And when he could see clearly, he glanced at his mapping screen.
With a start, he stared closely. It was unbelievable — eyes, a heart-shaped face, and two delicate hands. The image was crystal-clear for a moment. She held up her hands, partially framing the face. Slim, tapering fingers, Ken noticed, hypnotized by his hallucination. Her glittering eyes had no apparent division point between iris and pupil. They were as black as space, and as unfathomable. Her skin was palely iridescent with a greenish tinge. Unearthly, and unhuman.
Go … back!
There was no sound, and her lips didn’t move. The impression “Go back” bypassed his senses and penetrated directly into his brain. This warning was without tangible form, yet more frightening than the flashing alarms on the ship’s boards. Fear and a strong implication of terrible danger accompanied the anguished plea to “go back.”
The woman’s hands moved in an unmistakable gesture, making thrusting motions, symbolically pushing him away from her. She was telling him to leave this planet!
What was this apparition? There weren’t any women within dozens of light-years of NE 592. Perhaps she was a sweet memory out of Ken’s own past? But he’d never met anyone remotely resembling this exquisite creature with the jewel-like skin.
With the retrofiring pounding at him, Ken tried to speak but couldn’t utter a sound. He could form an answer only in his mind: “We’re trying! You don’t know how much!”
The retros cut out, and there was an instant of eerie silence. Then the image of the woman was gone as if it had never been. Was he conjuring phantoms?
A new light flickered on the pilot’s monitor. Ken swallowed a surge of nausea. Not only hadn’t the retros done the job, the rate of acceleration was increasing. Soon there’d be a third light. That was critical. If a fourth winked on, R.C. and Ken wouldn’t be in any condition to react to it; if they were fortunate they’d be unconscious from the heat of atmospheric friction. God spare them the agony of feeling themselves burn to death.
R.C. was talking to himself, almost inaudibly. Ken heard the pilot spit, “Damn you, Noland.” Then Zachary sighed heavily, steeling himself for an ordeal. He swiveled his command chair and eyed Ken. “We’ve got problems,” he said simply.
Ken nodded. “Okay. What’s my job?”
The barest hint of a smile tugged at R.C.’s thin mouth. “You might try praying. I’m riding the solar packs to give us one more really good retrofire. And I think you’d better send a Mayday.”
Hastily, Ken unlocked the security panel and punched the S.O.S. package. That should take care of the automatic sequence, no matter how busy the pilot and his apprentice got. Ken recalled his earlier pain and steeled himself for the firing of the whole retro package. Neither one of them would be able to breathe. Ken glanced at the security panel, startled. “She’s not functioning, Captain.” He pounded relays, tripped cross-circuits, playing symphonies on the board to release the Mayday signal. “I don’t get it … she’s got to work!” His angry frustration shook the helmet speakers.
R.C. winced, closed his eyes, Then he tapped the pilot’s console indicatively. “That blurred spot is a dampening field. It’s eating everything, including us, if it gets the chance.” His set jaw almost bumped his faceplate. “We won’t have any reserves when I’m through, but we’re getting down there in one piece.”
“Landing?” Ken dared to hope out loud.
“We have no chance of pulling her free, not on this vector and at this speed … We’ll have to ride her down all the way. It’s safer here than trying the lifeboat,” R.C. said firmly, daring anyone to dispute his decision.
Ken had no intention of doing so. But would the computers and the laws of physics be as cooperative?
He tightened the safety webbing another notch and double-checked his suit’s integrity. The planet’s surface seemed to race up out of his mapping screen now. They were terrifyingly close, roaring past orbital altitude. Digits worked across the screens so fast Ken couldn’t read them.
Ken took a last baleful stare at the mapping screen, at the blurred area that threatened them. A trap, sucking their ship into its gravitic maw.
Something else, to the west of the blur, loomed up. Ken couldn’t quite make out details, but it almost looked like structures of some kind. And something metallic lay close by. Impossible. The planet was totally uninhabited, a virgin, primitive world.
“Coming up.” R.C.’s breath whistled through the speakers. “Ten seconds to retro. Mark.”
