This one is due primarily to Peg Campbell, John's lovely wife. She read a story in The New Yorker by Peter de Vries, and in it was one line that tickled her fancy. It is the last line of Look Out! Duck!
But both she and John objected to what Mr. de Vries had to say about "pulp" writers, and wanted me to prove him wrong.
I don't know whether I did or not, but I enjoyed writing the story. You wouldn't believe the research it took to find out about ducks.
By the way, all the names of the characters and the spaceships are taken from the New Yorker story-with the exception of the hero's.
And one other.
There were four men aboard the cargo ship Constanza when she made the voyage to Okeefenokee, Three of them were her regular crew: Joseph Dumbrowski, the captain; Donald MacDonald, the engineer; and Peter Devris, the astrogator .
The fourth man didn't show up until the Constanza was almost fully loaded and ready to take off. Dumbrowski was definitely reaching the peevish stage when the panel truck came rolling up towards the loading pit that housed the interstellar vessel.
Inside the truck, the driver pointed toward the shaft of silver that speared up from the pit. "That's the Constanza, ahead," he said.
Rouen Drake, M.D., D.V.M., looked at it, nodded, and looked back through the glass panel at the remaining cargo in the rear of the truck. "You can't see it, children," he said, "but your new home is just ahead. At least it will be your home for a while,"
The cargo did not reply, The truck driver grinned. "You like them ducks, eh, Doc?"
The doctor grinned back. "In a way. They're the product of ten years of genetic engineering. Besides being proud of them, I think they're kind of cute."
The truck pulled up beside the ramp of the Constanza and braked to a halt. "Here comes Captain Dumbrowski," the driver said. Dr. Drake climbed out and offered his hand to the man in the striking crimson-and-gold of the Interstellar Service. The officer took it in a bone-crushing grip.
"Dr. Drake? I'm Captain Dumbrowski. Where have you been?"
The captain was a thickset man with beetling brows, and a voice like a bellowing bull.
"I got here as soon as possible, captain," Drake said stiffly. "I'm sorry if I'm late."
"We're overdue now," the captain said. "MacDonald will help you get loaded." He turned to another crimson-and-gold clad man nearby. "MacDonald, here's our last entry. One Drake and a harem of ducks." And with that, he turned and went into the ship.
Drake's jaw muscles set a little, and his face flamed crimson under his blond complexion. The truck driver smothered a snicker, and MacDonald seemed to be trying to offer a friendly smile instead of an impish grin. He didn't quite succeed.
"Section Five has been set up for your...uh ...ducks, Doctor," he said.
"Excellent," said Drake evenly. "Let's get them aboard as soon as possible." Then he added: "I'll check the rest of the cargo later."
Twenty minutes later, fifty ducks were safely ensconced in the specially rebuilt Section Five of the Constanza's hold. MacDonald leaned against a bulkhead and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. "Hoo!" he said. "I'm worn out."
"It isn't very comfortable, is it?" Drake asked rhetorically. He, too, was streaming with perspiration, and his arms felt heavy as lead.
"Temperature, one hundred degrees Fahrenheit," MacDonald said in a dry voice. "Humidity, eighty-five per cent. Gravity, one point five. Why.. .if I may ask?"
Drake stuck a soggy handkerchief in his pocket. "We have to reproduce the environment of the surface of Okeefenokee as closely as possible," Drake explained. "That's what the ducks are bred for."
"What's this planet like?" MacDonald wanted to know. His eyes warily followed a duck that flapped its way through the hot, muggy air with apparent unconcern.
"Something like Earth was a few hundred million years ago. Mostly swamps and shallow seas. Plant life is pretty highly evolved-wind pollinated, though; there aren't any insects. Animals haven't gotten much above the crustacean stage. Oh, there are a few chordates, I understand, but no true vertebrates. There are some things that look like fish, but they're more closely related to the mollusks.
"That wouldn't be so bad, but it means the colonists wouldn't have the proper proteins. We've got to change the ecological setup. Therefore, the ducks."
"Why ducks?"
"Don't ask me; I'm not an ecologist."
"They're sure queer looking," MacDonald said as one of them waddled unconcernedly toward him.
