A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (12 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
“I agree, but I don’t think that we ought to try this slope again, though,” said the professor. “The tremor will have loosened up everything and made it treacherous. There is also the possibility of hidden crevasses in the plain. Instead, I suggest that we follow the curve of the ridge until it joins that low one that descends near the spaceship.”
“I’d feel safer down there.”
“Maybe, but I think that we’d better follow my plan. The ridge is solid rock. It’d be like following a road right to the rocket.”
Bronwyn acquiesced, but with glum misgivings, and followed the lanky figure. It was not difficult traversing the connecting ridges, though the going was considerably slower. Again and again, tremors joggled the ground under their feet. On the plain below, plumes of dust geysered up, only to immediately fall leadenly to the ground. Even though small landslides continued to pour down the slope on either side, Bronwyn did indeed feel more secure being above the plain, which at the moment seemed as substantial as a pot of boiling oatmeal.
After an hour they reached a point about two dozen yards away from and slightly above the domed vehicle.
Sweat poured in sticky rivulets down Bronwyn’s face and it was maddening not to be able to brush it from her eyes. She wished she’d tied back her shoulder-length hair before putting on the helmet; damp strands were now glued to her forehead and cheeks.
Wittenoom reconnected their helmets. “Thank Musrum! The ship looks intact!”
“Let’s get aboard and out of here!” she urged, all of the novelty of her visit to the moon having long since been exhausted.
“I think that I’ve also seen all that I need to.”
“Someone seems to agree with you! Look!”
She pointed to the rocket which was now spouting gouts of sparks and smoke from its underside. It was strange to see what she knew must be a noisy event occuring in such dead, and deadly, silence.
“What in the world is Hughenden doing?” the professor asked.
“It looks to me as though he were planning to leave.”
“But we’re still out here!”
“I think that he’s not unaware of that.”
“We’ve got to stop him! He can’t do this!”
“He is doing it.”
“I’ll have him expelled from the Academy! By Musrum, I will!”
“Professor, quick, give me your specimen bag.”
“What? Whatever for?”
“Hurry, please! Just give it here!”
“All right, all right! Here.”
She took the bag, which had been supported from Wittenoom’s shoulder by a long strap of webbing. This she unclipped from the bag itself, then made a loop about three feet across by grasping the free ends. She glanced at the rocket which was not only continuing to spew flames and sparks, but was now teetering unsteadily on its round landing pads. It looked something like a spider suffering a hotfoot.
“Stand back, Professor!” she said, simultaneously unplugging the telephone line. Stooping, she picked a fist-sized rock from the ground. She placed this in the loop of webbing, braced her feet and began swinging the strap in a circle over her head. It spun faster and faster until her helmet seemed to be surmounted by a transparent grey disk.
Just as the spaceship’s feet left the surface, Brownyn released one end of the strap. The stone flew from the sling like a bullet, streaked toward the rocket and shattered one of the large ports near its nose. The effect of this was immediate and not a little startling. The shards of pulverized quartz that burst from the now-vacant hole were followed by a cloud of vapor that disappeared almost as quickly as it formed. Behind this came what must have been every loose article in the cabin: papers, books, food containers, clothing, then, at last, a bulky object that for a moment plugged the porthole. Only for a moment, however; it popped from the opening like a cork, a shapeless, pinwheeling mass that described its own deliberate, lazy, individual parabola before thumping into the dust among the scattered débris of what had been the spaceship’s contents.
The motors of the rocket had stopped firing at once and the vehicle dropped back to the ground with a jolt that almost collapsed the spindly legs.
With a gesture intended to encourage the professor to follow, Bronwyn loped down the rubbly slope without a backward glance. She stopped when she came to the distorted bundle that had momentarily plugged the porthole. It was, or had been, as she had suspected, Doctor Hughenden. The combined effect of being forced through an eighteen-inch hole and the decompression of the outside vacuum had been hard on him and not the least bit cosmetic. She turned away just as Wittenoom came bounding to her side. She seemed to be inclined to want to vomit in inconvenient situations and the idea of throwing up inside her helmet was, well, nauseating.
The professor plugged the telephone wire into her helmet and his tinny voice came to her ears. “Come on, Princess, let’s get to the rocket.”
“What did he think he was doing?” she asked as she turned away from the horrible object.
“I can’t begin to imagine.”
Bronwyn reentered the spaceship while the professor stopped to examine the individual rockets in the base. She knew that the cabin was now airless so she did not bother to seal the hatches of the lock. The interior was dark except for the light streaming through the portholes facing the sun. The cabin looked as though someone had picked it up and given it a hard shaking.