Ken silently counted down with the pilot. Ten seconds to retro, or to the end of everything?
Three … two … one … fire!
Fire exploded in Ken’s throat and behind his eyes. Pressure, grinding at his temples, his veins throbbing in protest at the assault of g-forces. He gasped, then regretted it; his lungs screamed for fresh air but he had no strength left to suck it in.
“Full … emergency,” Zachary breathed out.
The mapping screen jittered, froze its last image, and winked out, dark and useless. The retros were yanking the plugs on every auxiliary power flow, draining the ship to its dregs.
Ken’s hand crept slowly toward his second-pilot’s board. Every centimeter he gained was a tremendous struggle. His arm seemed to weigh tons; sweat beaded his brow from the effort. Somehow, he touched the lifeboat coupling circuitry. The rate of descent was still fatal.
What good is a lifeboat if you’re smeared all over an alien landscape?
He nudged the coupler and connected the lifeboat’s power-pack directly into the main retros. They gained another few seconds of precious power to fight the gravity trap in that blurred area.
It might be just enough to keep them alive.
The ship was yawing, unstable, bucking against R.C.’s frantic override program. That invisible monster lurking in the blurred area wouldn’t be defeated easily.
All the way down, Zachary had promised.
Ken felt as if lead were pouring down on his eyelids. Then a response shuddered deep within the little ship.
Would there be enough power? And would it be in time?
There was no possibility for a normal, vertical touchdown. The best they could hope for was a crash slide, if their rate of descent permitted it. Ken blinked and squinted at the board. The angle was flattening! Not much, but some.
Unable to speak, he winged encouragement at the pilot. Maybe good thoughts would help. R.C. mustn’t black out, not this close to victory.
A piercing scream menaced Ken’s eardrums. Atmosphere, heavy enough to heat the ship’s hull, screeched as it raced over the Survey craft’s skin.
The friction would heat the metal cherry red, then white hot, then …
“Hold on … damn … you,” R.C. gritted to the machine under his fingertips.
How could there be anything left in the retros? R.C. coaxed another iota of power out of them. Tongues of fire roared ahead of the ship, a fiery glide path for the tortured ship.
Steering, lifeboat, standard retros — all the power the ship had — was expertly balanced by R.C. Zachary. Ken’s own words came home to him. Well, he’d said he wanted to ride backup to the best pilot in Survey.
The ship, a silvery porpoise diving out of space into an unfriendly element, raced toward the smear of the planet’s surface.
“We’ve got to take it … now!” R.C. said, his voice a shrill crescendo.
The rending, toothpopping jolt of contact followed!
The ship tumbled through all her axes. Objects broke loose from restraints and flew about the cabin, metal and plastic confetti whose sharp edges were capable of cutting through a survival suit.
Only the dim glow of the command console remained to light the nightmarish scene. Ken’s stomach churned, and his mouth filled with the sour, burning taste of vomit.
He was smashed from one side of his couch to the other, flung against the safety webbing and crushed into the couch’s unyielding frame.
A seemingly unending, topsy-turvy ro
ll. No Academy course could have prepared him for this. Human reflexes couldn’t cope with so much gravitational chaos.
The little Survey ship bounced and rolled across the planet’s surface, until suddenly an excruciating pain above Ken’s right ear overwhelmed him. A red-white, shocking brilliance filled his mind’s eye.
Then … nothing.
CHAPTER 3
“Ken! Ken!”
Words reached out at him from far away. The sounds echoed down a painful tunnel, gouging at a throbbing ache to the right of his awareness.
“Ken!”
It was louder now, and more painful; stabbing at him through the darkness.
He flailed out blindly, trying to stop the pain. His hands were caught and held fast. Slowly, consciousness seeped into Ken’s stirring senses. He touched cloth. Uniform fatigues?
Opening his eyes, he winced as light struck his dilated pupils. Gradually, his vision cleared and focussed on the figure bending over him: R.C. Relief broke the pilot’s normally solemn expression. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“We … made it?” Ken whispered incredulously. His own voice startled him. He spoke like a man given a reprieve from certain death.
