“Okay, make another check on the reading.”
“I’ve made four checks already—”
“Damn it, make another!”
“It’s no use, Pink. The life-scanner’s never wrong.”
“No possibility of a monkey wrench dropped into its innards? It couldn’t be seeing things that aren’t there?”
“Not in a million years.”
“Then there’s no water, no air, no gravity worth mentioning, and still—”
“That’s right. There’s life on that silly-looking little apple. There’s somebody sitting on it!“
In the ninetieth star system to be explored by the insatiably curious men of Earth, there were seven planets. Between the fourth and fifth from the star there was a belt of asteroids: some three or four thousand tiny planetary bodies traveling in vast ellipses around the star. At one time they had probably constituted a single planet, but some unimaginable explosion far back in time had scattered the great ball broadcast, and the largest of the resulting planetoids was now no more than 440 miles across. In the gargantuan belt of them, many were no bigger in diameter than the spaceship Elephant’s Child herself.
When the instruments of the ship detected this belt of asteroids, Captain Pinkham turned aside as a matter of course, to cruise through it and let his cartographer map it, his organicus officer check it for signs of life, and all his other crewmen turn their inquisitive eyes and machines upon it. It was the seventh asteroid belt to be discovered by man, if you included the one between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, back home, incredible light-years behind....
No life had ever been discovered on an asteroid, except for the vegetable-animal space-eating bacteria on Pallas. No life—
Until now.
Captain Pinkham headed for the tiny bit of planet, let his ship’s screens pick it up and relay its presence to the automatic recoil engines, which slammed the Elephant’s Child to a stop about twelve feet away from the knobbly slate-gray surface. The energy testers, having come into play simultaneously with the screens, at once flashed the green “Not Radioactive” sign; a fairly useless gesture, since a positive reaction would have turned the ship away at an angle before it entered the danger zone.
The senior officer; said, “Jerry, let’s take a look at that critter you think is perched on this thing.”
The organicus officer grinned with one corner of his mouth. He pulled down a platinum lever, and a thirty-inch screen above his control board sprang to life. The black of space showed the bumpy planetoid like a ball of cold lava, and seated in the center of the screen, a man in a spacesuit.
Captain Pinkham licked his lips. “Okay,” he said, “I owe you a shot of rye. You were right.” Then he blinked his gray eyes. “My God!” he roared. “What’s a human being doing out here in System Ninety?”
The outburst, he felt, was quite justified; in fact, he might have gone stark raving crazy with justification. There seemed no possibility that his space armada could have been preceded to this star system by another from Earth. The ancient Martians might have made it this far, but their spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So he and Jerry were now staring at a hopeless absurdity. It couldn’t be there.
Pinkham leaned sideways and bellowed into the intercom. “Get in here! Everybody! On the double!”
The crew came running, from the engine rooms, the astrogatium and astrolab, from the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. The ship was gigantic; it took twenty minutes, for the ship’s complement to assemble in the captain’s control hall. There were fifty-seven men, eighteen officers. They stood in casual formation and gaped at the life-scanner’s screen.
The spacesuited figure had not moved.
Captain Pinkham said, “One question. Which of you gadget-happy jokers gimmicked up the scanner on us? Who did this?”
Nobody said anything. Only one man smiled: Lieutenant Joe Silver, a very bright, very ambitious big cub who was on his second extragalactic expedition and obviously had visions of earning his captain’s bronze comets within the year. Joe was a rather unpleasant young piece of beef, thought Pink; but he wouldn’t pull practical jokes. He was too bloody serious. If he smiled, it was probably because he was enjoying the Captain’s evident bewilderment.
“Then it isn’t a joke,” said Pinkham. “Three of you outside repairmen get into your suits and bring that in.” He gestured at the silent figure on the motionless little world of the scanner. “Jerry says it’s alive. Handle with care.” He waved them his dismissal.
Some twenty minutes later he watched the screen as the three crewmen descended to the surface of the planetoid, pried loose the double anchor which the unknown Earthman had sunk into the ball’s crust to hold him steady on the almost-gravityless world, lifted the bulky figure and leaped upward, like thick but weightless panthers carrying their prey, into the open air-lock.
