Anti-Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  After a few minutes I was clinging like some silvered insect to the hull just below the dome which covered the Bridge. A few feet above me was the wheeled hatch through which I would enter the vessel.

  I had gone over the required sequence of events from this point with Holden and Traveller, and, we had concluded rather grimly, I had only one possible course of action. All trace of my celestial mood of a few minutes earlier dissipated. I closed my eyes and listened to the rush of blood in my ears. I had never before killed a man; nor had I seriously contemplated the possibility of such an action. But, I told myself resolutely, the inhabitant of that Bridge was no civilized man; he was a Hun, an animal who had attempted to take the lives of four men, and who had also, in all probability, joined in the conspiracy to wreck the Prince Albert.

  He had shown no mercy, and deserved none.

  So, with my resolve renewed, I pulled myself above the sill of the windowed dome.

  I braced my feet against handles set in the lower hull and turned the wheel which would open the hatch. Speed was of the essence. The Bridge occupant was no experienced space voyager, of course, any more than the rest of us; and would, perhaps, understand little of the deadly implications of this grotesquely suited figure appearing outside his window. So we had hoped.

  As I worked I made out the interior of the Bridge. Amid the banks of elaborate instruments a lone figure drifted forward, gazing up at me with more curiosity than fear. He wore a bright red jacket. He made no move to stop me—but, I realized with a sinking heart, he held an advantage which we should have foreseen.

  In his hand was a pistol, pointed squarely at my chest.

  I considered abandoning my quest and ducking back to safety—but what would that avail me? If ever I were to enter the Bridge by this route, this was surely my best chance. In any event, if he were to take a shot at me he would surely blast a hole in one or more glass panes, thereby allowing his air to escape and so destroying himself as well as me!

  …But would our saboteur understand this?

  And then again, whatever the state of our pilot’s thoughts, what of my own? Now that I saw this “monstrous Hun” as a real human figure with a life and past of his own, did I have the resolve to kill him in this way?

  All this passed through my feverish soul in a few seconds. Abruptly I concluded that I would sooner die from a clean bullet through the heart than suffocate slowly; and if I should destroy the saboteur, well, it was no more than he had intended for me, Françoise, Traveller, and thousands of others at the launch of the Prince Albert!

  So, with renewed vigor, I turned the wheel.

  The saboteur moved away from the windows, and the fist which held the pistol wavered.

  In an instant, the seal broke. The hatch flapped up, narrowly missing my faceplate, and a gale thrust at my chest. I kept firm hold of my wheel with both hands; I was pulled aside and driven against the Bridge windowglass. Papers and other fragments billowed around me, and I saw the sparkle of ice crystals on the breeze.

  The saboteur was prepared for none of this.

  He was bowled through the air toward the hatchway; as he tumbled through the frame his pistol fell harmlessly from his shocked fingers and disappeared into the blackness, and with his fingertips the saboteur clung to the lip of the hatch, hanging there on the very rim of infinity! One yellow boot fell from his dangling leg and tumbled away into space; long black hair flapped across his brow, and he turned an agonized face to mine, tongue blue and protruding, eyes frozen over.

  But, despite these grotesqueries, and despite the ultimate peril of that moment, I recognized the man and found room for a fresh shock. For this was no Prussian saboteur; this was Frédéric Bourne, companion of Françoise!

  The last vestiges of air had escaped now; Bourne’s head lolled back, and his fingers loosened on the hatchway rim. Without further thought I grabbed at his wrist. Then, using my one free hand rather awkwardly, I hauled my way into the Bridge. My airhoses and the unfortunate Bourne came dangling after me, Bourne bumping hard against the frame. Once inside I shoved Bourne deeper into the interior of the craft, and dragged in a few more feet of hose.

  I grabbed at the hatch and slammed it closed, trapping my hoses, and labored to turn the wheel.

