The Fenris Device (15 page)

It is rumored that the human animal is born afraid of just two things: sudden loud noises and sudden loss of support. If that is really the case then the worst nightmare of the womb would probably simulate the experience of being jettisoned from a ship in an unpowered life raft, into the storm of Mormyr.

I didn't hit the release—the ship's computer had been entrusted with the delicate task of sending me on my way. Charlot wasn't a man to trust human reflexes where mechanical ones were available. I was in the cradle of the raft—and this was a real cradle, not the sort I was used to—stretched almost supine, just waiting, for long hours while the
Coregon
crawled her weary way to Mormyr and made along, long sequence of maneuvers in order to find the very narrow groove which Jacks and Charlot had plotted between them. Nobody counted me down—there was just a voice in my ear absently remarking that we were on our way, and then more silence, total silence, until I was catapulted clear.

There was one giddy moment when I was out of the ship's g-field but still free of Mormyr's, and into that same suspended moment came the furious, hammering attack of the storm. The embryonic nightmare. I felt my heart jump, and there was a sharp pain as if a wasp had sunk its sting into the cardiac wall. The pain that came from the sudden shock of fear was a surprise to me, and I think it helped me overcome the shock, rebalancing my mind. I couldn't afford the luxury of shock—the next release was manual, and it had to be spot on. No fumbling.

I heard Jacks murmur “Good luck,” and then I heard a click as he took himself out of the circuit. With the incredible clatter of the hailstones and the thunder and the buffeting wind all around me, I was suddenly aware of a complete inner silence—an utter loneliness, and seconds passed while I feared that it might stay that way, that I was deserted. Seconds of falling—free falling. I was already tensing myself for an impact that I knew was minutes away, that I knew I would not feel, because by then I would have kicked myself clear of the doomed raft.

Then Titus Charlot's voice cut in, cool and clear.

“Can you hear me, Grainger?”

“I hear you.”

“Everything fine?”

A rhetorical question. Neither he nor I could know. He was working to a set of calculations on an analogue simulation. I was a prisoner inside a falling tin can. If anything was wrong, neither of us could know.

“Count,” I said, feeling as if I ought to scream. There was no time for calm words—I wanted to know where I was, or rather when. I wanted to be into the descending chain of numbers that I knew so well. He had all the time in the world for reassuring comments and patience while he played with his simulation. Not me. These seconds might well be my last. The very least he could do was label them for me, one by one, give me something to latch on to. I was in pitch-darkness, my body weighing tons inside the armored suit, breathing bottled air, with my ears assaulted by the howling of the atmospheric chaos. I needed something to orient myself, something that pretended to have a semblance of reality. To Titus Charlot, they might only be numbers, but to me they were fragments of the real world.

He was counting. Coldly and mechanically.

I have been listening to countdowns all my life. In space—the times that I really feel alive—time revolves around countdowns. They take you beyond the light-speed on which the fabric of the universe is built, and they bring you back again. All seconds are similar, all voices are flat and unemotional. I knew Lapthorn's countdown, and Rothgar's, and Johnny's. I don't even know how I could tell them apart, but they all had some hint of individuality which marked them. Charlot's too. I had never heard a man sound so much like a clock as Charlot did. His was the absolute countdown. Pure mechanism. Perfect.

My hand gripped the release, and I knew I was squeezing. I couldn't stop. My hand was frozen to the lever like the grip of a dead man. The muscles were hard, sealed. I could feel pain in the rigidly held joints. But I couldn't relax the grip.

I was dreaming in flashes. Fully awake, but subject to ideas flitting through my mind as visual images. I dreamed that the lever jammed. I dreamed that my whole body was tight-frozen and that the count reached zero without my having pulled the release. I dreamed that the raft hit and exploded while the count was still descending, and I dreamed that my body was ripped apart in the crash, fragmenting in perfect time with the descent of the last few seconds.

