Takeoff. Part 21

The two men looked at each other without smiling. "You hurt?" Dumbrowski asked levelly.

"Yeah." Drake pointed at his nose. "Slightly busted," he lied. "You?"

Dumbrowski removed the pad, and blood poured from an inch-long cut directly over his cheekbone. "I'm bleedin' to death, you butcher."

Drake walked over and looked at the wound. "I'll put a tourniquet around your neck."

"You would."

Drake took antiseptics and healing agents from his bag and did things with them. Dumbrowski sat stolidly through it all. Finally, the doctor sprayed dermiseal over the cut and pinched it together while the proteinoid plastic polymerized, sealing the edges of the wound.

The eye was badly swollen and purpling. Drake took a hypogun out of his case and fired three minuscule shots into the tissue around the eye and then stood back.

"You'll live," he said.

"Thanks, Doc." He turned to MacDonald. "Mac, go down and get Pete, and you two put that Section Six peegee unit back together. We'll have to work on the main generator coils instead."

When MacDonald had gone, Dumbrowski got up and walked over to his foot locker, from which he extracted a one-liter bottle of amber fluid. "I hope you like Irish," he said. "It's as good for settling a brawl as it is for starting one." He poured two and added ice water. Then he said: "We've got to figure out how we're going to handle these ducks."

He never mentioned the fight again.

"I really don't think I can stand this much longer," Devris said. "I've gone along this far just for the gag, but I have almost reached my limit."

The heat was oppressive. The air was so wet that it seemed to splash as they slogged through it.

And at one and a half gravities, even the effort to lift a foot was annoying and tiring.

Drake took a scoopful of duckling food from a fifty-kilo drum and dumped it into the feeding troughs near the brooder.

"Wakwakwak!" chortled a hundred little b.a.l.l.s of feathers as they scrambled around the heating unit of the brooder.

Devris poured water into the drinking pans. It ran" abnormally fast and splashed queerly under the extra pseudogravitational acceleration. "Yes, sir ," he repeated, "just about reached my limit."

"What are you griping about?" Drake asked.

"Oh, nothing, nothing. It's just that for the past two weeks, I have been b.u.mbling around under a gee pull that makes me feel like I was made of lead. I seem to have spent all my life feeding ducklings stuff that acts like bird shot and pouring them drinks that flow like mercury."

"There's not that much difference," Drake objected. "In addition," the navigator went on, ignoring the interruption, "I have to lug this grossly heavy corpse of mine around through a fever-swamp atmosphere that is gradually driving me to the verge of acute claustrophobia." He wiped at his forehead.

"And, as I said, I have just about reached my limit."

"What are you going to do when you reach it?"

"Take a taxi and go home," Devris said, with an air of finality.

Drake finished filling the feeder and dusted off his hands.

"That's the last one for today ," he said. "Let's go up to your place; I want to look up something in that book of regulations of yours."

Devris set down his bucket of water. "How did you know I had a reg book?"

"Simple deduction."

"He can't even use a word without 'duck' in it," Devris whispered in a hoa.r.s.e aside. "O.K.

How?"

"I reasoned that no one would be able to quote from regulations the way you do without having studied them extensively. Whence, it follows that you must own a copy of your own, since it would be inconvenient for you to borrow the captain's all the time-and bad politics, besides."

"Marvelous, Holmes! Absolutely marvelous! You figured it out with only those few clues?"

"Almost," Drake admitted modestly. "Of course, there was one additional bit of evidence."

"Which was?"

"I saw the book in your room."

"Holmes, you are phenomenal; let's go."

The two men plodded their way up the stairs. The entire ship was under one hundred and fifty per cent of a Standard Gee now; the power coils had had to be rebuilt, but it was easier than redoing each floor singly.

They finally pushed their way into Devris' cabin and sat down.

"Whooo!" Devris said. "At least it's cooler in here."

MacDonald had rigged up individual air-conditioners for the sleeping rooms, but nothing could be done about increased pressure and gravity. The air was cooler and less humid, that was all.

Drake took the copy of the Interstellar Commission Regulations and began leafing through it.

"What's the trouble?" the navigator asked.

"s.p.a.ce," Drake said. "We haven't got enough floor area on the ship to take care of the ducks unless we jettison some of the cargo. This is a pretty big ship, but it's not big enough."

"Cargo?" Devris put a finger to his chin and stared at the ceiling. "You want to get rid of non-perishable cargo. Hm-m-m." He rubbed his chin with the finger. "Try Section XIX, Paragraph...uh...seven, I think."

Drake turned to that section and began reading. "The cargo officer shall be responsible for all damage to the ship due to shifting cargo, since it shall-"

"Nope," Devris interrupted, "that's for bigger ships, with four or five men in the crew. Wrong paragraph. Try Seventeen."

Drake flipped over several pages. "If, in case of emergency, it shall become necessary to jettison cargo, such cargo shall be that which is the least-"

"I can boil that down for you," Devris said. "There are orders of precedence. The idea is to junk the cheapest, most useless cargo first, and work your way up. Suppose you have a hundred kilos of oxygen and a hundred kilos of diamonds, and you have to get rid of a hundred kilos of something. What do you get rid of?

"Well, if it's s.p.a.ce you need, you get rid of the oxy, because a hundred kilos of diamonds can be broken up and stashed here and there in out-of-the-way places. Even if they couldn't, they'd be kept because they're a bit more expensive than oxy.