She was pleased to discover that the electric lights still worked, though things looked even worse when she switched them on. The professor’s helmet appeared in the manhole and as he joined her they reconnected their helmets.
“How are the rockets?” she asked.
“There is a problem there,” he replied. “If Hughenden had fired the takeoff battery as he should have, we would have been marooned here. However, for some reason we’ll never know, he was firing the tubes sequentially, so was unable to produce enough cumulative thrust to take off.”
“Go on. Do we have enough rockets left to leave here or don’t we?”
“Yes, we do, I think, but we’ll have to recruit some of the rockets that had been earmarked for braking our return to the earth.”
“Which means we’ll crash when we get back?”
“Not necessarily. We’ll more likely burn up in the atmosphere.”
“A cheery alternative.”
“Before we can even think about taking off, we need to seal that broken port.”
“I’ve thought about that. Can’t we crank the cover back over it, then seal it by gluing something on top with the stuff you used on the meteor puncture?”
The professor thought that this sounded like a fine idea and the two went to work repairing what they could of the various damages inflicted by the sudden decompression. A gravity barely one-seventh that of the earth’s was an immense aid in getting the overhead port repaired. Bronwyn was able to stand on the professor’s shoulders, which were considerably more than five feet above the floor. Added to her own two yards, she had no problem reaching the ceiling and the professor had no problem supporting her for the time it required, although they looked like an exceedingly peculiar vaudeville act.
They had both been sealed in their suits for half a day and the air inside them had finally gone stale . . . to say nothing of developing overwhelmingly individual odors. As soon as the plate had been glued over the porthole, Wittenoom opened the valve of a liquid air tank. It seemed to take hours, but Bronwyn finally heard a faint hissing. This grew gradually louder until she discovered that she could hear the professor as he moved around the cabin. She caught his attention and pointed to her helmet with a questioning gesture. He shook his head, then said, “Not for a minute or two yet. The pressure is still just a little bit too low.” She was startled when she realized that she had heard him even though their helmets were not yet connected by the telephone wire.
Finally, she saw the professor unscrew his helmet and wasted not a second in removing hers, which she threw to the floor in disgust. She gratefully sucked the clean, icy air into her lungs even though it was so cold that it stung. A cloud of condensed vapor puffed from the collar of her suit, and from her mouth at each breath.
“It’s freezing in here!”
“I’ve turned on the heater, but the sun will probably warm us faster, now that there is air in the cabin to convect heat from the walls.”
The cabin shuddered and Bronwyn had to cling to the central column in order to remain on her feet.
“How long before we can take off?” she asked.
“Only a matter of minutes.”
“Sounds like a matter of minutes too long to me.”
There was another shock, a prolonged one that made the spaceship rock sickeningly. As the professor worked feverishly at revising the firing sequence, bypassing the spent tubes and adding new ones, Bronwyn stripped off her suit, which slipped from her sodden body like the skin of a scalded tomato. Her coveralls were soaked with perspiration and clung to her like papier-mâché.
“I’ve been thinking, Professor, and I have an idea.”
“What’s that, my dear?”
“All of the tubes that Hughenden fired are useless now, aren’t they?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, why are we taking along their dead weight? Isn’t there some way we can jettison them? Wouldn’t that save enough weight to make the difference in getting back?”
“I’ve been incredibly stupid! Of course, you’re perfectly correct! It’s exactly the step principle that the main rocket was based upon. How could I have forgotten that?”
“That’s all right, I know that it’s not your field.”
“True enough. But I still don’t know if we will have enough rockets to brake sufficiently when we reach the earth.”
“Well, we’ve got to have a better chance then we had before.”
“And we really have no choice, unless we want to remain here.”
“Not likely. Especially since here might not be here much longer.”
“I’m glad that I haven’t yet removed my vacuum suit.”
“Why’s that?” she asked warily.
“The only way to jettison the spent tubes is to manually unscrew them.”
“But weren’t they designed to be automatically disconnected?”
“Yes, but Hughenden fired them randomly. We’d be jettisoning unused tubes along with spent ones.”
“Oh Musrum . . . ”
With disgust, she slipped back into her repellently clammy suit while the professor recharged their air cylinders from the main tank. It took another hour to remove the spent rockets, but it was not particularly difficult work and she was soon back in the now-comfortably warm cabin and out of her vacuum suit once again, though not nearly soon enough to satisfy her.