All the dreams fitted into the interstices between the numbers that rolled so deadly off Charlot's distant tongue. I could imagine him sitting rock-steady at his desk, eyes glued to the simulator, his mind chasing the calculations damn near as fast as the computer, his voice mesmerized by his commitment to and involvement with the programmed flight-path of the raft. We were the same, both frozen, both living through the numbers. The only difference was that he was living the simulation, and we knew that would be successful. Computers don't argue. Satisfaction guaranteed. I was living the real thing, with a real life hanging on a theoretical error. I could die, while he was still counting out the measure of his computed success.

He couldn't lose.

“Twenty,” he was saying, “nineteen....”

I needed a shot. I was dreaming I needed a shot. What I really needed was not to be so all alone. I needed to know that the shot was waiting just around the corner, that the shot was attached to a hand, that the hand was attached to Eve. I needed to know that the numbers were coming from a human voice and not from a machine. I needed to know that there was something else in the universe beside me—beside me. Alongside.

The wind didn't say a word, but he let me feel him. How? I don't know. He shuffled his feet or cracked his knuckles—something impossible, quite intangible. But enough.

Titus reached twelve, and he coughed. It was a good cough—a beautifully controlled cough. It knocked the first “e” off “eleven,” and joined the count with unhurried enthusiasm. I was grateful for that cough. I was grateful for Charlot's age and poverty of health. I was grateful that my remote control wasn't as remote as it might have been.

“Ten,” said Titus.

The sound of the deep, deep storm was fading in my ears. It should have been growing—the wind howling faster and harder, the lightning caging me, the hail raining down on me. But it was fading. All sound was fading. I was retreating from my senses. But Titus was still coming through. Not loud, not even clear, but measured. Tick, tick, tick....

“Four,” ticked away, “three, two, one….”

Zero, and I pulled the lever.

I never heard the zero. As soon as I had located it, as soon as I knew just when it was, in the time-space of my seclusion, I went to it myself. I found it, on my own (though I never would have, without pointers), and I pulled the lever dead on time.

And there it was again—the sudden loss of support in a moment of suspension and vertigo, the sudden renaissance of the storm just inches and fractions of inches away from me battering and howling like all the devils in hell at my implacable armor-nightmare. Still dreaming, still flashing across my mind in tiny packets of sensory energy. Quantum dreams, quantum nightmares.

There was light too, now. Colored light, dimmed by the smokiness of the thin transparency that served as a visor. It was four inches wide and an inch deep. No peripheral vision. No safety margin, on a heavy-duty suit. Nothing to see, except chaotic light, colored clouds lit by inconstant lightning.

Whirling. The colors whirled of their own volition, but I was turning too, turning in flight as I righted, as the power of the suit came into operation, holding me tight in arms of force, secure from harm, like bird's wings, fluttered belatedly into action to arrest a fall, to snatch a thin body back from disaster, and land....

Safely.

There was a soft crunch as I came to ground. I felt its softness reverberate up through my bones, as the brittle power of impact was soothed by the suit into a gentle multiple wave.

I heard nothing of the fate of the life raft. I didn't know which way it had gone. I saw nothing. Once I was free of it, it disappeared from my life. I went my own way, and landed my own way.

I landed on my feet, like a cat. I seemed to have nine lives, like a cat. Once more into hell. A cat in hell's chance. But I was still winning. Cats have a way of surviving.

Only curiosity kills cats.

There was a silence. An utter silence.

“I'm down,” I said, in the fond hope that somewhere out there was someone who might be interested to know.

I heard Titus Charlot. He wasn't answering—he was breathing. His mouth must have been very close to the microphone. I had the odd idea that I was hearing Titus Charlot, speechless. An unusual experience.

“Stay still,” he said, eventually. “I'm hooking the
Hooded Swan
back into the circuit.”

“What about Jacks?” I said, with commendable concern for the good of my fellow man. “Did he get the ship out all right?”

“We'll know in a moment,” said Charlot. “He's still in atmosphere. I'll let him in for a moment, as soon as we know he's clear. But only a moment. We have no time to waste.”

No, I thought. We never have.

For just the moment that Charlot promised, the circuit was connected four ways.

“I'm down,” I said again.

