Arielle lifted her head. Her right hand still gripped the control stick. It was bloody and had two deep gash marks in it. There was a small stone on her tongue. She spat it out. She watched the bloody hand move the stick in slow motion as her left hand flickered over the control board like a frightened bird.
"Lift!" her mind commanded as she applied power to the VTOL fans. There was a low throb from the right wing.
Shirley clamped her throat shut and went into emergency mode. Ripping the safety belt from her chest, she ran to the rear and came to a halt in front of the suit locker. There was a naked man slumped on the floor, his bath towel draped over his paunch, his private parts exposed. She ignored him and donned her suit—for once without consulting a checklist. The helmet snapped into place and she took her first breath. She then looked around to see what she should do next.
George! Shirley snatched a rescue ball from the top bin and zipped it open. Staggering a little on the tilting floor, she grabbed George by the arm as he started to slide forward. Lifting the hundred plus kilogram man like the twelve kilogram weight that he was in the reduced gravity, she stuffed him in the rescue ball head first. She reached down to the floor, picked up the bath towel, and stuffed it in after him. Another two seconds and George was zipped and pressurized. Shirley hung him from a hook and started forward. The floor tilted under her feet and her stomach sank. She swallowed hard and forced her eyes to look on the level. She came to the sleeping area and pounded on two Sound-Bar doors, while holding them tightly shut with her strong hands.
"David! Katrina! You OK!"
"Yes!" came the muffled replies.
"We've crashed in the ocean. Don't open your bunk doors until I check for air leaks!" She glanced up to see Richard. He had obviously heard her over the imp emergency links. He took a careful breath of air and held it. She took his suit out of the locker and helped him with the hard part, then made her way forward on the steeply sloping deck to the front.
Arielle was gunning the controls in time with the lurches of the waves, and firing the attitude jets in an attempt to lift the Magic Dragonfly into the air. She looked around as Shirley approached. Shirley was horrified at the sight of the beauty's face. Arielle's upper lip was a torn bloody strip hanging down over a gap in her teeth.
"We'f craffed," she said a plaintive voice. "And the fans won't work."
"You might as well stop trying the fans and rockets, Arielle," said Jill. "The left fan is broken. Even if we could lift out of the water, we couldn't build up enough speed to clear the jets."
"How's the hull, Jill?" said Shirley.
"There's a minor leak in the left wing fuel tank, but I have a minibranch making sure that it gets sealed. No evidence that the life-support hull has been breached."
Richard came forward in his suit. When he saw Arielle he blanched and went back for the first-aid kit. The Christmas Branch took it away from him and led Arielle back to the shower to wash her off and repair her torn lip with a neuskin patch. An imp came scampering out from under the pilot seat carrying a large white tooth with a bloody root.
Shirley opened her helmet and sniffed the air. It smelled funny, with an acrid smell of fear. The odor died as the air-conditioning fans continued their work of keeping the electronics cool. She and Richard headed for the back, shedding their suits as they went. Shirley heard a few mewling sounds from the shower and reached down to pick up the soggy red-stained jumpsuit from the floor outside the shower. On her way back to the cleaner she knocked on the Sound-Bar doors and told David and Katrina that it was safe to come out. She stuffed the jumpsuit into the sonic cleaner and stripped off her spacesuit, giving it a careful check as she did so, since she had neglected to check it when she put it on. It wasn't until she and Richard opened the suit locker to find a rescue ball hanging from a hook that she remembered George. She handed her suit to Richard and zipped open the bag. There was a rustle as the imp inside adjusted the towel and spoke.
"He'll be all right. He'll have a nasty headache when he regains consciousness, but there's nothing broken. Could you give me a hand in getting him to his bunk?"
"I've got him," said Richard, reaching past her to take the rescue bag off the hook. "You hang up your suit. You and Jill have to figure a way to get us out of here."
The rolling and pitching of the airplane was getting to Shirley. She didn't mind free-fall, but she had never enjoyed the motion of a ship. She didn't think she would get sick, but just thinking about it gave her doubts.
"Are you sure the left fan is out?" asked Shirley.
"Both fans were in the maximum forward position to maintain speed when the left wing struck the top of a wave. Immediately thereafter there was an overload in the acoustic sensor on the fan drive shaft followed by a rapid increase in back-reaction from the electric motor, raising the drive current to dangerous levels. I shut the motor down. Subsequent over-ride commands by the pilot produced heat surges in the windings of the fan motor, but no rotation as measured by the tachometer."
"Which you checked out with its self-test circuits."
"Which I checked out."
"It's bent and jammed then. I'd better go out and take a look at it."