“Strap yourself in,” said the professor. “There’s no reason that I can see for us not to take off immediately.”
“Fire away,” she replied, throwing herself onto her couch and buckling her belts. She pushed wet strands of hair from her eyes and asked, “What can I do?”
“I’d ask you to pray, but I don’t know that Musrum is all that receptive to deathbed repentances.”
“Then we’ll just have to take our chances. Do what you have to do, Professor.”
He did and with a tremendous roar, the rocket leaped from the surface of the doomed moon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NO JOKE
Rykkla was not at all surprised when she was awakened early the following morning by Bobasnyda bearing a summons from the Baudad. It was scarcely dawn, yet she arose with sprightliness and breakfasted in a chamber empty except for the mute attendants. When she returned to her sleeping quarters she found that a new costume had been neatly laid out for her, something not surprisingly all of tranparent gossamer, gauze and diaphane. She swathed herself in it, arranged her hair and had only just begun to wonder
What next?
when the eunuch returned and asked if she was ready for her audience.
“No,” she replied.
Bobasnyda raised a thinly penciled eyebrow. “No?” he fluted.
“No,” she repeated, “I’m not ready. I need my attendants.”
“Attendants? What attendants?”
“I am a world-renowned artiste. I do not appear without my attendants.”
“You do not have any attendants.”
“I didn’t yesterday, but I do now. Gravelinghe and Thursby are my attendants.”
“No, they are not. They were here before you. How could they be your attendants?”
“They are my attendants because I made them my attendants. I am a world-renowned artiste. It disturbs me that I must keep reminding you of that. I can chose whomever I like to be my attendant. I like Gravelinghe and Thursby. Please get them, we’re late.”
“You can’t have anyone with you.”
“Then I’m not going.”
“You must go! The Baudad has commanded it!”
“So what?”
“You will go to him whether you like it or not.”
“I haven’t refused to see your famous Baudad. I have just refused to see him unattended.”
“You saw him already, alone!”
“That was a social call. It was perfectly proper. Now I am expected to perform. That makes everything different.”
“You can’t have anyone in the Baudad’s chambers with you!” argued Bobasnyda and Rykkla recognized the capitulation; her mind’s eye smirked, if that is possible.
“I don’t require them to be inseparable, for heaven’s sake. Only to be in attendance. Even you ought to know that much. I have to tell you that I am thinking of mentioning your ignorance and poor memory to the Baudad. For the nonce, my attendants can await me outside the Baudad’s chambers.”
The eunuch heaved an oboe--like sigh and agreed that the two other women could accompany Rykkla, but that they would have to wait in the anteroom until her audience was completed.
“That will do,” said Rykkla. “I’m not just any female that some wandering band of halfwit soldiers happened to come across and picked up like a souvenir ashtray. The Baudad’s is not the first royal court before which I have performed, certainly not my first command performance generally speaking, by any means, and I am unaccustomed to anything less than the treatment due my status.”
“Ummyess. Well, then, you are ready, provided that these other two . . . ”
“Gravelinghe and Thursby.”
“ . . . Gravelinghe and Thursby . . . are prepared to join you?”
“Certainly.”
Gravelinghe and Thursby were ready when Rykkla and Bobasnyda searched them out and, in fact, had been impatient with the delay.
“We’ve been ready for an hour, Miss Woxen. Is there anything wrong?” asked Thursby with petulant formality.
“Just Bobasnyda,” sighed Rykkla. “I will have to speak to the Baudad about his presumptiousness.”
“I certainly would, if I were you, Miss Woxen,” sniffed the younger girl.
A eunuch who was not only vastly annoyed but not a little apprehensive bid the three women to follow him and he led the now familiar way to the Baudad’s chambers. The quartet entered an anteroom where Bobasnyda instructed Gravelinghe and Thursby to wait.
“Excuse me,” interrupted Rykkla, turning her back to the eunuch, facing her attendants. “Gravelinghe and Thursby . . . ”
“Yes, Miss Woxen?”
“You will await me until I return or until I otherwise require you.”
“Yes, Miss Woxen.”
“
Now
I am ready, Bobasnyda. You may announce me.”
“Announce you?”
“Of course.”
“What do you mean, ‘announce you’?”
Rykkla produced a perfect replica of a sigh of nearly infinite patience bearing up bravely under great strain. “I thought that this might be a problem for you, so I have done you a kindness. I have written it down for you. It’s extemporaneous and terribly unpolished, normally I would have had my advance man prepare something like this, and modesty, of course, forbade me from being more honest, but it’ll do.”
