Saturn Rukh (39 page)

“Say, Rod,” he called through the radio link after a few steps. “How about a little boost help with the belay line.”

“Sure thing,” said Rod. Soon he was doing deep squat leg boosts in synchronism with Dan’s steps from one loop to the next, adding the lift of his leg muscles to that of Dan’s.

On the way up, the three heard a strange rumbling noise coming from the radio link.

“What’s that! Thunder?” asked Dan, a little concerned since he was so exposed and so encumbered.

“Sounds like a rukh talking,” said Rod. “But it’s coming over the radio link instead of from outside.”

“It’s Pete snoring,” said Chastity sleepily. “Heard it plenty of times.”

Dan knew that was probably true. He also knew that it was none of his business what Chastity and Pete did together. But he still didn’t like it.

“We need to get her to
Sexdent
as fast as possible and get that wound cleaned and stitched up properly,” said Dan, as Rod helped him get Chastity down the feather tree to the rukh’s surface. “But we also need to take care of Pete.”

“He’s not suffering like Chass is,” said Rod. “I say let him hang there and sleep it off.”

“But—” protested Dan.

“I’ll stay here and reassure him in case he wakes up,” said Rod. “You take care of Chass and come back as soon as you can. I’m not climbing down there without a belayer up top.”

~ * ~

When Dan and Chastity arrived back at the ship, Sandra was waiting for them in the airlock. The minute Chastity had her helmet off, Sandra gave her a pain pill, then waited, hypodermic in hand, for Chastity’s shoulder to be bared as Dan cut the top half of the saturnsuit off, leaving only the lower sleeve portion that was wrapped over her stump. Sandra had set up a sick bay on the lower deck using Seichi’s bedboard as an operating table, with all of the medical kit’s operating tools lined up in a row on the galley counter.

The operation didn’t take very long. The loops of fine macropolyhextube line had sliced neatly through the skin and flesh when they had tightened, while the pressure of the bangle had neatly pulled apart the wrist intercarpal joints. Fortunately, there was a nub of metacarpal bone, some muscle tissue, and a portion of palm skin left on the little finger side of the hand, and Dan was able to fashion a small “finger” at the end of the stump that Chastity would be able to use for activating icons on a control screen.

~ * ~

The next day Chastity exited the ladies’, face pale with pain. She was still dressed in her blue satin nightgown and was planning on going back to her habitat to continue her recuperation. Even with Sandra’s help, the one-handed climb down the ladder had been tiring and she wasn’t looking forward to the climb back. First, however, she had to get a drink of water to take the pain pill that Doc had prescribed for her. She needed it. Her shoulder ached, and although it was no longer there, the thumb on her left hand was pulsating in pain. The way to the galley was blocked by Pete, who was opening one galley door after another, looking for something. He turned to face her, eyes bloodshot, chin covered with stubble, hair unkempt, and jumpsuit wrinkled and sweaty from being slept in.

“Where are they?” he asked grumpily. “I always kept the ethanol squeezers in the top locker. I need some ‘hair of the dog that bit me.’ They’re all gone.”

“I don’t know,” replied Chastity, glad that she really didn’t know where the alcohol had gone, although she remembered hearing Doc and Sandra discussing various hiding places to keep it away from Pete. “And I don’t care!” she concluded venomously, her violet eyes glaring at him, furious with suppressed anger.

Pete was sober enough to realize that an apology was in order. “Chass,” he started. “I’m really sorry for what I’ve done.” He reached clumsily toward her. “Let me give you a big hug and—”

“Don’t you
dare
touch me!” yelled Chastity angrily at him.
“Ever again!“

Chastened, Pete backed off. He didn’t blame her one bit. There was no apology sufficient to make up for what he had done to her. Sandra came down from her watch station on the control deck to back up Chastity, and Pete retreated to the men’s under their combined stare. Sandra helped Chastity get the pain pill out of the bottle so she could take it, then assisted her up the ladder by climbing up one side of the ladder while reaching through to support Chastity’s back as she climbed up the other side one-handed. After she had Chastity safely tucked back into her habitat, Sandra returned to her lonely watch duties. She would be “acting commander” of
Sexdent
for a number of hours yet, as Dan and Rod, physically exhausted from hauling Chastity and Pete to safety, both took an eight-hour Saturnday sleep period.

