The Man Who Lost the Sea (19 page)

Soft focus and go to black. Long beat
.

Heri took his beer away from his mouth and glared at the wall. “God’s sake, you send all that black?”

“Sure did,” said Burcke equably.

“Man, you don’t do that for anything but the second coming. What you think they expect with all that black? It sucks ’em in, but boy, you got to pay off.”

“We paid off,” said Burcke. “Here it comes.”

“The horse act, right?”

“Wrong,” said Burcke.

Dark stage. Desk, pool of light. Zoom in, Burcke, jaw clamped. In a face as sincere and interested as that, the clamped jaw is pretty grim
.

BURCKE: Tonight the Heri Gonza show brings you a true story. Although the parts are played by professional actors, and certain scenes are shortened for reasons of time, you may be assured that these are real events and can be proved in every detail.

“What the hell is this?” roared Heri Gonza. “Did you air this? Is this what went out when I was knocking myself out with that horse act?”

“Sit down,” said Burcke.

Heri Gonza sat down dazedly.

Burcke at desk. Lifts book and raps it
.

BURCKE: This is a ship’s rough log, the log of the Fafnir 203. How it comes to be on this desk, on your wall, is, I must warn you, a shocking story. The Fafnir is a twelve-cabin luxury cruiser with a crew of twelve, including stewards and the galley crew. So was the 203, before it was rebuilt. It was redesigned to sleep four with no room over, with two cabins rebuilt as a small-materials shop and a biological laboratory, and all the rest taken up with powerplant, fuel and stores. The ship’s complement was Dr. Iris Barran, mathematician—

Fade in foredeck of Fafnir, girl standing by computer
.

Dr. George Rehoboth Horowitz, microbiologist—

Bespectacled man enters, crosses to girl, who smiles
.

Yeager Kearsarge, pilot first class—

Kearsarge is a midget with a long, bony, hardbitten face. He enters
from black foreground and goes to control console
.

Sam Flannel, supercargo—

Widen lighting to pass cabin bulkhead, discovering large man strapped in acceleration couch, asleep or unconscious
.

“I got it,” said Heri Gonza in the projection room. “A rib. It’s a rib. Pretty good, fellers.”

“It isn’t a rib, Heri Gonza,” said Burcke. “Sit down, now.”

“It’s got to be a rib,” said Heri Gonza in a low voice. “Slip me a beer I should relax and enjoy the altogether funny joke.”

“Here. Now shush.”

BURCKE: … mission totally contrary to law and regulation. Destination: Iapetus. Purpose: collection of the virus, or spores, of the dreaded children’s affliction iapetitis, on the theory that examination of these in their natural habitat will reveal their exact internal structure and lead to a cure, or at the very least an immunization. Shipowner and director of mission:
(long beat)
Heri Gonza.

Fourteen hours out.

Fade Burcke and desk and take out. Dolly in to foredeck
.

Horowitz crosses to side cabin, looks in on Flannel. Touches Flannel’s face. Returns to computer and Iris
.

HOROWITZ: He’s still out cold. The tough boy is no spaceman.

IRIS: I can’t get over his being here at all. Why ever did Heri want him along?

HOROWITZ: Maybe he’ll tell us.

Small explosion. High whine
.

KEARSARGE: A rock! a rock!

IRIS:
(frightened)
What’s a rock?

Kearsarge waddles rapidly to friction hooks on bulkhead, snatches off helmets, throws two to Horowitz and Iris, sprints with two more into cabin. Gets one on Flannel’s lolling head, adjusts oxygen valve. Puts on his own. Returns to assist Iris, then Horowitz.

IRIS: What is it?

KEARSARGE: Nothing to worry you, lady. Meteorite. Just a little one. I’ll get it patched.

From control console, sudden sharp hiss and cloud of vapor
.

IRIS: Oh! And what’s
that?

KEARSARGE: Now you got me.

Kearsarge goes to console kneels, peers underneath. Grunts, fumbles
.

HOROWITZ: What is it?

KEARSARGE: Ain’t regulation, ’sall I know.

Horowitz kneels beside him and peers
.

HOROWITZ: What’s this?

KEARSARGE: Bottom of main firing lever. Wire tired to it, pulled that pin when we blasted off.

HOROWITZ: Started this timing mechanism … What time did it pop?

KEARSARGE: Just about 14:30 after blastoff.

HOROWITZ: Think you can get it off there? I’d like to test for what was in it.

