by Zach Hughes
It was just a matter of covering the last few million miles as quickly as possible and putting the Starliner into the orbital path of what was, yes, a planet in the life zone of the G-class sun. It was getting pretty exciting.
"They've found the Garden of Eden and they decided to stay for a while," Ruth said, as the Fran Webster circled the sun on flux for a meeting with what she was beginning to think of as Papa's Planet.
"It would be like Dad," David said, "to ignore every directive sent down by X&A about landing on a new planet before it's checked out by X&A
scientists."
"Papa wouldn't take any chances he recognized as such, but what if you were flying low over a garden planet? Wouldn't you be tempted to think that nothing could be wrong with such a beautiful place? Wouldn't you be tempted to stretch the law just a little bit to go down and have a closerlook?"
So it was, with the idea of a lush, blue and green, living planet having been planted in her imagination by her brother, that Ruth was at first puzzled, then frustrated by the bright, reflected light that showed the planet to be a gleaming ball of ice.
"Papa must have been so disappointed," she said, as David adjusted the optics to cut down on the glare and get higher magnification.
"I don't think they would have stayed around here long," David said.
"It makes me cold just to look at it," Ruth said.
The Fran Webster settled into a stable orbit. Since David had not as yet had the chance to use the ship's sensors and detection instruments he ran a quick scan on the ice world.
"Hey, now," he said, as the metallic readings nearly went off the scale.
"There's metal everywhere. It's under the ice but definitely not too deep.
I'm not a mining engineer, but if I'm reading these things right those have to be the richest ore fields yet to be discovered."
"Maybe that's why Papa stayed here for a while."
"Could be," David agreed. "I think we'd better go down and run a complete survey."
"Wouldn't that be a waste of time if Papa has already done it and filed his claim of discovery?" Ruth asked.
"If he had filed it, it would be on record."
"Oh, yes," she said. No such claim—no claim at all from Dan Webster—had been filed.
Flying at a few thousand feet over the gleaming surface of the ice, the ship screamed through a thin atmosphere. Instruments clicked and whirred. The ship flew herself. David was sitting in the command chair, watching the screens casually. His head jerked when the sensors zeroed in on a small mound of ice and gave off a sharper note of self-congratulation to indicate that they had found a particularly rich source of metal.
With a grunt, David took control, slowed the ship until she hovered on her flux drives. He did an infrared scan. Nothing. There was something about the shape of the ice mound that drew him. He lowered the ship until the Fran Webster stood on her flux drives a hundred feet above the ice.
The ice coating on the Old Folks was relatively thin. The heat of the flux drives sent clear water dripping, then flooding down the sides of the mound.
"Oh, David," Ruth gasped, as the metallic hide of a Mule began to show through, then the square, awkward shape and U.P. markings along with the name, Old Folks.
David landed the Fran Webster with her port air lock not a hundred feet from the entry port of the tug. At first he was not going to allow Ruth to accompany him, but he relented. After all, if something happened to him on the icy surface of the planet she had neither the skill nor the knowledge to get the ship into space and back to the U.P. He helped her get into her suit, checked the life-support system himself, suited up, led the way out into the almost nonexistent atmosphere. The cold was not the cold of space. Sunlight glared off the ice. The suit's instruments measured the same contrast in temperatures that one could expect to find on an airless moon, torrid in the sun, frigid in shade. By all rights the ice that covered the planet should melt and run rivers during the period of sun and refreeze at night.
David halted, pulled Ruth to a stop beside him.
"What?" she asked.
"Something's just a shade off center here," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Something is not right. What is your suit conditioner doing?"
She was silent for a moment. "It's cooling."
"The sun is quite hot," he said. "But there's no melting. The water we melted down with the flux tubes is already refrozen."
"I don't understand," Ruth said.
"You are not alone." He turned, started back toward the Starliner.
"David, please," she begged. "We've got to know. We've got to find out."
