Space Cadet (27 page)

But Thurlow, while he did not die, did not get any better.

“The old girl’s suggestion was sort of radical, but logical. She suggested that her healers take Burke’s head apart first, to see how it was made. Then they could operate on the boss and fix him.”

“
What?
” said Matt.

Tex was having trouble controlling himself. He laughed so hard he strangled, then got hiccoughs and had to be pounded on the back. “Oh, boy!” he finally exploded, tears streaming down his cheeks. “This is wonderful. I can’t wait to see Stinky’s face. You haven’t told him, have you?”

“No.”

“Then let me. Dibs on the job.”

“I don’t think we ought to tell him,” objected Oscar. “Why kick him when he’s down?”

“Oh, don’t be so noble! It won’t hurt any to let him know that his social rating is ‘guinea pig.’”

“She really hates him, doesn’t she?” Matt commented.

“Why shouldn’t she?” Tex answered. “A dozen or more of her people dead—do you expect her to regard it as a schoolboy prank?”

“You’ve both got her wrong,” Oscar objected. “She doesn’t hate him.”

“Huh?”

“Could you hate a dog? Or a cat—”

“Sure could,” said Tex. “There was an old tomcat we had once—”

“Pipe down and let me finish. Conceding your point, you can hate a cat only by placing it on your own social level. She doesn’t regard Burke as…well, as
people
at all, because he doesn’t follow the customs. We’re ‘people’ to her, because we do, even though we look like him. But Burke in her mind is just a dangerous animal, like a wolf or a shark, to be penned up or destroyed—but not hated or punished.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “I told her it wouldn’t do, because we had an esoteric and unexplainable but unbreakable religious tabu that interfered—that blocked her off from pressing the point. But I told her we’d like to use Burke’s ship to get the lieutenant back. She gave it to me. We go out tomorrow to look at it.”

“Well, for crying out loud—why didn’t you say so, instead of giving all this buildup?”

They had made much the same underwater trip as on entering the city, to be followed by a longish swim and a short trip overland. The city mother herself honored them with her company.

The
Gary
was everything Burke had claimed for her, modern, atomic-powered, expensively outfitted and beautiful, with sharp wings as graceful as a swallow’s.

She was also a hopeless wreck.

Her hull was intact except the ruined door, which appeared to have been subjected to great heat, or an incredible corrosive, or both. Matt wondered how it had been done and noted it as still another indication that the Venerians were not the frog-seal-beaver creatures his Earth-side prejudices had led him to think.

The inside of the ship had looked fairly well, too, until they started checking over the controls. In searching the ship the amphibians, to whom even a common door latch was a puzzle, had simply burned their way through impediments—including the access hatch to the ship’s autopilot and gyro compartment. The circuits of the ship’s nervous system were a mass of fused and melted junk.

Nevertheless they spent three hours convincing themselves that it would take the resources of a dockyard to make the ship fly again. They gave up reluctantly at last and started back, their spirits drooping.

Oscar had at once taken up with the city mother the project of recovering the jeep. He had not mentioned it before as the
Gary
seemed the better bet. Language difficulties would have hampered him considerably—their hostesses had no word for “vehicle,” much less a word for “rocket ship”—but the
Gary
gave him something to point to wherewith to explain.

When she understood what he was driving at she gave orders which caused the party to swim to the point where the cadets had first been picked up. The cadets made sure of the spot by locating the abandoned litter and from there Oscar had led them back to the sinkhole that was the grave of the jeep. There he acted out what had happened, showing her the scar in the bank where the jeep had balanced and pacing off on the bank the dimensions of the ship.

The mother-of-many discussed the problem with her immediate staff while the cadets waited, ignored rather than excluded. Then she abruptly gave the order to leave; it was getting on in the late afternoon and even the Venerians do not voluntarily remain out in the jungle overnight.

That had ended the matter for several days. Oscar’s attempts to find out what, if anything, was being done about the jeep were brushed off as one might snub a persistent brat. It left them with nothing to do. Tex played his harmonica until threatened with a ducking in the room’s center pool. Oscar sat around, nursing his arm and brooding. Matt spent much of his time watching over Thurlow and became well acquainted with the nurses who never left him, especially one bright-eyed cheerful little thing who called herself “Th’wing.”

