Lifeboat Page 7

  “Go ahead of me,” she said to Giles. “Make sure the way is dear to the rear area of the ship. By the time we get back there, his suit will be warm enough for you to touch safely.”

  “I understand,” said Giles.

  He walked swiftly in front of the two aliens into the back area of the lifeship, and the Captain, following him, brought the figure of the Engineer to a cot that had belonged to Di, and laid it down there, clipping the tool straps from the belt of the spacesuit to the frame of the cot to hold it in place.

  “Now ...” said the Captain.

  She unwrapped the plastic from her hands, and gently setting the powerful three fingers of each hand around the curve of the helmet, she turned it carefully until its seal disengaged. There was a little inward-sucking sound of air, and then the still-frosted helmet came loose in the Captain’s hands. She and Giles stood looking down at last on the face of the Engineer.

  To Giles, there was little to be read from what he saw. The Engineer’s eyes were closed, and his dark skin had an ashy color, as though it had been lightly dusted with gray powder. It was impossible for human eyes to tell whether he breathed or not.

  “How is he?” Giles asked.

  “Good. Some life remains,” answered the Captain shortly, almost absently, her hands flying about the spacesuit to undo its lockings and seals. “Adelman, behind you on the other cot you will find certain tools—among them a joined pair of cutters. Use them to remove the ties from the Engineer’s limbs. Do not try to unfasten the clamps. Cut. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” said Giles.

  He turned about and found the cutters of which the Captain had been talking.

  In the process of cutting the ties, he saw at close hand how the ancient spacesuit had, indeed, failed. Around the body section there had evidently been no leaks. But at more than one place on each arm or leg where flexing had occurred, there had been leaks. In each case the ties had clamped down; and now in the section that had lost air pressure, the limb of the Engineer showed swollen and ugly. In cutting the ties, Giles inadvertently touched several of these swollen sections and they gave slightly, bulging to his fingertips, like worn inner tubes filled to bursting with liquid.

  The Captain had the upper part of the Engineer stripped of the spacesuit by the time Giles had finished cutting the last of the ties around the engineer’s ankles. A moment later and the spacesuit was pulled free of the motionless alien, leaving him lying there in only the shipboard harness both Albenareth were accustomed to wear.

  The Engineer’s eyes were still closed. He had shown no sign of understanding that they had him back in the lifeship and were working on him. He did not move, but once or twice he had made a faint hissing noise deep in his throat.

  “How is he? Will he die?” Giles asked.

  “He is dying,” said the Captain. She whirled on Giles. “Go now. Keep your humans out of this back area. I do not want them here. I do not want them looking in here. Is that clear? The last moments of an Albenareth are not a spectacle for aliens.”

  “I will stay away and keep all the others away—of course,” said Giles. He turned and went out through the gap in the closer screen, into the section where the arbites still waited. Behind him there was a sudden screeching of tom .metal. He turned to see the cot which had been Frenco’s literally ripped from its supports, being thrust upright into the gap in the back screen to make a barrier there.

  The cot did not really fill the gap. There was room on the hull side of the opening for a human to slip through, if he or she wanted to. But it blocked a view of the two aliens from the middle section of the lifeship, and it was a stark symbol of the Captain’s demand for privacy.

  “I think you all understand what that means,” Giles said to the arbites. He was surprised to hear his own tongue thick from exhaustion. He gestured toward the cot blocking the entrance to the rear section of the lifeship. “The Captain has said none of us are to go back there, or look in there. I’ll add my own personal order to that. I don’t want any of you going close to that opening or sneaking a look—”

  He broke off suddenly. For the first time since they had come aboard the lifeship, the blue-white lights overhead that were never turned off and that nourished the growth of the ib vine had dimmed. They shone now with only a faint reddishness of illumination; and the abrupt decrease of light after all these hours left the humans nearly blind while they waited for their eyes to adjust.