"Although we are afloat, with the cockpit windows out of the water, the tail of the ship is submerged. The air-lock exit is underwater. I do not advise exiting."
That stopped Shirley for a moment. "Richard showed our suits can handle water," she said.
"My airlock is not designed for liquids," said Jill, using her severe tone.
Shirley knew her computer.
"If I can't get out the airlock. Then I can't fix the fan. The crew will have to stay inside until the life-support systems fail, and then they will all die."
There was a pause. Not a full second, but a noticeable one.
"The purging systems of the airlock can be reconfigured to accommodate liquids," said Jill. "Cycle time will double since I will have to purge twice. Once with super-heated air to evaporate any residual drops and liquid films, and once again to insure purity before breaching the inner lock. You will have to have your suit cooling on full power during the hot air phase."
"Fine," said Shirley, putting her helmet back on her head. "Cycle me through."
There was a moment of panic as a gush of water splashed down from two vents in the ceiling of the airlock. Shirley ducked under the thundering jets and peered through a rivuleted visor at the foaming swirl on the floor. Her feet were cold, and she felt the warmth of the boot heaters as her suit tried to compensate for the loss of heat. In a minute the ice-cold ocean water of Eau was up to her waist. The buoyancy of her suit in the water began to lift her feet from the floor. She grabbed with two hands to wall rungs to keep from being swept under the crashing foam.
"Let some air out of my suit," she hollered. "I'm floating." she heard a hiss from her backpack and the water pressed hard on the wrinkled glassy-foil covering of her suit. Although made of an impermeable metal alloy, the glassy-foil was as flexible as plastic because of its non-crystalline structure. A tenth of a millimeter thick, it could shrug off anything except the point of a knife blade. It did wrinkle under pressure, however, and the cold water pressed through the thermal control layer and chilled her skin. The water burbled in and the air vented out until the door could be opened, letting a giant oscillating ball of air loose to make its way to the surface. Shirley followed it out.
"Leave the lock open and the lights on," said Shirley. She swam out into the darkness under the wing, then reached for the permalight on her belt. The spearing ray of light swung up to illuminate the fan well. There was a black gap where one of the blades was missing. The blade next to it was distorted and torn.
Shirley looked at the nightmare of twisted high-strength steel. I reminded her of Arielle's mouth and was just as devastating to the inherent beauty of the Magic Dragonfly. She kicked downward and tilted herself back until her chest camera was pointing at the scene, while pulling down her holovisor to monitor the picture as seen through the viewfinder of the electrocamera. The image was blurred. The camera lens had been designed to interface between space and air, not water and air.
"Can you compensate?" she asked.
Instantly the blurred image snapped into sharp focus as Jill adjusted the bits to compensate for the index of refraction of the water as well as the slowly varying distance to the image.
"Got it," said Jill.
"Now to get a top view," said Shirley, kicking up to the surface and grabbing the trailing edge of the wing. She raised her helmet above the water, and just before it was engulfed in a breaking wave, she saw the dawn rising over Roche. Silhouetted in the pink light was the Christmas Branch, carrying an electrocamera and making its way carefully back over the water-washed wing.
"I have that side," said Jill.
Shirley clenched her chattering teeth and let herself drop beneath the waves. A few strokes and she was back in the lock. A water-lock this time, as powerful exhaust pumps sucked the water from beneath her boots.
"We'll have to ballast the boots and the backpacks so the suit can stay inflated and prevent contact of the legs and arms from the cold suit," she said.
"Good idea," said Jill. "Now turn around and let me dry off your back."
As Shirley turned and rotated her body under the blasts of hot air, she could see steam rising from the shiny metal film. The suit cooling cut in and she was just beginning to complain that it was getting too hot, when the cycle shifted. A few minutes later she was inside the plane. George was standing there with a worried expression, holding the back of his head.
Shirley took off her helmet and reported.
"It doesn't look good. The fan is broken. One blade twisted beyond repair and another one missing."
"Can you clear the twisted one and get the rest rotating?"
"Maybe," said Shirley. "But that will leave it unbalanced. I could remove another and turn it from a six-blade to a three-blade propeller, but I don't think that will lift. Perhaps we could jury rig another blade or two, or arrange a counterbalance."
"You work on it," said George, as Richard helped her out of her suit. Richard's arm brushed hers and he felt the clammy cold.
"You're frozen!" Richard said with concern.
"Not much worse than a deep dive in the Pacific Northwest," said Shirley. Still she didn't complain as he moved around behind her and gave her a long hug, his strong arms giving the firm muscular ones beneath them a warm embrace.
"How's Arielle?" she asked, as she basked in his warmth.