Th’wing changed his viewpoint about Venerians. At first he regarded her much as he might a good and faithful, and unusually intelligent dog. By degrees he began to think of her as a friend, an interesting companion—and as “people.” He had tried to tell her about himself and his own kind and his own world. She had listened with alert interest, but without ever taking her eyes off Thurlow.

Matt was forced willy-nilly into the concepts of astronomy—and came up against a complete block. To Th’wing there was the world of water and swamp and occasional dry land; above that was the endless cloud. She knew the Sun, for her eyes, perceptive to infrared, could see it, even though Matt could not, but she thought of it as a disc, of light and warmth, not as a star.

As for other stars, none of her people had ever seen them and the idea did not exist. The notion of another planet was not ridiculous; it was simply incomprehensible—Matt got nowhere.

He told Oscar about it. “Well, what did you expect?” Oscar had wanted to know. “All the natives are like that. They’re polite but they think you are talking about your religion.”

“The natives around the colonies, too?”

“Same deal.”

“But they’ve seen rocket ships, some of ’em, anyhow. Where do they think we come from? They must know we haven’t been here always.”

“Sure they know that—but the ones at South Pole think we came originally from North Pole and the ones around North Pole are sure we came from South Pole—and it’s no use trying to tell them anything different.”

The difficulty was not one-sided. Th’wing was continually using words and concepts which Matt could not understand and which could not be straightened out even with Oscar’s help. He began to get hazily the idea that Th’wing was the sophisticated one and that he, Matt, was the ignorant outlander. “Sometimes I think,” he told Tex, “that Th’wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron—but flunking the course.”

“Well, don’t let it throw you, kid. You’ll be a moron, yet, if you just keep trying.”

On the morning fifteen Venus days after their arrival the mother of the city sent for them and had them taken to the site of the jeep. They stood on the same bank where they had climbed ashore from the sinking ship, but the scene had changed. A great hole stretched out at their feet; in it the jeep lay, three-quarters exposed. A swarm of Venerians crawled over it and around it like workmen in a dockyard.

The amphibians had begun by adding something to the thin yellow mud of the sinkhole. Oscar had tried to get the formula for the additive, but even his command of the language was useless—the words were strange. Whatever it was, the effect was to turn the almost-liquid mud into a thick gel which became more and more stiff the longer it was exposed to air. The little folk had carved it away from the top as fast as it consolidated, the jeep was now surrounded by the sheer walls of a caisson-like pit. A ramp led up on the shoreward side and a stream of the apparently tireless little creatures trotted up it, bearing more jelled blocks of mud.

The cadets had climbed down into the pit to watch, talking in high spirits about the prospects of putting the jeep back into commission and jetting out again, until the Venerian in charge of the work had urged them emphatically to go up out of the pit and stay out of the way. They joined the city mother and waited.

“Ask her how she expects to get it up out of there, Oz,” Tex suggested. Oscar did so.

“
Tell thy impatient daughter to chase her fish and I will chase mine
.”

“No need for her to be rude about it,” Tex complained.

“
What did she say?
” inquired the mother-of-many.

“
‘She’ thanks thee for the lesson
,” Oscar prevaricated.

The Little People worked rapidly. It was evident that the ship would be entirely free before the day was far advanced—and clean as well; the outside shone now and a steady procession of them had been pouring in and out of the door of the ship, bearing cakes of jellied mud. In the last hour the routine had changed; the little workers came out bearing distended bladders. The clean-up squad was at work.

Oscar watched them approvingly. “I told you they would lick it clean.”

Matt looked thoughtful. “I’m worried, Oz, about the possibility that they will mess with something on the control board and get into trouble.”

“Why? The leads are all sealed away. They can’t hurt anything. You locked the board when you left it, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Anyhow, they can’t fire the jet when she’s in that attitude even if you hadn’t.”

“That’s true. Still, I’m worried.”

