Alternating Currents (15 page)

‘For what?’

‘Who knows for what? If I could put him through an E.E.S., I might be able to find out. But how can you run an electroencephaloscope on a tub like this? I’m lucky they let me have an X-ray.’

Lorch said, perhaps a touch too dryly, ‘What did doctors do before they had those gadgets ? Shoot the patients ?’

It made Broderick look at him thoughtfully. ‘No,’ he said after a second. ‘Of course not. With luck, I could run a verbal analysis on him, and I might pick some of the key stuff out of the sludge in, oh, four or five months. That’s what they did before they had the E.E.S. And now let’s get busy, mister.’

The two of them worked over an inventory of Broderick’s medicine chest, because even though the idea of putting the whole ship’s crew in suspended animation was ridiculous and impossible and contra-regs besides - what else was there ?

And it kept getting hotter.

~ * ~

Even Groden felt it.

He called reasonably to whoever was near, ‘Please do what I ask. Put things back the way they were, please. Please do it!’ He said it many times, many different ways. But his tongue was black velvet and his mouth an enormous cave; he couldn’t feel the words, couldn’t feel his tongue against his cheeks or teeth. That was the needles they kept sticking him with, he told himself. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘no more needles.’

But he wasn’t getting through.

Groden relaxed. He forced himself to relax, and it wasn’t easy. His body was all wrong; it hurt in places, and felt nothing in places, and - were those feelings at his waist and shoulders and legs the touch of restraining belts ? He couldn’t tell.

He was lying on his back, he was pretty sure. At least, the voices seemed to come from points in the plane of his body, as well as he could locate them. But if he was lying on his back, he asked himself, why didn’t he feel pressure on his back ? Or pressure anywhere? Could the ship be in freefall - all this length of time ? Impossible, he told himself.

He went back to relaxing.

The thing was to keep from panic. If you were physically relaxed, you couldn’t panic. That was what they had taught at the Academy, and it was true. Only they hadn’t taught the converse, he thought bitterly; they hadn’t said that when you were in panic it was impossible to relax.

No. That’s not the way to go about it, he told himself. Relax. Occupy your mind with - with - well, occupy your mind with
something.
Take inventory, for instance.

One, it’s hot. There was no doubt of that.

Two, something was pressing against his body at various points. It
felt
like restraining belts.

Three, voices came and talked to him. Damned dirty lying voices that - He caught himself just in time.

Four, he said to himself,
four,
somebody keeps sticking needles into me.

It was the needles, he thought wretchedly, that made everything else so bad. Maybe the needles
caused
everything else. With craven hope he told himself: sure, the needles; they’re sticking me full of drugs; naturally I’m having delusions. Who wouldn’t ? I’m lucky if I don’t turn into a hophead if I get out of this -

When I
get out of this, he corrected himself, whimpering.

He wondered whether he was crying.

Of course, if those lying voices were, by some chance,
not
lying, then he couldn’t be crying. Because he wouldn’t have any eyes to cry with. And, he told himself reasonably, there wasn’t much doubt that the voices were plausible. He had been injured somewhere around his eyes; he had felt the pain, and it was too intense and specific to be unreal. That was in the old days - how long ago they were, he could not begin to imagine - when there had been only a few needles now and then, and even if he did have a little trouble moving and talking, he was still in perfect possession of his faculties.

All right, he thought. So I was injured around the eyes.

But the rest - that was a damned lie. He had even believed it for a while - when the Broderick-voice said, with hypocritical sympathy, that he wouldn’t be able to see anything, ever, unless they got him new corpse’s eyes out of an eye bank on Earth. It had been a blow, but he believed it. Until, he reminded himself triumphantly, he had
seen!
Seen as clearly as he knew the voices were lying, that was when he began to suspect the existence of the whole horrible, senseless plot.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘Please, please - no!’ But they couldn’t be hearing him, because they were going right on with another needle; he could feel it. Furiously he fought to pull back the alien arm, make the marble lips move, the black velvet tongue speak, ‘Please-’

~ * ~

On the bridge, the captain was staring fixedly at the alien stars. It was a measure of his state of mind that he was on the bridge at all, at a time when the ship was going nowhere and there was nothing to be done beyond the routine.