"Katrina and the Christmas Branch reinserted the tooth, and she now has an imp brace in her mouth holding it in place. The neuskin patch should take care of her lip with at worse a hairline scar, but she's going to have a fat lip for a while." Richard, his own arms too cold to be of much good anymore, let her go.
"I think I'll go forward and see if I can raise Prometheus," he said. "You and Jill concentrate on fixing that fan." He headed up the rocking corridor while Shirley returned to the task of hanging up her suit.
«Come see what I found!»
*What!?!*
«A big animal as hard as a rock, but it floats!»
*Wow! Where?*
«This way.» The milky white cloud streamed off through the ocean, followed close behind by the red one. They approached the foundering winged metallic whale with caution.
*You're right!* said the red one, sending pulse after pulse of sonar signals at the distant object. The pulses varied in pitch and complexity as the powerful voice of Roaring*Hot*Vermillion attempted to peer into the inner portions of Dragonfly.
*All I can see is the outside! It's as hard as a rock!*
«There are some portions that are not as hard. Come closer.»
The two moved closer to the drifting aircraft. They were curious, but still cautious, since the huge plane was as big as they were. As they moved, their sonar pulses continued to scan its length.
«There are places near one end where you can almost see through. Those are also the places where you can "look". The beast seems to have small hot suns inside it, and they shine out through those places.»
*LOOK?!? SUNS!?!* The red alien was bewildered. Its body was sensitive to light, and when it was spread over the upper surface of the ocean basking in the warmth, it could tell roughly where the sun was in the sky, and whether a cloud had passed in front of it, but it had no eyes, so it didn't know what the heavens looked like. Its visual world was one of sound. Its sound pulses allowed it to see and visualize everything in its underwater kingdom, including the insides of its comrades. This was the first time it had met a beast that wasn't completely transparent to its piercing stare. As it approached the hard-shelled creature, the various portions of the red body could feel the diffuse beams of light coming from spots near one end of the long central body. As Roaring*Hot*Vermillion got closer, its body could look better, since some portions were quite close to the light sources.
«Get real close. Then you can not only see a little better, you can look better too.»
The red cloud pressed itself onto the hard glass of the cockpit window and tried to see in through the murky glass. The bursts of sonar energy from its body penetrated from the water into the glass quite easily, but on the other side was nothing but air, so most of the sonar signal reflected back, and only a small portion entered the cockpit to illuminate the objects there. The acoustic return also suffered the same loss as it moved from the low density air back into the high density glass. There was not much left of the sonar signal by the time it flowed back through Roaring*Hot*Vermillion.
*Can see some hard things inside, but there is a nothing in the way, and it makes it hard to see.*
«Are you looking too?»
*Yes. Many little suns. Too far away to look at well. They are all blurred together.*
Arielle looked out at the reddish-colored haze obscuring her right side window. Must be another one of those strange colored blobs. Suddenly her head hurt. She stood up and moved around, trying to shake the feeling.
*Something is moving inside!* A blast of high energy sonar sang through the glass and burst into the low-density air beyond. Arielle winced again, although she didn't know why.
*It is a long thing with a sphere on one end and straight portions coming out of the sides and bottoms! They are stiff, but they move. It's too much work to see. I give up. Let's go surfing?*
«Maybe I can see.» The white cloud slithered over the red one and flowed onto the next panel of glass in the cockpit window.
Arielle noticed that while the right side window of her cockpit window still had the reddish tinge, the front window on the right now had a milky-white appearance. There didn't seem to be any blending of one into the other. She frowned. She didn't like it. Her eyes shifted to pay attention to the perfect break between the two colors at the cockpit window frame.
Clear«»White«»Whistle tried again. It sent burst after burst of sonar into the strange hard beast, but saw nothing new.
«You're right. There's a nothing in the way. It's like trying to see above the top of the ocean.»
*Let's go surfing! I can feel a big one building up!*
«Let me try looking.»
*I already tried! Too blurry!*
Clear«»White«»Whistle didn't answer, but formed a portion of her body into a disk shape. The disk grew thicker in the middle, and the milky-white color of the flesh faded away into clarity as the milky macromolecules containing the genetic essence and nerve tissue flowed out of the disk region, leaving only the clear basic structural substance of the alien body.
A portion of the red cloud darted about the construct, noting its shape and looking at its clear color.
*Strange! What is it made of?*
«It is me. Or part of me.»
*Why does the disk bulge in the middle?*
«So I can 'look' at things from a distance.»
*Can't! You can only look at things when they are right next to you!*
«With this fat disk I can.»
*Really!?! Let me look!*
«Hold still!» the white one commanded, and holding the disk between the red one and the cockpit window, it used the crude lens of jelly to focus an image of the interior of the cockpit on the skin of Roaring*Hot*Vermillion.