"They're mutations," Drake told him. "Had to be. The surface gravity of Okeefenokee is half again as great as Earth's, and the air pressure and temperature are higher—as you've noticed. That necessitated modification of the duck's flying apparatus. And there were other changes; their diet isn't quite the same as that of ordinary Terrestrial ducks. They're still members of the Anatidae, but they aren't like any other duck on Earth."
The duck waddled closer and looked at the two men with apparent interest.
"What are you along for, Doc?" MacDonald asked. "Are you a veterinarian?"
"Yes. I also have an M.D. degree."
The duck looked him straight in the eye. "Quack!" it said distinctly.
MacDonald almost gagged.
Dr. Rouen Drake was a scholarly man who had the unfortunate luck to look like a scholar is supposed to look. He was lean and somewhat shorter than average height. His shoulders were slightly rounded, and his eyes had the faint telltale glitter which betrayed the lenses that corrected his myopia. His hair was blond and straight and had a pronounced widow's peak. Even his soft, measured, somewhat pedagogical voice betrayed him. It was the first time he had ever been aboard a spaceship in his life, and he felt somewhat out of place among the spacemen.
But he had a job to do, and he was determined to do it well.
After he and MacDonald left Section Five, they went back and checked over the other cargo. Item: One electric incubator, five thousand egg capacity. Item: Fifty electric brooders, one hundred duckling capacity. Item: Two hundred and thirty thousand pounds duckling rations, Types A and B. Item: Three thousand pounds adult duck rations, normal feeding. Item: Three thousand pounds adult duck breeding rations.
And, Item: Five thousand crash-frozen fertile duck eggs.
All in order.
Satisfied, Drake went up to the control blister in the nose to report to Captain Dumbrowski.
He was in a somewhat better mood now, possibly because there were still ten minutes until the scheduled take-off time. If Drake had been late—
"I'm all set, captain," Drake said. "The cargo is in excellent shape, and the live ducks are all taken care of."
"Good," said Dumbrowski. He turned to the other man who had been in the control blister with him. "Lieutenant Devris, this is Dr. Drake. Doctor, this is Devris, our navigator."
Devris was a good-looking man, quiet, efficient, and intelligent. His handshake was warm and friendly.
"All right, men," Dumbrowski said, "let's get settled. Take-off in eight minutes. MacDonald, show the doctor to his cabin."
Eight minutes later, the sixty-five meter long Constanza lifted her huge mass gently and easily from her pit and accelerated toward the sky. As she left the atmosphere, her course changed slightly, aiming her nose at a point near Shaula in Scorpio. Then the mass-time converters shifted in and the ship vanished. She was moving towards her destination at nearly ten thousand times the velocity of light. Okeefenokee was eighteen weeks away.
Time plodded on. The operation of the vessel was largely automatic, requiring only occasional human judgment. Once every twenty-four hours, the mass-time converters were cut and the ship returned to normal space so that Devris could take positional readings.
Twice a day, Dr. Drake went down to Section Five to feed and care for his ducks.
Between times, the men read, played cards, or watched the new movies that had been brought along. And each night, Captain Dumbrowski issued each man a ration of two bottles of beer.
Dumbrowski himself was a storyteller of no mean ability, although the subject matter was rather monotonous.
"And then there was that time on Tripha," he would say, pouring himself a foaming glass. "Some disease had wiped out nine-tenths of the male population. They'd whipped it finally, but even the men who were left were in pretty sad condition. Naturally"—he chuckled knowingly—"we had to do our duty. There was one little blonde who had four sisters—good lookers, all of 'em. Well, they seemed to take a shine to me, so..."
Or: "I remember a red-headed dancer in Lunar City; she did a strip that was out of this world! What technique! Anyway, I was in this dive, and—"
And so on. MacDonald would try to top him, but he always came off second best. Neither of them ever repeated himself exactly, but after a few weeks there developed an overhanging pall of similarity about the tales.
Drake noticed that Devris usually listened to Dumbrowski for a while, and then got up and strolled quietly to the astronomical dome. One evening, he walked out as usual, but as soon as he was out in the corridor, he turned and made signals with his hands and fingers.
Drake realized the signals were for him, since neither the captain nor the engineer could see Devris from where he sat.
Drake nodded imperceptibly, and got up a few minutes later. He walked quietly out, mumbling something about his ducks. Behind him, Dumbrowski was saying:
"...Could be picked up without any trouble. So I..."