  As soon as my hose was blocked the comforting susurrus of piped air, my constant companion through this jaunt, died away. Traveller had estimated that I should have sufficient seconds of air in my helmet and the remaining few feet of hose to allow me to open the way to my colleagues in the Smoking Cabin. But these calculations seemed remote as I labored in a suit that grew as tight and constricting as any iron maiden, and as my helmet turned at last into an impenetrable fog of condensation.

  I pushed myself to the floor and groped blindly across it, staring through my panes of mist in the vain hope of espying the hatchway. My head began to pound and my chest to ache, and I imagined the carbonic acid expelled by my lungs clustering about my face like some poison—

  My feet, scrabbling over the floor, encountered a wheel set on a raised hatch. I grabbed it with both hands, uttering a fervent prayer of thanks, and hauled at the wheel with what strength I had left… but to no avail. Exploration by touch informed me that a crowbar had been jammed into the spokes of the wheel, completely restricting its movement.

  It was the work of a moment to remove the bar, and then the wheel turned easily.

  The helmet grew darker, and I wondered if my senses were failing; the ache in my lungs seemed now to have spread to all parts of my neck and chest, and my arms felt as if all energy had been drained from them.

  The wheel turned in my hands, mysteriously; a final fragment of rationality told me that Holden and Traveller must be working at their side of the hatch also. I released the wheel and floated into darkness.

  The pain evaporated, and a soft illumination began to break through my darkness, a blue-white light like that of Earth.

  I fell into the light.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes again I fully expected to see the inside of my hellish copper helmet-prison once more. But my head was free; the furnishings of the Smoking Cabin were all about me. Holden’s face hovered over me, a round pool of concern. “Ned? Ned, can you hear me?”

  I tried to speak, but found that my throat was as sore as if it had been scoured, and I could only whisper, “Holden? I have succeeded, then?”

  His lips were pressed together, and he nodded gravely. “You have indeed, my lad. Although I fear we are not out of the woods yet.”

  He offered me a globe of brandy; the hot liquid coursed through my wounded throat. I raised my head. Holden pushed me back, saying I should not try to move yet; but I saw that I still wore the air suit, save for the helmet, and was lightly bound by a blanket into my bunk. “Bourne?” I gasped. “Did he survive?”

  “Indeed he did, thanks to your generosity,” Holden said. “Although if it were up to me I would have pitched the Frenchie out of the hatch…”

  “Where is he?”

  “The far bunk, being tended by Pocket. He went without air for perhaps a minute—but Traveller feels he will suffer no permanent damage. Sadly.”

  I rested my head back on my pillow. Through the storm of the recent events my surprise at the identity of our saboteur still shone like a clear ray.

  “And Traveller?” I asked. “Where is he?”

  “On the Bridge.” He smiled. “Ned, while Pocket and I worked at the two of you—unscrewing your helmet and so on—our host made directly for the various instruments of the Bridge, like a child reunited with lost toys!”

  I found the strength to laugh. “Well, that’s Traveller. Holden, you said we were not out of the wood; has Traveller reached some verdict already from his instrumentation?”

  Holden nodded and bit at his nail. “It appears our French friend has indeed used too much water for our return to Earth to be possible. But that’s not the worst of it, Ned.”

  Still stunned, I suppose, by my recent expe
riences, I absorbed this news with equanimity, and said, “But what could be worse than such a sentence of doom?”

  “Traveller has changed. It’s as if he has been galvanized by your example of determination and action; he has now resolved, he says, that we should return to Earth. But, Ned—” Holden’s eyes were wide with fear “—In order to save us, Traveller intends to take us to the surface of the Moon, and search for water there!”

  I closed my eyes, wondering if I were trapped within some dream induced by carbonic acid.

  8

  A DEBATE

  The days that followed were a blur. My perambulation through space had left my systems drained. And the strange environment of the Phaeton—the floating conditions, the rhythm of day and night marked only by the habitual routines of Pocket and Holden (Traveller, buried in his Bridge, was never to be seen now in the Smoking Cabin), the smoky, still air that made one long to hurl open a window—all of this combined to immerse me in a dreamlike state. Perhaps our isolation from the natural conditions of Earth had something to do with my distracted mental state; perhaps our human bodies are more bound than we know to the diurnal rhythms of our mother world.