*It looks tiny!!!* came a roar. *What is it?*
Clear«»White«»Whistle took the lens away and put it in front of its own body.
«There are lots of little suns. Some square. And there is that moving thing you saw. Looks funny. The sphere has ugly fuzz on it, and a slit that keeps opening and closing.»
*I can feel that big wave getting closer and closer!*
«You're right. I can feel it too.»
The lens was dissolved. The two huge blobs slithered to the top of the wing and launched themselves onto a large curling wave that washed over the drifting Dragonfly. The two aliens surfed expertly along on the wave, their recent discovery ignored in the excitement of the ride.
Arielle's headache lifted, and as it did, she noticed out of the corner of her eye the lifting of the milky and red haze from the windows of the cockpit. She moved forward, and kneeling on the copilot's seat, she tried to peer out into the murky water.
There was nothing.
Arielle was tempted to ask Jill if she had seen anything, but then realized that Jill's electronic video sensors were just as limited as her electrochemical video sensors were in this frigid ocean. She swung around into the seat and ordered a position update from the console. There was an almost imperceptible delay in the response. Arielle's test-pilot-trained brain noted the anomaly.
The barrage of sonar sounds had taken Jill unaware. It had heard some strange pings and chirps from a distance a few hours ago, but after they had disappeared she had relegated the noises into its permanent memory under "Geology, volcanic, vents, noises from." The noises reappeared, however, and at close range—so close that they were obviously not volcanic in origin.
The science-scan video cameras and the other sensors built into Dragonfly's body helped put together the picture. There was a red blob and a milky blob of water that moved slowly—like an clot of seaweed or jelly fish, seemingly moving with the tide. The blobs were completely amorphous, with no structure seen in either the video or infrared sensor. The inside video camera had confirmed the colors when the two blobs washed against the cockpit windows. The shape information went to a portion of Jill that had been programmed to test for signs of alien life forms. The program produced no match, for it had been trained to recognize symmetry and nonrandomness as an indicator of life. The information was sent off into memory storage and the alien-finding portion of the program was turned off.
The sonar input, after processing in both frequency space and time space, was also sent to the test-for-alien-life program. Soon urgent messages were running through the master bus, calling back the stored shape information and activating a search through every sensor that had collected the least bit of information at that critical time period.
There was a moment's pause as Jill responded to the bothersome query from the human Arielle concerning a position update. That done, full computer brainpower was applied. Strange scents were extracted from the noisy data in the chemical sensors that monitored the outside conditions. Unfortunately, there was no new sensor data coming in, so the analysis had to make do with the sensor records. But the records were not good enough. Jill was almost sure that it had seen evidence of life—an intelligent life-form. But what had been seen was not what the humans had expected, so the evidence was not conclusive. Jill would not bother the humans until it had done more calculations.
Jill thought.
"I need better sensor data," said Jill finally.
"What's the matter?" asked Shirley.
"I'm blind," said Jill. "I have lots of information from the infrared and video cameras on the two scanners in the 'eye' domes, but they are half-awash in the ocean. Besides, as an airplane, I'm used to having the long distance vision of radar. How can I protect you if I can't see things coming from a distance?"
"There's not much I can do," said Shirley. "Your radar dome is under the ocean and the water won't pass the microwaves. If you're going to insist on being a boat, you'll have to find some way to have me turn your radar into a sonar."
"OK," said Jill confidently. "Please turn my radar into a sonar."
"Can't be done," said Shirley, slightly perplexed.
"You said that all I had to do was find some way to have you turn my radar into a sonar," said Jill. "So I did."
"You did!!!" exclaimed Shirley.
"We have a complete set of spare parts for the under-ocean scanner," said Jill. "The sonar array of the ocean scanner has almost the same design features as the microwave scanner in my radome."
"That would make sense," said Shirley. "They both have the same wavelength, even though one uses radio waves, while the other uses acoustic waves."
"The piezoelectric sonar array uses higher voltages and lower currents than my semiconductor diode radar array," said Jill. "But I have reconfigured the driver to handle that. All I need is someone to replace the diode radar array with the replacement package for the piezoelectric sonar array."
"Can't the Christmas Branch to that?" complained Shirley. She could still feel the bone-cold waters pressing on her flesh.
"Not by itself," said Jill. "The Christmas Branch is out there now, rewiring the connector..."
"...All right! All right! I'll help it."