He leaned forward in his chair, jerking free the little magnets sewn into the waist of his trunks, and walked heel-and-toe across the bridge. The little Recorder Mate, Eklund or whatever her name was, was standing humbly in a corner, waiting for him to tell her why he had sent for her. But, the captain confessed to himself, the trouble was he didn’t exactly know why himself. And, after all, why should he? It was so damned hot -

Belay that kind of talk, he told himself. He said: ‘Eklund! Index.’ The girl’s eyes closed like the snapping of a shutter.

‘Take over,’ the Captain ordered the Exec. ‘Run her through the Riemannian configurations again. We’ll get every bit of dope she has.’ And they would, he knew. Because they had already.

And none of it helped.

~ * ~

It was a good thing, Ensign Lorch told himself, sweating, that spaceships were not painted. Otherwise he would surely have been set to commanding a crew chipping paint.

Terra II
being welded of unpainted metal, the colour a part of the alloy itself, his crew was defluffing the filter traps in the air circulators. It was a job for idiots, planned by morons; it took six men five hours to disassemble the air trunks and the junction boxes, five minutes to blow out the collected fluff on the static accumulators, five hours to put them back together again. There was an alternative method, which involved burning them clean with a high-voltage arc; that took one man slightly under three seconds. But that, the Exec had decreed, meant heat.

And
heat
was the enemy.

Of course, there was still a third alternative, which was to leave the fluff in the filter traps undisturbed. This would have generated no heat at all. But it also would have taken no time and occupied no personnel, which were decisive counts against it in the eyes of the Exec. A little fluff in the filters would make no conceivable difference to the operation of the ship, but idle men might make a very great difference indeed.

‘Hurry it up,’ growled Ensign Lorch. The men didn’t even look at him. Lorch looked around him self-consciously. As an officer, he had made inspection tours in the enlisted women’s quarters before, but he couldn’t help feeling out of place and slightly apprehensive.

That girl, the Recorder Mate - Eklund was her name - was droning all the parts of
Cyrano de Bergerac
to an audience in the far end of the lounge, and parts of Cyrano’s farewell to Roxanne kept mixing in with Lorch’s thoughts.

It didn’t matter; he wasn’t thinking to any purpose, anyhow. Neither he nor anyone else on
Terra II,
he told himself bitterly. Fifteen thousand light-years. The light that came to them from Sol - how weak and faint! - had been bright summer sunlight beating down on the skin tents of Neolithic Man creeping northward after the retreating ice. And the light from the nearest stars beyond
Terra II’s
skin, contrariwise, would fall on an Earth inconceivably advanced, a planet of mental Titans . . .

‘Mister Lorch,’ someone was repeating plaintively.

The ensign shook himself and focused on the spaceman wavering before him. ‘Eh?’

‘We’re done,’ the man repeated. ‘It’s all put together again. The filter traps,’ he explained.

‘Oh,’ said Ensign Lorch. He glanced self-consciously at the women at the far end of the lounge, but they were absorbed in Rostand’s love story. There was a murmur of gossip from them - ‘so all at once I knew there was somebody
looking
at me. Well, I called the duty officer and we searched, but -’

Ensign Lorch cleared his throat. ‘Well done,’ he said absently. ‘Dismissed.’ He turned his back on the detail and propelled himself down the passageway towards the sickbay.

If he went back to the bridge, the Old Man would find work for him; if he went to the wardroom, the Exec would find an excuse to send him to the Old Man. And his own quarters were horribly, stifling hot.

He accosted the ship’s surgeon and demanded, ‘How long are we expected to live in this heat ?’

Commander Broderick said irritably, ‘How should I know ? You don’t die of the heat, that’s sure. There are other things that will come first - suffocation, thirst, maybe even starvation.’

