Futures Past (16 page)

  
". . . What's happening down there, Grayson? Answer me!" It was Cross's voice in his phones. The captain must have been talking for some time without him realizing it.

  
"The roof was coming down on me," Grayson replied defensively; then he thought in sudden self-loathing, you're a low, yellow coward, why be a liar, too? He ended awkwardly, "At least, I thought it was."

  
Cross said, "I see."

  
Hastily Grayson told of his position near Stuart's pod, adding that it would be impossible to bring the engineer back along the corridor. Had the captain any ideas?
   
-

  
Cross had a lot of ideas, but they all hinged on Stuart being alive and well enough to run the lifeship. Therefore Grayson had better make sure Stuart was all right before he worried too much about getting him back to the control room. If the engineer was alive, an escape method had been worked out which stood a good chance of success.

  
As Grayson worked his way around the white enamel and chrome Wreck that had recently been a functioning robot nurse, and kicked out toward Stuart's pod, Cross told him what that method was to be.

  
The bright-eyed, romantic, hero-worshipping Grayson did not approve of the idea at all. But the Grayson floating in the debris of a wrecked ship, scared silly, and— melodramatic as it was—with his unpracticed hands and unsure mind possibly the only hope for the survival of his race, thought a little more realistically. The second Grayson, however, didn't completely approve of the idea either.

  
Briefly, a heavy charge of chemical explosive would be used to blow the stern section of the Starcloud apart, flinging out an expanding sphere of wreckage to the six corners of space. Unknown to the Raghman one of these chunks of debris would be the escaping lifeship. A few seconds later the Starcloud's remaining store of nuclear weapons would fission simultaneously, thus making it impossible for the Raghman to trace the fleeing lifeship even if they had been able to detect it among the wreckage. The Raghman would, it was hoped, be dead.

  
Grayson tried not to think of the crewmen in the stern section who, though cut off from central control, still managed to launch an occasional missile against the enemy. Or of the hundreds who had been taken to sickbay there. Grayson was, after all, a doctor.

  
Then why, he asked himself viciously as he bumped gently against the damaged control pod, don't you start proving it?

  
The wound torn in the leaden walls of the pod by the flying I-beam had scaled itself automatically with a smooth, transparent plug of hardened shock-fluid: as well as giving protection as a shock-absorber it acted as a self-sealing mechanism should the pod be punctured while in a vacuum. But the transparency of the seal was spoiled by cloudy red streaks. Grayson, greatly aided by the absence of gravity, pulled a section of the pod's lead shielding aside, uncovering a clear plastic inspection panel. He looked through it at Stuart.

  
It was hard to get an accurate idea of the engineer's condition, because the skin-tight suit in which he floated while inside the pod had been torn in the region of the wound, and his body temperature plus dilution by blood had made the fluid a soft red jelly instead of the clear, rock-hard cement it normally became when exposed to cold or vacuum. From what Grayson could see, he thought that the metal beam had struck somewhere below Stuart's right armpit, gouging a small piece of the arm and probably fracturing the humerus. Possibly there were a couple of ribs gone, too, but as there was no blood around the man's mouth, they could not have damaged his lung. His breathing was quick and shallow and he had lost a lot of blood. The case wasn't a complicated one, Grayson knew, nor should it prove fatal provided treatment was given promptly.

  
He reported his findings to the control room. Cross gave an almost explosive sigh of relief. "Good," he said. "Get him out of that pod, Doctor, then take him through the launching tube directly to the outer hull. About two hundred feet forward of the tube's mouth is the lifeship blister. Take him to it and into the boat. We'll be there then or a few minutes later." The captain paused, then finished urgently, "Get him fixed up quickly, Doctor. But be careful, too, he's our only hope."

  
It was only as Cross was speaking that Grayson realized the utter hopelessness of trying to treat Stuart. Funny how it was the most obvious things which were overlooked first, he thought; like the simple fact of the control compartment being open to space. To help the engineer he would have to remove the other from his hermetically sealed pod, and take off at least part of his own space-suit to have his hands free. But doing those things in a vacuum would result only in the rapid demise of both doctor and patient. He ground his teeth in anger and sheer self-disgust at his stupidity—temporarily forgetting the awful responsibility he carried—-and again reported to the control room.

  
Cross said, 'That's bad, Doctor." That's bad, Doctor!

  
Grayson was suddenly very sick of the captain's cold, emotionless voice and his infuriating habit of understating everything really important. And he was sick to death of officers who contemplated the destruction of their friends with steady hands, impassive faces, and crisp, military voices. He said, "Listen . . ." and with expletives he had heard and some he must have read somewhere, he began to qualify the badness of the situation. He spoke for several minutes.

  
"I agree," Cross said dryly when he had finished. "But is there nothing you can do?" He hesitated, then went on, "You're the man on the spot, Doctor. You'll be able to think of something, I know you will." His voice had a pleading, almost cajoling note in it which wasn't characteristic of the captain at all. It puzzled Grayson, but not for very long.

  
Cross and the others were depending on him to patch up Stuart in order to escape, Grayson knew, and now they must be beginning to wonder if they weren't leaning too heavily on a rotten stick. His crying fit back there in the corridor, and now this latest and downright mutinous outburst to the captain had them worried. Suppose Grayson had flipped, or was about to flip his lid, go mad? He'd need very careful handling if they were to make use of his medical ability, and that was the reason for Cross's tone. The captain was trying to humor him!