There was a crackle as Nick delArco said something both thankful and crude, while Jacks expressed his surprise and pleasure in like manner. Neither was talking to me, and the microphones failed to make their words clear. The meaning, however, was successfully conveyed.

“I'm a rich man,” said Jacks, just a second or two later. “Just don't make any mistakes lifting that baby.”

I didn't have to ask whether his part had come off all right. I could practically hear him counting his money. He was in clean space.

He cut out of the circuit.

“Right,” said Charlot. “Now we have to find out how far away you are and guide you in. Switch on your bleep.”

I substituted the signal for the sound of my voice, and I waited. I couldn't hear what was going on, but I could imagine it well enough. Titus was telling Nick how to use the ship's sensors to fix the bleep. I gave them a good two minutes and switched myself back on.

“Where am I?” I said.

“Impatient,” said Nick. “Keep bleeping.”

I gave him another two minutes.

“How far?” I asked, just to vary the dialogue.

“Spot on,” he said. “Less than twenty miles.”

Mormyr is a big world, and she blows big winds. Twenty miles was, indeed, spot on. But we needed that accuracy. On full power, the suit could take me three, maybe four miles an hour. And depending on how much power had gone up the chute making sure I landed properly, I probably had no more than eight hours in hand. Twenty miles was a real bull's-eye, and if it had been a competition we'd have won. But at the time, I could only feel that we'd brought it off according to plan, that we'd scraped home by a short head.

I still had those miles to walk.

It took me more than four hours, and it was very boring. I've walked the surfaces of some very strange worlds in my time—and some rather violent ones too. But for sheer hostility there was nothing to approach Mormyr. In a way, that long walk was a privileged experience. But I'm not one for telling barroom tales, and I have no grandchildren. I measure experiences by what they are, not what they'll add to me in years to come. That twenty miles in the kaleidoscopic tempest was just twenty very uncomfortable miles. There was nothing much to look at—two minutes of chaos is quite enough to provide a lifetime's memory.

The walking wasn't particularly hard—the suit provided the power to move itself and some of the power to move me—but it was by no means easy. I was totally unused to the type of suit, and after a few minutes I found it increasingly difficult to keep in step with it. It rubbed me at several points—particularly around my waist and in my legs, and it grew progressively more painful. I began the trek with light conversation—mostly directed at Nick and Johnny but long before I was halfway I had degenerated to complaints—mostly directed at Charlot and providence—and simple but ingenious curses.

Nick volunteered to come and meet me, but I told him not to be a damned fool. We had no suit as heavy as mine on the
Swan
and he'd have been taking a hell of a risk coming out in something that the hailstones wouldn't just bounce off.

I think the worst of the walk was that it interfered so much with the harsh beauty of the operation. If it had simply been a matter of that heartrending drop, followed by a smooth takeoff and return to safety, the whole rescue would have had a kind of elegance, even to my crude and matter-of-fact aesthetic sensibilities. But that walk destroyed all the fine feeling and triumph that I might have derived from the affair. By the time I reached the
Swan
I ached, I was sore, and I was in a thoroughly bad mood. Right back into the old Grainger groove. Without that long walk, I could almost have felt like a hero. I could have kidded myself, for a while at least. But there is something about having the insides of your thighs rubbed red raw that restores a somewhat callous perspective on life. There is something noble and heroic about a trickle of blood from the corner of one's mouth, or a discreetly bloody wound. There is nothing subtly uplifting about a sore bum.

The welcome I got from Captain delArco was almost sufficient to restore my faith in heroic nature. He was just perfect. He was a big man with a deep voice, and never given to leaping about with lunatic enthusiasm, so he played the part with wonderful self-control. But every time I moved I reminded myself of the true facts of life, and I was able to play my part down to the last grunt and scowl. Nick had spent a lot of time being resentful of that grunt and scowl in the past, but at that moment he began to love them in spite of themselves. As for Johnny—well, I think Johnny had always had perfect faith in the fact that I would come knocking on the door to pull him out of the jaws of death. I was only living up to his expectations.