Takeoff!

by Randall Garrett

  Heat. Damp, soggy, broiling heat. Unpleasant, miserable heat, from which there was no escape. And a great burden of weight that sapped the strength rapidly in the hot, wet air.

  MacDonald lifted another shovelful and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. He was stripped to the waist, clad only in a pair of sport shorts and his boots, and the perspiration ran down his neck and chest and back, soaked into the shorts, ran on down his legs, and collected in soggy pools in his boots. His hands were slippery on the handle of the improvised shovel, making it difficult to work.

  Across the room, Drake was surrounded by hundreds of awkward little birds who chorused their monotonous wakwakwak.

  MacDonald stopped shoveling for a moment and said: “I’m glad I’m not the feed man around here; I’m perfectly happy to handle the other end of the operation.”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Drake.

  “No, but the ducks follow you,” the engineer pointed out. “It would drive me nuts to have them underfoot all the time.”

  Drake put more feed in the pans. “You mean you think they follow me around just because I feed ‘em?”

  “Well, don’t they? You give ‘em their goodies; I just clean up after ‘em.”

  “It isn’t that,” Drake said. “Even if you fed them, they’d still follow me; I’m the first moving thing they saw after they hatched. It’s a built-in reflex. They think I’m their mother.”

  MacDonald plied his shovel again. “In that case, I am gladder than ever. Imagine being mama to thousands of ducks.” He lifted the scoop and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. “Imagine. Thousands and thousands of ducks. Following you. Loving you. ‘Mama! I stubbed my little webby foot, Mama. Kiss it and make it well.’”

  “Stop!” Drake said. “You make it sound nauseating.”

  “It smells nauseating!” boomed a voice from the door. “This whole ship is beginning to smell like a chicken coop!”

  “Duck coop,” MacDonald corrected as Captain Dumbrowski came on in.

  “Where are you taking that?” Dumbrowski asked, pointing at the wheelbarrow.

  “To the disposal. Why?”

  “Well, we can stop that right now! You’re an engineer, it says here; you ought to be able to figure it out.”

  MacDonald stopped and wiped his forearm over his dripping brow. “You mean clogging the disposal? Nah. There isn’t that much.

  “There will be; there will be. Drake! Are these figures you gave me on feeding correct?”

  Drake dusted crumbs of feed from his fingers, and walked toward Dumbrowski. “I’m pretty sure they are—why?” As he walked, the ducklings followed lovingly.

  “According to this, each one of those ducks will eat approximately seventeen kilos of feed in the next fourteen weeks. At the end of that time, they’ll mass about four kilos each.”

  “That’s right.”

  MacDonald dropped his shovel. “By the Seven Purple Hells of Palain! Nearly sixty-five thousand kilograms! The disposal won’t take it-not by a long shot!”

  Drake said: “Well, I’ll admit there’ll be more per day as the ducks grow, but—” Then he stopped. “What can we do?”

  “Do? There’s only one thing we can do. Dehydrate the stuff and dump it overboard!”

  Drake looked down at the ducklings clustered around his feet. “But we can’t do that! We’ve got to reclaim the grit!”

  “Grit? What do you mean grit?” Dumbrowski asked.

  “Sand and gravel. Ducks don’t have any teeth, so they have to eat a certain amount of grit to grind up the food in their crops. Without it, they’ll die. But there isn’t enough on board. We were going to hatch these birds on Okeefenokee, where there’d be plenty of it, so we didn’t bother to bring any along.”

  “Then what the devil have you been doing?”

  “Re-using what we have. It isn’t digested, of course, so I’ve been reclaiming it as fast as it’s eliminated, sterilizing it, and giving it back to them.”

  Dumbrowski put a hand over his eyes. “Let me think.”

  MacDonald and Drake stood there silently while the captain cerebrated. Finally, he took his damp hand away from his eyes and looked at MacDonald. “The A stage will have to be disconnected and used separately. We can dehydrate the stuff and take the sand out, but the organic section—well, that simply can’t be overloaded. It’ll have to go outside.”

