Falsen smiled at the memory.
He looked at the succession of figures showing at the bottom of the stern view-screen, then at the same flickering numerals on the radar-altimeter display. Possibly the young officer at the altimeter had been told, by her captain, what Bannerman had told him. She was beginning to look worried. So was Prenta, in her copilot’s chair. He wished that he knew which of the luminous squiggles corresponded to fifty meters.
He looked at the Lady Mother.
One hand was poised over the control console before her and she was watching the screen intently. The hand descended, not hurriedly, to the small thrust-adjustment wheel, turned it firmly clockwise. The vibration of the drive rose to bone-shaking, teeth-rattling intensity — then stopped. Throughout the ship alarm bells were sounding.
The drive started again — but too late, much too late.
Had this not been an old ship, her structure weakened by age, she might still have made her landing without disaster. Had each of the three great vanes of her landing gear struck soil of uniform consistency, all might yet have been well. But two of the vanes sank into mossy loam; the third struck a boulder only centimeters below the soft surface. Fatigued metal twisted, snapped. The ship heeled over, a toppling tower. There would still have been time to get up and clear, had the inertial drive not cut out again for the last time, had a feed line from the water tanks to the auxiliary reaction drive not fractured with the first shock. The brief blast from the Venturis arrested downward motion but did nothing to stop the topple.
Strapped in his chair, Falsen watched the far horizon swing up, up, until all that he could see through the viewport was the gray, marshy soil rising up, faster and faster, to hit him, to smash him.
Carlin … he thought. If she’d done a proper overhaul on her engines instead of cavorting with me …
He would survive, he knew. And so would Linda. But what of the others?
What of the ship?
She hit, with a bone-shaking thud. Had it not been for the softness of the terrain, things would have been very much worse.
He squirmed out of the retaining strap, let himself drop. He landed on all fours on the transparency of a viewport, through which he could see black mud and white wriggling things, some crushed but still twitching. He came erect, looked up. The Lady Mother was directly above him, staring down at him. Her face was colorless, but she was alive.
“Unsnap your belt!” he called. “I’ll catch you!”
She understood, released herself. She dropped heavily, clumsily, but he broke her fall, even though he was knocked over backward. The pair of them sprawled, recovering their wind, while Prenta and the junior officer managed to get out of their seats unaided.
The chief officer glared at him.
She said, “I have heard of the men you call, in your ships, Jonahs. You are one. First your spaceship. Then the dirigible. Now this … ”
The Lady Mother was recovering.
She rolled off Falsen, got shakily to her feet.
She snapped, “Lady Prenta, do not be absurd. There are no such beings as Jonahs. I am ashamed that a guest has been subjected to the ordeals suffered by Mr. Falsen during his time with us.”
“And is he the only one who has been suffering, Gracious Lady? We all have had more than our fair share of ordeals!”
“Enough, enough. I shall wait here, with Mr. Falsen, while you and the Lady Tamsin make an inspection. No doubt all department heads will have their hands full, so I shall rely upon you for the damage reports.”
Prenta and Tamsin scrambled up to the hatch in what had been the deck but was now a vertical bulkhead. Beyond the circular aperture there were the sounds of a brief scuffle and Prenta’s voice cursing angrily. Something, thought Falsen, must have gotten in her way.
That something was Pondor.
His green eyes glared down from the opening.
He spat, “What have you done? What have you done! You have broken my ship!”
Then he was gone.
Lady Mother sat down again, leaned against Falsen. He could feel her trembling. And if she knew, he wondered, if she knew what he was and what his intentions were, would she regard him as such a tower of strength? Would she not hate him as Pondor did, and more than one of the ship’s crew?
CHAPTER 24
He should find out what had happened to Linda, Falsen thought. But she would be all right. Like him, she was hard to kill, and any injuries she had sustained would soon heal. The Lady Mother needed him more than Linda did at this time. He could not leave her alone.
“Mr. Falsen,” she said softly, “you are an experienced spaceman. What did I do wrong? I must know … .”
“Your landing approach,” he told her, “was according to the text books … ” The Survey Service text books, he thought, but not the spacemanship manuals, harping on the theme of Safety First, preferred by the Merchant Service. “But perhaps you put rather too much trust in the ship’s machinery, the inertial drive especially.” And the person who was supposed to maintain it in proper working order …
There was silence for a while, broken by the buzzing of a telephone. Falsen got up, made his way carefully over the smooth, curved surface of the viewport to the vertical deck, climbed it by using chairs and instrument pedestals as hand and footholds. As soon as he got to the command chair the instrument fell silent.
He remained where he was for a little while, waiting for the telephone to buzz again. While he was in this central position he looked up and down and around at the various displays. There were more red lights than white or green, but he could see almost at a glance that the ship was still sealed, that life-support systems were operational. Air circulation was being maintained, so there must still be power — but was it from the hydrogen-fusion generator or the emergency-battery banks? How were things on the farm deck, where the tanks of algae extracted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen? And the inertial drive? That was O.U. bloody T., as was the emergency reaction drive.
