A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  After passing through an elaborately-appointed antechamber, the chamberlain allowed Rykkla to proceed him into a light-filled solarium of etched glass and wrought iron lace. The high-ceilinged room was filled with plants and the air was moist, warm and heavy. She heard her name spoken as the door closed quietly behind her. Ahead, amidst a mass of lush fernery, a shadow rose against the illuminated wall and said, “Ah! The houri Rykkla! Rykkla the houri! At last! At last! At last! Ak-Poom was correct: Musrum Himself could have provided nothing better. You enjoyed your night in my harem, I pray? You were well cared for?”

  “Ah, yes, indeed I did, indeed I was,” she replied, straining to discern some detail within the shadow and afraid that her squint was making a bad impression. “Thank you very much.” She wondered what an houri was and if he would think badly of her if she asked. She didn’t want to sound ignorant.

  “You were provided with everything you needed? You wanted for nothing?”

  “No, no. Everyone was very kind.”

  “Good! Excellent! I want very much for you to be comfortable now that you are here.”

  “Well, sir, your, um, Excellency, sir, I don’t think that I will be here all that long. I am very anxious to return home.”

  “Yes. I heard about the unfortunate accident that befell your circus. I was sorry to hear that; I had been looking forward very much to seeing it.”

  “You would have missed seeing even what little was left of it, had not your men rescued me from those villagers.”

  “It was for my pleasure entirely, I assure you. Don’t fear, nothing like that will ever happen again, at least not in that village, which I am happy to inform you is as if it never existed.”

  A chill quivered down her spine, like a conga line of earthworms, at this casual and semigrammatical pronouncement. She did not say anything for a long moment. She glanced over a shoulder and saw that she was standing in front of a brilliantly illuminated wall of etched glass and was suddenly conscious of the fact that the shadowy man had been closely scrutinizing her, that in a room that was awash with light her gossamer costume must be quite transparent.

  “Well, ah, your Excellency, you can understand then how anxious I am to return home.”

  “I can, but, if you will forgive me for correcting you, I believe that it is you that needs to understand.”

  “How is that?”

  “You are never leaving, my dear houri; my harem is now your home.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A NEW WORLD

  The cabin of the spaceship rang like a great bell under the impact of the meteorite. Bronwyn was at first only aware of a sizzling streak of orange light that flashed within inches of her nose, which she was glad was in reality not as long as she had always thought it, though only by a scant fraction of an inch. Savoring its narrow escape, that sensitive organ was wrinkling at the acrid odor of ozone just as its owner became aware of a screaming, hissing sound that was even more disturbing. She looked in the direction of the sound and saw that there was a perfectly round hole just below one of the portholes. As she watched, all of the paraphernalia that had been swimming randomly in the atmosphere of the cabin began drifting toward the hole, as though the débris were fish heeding the call of some distant spawning ground.

  Bronwyn’s mind, however, was not much occupied by similes, it immediately understood what was happening. “Professor!” she cried, while at the same time grabbing the first thing that floated past her face that looked large and soft enough to make an effective plug, a fist-sized wedge of cheese as it happened to be. A kick against the central column propelled her to the perforated wall where she jammed the dense mass against the puncture. The hole, she was surprised to see, was in reality something less than an inch across. Her impromptu plug held for the moment but almost immediately began to dimple in the center. She could hear air sucking around the edges, which were beginning to crumble. Desperately, she looked around for something more substantial.

  “Professor! Your book!” she cried.

  “Book?” he replied, as though he were only just beginning to realize that something was wrong, which, in fact, was exactly the case. Wittenoom was by any standards a genius, but the stream of time he lived in was in reality more like a languid backwater.

  “Yes! Quick! Toss me your notebook!”

  With a flick of his wrist, he skimmed the heavy volume toward her and the princess snatched it from the air, slamming it over the hole just as the last of the cheese was sucked into the outside vacuum. The thick book stuck to the wall as though it were glued. She turned in time to hear Hughenden say, with a strained and sarcastic edge to his voice, “If you’re quite finished there, you could lend me a hand up here.”