He hesitated. They were a mere fifty feet from the Old Folks. He could see frost reforming on her hull. Worse, he could see the large rent in the metal where the interior water tanks had expanded with deadly results.
Every molecule of air in the ship's atmosphere would have rushed out within seconds.
"Ruth, honey, I think you'd better go on back. I'll take a look."
"No," she said.
The Old Folks' entry hatch was closed. David checked for power with the suit's instruments. The ship was dead. He used a small bonding torch that was built into the suit's right arm to cut away the lock. The hatch resisted opening, creaked and grated as he pulled, then shattered at the hinges, the strong hull alloy turning into powder to fall to the ice below.
He also had to cut his way through the inner lock door and then he was in the Mule's lower area. The blink generator was dead. No flicker of energy showed on the instruments. The ship's atmosphere matched the thin one of the ice world. There wasn't enough free oxygen to allow a gnat to breathe.
He moved forward. A rime of frost covered everything, including an irregular heap of—something— on the deck near the external tools control panel. He started to step over, halted with one booted foot in the air, felt his heart hammer, his gorge rise, for through the coating of clear ice he saw a face, or what was left of a face. The liquid inside the eyeballs had frozen, shattering everything like glass. On the face and neck blood veins had expanded with the cold, thrusting cords of red through splits in the gray, frozen skin.
"Stay back," he said, but it was too late. Ruth was by his side looking down. Her cry was not a scream of horror. It was almost soft, a hair-raising expression of grief that lanced through him.
Ruth knelt, touched the frozen forms. David knelt beside her.
Dan Webster had managed to get his arms around his wife and there they had stayed so that they were locked together in a glacial embrace.
Ruth was sobbing quietly. David said, "Well, they were together. They would have wanted to be together."
She turned her helmeted face to glare at him. "They would have wanted to live."
"Yes, of course." He looked around. Everything seemed to be in order.
Aboard a ship there is a place for everything and everything had better be in its place if you wanted to have room to move. He left Ruth weeping beside the frozen corpses and walked into the control room. Old Folks was as dead as a ship could be. He used his gloved hand to wipe the rime off the covering of an instrument and the glass powdered under the pressure.
Damned odd. And a lance of cold came through the insulated glove with painful intensity.
"What the hell?" he muttered. He walked back to the auxiliary control panel, lifted Ruth to her feet. "We're going."
"What about them?"
"Something's very wrong here, Ruth. We're going. We're going to go back to the Fran Webster and then we're going to get the hell out of here."
"What about them?" she repeated, desperation in her voice.
"Ruth, they're not going anywhere."
"We can't just leave them here."
"Come on."
"No," she said, jerking away. She fell against the control panel. Glass and metals powdered. He had to catch her to keep her from falling through the once solid panel.
"What?" she asked, her eyes wide.
<
br /> "Let's go."
She made no further objection, followed him into the sun. Her feet were cold. Where she had touched the bodies of her mother and father with her gloved hands the flesh felt numb, painfully cold. She was shivering when David helped her strip out of the suit.
"You were quite worried over there," she said.
"Damned right."
"What killed them?"
"The cold."
"The sun is hot. It made the suit coolers work."
"Tell me about it," he said, placing his suit on the rack carefully. He moved swiftly to the control room, activated the ship's flux drive, started to push the button that would have sent the Fran Webster soaring away from the planet's icy grip. Ruth's appearance on the bridge stopped him.
The transformation was instantaneous. Hot lances of overwhelming desire brought him to his feet. He could no longer remember who or where he was, or what he had been about to do. She moved to meet his lunge and they were together, lips hot and wet and hungry. He lifted her and carried her, a soft, hot, lovely burden, to his quarters and the big bed, peeled away the unisuit. He was aware only of need, a need so vast, so consuming that there was room for nothing else in his consciousness. It was not sister and brother who coupled, gasping, clutching, moaning in extreme passion, but two sexual animals from whose minds all else had been sucked away.