Kearsarge gets the device off, gives it to Horowitz, who takes it into lab
.

Cut to cabin, closeup of Flannel’s helmeted face. He opens his eyes, stares blankly. He is very sick, pale, insane with dormant fear. Suddenly fear no longer dormant. With great difficulty raises head, raises strapped-down wrist enough to see watch. Suddenly begins to scream and thrash around. The releases are right by his hands but he can’t find them. Iris and Kearsarge run in. Kearsarge stops to take in the situation, then reaches out and pulls releases. Straps fall away; Flannel, howling, leaps for the door, knocking the midget flat and slamming Iris up against edge of door. She screams. Kearsarge scrambles to his feet, takes off after Flannel like a Boston terrier after a bull. Flannel skids to a stop by the lifeboat blister, starts tugging at it
.

KEARSARGE: What the hell are you doing?

FLANNEL
(blubbering):
14:30 … 14:30 … I gotta get out, gotta get out … (screams)

KEARSARGE: Don’t pull on that, y’damn fool! That’s not the hatch, it’s the release! We got spin on for gravity—you’ll pitch the boat a hundred miles off!

FLANNEL: Oh, lemme out, it’s too late!

Kearsarge punches upwards with both hands so unexpectedly that Flannel’s grip is broken and he pitches over backwards. Kearsarge leaps on him, twists his oxygen valve, and scuttles back out of the way, Flannel staggers over to the boat blister, gets his hands on the wrong lever again, but his knees buckle. Inside the helmet, his face is purpling. Horowitz comes running out of the lab. Kearsarge puts out an arm and holds him back, and together they watch Flannel sag down, fall, roll, writhe. He puts both hands on helmet, tugs at it weakly
.

HOROWITZ: Don’t for God’s sakes let him take off that helmet!

KEARSARGE: Don’t worry. He can’t.

Flannel slumps and lies still. Kearsarge goes to him and opens valve a little. He beckons Horowitz and together they drag him back to the cabin and with some difficulty get him on the couch and strapped down
.

HOROWITZ: What happened? I had my hands full of reagents in there,

KEARSARGE: Space nutty. They get like that sometimes after blackout. He wanted out. Tried to take the boat.

HOROWITZ: He say anything?

KEARSARGE: Buncha junk. Said, 14:30, 14:30. Said it was too late, had to get out.

HOROWITZ; That snivvy under the console popped at 14:30. He knew about it.

KEARSARGE: Did he now. What was it?

HOROWITZ: Cyanide gas. If we hadn’t been holed and forced to put the helmets on, we’d’ve had it.

KEARSARGE: Except him. He figured to be up an’ around lookin’ at his watch, and when she popped, he’d be in the boat headed home and we’d keep blasting till the pile run dry, som’res out t’ords Algol.

HOROWITZ: Can you fix those releases so he can’t reach them?

KEARSARGE: Oh sure.

Fade. Lights pick up Burcke at the side
.

BURCKE:
(as narrator)
They got an explanation out of Flannel,
and it satisfied none of them. He said he knew nothing of any cyanide. He said that Heri, knowing he was a bad spaceman, had told him that if it got so bad he couldn’t stand it, he could always come back in the lifeboat. But if he did that, he’d have to do it before 14:30 after blastoff or there wouldn’t be fuel enough to decelerate, start back, and maneuver a landing. He insisted that that was all there was to it. He would not say what he was doing aboard, except to state that Heri Gonza wanted him to look out for Heri’s interests.

No amount of discussion made anything clearer. Heri certainly could not have wanted the expedition to fail, nor his ship hurled away from the solar system. They reluctantly concluded that some enemy of Heri Gonza’s must have sabotaged them—someone they simply didn’t know.

The weeks went by—not easy ones, by any means, in those quarters, without any event except Iris Barran’s puzzling discovery that the ship required no astrogator after all: what the veteran Kearsarge couldn’t handle in his head was easily treated in the computer. Why, then, had Heri Gonza insisted on her cramming on astrogation?

Zoom in to Saturn until it fills a quadrant. String out the moons
.

Heri Gonza watched the bridge sequence, as Saturn swept close and the moons rolled by like broken beads, and little Iapetus swam close. Iapetus is not a moon like most, round or oblate, but a rock, a drifting mountain some 500 miles in diameter. And before them was the solution to the mystery of the changing moonlight. Some unknown cataclysm has cloven Iapetus, so that it has one sheer face, nearly four hundred square miles of flat plain (or cliff, depending on how you look at it) made of pale grey basaltic material. Since Iapetus always maintains one face to Saturn, it always appears brighter as it rounds the eastern limb and dimmer as it goes west, the albedo of the flat face being much higher than the craggy ruin of the rest of its surface.