~ * ~

After a week and a half of rest, Chastity got herself dressed, and over Dan’s objections insisted on starting to pull her share of watch shift duties. She pretended she didn’t notice that every time she was on watch duty, Dan or Rod or Sandra “just happened” to be out of their habitats and busy doing something or other, so she was never left alone. Pete, thoroughly chastened and essentially ignored by the others, spent most of his time in his habitat watching old videos recalled from Jeeves’s immense memory.

During this particular nighttime shift, Chastity found that her “guardian angel” was Rod. Rather than forcing Rod to come up with some excuse for his being awake when it was dark outside, she enlisted his help by asking his advice.

“I’m still trying to find a way to fly us out of our predicament,” she said to him as she came down the ladder to join him in the galley for a cup of coffee. Now that her arm was not so sore, she was becoming quite proficient at using the little bit of wrist she had left in her left hand to “hook” the side rail on the ladder. “I know we’ve been through it dozens of times and proven mathematically it can’t be done, but I keep thinking that we’ve just not thought of the right set of trajectories.”

“I do the same thing when I’m on watch duty,” admitted Rod, leaning his back against the comer of the galley and lifting his squeezer. “Sometimes even when I’m not on watch duty.”

“I thought if you and I worked on it together, then perhaps we might come up with some new idea that we wouldn’t have thought of separately.” She joined him at the galley counter and picked up her squeezer from Kitty. The deck and countertop, like everything else on
Sexdent,
was now tilted at a slight angle since Peregrine was on its nightly climb upward. The tilt of the deck brought their bodies together, shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh. Rod stiffened slightly at the close contact and turned to look closely at her. She had obviously gone through a long session in the ladies’ before she started her watch shift, for her makeup was perfect and not a hair of her gorgeously curly black hair was out of place. He didn’t have to look down to notice the position of the zipper on her coveralls; his peripheral vision was sufficient for that.

“What I was thinking,” she continued, putting her squeezer in the crook of her left wrist to keep it from sliding across the countertop while drawing on the counter with her right index finger, “was that instead of trying to get out to Titan in one big jump, we try climbing out from moon to moon, using a rocket burn at each one, and saving the tether for the moon where it will do the most good.” Rod, instead of looking at the moving fingertip, found his eyes staring at the stump and its strange little wormlike appendage, both still mottled with purple-red scars where the stitches had been.

“We both know that it probably won’t work,” said Rod. “It’s always best to do your bums deep in a gravity well, and the gravity well of Saturn is the deepest one we’ve got. But... you never can tell until you work out the equations. Let’s go on up to the consoles and take Jeeves through his paces.” He was relieved when the close contact was broken and even more relieved when they got to the control deck where they would be working at separate consoles. His body had enjoyed the contact with her body, but his brain had recoiled at the injury, leaving him in a highly confused emotional state. Now that they were working together on a technical problem and he could think of Chastity as a pilot instead of as a woman, the fact that she had no left hand was no longer important.

For the next four hours, the two pilots worked the problem intensely, trying one option after another. Chastity felt really alive again, the pain in her shoulder and wrist forgotten as her brain concentrated on trying to solve the impossible problem.

Finally, they ran out of variations on Chastity’s original idea. Unfortunately, none of them offered any route to escape from their present predicament.

“Well,” said Chastity, almost cheerfully, as she shut down the trajectory computation program and put the pilot console back on its standard display. “It didn’t work, but it was a good try.”

“Let me know when you have another idea,” said Rod. “One of these days one of them is going to work.” He yawned and looked at the time on the display clock. “Where did the night go?” he said, getting up and stretching. “I’ll be on night-shift duty in five hours, so I’d better take a shower, hit the sack, and get a few winks so I’ll stay awake.”

