A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  For a second time the sound and pressure ceased and a split second later began again; unbelievably, it was worse than the first two times. Halfway through this third period of acceleration something strange happened, though Bronwyn was only dimly conscious of it at the time: the roar of the hundreds of flaming rockets gradually faded until the interior of the life compartment was as silent as the grave. All that she was aware of was the steady ticking of the clockwork in the central column as relay after relay was tripped. Had the rockets stopped firing again? If so, why was there no relief this time from the pressure? As she wondered about this, even if semiconsciously, there was a third diminution in the acceleration and a moment later a fourth increase . . . though mysteriously there still was no accompanying sound. How could there be acceleration without the rockets firing? How could they fire without producing a sound? Had her ears failed? Had her brain been squeezed so flat, -like a sponge in a mangle, that no sound could penetrate it? Were all of her thoughts and memories now oozing from her ears and nose? She wished that she could ask what was happening, but could not draw a breath into her flattened lungs. It was horribly uncanny: she could still hear the clock ticking on the wall above her head and the steady clacking of the firing mechanism. She glanced at the former through bleary, squashed eyes. Great Musrum! Less than ten seconds have passed!

  The round face of the clock wobbled like an uncooked egg white just before everything dissolved into an amorphous grey fog.

  She dreamed that she was a mermaid, gliding as sinuously as an eel through the slippery seawater, her graceful tail leaving behind a luminous track as phosphorescent as a meteor’s. She was enjoying a kind of freedom that even birds must envy, for she could stop in midflight and relax as motionlessly and listlessly as thistledown amidst the wavering light that wove vertical curtains around her like a chlorine aurora, painting glaucus, reticulated patterns that shimmered over her streamlined body, making her look as luminous and translucent as a blown glass figurine. Poor weightful birds, who had to work constantly to stay aloft; they could not rest for a second or they would drop like feathery rocks. How indeed they must envy Bronwyn, supported on all sides by a comforting, encompassing, unfailing fluid, embedded like a fly in amber, a bubble in treacle, a stray thought wandering like a bacterium in the brain of Musrum, lost in his infinite convolutions like a rat in a maze.

  But, she wondered in surprise, if this is such a splended sensation why do I feel so sick to my stomach? It can’t be possible that mermaids get seasick!

  They must, however, because she could feel her duodenum give a sudden, spasmodic lurch.

  She opened her eyes and found herself looking down on the professor and Hughenden as they still lay on their couches. There was a momentary overlap as dream segued into reality, during which half second or two the princess wondered what in the world the two scientists were doing underwater. Then, as her vision became steadier, she wondered what they were doing on the ceiling, stuck there as nonchalant as a pair of houseflies. As she fully awakened, her brain reeled in sympathy with her stomach; there was a nasty reversal, an inversion of perception: why was she looking down on the two men? Why was she hovering somewhere near the apex of the cabin? Why was she stuck there like the nonchalant housefly? Why was there this horrible sensation of falling when she could so clearly see that she was not moving? And why, oh why, had she been so silly as to have eaten before she boarded the rocket?

  All around her swirled the forgotten paraphernalia, the unnoticed minutiae of life, coins, bits of paper, pencils and a penknife, a twenty-crown banknote, a cancelled train ticket, a comb, paper clips, a safety pin, a piece of candy, a few small pebbles, nuts and bolts, spinning around her like anxious ballroom suitors vying for her hand in a grand aerial waltz. As Bronwyn spun slowly on her long axis, like a spindle, she closed her eyes and thought, I’m like the clockwork dancer atop a music box. I will turn and turn even after the spring runs down and the music stops; I will waltz here until I die. Then my corpse will waltz; it will waltz until the flesh falls from its bones. My bones will waltz until their ligaments disintegrate and the bones spin away from one another, revolving until they become dust. Then every separate mote of dust will revolve until it dissolves into its every particular atom and molecule, and these will then continue to revolve and dance and waltz with each other forever and ever and ever . . .