CHAPTER FIVE
Delicate, transparent angel sails extended backward from her shoulders. Her body was humanoid, and shapely. Wing muscles wrapped around her torso, giving the impression of breasts under a filmy garment that took its color from the short, sable fur that covered her. She was as beautiful as a butterfly with her regal stance, her protruding, multifaceted eyes, her delicate face and nose. She stood alone in an alien forest of shifting, whispering, oddly shaped trees.
"Goddamnit, Frank," she called out, "I'm going to break a leg in here. I can't see a damned thing through these freaking bug eyes."
Frank, the director of the largest and biggest ever production of The Legend of Miaree, sighed wearily.
"Frank, I'm an actress, not one of those Old Earth seers who doesn't need eyes," the whimsically delightful female said. "I'm supposed to be contemplating the possible destruction of my world, of everything that I know and love. I'm supposed to be helplessly enthralled by the maleness of a man from Delan, the constellation of the mythical beast. I'm supposed to smell like flowers because I've got the hots and all I can do is stumble over my feet because I see six of everything through these motherless bug eyes."
"All right, everybody," Frank said, "take five." He pointed a long-nailed finger at a technician. "You, Big Brain," he shouted. "It's costing just over four thousand credits per minute whether this crew is working or not. If we were paying you enough, I'd take this lost time out of your salary."
"I wouldn't turn down a raise." The speaker was young, tall, and he was often mistaken by visitors for one of the holostars in the expedition that had come to a frontier planet whose distance from U.P. center was measured in parsecs of four figures.
"Don't give me lip," the director said. "Just do something about those Goddamned bug eyes."
The young man made his way carefully onto the artfully forested holostage, approached the winged female. "I'm sorry, Miss Webster," he said. "Let me have a look."
He put his face close to hers. His heart pounded as he was submerged in the sweet scent of her breath.
"Sorry, Vinn," she said. "The eyes always worked before. Something just went wrong."
The perfection of her form was evident through the skintight garment that simulated the Artunee fur of the alien female, Miaree. The protruding eyes could not hide the classic symmetry of her face. Vinn Stern had never seen a woman who was as nearly ideal as Sheba Webster. He was grateful for the opportunity to be near her. Every day he thanked his lucky stars that he'd stumbled into his job as scientific adviser to the producer of Miaree.
"Well, that's it," he said after having stood very, very close to Sheba Webster for a full half-minute although he had seen the reason for her difficulty immediately.
"Perhaps, Mr. Stern," the director said impatiently, "you will see fit, sometime today, to tell us what it is."
"Makeup put the eyes on upside down," Vinn said.
"Oh, hell," Frank said. He made his way through Vinn Stern's version of a grove of Artunee pleele trees. "Can't you manage to do the scene, darling, without having to redo the eyes?"
"Frank," Sheba said patiently, "I'm supposed to be an alien female. I'm supposed to cease being Sheba Webster and become a being that metamorphosizes from some horrid sluglike leaf-eating creature into a sensitive entity. I'm encapsulated in fur. I'm sweating my buns off. This stuff makes me itch all over, and I'm supposed to be able to feel love for some macho alien male? I'm supposed to be able to project that I'm a lovely, doomed butterfly when I risk breaking a leg each time I move?"
Frank sighed again. It took well over an hour for makeup to prepare Sheba's face and hair. He turned away, lifted his arms toward heaven in supplication. "All right, everybody, power down. We'll have an early lunch.
Back on the set ready to shoot at one-thirty." He turned to Sheba. "Okay?"
"Okay," she said. "You're so very considerate, Frank. It's a genuine pleasure to work with you." The tone of her voice indicated exactly the opposite meaning. She lifted her hands and tugged at the bug eyes.
"No, don't, please," Vinn said, putting his hands atop hers. "Let me do it."
