Tales of the Flying Mountains (22 page)

Everything would have been easier on dayside and at a greater altitude, d'Andilly thought. His mind was buffeted into stupidity, able only to repeat the obvious, over and over. Where the air was thinner than here, less unpredictable variation of windage and density, adequate light, Tom would have been more readily seen as well as rescued. But preparing the drogue had been a maddeningly slow task, when one must stop and plan out every step. The rescuers had arrived very late. Perhaps too late,
Mary Girl
might already have taken the final plunge.

If she wasn't found within the next few minutes, the attempt must be abandoned. They were too near the burnup point. The instrument panel showed outside temperature rapidly rising. Soon the intake scoops would be redly glowing dragon mouths. And soon after that—

“
Hei! Dort!
” von Raaben bellowed. “Eleven o'clock low, see him? There, I say!”

“Jumping Judas, yes,” Wisner exclaimed. “I was wrong. We really and truly located him with our own bare eyeballs.” Crispness entered his tone. “Okay, Chuck, you still want to be squadron leader?”

“
Mais oui
. Who is better qualified?” D'Andilly had now spotted the distant shape himself. With a pilot's sense of dynamic relationships he gauged how to intercept, and issued his instructions. He knew that he was in fact not superior to his associates. But a single command was essential to coordinated effort.

And they would have to do one all-time job of coordination!

The three ships slewed about, fighting for every degree of turn, and dove on
Mary Girl
. Relative velocities were not great, and they established position quickly. There they flew not far ahead of the wreck, which they surrounded by the tow lines. For a moment, then, a kind of stability prevailed.

“Tom, can you hear me? Come in, Tom,” Wisner called.

“Stow the conversation,” d'Andilly said. “Are you ready? Let's brake a little … back, back, easy does it … not so fast, Krauthead … raise a bit, Bill … ah, we're snagging him.”

About halfway between ships and balloon, the three cables were linked by three connecting strands, which in turn supported a flexible metal net.
Mary Girl
was just behind that net. Inchmeal, struggling with a turbulence that threatened to tangle their lines and dash them together, the rescuers allowed the net to move more slowly than the wreck. The scoop nose entered; the mesh snugged close around; the fish was caught.

“Everything seems okay, true?” d'Andilly said.
Bien
, let her go.”

The hastily adapted hose mechanisms in
Mignonne. Sky Thief
, and
Seeadler
cast loose. The tow lines whipped backward. A radio instruction went to a small package in the balloon's container. It detonated. The metal peeled away. As the furious thrust of air entered its folds, the parachute opened.

D'Andilly brought his staggering ship under control, glanced back, and forgot all else in his awe. High over the stormclouds that looked like white mountains, a transparent hemisphere with a ghostly moon-shimmer across its surface began to bloom. Ever wider it swelled, until d'Andilly thought surely the fabric must rip across and release the shooting star.

But the fabric held. Expanding that elastomer took a great deal of energy, which
Mary Girl
supplied from her velocity. She started to fall more steeply, but at a fast-diminishing rate. Decelerating under power to keep pace, d'Andilly found himself under almost three gravities, besides Jupiter's own pull. Well, that shouldn't be too hard on Tom's body for the short time it must continue.

His live body, one hopes
. “Tom, are you there? Do you read us?”

The four ships fled on eastward. They crossed the sunrise line and saw long light, the color of roses, across endless vapor fields. The dwarfed sun climbed higher for them. They descended toward the clouds, until they saw lightning lick its chops.

But by that time nearly their whole speed had been lost. The wreck was parachuting quite gently. It was downright anticlimactic when they closed in on
Mary Girl
and grappled fast. A second radio command ignited thermite cartridges on the cables and burned them loose from the net.

Engines strained skyward. Looking aft, d'Andilly saw the parachute seized by a wind and sent fluttering in the direction of a thunderhead a thousand kilometers tall.
Jupiter wants revenge
, he thought weirdly.
Well, to hell with him. We'll be back
.

After a while, stars crowded a clear darkness. A great silence opened up. The planet seemed no more than some painted backdrop. D'Andilly shook himself gingerly, as if afraid that the bruised flesh would drop off. But no permanent harm seemed done. “Let's go into orbit,” he said. His voice sounded odd to him, heard through ears that still tolled. “I want to board and see how Tom is.”

