Chapter XVIII

“I’m frightened,” Copper said, twisting uncomfortably in the shock chair beside Kennon’s.

“After you have been so brave?” Kennon asked. “That’s nonsense. It’s just nervous reaction. Now web in like I showed you. It’s time for blast-off. We don’t dare wait much longer.”

“All right--but I have a feeling that this isn’t right. Something is going to go wrong.”

“I hope you don’t have precognition.” Kennon smiled. “I’ve checked everything. The ship is as good as she’ll ever be. There’s nothing more that we can do.”

“There’s one consolation,” Copper said wanly. “At we’ll die together.”

“There’s a better chance that we’ll live together.”

“I hope so.”

“Ready?” Kennon asked.

She nodded.

He flipped the switches that would send the fuel rods into the reactor. Below them a soft, barely audible whine ascended the sonic scale to a point of irritating inaudibility. Kennon smiled. The spindizzy was functioning properly. He flipped a second bank of switches and a dull roar came from the buried stem. Ashes and pumice heated to incandescence were blown through the air. Molten drops of radioactive lava skittered across the durilium hull as Kennon advanced the power. The whole stem of the ship was immersed in a seething lake of bolling rock as the Egg lifted slowly with ponderous dignity into the night sky.

“Hang on!” Kennon said. “I’m going to hyper.” His hand moved a red lever and the Egg shimmered and vanished with a peculiar wrenching motion into an impossible direction that the mind could not grasp. And the interceptor missile from Otpen One nosed through the space the Egg had occupied.

“We made it!” Kennon said, looking across the writhing semifluid control board, shifting oddly in the harsh yellow monochromatic light that pervaded the cabin. The screens were leaking like sieves, but they were holding well enough to keep Cth yellow from being anything more than an annoyance. He glanced over at Copper, a fantastically elongated Copper who looked like a madman’s dream of chaos.

And Copper screamed! The sound echoed and re-echoed, dying away with a lingering discordant reverberation that made his skin tingle.

“Copper! It’s all right! It’s all right! Stop it!”

Copper screamed again and her elongated figure suddenly foreshortened and collapsed into a small writhing ball from which two small pink hands emerged clutching at a gelid mass of air that flowed sluggishly around them.

And Kennon knew what he had forgotten! Hyperspace with leaky screens was nothing to inflict upon an unprepared mind. It is one thing to endure partial exposure after months of training, with experienced medics standing by to help you through the shock phase, but quite another to be thrust from a safe and sheltered existence into the mind shattering distortions of the Cth continuum.

The Egg was old. Her screens, never good at best, were hardly more than filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes of controls and instruments into writhing masses of obscene horror that sent extensions wiggling off into nothingness at eye-aching angles. A spaceman could take this--knowing it wasn’t real--but a tyro could not.

Copper collapsed. Her mind, assaulted by sensations no untrained person should experience, went into shock. But she wasn’t granted the mercy of unconsciousness. Terrified by a pseudo reality that surpassed her wildest nightmares, she stared wide-eyed at the control room and the thing that had been Kennon. She screamed until her throat was raw, until the monster beside her touched her with Kennon’s hands. Then, mercifully, she felt a stinging in her arm and all sensation ceased.

Kennon stared glumly at the controls. Fleming alone knew how many objective years were passing outside as they hurtled through four-space. Subjectively it would only be hours aboard the Egg, but a decade--or maybe a century--might pass outside this mad universe where neither time nor speed had meaning. The old ships didn’t have temporal compensators, nor could they travel through upper bands of Cth where subjective and objective time were more nearly equal. They were trapped in a semi-stasis of time as the ship fled on through the distorted monochromatic regions that bypassed normal space.

The Egg slipped smoothly out of the hyper jump, back into the normal universe. Beta floated above them, the blue shield of her atmosphere shining softly in the light of Beta’s sun.

“Couldn’t hit it that good again in a hundred tries,” Kennon gloated. “Halfway across the galaxy--and right on the nose.” He looked at the shock chair beside him. Copper was curled into a tight ball inside the confining safety web, knees drawn up, back bent, head down--arms wrapped protectingly around her legs--the fetal position of catatonic shock.

He shook her shoulder--no response. Her pulse was thready and irregular. Her breathing was shallow. Her lips were blue. Her condition was obvious--space shock--extreme grade. She’d need medical attention if she was going to live. And she’d need it fast!

“Just why, you educated nitwit,” he snarled at himself, “didn’t you have sense enough to give her that injection of Sonmol before we hypered! You haven’t the sense of a decerebrate Capellan grackle!”

He turned on the radio. “Emergency!” he said. “Any station! Space-shock case aboard. Extreme urgency.”

“Identify yourself--give your license. Over.”

“What port are you?”

“Hunterstown--will you please identify? Over.”

“Your co-ordinates,” Kennon snapped. “Over.”

“280.45--67.29 plus. Repeat--request your identification.”

“Pilot Kennon, Jac, Beta 47M 26429. I have no I.D. for the ship--and you’ll see why when I land. Over.”

“Hunterstown Port to Kennon. You are not--repeat not--cleared to land. Go into orbit and report your position. Over.”

“Sorry, Hunterstown. You wouldn’t have checked in if you didn’t have room, and a hospital. This is an emergency. I’m setting down. Out.”

“But--” The words got no farther. Kennon was already spinning the ship.

“All right--we have you on the scope. But this is a class one violation. You may come in on Landing Beam One.”

“Sorry. I have no GCA.”

“What?--what sort of ship are you flying?” The voice was curious.

“I’m matching intrinsics over your port. Talk me in when I break through the overcast.”