Drake headed for the astronomy dome. Devris was pouring a colorless liquid into a couple of glasses. He added ice and fruit juice and said: "I thought you might like to get away from Joe 'One-Note' Dumbrowski for a while. Here; have a drink." He handed one of the glasses to the doctor.
Drake sipped at the drink. It was smooth, but with a strange aura of power. "Isn't this against regulations?" he asked.
"Not exactly." Devris' smile was that of the triumphant loophole-seeker. "'Articles of Interstellar Commerce... '" he quoted. "'Section VIII, Paragraph 4: No beverage alcohol shall be permitted aboard Service vessels except regulation five per cent beer, which shall be rationed to personnel at the rate of twenty-four fluid ounces per day, such rations not to be cumulative.'" He paused for a moment, then went on: "Section IX, Paragraph 3: Intoxication of personnel shall be punished by the commanding officer of the ship according to Section II, Paragraphs 7 and 8, dealing with endangering the lives and/or property aboard service vessels.'"
"Then what's this?" Drake asked, holding up his glass.
"Lens cleaning fluid," Devris said candidly. "I find absolute alcohol to be an excellent lens cleaner.
"Naturally," he continued virtuously, "no one in his right mind could consider lens cleaning fluid a beverage."
"Which proves," said Drake, taking another sip, "that I am not in my right mind."
"I'll drink to that," said Devris. They drank.
"Very neat," Drake said. " As long as you do not become intoxicated and do not have alcoholic beverages aboard, you are not disobeying the regulations. Does the captain know about this?"
"Probably. But we don't mention it. We have a tacit agreement. He doesn't check on my lens cleaner, and I don't ask him why he has an extra foot locker aboard."
"I see. No one checks on the captain. What about MacDonald?"
"He's satisfied with his beer ration, I guess. He isn't much of a drinker. He'd rather swap true confessions with Joe One-Note." He finished his drink and mixed another. "You know," he said philosophically, "I have done a little computation. Assuming that all of Joe's stories are true, and assuming that each of his conquests was completed in a minimum amount of time, and using Service tables to compute the average length of a voyage and the average time of stay on a planet—figuring all these in, I say, I have come up with a cubic equation."
Drake nodded. "I follow you. So?"
"I have come up with two real and one imaginary roots to the equation." He held up a hand and began counting them off on his fingers.
"Real Root One: Captain Dumbrowski is over nine hundred years old. Otherwise, he couldn't possibly have done all that work in the time allowed.
"Real Root Two: Captain Dumbrowski has psionic powers and is able to teleport himself from this ship every night to some suitable planet in the galaxy and get back within eight hours."
"Uh-huh. And the imaginary root?"
"Captain Dumbrowski's stories are imaginary. But, being imaginary, such a root is not allowable in a real situation."
"Naturally not," agreed Drake. "Pour me another drink."
As the navigator mixed, Drake asked: "I wonder why he lays it on so thick?"
"He married young," Devris said oratorically. "His wife is a small, birdlike woman to whom he is intensely devoted. She is, as far as I can determine, a simpering prude."
"So he tells sea stories like Long John Silver, eh?"
From then on, Drake managed to get away from Dumbrowski early and have a chat with Devris in the evening. The navigator proudly displayed his instruments, and even let the doctor compute their position one day. Drake got one of the factors confused, and Devris respectfully informed him that he had better tell the captain to turn around, because the ship was heading towards Alhena in Gemini, dead away from their target.
Drake, in turn, took the navigator to Section Five to show him his ducks.
"Why live ducks, anyway?" Devris asked. "Why not just ship them all as eggs?"
"Well, remember, these aren't going to be domestic ducks; they'll be allowed to go wild on Okeefenokee. One of the most important things a duck can learn is how to be a duck. It isn't all instinct, you know. So we have a live adult duck for every hundred eggs. The old duck teaches the younger ones the duck business."
"Been in the family for generations, eh?" Devris asked.
"We hope so. Believe me, we hope so."
"You hope so? I'd think any duck could learn the duck profession. It ought to be easy as duck soup."
Drake winced. "Not necessarily. These ducks, like most domestic ducks, are descended from the Anas boschas—the mallard. But domestic ducks have been inbred and crossbred for meat and egg qualities. In several strains, the brooding or nest-sitting instinct has been bred right out. Such a species wouldn't survive in the wild; the duck would lay her eggs and then walk off and leave them.