Shirley donned her suit and slowly cycled through the outside lock, carrying the heavy sonar array on a shoulder harness. It was still dark, so she took her time as she swam under the wing and along the left side of the Magic Dragonfly to the front of the aerospace plane. She splashed upwards enough to peek through the cockpit windows at Arielle looking out at her, then sunk beneath the waves. She got out her trusty Swiss Army Mech-All and rotating it until she came to the right slide switch, she pushed the switch and a strange screw-driver was instantly formed from one of the many triggerable memory structures in the complex metal alloy head. The blade was shaped like the curved surface of a penny. Shirley jammed it into one of the curved slots on the radome and twisted. A flat metal screw head popped out. Shirley sunk down a little and attacked another slotted inset screw head.
"Here, take this," said Jill, its Christmas Branch handing her a thick circular plate of metal with crossed slots in it. Shirley took the microwave transmitting array and handed in the heavy cluster of square ceramic tiles.
The Christmas Branch took the cable dangling from the back of the sonar array and connected the cable to a jet-black box. There was a pause and Shirley hollered.
"OUCH! It makes my teeth ache," said Shirley.
"Good," said Jill. "That's the tooth sensitizing frequency. How about this?"
"I feel sick," replied Shirley.
"The infrasonic portion is working," said Jill. "Now the ultra-high band. Do you hear or feel anything?"
"Bow-wow," said Shirley, her ear tips trying to curl up. She closed the radome, being careful not to leave any trapped air that would impede the sonar signals.
"I can see!" said Jill through her imp. "I have to wait a number of seconds before the distant parts of the image come in, but I can see again!"
"What can you see?" asked Shirley.
"We're on the side of a gradual slope that extends for kilometers." said Jill. "The slope reaches a plateau some ten meters under the surface of the ocean. There are some volcanic vents there."
"Richard was right about being near a vent field," said Shirley. She began to really feel the cold. "I think I'll go inside and tell him."
"I've already informed Richard of our find through his imp," said Jill.
"I think I'll go inside and tell him anyway," said Shirley.
George was sitting at the science console monitoring the flow of data from the imager memory banks through the satellite data link to Prometheus. Even though they might not be able to get off this world, at least their data would.
There was a buzz from one of the flight consoles. A blinking light on one of his side panels indicated that the communication link from Rocheworld Base had been opened. He switched the communication console controls to his science console and answered.
Carmen's face appeared on the screen. As she noticed him, her hand reached up to her hairline, but before it touched her hair, there was a rustle of the comb-imp stuck to one side of her head and instantly every hair in her bouffant hair-do was in its exact place. Carmen's hand dropped.
"We may have a solution to your problem, Dragonfly," she said. "Red thought it up while we were discussing what to do." Carmen touched a control on her panel and the view expanded to show Red Vengeance standing near her shoulder, a worried look on her face. Her hair was tousled and she looked like she had missed a night's sleep. There was also a suspicious redness around her eyes.
"I don't know whether it will work or not..." said Red hesitantly. A deep voice broke in from the other side and Thomas's face peeked into the pickup from the other side of Carmen.
"Sure it'll work," said Thomas, "I'd've never thought of it, since all I've ever done is haul cargo from heavy gravity planets. It took a rock-hound like Red to think of this one. I have Jack figuring out the optimum trajectory and the fuel margins we will need for various hovering times, but it should work fine."
"Great!" said George, "But what is it?"
"As you know," said Red, "The ascent module from the Eagle doesn't have enough fuel to take off from Roche, land near you and take off again, even if we lighten it by throwing off everything movable. However, it does have enough fuel to take off from Roche and travel over to the zero gravity region between the planets, hover for a minute or so over the peak of the water mountain, pick you up, and still escape out to the L-5 point. Prometheus can then sail in and pick us up from there.
Greatly relieved, George's face lit up as he listened to Red. "That sounds terrific!" he said to the hopeful faces on the screen. "I hope Jack doesn't find anything wrong with it. We're a long way from the top of the water mountain, but we'll find a way get there even if we have to swim!"
"Fortunately, we have lots of time," said Thomas. "How are your consumables holding out?"
"No problem there," said George. "The good food is going fast, but it will last us for a few more weeks. Then we have the emergency rations, and if worse comes to worst, Jill can make us sugar syrup out of the soup we are sitting in. We are probably good until one of the recycling units develops a failure that Shirley and Jill can't fix. With that kind of time, we could even paddle the plane the thousand kilometers up the mountain."
Jill's voice broke in, "The distance from our present position to the top of the water mountain is one thousand two hundred and forty-three kilometers."
"Thanks," said George sarcastically, thinking of the sweat each one of those kilometers represented.
Another computer voice interrupted. It was Jack this time. "The proposed mission plan is feasible. Hovering time near the peak of the water mountain varies from twenty minutes at high tide to thirty seconds at low tide. I have left a reserve of fuel for final rendezvous maneuvers with Prometheus at the L-5 point. This can also be used if it is necessary to extend the hovering time."