He dreaded what he might find.

“Shucks,” said Wisner, with a shaken catch of laughter, “I can tell you that. I can see into his cockpit from here. He's waving and shaking hands with himself like a lunatic. Nothing wrong with him.”

Joy jumped in d'Andilly.

“It must just be that his radio went out,” von Raaben said. “With a dead engine he was depending on the emergency accumulators for everything, and I think they must be drained. Come on, let us take a sight and lay a course and get back as fast as possible. I want some beer.”

“Beer you shall have,” d'Andilly warbled, “all the beer you wish, you foam-at-the-mouth Boche, beer in Jupiter-sized steins until it cataracts from your ears. Provided, of course, that I get as much cognac.”

He adjusted thrust vectors according to navigational directions. The three ships and their load moved toward rendezvous. D'Andilly could almost taste the liquor now. He filled his cockpit with hoarsened song.

…“
Que donn'rez vous, la belle,

Pour le voir revenir?

“
Auprès de ma blonde

Qi'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon
,

Auprès de ma blonde

Qu'il fait bon dormir!

The
Vesta Castle
throbbed with energy, accelerating homeward.

Captain ben Judah wreathed his head in smoke and squinted at a tiny spar. With much care he brought it to the clipper foremast and held it in place a moment until the glue began to set. His inner eye visualized this
Witch of the Waves
as a real thing, soon to be commissioned, to raise her cloud of sails and ride the wind across the world. Gulls wheeled above, no whiter than the wake she cut through infinitely blue water ….He sighed. One might as well face facts. Romance had long died out of the universe.

There was a diffident knock. He laid down his tweezers and said, “Come in.”

Roy Pearson shuffled through. Ben Judah was shocked at the man's drawn appearance. “Hello, there! What the blazes have you had afoot?” he asked, as heartily as he was able. “Taking your meals in your cabin like that, the past half dozen watches. If I hadn't been so busy getting us under weigh, I'd have come to see what ailed you.”

“Oh, save it.” Pearson lowered himself to the edge of the bunk and stared between his knees at the deck. His voice was hardly audible. “You know why I kept out of sight.”

“Come, now. Nobody's angry at you for giving advice that turned out to be mistaken. You should know your pilots better than that. They might crow a little, as they well deserve to, but nobody that extroverted can nurse a grudge. Even Tom Hashimoto remarked at mess, when he'd heard the story, that in your place he'd have done exactly as you did.”

“It isn't that.” The voice grew louder, saw-edged. “It's you. I thought I could be smug about filing my complaint. But it's no use, I can't be.” Pearson achieved an upward glance. “But I'm still going to do so,” he said. “I've got to. If we don't stand by doctrine, how many other young men will die or be crippled?”

“Well, for everything's sake!” Ben Judah broke into laughter. “Is that what was eating you? Roy, Roy, we need you for comic relief. Haven't you heard the C.E.'s report on the salvaged vessel?”

“N-no. What—” Pearson tried to rise, but his legs wouldn't obey.

“He made a cursory inspection, and found immediately what had caused the trouble. In the engine, of course. Sulfuric acid fumes had corroded the cross-linkages between reactor and geegee generator.”

“Where in confusion did it come from?”

“That's clear, too. There have been similar incidents in the past, Mac tells me, involving other kinds of machinery. You see, steel is usually pickled in sulfuric acid, and some of the acid seeps in, gets right in between the crystals. Then, in a sealed environment like that engine compartment, and under the encouragement of nuclear radiation and stray field-drive impulses the acid leaks out again. Very, very slowly, but it does. Precautions had been taken against that type of thing, but evidently they weren't thorough enough. You recall
Mary Girl
is one of the oldest scoopships in service. She'd had a long time for the effects to accumulate.”

“But this means—” Pearson's brain began to click in accustomed patterns. “Yes, it shouldn't be hard to deal with. Install pH meters, or something of the sort, to give warning.”

“I thought of that, too,” ben Judah said. “Hindsight is always so much sharper than foresight, isn't it? Okay. Suppose I had not countermanded your orders and we had not gotten that ship back. How many more would have been lost before the cause was found?”

