You need a chin window to let you see what you're doing, too! A thing can look fine on paper and be utterly crumby in the field. But I didn't waste time moaning; I had a one-eighth charge of oxygen I could reach. I grabbed it.
That poor, overworked adhesive tape was a sorry mess. I didn't bother with bandage; if I could get the tape to stick at all I'd be happy. I handled it as carefully as gold leaf, trying to get it tight, and stopped in the middle to close Peewee's exhaust entirely when it looked as if her suit was collapsing. I finished with trembling fingers.
I didn't have Peewee to close a valve. I simply gripped that haywired joint in one hand, opened Peewee's empty bottle with the other, swung over fast and opened the oxygen bottle wide jerked my hand across and grabbed the valve of Peewee's bottle and watched those gauges.
The two needles moved toward each other. When they slowed down I started closing her bottle and the taped joint blew out.
I got that valve closed in a hurry; I didn't lose much gas from Peewee's bottle. But what was left on the supply side leaked away. I didn't stop to worry; I peeled away a scrap of adhesive, made sure the bayonet-and-snap joint was clean, got that slightly recharged bottle back on Peewee's suit, opened stop valves.
Her suit started to distend. I opened one exhaust valve a crack and touched helmets. "Peewee! Peewee! Can you hear me? Wake up, baby! Mother Thing!—make her wake up!"
"Peewee!"
"Yes, Kip?"
"Wake up! On your feet, Champ! Get up! Honey, please get up."
"Huh? Help me get my helmet off... I can't breathe."
"Yes, you can. Kick your chin valve—feel it, taste it. Fresh air!"
She tried, feebly; I gave her a quick strong shot, overriding her chin valve from outside. "Oh!"
"See? You've got air. You've got lots of air. Now get up."
"Oh, please, just let me lie here."
"No, you don't! You're a nasty, mean, spoiled little brat—and if you don't get up, nobody will love you. The Mother Thing won't love you. Mother Thing!—tell her!"
("Stand up, daughter!")
Peewee tried. I helped her, once she was trying. She trembled and clung to me and I kept her from falling. "Mother Thing?" she said faintly. "I did it. You... still love me?"
("Yes, darling!")
"I'm dizzy... and I don't think I... can walk."
"You don't have to, honey," I said gently and picked her up in my arms. "You don't have to walk any farther."
She didn't weigh anything.
The trail disappeared when we were down out of the foothills but the crawler's tracks were sharp in the dust and led due west. I had my air trimmed down until the needle of the blood-colour indicator hung at the edge of the danger sector. I held it there, kicking my chin valve only when it swung past into DANGER. I figured that the designer must have left some leeway, the way they do with gasoline gauges. I had long since warned Peewee never to take her eyes off her own indicator and hold it at the danger limit. She promised and I kept reminding her. I pressed her helmet against the yoke of mine, so that we could talk.
I counted paces and every half-mile I told Peewee to call Tombaugh Station. It was over the horizon but they might have a high mast that could "see" a long way.
The Mother Thing talked to her, too—anything to keep her from slipping away again. It saved my strength to have the Mother Thing talk and was good for all of us.
After a while I noticed that my needle had drifted into the red again. I kicked the valve and waited. Nothing happened. I kicked it again and the needle drifted slowly toward the white. "How you fixed for air, Peewee?"
"Just fine, Kip, just fine."
Oscar was yelling at me. I blinked and noticed that my shadow had disappeared. It had been stretched out ahead at an angle to the tracks. The tracks were there but my shadow was not. That made me sore, so I turned around and looked for it. It was behind me.
The darn thing had been hiding. Games!
("That's better!" said Oscar.)
"It's hot in here, Oscar."
("You think it's cool out here? Keep your eye on that shadow, bud—and on those tracks.")
"All right, all right! Quit pestering me." I made up my mind that I wouldn't let that shadow get away again. Games it wanted to play, huh?
"There's darn little air in here, Oscar."
("Breathe shallow, chum. We can make it.")
"I'm breathing my socks, now."
("So breathe your shirt.")
"Did I see a ship pass over?"