  “Bronwyn!” cried the professor. “Keep your eyes open!” His warning was, however, too late and the miserable princess erupted like an overtaxed pressure cooker. “Oh, my dear!” commiserated Wittenoom, while the other scientist only glared darkly, making no attempt to disguise his disgust. The professor unlatched his harness and, with a gentle push, drifted toward Bronwyn, who had curled into a ball, now the center of her own miniature planetary system of orbiting globules of digestive débris.

  “Doctor Hughenden,” the professor said, while catching hold of the girl’s ankle, “please find something with which to gather up this mess.”

  As Wittenoom drew the princess toward the floor of the compartment, like a captive balloon, the other scientist, with a snarl, unfastened his restraining belts and began the distasteful job of carefully gathering Bronwyn’s effluvia in a bag woven of a fine mesh.

  “Are you all right now?” asked the professor as he fastened Bronwyn into her couch.

  “I feel much better,” she replied weakly. “But what happened? What’s going on? Are we falling?”

  “No. Or at least not exactly. Not the way you mean, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry about the mess. I felt so dizzy.”

  “Don’t give it another thought.”

  “Easy for you to say,” grumbled Hughenden from above.

  “I remember what you told me about free fall now,” the princess admitted. “I just had no idea what it’d be like. It took me completely by surprise. I think that I’m going to be all right now.”

  “Here,” the professor said, handing her a piece of bread. “Eat this slowly, it’ll help settle your stomach.”

  “I certainly hope so,” said Hughenden ungraciously, as he deposited the bag into a waste receptacle. “We’re going to be finding bits of her breakfast for the rest of the trip. What a fool thing to do: eating before the launch.”

  “It was just the shock,” she repeated. “Before I opened my eyes, I was dreaming about floating, like a, a fish. It was a very pleasant sensation.”

  “I rather like it myself,” agreed the professor, whose elongated body wavered bonelessly above her like a pennant or a strand of kelp. “If weightlessness is not otherwise proving a handicap to anyone, then I propose that we dispense with any attempt to create gravity artifically by rotating the cabin.”

  “Good,” said Hughenden. “I’ve maintained all along that the Coriolis forces in such a confined space would be disorienting at best and debilitating at worst. Our heads would be travelling at a substantially different speed than our feet. Every time we moved or bent over, we’d suffer severe attacks of vertigo or disorientation.”

  “Then please leave the cabin the way it is,” Bronwyn urged. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “Good question,” replied Wittenoom. “Somewhere about five hundred miles above the earth, I imagine.”

  “That’s a useful answer,” sneered the doctor. “That only limits us to being somewhere on the surface of a rapidly expanding imaginary sphere with an area, presently, of some 254,340,000 square miles.”

  “Did all of the rockets work as they should have?” Bronwyn asked. “I don’t remember hearing all of the stages firing.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” answered Hughenden. “We were travelling faster than our own sound.”

  “If the outer carapace fell away as it was supposed to, we can open the ports and see what we can see,” said Wittenoom.

  There were fifteen portholes: twelve spaced around the compartment’s circumference, just above the level of the couches, and three larger ports near the apex of the dome. Bolts held protective plates ov
er the thick quartz windows. These were attacked with wrenches by the three astronauts; the panels fell into slots designed to receive them, where they locked into place. Immediately half a dozen dazzling, parallel beams of light cut diagonally across the interior of the compartment. Half a dozen brilliant circles or ellipses (depending upon the angle at which a particular beam struck the curving interior) were projected onto the opposite wall. These drifted almost imperceptibly as the spacecraft slowly rotated on its axis.

  “We’d best regularize the motion of the ship,” said Hughenden, “and get dark filters over the ports facing the sun. The crystal is opaque to infrared but it’s virtually transparent to ultraviolet. We don’t want that much radiation pouring into the cabin.”

  “Nor anyone accidentally looking at the sun,” agreed Wittenoom.