"We went back to the original wild mallard to get Anas okeefenokias, here. The genetic engineers worked hard to get the bird they wanted, but a couple of strains turned out to be absolutely worthless. One strain was a failure because the opposite sexes refused to have anything to do with each other—no mating instinct."
"Tell that to Captain Dumbrowski. He'll have a duck fit," said Devris calmly. He ducked just in time.
Seventeen weeks slipped by. It was on the fourth day of the eighteenth week, two days' flight from Okeefenokee, that Drake found a sick duck.
It wasn't really very ill; it had managed to get a scratch near one eye, and the scratch had become slightly infected. It took him a couple of minutes to snare the duck, then he picked it up and looked at it.
"Not too bad at all," he said. "I'll take it up to my cabin and put something on that. And I guess I'd better take a good look at the others; they may have been fighting."
Devris mopped the perspiration from his dripping brow. "You want me to take it up, doc? I have to go make my positional check, anyway. MacDonald is going to stop the ship in a few minutes."
"Sure. Thanks." Drake handed the duck to the navigator. "Keep her close to your body, and when you get her up to my place, put a blanket around her. These ducks have a higher body temperature than normal, and that air out there is pretty cold to them."
"Can do," said Devris. And he left, with the duck cradled securely in his arm.
Fifteen minutes later, a loud-speaker blared in the room. The dense air, coupled with Dumbrowski's booming voice, made a thunderous noise in the compartment. Squawking, flapping ducks fled from the voice.
"DRAKE! GET UP HERE TO THE CONTROL BLISTER! AND I MEAN FAST!"
Drake made it fast. There must be something badly wrong for Dumbrowski to give an order like that.
The first thing that struck him oddly when he entered the control blister was the peculiar odor. There was the acrid smell of burnt insulation, the biting, metallic effluvium of vaporized copper, the stench of burnt feathers, and—beneath it all—the tasty, tantalizing aroma of roast duck.
Devris was standing at rigid attention in the middle of the room, listening to Dumbrowski bellow.
"...and I don't give a damn what the doctor asked you to do!"
"He didn't ask me, captain; I volunteered."
"Shaddup! You had no right to volunteer! He—"
"What about me, captain?" Drake asked.
Dumbrowski whirled. "Oh, there you are! What do you mean, letting one of your blasted ducks out of their section? You dumb cluck, do you realize you've wrecked a multi-million dollar spaceship?"
MacDonald was kneeling over an open panel from which heavy clouds of smoke were still pouring.
It seemed that MacDonald had been inspecting the circuits, giving them a final check before the last two days of the drive. The mass-time converters had been shut off so that Devris could make the daily position check.
MacDonald had had the panel open, and had stepped across the room to get a meter of some kind.
And a duck walked in.
MacDonald had tried to shoo it out, but the duck, stubborn to the end, had shooed in the opposite direction. Instead of fleeing through the open door, she had headed for the darkened cabinet which housed the control circuits.
She had landed across a couple of leads which came directly from a high-voltage, high-amperage, direct-current generator. MacDonald had been afraid to try to get her out, and afraid not to. She had flapped and quacked and fluttered about, jiggling loose wires and cracking other equipment. Then the insulation on the DC leads had broken, and all hell busted loose.
The unfortunate thing was that the leads had been between the generators and the circuit breakers. There was no load on them at that point and no reason to think there would be a short. But short there was.
The duck had died instantly, and had carbonized an instant later. The arc established had blazed its way back to the generator, destroying everything in its path. Carried by the ionized metal between the leads, the arc had not stopped until it reached the point where the leads were separated by a high-test ceramic insulator.
"And the worst of it," MacDonald said, "is that we can't replace it. We're not equipped to repair a burned out generator and all that other stuff. We don't carry that many spares. Things like this just don't happen on board a spaceship."
"I'll say they don't!" Dumbrowski bellowed. " And if it hadn't been for this duck doctor here, it wouldn't have happened at all!"
Drake clenched his teeth and said nothing.
"Do you know what this means?" Dumbrowski asked in a subdued roar. "It means we will have to call all the way back to Earth and tell them we're marooned here, two days' time from our destination. And that means we'll have to sit here and wait for eighteen weeks for the ship to get here with the necessary parts!"