“Come down again, please, Mr. Falsen,” called the Lady Mother. “Ignore the telephones. If anybody wants me, they know where to find me.”
He dropped back down to where she was sitting.
He said, “According to the indicators, things don’t look too bad. I’m assuming, of course, that the layout hasn’t been changed since this was a Terran ship. I can’t read Doralan.”
“Panegan,” she corrected him. “Dorala is the world, Panegar is the nation. On Dorala we have more than one language.”
“Oh.”
“But Panegar is the major spacefaring nation,” she told him. “But why am I babbling about inessentials? The safety of my ship, my people, my people especially, should be my main concern. How many have been hurt? Or killed? Too many have been killed already.”
“If they were at landing stations,” said Falsen, “strapped into their bunks or chairs, they should have come through, just as we did.”
“There is always somebody,” said the Lady Mother, “who will disregard safety regulations … .”
And some, thought Falsen, who would not have been able to observe such rules. Those stowaways (somehow he was sure that there was more than one of them) in the storerooms … surely they were crushed in a cascade of bales, drums and the Odd Gods of the Galaxy alone knew what when the ship toppled. He felt sorry for them.
“Here is Prenta back,” said the captain.
The chief officer dropped into the control room through the open hatch. Her uniform was torn and dirtied, and there was a blood-oozing abrasion on her right knee. She started to make a report in her own language.
“In English, please,” said the Lady Mother.
“Very well, Gracious Lady. To begin with, the ship is still sealed. The after air lock is buried in mud, but we shall be able to get out through a cargo port — after we have cleared away the mess of stores and equipment that block the way to it. The … ”
“Lady Prenta, at the moment I am more concerned w
ith the people than the ship. What of casualties?”
“Very few, Gracious Lady, and none serious. We were lucky.” She could not resist adding, “For a change.”
“I wish a report, Lady Prenta, not humorous comments.”
“Very well, Gracious Lady. There is surprisingly little structural damage. The fusion generator is still functional and supplying power. The farm deck is a shambles, but it will be possible to salvage algae and other plant life. The contents of the tissue-culture vats, however, must be regarded as a loss. I have talked with Lady Carlin, and she assures me that she will be able to repair the inertial drive. I suggested that lateral thrust be used to lift the ship, but she told me that too little thrust is developed laterally to raise such tonnage from the surface. I went aft to try to discover why the reaction drive failed to function. There is nothing wrong with the mini-reactor that I could see, but feed pipes to the chamber are fractured. The automatic sealing must have functioned, however. The reaction-mass tank is still almost full … ”
“The least of my worries,” said the Lady Mother. “Water is one commodity of which there is no shortage on this world. And now, Lady Prenta, as soon as you have recovered your breath, will you organize a working party to clear one of the cargo ports so that we can get out of the ship? I wish to make an exterior inspection.”
“Very well,” Prenta said. “I shall report back to you as soon as the cargo port is cleared.”
“How is Linda?” asked Falsen. “Did you see her?”
“Yes. She is all right. Jonahs never come to any harm themselves, do they?”
She scrambled up to the hatch in the control-room deck, wriggled through it and was gone.
CHAPTER 25
Somebody had had the sense to run the elevator cage as far aft as it would go, to its sternmost terminus just above (when the ship was in her normal attitude) the reactor room. It was possible, therefore, to get to one end of the ship from the other by walking through the axial shaft. The spiral staircase encircling the outside of this normally vertical tunnel would have been impassable to anybody but a trained gymnast.
After he had helped the Lady Mother up to the access hatch in the control-room deck, Falsen accompanied her along the inside of the shaft. Although it was possible to walk without stooping, the going was not easy; the metal lining was so smooth as to be slippery underfoot. Some of the dim inspection lights were out, probably broken by the shock of the ship’s fall. Ahead, however, there was a much brighter illumination streaming in through the open door to the storeroom.
They came to this opening and found that a light ladder had been lowered through it. The captain went up first, closely followed by Falsen. Prenta was waiting for them, looking very tired but, at the same time, pleased with herself. She and her gang had done well — although, Falsen thought, gravity must have done most of the work. Had the cargo port not been directly overhead, the task of clearing a way to it would have been almost impossible, would have been impossible without the aid of a team of stowbots and experienced operators. The contents of the storeroom had fallen, fortuitously, to either side of the axial shaft. It was as though, Falsen thought, he and the Doralans were standing at the bottom of a trench, one with outward sloping sides. But the sides were not of earth but of crates and bales and drums. There had been breakages, leakages. The air was heavy with chemical odors and the aromatic acridity of alien spices.
Yet nothing, nobody, had died in here, Falsen knew as he inhaled the conflicting scents. There was no smell of death. Nonetheless it was in this compartment that he and Linda had found the stowaway, where probably there had been other Doralan males hidden. Either those beings had been elsewhere — but where? — when the ship had crashed or they had been very lucky.
Or proof against all normal and most abnormal hazards.
Another folding ladder had been extended and set up to reach the rim of the cargo port. Crew women were already up on the hull; some of them were peering down over the rim of the aperture.
“Come with me, Lady Prenta,” said the Lady Mother. “And you, Mr. Falsen.”