“Talk you in?”

“That’s right. My instruments are obsolete.”

“Great Halstead! What else?”

“I have an Ion drive. Plus two radioactive.”

“Oh no!--And you still want to come in?”

“I have to. My passenger’s in shock. She’s going to have a baby.”

“All right--I’ll try to get you down in one piece.”

“Have an ambulance ready,” Kennon said.

Kennon lowered the Egg through the overcast. Ground control picked him up smoothly and took him down as though it had been rehearsed. The Egg touched down in the radioactive area of the port. Decontamination jets hissed, sluicing the ship to remove surface contamination.

“Ochsner! what sort of a ship is that?” Ground Control’s startled voice came over the annunciator.

“It’s an old one,” Kennon said.

“That’s a gross understatement. Stand by for boarders. Ambulance coming up.”

Kennon opened the airlock and two radiation-suited men entered. “At least you had sense enough to wear protective clothing in this hotbox,” one said as they carefully unwebbed Copper and carried her out of the lock. “You wait here. The Port Captain wants to see you.”

“Where are you taking her? What Center?” Kennon asked.

“What should you care? You’ve nearly killed her. The idea of taking a pregnant woman up in this death trap! What in Fleming’s name’s the matter with your brain?”

“I had to,” Kennon said. “I had to. It was a matter of life and death.” For once, he thought wryly, the cliche was true.

The Betan’s face behind the transparent helmet was disgusted and unbelieving. “I hear that sort of thing every day,” he said. “Am I supposed to believe it?”

“You’d believe it if you’d have been where I was,” Kennon muttered. “Now--whe’re are you taking her?” he demanded.

The man arched blond eyebrows. “To the local Medical Center--where else? There’s only one in this area.”

“Thanks,” Kennon said.

He watched the ambulance flit off as he waited for the Spaceport Patrol. There was no further need for the protection suit, so he peeled it off and hung it in the control-room locker. Copper was right, he mused. It did itch.

The Port Captain’s men were late as usual--moving gingerly through the radiation area. A noncom gestured for him to enter their carryall. “Port Captain wants to see you,” he said.

“I know,” Kennon replied.

“You should have waited upstairs.”

“I couldn’t. It was a matter of medicine,” Kennon said.

The noncom’s face sobered. “Why didn’t you say so? All you said was that it was an emergency.”

“I’ve been away. I forgot.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. You’re a Betan, aren’t you?”

Kennon nodded.

They drove to the Port Office, where Kennon expected--and got--a bad time from the port officials. He filled out numerous forms, signed affidavits, explained his unauthorized landing, showed his spaceman’s ticket, defended his act of piloting without an up-to-date license, signed more forms, entered a claim for salvage rights to the Egg, and finally when the Legal Division, the Traffic Control Division, the Spaceport Safety Office, Customs, Immigration, and Travelers Aid had finished with him, he was ushered into the presence of the Port Captain.

The red-faced chunky officer eyed him with a cold stare. “You’ll be lucky, young man, if you get out of this with a year in Correction. Your story doesn’t hang together.”

It didn’t, Kennon thought. But there was no sense telling all of it to a Port Captain. Under no circumstances could the man be any help to him. He had neither the power nor the prestige to request a Brotherhood Board of Inquiry. In rank, he was hardly more than a glorified Traffic Control officer. It would do no good to tell him an improbable tale of slavery on a distant planet. The only thing to do was wait out the storm and hope it would pass. If worst came to worst he’d use his rank, but he’d made enough stir already. He doubted if the Captain had authority to order him into Detention--but he was certain to get a lecture. These minor officials loved to tell someone off. He gritted his teeth. He’d endure it for Copper’s sake--and to get out of here quietly. Alexander would undoubtedly have agents posted by now, and his only chance for temporary freedom of action was to get out of here with as little fuss as possible.

He sat quietly, his flushed face and tight jaw muscles betraying his impatience as the Captain paced up and down and talked on and on. The man sounded like he could go for hours. With increasing impatience Kennon listened to the cadenced flow of complaint and condemnation, occasionally inserting a “Yes, sir” or “Sorry, sir” or “No, sir” as the words flowed around him.

However, there had to be a breaking point somewhere, and the monotony was beginning to wear his temper thin. Another five minutes, he reflected, was about all he could take.

The door chime rang softly.

“Come in,” the Port Captain said, breaking off in mid-tirade. The change in his manner was so abrupt that Kennon couldn’t help smiling.

A young blond man in an interne’s gray uniform entered the room.

“Yes, Doctor,” the Port Captain said. “What can I do for you?”

“Do you have a Jac Kennon here? Dr. Jac Kennon?”

“Did you say doctor?” the Port Captain said in a half-strangled voice.

“You never let me tell you,” Kennon said mildly, “that my landing here was a matter of medicine. Technically you have contributed to a delay in treatment.”

The Port Captain’s face paled. “Why didn’t you say something?” he said.

“Against your gale of wind I would be but a faint breeze,” Kennon said coldly. He turned to the interne. “I’m Dr. Kennon.” They bowed formally to each other.

“I’m Smalley, sir, from the medical center. Dr. Brainard sends his compliments and requests that you join him for consultation.”

“The Port Captain--” Kennon began.

“Don’t worry about it, Doctor. I’ll relinquish responsibility to Dr. Brainard,” the Captain said.

“I have placed a formal written request with your office,” Smalley said stiffly. “You are relieved of further charge. Dr. Kennon is urgently needed. It is a matter of medicine.”

The Captain looked relieved. On Beta it was poor policy to interfere with the doings of doctors and engineers--or even doctors of philosophy.