"Good!" said Thomas, turning and leaving the screen. "Show me the trajectory on the Command console."
George looked at the screen containing the faces of the two women. One was calm, professional, and coolly perfect, with a pleasant smile. The other was just as professional, but had a worried half-smile and wide eyes.
"Are you sure you can get there?" asked Red.
"Don't worry, Red," he said. "I was only kidding about swimming or paddling this flying submarine. I'm sure Shirley will figure out some way of getting some propulsion for Dragonfly. We have plenty of power, it's just that we're used to flying through air, not water. I'll see you two later, I'm going to tell the crew the good news that we have at least one way off this smelly egg." He turned off the communications console connection and talked to his imp.
"How does it look to you, Jill?" he asked.
"I have all the mission data from Jack through the data link," it said. "The only problem that was not mentioned is that we have to work out some way to protect you from the ascent module jet exhaust. Jack was planning to turn off the jets and free-fall slowly down while the crew is pulled up with a winch."
"That sounds a little tricky," said George. "I am sure we can arrange some sort of blast canopy made up out of one of your wing panels with a pickup ring on top."
"I hadn't thought of that," said Jill. After a seconds pause it said, "That will work too, the material is thin, but it will not be in the jet long."
"Good," said George. "Are there any other potential problems in the plan?"
"How you are going to travel those one thousand two hundred and forty-two kilometers?"
"I thought you said one thousand two hundred and forty-three," said George.
"I did," said Jill. "But we are coming to another high tide and the currents in these regions are twenty kilometers an hour. We have moved closer to the peak."
"Well, that's a start," said George. Too bad we can't anchor somewhere while the tide is going the other way."
"You can," said Jill, in its detached voice. "The water is only a few tens of meters deep in this region."
George gave a long laugh, his emotional relief at finding a means to rescue his command finally breaking through to the surface. He pounded a few keys on his console to link the audio pickup to all the imps and suit-imps on the ship.
"Avast there, ye sky-lubbers!!" he boomed into the mike. "Hit the deck and come a'running! This is Captain George, and I want every man-jack and -jill to assemble amidships. I have good news, me hearties, we are setting sail for home."
As he said those words, George had another thought, and whispered to his imp. "How much cloth have we on board?" he asked. The reply was lost in the confused clamor of voices coming over the audio link on the console. There was one voice that he took particular care to answer.
"Yes, Shirley," he said. "I want you and your crew too. We'll probably never be able to get Dragonfly in the air again, but Red has come up with a plan where we don't have to. Instead of making Dragonfly back into an airplane, we're going to make her into a boat, and we'll need you in on the planning session since you are the only one other than Jill that knows Dragonfly inside and out. Unfortunately, Jill doesn't have any imagination, and that's what we are going to need a lot of if we are going to get off this world while we are still on decent rations."
Within less than a minute, George heard the first of the airlock cycles as the outside crew boarded and came forward wearing their suit briefs. Arielle had been sensibly asleep, her calm test-pilot nerves allowing her to keep up her necessary rest schedule. David, unable to sleep, had forced his tired body into a suit and had gone out to work with Shirley, Katrina, and Richard, wanting to do something, anything, to take his mind off their predicament. Arielle tried to find a decent place to get dressed, but finally gave up and came out in her sleeping outfit—a pair of warm pajamas with elastic cuffs and booties. Her spare frame had always suffered under the temperatures that the endomorphs around her found comfortable. In her furry pink bunny suit, surrounded by a smelly dripping crew dressed in sweaty suit-tights, she looked like a small child captured by a pack of space-pirates. She perched on one of the stools in the corner of the galley and faced forward. Shirley sat on the galley counter, while the rest of the crew were scattered on the various stools and chairs that lined the corridor.
David swiveled in the computer console chair (practically his private preserve). His thin face seemed even leaner with its hint of orange-red stubble. He blinked his eyes tiredly a few times and shook his head to keep awake in the unaccustomed warmth of the body-heated room after his hours in the cold seas of Eau.
"Don't keep us in suspense, George," he said. "How are we going to get home? Are they going to send another SLAM down to pick us up off some mud flat?"
"I'm sure Jinjur would do that if it were necessary," he said. "But Red has come up with another idea so that we don't have to waste two landers on the same planet. If we can get to the low-gee region on the top of the water mountain, then Red can pick us up there with the ascent module." Shirley listened to George's speech, whispered for a while to her imp, then finally broke into the conversation.
