Fade Out (36 page)

One of the cadets grabbed his arms with polite firmness. ‘Would you mind standing aside, sir?'

The cadets put their shoulders to the doors and got them partly open Another white cloud of cold air swirled around them.

‘Don't breathe in!' cried Wedderkind.

Connors, Spencer, and Page passed the two turboblowers up to the cadets by the doorway to pour in what heat they could, while Shanklin dragged Turner out. Spencer kicked both doors shut.

Wedderkind knelt over Turner. The moisture on his skin had formed into tiny crystals of ice, and his lips were blue. His friends crowded around him. Spencer loosed a stream of remorseful obscenities. Wedderkind stood up.

‘Is he going to be all right, sir?'

Wedderkind shook his head.

‘That's crazy – he has to be.' One of the cadets began to knead Turner's chest. He looked up. ‘Doesn't anybody know what to do?'

Connors took Wedderkind aside. ‘What happened to him?'

‘His lungs froze solid. That's what happened. Stopped his circulation, like that.' Wedderkind snapped his fingers.

A jeep screeched to a halt behind them and the emergency medical team piled out. The young doctor tried to revive Turner's heart with an injection of digitalis, pounding it with his fist, artificial respiration, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was all quite useless. Turner had died as he stepped through the door. The medics pulled a stretcher from the back of the jeep, put Turner on it, and covered him with a blanket.

Wedderkind pointed to Shanklin, the cadet who had gone in to pull out Turner.

‘You'd better take this young man with you. He's going to need some fast treatment for frostbite.'

‘Right,' said the young doctor. Shanklin was ushered aboard the jeep. Turner's body was loaded on the back.

Wedderkind watched them drive away. ‘It's all my fault. I saw it happening and just didn't shout fast enough.'

‘No, it's mine,' said Spencer. ‘If I'd tried harder to open the door – '

‘It might have been you under that blanket,' said Connors.

The outside walls of the field lab units were now covered with an opaque layer of white frost like that on the windows.

There was a series of sliding noises from inside the lab, a clatter of things falling, glass smashing. Spencer picked up Turner's hard hat and smashed one of the windows in the door to the central unit. Cold white air spilled out through the hole. Spencer edged up to the window. The inside of the central unit was a complete shambles.

As his body temperature had plunged past zero, Friday had turned himself into a supermagnet, exerting a colossal force that had dragged everything metallic towards him.
They broke the windows in the four wings of the field lab and found the same chaos. Everything was covered with frost. Expensive and fragile equipment stuck out bizarrely from the walls in the corner of the room where each one joined the central unit. The force of the attraction had even sheared tools from the benches where they had iced up.

‘Everything's in a dreadful mess,' said Page. ‘It'll take weeks to build it all up again.'

‘
And
demagnetize everything,' said Lovell.

‘Oh, dear, yes, of course,' said Page.

There were more crashing noises as other bits of equipment broke free from the thin grip of ice and flew across the room towards Friday.

‘At least we know how these two generate their magnetic fields,' said Wedderkind.

‘Great,' said Connors. ‘But what do we do now?'

‘I think we ought to let him out before he does any more damage.'

They got Aaron to knock both ends of the central unit with the shovel of his earthmover. The intense cold inside rolled out chilling the outside air into small white clouds that drifted around the watching research group. They could now see clear through the shattered central unit. Friday was wedged in by a pile of miscellaneous metal objects – racks, chairs, filing cabinets.

Pushing out his folded legs, Friday calmly created enough room in the middle of the frozen junkheap to stretch them. He had obviously switched off the current which had turned him into a supermagnet. Climbing over the mess, he walked out of the far end of the hut and up on to the plateau. From there, he headed up on to the crest of the Ridge and wandered about in his usual aimless fashion until his white frosted shape thawed out completely.

Back at the field lab the research group began the task of putting the place in order, with the help of a cadet work detail. It was a messy job. All the paper work became soggy as it thawed out and had to be either thrown away or carefully dried. Everything else had to be wiped down. Every item of equipment that contained ferromagnetic or diamagnetic elements was found to be strongly magnetized, and any two objects placed less than three feet apart promptly slid together.

Connors and Wedderkind drove down to the base camp medical unit to see how Shanklin was. They found him heavily bandaged and under treatment for severe frostbite. His hands, face, and feet were badly swollen. Surgery was inevitable.

The news had already been broken to Allbright when they went to see him in the operations hut.

‘I'm sorry about that boy Turner,' said Connors. ‘And Shanklin – hell, that's just dreadful. They told us he's going to lose all his fingers and most of his face.'

‘I've spoken to the other cadets involved,' said Allbright. ‘It seems that the accident was as much, if not more, due to their zeal as to anyone else's misjudgement.'

‘Nevertheless,' insisted Connors, ‘it was
my
misjudgement.'

‘No, I'm more to blame than you are,' said Wedderkind. ‘I knew exactly what the dangers were. I just didn't react quickly enough.'

‘None of us want to cause the death of any of the people on this project,' said Allbright. ‘Especially these young men whose lives are full of promise. But if you fail to act decisively, you fail the men under your command. You've just lost your first soldier, Mr Connors. Believe me, losing the second is no easier.'

Max joined Connors and Wedderkind at their supper table. He hadn't been asked, but then Max was like that. He unloaded his supper, dropped the tray against the leg of the table, and made a mess of the ashtray with his cigar stub.

‘Didn't go too well today, huh?' Max filled his big, square jaw with food.

‘Not too well,' said Connors.

‘We're having problems immobilizing him,' said Wedderkind.

‘You're also having problems getting near him,' said Max.

