Futures Past (22 page)

  
Hundreds of microscopic bullets were bursting on the armor now—with a sound like the crackling of dry burning twigs—and the plastic in front of his eyes was a deeply-pitted blur. Suddenly he saw the gray shine of metal in the underbrush ten yards away. The Deedee gun? He stumbled toward it.

  
The Bugs were thick around his head and above the huddled, twitching form of the lieutenant but above the ship with its outsize Queen Bug they were a whining, seething, near-solid mass. Even if the sprayer was damaged, MacFall thought desperately, he could throw it against the ship and burst its pressure tank. That would certainly kill the insects crowding above the ship as well as the mass of pink, wriggling grubs packed inside it.

  
But now he could not see at all. He felt with his feet for the Deedee gun, then cried out suddenly as his face armor was holed. He took it on the cheek, luckily. With his hand pressed tightly against his eyes—the plastic was worn paper thin in that area—he groped forward. Through the gauntlet protecting his face he felt the attackers concentrating on the back of his hand. There was another stab at his neck. Something tore at his ear. Then his gauntlet was holed and he could not keep his hand against his face anymore.

  
Where was the Deedee gun? It was only a matter of time now, of seconds ...

  
The lieutenant's eyes had escaped but the nerve controlling one of his eyelids had been damaged—he wore a perpetual, knowing wink that was almost a leer. That, together with his torn, cream-smeared face and his white, skinny body made MacFall think of an outrageous cross between Chevalier, Frankenstein and . . . well, he didn't know what.

  
They had stripped to drill shorts and boots, and the breeze which had sprung up at dusk was sheer heaven. Nolan had left his heavy coveralls behind, but MacFall carried his over his arm—they were army issue and he just might be charged for them if they weren't handed in, despite their uselessness now.

  
"That explains why the ship wasn't destroyed," Nolan said as they retraced their steps to base. "And why that first swarm of Bugs attacked so viciously—they were intent on protecting their young." He still sounded dazed by the whole business. "And Sergeant," he went on enthusiastically, "from close inspection I'm convinced that their first choice of food supply is other, smaller insects, though they can live on any warm-blooded creature as well. Think what this means! They could, for instance, exterminate the tsetse fly for us, and the other insects which keep us from developing large areas of the planet. You'll see, this is going to benefit both sides, eventually."

  
MacFall grunted, then thinking that perhaps something more enthusiastic was called for, said, "Peace, ain't it wonderful!" Looking over his shoulder he wondered suddenly whether the Bugs engaged in escorting them back to base were naturally luminous or did they carry the Bug equivalent of a flashlight. The effect was pretty, anyway.

  
"For a while it was touch and go," the lieutenant was babbling on. "After they stopped attacking me suddenly and I sat up, it still seemed to be in the balance. They were clustered around our plastic counters and that female, obviously interested but quite definitely hostile to us even then. What made them change their minds, decide on peace?"

  
MacFall knew what, but he wasn't telling. He remembered that pause in the Bug attack all too clearly, and he had known somehow that the Bugs were undecided about them. MacFall had taken, off his now useless helmet to see better, and among other things he saw the dozen or so Bugs which he had flailed to the ground with Nolan's discarded helmet. They had been waving their legs weakly and only three of them looked dead. MacFall —call it hunch, intuition or whatever—had done exactly the right thing. He had taken off his coveralls, rolled up his sleeve, then carefully lifted each weakly struggling Bug between finger and thumb and placed it on his arm.

  
The bites hadn't hurt at all, and a few drops of human blood had worked wonders for some of them.

  
If the lieutenant ever discovered what he had done he would probably start agitating for a medal for the sergeant. But MacFall was not going to tell him. A medal was all right, of course, but MacFall did not think that he could ever face his men again if they were to find out that he was blood brother to a swarm of Bugs.

  
WITH the sounding of the five second warning the clicking, whining bedlam inside Ramsey built suddenly to a climax. The chemical boosters fired, their thunder so deep and vast that it was felt in the bones rather than heard with overloaded ears, and the ship began creeping into the sky. It picked up speed rapidly until airflow over its fins began to assist the gyros in maintaining vertical stability, until it began to outstrip its own thunder and until five gravities of acceleration and a surprisingly few minutes of time had combined to hurl it accurately into space. Then just before the booster stage was due to fall away the ship's reactor cut in smoothly, augmenting the enormous pre-burnout thrust with its modest half-G.

 
 
That was when it happened.

  
The radio unit which was attached to a bulkhead a few feet above the pilot's position tore loose and dropped onto the couch below, then rolled off and snapped through the open well of the passenger compartment as if pulled by a giant elastic band. The passenger lounge was twenty-five-feet long and with our five Gs acting on it the small, metal cabinet gained enough velocity to crash through the transparent panel which looked into the cargo space without even slowing down. Here it was deflected by cargo into the food storage compartment where it left the ship via a large, ragged hole it had torn in the hull plating.

  
On time to the split second the booster stage dropped away and Ramsey, outwardly unaffected by these internal disturbances, continued along its precalculated flight path. After seventeen minutes at one-half G the reactor shut down and the ship was precisely on the course which would place it in orbit around Mars in a little over sixteen weeks. The fact that something had happened to the radio would not become apparent until the captain failed to make his post takeoff check report and, because it was the radio that had gone, the people on the ground would not know that anything else was amiss. So far as they were concerned, Ramsey was pointed in the right direction and everything was Go.