"We could use the tidal currents," she said. "Dropping an anchor when they are in the wrong direction, but that wouldn't work when we start up the water mountain. The ocean becomes tens of kilometers deep there. We could think about a sail, but neither Jill or I have been able to come up with enough mast and sail to make a significant difference. There is another alternative, and that is to use Dragonfly's VTOL fans in a slow-rpm mode as a water propeller instead of an air propeller. Not very efficient, but it would give us a number of knots. Our only problem is that only one of the VTOL props are working. If we just ran that one, we would go in circles." Shirley stopped and her eyes widened for a second. The rest of the crew almost could see the light-bulb above her head. She whispered something else to her imp. There was a moment's pause, then the crew heard a slow throb coming through the hull from the undamaged right engine. George walked upward to look out the cockpit windows.
"We're moving," he said.
Shirley jumped down off the galley counter and strode forward. She sat herself down in the copilot seat and tilted her head to one side to line up the center of the window brace with one side of the rocky globe hanging in the sky ahead of them.
"Have you got the rudder hard over?" she asked Jill.
"Yes," said her imp.
Shirley watched, then shook her head slowly as the nose of the craft drifted off to the right. As they started to turn back the way they came, Shirley called a halt.
"The fan can move us at a significant speed," she said. "But even with the tail rudder and ailerons doing their best, we still travel in a circle, going essentially nowhere."
"How about a sea-anchor on the starboard side, way out on the tip?" suggested David, trying to dredge up what little he could remember of his distant sailing lessons on Earth.
Shirley didn't answer. She leaned back in the copilot seat, her mind flipping through page after page of the engineering manual for the Dragonfly. Jill was not idle, and Shirley would occasionally nod as something was whispered into her ear by her imp. Suddenly she rose from the chair, strode down the length of Dragonfly, and went into the work area in the back that contained the air conditioning and renewal banks.
Although Jill had a brain that used as little electrical power as possible, that brain still used a significant number of picowatts per thought. The air conditioning on Dragonfly was not meant for the comfort of the crew, but to keep Jill's brain cool enough to eliminate "soft" errors due to thermal excitation. Shirley opened a louvered door and peered up. She stopped, went back to the suit locker, obtained her permalight and returned. She flashed the brilliant white beam up past the cracks between the flutes on the cooling fins of the air conditioning system to the air fans overhead. She stopped and punched a seldom used code into the permalight's microcomputer. Her thumb on a two-way variable switch, she sent the beam upward again. A few practiced flicks and she could see in the strobing flashes of light the air fans seemingly slow and come to a stop as the blinks of light from the illuminator in her hand matched the turns of the blades.
"How about those?" she asked her imp. "They're small, but one or two of those run at the proper speed could push enough water as the VTOL fan."
"Those are part of the air supply," Jill remonstrated. "Regulations do not permit any diversion of primary life support systems to other purposes."
Shirley replied in a firm voice, "The purpose for which the fans would be used are essential to the welfare of the crew. Please record my recommendations in your priority memory banks and verify with the Commanders of Dragonfly and Prometheus."
There was a short pause. Shirley heard a gruff "She's right," from the front of the aerospace plane. Then she heard Jill speak again through her imp.
"The substitution you suggest will work with proper control of the relative rotation rates of the two fans. There will be a twenty percent degradation of the air flow throughout the Dragonfly. That will leave us at only ninety percent of nominal. My motile Branch is not capable of removing the fan. The masses and gravity are too much at this location."
"That's all right," said Shirley, greatly relieved that the computer had given in so gracefully. That probably meant that the substitution was a piece of cake.
It wasn't.
Jill's Christmas Branch did all it could by unscrewing bolts that human fingers could never have reached, but the bulky fan was in its bay to stay. There were access plates that allowed the whole air-recycling unit to drop out of the bottom of Dragonfly for installation and maintenance, but they could not be used when they were deep under the slimy, smelly ocean of Eau. Shirley was dripping sweat before she finally had twisted the recycling units aside enough to get the fan through the door. At that, she had to trim some of the support structure with a laser cutter. The sharp edges of the one-meter-diameter fan and its support seemed to reach out to nick her flesh as she struggled into her suit-tights, then into the spacesuit that proved to be as good in water as it did in space.
Despite her weariness, she carefully went through the checklist with Richard, then checked him out. She sent him through the lock first, then inserted the fan, allowing it the privilege of having the lock all to its razor-tempered self. After Richard had removed the deadly square with its slowly rotating fan from the lock, she cycled through, then followed him as he floated off under the left wing. Shirley reached into her tool-belt for a large omni-wrench and took care of the obvious bolts on the outside, while a large segment of Jill's inside Christmas Branch snaked its way into the wing and took care of the inside connectors. Shirley motioned Richard back while the last of the connections were loosened. The heavy fan and its motor dropped from the wing and settled slowly in into the depths.