  The dark little man was huddled against the curving wall opposite the princess. Though he still managed to maintain his perpetual, supercilious sneer, it was twisted by pain. Droplets of perspiration were drifting away from his face as though it were being rendered into its constituent oils. It suddenly dawned upon Bronwyn that there necessarily had to be two holes: one for the meteorite’s ingress and another for its egress. Hughenden had the palm of one of his hands clamped against the wall and it wasn’t much of an effort to figure out what was under it.

  Wittenoom, meanwhile, had become current with ongoing events and had opened a large chest bolted to the base of the wall. From this he had taken a pair of large, thick disks of metal and a small can. Carrying these, he swam to where Hughenden was glued.

  As he opened the can and spread the contents, a thick, black substance that resembled axle grease, over one side of a metal disk, Wittenoom said, “If you’ll move your hand as soon as I’m ready, I’ll put this patch in place.”

  “Easier said than done,” replied the doctor through gritted teeth. “I don’t think that I can move my hand.”

  “Of course you can. The air pressure in here is low enough that it shouldn’t be any problem. The hole’s only an inch wide.”

  “That may be all very well and good,” snarled Hughenden, “but I still cannot move my hand.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re only at half an atmosphere. The hole is less than an inch in diameter. Therefore there can’t be much more than five pounds of pressure holding your hand there.”

  “You can do that stuff in your head?” the princess asked, admiringly.

  “I rounded the numbers. Bronwyn, can you help him? As soon as you get his hand off the hole, I can patch it. And we have to hurry and get a patch on the other hole, as well. There is air leaking around the book.”

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. Grab his wrist and pull, I suppose.”

  Bronwyn grabbed Hughenden’s wrist and pulled. The doctor uttered a terrible curse as his hand came away from the wall with a loud pop. Immediately, the professor slapped the disk over the hole.

  “The glue will set in seconds,” he said, “and the seal will be as strong as iron.”

  “Damn!” said the doctor. “Don’t you know your own strength?”

  “I’m sorry,” offered Bronwyn, who knew perfectly well how strong she was, with feigned sincerity and looked with interest and satisfaction at the palm of Hughenden’s hand. There was an enormous blister in the middle of it, exactly the size and shape of the hole. Within hours there developed a horrible-looking black bruise that almost covered the entire hand. It was days before the doctor again had even limited use of that appendage.

  “If you’ve crippled me, you’ll hear about it.”

  “My goodness; at last: something to look forward to.”

  Meanwhile, the professor had managed to peel his notebook from the other hole and had applied the second patch.

  “Look here,” he said, floating gracefully to his companions. “I scraped this from the edge of the puncture before I put the patch on.” He held out the blade of his pocket knife. On its edge was a yellow smear.

  “What of it?” grumbled the doctor.

  “It looks like gold!” said Br
onwyn, peering closely at the evidence.

  “What?” cried Hughenden. “Gold?”

  “That’s certainly what it looks like,” said the princess.

  “Let me see that,” said Hughenden, snatching the knife from the professor’s fingers. “You probably don’t know what you’re looking at.” He took a loupe from an inner pocket and screwed it into his eye. He scrutinized the blade for nearly a minute, then took a pair of tweezers from the same pocket and poked at the yellow flakes.

  He looked up at the other scientist and the princess. The loupe drifted from his eye. “This is not gold!” he pronounced.

  “Well, I’m certainly taken aback,” said Bronwyn.

  “Are you sure?” asked Wittenoom.

  “Is mineralogy your field?”

  “No, it isn’t,” he admitted, “but it’s not yours either, I don’t think”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Bronwyn looked at the little man, adding suspicion to the already large fund of dislikes associated with Hughenden, alphabetically between repulsion and tubeworm. Why is he lying? she wondered. I certainly know gold when I see it, even if Wittenoom doesn’t. She decided, for the moment, neither to argue with Hughenden nor to say anything to the Professor.