"Couldn't we get a ship here from Okeefenokee?" Drake asked, forcing his voice to keep calm.
Dumbrowski sneered. "Hardly. That's a Class C colony; it isn't really a colony yet. It isn't self-supporting. There isn't a ship any closer than Earth."
He stood there for a moment, and evidently his anger subsided a little. " All right; it's happened. We'll have to make the best of it. We've got enough food on board, and the paragravity units didn't go—thank Heaven."
MacDonald, rummaging around in the smouldering mass of fused equipment, said: "The only thing gone is the control system of the mass-time converters and the drive thrust." He scrabbled around a bit more, then: "And all the leads to the cryogenics section."
It took a full two seconds for that to hit Drake. "You mean the refrigerator? The one my eggs are in?"
"Yeah," said MacDonald, his voice muffled by the cabinet.
"Five thousand rotten eggs on our hands!" bellowed Dumbrowski. He turned to Drake. "We might as well start dumping them now."
It was all Drake could do to hold his temper. Part of him wanted to throw a punch straight into Dumbrowski's teeth; part of him whispered that it might not be too sensible. Dumbrowski outmassed him by fifteen kilos.
Discretion won by a narrow margin. "I'm afraid I can't let you do that, captain," he said stiffly. "At least not until we check with the Interstellar Commission. They might frown on our dumping those eggs without doing everything in our power to save them."
"Look, Doc," Dumbrowski said coldly, "I've dumped cargo before if it was going to spoil. I once dumped five tons of powdered eggs because a leaky water pipe damped them down. When eggs begin to stink, they really stink. Hydrogen sulfide isn't too congenial an aroma.
"If I ask the Commission, they'll just tell me to dump 'em. So why bother?"
"Now you look, Dumbrowski." Drake's voice was rapidly becoming brittle. "In the first place, those aren't ordinary eggs. They are fertile, mutant duck eggs. In the second place, I am quite sure that the Commission won't tell you to dump five thousand eggs worth two thousand dollars each!"
Dumbrowski's heavy brows shot up. "Two thou—You mean those eggs are worth ten million dollars?"
"Exactly."
"But what else can we do? MacDonald!" He swung around to the engineer, who was still probing in the ruins. "Is there any chance we can get the refrigerator going again?"
"None, skipper. Everything in here is gone."
Dumbrowski turned back to Drake. "See? What else can we do?"
"What do you normally do with fertile eggs?"
"You mean—?"
"I mean we incubate them. Check with the Commission." And Drake turned on his heel and walked out.
Drake blamed himself for the escape of the duck. He'd forgotten to tell Devris that they were stronger than an average duck because of the high gravity they lived under. Devris had wrapped the duck securely in a blanket and left it on Drake's bed. The door to the doctor's cabin had been left open a crack, and after the duck had wriggled herself loose from the blanket, she had gone out for a stroll.
Well, he had to agree with Dumbrowski on one thing: there was nothing to be done about it now; they'd just have to make the best of it.
He went down to Section Twenty, where the refrigerators were. The egg cases would have to be removed and thawed properly, at just the right rate. Then they'd have to go into the incubator. He figuratively spat on his hands and got to work.
When Lieutenant Devris came down an hour or so later, the eggs were in the slow warmer. Drake looked up as the sound of boots echoed along the corridor and into the room.
"Hi, Pete. What's up?"
Devris grinned lopsidedly. "The captain told me to bring this to you. He's too furious to bring it himself." He handed Drake a flimsy.
Drake looked at it and grinned. It read: "Okeefenokee duck eggs must not be allowed to perish. Incubate and hatch. Every effort short of actual danger to crew must be expended to save ducks. Crew of the Constanza is instructed to give Dr. Rouen Drake full co-operation."
Devris said: "I'm sorry about that duck, Doc."
"Forget it. It could have happened to anyone. What are the chances that it would walk into the control blister? Pretty small, I'd think."
"Yeah. Pretty small. But it happened."
"I'll say it did. What a mess." He paused and looked up at the navigator. "Pete?"
"Yeah?"
"Pete, why does Dumbrowski have it in for me?"
Devris looked uncomfortable. "I don't know, Doc. It's just his way. He yells at everybody. Don't ask me why he picked you to rib. You can't always explain the queer quirks in a guy's mind." Then he turned and went out.
Drake looked at the door for a long time. Then he shrugged and went on with his work.