  “Oh! Look!” cried Bronwyn, pushing herself toward the ceiling. She caught hold of one of the many leather loops that decorated the interior of the spacecraft, something like the straps that adorn subway cars, and anchored herself beneath one of the large portholes. A portion of her mind amazed itself at how rapidly its owner had become accustomed to the almost moment-by-moment changes in orientation. As soon as she had grasped the handhold and placed her feet on either side of the port, squatting over the crystal disk, she no longer thought of herself as being on the ceiling but rather near the center of a dish-shaped floor. She had no difficulty in imagining that she was now looking down through the quartz-plugged opening.

  “Professor! Come look!”

  The three overhead portholes were each nearly eighteen inches in diameter and with her face pressed close to the almost invisible quartz surface, Bronwyn felt as though she were suspended in space like a fixed star. This must be what it feels like to be a constellation, with stars for eyes and comets for fingers and toes. The sky was black and, to her surprise, starless; even the brightest of the stars were lost as the glare of the nearby moon dazzled her eyes.

  The smaller of the earth’s two moons hovered before her face like a pan of milk, seeming so close that if she had been a cat she could have lapped up every phosphorescent drop.

  The lactescent disk seemed to rotate slowly, like the plate of a lazy susan, as the spacecraft turned slowly on its axis. Gradually even this slight motion ceased as Hughenden halted the spin; Bronwyn heard the short, hissing bursts of the attitude jets.

  “It looks close enough to touch,” she said.

  “I only wish that were so,” replied Wittenoom. “We have tens of thousands of miles yet to go.”

  “So far?”

  “Only in distance. In time, only a day or two.”

  “It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with it. It’s so pretty.”

  “No. We’re still too far to see anything with the naked eye. And of course, meteors would be invisible in the vacuum around us. That the moon is full doesn’t help, either. Hughenden, see if you can find the telescope.”

  The sour little scientist did as he was asked and propelled the instrument toward the professor as though he were launching a torpedo, adding ungraciously: “As soon as you’re finished sightseeing, I believe that there is work to do.”

  Beneath Bronwyn’s enhanced gaze, the surface of the moon was transformed. What had to her unaided eye appeared as smooth and featureless as soft, white cheese was now revealed as a confused mass of pits, craters and cracks, making the magnified moon resemble more a very old plate that had just been dropped onto a floor or, to maintain the original analogy, a dessicated and moldy wheel of cheese that had been allowed to sit forgotten too long on a shelf.

  “Professor!” she suddenly cried.

  “What is it?”

  “The moon just cracked! I saw it! A crack . . . it must be miles wide! It looked like someone had just broken a cookie!”

  “Let me see,” the professor replied, taking the telescope from her hands and peering into its lens. “Dear, dear . . . I hope that we will not be arriving too late.”

  “Too late for what?” she asked warily.

  “I hope that there’ll be still be a moon when we get there.”

  “And what happens if there’s not?”

  “Then our return to the earth becomes a highly complex problem in celestial mechanics.”

  “Not too complex, I hope.”

  “Well, it is a branch of mathematics that is somewhat outside my field.”

  “What about you, Doctor Hughenden?” Bronwyn asked.

  “What about me?”

  “How’s your celestial mechanics?”

  “Do I look like a mechanic?”

  “You look like a tick, but what does that have to do with my question?”

  “Princess!” admonished the professor.

  “I asked him a simple question and he knew perfectly well what I was talking about!”

  “All that I can tell you,” smirked the doctor, “is that I agree with Wittenoom: if the moon is destroyed before we arrive, then our return to the earth becomes problematical in the extreme.”

  “But why would that be? Why couldn’t we just turn around and go back?”

  “Things just aren’t that simple out here, Princess,” answered Wittenoom. “Everything is moving, nothing is still, and all of these motions are curved, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, that sort of thing. Orbits are something like railroad tracks, you see. We’ve put ourselves on one that intercepts the moon. If the moon disintegrates, we will still continue on our track just as if it were still there. Unfortunately, we were counting on the presence of the moon and its gravity to alter our course, switch us to onto a spur, as it were, curving our path into a circle. From that new orbit we could easily arrange our descent onto the moon’s surface. Without the moon to deflect our path, we would simply continue to fly off into space.”