  I was disturbed several times, however, by a roaring sound, a gentle pressure that pushed me deeper into my cot. At such times I vaguely wondered if I had traveled through time as well as through the vacuum and had somehow been returned to those nightmare moments of the launch of the Phaeton into space. But each disturbance faded after a few seconds; and each time I relapsed into my unnatural slumber. I learned later that my connection of these events with the launch was not unfounded, for the sound I heard was indeed that of the vessel’s main rockets. Traveller, installed in his pilot’s couch, worked his motors so that we blazed through space; once more—however briefly—we were masters of our own destiny.

  But this time we were not simply hauling away from Earth; this time Traveller was guiding us to a destination far stranger…

  Apart from gentle washings, feedings of soup and warm tea, and other ministrations performed by the gentle Pocket, the others made no attempt to wake me, believing that it was better to let Nature take her course. And I had no wish to emerge rapidly from this womblike half-sleep; for what should I find on awakening?—only the same grisly parade of doom-laden alternatives which had driven me to my desperate jaunt through vacuum.

  But at last my strange sac of sleep dissolved, and I was expelled, as reluctantly as any mewling infant, into a hostile world.

  Finding myself loosely bound up in a blanket cocoon, and too weak even to extricate myself, I called feebly for Pocket.

  The manservant was able to lift me from my bed as if I were an infant… although the rather mysterious Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions, as expounded by the great Sir Isaac Newton, caused him to lurch adversely through the air. He dressed me in a gown belonging to Traveller, fed me once more, and even shaved me.

  The face I saw in the shaving mirror was gaunt-cheeked, with eyes red and rimmed with darkness. I was, I feared, scarcely recognizable as the young man who had joined the launch of the Prince Albert in such fine humor only days before. “Good Lord, Pocket, I should hardly sweep la belle Françoise from her feet in this condition.”

  The good chap rested a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you bother with any such considerations, sir. Once I’ve fed you up you’ll be in as fine fettle as you ever were.”

  His cheery, homely voice, with its base of genuine warmth, was immensely comforting. “Thank you for your care, Pocket.”

  “It’s you who wants thanking, Mr. Vicars.”

  Now George Holden hove into view from the Bridge; with a kind of featherlight clumsiness he lowered his girth through the famous ceiling hatch—now jammed open—and floated across the air. “My dear Ned,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Quite well,” I said, rather embarrassed by his effusiveness.

  “You may have saved all our lives, thanks to your extraordinary courage—I could never have faced that stroll in the dark! Even the thought of immersing my head in that copper cage causes me to shudder—”

  I shivered. “Don’t remind me. In any event, I have scarcely rescued us; we are still lost in space, are we not, dependent for salvation on Traveller’s eccentric plans?”

  “Perhaps, but at least we can now put such plans into operation; without your courage we would still be trapped, falling out of control into the darkness, our lives maintained at the whim of a French swine. As you lay unconscious for so long, we began to fear that the carbonic acid in that suit had done for you after all, lad; and I could have broken the throat of the Frenchie with my own hands, these hands which have held nothing more cruel than a pen for thirty years.”

  I frowned, a little taken aback by this torrent of anger. “Holden, how long have I been asleep? What is today’s date?”

  “According to Traveller’s instruments today is the twenty-second of August. You have slept, therefore, for a full seven days.”

  “I… Good Lord.” In my still rather dazed state I tried vainly to work out how much further I had traveled from the Earth in that time, but—unable, in my fuddled condition, to recall if there were twenty-four or sixty hours in a day—I abandoned the project. “And the saboteur, Holden; the man Bourne. What of him? Has he recovered consciousness?”