  
The idea of that made Grayson very angry. He opened his mouth to loose a second verbal broadside, but then he began to think about the responsibilities that Cross had—chief among them the one of getting the data home which might at last enable mankind to hold out against the Raghman. His anger died and was replaced by a feeling almost of pity. He didn't blame the captain for his attitude; if Grayson had been on the verge of madness, it would have been exactly the right attitude. Cross was all right.

  
But the problem of getting Stuart to the lifeship was his own. There must be a solution, Grayson knew, because this type of accident must have occurred, and been solved before. If he could only steady his jumping nerves enough to think.

  
He had solved a similar problem less than half an hour ago, he remembered suddenly, when the forward observation blister had been holed. The man—injured but space-suited—had been treated on the spot. Grayson had rushed two nurses to the blister and had them spray their quick-setting plaster over the hole in the glassite, sealing it and allowing air pressure to return. The stripping of the casualty's suit and subsequent treatment had been simple. He had felt rather pleased with himself over that one.

  
Grayson couldn't use that solution now, though, because the hole in the wall of number six was four yards wide, not six inches, and even if Nurse 53 had enough plaster compound to seal it, the robot was jammed tight under several tons of metallic treacle and so couldn't be used. He tried desperately not to think of his surroundings, and only of the problem. The sort of problem, Gray- son told himself as calmly as he could, with one of those disgustingly simple answers that might be shot at you during your periodic refresher courses. Not the desperately urgent, life-or-death-for-millions type of problem at all, but just a problem.

  
Suddenly he had it. Moving quickly to the stoved-in wall of number six's control chamber he looked up along the tangle of wreckage inside the launching tube. Through it Grayson could see a patch of black, star-studded space. He switched his suit radio to "transmit" and began to speak rapidly.

  
"How long will you need, Doctor?" Cross asked quickly when he'd finished. There was almost hope in his voice.

  
"About fifteen minutes."

  
"Right. We'll meet you at the lifeship in fifteen minutes," Cross said briskly; then: "Harper had already left for the lifeship blister, Smith is following now with the data tapes. I'll stay here for a while in case they spring something new."

  
Grayson grunted acknowledgment, and hurried into the corridor containing the imprisoned Nurse 53. He felt uncomfortably like a cannibal as he ripped into the sleek white-enameled hide of the almost human robot—one of the very few mechanisms, he thought sadly as his eyes passed over the bright red cross painted on its side, that was specifically developed to save lives. The hypos and other instruments that he would need were not designed for human use, of course, but Grayson thought he could manage—Stuart wasn't, after all, a very intricate case. He rifled several of the robot's compartments, then wrapped the loot in some cotton and gauze found in another. He returned to Stuart.

  
The engineer looked really bad now. Grayson softened a small area of the cement above Stuart's shoulder, inserted a long needle, and deftly hardened it again before the air pressure could blow it out. He fed in glucose and anti-shock, then withdrew the needle slightly and squirted in coagulant to halt the flow of blood still coming from the wound. Until he got the man into the lifeship it was the best he could do but he was very much afraid that it wasn't enough.

  
Grayson switched on the self-powered cutter used for freeing injured men from metallic wreckage—also torn from the corpse of Nurse 53—and started slicing through the cables and structural members holding Stuart's pod to the floor.

  
The pod under Earth-normal gravity would have weighed easily a ton, and though weightless now, it retained all its mass and inertia. Grayson was hot and sticky inside his suit from his exertions, but he finally got it moving toward the gap in the wall. As it drifted ponderously through the breech section and into the tube proper, he bit his lips with sheer impatience. But then he realized that its great mass was really an advantage, because the pod cleared a six-foot tunnel through the loose wreckage which sometimes blocked the tube. Grayson had nothing to do but hold onto a piece of trailing cable and be towed along.

  
As they neared the end of the tube, Grayson wriggled ahead of the pod and began trying to slow it down. He didn't want it to drift completely off the ship.

  
A few yards from the tube's mouth he had it almost at a standstill, and began climbing up for a preliminary look at the condition of the ship's hull between him and the lifeship blister. Suddenly something began dragging him upward.

  
Grayson grabbed desperately for a beam, then jammed a leg between two others and twisted around to lock it in position, bare seconds before his handgrip let go. The suit and his leg, he thought sweating, should hold for a few seconds. He yelled: "Captain! The screen!"

  
Abruptly the force trying to tear him off the ship vanished.

  
Stupidly, Grayson had forgotten the Starcloud's repulsion screen. That screen was designed to throw back any material object trying to make contact with the ship's hull, and when Grayson had come too close to the hull it had naturally tried to fling him off the ship, too. Cross had cut the screen now, but that raised another problem. From now until they took off in the lifeship, the Starcloud had no protection whatever against the Raghman.

  
"I'm leaving now," Cross said suddenly, his voice sounding strangely husky. For the first time Grayson realized how the captain must hate losing his ship. "Everything is rigged for the getaway," he went on, "so there will be no contact between us until we meet you in the lifeship." With bitter formality he ended: "Control to Grayson. Off!"