"On the other hand, if the ship is low on oxy, you jettison the diamonds. See?"

"Who decides which to drop?" Drake asked.

"The captain, always-even if there's a cargo officer aboard. It's the captain's decision, because his job is to protect life first and property afterwards."

Drake nodded. "That's what I wanted; I'm going up to see Dumbrowski."

As he was toiling his way up the stairs, he met Dumbrowski toiling his way down.

"Oh, there you are," the captain said. "I wanted to know if you needed that incubator any more."

"Just what I was going to talk to you about. I was looking things up in the regulations, and I found we can toss out a lot of stuff-a lot of the cheaper cargo."

Dumbrowski nodded slowly. "You looked it up, eh? That's good. But, you know, I hate to throw anything away-and I don't think I will."

"But, captain-"

"Will you kindly go back down those stairs? I'm getting tired of just standing here. Let's go to Devris' room."

Drake retreated obediently. They went to the navigator's compartment, and Dumbrowski knocked resoundingly on the door. "Pete! It's me."

"Come on in, skipper," Devris said.

Dumbrowski looked at the doctor. "I wouldn't want to open the door while he was cleaning lenses," he said. "It might get dust on them if I opened the door too suddenly."

"I See," said Drake.

They pushed the door open and sat down.

"Now, about this jettisoning cargo," Dumbrowski began. "I don't think it's necessary. Besides, we just couldn't dump all the stuff we'll need. We couldn't get rid of all your duck food, could we?"

"No-o-o; we couldn't."

"But we'll need that s.p.a.ce. So, I have an idea. Look; we're a good long way from the nearest large gravitational body. Is that right, Pete?"

"I haven't detected anything in the past five weeks. We're nine light-years from the nearest star. It's a blue-white; you can't miss it if you look out the ports."

Dumbrowski nodded and looked back at Drake. "So here's what we do: We take all the stuff we can and cart it outside and attach it to the hull with magnaclamps. That includes all those drums of duck food, and everything else. The brooders, too, when you're through with 'em.

"Then, if we need anything, all we have to do is go out and get it. Follow?"

Devris just nodded, but Drake felt rather dazed. It had never occurred to him that it was possible to throw something overboard without throwing it away.

I'm just not used to thinking in terms like that, he thought. I keep thinking of aircraft. Then he thought of something else. "What do we do when the rescue ship comes?"

"Well, they'll be able to take part of the cargo, and we'll haul back in the rest. Those ducks can becrowded for a couple of days, can't they?"

"Sure; two days won't matter." After all, he decided, it wouldn't really crowd them much. By that time, all the feed would be gone-or at least most of it would.

"Good," said Dumbrowski. "Good. There's one other problem. Who's going to clean up after the ducks?"

Drake smiled a sickly smile. "I guess we'll all have to work at it. It'll all have to be carted to the disposal."

"Three cheers." Dumbrowski stood up. "Well, MacDonald and I will start hauling stuff outside."

And with that, he heaved himself up and walked out.

"You know," Drake said, looking at the closed door, "that guy worries me. For the past couple of weeks, I thought that... well-" He stood up and looked at his hands, frowning. "I thought we'd arrived at an understanding." He looked up at Devris. "But he still seems worried about something."

"Well, sure he is," Devris said. "He's not going to be in the best of odor with the Commission."

"Why not?"

"You mean you don't know?" Devris sat down again on a nearby chair. "Why, man, he's in trouble. So am I, and so is MacDonald-although neither of us is in as bad a jam as the skipper is."

"Why?"

"Because the ship has been disabled. We don't have any reasonable explanation for it. I'm in a jam because he had the control panels open when the duck walked in. But Dumbrowski is in a jam because he's captain, and all this is his fault. He's directly responsible for the whole thing."

Devris wasn't looking at Drake now; he was looking at his fingernails. "Maybe you wondered," he said, "why the skipper was so sore at you after the accident. Maybe I should have told you before this, but here it is.

"The Constanza is Dumbrowski's whole life. Sure, his little wife is a nice gal, but she's not something you can anchor your life to. Dumbrowski's pinned his life to Constanza."

Drake chewed at his lower lip. "I can see that. Sure. But what did I do?"

Devris looked up from his fingernails. "It isn't something you did. It's something you can't be held responsible for.

"The ship has been wrecked. For the first time in his career, Dumbrowski has had to call for help because his ship was out of commission. His ship. The Constanza.

"I'm responsible because I brought the duck up. And Mac, as I said, is responsible because he shouldn't have let the duck get in. But Dumbrowski may never get another promotion-it's his ship that was wrecked."

"I see," Drake said slowly. "And I'm not responsible at all?"

"Not as far as the Commission is concerned. It couldn't be shifted on to you, even if you wanted it to be." Devris smiled a little. "And I know you well enough after all these weeks to know that you'd take responsibility if you could.

But it won't wash. It can't be done. We've had it-that's all."

Heat. Damp, soggy, broiling heat. Unpleasant, miserable heat, from which there was no escape.

And a great burden of weight that sapped the strength rapidly in the hot, wet air.

MacDonald lifted another shovelful and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. He was stripped to the waist, clad only in a pair of sport shorts and his boots, and the perspiration ran down his neck and chest and back, soaked into the shorts, ran on down his legs, and collected in soggy pools in his boots. His hands were slippery on the handle of the improvised shovel, making it difficult to work.

Across the room, Drake was surrounded by hundreds of awkward little birds who chorused their monotonous wakwakwak.