She climbed nimbly to the opening in the hull. Now that she was doing something, Falsen thought, she had shaken off her stunned apathy. Prenta went up after her. Falsen brought up the rear. He pulled himself up onto the curved plating, looked around. It was strange, uncanny almost, to see a spaceship in such a position, half-submerged in mud, an enormously long metal cylinder, tapered at each end, extended at full length in a trench — a grave? — of her own digging. Aft, two of the great vanes were exposed, each sixty degrees from the vertical. The third one had to be buried.
The Lady Mother made her way cautiously down the curved metal surface, slippery in the drizzling rain, to where another ladder had been set up, the foot of it on the ground. Prenta was even more cautious, went down backward on her hands and knees. Falsen swallowed his pride and followed suit. Walking around on the outside of a ship in space, with the vessel in free-fall, was one thing. Here, with the tug of gravity threatening a nasty fall, it was another.
He reached the ladder, got his feet onto a rung, his hands onto another well above it. He clambered down rapidly, stepped onto mossy ground outside the ridge of displaced soil. The Lady Mother and Prenta were walking slowly aft. He set off after them.
When they got to the stern they could see the cause of the disaster. That brief, ineffectual blast of the emergency reaction drive had blown a pit of its own into the soggy surface, a trench lined with baked clay in which the broken vane, the exposed metal of the fractures still bright, not yet dulled by the damp air, was visible in its entirety.
“It can be repaired,” said the Lady Mother at last. “We have power for the flame cutters and welders. If necessary we shall have to … cannibalize? Is that the correct expression, Mr. Falsen? There are bulkheads in the ship not essential to her structural integrity, required only for the making of airtight compartments.”
“It is possible,” said Prenta doubtfully.
“Why so pessimistic, Lady Prenta? We still have the ship, almost undamaged save for this vane. I have talked to the Lady Carlin; she assures me that she will soon have the inertial drive in working order. Even the Mannschenn Drive has survived, although it will require recalibration before the ship is ready for a deep-space voyage.”
“Have you not forgotten one thing, Gracious Lady?”
“And what is that, Lady Prenta?”
“Before we can lift off this world the ship must be restored to an upright position.”
The captain’s face lost its animation, clouded.
“That,” she admitted, “is indeed a problem, but not an insuperable one. There must be a way. Let us regard it as an interesting exercise in spacemanship. What is your opinion, Mr. Falsen?”
• • •
Falsen was remembering how he, among others, had been confronted with just such a problem. It had been during his last training cruise in the Federation Survey Service during which he, together with several others, reservists and regulars, was supposed to achieve promotion from lieutenant junior grade to lieutenant. Aboard the ship, an obsolete cruiser, were officers who were both instructors and examiners. There had been the elderly, crusty Commander Blivens whose specialty was spacemanship. It was rumored that Blivens had actually served in rockets, but he wasn’t really that old. It was rumored that he had first gone to space in the Ehrenhaft Drive ships, the gaussjammers. This was possible.
Falsen recalled a lecture given shortly prior to the spacemanship orals. The young officers were seated in rows in the compartment used as a lecture hall, with old Blivens strutting back and forth on the platform to one side of it, three steps one way, three steps the other. Suddenly he ceased his circumscribed perambulation, stood and faced his audience.
He barked, “I suppose you’re wondering why I always walk when I’m talking. I’ll tell you. It’s because it’s a luxury. When I started my career, it was free-fall all the way, all the time. You young gentlemen take lu
xuries for granted these days — but there’ll be times, in the Survey Service especially, when you’ll find that you’ll have to make do without ‘em.
“Now, here’s a problem. You’re in command of a ship — I suppose some of you will get that far — and you’ve made a botched landing. That happens to the best of us. You’ve toppled. Your ship has crashed onto her side. You want to get her up onto her vanes again so that you can lift off once you’ve buried your dead and made your repairs.” He laughed harshly. “I can just hear what you’re thinking, you young gentlemen out of the Merchant Service especially. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ you’re asking yourselves. ‘Just weld towing lugs onto the stem, if they’re not there already, and hook on a tug, or some other heavy lift vessel, and up you come.’ Your only real worry will be writing the report on the original accident, trying to convince the Admiral or the Astronautical Superintendent or the Managing Director that the Odd Gods of the Galaxy had it in for you personally.
“But it’s a hypothetical Survey Service ship that you’re captain of, gentlemen. It’s not at some commercial spaceport with all mod cons, including tugs, where you’ve made a disgusting exhibition of yourself. Furthermore, it’s not at a Survey Service base with every conceivable facility on tap. You’ve made a landing on some planet, newly discovered, maybe inhabited by intelligent beings and maybe not, but with no modern technology save what you’ve brought down with you. You’ve made a landing and made a balls of it. There’s no other ship with you and it will be years before your radio signals, informing the nearest base of your whereabouts, get there.
“If your ship had a mixed crew, you might think, ‘What does it matter? We’ll just stay here and start a colony.’ But you don’t have a mixed crew. You want to get home to your everloving wives and children. Oh, perhaps you don’t, but most of your officers and men do.
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