She handed the astounded eunuch a neatly folded square of paper, at which he could only stare dumbly.
“Well? Go on in and read it! Good heavens, you
can
read, can’t you?” She turned to her somberly waiting attendants and said to them,
sotto voce,
“Merciful Musrum!” to which they sychophantically rolled their eyes toward the ornate ceiling, clucked their tongues and shook their heads.
“All right! All right!” tootled the eunuch angrily, throwing open the door and throwing himself through, the petulance of the gesture spoiled somewhat by a mass that was just chock-a-block with inertia. The door barely squeezed shut after passing his bulging behind and the three women immediately rushed to press their ears against the panel. They heard:
It is with the greatest pleasure that I have the privilege and inexpressible honor of introducing one of the premier performers of our or any other age, an artist whose, ah, artistry has amazed and delighted audiences on two continents, who has earned the heartfelt accolades of virtually every royal court, who rival one another for command performances. It is with the most abject humbleness, to say nothing of heartfelt appreciation for the opportunity of being allowed to even speak the revered name, that I make known to you the imminent appearance of . . . and here, your Excellency, you must understand that I am instructed to speak in a whisper of hushed and awed tone . . . the imminent appearance of Miss Rykkla Woxen!
Bobasnyda had barely breathed these last four syllables when behind him the door was flung open and our heroine swept past his bulk, glimmering like a windblown
ignis fatuus
, like a rag of cloud unimpeded by a mountain, like a pennanted skiff circumnavigating a plodding steamship.
“That is enough your terrible flattery! I am here!” she cried and with a wave of her hand dismissed the eunuch who, to his amazement, suddenly found himself outside a closed door, in the anteroom with a pair of smirking women.
Before the Baudad could speak, Rykkla said, “You can tell that vast blanc mange that he need not hover beyond that door, there must be things elsewhere that better command his attention.”
“Well, yes, of course,” replied the Baudad, who picked up a flexible tube from its clip on a column by his elbow and spoke a few, brief words into it. He returned the tube to its place and said to the girl, “He is gone. Only your, um, attendants remain.”
The Baudad looked at Rykkla with an expression mixed almost equally of curiousity and amusement. In her own turn, Rykkla examined the man critically, if not without a little professional interest. She had not been able to clearly see him during her pervious interview and now that he stood in the midst of the light-filled chamber, he was no longer a vague silhouette.
Interesting. Makes me wish that I was scouting for my circus. He’d probably be terribly offended if I made him an offer.
She had first assumed that the Baudad was a man of medium height, but this she realized was only because his eyes had met hers on more or less a level. However, where most other people’s bodies would have continued on past the waist and eventually bifurcate into at least a pair of legs, the Baudad’s stopped, evidently just below his navel. In place of lower torso and limbs, his truncated body sat atop a kind of elaborate stool or highchair, held there by a harness of artfully-tooled leather straps. The woodwork was very finely turned and carved, she noticed. A fringe of gold-threaded brocade hid the actual juncture, but a half dozen cranks and handles protruded through its folds. A system of belts, chains and pulleys connected these with large wheels or casters at the base of the stool. By turning the cranks with his powerful arms and hands he was, with this arrangement, able to move around with surprising alacrity. What existed above this interesting and ingenious machinery was, unfortunately, less prepossessing if no less fascinating, though perhaps less from the point of view of a sideshow scout than from that of a dedicated teratologist.
The Baudad proper was a disparate assembly consisting of a whithered torso upon which the richly embroidered silks hung as though upon a wire hanger, his chest seemed so hollow that Rykkla suspected that she’d be able to see his spine through it, a long, S-shaped neck, apparently bent beneath the weight of the massive skull, and incongruously though not inexplicably muscular arms that hung well past the level of the Baudad’s platform. The face was as angular and blocky as the cornerstone of a building, as though if she were to look behind his prominent ears she would find the words
Erected 3214
engraved there. None of his features, save the ears, were of any particular prominence: the nose was a thin ridge, the tiny eyes (slightly mismatched in size) almost socketless, the lips a dry-looking crack. The face looked more like random imperfections in what was supposed to have been a flawlessly cast cement block.
I can’t begin to imagine what he intends to do with me, nor how for that matter,
thought Rykkla, who realized perfectly well that the Baudad Alcatode must necessarily be missing more than just a pair of legs.
“Well,” he chuckled, “that was quite an entrance. Probably did Bobasnyda a power of good, the pompous bag of suet.”
