much difference,” Drake objected. “In addition,” the navigator went on, ignoring the interruption, “I have to lug this grossly heavy corpse of mine around through a fever-swamp atmosphere that is gradually driving me to the verge of acute claustrophobia.” He wiped at his forehead. “And, as I said, I have just about reached my limit.”

  “What are you going to do when you reach it?”

  “Take a taxi and go home,” Devris said, with an air of finality.

  Drake finished filling the feeder and dusted off his hands.

  “That’s the last one for today ,” he said. “Let’s go up to your place; I want to look up something in that book of regulations of yours.”

  Devris set down his bucket of water. “How did you know I had a reg book?”

  “Simple deduction.”

  “He can’t even use a word without ‘duck’ in it,” Devris whispered in a hoarse aside. “O.K. How?”

  “I reasoned that no one would be able to quote from regulations the way you do without having studied them extensively. Whence, it follows that you must own a copy of your own, since it would be inconvenient for you to borrow the captain’s all the time—and bad politics, besides.”

  “Marvelous, Holmes! Absolutely marvelous! You figured it out with only those few clues?”

  “Almost,” Drake admitted modestly. “Of course, there was one additional bit of evidence.”

  “Which was?”

  “I saw the book in your room.”

  “Holmes, you are phenomenal; let’s go.”

  The two men plodded their way up the stairs. The entire ship was under one hundred and fifty per cent of a Standard Gee now; the power coils had had to be rebuilt, but it was easier than redoing each floor singly.

  They finally pushed their way into Devris’ cabin and sat down.

  “Whooo!” Devris said. “At least it’s cooler in here.”

  MacDonald had rigged up individual air-conditioners for the sleeping rooms, but nothing could be done about increased pressure and gravity. The air was cooler and less humid, that was all.

  Drake took the copy of the Interstellar Commission Regulations and began leafing through it.

  “What’s the trouble?” the navigator asked.

  “Space,” Drake said. “We haven’t got enough floor area on the ship to take care of the ducks unless we jettison some of the cargo. This is a pretty big ship, but it’s not big enough.”

  “Cargo?” Devris put a finger to his chin and stared at the ceiling. “You want to get rid of non-perishable cargo. Hm-m-m.” He rubbed his chin with the finger. “Try Section XIX, Paragraph...uh...seven, I think.”

  Drake turned to that section and began reading.

  “The cargo officer shall be responsible for all damage to the ship due to shifting cargo, since it shall—”

  “Nope,” Devris interrupted, “that’s for bigger ships, with four or five men in the crew. Wrong paragraph. Try Seventeen.”

  Drake flipped over several pages. “If, in case of emergency, it shall become necessary to jettison cargo, such cargo shall be that which is the least—”

  “I can boil that down for you,” Devris said. “There are orders of precedence. The idea is to junk the cheapest, most useless cargo first, and work your way up. Suppose you have a hundred kilos of oxygen and a hundred kilos of diamonds, and you have to get rid of a hundred kilos of something. What do you get rid of?

  “Well, if it’s space you need, you get rid of the oxy, because a hundred kilos of diamonds can be broken up and stashed here and there in out-of-the-way places. Even if they couldn’t, they’d be kept because they’re a bit more expensive than oxy.

  “On the other hand, if the ship is low on oxy, you jettison the diamonds. See?”

  “Who decides which to drop?” Drake asked.

  “The captain, always—even if there’s a cargo officer aboard. It’s the captain’s decision, because his job is to protect life first and property afterwards.”

  Drake nodded. “That’s what I wanted; I’m going up to see Dumbrowski.”

  As he was toiling his way up the stairs, he met Dumbrowski toiling his way down.

  “Oh, there you are,” the captain said. “I wanted to know if you needed that incubator any more.”

  “Just what I was going to talk to you about. I was looking things up in the regulations, and I found we can toss out a lot of stuff-a lot of the cheaper cargo.”

  Dumbrowski nodded slowly. “You looked it up, eh? That’s good. But, you know, I hate to throw anything away—and I don’t think I will.”

  “But, captain—”

  “Will you kindly go back down those stairs? I’m getting tired of just standing here. Let’s go to Devris’ room.”