Pearson stared at him. “That's right.”

“Therefore my decision resulted in a net profit for the company, or at least in avoiding a serious net loss. So your duty is to give me the highest commendation and nominate me for a raise in pay.”

Pearson sprang clumsily to his feet and extended a hand that quivered. Tears touched his eyelids. “You can bet I'll do that, Elias!”

“Now, now,” rumbled ben Judah, embarrassed. “No need to make a fuss. Relax. Have a drink.”

Before long, Pearson had recovered enough self-possession to suggest a game of chess.

Interlude 5

Again we sit quiet a while. The music romps around us. My whisky-and-water wets my tongue with faint smokiness, complement to the odors from Missy's cigar and Amspaugh's pipe. Lindgren raises his big frame and moves toward the bar.

“We seem to be wandering over a whole small universe of discourse,” Amspaugh remarks at last. “But I suppose that's inevitable in a philosophical discussion, which this has obviously turned into.”

Dworczyk glances at his watch and I remember he wants to get back to an experiment. “Do we have to go that deep?” he asks. “We're not scheduled to write the text ourselves, and I don't hold with straitjacketing their authors. We simply want to propose some guidelines.”

“But what are the guidelines to be?” Echevaray replies softly. “That is the whole question before us.

“Well, I don't think they have to be as complicated as some of you are claiming. Look, you realize just a fraction of the kids will remember much of what they learned in elementary history; and just a fraction of those will want to dig deeper. Let's give 'em the basic dates—1492, 1776, 1969, 2002, the usual ones—and the basic information about what happened. A factual skeleton, in other words. Those who get interested can flesh it out later, maybe articulate it in an entirely different way, but that's not our concern here and now.”

“It is, though, Tom,” says Missy. “If nothing else, a bare-bones account would be so dull that every pupil would forget it the minute exams were over. None would feel like further study. You might as well not bother.”

“Oh, sure, I realize that,” Dworczyk agrees. “Do let the authors throw in picturesque stuff. Romance, adventure, fine! Whatever you may say, Colin, Conchita's right: the story of the conquest of space is full of the wildest episodes. And, uh, the most inspiring too, once in a while.”

The young woman surprises me by replying soberly: “Good, but not sufficient. We want to, we must give the next generation examples of courage and self-sacrifice. But we have to show how these work in a larger context. Otherwise I can easily imagine a future emergency where someone's loyalty to his immediate friends is stronger than his loyalty to the ship. And that could destroy the entire crew.

“Besides, without getting too prosy, we'd better bring home the fact that the interesting virtues like heroism aren't the only essential ones. We need to cultivate the dull ones also.”

“We might convey the lesson subtly,” Orloff suggests, “as by choosing an episode which illustrates all these points ….Heh!” He snaps his fingers.

“What about the herdship
Merlin?
”

“The what?” I ask.

The older people look intrigued. Clearly they were alive when the happening was a
cause célèbre
. Conchita, Echevaray, and I exchange blank glances.

“Excellent,” Amspaugh says. “In fact, you could point out more, as embodied in the story. Cooperation, for instance. After all, the economic expansion of the Republic, of the entire Belt, benefitted Earth likewise; and the asterites, in turn, had a great deal to gain from close relationships with the mother planet. The children might get some idea of the unity of mankind—if their teachers refrain from droning on and on about it.”

“And the sunjammer that was involved,” Lindgren chimes in from the bar. “I'm no poet, but I'd assume any writer could make a symbol of the sunjammer fleet—you know, driven by the same light that keeps life itself going; weaving the worlds together the way the sun holds them together; that sort of thing. Where's the brandy gotten to?”

McVeagh snorts. “Come off that, people! You know as well as I do, no individual worked to improve the lot of any part of mankind except Number One. And you know the improvement that did happen never led to any immediate brotherhood. I got interested in the
Merlin
case once and read several books about it, so I'm not vaguely remembering old 3V 'casts. If you ask me, it beautifully illustrates my own point. Commercial as well as political relationships went right on in squabbling, scrambling, bungling, friction, prevarication, and general inefficiency. In short, business as usual.”