Children of the Comet (13 page)

He looked at the animal that shared the container with him. It had its head above water and seemed to be breathing normally—though through a single nostril on the top of its head! It was a strange sight. He had never seen a large animal breathe before. They all got their air from the Tree, each in their own way, and then could stay out on the branches for as much as half a day to graze or hunt. Except some of the web beasts. Some of them could spin silk cocoons around themselves and stay in vacuum for days at a time.

The animal was studying him too. There was almost a human intelligence in its eyes. It squeaked at him as though it were actually talking. It dawned on him that he could take off his helmet and breathe if he kept his head above water, then submerge himself again when the new gravity got to be too much for him.

The older dwarf who had those queer folds in his eyelids came back from wherever he had been. He climbed several crossbars attached to the side of the water vessel and stared down at Torris through the transparent lid without saying anything. Then he climbed down and conferred briefly with the young dwarf.

Torris could see him through a small round window that would have made a good faceplate for one of Parn's customers. He was laughing.

He turned his head toward the far wall and began talking to the air again.

CHAPTER 20

“I've got another message coming through from Chu,” Alten said. “He's a couple of light-hours closer than he was the last time, and he's accelerating at a steady one G.”

Joorn looked up from his control board. “What did he say about their passenger?”

“They got him inboard without much resistance. They had to put him in the dolphin tank with Jonah. He couldn't even take the one G.”

“That'll be a problem. He'll be okay while we're coasting, but we've got a lot more deceleration to do before we get into the inner system. And then, of course, we'll have to put the ship under spin. We can't function for extended periods under null G.”

“We'll worry about that later. He'll either have to live with the dolphins or we can fix him up with facilities at the axis. Damned inconvenient!”

“If he lived on that comet, he's adapted to null G, or close to it.”

“Chu says he's about twelve feet tall and probably wouldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds in Earth gravity. Elongated limbs and prehensile toes, from the look of his boots. He's evolved after six billion years. But his equipment is primitive—bow and arrow, no metal of any kind, with fittings carved from some kind of animal bone, a hand-sewn spacesuit made out of some kind of animal gut. About what you'd expect of a Cro-Magnon, if they'd had to survive in space. How he heats the spacesuit is a mystery. We'll have to get him out of it to find out.”

“Irina and her team will have their work cut out for them.”

Alten frowned. “Speaking of Irina, I haven't heard from her. Nina should have been with her by now.”

“Hold on. I'll put you through to her. There, you've got a private channel.”

Joorn went back to his piloting. Alten spoke in subdued tones to his communicator. Finally he looked up, concern showing on his face.

“She never showed up. She should have been there long before now. That's not like Nina. She doesn't get distracted. She wanted to be with her mother when our visitor arrived.”

There was a sudden crackle of background noise from the speaker. The private channel had somehow been breached. Joorn froze as Miles Oliver's supercilious voice filled the control room.

“Worried about your precious daughter, Alten? She's with me. You'll get her back if you and your doting father do exactly as I say.”

The background noise resolved itself into a muffled babble of men's voices. Nina came through faintly. “Don't listen to him, Father! He's crazy!” Then she was cut off.

Alten exploded in a sudden blind rage. “Oliver, what have you done? I promise you that if you—”

“Shut up, bright boy! Or are you bright enough to realize what's at stake?”

Joorn cut in. “What do you want, Oliver?”

“Ah, our eminent captain speaks. You know what we want, Captain. We want you to turn the ship over to us. We've reinforced our numbers with recruits from a new generation, and we haven't forgotten our pursuit of man's greatest adventure.”

“Is Professor Karn in on this?”

There was the briefest of pauses. “The professor will come around. You're lucky to have him on your side. He'll see that you and your followers get a habitat or two. They have reentry capability. We're already on the fringes of the inner system, and our gamma is down to a point where the habitats can manage to deorbit on their own. You ought to be able to find someplace to light.”

“My granddaughter is right, Oliver. You're crazy. Sol's already expanded past Earth's orbit and might take another million years to shrink. We don't know what's left in the Sol system. You might be condemning a whole human population to death.”

Oliver gave a nasty laugh. “Your boy Alten's the genius. He ought to be able to figure something out.”

“What's the hurry, Oliver?” Joorn's voice was strained with the effort to sound reasonable. “You waited till now to make your move. It will take years to get all that gamma back. Why not give us time to explore the Sol and Centauri systems, especially since they're joined at the hip now?”

“And give you and your cronies a chance to put us under house arrest for another twenty years? No deal. Now's our hour, and we're not letting it slip away from us this time.”

Alten broke in, his voice shaky. “We can talk this over. Where are you holding Nina?”