The spacesuited stranger had not moved in the slightest.
Yet the scanner, which was never wrong, said that within the armor of the suit was life.
Pinkham sat staring at the blanked-out screen, and a queer chill began to crawl up his neck. An old slang phrase came to his mind, and wouldn’t leave.
How come? How come? How come?
PINK AND JERRY AND JOE Silver walked around and around the spacesuit. Bill Calico, the astrogator, and Washington Daley, the senior lieutenant, sat in front of it on stools covered with Venusian joerg-hide, going through a routine of flippant gags that thinly disguised their bafflement. Finally Pinkham said, “When were these suits invented?”
“2144,” said Joe Silver.
Bright kid, thought Pink with irritation. “Thirty-odd years ago. That’s my guess, too.”
“October 1st, 2144, is the patent date,” said Joe Silver smugly.
“Click, click, click,” said Daley. “Your mind is a damn file room, Silver. It gives me the jitters.”
Joe Silver looked at him expressionlessly.
“I just read the date on the instruction plate,” he said.
Captain Pinkham bent down and read aloud from the nayrust plate set into the back of the spacesuit.
“‘Bernard Patent Slugjet Suit, size 24-B patented’ ... here it is. ‘Instructions for reviving occupant. The man in this suit is alive if the translucent face plate is tinted orange.’”
“It is,” said Bill Calico with eagerness.
“‘Unscrew the seven small x-screws around face plate. Depress lever Z on right side of chest plate. Loosen gorget, shoulder pieces, pallettes, brassarts, cuisses....’” They were following the instructions as he read. He thought, these suits were terrific, they were the best. But you had to have a billion dollars behind your expedition or you couldn’t afford ‘em. Each one cost half as much as a regular-size moon rocket! They shouldn’t have stopped making them, though. They ought to have tried bringing down the cost. One of these could save a man’s life when nothing else in God’s universe could; and a man’s life is surely worth as much as half a moon rocket?
The Bernard Slugjet Suit. Guaranteed to keep a guy alive for a minimum of 250 years in free space. Guaranteed to let him emerge healthy and—miraculously—sane, provided he was picked up within the time limit.
You were jetting toward the edge of the galaxy, say. Your ship ran into trouble. A big meteor tore out your belly, or your fuel gave out, or any of a million things happened to crack up the beautiful great spaceship that was your vehicle and your pride and almost you, an extension of yourself, an expression of your yearning to conquer the stars. So you got into your slugjet suit and walked out an air-lock, if you had enough warning, that is. And there you were in space.
Your suit was actually a miniature spaceship itself; if there was land anywhere near, you aimed for it, loosed your powerful shoulder jets, and shot toward it. The suit had a range of about five hundred thousand miles, which was often enough.
But suppose it wasn’t. Then you just stayed there in black space, and you started to touch buttons in the big gloves, to pull levers on the chest, and to activate other circuits by the sound of your voice. And the suit became a world for you, a world that kept you healthy and sane for a quarter of a millennium.
Your life processes were slowed down to a pace of only a crawl and a mumble, next door to death. Your breathing couldn’t be detected. Your heart beat six times to the hour. Drugs did it, and vapors, the depressants of a hundred planets gathered and refined by Bernard for his suits.
You didn’t sleep; you didn’t need to. You were a slug, a worm in a cocoon, awake in an ultra-slow-motion way. In 250 years, you aged about fifteen. The suits were supposed to have a maximum efficiency of a thousand years; you came out an old man at the end of that time, maybe, but it was an even bet that you did come out.
And to keep your mind whole and unwarped, there in the immensity of brain-shattering space, you were entertained—well and constantly.
Three-dimensional movies were shown on your translucent face plate, so slow that to a person with unhampered reflexes they would look like stills. Music played to you, a low drone and buzz that to you was jazz, classical, anything you selected. The Minute Waltz took several hours to play in your ear.
