Primrose Rescue p-2

by Bud Sparhawk

  But occasionally he could not rest. In those periods he recalled the terror he had felt when he was outside. What if Louella found out that his cowardly fear had nearly caused him to kill himself and the captain? Would she laugh at him, belittling him in that taunting way of hers if he told her? Yes, he thought sadly, she would do exactly that. He had no choice but to hide his cowardice from her and Rams. He just wished that he could hide it from himself as well.

  He had nightmares of falling endlessly into Jupiter’s bottomless depths and being crushed slowly in her enormous embrace. There was no rest from such dreams and he usually awoke bathed in the stink of fearful sweat.

  Ten days after the near encounter with the wayward station, the winds, which had been generally westward, suddenly became gusty, shifting thirty degrees to the north, varying in strength each time they quartered back to the west.

  Once, Thorn started to drift away from Primrose when the winds gusted, only to slam back and strike broadside as the wind shifted. Primrose shuddered with the force of the collision. A moment later, far below, Thorn’s keel, with the huge rock attached, smashed into Primrose’s and sent a vibration racing upwards that made the hull ring.

  The chunk of rock embedded in Thorn’s keel had been a gift from the storm, one of the valuable bits of flotsam the storms occasionally brought up from the depths. It was these rocks that made Jupiter’s miners risk searching the edges of the hurricanes despite the dangers. A single rock could bring a fortune for its metallic content, and a modest profit for the volitiles that it might contain. By the standards of the trade the one caught in Thorn’s keel was enormous, ten times the size of the largest one Rams had ever heard of.

  “Any more surprises like that and we’re liable to flounder,” Louella remarked as the vibrations dampened. “I’m not sure of how much punishment this ship will bear.”

  “We ought to cast Thorn off,” Pascal suggested. “Thorn and that damned rock’s a danger to us. Besides, we could to make better time if we weren’t burdened by the tow.”

  “NO!” Rams shouted from his bunk. The reduction of the dosage meant that he was conscious more than not. “Can’t do that to me… won’t let you steal my future.”

  Pascal knelt beside him. “Captain, be reasonable. You need medical attention soon or you’ll never be able to use that leg. What good would all the money be if you can’t walk?”

  Rams coughed. “Not ’bout money… ’s about freedom: owning my ship free and clear; being able to steer from port to port without worrying about the bank waiting to seize it. About having enough profit to get a decent crew, ’nough to put something aside for when I can’t fight the damned gravity any more.”

  He pushed Pascal’s arm away and turned his head toward Louella, stretching a hand out to her. “This is about having Primrose as my own for the first time. Can’t you understand that?” he sobbed before lapsing back to unconsciousness. “Can’t… you… understand…”

  Pascal couldn’t understand Rams’ concern. He’d always sailed on someone else’s boat; sometimes as captain, but mostly as crew. Ownership had never mattered to him; it was being able to sail the ship, to direct her course, to trim her heading was all he cared about: There always had been far more ships needing trained captains and crew than there were capable people. Ownership wasn’t important.

  “I understand,” Louella remarked unexpectedly from the passageway, breaking his chain of thought. “We’ll do everything we can to save her, won’t we Pascal?” The tone of her voice told him that anything other than agreement would create a hell of a row.

  * * *

  “It’s insane,” he replied with as much emphasis as he could muster as he let her slip behind the wheel. ” We’re liable to have a hull rupture if Thorn smashes into us again! We’ll never make it to the station unless we cut the damn tow loose and get rid of Thorn and that damned rock! Its stupidity to try to save them when our own survival is at stake.”

  Louella snorted in derision and twisted the wheel, heading Primrose back into the wind. Thorn was pushed away as the head wind rushed between the two hulls.

  “I’m putting us on a new course. If we sail close to the wind Thorn will stay on our lee side and away from Primrose. We won’t have any more bumping.”

  “That’s crazy. That is completely off our planned course! We might miss the station entirely!”

  “Pascal, you bitched the same way when we were trying to work our way around Cape Horn in that storm back in ’79 and I got us through that, didn’t I? Now, instead of complaining, why don’t you try to figure out what this new course will do to our arrival time.”

  After a few minutes of playing with the inertial and the computer Pascal announced that they would arrive too late, twenty hours behind the station.

  Louella considered for a few minutes. “If we come up behind her then we can go on a broad reach and catch up to the station. Hey, our speed has to be faster than the station’s. We can catch it in maybe thirty hours or so. That’ll only add another day or so to what we originally thought. Close enough, and it saves the tow for the captain.” She nodded toward Rams, who had slipped back to sleep while they argued. “That should be good enough reward for saving our skins, eh, Pascal?”

  Pascal couldn’t argue with that: He just hoped that their supplies would last.

  And the captain, of course.

  * * *

  Rams’ condition was getting worse by the hour. Pascal had peeked beneath the bandages; he saw the swelling around the break, felt the heat radiating from the wound. Obviously there was an infection present within the leg, probably around the break. He’d been giving Rams the antibiotics until their supply ran out. The supply had never envisioned a journey this long, he thought, and now Rams was paying the penalty.