“I’ll be off shift duty in half an hour,” said Chastity softly, swiveling in the pilot console chair to smile invitingly up at him. “Would you like some company tonight?”

A frightened, almost panicked look appeared on Rod’s face. “Gee, Chass,” he spluttered. “I’d love to, but didn’t Doc say you’re supposed to take it easy and rest?”

Chastity had been expecting that answer and was going to reply, “I was planning on just lying there and letting you do all the work.” When, however, she saw that Rod’s eyes were focused not on her cleavage, but on the stump of her left arm, she suddenly grew angry.

“What’s the matter, Rod?” she snarled, raising her stump and thrusting it at him. “Don’t like the idea of fucking a ‘crip’?” Rod didn’t try to answer, but quickly turned and scuttled down the ladder to the safety of the shower. “And don’t bother coming back and saying you’ve changed your mind,” she yelled loudly at his retreating back. “The last thing I want from
you
is a ‘pity fuck.’ “

~ * ~

A few days later, as the long nighttime climb of Peregrine and the rest of the flock was reaching its end, Sandra noticed that Uppereye had stopped paying attention to the language lesson. She then realized that the normal low level of booming “gossip” among the members of the flock had increased in volume and quantity. Uppereye had been communicating with Sandra in the “upper register” using the air sacs in Uppereye’s neck, but at the same time Uppereye had been talking to other members of the flock by generating chordal tones with Peregrine’s body that Sandra felt mostly with her feet and gut. Sandra knew from experience that the chordal patterns were different from the usual flock gossip and once again sadly missed Seichi. If he had stayed alive and had spent the last many months learning rukh talk, he could probably have told her what the sounds meant, not only in content, but feeling. As it was, she was restricted to getting a translation in pidgin English from Uppereye.

“Peregrine makes much talk,” Sandra started. “Flock makes much talk. Talk is different. Talk this night not same as talk other nights. Why talk different?”

“Eagle not okay,” replied Uppereye, handing the portable console back to Sandra and raising its eye up on its neck to leave. “Uppereye go now. Uppereye go help Eagle.” Sandra, slightly bewildered, and wanting to ask more questions, watched as Uppereye left, using a combination of claws and canards to make its way back to its niche in the prow of Peregrine.

“What happened?” asked Dan over the radio link from his watch station on the control deck. “Why did Uppereye leave early?”

“I don’t really know,” said Sandra as she prepared to enter the airlock. “Something about Eagle not being okay. I guess we’ll know more once the Sun comes up and we have more light on the subject.” As the airlock platform rose up, she heard loud rising tones coming from the front of Peregrine’s body. The humans normally only heard those tones when the flock was in a daylight hunting dive. Something strange indeed was going on in the flock.

~ * ~

Petra settled into her niche and chirped a strong signal from the ranging sacs along the front edge of Petru’s wing, aiming them at the distress cries coming from Galru far above. She made the chirp high in tone so as to allow her to extract the maximum detail from the return. When the return came, the image it brought was not a good one. Although Galru flew straight and steady, and Galra was in her proper place on the top of Galru’s keel, there was something wrong with Galro, for the long neck that supported Galro’s eye had come loose and was hanging down from the base of Galru’s keel. What was worse, Galro’s eye was only half-open and stayed that way.

Petra increased Petru’s thrust rate and climbed upward to help. All around her in the dawning light she could see other members of the flock joining her as they hurried to assist one of the more-respected elders of the flock.

~ * ~

“It’s Eagle, all right,” said Dan, as Sandra, still dressed in her saturnsuit, scampered up the ladder from the airlock. Dan was looking upward through the holoviewport with the biviewer. “I can tell from the white band of feathers near the head of the keel. There’s something wrong with Eagle’s lower eye. It’s hanging down limply. Doesn’t look good to me.” He froze the pantograph holding the biviewer and stepped aside so Sandra could take a look.

“The brain of the lower eye must have died during the night,” said Sandra as she studied the light-amplified image through the biviewer. “But the upper brain must be all right, because the body is flying along normally.” There was a long silence as they both thought about the implications.