“So it would seem,” R.C. released Ken’s hands and straightened up. “Though for a while I wasn’t too sure you were still with me. How do you feel? Any broken bones? Can you move your arms and legs?” Ken licked the residue of his stomach’s upheaval off his lips. Gingerly, he tested his limbs. R.C. had unsnapped the safety harness and now examined his apprentice for injury, checking while Ken wiggled his feet, probed his ribs. “I feel stiff,” Ken decided, “but that’s the worst of it. You okay, Captain?’
“A full quota of muscle strains and bruises,” R.C. said. He noticed Ken’s shocked stare around the cabin. “I know. It’s a mess.”
That was a woefully inadequate phrase. Two meters from Ken’s mapping console, a jagged hole gaped in the Survey ship’s hull. Sunlight streamed through the opening, illuminating the interior. The cabin was littered with wreckage — fragments of sensors and monitors, shards of oxygen-regeneration plates, government equipment and personal belongings mingled in hopeless confusion. Part of the debris dangled limply over that rip in the ship’s skin.
Memories of survival training courses rushed into Ken’s mind. “Environmental integrity,” he said worriedly, pointing to the hole.
“The crash gave us a new airlock,” R.C. said wryly. “You checked out the air for us.” The pilot nudged what should have been Ken’s face plate. Only a few pieces of plexi clung to the metal guard ring anchoring the helmet. “You got lucky,” R.C. explained. “Eads’ Initial Survey was accurate, and apparently there haven’t been any radical changes in NE 592’s atmosphere in the last twenty years. Still one point oh three Earth normal.”
“Where’s the rest of my face plate?” Ken said inanely, still feeling shaky.
“Scattered all over the cabin, I presume. I’m surprised none of the pieces got in your eyes.” R.C. yanked free the toggles holding the ruined helmet to the suit. “It wasn’t on the flight plan, but you played guinea pig. When I woke up, there you were with your bare face hanging out, breathing unfiltered air.” When the helmet came off, Ken explored that throbbing above his right ear. His fingers came away sticky with blood. Concerned, Captain Zachary looked over the wound and said, “It’s a cut about four or five centimeters long. Not too deep. Sit still while I try to find the medi-kit.”
“I don’t think I’d be tracking this well if it was a fractured skull,” Ken murmured. He turned his head slowly to watch R.C.’s hunt through the debris. For a short while, any violent movement would probably bring on an attack of vertigo.
“Here we go.” R.C.’s search had unearthed an apparently intact medi-kit. The kits were designed to take incredible punishment. Anything a human could survive, a medi-kit could weather. When R.C. had scanned the miniature medi-comp across Ken’s wound, he pronounced “Good! The readouts say no fracture or concussion.”
As the pilot cleaned the cut and applied an analgesic spray dressing, Ken waited patiently. The procedure was moderately painful and cleared the remaining cobwebs from his brain. Anxiously, Ken asked, “How bad’s she damaged?”
R.C. repacked the medi-kit and looked around the ship’s cabin. “Bad enough. I haven’t been outside yet, but the interior’s pretty well gone. Damned little is in one piece, let alone working.”
That sour countenance was revelatory, and Ken sympathized. After so many years, Iron Man Zachary had finally lost a ship. But R.C.’s second record — of never losing a man — still stood; R.S. didn’t know how badly the ship was damaged because he’d spent his time worrying over his injured apprentice. Ken appreciated that, and his admiration for R.C. Zachary as a space pilot grew even more.
Zachary helped his apprentice kick out of the remains of his useless space suit. R.C. himself was already down to fatigues, and Ken noted a torn suit and dented helmet thrown in a pile in a corner. As he rubbed kinks out of his arms and legs, R.C. scuffled through the debris to the hole in the bulkhead and peered outside.
“We’re parked on a ten or fifteen degree slope,” he announced. “Must have rammed into a hill. That’s probably what stopped us.”
Ken envied the man’s aplomb. R.C. talked as if space wrecks on uninhabited planets were an everyday occurrence. “What does it look like out there?”