The eggs went into the big automatic incubator. Normal duck eggs are incubated at 101° to 103° Fahrenheit for twenty-eight days, but the Okeefenokee duck eggs required 129° F. for only twenty-one days.
Every ten hours, the incubator automatically turned the eggs; the atmosphere inside was kept properly humid and warm. On the sixth day, Drake candled the eggs to see if any were infertile.
Thirty-two of them showed no sign of life; they went into the disposal unit. The others went on incubating.
Dumbrowski calmed down quite a bit during the next couple of weeks. Drake didn't go out of his way to avoid the man, but he didn't seek the captain out, either. The feeling seemed mutual.
Still, Drake dreaded the day when' he would have to tell Dumbrowski the whole truth. He had spent his time getting the exact measurements of the ship—and the ship wasn't quite big enough.
Eighteen weeks until help would come from Earth. Eighteen weeks of floating in emptiness, fifty-four light-years from their destination, thirty-four hundred light-years from Earth, and nine light-years from the nearest star.
The eighteen weeks became seventeen, then sixteen, and then fifteen. And the duck eggs were ready to hatch.
Two days before the hatch was ready, Drake went to Captain Dumbrowski. For over a week, things had looked calm on the surface, but underneath, the situation was about as touchy as dry nitrogen iodide in a sandstorm.
Dumbrowski was playing cribbage with MacDonald. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, pair six, pair eight," he said, pegging his hand. He looked up as Drake entered. "Hello, Doc. How're the eggs?" His voice was carefully modulated.
"They hatch day after tomorrow, captain. I'll need some room for the brooders. They're all knocked down for shipment, and I'll have to put them together."
"I see." Dumbrowski shuffled the cards slowly. "About how much room will you need?"
"There's fifty of 'em," Drake said. "They're square, two meters on a side."
"I see." He tamped the cards on the table, cut the deck, and shuffled again—slowly. "That's two hundred square meters of floor space."
"A little more," Drake said. "They can't be crowded together too much."
Dumbrowski sighed gustily. "Well, I reckon we can find space here and there in different sections. It'll take a little moving around, but I guess it can be done."
"I'm afraid that won't do, captain. You see, those ducks have to be raised under one point five gees, at high pressure and high temperature and high humidity—just like the rest of the ducks."
Dumbrowski stopped shuffling. "I see," he said at last. "They're going to hatch in two days and we have to shift the cargo around so that you can have another section. Then we have to reset the paragravity units under the floor. And set up the heaters and the humidifiers and the pressurizers. I see." He put the cards down carefully on the table and looked up at Drake. "All right, Doc. MacDonald and I will tend to it. Meanwhile, I'd appreciate it if you'd stay out of my sight for a while."
Drake swallowed and said nothing for a moment. Then: "You hate my guts, don't you, Dumbrowski?"
"I would if you had any," the captain said evenly. "You get 'em; I'll hate 'em."
That evening, Drake went up to the navigation dome. Devris was punching figures into a small computer, so the doctor sat down and waited quietly until he was through.
After several minutes, a relay clicked, a typer rattled a little, and a white sheet covered with figures slid out. Devris took it, stared at it, and snarled four words.
"Is that what's known as a 'deep space oath'?" Drake asked mildly.
"Huh? Oh, hello, Doc. Didn't see you come in." He looked back at the paper. "If you mean an oath directed towards space, yes. So far, I can't pin our exact position down without an error of plus or minus one light-month. That's a little over four minutes' flight time."
"That sounds pretty good."
"Oh, it is; but I want it better. My ambition is to be able to get it down plus or minus an inch, but I think the noise level is a bit too high."
"Hm-m-m. Where's Dumbrowski and MacDonald?"
Devris looked up from his paper. "Didn't you know? They're working on Section Six."
"Oh?" Drake blinked. "I'd have thought they'd have that cleared out hours ago."
Devris let his mouth hang open for a second, then snapped it shut. "Oh, joy, joy. What you know about a spaceship could be printed in newsface headline print on half-inch osmium plate and it would consist entirely of the fifteenth letter of the alphabet."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that the paragravity units under the floor have to be completely reblocked. You don't just wave your hand to get an extra half gee out of 'em."
Drake swallowed-hard. "Why...why, I thought all you had to do was turn a dial or something, like a thermostat."