The sable smoothness of the fur garment was sensuous, the knowledge that it was her hands under the fur caused him to take a deep breath. He sprayed a neutrally balanced enzyme dissolver around the multifaceted artificial organs and caught them as they fell. Sheba's own huge emerald eyes teared from the residue of the spray. He produced a clean cloth, touched the corners of her eyes delicately.
"Thank you, Vinn," she said.
"You'd better go along with her, Stern," the director ordered as Shebaswayed away through the pleele trees. "Be sure they do it right this time."
Vinn caught up with Sheba as she stepped off the holostage. "I've been told to supervise makeup," he said.
"Good for you." She turned aside, headed toward a cubicle that had her name on the door.
"Ah, that's not the way to makeup, Miss Webster," Vinn said.
"Come in, I'll need your help," she said.
Sheba's dressing room smelled of girl—perfumes and powders. She stopped just inside the door. "The zipper is just under here." She lifted her long blonde hair away from her neck.
"Miss Webster, I don't think there's time," he protested.
"I'm being slowly boiled," she said. "The zipper, please."
He pulled the tab.
"We have to be very careful of the wings," he said. The zipper made a tiny noise. Girl skin emerged from under the fur. His fingers pulled the tab down the ridge of her spine, over the outward flow of her rump.
"Thank you," she said. She skinned out of the fur and bent over a wash basin to splash cooling water into her face, thereby destroying an hour's work in the makeup room. Her position emphasized the womanly outthrust of hip, the taut roundness of buttock. She wore only the briefest of undergarments. She was so beautiful that Vinn had trouble breathing.
"Would you please hand me the robe hanging behind the door?"
She turned her back to him and lifted her arms. He held the robe for her. She shrugged to nestle it on her shoulders and turned to face him. "If I invite you to lunch, would you be kind enough to fetch it for us?"
"My pleasure," he said.
He was back quickly with two hotpacks. Sheba pulled a small table out from the wall and they sat facing each other. When the lids of the hotpacks were removed, delicious smells joined the feminine scents of thedressing room. Sheba said, "Ummm," and attacked the food hungrily.
Vinn, fascinated, could only watch.
"If you're not going to eat your meat—" she said, looking up at him with her green eyes. Her lips w
ere glossy.
"No, no," he said. "If you want it—"
"Thank you," she said, spearing his filet with her fork. She smiled radiantly. "Don't let it bother you. You're not the first to be amazed by my metabolism."
"You do enjoy your food, don't you?"
"I was my mother's despair," she said. "She was always telling me that it wasn't ladylike to eat like an outworld mine worker."
"Well, you certainly don't have a weight problem."
"Never," she said. "I can eat my weight and not gain an ounce."
"You're fortunate."
"You're not going to eat anything?"
He flushed. She said nothing more. He was not the first young man to be stupefied by her beauty. She never could fully understand it, but she accepted it. In her mind she was just Sheba, the youngest Webster girl.
She liked her body well enough because it was lithe and healthy and sturdy, because it was capable of doing fun things like rock climbing and soaring. After a period of trying to hide her developing body with baggy clothes and a slump of her shoulders when she was a teenager she had learned to be thankful that others found it pleasant to look at her. All of her life she had liked pleasing people and she had developed that skill into a precision art. She had only to walk into a room to be the center of attention. Her beauty and charisma had made a place for her in holofilms, and then she had accepted another challenge and had set out to learn the craft of the actor.
Now, in the full bloom of womanhood, she stood at the pinnacle of her profession, ranked among the top dozen performers, male and female, who were familiar to viewers on hundreds of worlds. She had come to love thelifestyle that was made possible by her looks and by an acting ability that had been developed carefully from nothing more than a small kernel of talent.
"How did you happen to end up out here in the wilderness?" she asked, in an effort to put Vinn more at ease.
"Just luck," he said. "I was working at the Verbolt works on Xanthos—"
"You're one of those?" she asked, widening her eyes.
"Big brain, that's me," he said with a self-conscious laugh.