  “I repeat,” croaked Giles. “Stay away from that rear section. There’s nothing back there you’re likely to need.” He nodded meaningfully at the lifeship’s primitive sanitary facilities, which were enclosed by the screens of the middle section. “Stay here and stay quiet until further order. Not only will you have me to deal with if you don’t, but the Captain will probably take his own measures—and I can’t promise to protect any one of you, in that case.”

  He turned, feeling his blind way with both hands, and stumbled through the gap in the front screen to fumble for and locate his cot His hands closed on the edge of it he sat down on it and lay back. Sleep swallowed him at a gulp....

  He was on his feet and moving again before he was truly awake. The air was being shivered by screams from some human throat The overhead lights in the lifeship were back to a brilliant blue-white. In a staggering plunge he went toward the noise-through the gap in the nearer screen and through the knot of arbites who were beginning to cluster about the cot-blocked gap in the farther screen. He went past the cot itself, knocking it aside as he burst into the rear section of the ship. Just as he did so the screams were stopped as abruptly as if a hand had been jammed over the mouth of the screamer.

  He found himself facing the Captain, who stood holding Di like a broken doll in long, dark alien hands. The girl draped limply, eyes closed, in the grasp of the alien. Of the Engineer there was no sign; but the Captain, the floor covering, and the one cot that remained were liberally spotted with dark alien blood.

  “Take her,” said the Captain, making one step forward and putting the unconscious form of the girl into Giles’ arms. “She came back here where she was told not to; but she is not harmed.”

  Giles accepted the dead weight of Di. He stood holding her and still staring at the Captain.

  “Where is the Engineer?” Giles said thickly in Albenareth.

  “He has passed through the further Portal in all honors,” said the Captain. She switched abruptly to Basic. “So much for he that was he. His husk”—the Captain turned and nodded toward the converter—”is of use and has been put to use.”

  There was a sickened moan from the arbite group in the screen opening. Giles stared at the converter. The main door on top of it was still propped open slightly. That door was fully large enough to allow insertion of the Engineer’s body. There would have been no need to dismember the corpse. Giles looked about and saw the pile of instruments he had seen earlier. None of them was marked with the dark blood so omnipresent otherwise.

  “Whose blood is that?” he asked in Albenareth.

  “Human,” said the Captain, in the same language, “I am weary of the questions of you and your race!”

  She strode past Giles abruptly, almost knocking him over. The arbites scattered before the tall figure, then flowed back into the rear section to stare at the blood, the converter, and the figure of Di.

  Giles himself looked down at Di. On either side of her neck toward the back the dark shadows of bruises were beginning to discolor the skin—two bruises on one side of the neck and one on the other, as might have been made by a very powerful, three-fingered hand.

  “What happened?” It was Mara, seeing him, reaching down to lift the unconscious girl’s head. “Frenco said she had nightmares. She must have woken up from one, forgotten where she was, and started back to her cot, here. But what made her scream like that? What did she see?”

  “God knows,” said Giles, grimly. He looked down at the closed eyes in the still face. “And if those screams are
any indication, I doubt she’ll want to remember what it was when she does wake up. We may never know.”

  6

  Second day—16:15 hours

  Giles had been right in his unprofessional guess. When Di came to, after she had been carried to a cot in the middle section, she did not remember. She seemed confused and uncertain, like someone who has just recovered from the effects of a heavy drug. She cried and clung to Mara or Biset, whoever was closest. She threatened to become hysterical if any of the men came near her— including Frenco, whom she did not seem to recognize at all.

  In the end, the two other women took turns sitting with her, and bit by bit she dropped into short periods of uneasy sleep, from which she was as likely to wake screaming as not. But, gradually, the violence of her nightmares seemed to diminish, and she began to sleep for longer and more normal periods. Still, she did not remember anything of what she had seen in the stem area of the lifeship. Her last memory was of the Engineer being brought back through the airlock.