"You did? Is that why you waited until two days before the hatching to tell Dumbrowski? He'll be up all night and all day tomorrow, he and MacDonald. I'd be down there helping them, except there isn't room between the deck plates for three men."
Drake buried his face in his hands. "This is horrible! No. Nonono no!"
Devris looked a little alarmed. "Oh, now, Doc, it isn't as bad as all that. You didn't know."
The doctor looked up. "It's worse than that! I need that little bitty space for ducklings—ducklings, mind you! But do you realize that those birds will be adult ducks by the time the rescue ship gets here? An adult duck needs eight thousand square centimeters of space; those ducks will need four thousand square meters of floor area by the time they grow up!"
"Four thousand square meters," Devris said in a thoughtful tone. "That's pretty nearly the whole deck area of the ship. Interesting." He got up and went over to the bottle marked "Lens Cleaner" and began mixing a stiff drink.
He was humming to himself, and it took Drake a second or two to recognize the tune.
I heard one day
A gentleman say
That criminals who
Are cut in two
Can hardly feel
The fatal steel
And so are slain
Without much pain.
If this is true,
It's jolly for you;
Your courage screw
To bid us adieu—
Devris stirred the drink vigorously and handed it to the doctor. "You'd better go down and tell Dumbrowski now, before he gets too much more done on that section. Drink that—you'll need it."
Drake finished the glass in short order and headed for Section Six.
The stairway to Section Six was closed, and a big sign glowed on its surface.
DANGER! THE P-G UNIT IN THIS SECTION IS OFF! USE EXTREME CAUTION!
Drake opened the door carefully and peered down the stairway. The lights were on, and everything looked normal. He started down the stairs.
Halfway down, something tugged at his insides and sudden nausea hit him. He stumbled down two more steps, and the ship seemed to do a prodigious loop. There seemed to be a pull from above. He was falling up the stairs! He lurched out and grabbed at the railing. He missed, and the ship whirled about him. He did a queer somersault, while his stomach flipped in the opposite direction. He twisted frantically, trying to regain his balance and his sense of orientation. His stomach flipped back in place, twisted around, joggled, gave up in despair, and emptied itself of its contents in one titanic upheaval.
Drake passed out, colder than a fritter.
He was being shaken. A voice was saying: "Come on, Doc; snap out of it. You're all right, Doc; come on."
In the background, he could hear Dumbrowski's bellowing laughter.
As if in a dream, he opened his eyes blearily. "What happened?" Then: "Where am I?"
"You're in Section Seven, Doc," said MacDonald. "You stepped across the barrier field into no-gee, and went haywire."
"Boy!" said Dumbrowski, "did you look funny!" And again he burst into laughter.
Drake found himself lying on the floor. His clothes were a mess, and his head still felt dizzy.
"But I've stepped across barrier fields hundreds of times," he protested feebly. "It never did that before."
"Sure," MacDonald said. "You've gone from one and a half gees to one gee and vice versa. But all you felt was a weight shift. But total absence of pull is the limit; you lose all your orientation."
"You flipped, man; you really flipped!" Dumbrowski had subsided to a rumbling chuckle, punctuated by gasps.
"How do you feel?" asked MacDonald with a broad grin.
"I feel fine." Drake's voice was cold. He sat up, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began dabbing at his face. His stomach still felt a little queasy, but otherwise he was all right.
"Didn't you know the Olympics were being held in Madagascar this year?" Dumbrowski asked. "Or did you have some other purpose than trying to win the fancy-diving championship?"
"I came down to tell you something." The ice in the words almost liquefied the air, but Dumbrowski didn't seem to notice.
"Really? Well, I must say you attracted my attention. What was it?"
Drake told him. He told him in detail and with precision. And, inside himself, he enjoyed every second of watching Dumbrowski's expression change. Laugh at me, will you? Laugh now. Go ahead and laugh.
Dumbrowski didn't laugh. His face darkened a little, and he said: "You don't think very far ahead, do you, Doctor? You're supposed to take care of those ducks, not me. You wanted 'em hatched; my orders are to co-operate. Well, you haven't told me a thing. I don't know what kind of orders you think you're giving, but I've had just about enough of 'em. I'm tired of walking around blind on my own ship, wondering when you're going to come up with another half-baked idea."