“Grassland, some pink trees. Basically it looks as Initial Survey indicated.” R.C. turned to the wrecked cabin and stood, arms akimbo. “All right. I suppose we’d better see what we have left.”
A logical decision, but where would they start? Ken stood up, and nearly sat down again. His body trembled, unaccustomed to planetary gravity after a month in deep space. R.C. eyed him thoughtfully and poked through the medi-kit. He dug out medication for them both — endurets of gravity compensation drugs. That would tide them over until they adjusted to the planetary gravity system.
“If you don’t feel up to —” R.C. began.
“I’m fine,” Ken responded, squaring his shoulders. The pilot was twenty-five years older than him; head cut or not, Ken was determined the old man would not show him up. While the pilot checked the main monitors, Ken went over the communications console, trying to pinpoint the failure in the Mayday system. A brief run-through told him the worst. “Power readings are dead. Even the auxiliaries.”
“And the lifeboat pack,” R.C. added. Ken regarded the Captain warily, anticipating a reprimand. But R.C. nodded approval. “Right thing to do, and at the right time. Good try, Ken. That extra boost gave me the maneuvering power I needed. Without it we’d be smeared all over the landscape.”
Ken started to reply with thanks of his own, but R.C. had gone back to the main problem. “See if you can spot a power panel; any part big enough to regenerate will do.”
“It looks like they’re all in a hundred pieces,” Ken commented, but he joined the search.
Sunlight poured cheerily through the tear in the hull. The golden radiance of a Class-G star and a warm Earthlike atmosphere made this a good world for Terran colonists. But a pioneering colony ship would come with her own supplies, to build and sustain its people for years. Being stranded out here on the far frontiers in nothing larger than a Secondary Survey ship was quite a different proposition, and not an encouraging one.
The grim urgency of their situation struck Ken. The little ship was a deep-spacer, not designed to support its crew on an uninhabited planet. They had to get communications operating and send out a Mayday, now.
“Here’s one,” said R.C. triumphantly. He dug under a mound of broken plexi and clutched the end of the power panel. Ken tramped across the clutter to aid him. “Can you lift that end? Let’s get it over to the input boards.”
The plexi sheet wasn’t whole. Several large chunks were bitten out of the sides. But as R.C. had said, any panel big enough to hold a regeneration charge would serve. It would provide enough juice to power the Mayday
circuits.
Wrestling the panel to the bulkhead took the men longer than they had anticipated. For several moments, they sat on the remains of storage lockers, sucking in air. “It’s going to take us a while,” Ken panted.
R.C. paced himself cannily like the veteran he was. Finally he peered critically at the imput panel. “All right. Let’s get to work.”
*
Installing the panel drained more of their energy. The tension, the crash, all had taken their toll. But by the time they’d finished, Ken was enjoying the effects of the medicine; his muscles were responding almost normally again.
He gazed dubiously at the results of their labor, knowing that R.C. must be wondering the same thing he was. Nothing had behaved right since they’d spotted that peculiar blurred area, including the circuitry that should have beamed the Mayday out into space. What else had the strange blurred area affected?
“If we could cross-check …” R.C. muttered, slapping the panel. He stirred the crystalline readouts to momentary, fluttering life, then they died.
“The longer we wait the more chance a linkage will go,” Ken said, quoting from the manuals. The pilot nodded, not commenting on the obvious. “That S.O.S. acted like something smothered it before it left the antenna.”
“I know.” R.C.’s expression puzzled Ken. There was no despair — Zachary wasn’t a quitter — but there was anger in those hazel eyes. Was it something his apprentice had done, or not done? No, most likely R.C. was cursing the bad luck that had caused the crash.
What other nasty surprises lay in store for them on NE 592?
“We must have communications,” R.C. said heavily.
Recalling all the earlier problems, Ken stared at the power panel. He wished he could see behind the circuitry and examine the integrateds for damage. But the engineers had designed this ship with every safety feature: non-flammable, non-toxic materials, the latest equipment, and all the interlocks imaginable. Either something would work, or it was broken. There could be no halfway point.
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