[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.“I called him.Do you think they can get in?” She stood beside her chair.“Zip that,” Javik said, glancing at her blouse.She mentoed it.As Javik heard the zipper rise, he wondered how the mento-zipper system worked.He knew from experience that another person could not mento your zipper, but did not understand the technology.He scowled.I am really low, he thought, scolding himself.On a critical presidential mission, and I’m in the sack with a goddamned transsexual.Evans pressed a red alarm button on her console.“Blanquie!” she yelled as the siren screamed.“Get out here!”“Where is he?” Javik snapped.At Javik’s memo-command, Mother reported on the ship’s mechanical problem: “Still searching.Maximum search duration three minutes, fourteen seconds.”“There’s something strange about these creatures,” Evans said.She shut off the siren.“That’s news?”“I mean, they look like dead humans, with terrible wounds.Oh! That one has no arms!”A hideous, deformed creature with open wounds at its torn and empty armpits pounded its body against the windshield.Javik grimaced as the glassplex flexed.“His forehead!” Evans said.“What’s that on his forehead?”“I don’t know,” Javik said, glaring at the instrument panel.“Damn these engines!” He rubbed the back and one side of his head.The mento unit pain had become dull and had traveled around the outside of his skull.“P.F.,” she said, reading the creature’s forehead.“Product Failure!” She felt a chill.“Catapulted bodies from Earth!”Javik heard Wizzy snore fitfully from somewhere on the floor.“I think we’re in the Davis Droids,” Javik said.“Asteroids to port and starboard.”“How could they be alive out here?” she asked.“Forget ‘em!” Javik yelled.“And help me get the friggin’ engines started! Blanquie! Where the hell are you, Blanquie?” Javik flipped the starter toggle on and off, with no result.“Go back and check Blanquie.Get him out here.Now!”Evans rolled aft rapidly.She opened the hatch to Blanquie’s sleeping compartment and looked in.She screamed.Then she coughed as a rush of icy, rarefied air hit her face.Whirling around on his chair, Javik saw Evans recoil from the hatch in shock.Evans slammed the hatch shut and mento-locked it.‘The compartment is full of monsters!” she said.“I saw Blanquie lying on the bed with blood all over him.” She looked at Javik with terror-stricken eyes.“I think he’s dead.”“Jeheezus!” Javik said.“Could this be the Happy Shopping Ground?” Evans asked, rolling forward.“Are they Product Failure victims?”“Do you wanna die, Evans?” Javik said.His voice became loud and high-pitched: “You wanna die?”“No sir.I don’t.” She slid into her chair“Then get a hold on yourself.I might as well be alone out here, for all the help you’re giving.” He mentoed Mother again.“Three hundred sixty-two possible causes remain,” Mother said.“Maximum search duration one minute, twenty-eight seconds.”“Sorry, sir,” Evans said.“What should we do, Captain Javik?”“What’s all the commotion?” Wizzy asked in a little voice.He scooted out from under Evans’s chair and hopped on the dashboard.“So you’re awake,” Javik said.“Finally.”“I was tired,” Wizzy said, studying the humanoids with his yellow cat’s eye.Wizzy glowed red, calling upon his data banks.“Davis Droids,” he said.“I warned you about this place.Nurinium here.”“What the hell is nurinium?” Javik asked.“An element sprinkled around the universe by magicians,” Wizzy said.“It gives inanimate objects life.”Javik shook his head.“Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, to Evans.Thud! Barump! The creatures pummeled the ship with extra intensity.The windshield flexed again.“Show me some of your wondrous powers, Wizzy,” Javik said sarcastically.“Or would you rather sleep?”“Well!” Wizzy huffed.“I’m not perfect? I told you that.And I am only nineteen hours, fifty-six minutes old!”“All right, all right,” Javik said.“Any idea why the engines won’t start?”Wizzy’s cat’s eye slanted toward Javik.“Creatures in the exhaust tubes,” he replied, glowing red again.“Tubes are plugged.”“How the hell could they do that, with the ship going in excess of three hundred thousand kilometers per hour?”Wizzy laughed, rocking for a moment on the dashboard.He glowed red-orange this time, although his eye remained yellow.“From your energy waves, and those of the ship, I see precisely what happened: One of the ship’s E-cells was consumed sixteen minutes ago.There was a delay in switching to a new fuel cell—”“Shit,” Javik said.“And that shut off the engines.I could have solved it easily.Hell, Mother should have—”“But you were preoccupied,” Wizzy said, “and didn’t realize the ship had stopped.It shut down in a very bad place.”“Never heard of a Mother failing before,” Evans said gloom-ily.Javik glared at her.“Thanks for the analysis,” he said.“Both of you.Now what?”“Something plugging the exhaust tubes,” Mother reported.“Manual correction required.”Thump! Kathud! The pummeling continued.“You’re the captain,” Wizzy said.“Don’t be rude,” Evans said to Wizzy.‘The word is insubordinate,” Javik said.He waved his gun at the humanoids.They paid him no heed.Disconsolate, Javik stared down at the deck.Wearily, he set his pistol on his lap.The headache was subsiding.He sighed at the small relief of that.An aft hatch clanked open.“They’re getting in!” Evans shouted.Javik looked aft.A creature floated in, then fell to the cabin floor in the pseudo-gravity of the ship.Evans rolled aft.She skirted the creature, which lay on the deck in apparent disorientation.Gasping in rarefied air over the hatch, she slammed it shut.Then she mento-spun the locking device while creatures in Blanquie’s sleeping compartment thumped against the underside of the deck.“I’m mento-holding it locked,” Evans said.“They’re trying to force it open again.” She heard the ship’s oxygen system hum loudly, replenishing the air supply.Smelling the odor of decaying flesh, Javik studied the creature that had entered the cabin.It was male, wearing a torn Earth T-shirt and blue jeans.An electroplated purple badge was attached to the shirt, dangling next to a rip that exposed a black “P.F.” stamp on the chest.Seeing a deep gash on the face, Javik decided this must have been the cause of death
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]