  “We need to get him to a doctor soon,” he told Louella when she returned from her all too brief rest. “I think that an infection is setting in and I don’t have anything left to deal with it.”

  “How far away is CS-17? We should be crossing its track this watch, shouldn’t we?”

  Pascal started; the discovery of Rams’ problem had driven the approaching station completely out of his head. That was the trouble with exhaustion, it was so damned hard to keep your mind focused, so hard to remember anything. “Yeah, we should hit it sometime in the next few hours. Then all we have to do is catch up to her.”

  Louella slipped into the seat and placed her hands wearily on the wheel. “Piece of cake.”

  “Trust your inertial,” Pascal replied mirthlessly with a final glance at Rams. He headed for his bunk and a few blessed hours of relief.

  * * *

  He awoke with a start. An alarm was ringing shrilly somewhere. Was it time to go to school? No, that was the dream. He shook his head to clear it and realized that it was the radar alarm. They must be near the station! “Damn Louella,” he cursed. She must have let him sleep right through the watch, doubling her own burden to lighten his own. He tightened the truss, stood and moved toward the cockpit, checking the time as he did so.

  Wait a minute; he hadn’t been asleep more than four hours! What the hell was happening? The station was still hours away. What could they have run into?

  “It’s another damn ghost,” were the first words Louella spit at him as he entered the cockpit. “Come on over here and see what you can make of the displays.”

  “Looks like something really big. Could be the station, just like the last one. Trim us up a couple of points higher, would you?” Louella twitched the wheel slightly to turn Primrose closer to the wind. Their speed picked up slightly and the radar image started to clear.

  “Doesn’t look like a station,” Pascal announced as the outline clarified. “Come around another ten degrees. Yes, stay on this heading and we’ll be able to pick it up on the sonar.”

  An hour later they still couldn’t make out what they were seeing on the screen. The image showed something larger than the ship by a factor of ten, but looking like nothing
they’d ever seen.

  As best they could make out it was roughly cone-shaped, with the blunt end facing the wind. Whenever they got close a slimmer projection appeared at the leading end and seemed to lead upwards.

  It was Rams who figured it out. “It’s a drogue,” he explained. “One of the sea anchors the station uses to hold itself in place. They’re usually a klick below though.”

  “What the hell is it doing at this level?” Louella demanded. “I though those things were hundreds of meters below the stations, not on the level the ships used.”

  Pascal thought hard. “Maybe we aren’t where we’re supposed to be. Perhaps we are way down below where our instruments tell us we are.”

  Louella stared hard at the display, trying to work out her own conclusions. “You think there’s something wrong with the altimeter? Oh shit!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The altimeter isn’t absolute. It just figures out the altitude by the buoyancy of the ship—it’s an approximation.”

  “So we aren’t as high as we should be? That doesn’t make any sense. If the outside pressure was lower then the station would be as affected as us.” Pascal replied, fighting to hold the logic of the problem in his mind.

  “Thorn’s dragging us down,” Rams suggested. “Rock and ship are ballast too. Holding us down.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Louella exclaimed. “Crap, all we have to do is rise to their level to dock with her.”

  With that she reached out and flipped the heater switches that would vaporize and vent a portion of the ballast and lighten the ship. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to evacuate some ballast. Hey, that’s strange…” Her forehead crinkled in thought as she stared at one of the displays on the console. Finally, she spoke.

  “Pascal, honey, I think we have another little problem.”

  * * *

  After extensive systems checks and repeated attempts to get Primrose’s heaters to work they concluded that the heater circuits within her keel must be faulty.

  Louella said it first. “The question isn’t how did it happen; it’s what can we do about it? How can we get the ship up to the station’s altitude?”

  “Need to get down there and fix the circuits,” Pascal suggested after a few minutes of intense thought. For some reason he wasn’t thinking too clearly, probably because of the lack of rest and the pressure of their predicament.

  “I think the drag of the tow is holding our speed below that of the station at this angle of attack. We’re losing way relative to the station. We need to quarter away to build up enough to catch it again,” Louella said in a tired voice.

  So saying, she let the wind take Primrose on a slanting course away from the station, building their speed once more. Back and forth they passed under the station, careful to avoid the lines that held the drogues in place, and trying the radio with each pass, but getting only static for their troubles. There was no way they could tell whether the station was aware of their plight or not.

  Meanwhile Pascal had crawled forward to loosen the hatch to the lower deck and the heater connections. He had to check several times, because he kept forgetting what he had done. As far as he could tell, the heaters were working properly. He could even feel the warmth through the housings with his hand.

  So that meant the problem wasn’t the heaters, he reasoned slowly. Therefore, it had to be the vents. They must have been damaged whenever Thorn’s rock had smashed against their keel. Maybe one of their collisions had warped them into uselessness. No way of telling from down here. Wearily he climbed back up and made his way to the cockpit to tell Louella the sad news.

  “I knew we should have cast Thorn off when we had the chance,” he said once he got his breath back.