The next chore was to install the small air conditioning fan in place of the much larger propeller. Richard had no problem positioning it into place with its blades nearly all under water, but the amount of space left required some sort of bracing. Shirley looked over the situation in the dimming light, making length measurements as well as illuminating the scene with her versatile permalight. Dusk settled in on Eau and the two called it a day. They hung the fan in the gaping hole on Dragonfly's wing, swam to the distant hull and cycled through.
George, Arielle, and Katrina were relaxing for the first time in many days. They were watching one of David's sonovideo compositions in the large-screen color display above the computer console. Each person had an extra section of the Christmas Branch on their ears as stereo headphones. David was improvising some additional audio and visual effects to add to the recorded composition of "Flight" that would thrill billions of others six light years away on Earth when they heard it a half-dozen years hence. Listening to the music and watching the video, George thought that David was at his peak, tired as he was — or maybe it was because he was so tired. George looked quickly at the console and saw with relief that someone (probably Jill) had turned on the high fidelity sonovideo recorder. This exultant evening of genius would not be lost.
There were low noises from the rear of the aerospace plane. They really didn't interfere with the concert, but George's command responsibility made him pay attention. He finally identified the sounds as that of two large people trying to take a shower in the same small booth. He made a motion with his hand near one ear as though he were turning a knob and the volume on his earphones increased, drowning out the noise from the rear. He relaxed and looked with relief at the beautiful video caressing his eyes.
Twenty minutes later Shirley came through the privacy curtains. She picked her way through the relaxed humanity clustered around the computer console and went to one of the cockpit consoles. George saw her pass and got up to follow her.
"Where's Richard?" he asked.
Shirley smiled a knowing grin. "He's snoring away in a bunk. Had a lot of exercise today," she explained.
"So have you," said George. "Don't you think you ought to get some sleep before daylight in three hours?"
"Before we can go out again we'll need a fairly complicated bracing structure made. I thought Jill and I could design it before I go to bed. The Christmas Branch can be building it while I get a good nine hours sleep. I've been on the go for thirty hours." She patted her tummy. "Hmmm. My stomach thinks my mouth's on strike." She interrupted Jill's computations to order up a double dinner of chili, then turned to grin at George.
"It's going to work, George," she said. "We should be chugging our way up the mountain in less than a day." Relieved, George returned to David's performance.
The music through the imps grew stronger. David was now improvising, and the effect was like a fairy nimbly scampering up the stairways of the gods. George's eyes had automatically closed as he heard the charismatic sounds, but then he forced them open as he realized that he was in the chamber of a lyrical genius, one who wrote emotions in the colors and tones of light and music rather than the scratches and snarls of writing and speech.
No longer was this place a dingy, crowded corridor filled with aching, sweating bodies, but the vast empty corridors between the starlanes of the galaxy. His eyes, his ears, his soul, drank in the new freedom from the fleshly bondage that had been the inheritance of the human race... for the long-fettered grey mass of the human brain now saw greater things.
The greater things drifted in from the ghost-like shrouds of haziness. Then—with the music adding substance—they grew to take over the vision, still avoiding the direct glance, the firming up, the human desire to make desire a reality.
David, inspired by his own feedback, took off on another improvisation. The scenes repeated, yet were different in a subtle, yet significant way. The music counterpointed from one disparate scene to another, while the images mixed and blended. There were new, more complex interrelationships. The scene and sound came to a dramatic climax. As it did, George knew only that he didn't have enough experience to appreciate it. If he had heard and seen that on the screen without preparation, he would have hollered for a repair technician. Yet he knew that the sonovision was just as the artist had wanted it, but he, George, was only dimly able to recognize its majestic complexity.
The remains of the music and scenes echoed through the hallways and chambers of his mind. There was a long pause, in which the only sound was that of David taking a few deep breaths, Shirley pecking at keys up front, and a long sonorous rumble from a bunk in the crew quarters.
"Thank you, David," said Katrina. "That was one of your most exquisite compositions."
"Oohh!!!" said Arielle, her breath finally exhaled. "Oh! Nife!!" she said again, her gaze passing though the blank screen on the bulkhead to the stars beyond. She finally noticed where she was. Blushing slightly, she pulled her long pink bunny legs up to her chin and grew silent. A shy grin still flickered on her lips above her clasped hands.
George, still out of his element, tried to express the gratitude that he felt for witnessing what was obviously a rare moment in artistic creation. He knew only that his faulty sense of appreciation had captured but a small portion of the fountain of genius that had flowed over him.
"That was really good, David," he said. "I mean, I really, really liked that one. It really made a really great impression..."
He had the sense to stop.