Lorch looked thoughtfully at the medical officer. Red-eyed, his face lined with worry and weariness, Broderick was showing strain. Through his scanty shorts, you could see the fishbelly whiteness of his skin; it was old man’s skin, and Broderick, for all of his passing the annual fitness exam, was getting on towards being an old man.

Lorch said more gently, ‘I guess you’re getting a rough time all round.’

‘Good Lord, am I!’ the surgeon snapped. ‘Half the ship’s complement has been in here today - little fiddling things like prickly heat and dizzy spells. Dizzy spells! How the devil can anyone
not
have dizzy spells? The women’s quarters have practically a regular courier service. If it isn’t antiperspirants, it’s salt tablets; if it isn’t salt tablets, it’s alcohol from the ship’s store for rubdowns.’ He passed his hand shakily over his eyes. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘to top it all off there’s him.’ He pointed to the inner chamber of the sick-bay. Lorch, listening, could hear the blinded Groden’s rasping breath.

There was a shrill whistle from the speaking tube, then, tinnily, a voice from the bridge. ‘Commander Broderick! Captain requests you report to the bridge at once.’

The surgeon blinked and swore. ‘How the devil am I supposed to do that ?’ he demanded. ‘Two of my crewmen are out with heat prostration, and the other two were working all night. All right, I go up to the bridge. Suppose there’s some trouble? Suppose Groden starts acting up again?’ He stared irresolutely at the speaking tube.

Lorch said thoughtfully, ‘Say, Commander, could I keep an eye on him for you ?’

It was a fine idea. Broderick took off for the bridge and Lorch, hastily briefed on the simple task of sticking a new needle in Groden’s arm if he showed any signs of trouble, bade him a careful good-bye and waited until he was well out of sight before, whistling, he knelt before the cabinet of emergency medical supplies.

Broderick had given him an idea. And, he told himself blissfully, moments later, it had been a good one. Alcohol rub! Now why hadn’t he thought of that himself?

He hardly noticed that Groden’s heavy breathing had changed pitch and character. It almost formed words now.

~ * ~

On the bridge, the captain was briefing the ship’s officers - all but Groden, in the sick-bay, and Lorch, who, the captain had agreed, was easily enough spared to watch after Groden - on what in his mind he called Project Desperation. It didn’t take much briefing because it was the only thing left for them to do and every man on the ship knew it.

‘We have,’ the captain said precisely, ‘margin for just under forty minutes of rocket blast at standard thrust. That will bring our overall temperature up to sixty degrees, give or take a degree according to Engineering’s best guess. And that’s the maximum the human body can stand - that’s right, Broderick ?’

The surgeon quickly translated into the Fahrenheit scale; a hundred and forty degrees or so.

‘That’s right, sir,’ he said. ‘If we can stand that much,’ he added reluctantly after a moment. ‘It hits that on Earth in a couple of places - around the Dead Sea, Aden, places like that. But it isn’t sustained heat; it drops considerably after dark.’

The Captain nodded sombrely. ‘We’ll hope,’ he said, ‘that we’ll find ourselves out of this before we hit sixty degrees. If we don’t - well, at least we won’t starve or suffocate. You understand, gentlemen, that the odds are against us. I suggested to Lieutenant Ciccarelli that it was a million-to-one-shot. He said I was an optimist. But one chance in a million, or a billion, or whatever the number may be, is better than no chance at all. Do you all agree?’

There was no answer. The captain went on, ‘Before we jump, I presume no one has a better idea?’ No one had. ‘Thank you. Then, gentlemen, if you will assume your stations, we’ll get down to business. Stand by to jump.’

The captain took his place with an air of benign detachment. It wasn’t a captain’s job to take the conn of a ship in a perfectly routine manoeuvre. He watched approvingly as the Exec put the ship on alert, then on stand-by, then went through the checklist that culminated in the ‘jump’ into hyperspace.

The captain was a model of placid, observant command officership, but behind the placid face, the agitated mind was churning out awful calculations.