“Always glad to be of service,” replied Rykkla, courteously, adding: “This is a very nice place.” And it was, too. Just as she had remembered it: the ceiling and three walls all of large, frosty glass panes with early morning sunlight pouring into the solarium like warm milk through a colander.
“It
is
awfully close in here, though, don’t you think?” asked Rykkla, who, in spite of the almost complete insubstantiality of her costume, felt beads of perspiration tickling meandering paths down her spine and between her breasts. She knew that the beads of moisture exuding from every pore were beginning to glue the diaphanous fabric, already as transparent as cellophane, to her skin. The Baudad’s huge head rotated tropistically toward the light. “Ah!” he whispered. “The sun is so warm! So good! It fills me like a bottle of hot wine! Hot spiced wine! Do you not like the sun?”
“I can take it or leave it. Generally, it does my complexion no good.”
He turned his flat, lifeless eyes onto her. It was like looking into the expressionless surface of a rubber eraser. “Oh, but you must be wrong, my dear. You are so . . . perfect. Nothing could possibly have happened to you that was not itself perfect as well.”
“I could argue with that.”
“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” he appeared to laugh. “You are very funny. A sense of humor implies intelligence and intelligence is another aspect of perfection. None of the other women here have a sense of humor. Therefore they probably lack intelligence. Do you like jokes?”
Sure, but the funniest thing here is you, my friend.
But aloud she said, “Of course. Do you know any good ones?”
“Oh, certainly! Certainly!” He struck the palms of his massive hands together with the thudding sound of two sandbags colliding. “Would you like to hear one?”
“There’s nothing that I’d like better.”
Though not from you, even if I can’t see any way of preventing it.
His head sank onto his insubstantial chest, deep in thought, as he paced in a tight circle. Rykkla admired the silence with which his machinery operated. The wheels, she noticed, had rubber rims that produced only the softest squelching sound on the tiled floor, still damp from the freshly-watered plants.
“Ah! I know!” He swiveled tightly to face her. “Two Peigambar herdsmen meet on a roadway. One says to the other, ‘Queer, isn’t it?’ ‘What’s queer?’ says the second herdsman. ‘That night falls, ‘ ‘Yes?’ ‘, but doesn’t break!’ ‘No.’ ‘And the day breaks, ‘ ‘Yes.’ ‘, but doesn’t fall!’ ‘No, but it’s getting very warm.’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘There would be a big thaw but for one thing, ‘ ‘And what is that?’ ‘There’s nothing frozen.’ And they part.”
Only by the quickness of her not inconsiderable wit did Rykkla realize that the joke was finished and managed to laugh without the passage of so much as a single extraneous heartbeat. “Haha!” she said. Thus encouraged, the Baudad continued.
“‘How are you today?’ asked the gentleman of his friend. ‘Oh, I can’t kick,’ the friend replied. ‘Thought you were ill,’ commented the first gentleman in some confusion. ‘I am, I have the gout.’”
“Oh! Haha!”
“I saw a sign in a hardware store today that said ‘cast iron sinks’. As though everyone didn’t know that already!”
“Hahaha.”
“A Piegambaran comes to this country, remains here ten years, and goes back to Piegambar and dies. What is he?”
“Oh, ah, I don’t know.”
“A corpse, of course! A coquettish girl saucily says to a soldier, ‘I am told that though you are a military man, you are afraid of powder.’ replies he: ‘To prove that the assertion is calumnious, I have only to do this.’ Whereupon he lightly kisses her on the cheek, and his lips bear witness that he was not. The same girl asks the soldier, ‘Why do you remove your sword, Lieutenant?’ And the gallant officer replies, ‘My lovely miss, the fire from those eyes would compel the bravest soldier to surrender his arms.’ A tramp asks of a housewife, ‘Can’t you give a poor man something to eat? I got shot in the war and can’t work.’ ‘Where was you shot?’ asks the good woman. ‘In the spinal column, mum.’ ‘Go ‘way! There was no such battle!’ Did you know that while I was eating my breakfast this morning the butter ran? That was nothing, however, because I was uptown last night and saw a cake walk. Sailors are not usually fond of agricultural implements, but they always welcome the cry of ‘Land-hoe.’”
“Um. Ha.”
“A squall on the sea is a stress of weather, and a squaller on land is a songstress. A boil on the pot is worth two on the neck. A man stole a harness the other day and never left a trace. ‘I don’t give a rap,’ said the coachman, haughtily, as he rang the electric bell. The glazier is not necessarily a tiresome man just because he ‘gives you a pane.’”