  “I can do it,” said MacDonald. “But it’ll mean we’ll have to dump it out the air lock at least once a day.”

  “You can do it when we go out to get new cans of food. Make it all one operation,” said Drake.

  “Yeah,” said Dumbrowski. “You know,” he went on, with a touch of bitterness in his voice, “this isn’t a spaceship—it’s a sea anemone!”

  “I see what you mean,” said Drake.

  Overhead, two ducks flapped by.

  Two men stood in the decompression room of the air lock while the pumps labored to reduce the pressure to zero. Their spacesuits swelled a little as the air left the room, and between them, a box of grayish powder churned softly as the atmospheric gases between the particles of powder worked their way out,

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right, Doc?” MacDonald asked.

  “I think so. With this nylon rope to anchor me, if I get nauseated again, you can pull me back.”

  “Well, it will be easier with two of us, but Devris could have gone instead.”

  “He’s got to keep shoveling. I can’t scrape up the stuff from the floors,” he explained.

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because I can’t keep the ducks away from me. Every time I lift up a scoopful, I get three or four ducks with it!”

  MacDonald shook his head inside the bubble of his space helmet. “Poor mama duck. Or should I say Papa Drake?”

  “You should say nothing of the kind,” the doctor said.

  The “all clear” light winked on, and MacDonald opened the outer door.

  “You go out first, Doc. Ease yourself past the barrier field slowly. Keep a hand on the edge of the door. And remember, you’re not falling. Just keep your eyes open.”

  Drake did as he was told, and, in a few seconds, he was outside the ship and outside the paragravity field.

  “How do you feel?” MacDonald’s voice came over the phone.

  “All right. A little confused, but I’m not sick. And everything isn’t spinning around.”

  “O.K.; I’ll be right with you.” He came out, dragging the heavy box with him. “Now, can you clamp your boots onto the hull? They’ll come on automatically; all you have to do is put them flat on the metal.” He demonstrated, and Drake followed suit.

  “I’m O.K., now,” he said. “Here—let me carry the box while you get the food.”

  “Fine.” MacDonald raised a gloved finger and pointed. “The dumping ground is right back there near the tail.”

  Drake looked around him. Here and there, spread over the outer hull of the ship, were fantastic-looking shapes—various pieces of the cargo which had had to be taken outside. He could see the incubator looming queerly in the dim illumination of the far-off stars.

  MacDonald was making his way toward a jungle of steel drums which held the duck food. Drake watched him for a moment, then started walking toward the tail of the ship.

  It was an eerie feeling; the ship was big, but it wasn’t big enough to make one feel one was walking on a planet. The horizon was much too close. His boots were a little difficult to handle at first; the magnetic soles stuck tenaciously to the hull and had to be pulled off with each step. Finally, he found it easier to shuffle along, sliding the magnets over the hull.

  Ahead of him, he saw a huge white patch on the hull. His helmet light gleamed off its surface. The dumping ground. He shuffled into the area, his boots raising clouds of the stuff, which only settled very slowly under the feeble pull of the ship’s orthogravitational mass.

  When he reached a spot near the middle of the heap, he turned the box upside down to dump it.

/>   Nothing happened. The stuff just stayed in the box.

  Sure, he thought to himself, grinning; not enough pull to make it fallout of the box.

  Well, that was easily solved. With the box still held upside down, he shoved down hard, and then stopped the box. The powder, with its inertia undiminished, went on out, moving toward the hull. It hit—and splashed!

  Like a liquid, the powder sprayed out in all directions, enveloping Drake in a white cloud.

  He tried to back away from it, but instead of backing, he jumped. His boots came loose from the hull. He was drifting, weightless, in a cloud that was as impenetrable as heavy fog. His helmet light illuminated the particles a few feet in front of his face, but beyond that, there was nothing.

  For a moment, nausea threatened to further complicate matters, but he forced it down. “Mac,” he said steadily into his phone, “I think I’ll need a little help.”

  “Yeah? What happened?”

  Drake told him.

  “Have you still got the box?” MacDonald asked.

  “Yes.”

