The Sky Trap Part 2

Lawton got another bad jolt the instant he emerged through the 'chute opening. Captain Forrester was leaning against a parachute rack gasping for breath, his face a livid hue.

Slashaway looked equally bad. His jaw muscles were twitching and he was tugging at the collar of his gym suit.

Forrester gasped: "Dave, I tried to move the ship. I didn't know you were outside."

"Good G.o.d, you didn't know--"

"The rotaries backfired and used up all the oxygen in the engine room.

Worse, there's been a carbonic oxide seepage. The air is contaminated throughout the ship. We'll have to open the ventilation valves immediately. I've been waiting to see if--if you could breathe down there. You're all right, aren't you? The air _is_ breathable?"

Lawton's face was dark with fury. "I was an experimental rat in the sky, eh?"

"Look, Dave, we're all in danger. Don't stand there glaring at me.

Naturally I waited. I have my crew to think of."

"Well, think of them. Get those valves open before we all have convulsions."

A half hour later charcoal gas was mingling with oxygen outside the ship, and the crew was breathing it in again gratefully. Thinly dispersed, and mixed with oxygen it seemed all right. But Lawton had misgivings. No matter how attenuated a lethal gas is it is never entirely harmless. To make matters worse, they were over the Atlantic Ocean.

Far beneath them was an emerald turbulence, half obscured by eastward moving cloud ma.s.ses. The bubble was holding, but the morale of the crew was beginning to sag.

Lawton paced the control room. Deep within him unsuspected energies surged. "We'll last until the oxygen is breathed up," he exclaimed.

"We'll have four or five days, at most. But we seem to be traveling faster than an ocean liner. With luck, we'll be in Europe before we become carbon dioxide breathers."

"Will that help matters, Dave?" said the captain wearily.

"If we can blast our way out, it will."

The Captain's sagging body jackknifed erect. "Blast our way out? What do you mean, Dave?"

"I've clamped expulsor disks on the cosmic ray absorbers and trained them downward. A thin stream of accidental neutrons directed against the bottom of the bubble may disrupt its energies--wear it thin. It's a long gamble, but worth taking. We're staking nothing, remember?"

Forrester sputtered: "Nothing but our lives! If you blast a hole in the bubble you'll destroy its energy balance. Did that occur to you? Inside a lopsided bubble we may careen dangerously or fall into the sea before we can get the rotaries started."

"I thought of that. The pilots are standing by to start the rotaries the instant we lurch. If we succeed in making a rent in the bubble we'll break out the helicoptic vanes and descend vertically. The rotaries won't backfire again. I've had their burnt-out cylinder heads replaced."

An agitated voice came from the visiplate on the captain's desk: "Tuning in, sir."

Lawton stopped pacing abruptly. He swung about and grasped the desk edge with both hands, his head touching Forrester's as the two men stared down at the horizontal face of petty officer James Caldwell.

Caldwell wasn't more than twenty-two or three, but the screen's opalescence silvered his hair and misted the outlines of his jaw, giving him an aspect of senility.

"Well, young man," Forrester growled. "What is it? What do you want?"

The irritation in the captain's voice seemed to increase Caldwell's agitation. Lawton had to say: "All right, lad, let's have it," before the information which he had seemed bursting to impart could be wrenched out of him.

It came in erratic spurts. "The bubble is all blooming, sir. All around inside there are big yellow and purple growths. It started up above, and--and spread around. First there was just a clouding over of the sky, sir, and then--stalks shot out."

For a moment Lawton felt as though all sanity had been squeezed from his brain. Twice he started to ask a question and thought better of it.

Pumpings were superfluous when he could confirm Caldwell's statement in half a minute for himself. If Caldwell had cracked up--

Caldwell hadn't cracked. When Lawton walked to the quartz port and stared down all the blood drained from his face.

The vegetation was luxuriant, and unearthly. Floating in the sky were serpentine tendrils as thick as a man's wrist, purplish flowers and ropy fungus growths. They twisted and writhed and shot out in all directions, creating a tangle immediately beneath him and curving up toward the ship amidst a welter of seed pods.

He could see the seeds dropping--dropping from pods which reminded him of the darkly horned skate egg sheaths which he had collected in his boyhood from sea beaches at ebb tide.

It was the _unwholesomeness_ of the vegetation which chiefly unnerved him. It looked dank, malarial. There were decaying patches on the fungus growths and a miasmal mist was descending from it toward the ship.

The control room was completely still when he turned from the quartz port to meet Forrester's startled gaze.

"Dave, what does it mean?" The question burst explosively from the captain's lips.

"It means--life has appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside the bubble, sir. All in the s.p.a.ce of an hour or so."

"But that's--_impossible_."

Lawton shook his head. "It isn't at all, sir. We've had it drummed into us that evolution proceeds at a snailish pace, but what proof have we that it can't mutate with lightning-like rapidity? I've told you there are gases outside we can't even make in a chemical laboratory, molecular arrangements that are alien to earth."

"But plants derive nourishment from the soil," interpolated Forrester.

"I know. But if there are alien gases in the air the surface of the bubble must be reeking with unheard of chemicals. There may be compounds inside the bubble which have so sped up organic processes that a hundred million year cycle of mutations has been telescoped into an hour."

Lawton was pacing the floor again. "It would be simpler to a.s.sume that seeds of existing plants became somehow caught up and imprisoned in the bubble. But the plants around us never existed on earth. I'm no botanist, but I know what the Congo has on tap, and the great rain forests of the Amazon."

"Dave, if the growth continues it will fill the bubble. It will choke off all our air."

"Don't you suppose I realize that? We've got to destroy that growth before it destroys us."

It was pitiful to watch the crew's morale sag. The miasmal taint of the ominously proliferating vegetation was soon pervading the ship, spreading demoralization everywhere.

It was particularly awful straight down. Above a ropy tangle of livid vines and creepers a kingly stench weed towered, purplish and bloated and weighted down with seed pods.

It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton had ever smelt before.

The bubble had become a blooming horror sailing slowly westward above the storm-tossed Atlantic. And all the chemical agents which Lawton sprayed through the ventilation valves failed to impede the growth or destroy a single seed pod.

It was difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion of problematically poisonous acids.

It was no sale. The growths increased by leaps and bounds, as though determined to show their resentment of the measures taken against them by marshalling all their forces in a demoralizing plantkrieg.

Thwarted, desperate, Lawton played his last card. He sent five members of the crew, equipped with blow guns. They returned screaming. Lawton had to fortify himself with a double whiskey soda before he could face the look of reproach in their eyes long enough to get all of the p.r.i.c.kles out of them.

From then on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship's kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The a.s.sistant engineer leapt through a 'chute opening, after avowing that he preferred impalement to suffocation.