  Holden snorted. “Yes. Would that he had been killed. In fact he emerged from his airlessness- induced torpor rather more rapidly than you.” He turned and pointed to the bunk folded out from the wall opposite me, and I made out a shapeless bundle of rather soiled blankets. “There the wretch still lies,” Holden said bitterly, “surviving in a ship he would have turned into an aluminum coffin for us all.”

  Holden kept me company for a while, but then tiredness crept over me once more and, with apologies to the journalist, I had Pocket assist me to a prone position in my bunk and closed my eyes for some hours.

  When I awoke the Smoking Cabin was empty, save for Pocket, myself—and the shapeless bundle in the far bunk. I asked Pocket for some tea; then, refreshed, I emerged from my bunk. After so long in bed I feared that my legs would buckle under me, and had we been on Earth perhaps they would have; but here in the comfortable floating conditions of space I felt as strong as I had ever done, and I pulled my way confidently across the Cabin.

  I hovered over Bourne. The Frenchman lay facing the wall—I could see his eyes were open—and when my shadow touched him he turned and stared up at me. He was scarcely recognizable as Françoise Michelet’s haughty, even arrogant companion of a few days earlier. His face, always thin, had been reduced to the skeletal—his cheekbones jutted like shelves—and his lower chin was coated with a tangle of unruly beard. The remains of his masher’s costume—the red jacket and checked waistcoat—were now stained and crumpled, their gaudy colors only adding to the fellow’s pathetic aspect.

  We stared at each other for several seconds. Then he said, “I suppose now you will finish the job you started, Monsieur Vicars.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That you intend to kill me.” He said this quite without emotion, as one will describe the state of the weather, and continued to regard me.

  I frowned and probed at my feelings. Here, I reminded myself, was a man who had stolen Traveller’s prototype craft; who had imprisoned myself and my three companions and hurled us into interplanetary space, quite probably to our deaths; who had directly caused the deaths of many innocent spectators at the launch of the Phaeton; and who had, no doubt, also been implicated in the plot to sabotage the Prince Albert itself, thereby taking the lives of perhaps hundreds more—including, possibly, that of Françoise Michelet, the girl on whom my foolish heart had fastened. I said quietly, “I have every reason to kill you. I have every reason to hate you.”

  He regarded me quite without fear. “And do you?”

  I looked within my heart, and at Bourne’s thin, suffering face. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I need to think about it.”

 
; He nodded. “Well,” he said drily, “I suspect your companion does not share your calmness.

  “Which one? Traveller?”

  “The engineer? No. The other; the fat one.”

  “Holden? He has threatened you?”

  Bourne laughed and turned his face to the wall; when next he spoke his voice was muffled. “Since the engineer restrained him from strangling me in my weakened condition your Monsieur Holden has decided to starve me to death; or perhaps to dry me out like a leaf in autumn.”

  “What do you mean?” I turned to the manservant, who had been watching us circumspectly. “Pocket? Is this true?”

  Pocket nodded, but tapped his thin nose. “He was already half-starved after all those days on the Bridge without food or water, sir. But I wasn’t going to let anybody starve to death; I’ve been feeding him scraps and leavings when no one’s looking.”

  I felt a great relief that Holden’s systematic cruelty had been subverted. “Good for you, Pocket; you were quite right. What did Sir Josiah have to say about all this?”

  Pocket shrugged philosophically. “After he calmed Mr. Holden down, the day when you did your great deed—well, sir, you know how Sir Josiah is. I expect he’s forgotten all about this Frenchie; he’s scarcely been down here since.”

  I smiled. “That I can well imagine.”

  “I did not ask for the charity of a servant,” Bourne said coldly.

  “And charity you’re not receiving, my lad,” said Pocket. “But if you think I’m about to spend my last few days sharing a tin box with the body of a Frenchie you’ve another think coming.” He spoke sternly, but rather in the manner of a parent admonishing a child; and I realized then that there was no malice in any corner of this remarkable chap’s character.