“Well, let’s take a look, then. I want to talk to the foreman in any case. I’ve got an idea.”

“What idea?” asked Tex.

“Maybe they can get her upright in the pit. It seems to me we could take off from there and never have to drag her out. Might save several days.” They went down the ramp and located the Venerian in charge, then Matt and Tex went inside the ship while Oscar stayed to talk over his idea.

It was hard to believe that the pilot room had lately; been choked with filthy, yellow mud. A few amphibians were still working in the after end of the room; elsewhere the compartment was clean.

Matt climbed to the pilot’s seat and started inspecting. He noticed first that the sponge-rubber eyeguards for the infra-red viewer were missing. This was not important, but he wondered what had happened to them—did the little folk have the vice of souvenir snitching? He filed away the suspicion, and attempted a dry run on the controls, without firing the jet.

Nothing operated—nothing at all.

He looked the board over more carefully. To a casual inspection it was clean, bright, in perfect order, but he now perceived many little pits and specks. He dug at one with a finger nail, something came away. He worked at it a bit more and produced a tiny hole into the interior of the control board. It gave him a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. “Say, Tex—come here a minute. I’ve got something.”

“You think you’ve got something,” Tex answered in muffled tones. “Wait till you’ve seen this.”

He found Tex with a wrench in his hand and a cover plate off the gyro compartment. “After what happened to the
Gary
I decided to check this first. Did you ever see such a mess?”

The mud had gotten in. The gyros, although shut down, were of course still spinning when the ship had gone into the sinkhole and normally would have coasted for days; they should still have been spinning when Tex removed the cover. Instead they had ground to a stop against the mud—burned to a stop.

“We had better call Oscar,” Matt said dully.

With Oscar’s help they surveyed the mess. Every instrument, every piece of electronic equipment had been invaded. Non-metallic materials were missing completely; thin metal sheets such as instrument cases were riddled with pinholes. “I can’t understand what did it,” Oscar protested, almost in tears.

Matt asked the Venerian in charge of the work. She did not understand him at first; he pointed out the pinholes, whereupon she took a lump of the jelled mud and mashed it flat. With a slender finger she carefully separated what seemed to be a piece of white string, a couple inches long. “
This is the source of thy troubles
.”

“Know what it is, Oz?”

“Some sort of worm. I don’t recognize it. But I wouldn’t expect to; the polar regions are nothing like this, thank goodness.”

“I suppose we might as well call off the working party.

“Let’s don’t jump the gun. There might be some way to salvage the mess. We’ve
got
to.”

“Not a chance. The gyros alone are enough. You can’t raise ship in a wingless job without gyros. It’s impossible.”

“Maybe we could clean them up and get them to working.”

“Maybe you could—I can’t. The mud got to the
bearings
, Oz.”

Jensen agreed regretfully. The gyros, the finest precision equipment in a ship, were no better than their bearings. Even an instrument maker in a properly equipped shop would have thrown up his hands at gyros abused as these had been.

“We’ve at least got to salvage some electronic equipment and jury-rig some sort of a sending set. We’ve got to get a message through.”

“You’ve seen it. What do you think?”

“Well—we’ll pick out the stuff that seems in the best shape and take it back with us. They’ll help us with the stuff.”

“What sort of shape will it be in after an hour or so in the water? No, Oz, the thing to do is to lock up the door, once the last of the filth is out and come back and work here.”

“Okay, well do that.” Oscar called to Tex, who was still snooping around. He arrived swearing.

“What now, Tex?” Oscar asked wearily.

“I thought maybe we could at least take some civilized food back with us, but those confounded worms bored into the cans. Every ration in the ship is spoiled.”

“Is that all?”

“‘Is that all? Is that all?’ the man says! What do you want? Flood, pestilence, and earthquakes?”

But it was not all—further inspection showed another thing which would have dismayed them had they not already been as low in spirit as they could get. The jeep’s jet ran on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The fuel tanks, insulated and protected from direct radiation, could retain fuel for long periods, but the warm mud had reached them and heated them; the expanding gases had bled out through relief valves. The jeep was out of fuel.