  Frenco, meanwhile, in the space of less than twenty-four hours, went from a round-faced boy to a pale, sharp-featured man on the edge of violence. He could not believe that Di did not want him near her and was ready to fight his way to her. In the end, Giles had to appoint Hem to guard the girl against Frenco’s approaches.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the humans were close to a condition of total anarchy. With the exception of Hem, who was apparently undisturbed by the disposition of the Engineer’s body, and Giles, who forced himself to eat, none of the others would touch the pulp of the fruit from the ib vine. Indeed, with the exception of Hem and Giles, the humans held off drinking the ib juice until thirst literally drove them to it. But eat they would not. Finally, Giles called them all together in the center section between the screens.

  “Now listen to me,” he said. “Try to understand. We’re out here alone in space, surrounded by light-years of emptiness, and this lifeship is the only thing we have to give us a chance of ever making it to planetfall again. If we ever get out of this alive, what we’ll have to thank will be the lifeship and the Captain—yes, the Engineer, too. Don’t look away from me when I say that. Make an effort to think outside all the things you grew up with and learned and took for granted. What we have here—this closed cycle with the converter—is exactly the same kind of closed cycle we had back on Earth, only simplified... . Look at me when I talk to you!”

  Pale faces that had been averted turned back to him. That much he could make them do—obey the physical command. Whether he could actually get them to think in terms of this new and alien environment was something else again. Well, at least he could try.

  “I want you to look at matters squarely, with your feelings set aside,” he went on. “The drive motors needed to be worked on. That is a fact. The Engineer had to go outside and work on them, at the cost of his life, which was a price he expected to pay. Another fact It did cost him his life; and the Captain, rather than letting go to waste nutrients which would help keep us alive—us humans, remember, not just some equivalent number of individuals of his own race—put the Engineer’s body in the recycling tank to feed the ib vine. Fact. There they are—facts. Not matters of opinion which you can choose to react to or not to react to— but facts. Because if you don’t accept them as the facts they are, the final fact of all will get you—if you don’t eat, you’ll die.”

  “Kept him alive, too ...” muttered a male voice.

  “Who’s that? Esteven?” Giles stared at the entertaincom. Unlike the others, Esteven was not particularly pale. If anything, he was a little flushed and there was a glazed, defiant look to his eyes. “What do you mean—kept who alive, too?”

  “I mean him—the Captain!” said Esteven, more loudly. “He lives off the ib vine, too—and the Engineer. I say he was keeping himself alive by putting the Engineer in there—Honor, sir!”

  The last two words were uttered almost impudently. But Giles paid little attention. He was busy adjusting his own mind. He had forgotten that the arbites believed the Albenareth Captain to be a male. For a moment he toyed with the idea of telling them the truth about the alien commander’s sex, then rejected it. The less confusion and surprise aboard from now on, the better.

  “The Albenareth don’t fight the prospect of death the way we do, Esteven,” Giles said, evenly. “You know that. What makes the Captain run is a sense of duty, not personal worries.”

  “Pardon me, Honor, sir,” said Esteven. The ordinarily quiet and withdrawn man was acting far out of his usual character at the moment. He was almost belligerent. “But are you sure about that?” It was time to sit on him, thought Giles.

  “When I tell you anything, Esteven,” he said, harshly and finally, “you can take it for granted that I’m sure about it, or I wouldn’t say it. Now, unless you’ve got something more useful to say, I want you to sit there and be quiet. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Honor, sir ...” All at once the belligerence went out of the arbite. He shrank back into his usual silence and inconspicuousness.

  “All right,” said Giles, turning to the others. “I’m not going to order you to eat. I’m going to appeal to you to try to eat; and until you do, all of you are going to be required to sit here, twice a ship-day, and watch while Hem and I eat. And that first meal is going to be right now.... Hem?”

  The big laboring arbite got up, stepped into the rear section, and returned with two bowls of the ib pulp. He handed one to Giles and sat down on a cot with the other.