  Drake retreated obediently. They went to the navigator’s compartment, and Dumbrowski knocked resoundingly on the door. “Pete! It’s me.”

  “Come on in, skipper,” Devris said.

  Dumbrowski looked at the doctor. “I wouldn’t want to open the door while he was cleaning lenses,” he said. “It might get dust on them if I opened the door too suddenly.”

  “I See,” said Drake.

  They pushed the door open and sat down.

  “Now, about this jettisoning cargo,” Dumbrowski began. “I don’t think it’s necessary. Besides, we just couldn’t dump all the stuff we’ll need. We couldn’t get rid of all your duck food, could we?”

  “No-o-o; we couldn’t.”

  “But we’ll need that space. So, I have an idea. Look; we’re a good long way from the nearest large gravitational body. Is that right, Pete?”

  “I haven’t detected anything in the past five weeks. We’re nine light-years from the nearest star. It’s a blue-white; you can’t miss it if you look out the ports.”

  Dumbrowski nodded and looked back at Drake. “So here’s what we do: We take all the stuff we can and cart it outside and attach it to the hull with magnaclamps. That includes all those drums of duck food, and everything else. The brooders, too, when you’re through with ‘em.

  “Then, if we need anything, all we have to do is go out and get it. Follow?”

  Devris just nodded, but Drake felt rather dazed. It had never occurred to him that it was possible to throw something overboard without throwing it away.

  I’m just not used to thinking in terms like that, he thought. I keep thinking of aircraft. Then he thought of something else. “What do we do when the rescue ship comes?”

  “Well, they’ll be able to take part of the cargo, and we’ll haul back in the rest. Those ducks can be crowded for a couple of days, can’t they?”

  “Sure; two days won’t matter.” After all, he decided, it wouldn’t really crowd them much. By that time, all the feed would be gone—or at least most of it would.

  “Good,” said Dumbrowski. “Good. There’s one other problem. Who’s going to clean up after the ducks?”

  Drake smiled a sickly smile. “I guess we’ll all have to work at it. It’ll all have to be carted to the disposal.”

  “Three cheers.” Dumbrowski stood up. “Well, MacDonald and I will start hauling stuff outside.” And with that, h
e heaved himself up and walked out.

  “You know,” Drake said, looking at the closed door, “that guy worries me. For the past couple of weeks, I thought that... well—” He stood up and looked at his hands, frowning. “I thought we’d arrived at an understanding.” He looked up at Devris. “But he still seems worried about something.”

  “Well, sure he is,” Devris said. “He’s not going to be in the best of odor with the Commission.”

  “Why not?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Devris sat down again on a nearby chair. “Why, man, he’s in trouble. So am I, and so is MacDonald—although neither of us is in as bad a jam as the skipper is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the ship has been disabled. We don’t have any reasonable explanation for it. I’m in a jam because he had the control panels open when the duck walked in. But Dumbrowski is in a jam because he’s captain, and all this is his fault. He’s directly responsible for the whole thing.”

  Devris wasn’t looking at Drake now; he was looking at his fingernails. “Maybe you wondered,” he said, “why the skipper was so sore at you after the accident. Maybe I should have told you before this, but here it is.

  “The Constanza is Dumbrowski’s whole life. Sure, his little wife is a nice gal, but she’s not something you can anchor your life to. Dumbrowski’s pinned his life to Constanza.”

  Drake chewed at his lower lip. “I can see that. Sure. But what did I do?”

  Devris looked up from his fingernails. “It isn’t something you did. It’s something you can’t be held responsible for.

  “The ship has been wrecked. For the first time in his career, Dumbrowski has had to call for help because his ship was out of commission. His ship. The Constanza.

  “I’m responsible because I brought the duck up. And Mac, as I said, is responsible because he shouldn’t have let the duck get in. But Dumbrowski may never get another promotion-it’s his ship that was wrecked.”

  “I see,” Drake said slowly. “And I’m not responsible at all?”

  “Not as far as the Commission is concerned. It couldn’t be shifted on to you, even if you wanted it to be.” Devris smiled a little. “And I know you well enough after all these weeks to know that you’d take responsibility if you could. But it won’t wash. It can’t be done. We’ve had it-that’s all.”