  “Too late to reconsider that now,” she replied, too tired to even argue the point. Instead she appeared to be deep in thought.

  In a few minutes Louella came up with a truly frightening solution: Pascal would simply go over to Thorn and switch on her heaters. That would provide enough lift to bring the both of them to the station’s level.

  “Maybe I should raise Thorn’s sails, too,” he suggested dryly. “Or even sail the damned thing up to the station by myself.”

  The sarcasm was lost on Louella, who was as tired and worn down as he. “Did you forget that we lost the sails, dear? No, just see if you can lighten the load for us.”

  “Maybe if we just cast off the tow,” he began.

  “Not after bringing it all this way you won’t!” she shot back. “We’re going to save both of them!”

  Pascal wasn’t sure if she meant Primrose and Rams or Thorn and the rock. Not that it mattered—he still had to go out on deck and dare Jupiter’s fatal siren call once more.

  He hoped his bowels would hold this time.

  * * *

  Slowly and with great care, he suited up and returned topside, clipping two safety lines in place as Louella flipped on the lights. Very carefully he worked his way to the edge of Primrose’s deck clamping a deathlike grip on a stanchion to anchor himself in place.

  After a few moments in which he tried to steel himself for the task ahead, he looked at the gap between the two ships, the chasm that had no bottom, a chasm into which he could easily fall forever…

  No. He shook his head to clear out the thought. He couldn’t let the fear control him. He had a job to do. But his guts told him differently, as did his trembling legs.

  Thorn was still drifting off to the port side, but she was significantly below Primrose’s level, giving the tow lines a steep downward slope. Why hadn’t they noticed that she was pulling them down? Was that something else they had missed because of their fatigue?

  Maybe he could do what he had the last time; tie himself to the tow rope and slide down to Thorn. It would be easier than last time with the slope so steep. Wait, maybe it was too steep; so steep that he would break his legs from the impact of hitting the other deck under two gees!

  But what if the tow line parted when he hit? with his legs broken he wouldn’t be able to hold himself in place—he’d slip over the edge and into the dark chasm that…

  Damn, why did his thoughts keep returning to that nightmare? Once more he tried to clear his head of the nibbling fear even as he threw another line around the winch for added security. Perhaps he could rig a second line to retard his fall, paying it out as he lowered himself down the line. That would keep him from hitting too hard, but it would also make the time he hung over the deep, black emptiness even longer—increasing the risk of the line breaking and letting him fall, fall… He shook his head, dismissed the thought, and began rigging the lines.

  He first put a short loop around the tow rope, then anchored both ends to his suit. He then attached a second loop, and a third, just to make sure. Next, he detached another line, put it around the winch, and secured one end to his belt: That would be his retard line, one he could pay out through his hands and control his slide.

  Just as he had before, he said a short prayer before lying down under the tow line and testing the harness he’d created. Satisfied that it would hold him, he released a meter of the security line and felt himself start to slide down Primrose’s curving side.

  Through the narrow field of his helmet he could only see the tow rope and the spider’s web of lines that supported him. He concentrated on letting only a small amount of line at a time through his gloves. With each downward lurch the fear started eating at the edges of his mind, fear that he kept trying to suppress, of the depths that could so easily draw him down, down, down. A shudder of stomach-wrenching fear tore at him as he rocked somewhere above the vast chasm, paralyzed by his fear, unable to move. Tears welled up in his eyes and he felt his sphincter spasm. He was shaking so hard that it was difficult to think.

  The longer he stayed here, he finally realized, the greater the chance that the line would break and send him to his death. With great effort he forced his hands to relax for an instant and release a
nother meter of security line so that he could continue his slide toward Thorn.

  Except he didn’t move. The released line drooped limply on his chest. Panic filled him. The retarding line was jammed. He was stuck here! He would stay here forever, dying suspended above Jupiter’s crushing depths!

  With the desperation of the damned, he reached up to pull at the tow line that was supporting him, desperately hoping to get himself in motion, but the tow line was just out of reach; he had made the harness too long!

  And the call of the depths was intensifying, increasing his risk, increasing his fear. The sour smell of urine and emptied bowels inside his suit told him that his body had submitted to the fear even more than his mind.

  What could he do, he wondered with sudden clarity of mind; just lie here in his own shit and piss and tears until the lines snapped and ended it all? Yes, that could be an appealing option—a few minutes of terror and then the sweet release of death, final and complete! Finally there would be an end to this fear, these nightmares, this cowardice that he had lived with for so long.

  But, another part of his mind protested, that would also doom Rams and Louella, two people he had an obligation to save, and one whom he just realized that he loved. He couldn’t kill them just because of his own cowardice.

  Then he noticed that two of the safety lines were crossed on the tow line. They had jammed while he lay there letting himself submit to the cowardly voice within. All that he had to do was untangle them and he’d be able to continue.

  After struggling to reach the lines he finally concluded that there was no way to reach the knot. The only way to undo the tangle was to untie one end of one of them and pull it through. All he had to do was remove one of the safety lines that kept him from falling into the depths at his back.