  
For a time the ship's passengers had the same comforting idea. All except one....

  
Herdman knew immediately that they had lost pressure by the change in the sounds which the ship was making— he was hearing them via the fabric of his couch and helmet rather than through the air of the passenger lounge—• and by the way his spacesuit creaked. A leak was not a very rare occurrence during the period of maximum stress that was takeoff and, provided it was not the product of some more serious malfunction, loss of pressure was nothing to worry about. The ship's air regeneration system would not be activated until after the captain had checked that everything was sealed tight, so that all they had lost was a few cubic meters of the dusty, peroxide-smelling air which had come aboard with the passengers before takeoff. Herdman waited tensely for something more calamitous to happen, and when it didn't he began to relax.

  
The people on the ground were especially careful with ships making their first trip, he thought sourly, and with a vessel like Ramsey—the first spaceship designed primarily to carry passengers—the care with which they had checked everything must have been blood-curdling to watch. Herdman was reminded of the chilling little tale of the overanxious engineer who had tested the free working of an emergency-jettison control forty-seven times in order to make absolutely sure that it was functioning correctly, only to find on the forty-eighth time that he had tested the mechanism to destruction. ...

  
As he lay staring at the underside of the acceleration bunk above his own, Herdman let his mental eye travel farther upward, past and through the vertical tier of nine bunks above him—six of which were empty—to Control and to the man who occupied it.

  
After the reactor shut down there would be a forty-five-minute instrument check, he knew, after which the captain would carry out a visual inspection of his ship to make doubly sure that everything was sealed and secure. During this inspection the captain would trace and seal the leak, and only when pressure was restored would he give permission for the passengers to get out of their tiny bunks and even more constricting spacesuits.

  
Should anyone dare to leave his bunk before receiving permission to do so they would find themselves in trouble, because captains did not like people cluttering up their ships during that all-important first inspection. Herdman sighed, hoping that Captain Ramsey would not insist on treating him like a passenger, that the pilot might even ask him to help look for the leak. But very likely the hope was a forlorn one. From what he had heard of Ramsey, the captain was the type who leaned over backward and, perversely, Herdman did not want to claim any privileges which were not first offered.

  
But half an hour later Ramsey still had not appeared, neither had there been any of the faint, irregular sounds and vibrations from the ship's metal which would have indicated the captain moving about. Herdman began to feel anxious, and within a minute his anxiety had grown to the point where he was willing to risk a rebuff for leaving his bunk without permission. The instant he realized that something might be wrong, Herdman slapped the quick-release plate on his harness, twisted out of the bunk and kicked himself toward the cone—all without coming to any conscious decision regarding his actions. It was a matter of conditioning—if there was trouble, Herdman had been trained to do the correct thing automatically, and such conditioning died hard.

  
Something had torn loose, he saw as soon as he reached the control-room trap. There was a one-foot square gap in the almost solid canopy of control panels and tell-tales which was the nose cone. Four projecting lugs showed in the empty space, to which had been bolted the missing item of equipment, and raw metal gleamed in the empty hole of each lug. Herdman wondered briefly if some over-zealous member of the ground crew had tightened one of those bolts so thoroughly that he had stripped the thread, and the stress and vibration of five Gs had done the rest. But it would be very difficult to bring a negligence charge against a man who was guilty of being too careful.

  
The equipment had fallen a distance of three feet onto the captain's position, although with an acceleration of five Gs acting on it the object's speed and inertia had been the equivalent of a fall of fifteen feet under normal conditions. It had struck the captain's shoulder and dented the side of his helmet before rolling off to go bulleting through the port at the bottom of the passenger lounge.

  
Ramsey's suit was badly crushed where the right arm joined the body and inside the visor the pilot's face was white and sweating. The captain wasn't moving although the suit was still airtight. Herdman pulled himself closer and saw that the other's eyes were closed, that he was breathing and that little red beads were floating about inside the helmet, eddying with every breath that he took.

  
If Ramsey wasn't taken out of his suit quickly, or at least had his helmet removed, there was danger of him breathing in one of those tiny red beads and choking to death on it. But before he removed the helmet, Herdman would have to restore pressure to the ship....

  
While he was applying a number one patch to the holed port Herdman became aware of three heads looking down at him over the edges of the occupied bunks. None of the passengers made any attempt to leave their places; they probably thought he was the captain, and Herdman ignored them until air was hissing into the compartment and the pressure gauge told him that it was staying there. Then with an atmosphere present to carry his voice he flipped his outside speaker switch and said, "All right, gentlemen, you can take them off now," and dived toward Control again.

  
There he swung himself over the pilot's couch, locking his legs around it at the level of Ramsey's waist, and began carefully removing the helmet.

  
The face he uncovered was the same one that had looked out at him from the pages of newspapers and magazines with increasing frequency over the past five years, but the utter relaxation of unconsciousness gave the features an unfamiliar look. There were three deep lacerations above and behind the right ear, caused by the radio earpiece which had practically shattered itself against Ramsey's skull. He swung away and began searching for the ship's log.