  “O.K.” There was a feeling of stifled laughter in MacDonald’s tone. “I’ll go back to the lock and pull you in on the nylon rope.”

  A minute or so later, Drake felt a slight tug on his rope. And that was all. Just the first slight tug, then nothing. Had his rope broken?

  “Mac!” he yelled frantically. “I think my rope broke! I’m lost!”

  “Take it easy, Doc; take it easy. You’re O.K. I just gave enough pull on the rope to get you started in this direction. You’ll drift on in. I’m taking up slack now.”

  Drake didn’t feel as though he were moving. “Taking up slack? Are you sure? Why don’t you keep pulling?” His voice sounded strained, and it boomed loudly inside the helmet.

  “If I kept pulling, I’d accelerate you. I don’t want to brain you or something. Ahhh! Here you come!”

  The white cloud was thinning, now, soon Drake could see that he was, indeed, drifting toward the air lock.

  He moved in near MacDonald. The engineer reached out, grabbed his legs and pushed them down toward the hull. The boot magnets grabbed hold.

  “Let’s get inside,” MacDonald said. “This suit is beginning to itch.”

  “Itch? Hell, this is the first time I’ve been comfortable in five weeks!”

  “Yeah? W ell, I itch. Say—how come you walked out into the middle of that to dump the box? That won’t settle for days.”

  “It looked higher out in the middle—I thought that’s what you had been doing.”

  “Naw! I walk up to the edge and give the box a shove. The stuff slides along the hull plates and piles up in just about the middle. Didn’t you see the drift marks?”

  Drake nodded. “Sure, but I thought it was just the wind—” He stopped and felt his face going a bright red.

  How stupid can you get? Wind? In space?

  But MacDonald only said: “Boy, will I be glad to get this suit off and scratch.”

  The next day, MacDonald was sick. His eyes were swelled almost shut, and his skin was covered with red, blotchy patches that itched like fire.

  While Dumbrowski and Devris labored over the feeding and the cleaning, Drake labored over MacDonald. The man was feverish and miserable. The high temperature and the humidity hadn’t helped any.

  Dumbrowski, worried, got the ducks fed in short order and hurried up to MacDonald’s cabin as fast as a one-point-five gee would let him.

  Drake had pumped several shots into the engineer’s blood system, and sprayed his skin with a soothing semi-anaesthetic lotion. The swelling was beginning to go down a little.

  Dumbrowski stood at the door, waiting for him to finish; when he was, the captain motioned with his hand.

  “What’s the matter with him? Is it contagious?”

  Drake shook his head. “No. Simple allergy reaction, that’s all. He’ll be all right.”

  “Something he ate?”

  “No—he’s allergic to duck feathers.”

  Dumbrowski leaned against the wall, and said nothing for a long moment. “I think I could cry,” he said after a bit. “I honestly think I could cry. Can’t cure him, I suppose?”

  “Not with what I have on board. All I can do is keep the reaction down. He’ll have to stay away from the ducks from now on.”

  Dumbrowski looked at Drake. “You know,” he said philosophically, “when this trip is over, I think I shall apply for a vacation in the Martian uranium mines. I understand it’s very pleasant.”

  Drake listened to the scrape, scrape, scrape of the shovel as , Dumbrowski pushed it over the deck. It was a good thing the decks were covered with plastic; it would have been impossible to keep bare steel clean by scraping alone.

  The doctor had put a small amount of the sterilized grit into a test tube and added hydrochloric acid. He held it up to look at it. Behind him, he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing.

  “No bubbles,” Drake said. “No lime.”

  “What?” the captain asked wheezily.

  Drake turned around. “There’s no lime left in the grit. It’s supplied in the form of crushed oyster shell; the birds need it for bone formation now and egg formation later. It dissolves slowly, so most of the oyster shell is excreted intact. But this grit has been reprocessed so many times that there’s no lime left.”

  Devris pushed open the door and trundled in a can of feed on the improvised wheelbarrow. He listened for a moment to the gasping breath of the captain and watched the worried look on Drake’s face. “How much of this can the human system stand?” he asked, of no one in particular. “Mac has eczema, the skipper is coming down with asthma, Drake has ducks, and I have the galloping heebie-jeebies.”