  For the following day and a half the spaceship sailed through the ether as smoothly as a hockey puck. Little more was said about the gold; in fact, Hughenden assiduously avoided not only the subject, but anything except the most necessary conversation with the others. Wittenoom, too, refused to discuss his discovery, which Bronwyn knew only confirmed the evidence of the Ibrailan meteorite. Why he didn’t argue the point was a mystery to the princess; she decided that Wittenoom, for his own reasons, must not have told anyone else about it. She briefly wondered why and was content with the conclusion that golden meteors and golden moons considered as serious subjects were perhaps a little far-fetched for sober scientists.

  In any case, Wittenoom had chosen to keep the information to himself and for the time being, at least, she would respect that.

  Bronwyn had assigned to herself the job of keeping an eye on the little moon. Through her telescope the plaster-white surface raced beneath her gaze, the combined movements of the moon and the spacecraft were magnified fifty times by the instrument’s lenses. As the rocket sped in its orbit, the moon’s appearance ever more rapidly changed. From full to gibbous to quarter, the appearance through the telescope changed dramatically. The sun-bleached surface became darker and dingier-looking as the sun angle lowered. More colors became visible: mostly warm greys and greyish browns, like beach sand or dirty concrete. Bronwyn was disappointed to see nothing that looked like gold. The lowering angle of the light emphasized surface detail so that what once appeared to be almost smoothly featureless had now become a rugged-looking collection of pits, pocks and craters of all sizes, to say nothing of chains of jagged mountains. Everywhere the surface was criss-crossed by wrinkles, rilles, chasms, cracks and clefts. All of these looked fresh to Bronwyn; more than once she was convinced that she saw new splits forming, appearing as instantaneously as a crack in a pane of glass. Surely the little satellite was shattering before her eyes. What if the scientists were right and it fell to pieces before they arrived? Worse, what if it falls apart after we arrive?

  The first contingency seemed to be failing to take place as the spaceship settled into a low, circular orbit above the tortured satellite. Once again Bronwyn had to endure the forces of acceleration, or decelleration, as a battery of rockets were fired to slow the ship enough for it to fall into its orbit. This was, fortunately, not nearly so severe as the takeoff had been.

  Bronwyn remained strapped to her couch as Wittenoom prepared for the final descent. As he and the other scientist busily checked cables, made connections, set timers and performed all of the other preliminaries necessary to landing, she asked, “I certainly hope appearances aren’t misleading.”

  “What do you mean, my dear?” replied Wittenoom, around a mouthful of screwdriver.

  “You both seem to know exactly what you’re doing, but neither of you have ever done this before, have you?”

  “I don’t see what your point is,” replied Hughenden. “It’s all been worked out. If we do A, B and C then D, E and F will occur.”

  “You’re dead certain that, say, D, E and G won’t happen instead?”

  “How could it? That’s as ridiculous as expecting two and two to make five. If you really don’t want anything untoward happening, then I’d suggest that you remain quiet and not distract us from what we’re doing.”

  Unbounded self assurance always worried Bronwyn, especially when it wasn’t her own.

  After an hours’ work the two scientists seemed content with their labors and climbed into their couches. They fastened their restraining straps and began closing switches.

  “Now?” asked Hughenden.

  “I don’t see why not,” replied Wittenoom, throwing the switch.

  There was a roar from the base of the rocket as yet another battery of motors fired. Bronwyn was once again pressed into her cushion as the spaceship was slowed even more. This time its speed was reduced to a point where the curve of the new orbit intersected the surface of the moon. The sound stopped after a few seconds and she was once again weightless.

  “What’s happening now?” she asked.

  “We’re dropping toward the moon,” answered Wittenoom. “We should be heading for a point not far from the eastern limb at about sixty or seventy degrees north latitude.”