  Giles ate stolidly, hiding his own feelings about the Engineer and the vine pulp under the mask of indifference he had learned during that first year after being sent away to boarding school. Hem was truly indifferent. The watching arbites sat silently, bearing up very well under the scene they were witnessing—until the very end, when Hem thoughtlessly began to lick the stray pulp from his fingers and first Di, then Groce and Frenco, were abruptly sick, crowding into the sanitary cubicle with little energy left over to be considerate of one another.

  Much of the same scene was repeated six hours later, and again for three more times before Biset and Mara, at once, sat down with bowls holding hardly more than a tablespoonful apiece of the ib pulp and choked it down. Two mealtimes later and they were all eating, including Di.

  Meanwhile, Di and Frenco had moved back into the spurious privacy of the rear section of the lifeship. Another cot had been pulled up from the floor to take the place of the one the Captain had tom from its fastening to bar the entrance in the screen. The rest were all in the center section with the exception of Hem, who had moved to a cot up in the front section where Giles had been by himself until the Engineer’s death.

  It was a curiously forward thing for the low-graded bumper to do on his own intiative, but Giles thought it best not to question the man about it. Most arbites of Hem’s type, questioned about anything, became overwhelmed with embarrassment and tongue-tied with the fear of not giving the proper answers. Meanwhile, things were going as smoothly as could be expected, now that all the humans were finally adjusted to the lifeship’s environment and eating correctly once more. Giles turned over the situation in his own mind. It was one in which ordinarily he would offer the arbites some kind of reward to reinforce the positive effect of their good behavior. But here on the lifeship, rewards were not easily available.

  He hit finally on a farfetched possibility. He must talk to the Captain anyway, and that conversation would provide an opportunity for the asking of a special consideration. He waited until several ship-days after the death of the Engineer before approaching the other Albenareth.

  Choosing a time when the arbites were all in the middle or stern section of the craft, Giles went up to the partition within which the Captain had been keeping herself isolated almost continuously since the Engineer’s death. Standing outside the screen that hid the alien commander, Giles spoke in Albenareth.

  “Captain, I’d like to talk to you.” There was a moment’s pause, then the sound of the ali
en voice answered.

  “Come.”

  Giles walked around the edge of the screen and turned to face the Captain, who was sitting before one of the control consoles. Without getting up, she swiveled her command seat to face him.

  “Captain,” said Giles, “perhaps you can tell me now how long it will be before we make planetfall in this lifeship.”

  “We will reach Belben in a little less than a hundred and eight ship-days.”

  “I see,” said Giles. “That is a long time.”

  “It is the time required,” said the Captain. There was no difference that Giles’ human ear could find in the Albenareth’s tones, and no difference that he could see in the way she sat or spoke. But still, something about her conveyed an impression of remoteness, as if she had somehow put a new distance, not only between her and himself, but between her and the lifeship with everyone else aboard it.

  “I take it there is no better destination?” asked Giles.

  “There is no other destination.”

  “If the Captain will bear with me,” said Giles. He had a feeling as if he was walking through some strange field sowed with booby traps and mines that he could not imagine, much less see. What he had to say skirted the dangerous perimeter of alien emotions, alien honor. “There is a human mining colony together with an Albenareth spaceship station, on a world called 20B-40, according to our charts. Out of interest, I studied those charts before leaving on this voyage. I have no skill at navigation, of course, beyond piloting my own small craft within my own Solar System; but unless I am mistaken, at this moment 20B-4Q would be only perhaps half the distance from us that Belben is.”

  “Perhaps,” said the Captain. “However, Belben is our destination.”

  “Why, when 20B-40 is closer?”

  “Belben was our original destination. My ship has been lost, but some honor may be saved if what is left of her passengers are delivered as promised.”

  “What honor will there be in delivering them, if they are not then living?” Giles asked. “A hundred and eight days is a long time for these people of mine to survive under these conditions.”