("How should I know? You're the one with the blinkers.")
"Don't get smart. I'm in no mood to joke."
I was sitting on the ground with Peewee across my knees and Oscar was really shouting—and so was the Mother Thing. ("Get up, you big ape! Get up and try.") ('Get up, Kip dear! Only a little way now.")
"I just want to get my wind."
("All right, you've got it. Call Tombaugh Station.")
I said, "Peewee, call Tombaugh Station."
She didn't answer. That scared me and I snapped out of it. "Tombaugh Station, come in! Come in!" I got to my knees and then to my feet. "Tombaugh Station, do you read me? Help! Help!"
A voice answered, "I read you."
"Help! M'aidez! I've got a little girl dying! Help!"
Suddenly it sprang up in front of my eyes—great shiny domes, tall towers, radio telescopes, a giant Schmidt camera. I staggered toward it. "May Day!"
An enormous lock opened and a crawler came toward me. A voice in my phones said, "We're coming. Stay where you are. Over and out."
A crawler stopped near me. A man got out, came over and touched helmets. I gasped: "Help me get her inside."
I got back: "You've given me trouble, bub. I don't like people who give me trouble." A bigger, fatter man got out behind him.
The smaller man raised a thing like a camera and aimed it at me. That was the last I knew.
CHAPTER 7
I don't know if they took us all that weary way back in the crawler, or if Wormface sent a ship. I woke up being slapped and was inside, lying down. The skinny one was slapping me—the man the fat one called "Tim." I tried to fight back and found that I couldn't. I was in a straitjacket thing that held me as snugly as a wrapped mummy. I let out a yelp.
Skinny grabbed my hair, jerked my head up, tried to put a big capsule into my mouth.
I tried to bite him.
He slapped me harder and offered me the capsule again. His expression didn't change—it stayed mean.
I heard: "Take it, boy," and turned my eyes. The fat one was on the other side. "Better swallow it," he said. "You got five bad days ahead."
I took it. Not because of the advice but because a hand held my nose and another popped the pill into my mouth when I gasped. Fatty held a cup of water for me to wash it down; I didn't resist that, I needed it.
Skinny stuck a hypodermic needle big enough for a horse into my shoulder. I told him what I thought of him, using words I hardly ever use. The skinny one could have been deaf; the fat one chuckled. I rolled my eyes at him. "You, too," I added weakly. "Squared."
Fatty clucked reprovingly. "You ought to be glad we saved your life." He added, "Though it wasn't my idea, you strike me as a sorry item. He wanted you alive."
"Shaddap," Skinny said. "Strap his head."
"Let him break his neck. We better fix our own selves. He won't wait." But he started to obey.
Skinny glanced at his watch. "Four minutes."
The fat one hastily tightened a strap across my forehead, then both moved very fast, swallowing capsules, giving each other hypos. I watched as best I could.
I was back in the ship. The ceiling glowed the same way, the walls looked the same. It was the room the two men used; their beds were on each side and I was strapped to a soft couch between them.
Each hurriedly got on his bed, began zipping up a tight wrapping like a sleeping bag. Each strapped his head in place before completing the process. I was not interested in them. "
Hey! What did you do with Peewee?"
The fat man chuckled. "Hear that, Tim? That's a good one.
"Shaddap."
"You—" I was about to sum up Fatty's character but my thoughts got fuzzy and my tongue was thick. Besides, I wanted to ask about the Mother Thing, too.
I did not get out another word. Suddenly I was incredibly heavy and the couch was rock hard.
For a long, long time I wasn't awake or truly asleep. At first I couldn't feel anything but that terrible weight, then I hurt all over and wanted to scream. I didn't have the strength for it. Slowly the pain went away and I stopped feeling anything. I wasn't a body—just me, no attachments. I dreamed a lot and none of it made sense; I seemed to be stuck in a comic book, the sort P.T.A. meetings pass resolutions against, and the baddies were way ahead no matter what I did.