“Burckee, Burckee, Burckee ol’ turkey,” murmured the comedian in accents of wonder, “who the hell writes your stuff? Who writes your lousy, lousy stuff?”

Stock shot, Fafnir putting down tail-first on rocky plain, horizon washed out and black space brought down close. Rocks sharp-cornered, uneroded. Long shot, stabilizing jacks extending widest. Ladder out. Two suited figures ride it down, the other two climb down
.

Close-up, all four at tail-base
.

HOROWITZ:
(filter mike)
Check your radios. Read me?

ALL: Check. Read you fine.

HOROWITZ: Each take a line. Walk straight out with the line as a guide, and when you’ve passed our scorch area, get a rock scraping every five feet or so until you’re far enough away that the horizon’s a third of the way up the hull. Got that? No further.
(Beat)
And I can almost tell you now, we aren’t going to find one blessed thing. No virus, no spore, no nothing. My God, it’s no more than twelve, thirteen degrees K in the shadows here. Anyway … let’s go.

BURCKE:
(off)
Scratch and hop, scratch and hop. In this gravity, you don’t move fast or push hard, or you’ll soar away and take minutes to come down again. Shuffle and scratch, scratch and sweep, scratch and hop. It took them hours.

Close-up, Kearsarge, looking down
.

KEARSARGE: Here’s something.

Close-ups, each of the other three, turning head at the sound of Kearsarge’s voice
.

HOROWITZ: What is it?

KEARSARGE: Scorch. A regular mess of it. Hell, you know what? Swope toppled his ship. I can see where he came down, where he took off, scraping along to the big edge there.

FLANNEL: Wonder he didn’t wreck her.

KEARSARGE: He did. He couldn’t hurt the hull any in this gravity, but he, sure as hell wiped off his antennae, because there they are: landing, range, transmission—every one, by God. No wonder he come barreling in the way he did. You can’t land a Fafnir on manual, but you can try, and he tried. Poor ol’ Swopie.

HOROWITZ: Everybody over there by Kearsarge. Maybe Swope picked up something where he scraped.

Long shot of the four working around long scorch and scrape marks
.

BURCKE:
(off, narrating)
They filled their specimen sacks and brought them aboard, and then for seventy-two hours they went through their dust and stones with every test Horowitz could devise.… He had been quite right in his first guess. The moonlet Iapetus is as devoid of life as the inside of an autoclave.

Cut to foredeck set, but upended, the controls at highest point, the floor what was the after bulkhead. Iris moving around with slow shuffle, setting out magnetized plates on a steel table, each one hitting loudly. In background, Flannel fusses with small electron mike, watching screen and moving objective screws. Lifeboat blister open, Kearsarge inside, working
.

Airlock cycles, opens, and Horowitz comes in, suited, with sack. He is weary. Iris helps with helmet
.

HOROWITZ: I’ve had it. Let’s get home. We can get just so duty-bound.

IRIS: What’s this “home”? I don’t remember.

HOROWITZ: You for home, Kearsarge?

KEARSARGE: Any time you’re through hoein’ this rock.

HOROWITZ: What are you doing in there?

KEARSARGE: Just routine. Figured you might want to buzz around the other side with the boat.

HOROWITZ: Nosir. I came close enough on foot. I say we’re done here. A man could sit home with a pencil and paper and figure out the density of sub-microscopic growth this place would have to have to bring any back on the hull. We’d be hip deep in it. The iapetitis virus didn’t come from Iapetus, and that, friends, is for sure and official.

KEARSARGE:
(off)
Oh my holy mother.
(He pops out, putty-colored.)
George, get over here.

IRIS: (curiously) What is it?

She goes over and disappears for a moment inside the boat, with Kearsarge and Horowitz. Off, she gasps. Then, one by one they climb out and stand looking at Flannel. Sensing the silence, he looks up and meets their eyes
.

FLANNEL: What I got, blue horns or something?

HOROWITZ: Show him, Kearsarge.

Kearsarge beckons. There is a strange pucker of grim amusement on his craggy face
.

KEARSARGE: Come look, little feller. Then you can join our club.

Reluctantly, the big man goes over to the blister and follows Kearsarge into the lifeboat. Dolly after them, swing in to the instrument panel, under it and look up
.