There was that unpleasant laugh again. “We've just finished talking it over. The clock is ticking for Nina. Don't take too long to decide, bright boy. We'll be in touch.” There was dead silence as the circuit was broken.

Alten turned to Joorn, his face a study in anguish. “What do we do now, Father?”

“First off, we stall Oliver till we get Chu and Martin back. The minute Oliver starts building up gamma again, we lose our ability to rendezvous with the lifeboat. Oliver's perfectly capable of letting them die in space.”

“But what about Nina?” Alten cried hoarsely.

“They had to have abducted her somewhere between the control room and the observation gallery. That's a finite distance. And then they would have had to take her somewhere nearby. Some uninhabited nook where they wouldn't be seen.”

“She was worried about Martin. She would have passed the staircase leading to the dolphin level. She might have taken a detour to wish him luck before he left.”

Joorn called one of the guards over. The man's face was white with shock.

“You heard, Talbot?” Joorn said.

Talbot nodded.

“I want you to find Ryan.
Don't
use your communicator under any circumstances. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell him what happened. Tell him the war with Karn's on again and to take a large search party to scour the area surrounding the dolphin lagoon—both levels. And tell him to post more guards outside the control room.”

“I don't like to leave you alone, Skipper …”

“Get going. Oliver isn't going to try anything here for the time being. He doesn't have enough men, or he wouldn't have tried this fool stunt with my granddaughter.”

“Yes, sir!” Talbot fell all over himself getting to the door. He exchanged a few words with the other inside guard and hurriedly left. The door clicked as it locked itself behind him.

“What now?” Alten said.

Joorn busied himself at the control board. “I'm going to talk to Chu.” At a look from Alten, he added, “Don't worry. It won't go through the ship's com traffic. It'll be direct laser. No way Oliver can intercept it. Chu should receive it in about three hours.”

“Then what?”

“Then I put on the brakes. Hard. Without making a general announcement first. That ought to throw Oliver off-balance. By that point, Chu will have finished accelerating. He'll be motionless in relation to
Time's Beginning
. He can dock with his chemical jets. We'll all be essentially in null G.”

“And they'll be home safe then.”

“Yes. Our stringbean visitor included.”

“Ryan will need to be told.”

“He will be.”

CHAPTER 21

“The bastard!” Martin said.

“We all knew that,” Chu said.

“I'd have believed it of Oliver,” Martin said, “but not of Professor Karn.”

“You weren't born yet when the mutiny happened,” Chu said. “Karn deceived us all.”

Martin clenched his fists. “If they've hurt Nina, I'll kill them!”

Chu shot him a warning look. “Keep it down, Martin. Our friend will think you're talking about him.”

Martin looked over at the strange being they'd rescued. He'd been out of the dolphin pod for about an hour now. He seemed to have gotten along fine with Jonah, and Chu and Martin had come as far as exchanging names with him, though the squeaks and whistles that constituted Jonah's dolphin name were beyond any of them. Currently he was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a worktable that he was happily taking apart. It was a spidery pose that put the knees of his long legs at approximately the same level as his shoulders. The floor was littered with things he'd dismantled. Now he was industriously unscrewing the pipestem legs of the worktable.

“Hell on the furniture, isn't he?” Chu said.

“He's curious,” Martin said. “He's never seen things made of metal before, and he wants to see how they're put together. Now he's learning about screw threads.” He paused thoughtfully. “Though you can carve spiral threads out of wood or bone, can't you? I wonder how they fastened their arrowheads. Didn't the Cro-Magnons—”

Chu laughed uneasily. “Forget it, Martin. He's not planning to massacre us. We're his friends now, Jonah included. He's a fast learner.”

“We can get him to the dolphin pool while the drive's still off,” Martin said. “Then we'll have to figure something out. We can't keep the ship in free fall forever.”

“Your mother and her anthropology cohorts will have to get used to doing their interviews in the dolphin pool, that's all.”

Martin was tightening his fists again. “The question is: What are we going to do about Nina?”

“
We
can't do anything. That's Ryan's job. Maybe he'll have it wound up by the time we get there. If not …”

“What?”

Chu became thoughtful. “Oliver will be able to tap into the feed in the observation gallery, won't he? He'll already have seen the transmission I sent when we picked up Mr. Longlegs and when we got him into the dolphin pod with Jonah. When I send the next installment, I can fudge our ETA by a half hour or so. Your grandfather will know the truth because he'll be coordinating the docking. But the hoi polloi on the observation deck won't know until the gravity goes off without warning. And neither will Oliver. Maybe he'll do something stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Like showing himself to Ryan.”