Once the couch gave a twisting lurch and suddenly I had a body, one that was dizzy. After a few ages I realized vaguely that I had gone through a skew-flip turnover. I had known, during lucid moments, that I was going somewhere, very fast, at terribly high acceleration. I decided solemnly that we must be halfway and tried to figure out how long two times eternity was. It kept coming out eighty-five cents plus sales tax; the cash register rang "NO SALE" and I would start over.
Fats was undoing my head strap. It stuck and skin came away. "Rise and shine, bub. Time's awastin'."
A croak was all I managed. The skinny one was unwrapping me. My legs sagged apart and hurt. "Get up!"
I tried and didn't make it. Skinny grabbed one of my legs and started to knead it.
I screamed.
"Here, lemme do that," said Fatty. "I used to be a trainer."
Fats did know something about it. I gasped when his thumbs dug into my calves and he stopped. "Too rough?" I couldn't answer. He went on massaging me and said almost jovially, "Five days at eight gravities ain't no joy ride. But you'll be okay. Got the needle, Tim?"
The skinny one jabbed me in my left thigh. I hardly felt it. Fats pulled me to a sitting position and handed me a cup. I thought it was water; it wasn't and I choked and sprayed. Fats waited, then gave it to me again. "Drink some, this time." I did.
"Okay, up on your feet. Vacation is over."
The floor swayed and I had to grab him until it stopped. "Where are we?" I said hoarsely.
Fats grinned, as if he knew an enormously funny joke. "Pluto, of course. Lovely place, Pluto. A summer resort."
"Shaddap. Get him moving."
"Shake it up, kid. You don't want to keep him waiting."
Pluto! It couldn't be; nobody could get that far. Why, they hadn't even attempted Jupiter's moons yet. Pluto was so much farther that—
My brain wasn't working. The experience just past had shaken me so badly that I couldn't accept the fact that the experience itself proved that I was wrong.
But Pluto!
I wasn't given time to wonder; we got into space suits. Although I hadn't known, Oscar was there, and I was so glad to see him that I forgot everything else. He hadn't been racked, just tossed on the floor. I bent down (discovering charley horses in every muscle) and checked him. He didn't seem hurt.
"Get in it," Fats ordered. "Quit fiddlin'."
"All right," I answered almost cheerfully. Then I hesitated. "Say—I haven't any air."
"Take another look," said Fats. I looked. Charged oxy-helium bottles were on the backpack. "Although," he continued, "if we didn't have orders from him, I wouldn't give you a whiff of Limburger. You made us for two bottles—and a rock hammer—and a line that cost four ninety-five, earthside. Sometime," he stated without rancour, "I'm gonna take it out of your hide."
"Shaddap," said Skinny. "Get going."
I spread Oscar open, wriggled in, clipped on the blood-colour reader, and zipped the gaskets. Then I stood up clamped my helmet, and felt better just to be inside. "Tight?"
("Tight!" Oscar agreed.)
"We're a long way from home."
("But we got air! Chin up, pal.")
Which reminded me to check the chin valve. Everything was working. My knife was gone and so were the hammer and line, but those were incidentals. We were tight.
I followed Skinny out with Fats behind me. We passed Wormface in the corridor—or a wormface—but while I shuddered, I had Oscar around me and felt that he couldn't get at me. Another creature joined us in the air lock and I had to look twice to realize that it was a wormface in a space suit. The material was smooth and did not bulge the way ours did. It looked like a dead tree trunk with bare branches and heavy roots, but the supreme improvement was its "helmet"—a glassy smooth dome. One-way glass, I suppose; I couldn't see in. Cased that way, a wormface was grotesquely ridiculous rather than terrifying. But I stood no closer than I had to.
Pressure was dropping and I was busy wasting air to keep from swelling up. It reminded me of what I wanted most to know: what had happened to Peewee and the Mother Thing. So I keyed my radio and announced: "Radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Cocoa—"
"Shaddap that nonsense. We want you, we'll tell you."
The outer door opened and I had my first view of Pluto.
I don't know what I expected. Pluto is so far out that they can't get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer—if "summer" is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.