  Dumbrowski ignored him. “What about this lime, Doc? Can they do without it?”

  “Not at this stage of the game; it’d kill them to go without it for very long.”

  “I will gladly sacrifice my useless bones to be ground up for duck food,” Devris volunteered. “Or, if that seems drastic, we can all pull each other’s teeth.”

  “Very funny,” said Drake sarcastically.

  “It isn’t so funny, at that,” Dumbrowski told him. “We haven’t got any lime on board. Why didn’t you think of this before?”

  “It’s never come up before,” Drake said, irritated. “We know how much oyster shell to give them, but the amount that’s actually absorbed has never been computed because there’s no necessity for it, usually.”

  “Well, you still should have mentioned it before now”‘ Dumbrowski’s voice was tight.

  “Hey! Hey!” Devris interrupted. “Don’t go flying off the handle, you two! That fire hose, you know, still works.” He set the can of feed gently on the floor, shooing ducks out of the way.

  “You know the trouble with you two guys?” he continued. “You, Doc, know everything about ducks and nothing about spaceships. And the skipper knows everything about spaceships and nothing about ducks. And neither of you knows which bit of information is vitally necessary for the other. And you both think the other is playing it dirty by withholding information.”

  “You’re right,” said Dumbrowski, cooling perceptibly. “I’m sorry, Doc; now, let’s think about this.

  “Lime, you say. I’m not much of a chemist; isn’t that calcium oxide?”

  “Not in this case. ‘Lime’ can be calcium oxide, or calcium hydroxide, or calcium phosphate, or calcium carbonate, depending on who’s doing the talking. In this case, it’s the carbonate.”

  “You couldn’t use calcium chloride, I suppose. We’ve got plenty of that in the emergency air purifiers.”

  “I’m afraid not. It’d have to be the carbonate.”

  “Hey!” Devris said suddenly. “I’m no chemist, either, but couldn’t we add carbon dioxide to it or something?”

  “Not unless we had plenty of sodium hydroxide or the like—”

  “We do!” said Dumbrowski. “We’ve got that in the air purifiers, too! It takes the CO2 ou
t!”

  “Then we’ve got it!” Drake was excited. “We run enough carbon dioxide through it to make sodium carbonate; then we mix the calcium chloride with it! The calcium carbonate formed will drop to the bottom because it’s insoluble, leaving sodium chloride in solution! It’s perfect!”

  Then his face fell. “But we can’t tamper with the air purifiers, can we?”

  Devris and Dumbrowski both grinned. The navigator said: “That proves my point—you don’t know enough about spaceships.”

  Dumbrowski said: “These are the emergency purifiers. As long as the electronic purifiers work, we don’t use the chemicals—too inefficient. We only have ‘em aboard in case the electronics go out—and they’re in good condition. Besides, we shouldn’t have to use all the chemicals. About how much would you need?”

  “I’ll have to figure it out from the lime removed from the grit, but it shouldn’t be too much.”

  “Good! We’re all set, then.”

  More weeks passed. The brooders were taken outside to make more room as the birds increased in size and need for living space. By the end of the sixteenth week, the Constanza was full of ducks. From engine room to control dome, there were nothing but ducks-ducks that waddled and quacked and flapped their way freely through the huge ship. All the doors were left open now, except those which sealed off the engines and the control rooms and the sleeping compartments. Everywhere else, there were ducks. Thousands of ducks.

  It had been hard work, but the pressure was beginning to let up a little as the hour of their rescue approached. N one of the men had had too much sleep, and all had lost weight. Even Dumbrowski was beginning to look hollow-cheeked.

  To Drake, everything was fine; his ducks were in fine fettle, all of them. The tanks that had been built and flooded for swimming purposes were being used as the older ducks taught the young ones to swim. Everything was fine except for one thing—he still didn’t understand the odd aloofness that concealed Dumbrowski’s anger. Why should the captain be sore at Drake before the accident happened? The remark about “Drake and his harem of ducks” still rankled.