  “Why can’t we use our rockets to change our orbit? The ones we would have used to land and take off?”

  “Oh. Hm. I suppose that would be possible, but that’s where the problem of celestial mechanics comes in. How many of our rockets do we fire off? In what direction? How often? After all, we don’t want to sail off into the void in just any old direction, we specifically want to return to the earth. Nor do we want to reenter the atmosphere at the wrong angle, or too fast, or without enough spare rockets to brake our fall.

  “As I say, everything is curved out here, Bronwyn. You simply can’t go from one place to another and back again in a straight line, like sailing a boat or riding a bicycle. The curves are immutable and we must choose the proper ones.”

  “This is a stupid discussion in any case,” offered Hughenden sourly. “The moon’s still there. We’ve got better things to do than tutor a beginning course in elementary astronomy. At least I have something better to do.”

  “You’re going to bathe?” asked Bronwyn.

  “Now, now, Princess,” said Wittenoom. “He’s right. There are endless observations we must make. This is a unique opportunity. We’re the first people to ever rise beyond the atmosphere of the earth and we must make the best of it.”

  “What can I do?” she offered.

  “Think you could make lunch?” asked the doctor. “I’m starving.”

  “I don’t consider that any incentive.”

  Nevertheless they ate, an experience that Bronwyn found both exasperating and exhilirating; she spent more time experimenting and playing with her food then eating it. And, it must be fairly recorded, so did Professor Wittenoom. Only the dour Hughenden glumly followed the proper and tedious procedures for eating weightless food.

  Bronwyn had completely forgotten the unpleasantness of her awakening and introduction to free fall; so completely, in fact, that it took the meteorite that bulleted through the cabin like a red hot needle to spoil her enjoyment.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RYKKLA’S SURPRISE

  After she had absorbed the initial surprise, Rykkla quite enjoyed her evening in the Baudad’s harem, though most of her fellow inmates were a little aloof, regarding the new
comer not so much with unfriendliness as with a kind of wary superciliousness, rather like the old time members of an exclusive club faced with a novice applicant. She scarcely noticed, since there were simply too many other women; she was too tired to care and, in any case, she could out-superciliate anyone.

  As soon as the chamberlain left, Rykkla was approached by an enormous balloon that introduced itself, in a high, fluting voice, as Bobasnyda, the chief eunuch. This much interested Rykkla, who had heard of such people, but had never thought to meet one. He was nearly as big as Thud had been, at least volumetrically, though he did not look nearly as substantial. Bobasnyda looked as soft as a loaf of waterlogged bread and she was convinced that she could push her arm up to the shoulder into his bloated, puddingy stomach, though Musrum alone knew what would ever possess her to try such a repulsive experiment. For all of the eunuch’s mass, his face was pinched and small-featured, with the eyes of a suspicious pig. He was costumed in a perfunctory vest, which did nothing to disguise his bulk, and loose, baggy trousers. The latter garment disappointed Rykkla, who had hoped to be able to be able to discover some evidence of what she had heard to be true.

  The eunuch perfunctorily introduced Rykkla to two or three of the other women, chosen apparently only by reason of their proximity. He pointed to them, barely glancing their way, and with a crook of his finger, drew them to where he and Rykkla stood. They came as docilely as the members of a dog act and bobbed their heads to Bobasnyda, careful not to look directly at Rykkla, though she could see their eyes slyly darting toward her. One was an Amazon of prodigious proportions who, Rykkla thought, could have been Gyven’s big sister; the other was reduced to a miniature, though in reality the top of her head came nearly to Rykkla’s shoulders, as she stood next to the giantess, whose square hips were almost in a line with the smaller girl’s eyes. She was small but not as small as she appeared.