  Bronwyn knew what that meant. The limb was merely the edge of the moon’s disk as seen from the earth. The latitude meant that their landing site would be about two-thirds of the way toward the north pole from the equator.

  Hughenden had his face buried in the hood of the rangefinder and was calling out distances at regular intervals.

  “Three hundred miles . . . two ninety . . . two seventy-five . . . two fifty-five . . . two thirty . . . ”

  Bronwyn could easily detect their increasing velocity. Wittenoom was busy checking the switches and connections for the last batteries to be fired before landing, the batteries that, hopefully, would reduce both speed and altitude to zero simultaneously. What if even one of the tubes misfired? How much of a landing shock could the vehicle sustain? From the outside it had always looked as substantial as a diving bell, but diving bells were seldom expected to hold up to being dropped a few hundred miles onto a hard surface.

  “ . . . one seventy . . . one hundred . . . fifty . . . ”

  “Firing battery two!” announced Wittenoom as his hand descended onto the switch. There was a brief, muffled roar. Was that it? We’re still falling . . . but, by Musrum’s bristly balls!, I can feel my weight! It’s not much, but I can feel it!

  “ . . . fifteen . . . ten . . . five . . . ”

  “Battery three! Hold on! What’s it look like, Doctor?”

  “Some rugged bits, but not too rough-looking. like a badly-plowed field.”

  “Anything the legs can’t handle? Anything look higher than the clearance beneath the motors?”

  “Can’t tell . . . three thousand feet . . . two thousand . . . one thousand . . . better fire the peroxide jets now; if we’re going to land at all, this is the time for it.”

  Bronwyn heard the hissing of the peroxide jets as they responded to Wittenoom’s adjustments, four little rockets spaced ninety degrees apart around the waist of the spaceship. Small as they were, they would be sufficient in the low lunar gravity to set the big ship down gently.

  “Time to lower the legs, I think,” said Wittenoom.

  “You’ve got the switches, so lower them.”

  “I have not. They’re over there by you.”

  “I beg your pardon. I know what I have over here and the landing leg switches are not among them. You designed this thing, so I had imagined you’d know your way around it.”

  Wonderful! thought Bronwyn, falling back onto her cushions, an attitude that gave he
r a perfect view of four big levers labled

  LANDING LEGS A, B, C, D.

  “Professor! They’re over here! What should I do?”

  “What’s there?”

  “The controls you’re talking about, for Musum’s sake! For the landing legs!”

  “You have them?”

  “Ha!” sneered the doctor.

  “Well,” said the professor, “pull them immediately, please!”

  She did, one after the other, and heard a whining and clanking that told her that her action was having some sort of effect. She assumed it was what was expected and desired. Above each of the levers a green light flashed on. She reported this to Wittenoom.

  “Excellent!” he replied, just as Hughenden cried out, “One hundred feet! Fifty feet! Twenty! T . . . ”

  He was interrupted by a terrific crash; the spaceship bounced up and down sickeningly, two or three times, like a wallowing, overballasted boat. It stopped and for a moment silence flooded the interior of the cabin, a silence the like of which Bronwyn had never before experienced.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PLANS

  Rykkla was very unhappy: she had found out what an houri was. It was Thursby who had explained that they were mythological black-eyed nymphs, beautiful virgins endowed with perpetual youth and grace, that Musrum personally assigned to the especially faithful. They delighted in catering to every whim of His most devout followers and were monomaniacally devoted to their comfort and pleasure.

  “You look just exactly like the houris in the pictures,” Thursby added, which, however flattering, Rykkla found inexplicably disquieting.

  “Out of one hundred and sixty women,” Rykkla argued, “surely there must be others who look more like Musrum’s birthday present to the Baudad than I do. And out of the millions of women he had his choice of kidnapping it seems even less likely that I’d be the only houri he’d find.”