‘That's partly due to our limitations,' said Wedderkind. ‘The human body only functions efficiently within a very limited temperature range. From about minus ten degrees to plus forty degrees centigrade. We can survive in temperatures in excess of that fifty-degree range, but we have to insulate ourselves.'

‘If we'd had the cold suits you might have been okay then.'

‘We could have got near Friday,' said Wedderkind. ‘But when he turned on the magnetic field, we couldn't put a screwdriver near him without losing control of it.'

‘Yeah, I saw the mess,' said Max. ‘What's the plan now? You gonna try the big trip?'

‘The space suits are on their way,' said Connors. ‘We still need to be able to keep Friday out of the way while we get in and out.'

‘I could drop the blade of a bulldozer on him,' offered Max. ‘Pin him to the ground.'

‘Max, until we know whether this thing is alive or not, we're trying not to damage him.'

‘He's already killed one guy.'

‘Friday didn't kill him, the cold air did.'

Max eyed Connors and chewed another mouthful slowly. ‘Your father must have been a lawyer,' he said.

It took two days of intensive work to straighten out the field lab, but most of the magnetized equipment had to be replaced. While work was still in progress, the two space suits that Spencer had ordered arrived from Cape Canaveral, Florida, along with a brace of NASA technicians.

Spencer dressed up in one of the suits and was then loaded with the bulky backpack that contained the life-support systems. The suit and pack had been designed for optimum performance in zero-gravity or lunar-g conditions where everything weighed one-sixth of its weight on Earth. Spencer found it was a lot to carry around. It was clear that if anything went wrong while one or more of them was inside Crusoe, they wouldn't be able to get out in a hurry.

Davis, the biologist, and Tomkin, the zoologist, were satisfied that Friday was continuing to explore every corner of his immediate environment, and was keeping them all under close observation. Collis, the language scientist, who, in many people's view, was totally superfluous to requirements, had got together with Alan Wetherby. For several days now, they had been running through the videotapes of Friday trying to spot any sequence of limb or antenna movements that could be even remotely construed as a signal. In conjunction with the videotapes, they were also studying the recordings of
Friday's rapid clicking noises, made with the help of a long-range cannon mike.

Collis, who had carried out analytical studies in connection with the Navy's dolphin research program, was well aware of the enormity of the task facing them. The chances of communicating with Friday – establishing what was known as ‘interspecies interlock' – were virtually nil.

On the technical side, at least, some small progress had been made. After a careful examination of the contents of the wrecked field lab, it was clear that Friday could drop his body temperature from its normal thirty degrees centigrade to Absolute Zero – minus 273 degrees centigrade. The inevitable question was, if he could drop his temperature that far, how
high
could he raise it? He was turning out to be a far more sophisticated package than they had originally thought, but this new capability fitted in with the idea of Friday as the mobile, all-purpose unit of a planetary probe. If he was to function on Mercury, he would need to lower his body temperature. The same would apply on Venus. And, conversely, he would need to produce heat to withstand the bleak cold of the surface of Pluto, the planet farthest from the sun.

But what about the differing forces of gravity within our solar system? From measurements of the tracks left in the soil, Friday's weight had been estimated at three hundred pounds. Although they had no way of discovering the load-bearing characteristics of the black crystal, Neame had produced calculations to show that Friday's legs were just thick enough to support his weight. To withstand Jupiter's crushing atmospheric pressure – a million Earth atmospheres, plus a force of gravity 2.7 times that of Earth – Friday's legs would have to be as thick as tree trunks. Perhaps Crusoe contained another vehicle specially adapted for exploring high-gravity planets.

Lovell came up with another idea. If Friday could raise and lower his temperature, perhaps he could also vary his weight, in which case the loading on his structure would remain constant. It would not be necessary to change his atomic structure. The weightlessness could be achieved by a condition of minus-g, an antigravity mechanism, working on the principle of magnetic repulsion. Practical experiments had already shown that a train could be floated on a magnetic cushion and then driven forward by linear induction motors.

Lovell's suggestion was based on the theory that he and Brecetti were redeveloping, which was that Crusoe
was
harnessing the Earth's magnetic field rather than producing his own. According to this line of thought, Friday could perhaps harness planetary g-forces in the same way.

‘But wait a minute,' said Connors. ‘If he can adopt an antigravity state to walk around on planets like Jupiter, he could also use it on this one and – just float away.'

Lovell raised a thick pair of grey eyebrows and tilted his head to one side. ‘Yes, he could.'

Connors turned to Wedderkind. ‘So we haven't just got to fence him in, we've got to be ready to sit on him as well.'

‘We can't exclude that possibility.'

Connors considered the situation for a moment. ‘How far are you prepared to go to immobilize Friday?'

‘Anything short of physical damage,' said Wedderkind. ‘At least until we have an opportunity to look inside Crusoe.'

‘I don't get it,' said Max. ‘Why do you guys keep pussyfooting around? The only way to find out how this thing works is to take it apart. It's got to be done sooner or later so why not now?'

Wedderkind took off his glasses and began to wipe the
lenses. ‘Max, I don't think there is a person in this room who doesn't want to examine this pair, right down to the last molecule.'

He replaced his glasses carefully. ‘The fundamental question is, should we interfere with the functional integrity of these two craft, before we gain some inkling of their mission? Earth may be just one port of call on a voyage of exploration that could include our whole solar system – or even our galaxy. Perhaps what we
should
be thinking about is what evidence we could provide Crusoe and Friday with as proof of our existence, the extent of our civilization. Artefacts, a record of Man's history and his achievements for them to take back to their point of origin.'