The elongated man had finished unscrewing the table legs and placing them carefully beside himself. Now he was holding up the transparent tabletop and inspecting the screw holes. He looked over at Chu and Martin and said something unintelligible in a questioning tone.

“Get your camera,” Martin said.

Nina landed a healthy kick on the shin of one of the men holding her and caught him by surprise. He cried out in pain and dropped her arm. She quickly pulled free of the other man, whose grip had finally grown slack, and made a run for the door.

She got about five feet before one of the awful men in the room caught her and roughly dragged her back to her captors. The man she had kicked looked her over, then unexpectedly slapped her in the face. “Little bitch!” he growled.

It was the first time in her life that anyone had hit her. People just didn't do such things, not in her world. For the first few moments, the shock and surprise kept her from getting angry, then the hot rage she had felt when she had first been abducted came back. She got that under control quickly, telling herself that the important thing was to figure out a way to get even. No, she corrected herself, the first thing was to somehow get away. Then her father and grandfather would get even for her.

What made it worse was that she knew a dozen or more of the men in the room—or at least knew who they were. She had seen them in Professor Karn's physics class. They were friends or sidekicks of Professor Karn's special protégé, Miles Oliver. And that made it twice as bad. Oliver knew her well enough to call her by name. They had even exchanged a few words from time to time.

Stop it, she scolded herself. Concentrate on getting out of this.

Her prospects didn't look good. She was in an enormous storeroom somewhere above the dolphin lagoon, near the huge airlocks meant for the habitat's landing craft. The place was crammed with work benches and tool lockers. These renegade men had broken into the tool lockers, helping themselves to anything that could be used as a weapon. Looking around, she saw hammers, lengths of pipe, monkey wrenches, pry bars, and, scariest of all, things like electric drills, reciprocating saws, and nail guns. Things that could only be used to hurt people, even kill them. What kind of men would do that?

She counted them again. If she ever got free, she could at least report on their numbers. There were between fifty-five and sixty; it was hard to be sure, the way they kept moving around. She couldn't understand how they hoped to take over the ship with so few.

Miles Oliver came over to talk to her captors. He had armed himself with a nail gun. Nina shuddered. She was familiar with the tools used by the maintenance crews that Martin worked with. The nail guns were small but powerful with a range of twenty feet or more if a workman's hand slipped and it fired into the air.

She let him see that she wasn't afraid. “Didn't you see this man hit me? Aren't you going to say something?”

He glanced at her indifferently. “That's what you get for being a bad little girl. You'll get worse if you misbehave again.”

“It's you who's going to get worse. I'm going to tell Professor Karn what you've done.”

He looked as if he were going to say something, then stopped. He turned to the man who was holding her. “Find some rope, will you, Pfyfe? We'd better tie her to a chair. You better gag her too.”

He turned away to talk to someone else. She fought back tears of rage as Pfyfe tied her to the chair and stuffed an oily rag into her mouth. She wasn't going to let him think she was crying.

They were still traveling at thousands of miles an hour, but so was the lifeboat. Joorn kept his eyes on the viewscreen. They seemed to be closing the gap at a snail's pace. The lifeboat was only a few miles away now.

“Here we go,” Joorn said.

He reached for the cord hanging overhead and yanked sharply. A klaxon blared deafeningly, a sound that was repeated throughout the ship. Joorn waited exactly ten seconds. “That should be time enough to prevent any broken bones,” he murmured, and punched the Execute Program button. He settled back in his seat. Within another ten seconds, he was totally weightless.

Ryan's lieutenant, Grier, floated over. “That ought to flush them out, Captain. They won't know what's happening.”

Alten was hovering about a foot above his seat, steadying himself with one hand to keep from rising farther. “Is there any word?” he asked.

“I'm afraid not,” Grier said. “There are all sorts of nooks and byways in that sector but no living quarters, so it's usually pretty deserted. Of course I'm getting my information from runners, so it's anybody's guess what might have transpired in the last fifteen or twenty minutes.” He grimaced. “It's awkward not being able to use my communicator. This must have been what it was like to fight a battle in the Middle Ages.”

Alten came all the way up and braced his hand against his chair to aim himself at the door.

“I'm going down to see what's what.”

“Ryan has about a hundred men in the search party, Professor,” Grier said. “They're searching on a grid. You'll only get in the way.”

“I don't care,” Alten said. He sailed in a flat trajectory to the door, nodded to the half dozen guards Ryan had sent up, and let himself out.

“I don't like it,” Grier said to Joorn. “If he blunders into them on his own, we could have two hostages instead of one.”

“Man, I'd go too if I didn't have to stay with the controls,” Joorn said.

“I'm sorry, sir,” Grier said. “You're right, of course.”