But I had never been much interested in Pluto—too few facts and too much speculation, too far away and not desirable real estate. By comparison the Moon was a choice residential suburb. Professor Tombaugh (the one the station was named for) was working on a giant electronic telescope to photograph it, under a Guggenheim grant, but he had a special interest; he discovered Pluto years before I was born.
The first thing I noticed as the door was opening was click... click... click—and a fourth click, in my helmet, as Oscar's heating units all cut in.
The Sun was in front of me—I didn't realize what it was at first; it looked no bigger than Venus or Jupiter does from Earth (although much brighter). With no disc you could be sure of, it looked like an electric arc.
Fats jabbed me in the ribs. "Snap out of your hop."
A drawbridge joined the door to an elevated roadway that led into the side of a mountain about two hundred yards away. The road was supported on spidery legs two or three feet high up to ten or twelve, depending on the lay of the land. The ground was covered with snow, glaringly white even under that pinpoint Sun. Where the stilts were longest, about halfway, the viaduct crossed a brook.
What sort of "water" was that? Methane? What was the "snow"? Solid ammonia? I didn't have tables to tell me what was solid, what was liquid, and what was gas at whatever hellish cold Pluto enjoyed in the "summer." All I knew was that it got so cold in its winter that it didn't have any gas or liquid—just vacuum, like the Moon.
I was glad to hurry. A wind blew from our left and was not only freezing that side of me in spite of Oscar's best efforts, it made the footing hazardous—I decided it would be far safer to do that forced march on the Moon again than to fall into that "snow." Would a man struggle before he shattered himself and his suit, or would he die as he hit?
Adding to hazard of wind and no guard rail was traffic, space-suited wormfaces. They moved at twice our speed and shared the road the way a dog does a bone. Even Skinny resorted to fancy footwork and I had three narrow squeaks.
The way continued into a tunnel; ten feet inside a panel snapped out of the way as we got near it. Twenty feet beyond was another; it did the same and closed behind us. There were about two dozen panels, each behaving like fast-acting gate valves and the pressure was a little higher after each. I couldn't see what operated them although it was light in the tunnel from glowing ceilings. Finally we passed through a heavy-duty air lock, but the pressure was already taken care of and
its doors stood open. It led into a large room.
Wormface was inside. The Wormface, I think, because he spoke in English: "Come!" I heard it through my helmet. But I couldn't be sure it was he as there were others around and I would have less trouble telling wart hogs apart.
Wormface hurried away. He was not wearing a space suit and I was relieved when he turned because I could no longer see his squirming mouth; but it was only a slight improvement as it brought into sight his rear-view eye.
We were hard put to keep up. He led us down a corridor, to the right through another open double set of doors, and finally stopped suddenly just short of a hole in the floor about like a sewer manhole. "Undress it!" he commanded.
Fats and Skinny had their helmets open, so I knew it was safe, in one way. But in every other way I wanted to stay inside Oscar—as long as Wormface was around.
Fats unclamped my helmet. "Out of that skin, bub. Snap it up!" Skinny loosened my belt and they quickly had the suit off even though I hindered.
Wormface waited. As soon as I was out of Oscar he pointed at the hole. ''Down!
I gulped. That hole looked as deep as a well and less inviting.
"Down," he repeated. "Now."
"Do it, bub," Fats advised. "Jump or be pushed. Get down that hole before he gets annoyed."
I tried to run.
Wormface was around me and chivvying me back before I was well started. I slammed on the brakes and backed up—glanced behind just in time to turn a fall into a clumsy jump.
It was a long way to the bottom. Landing did not hurt the way it would have on Earth, but I turned an ankle. That didn't matter; I wasn't going anywhere; the hole in the ceiling was the only exit.
My cell was about twenty feet square. It was, I suppose, carved out of solid rock, although there was no way to tell as the walls and floor and ceiling were the same elephant hide used in the ship. A lighting panel covered half the ceiling and I could have read if I'd had anything to read. The only other detail was a jet of water that splashed out of a hole in the wall, landed in a depression the size of a washtub, and departed for parts unknown.
Have Space Suit - Will Travel Page 10