Body wastes and carbon dioxide were eliminated, and breathable air released, by the same principles in use in spaceships. You were fed intravenously, vitamins, concentrates of everything you needed were stuck into you without your knowing it, for you lived too slowly to be capable of pain. The temperature of your suit was even. Audiotherapy was given you at suitable intervals. You were rescued, and came out of your suit as well-adjusted, as balanced as you’d gone in. Maybe more so.
Rescued? It wasn’t all left to luck. The radio in your high bulbous crest broadcast a constant S.O.S. Your suit glowed so that it could be spotted easily, a crimson star against the blackness. Your own life within it called to every life-scanner within 500,000 miles.
Meanwhile, you were in a damn fine world of your own....
Pinkham finished reading the instructions, and walked around to the front of the bulky suit. Bill Calico lifted off the crest, Daley removed the helmet, Jerry and Joe Silver caught the suit as it fell away in two sections.
And Captain Pinkham caught the girl.
She was slim and full in the places where a woman ought to be so, and her hair, close-cropped, was black-brown and shining. Her face was good, damn good, bloody damn fine to a spaceman who’d been out on the ways for a couple of years; but Pink had the happy thought—it was the first one he had, before the shock really hit him that that this was a girl—that she would have looked just as good to him on Earth.
She wore the uniform of an organicus officer: just a bit dated, the lapels too wide by an inch, the synthetic fabric of the jacket just a little more clinging and revealing than the current fashion, the pants narrow at the cuff where today’s were bell-bottomed. She must have been out here a while; not more than thirty years, though. She did not look more than twenty-five now, and the normal life span was a hundred and ten.... Pink snapped his queer thoughts sharply into line. What did her age matter to him?
She was limp in his arms, as relaxed as a sleeping kitten. Her eyes, deep brown, were open but heavy-lidded. He half-knelt, cradling her comfortably, as Jerry anticipated his question and said, “She’s okay. She’ll be out of it in a few minutes. She’s still living slower than we are.”
Joe Silver, unaccountably across the room by the life-scanner, said, “Hey! There’s another one!”
“Another what?” asked his senior lieutenant, Daley.
“Another fellow—or girl—in a Slugjet. Down that direction a few thousand miles.”
As all of them but Pink raced to the screen, the girl began to sing, softly, musically, and very slowly.
“I am sick of this bucketing Lunar runIn this dirty old steel cocoon;I’m sick of the Earth and I’m sick of the SunAnd I’m sick to death of the Moon....“
That was—what was the name?—the Lament of the Veteran Rocketeer, a ballad that Pink had been singing in his grade school days. He hadn’t heard it for more than a dozen years. Probably popular when this gal blasted off Terra.
She stopped singing. “‘Bout time you got here,” she said drowsily. “I’ve been waiting for months. Didn’t Fawcett’s crest radio reach you?”
“Take it easy,” said Pink, and told himself that was a stupid thing to say. “Who are you? What was your expedition?”
She blinked. “You aren’t Commander Dyevis, are you? Who are you?”
“I’m Joe Silver,” said that young upstart over Pinkham’s shoulder.
“Nobody asked you,” said Daley. They had left the screen, all but Jerry, who was making course for the second speck of life in the asteroid belt.
“This is the Elephant’s Child, flagship of Armada Seven, 843 days out of Terra to explore star systems 87 through 93,” said Pink quietly. “We just plucked you off an asteroid in System Ninety. This is—” take it easy, he said to himself this time, “this is October 18th, 2176.”
“Holy Holmendis,” said the girl, turning a little pale. “Our ship split up her seams in November of 2158.”
Daley, the oldest of the lot at thirty-six, and the coolest spacehead of them all, said, “May I introduce Captain John Pinkham, our leader?” Formalities eased a shock, he knew, and helped you over the rough spots. “I’m Lt. Washington Daley and you are—”
“Organicus Officer Circe Smith, of Colonel Fawcett’s exploratory armada,” she said automatically.
“Fawcett!” said everyone, loudly and with amazement.
“So he got to System Ninety,” said Pink. “Every spaceman on the ways has wondered about Fawcett for eighteen years. He vanished with two ships—”
“She knows that, Captain,” said Daley.
“Oh. Of course.”