It had the effect of an emotional thermite bomb. In a phenomenal energy gain, Drake's nerves went from frigid to boiling. "Now, listen here, you thickheaded ape...you...you dumb lowbrowski! You haven't even offered to co-operate! You haven't even asked any questions! How am I supposed to know everything when you don't tell me and don't ask me?"
"Me?" bellowed the captain. "Me?" How am I supposed to know what kind of questions to ask about ducks? Who ever heard of raising ducks on a spaceship, anyway? You and your eggs, you egghead! You and your filthy rotten eggs!"
They were on their feet now, glaring at each other. MacDonald was looking from one to the other apprehensively, wondering what was going to happen and when.
"My eggs are cleaner than your filthy stories!" Drake snarled. "At least I don't bore everybody to death with imaginary tales."
That was enough for Dumbrowski. He snarled back at Drake, then, with a bellow of mingled rage and pain, he came at him.
He was heavier than Drake, but they were more evenly matched than might be supposed. The doctor had been working with his ducks in a one-point-five gee field for several years, at least an hour a day. His muscles were harder and tougher than they looked.
Drake stepped aside, and the captain's blow missed. But his other arm, flailing out, caught Drake in the ribs. The doctor grunted and drove a fist into Dumbrowski's abdomen at short range. The spaceman's hard-muscled middle gave a little, and his arms went around Drake. They went down together, rolling over and over on the tough plastic covering that sheathed the steel deck.
MacDonald ran forward to break up the battle, but one of the combatants swung out a leg at just the wrong moment and caught the engineer across the shin. He staggered back, off balance, and dropped, landing hard. He got up and limped toward the intercom while the Battle of Section Seven went on.
He jabbed the general call button and bawled: "Pete! Come down to Seven! These two blockheads are tryna kill each other! On the double!"
Devris barreled down the stairway and tried to help MacDonald break up the tussle—without noticeable success. Both of them got punches for their pains.
Finally, Devris ran over to the wall and pulled out the emergency fire hose. He almost turned it on before MacDonald yelled: "Hey! Pete! Water—not carbon tet!"
Devris looked at the selector dial. It pointed at CCl4. He twisted it past CO2 to H2O and flipped the switch. A high-velocity stream of water splattered into the tangled bodies on the floor .
They broke up, sputtering.
"Now both of you stop," Devris commanded, "or I will use the carbon tet!"
But it wasn't needed; the water had done the job.
"How's your nose?" Devris asked.
Drake stood before the mirror in his room and surveyed himself. One eye was bruised a little and his nose was badly swollen. "Id hurds," he said, "bud I thig ids gwid bleedig. I'll dage the pagging oud." He pulled the packing from his nostrils and reached into his kit for a little spray gun. He directed the cloud of mist into his nostrils for a second.
"There; that's better."
MacDonald stuck his head in the door. "You all right, doc? Anything broken?"
"I'm O.K.," Drake told him. "For a while I though I'd busted a hand on Dumbrowski's head, but I took a look at it under the transparency, and it's only bruised."
"Well...uh...You sure you feel, O.K.?" MacDonald's tone was hesitant. "Oh...the...uh ...the captain has a pretty bad eye. I wonder if you'd take a look at it."
Drake hesitated. "I doubt it he'd let me in the room."
MacDonald grinned and relaxed a little. "He said that if you didn't come, I was to tell you that you caused the damage and you had better get up there and fix it or the skipper will confiscate your med kit, report you to the TMA, and personally come down here and beat you in a fair fight." He shrugged. "I'm quoting, you understand."
In spite of the fact that it hurt his lip, Drake grinned. "I'll be right up. And you tell him that if he gives me any trouble I have a hypo here that will put him to sleep for a week."
"Righto!" MacDonald vanished.
As the doctor packed his kit, Devris said: "I see you've learned one thing about Dumbrowski."
"Yeah? What's that?"
"That he doesn't expect anybody to believe what he says when he exaggerates."
Drake paused to let that sink in. "You mean—"
"Yeah. Those stories of his. They bore me, but he and MacDonald have a lot of fun with them. Everybody doesn't have the same tastes, Doc."
Drake closed his kit slowly. "You're right; they don't." He picked up his kit and headed toward the captain's room, wondering what he was going to say.
When he went in, Dumbrowski was sitting in a chair with his shirt off, scratching his hairy chest. His face was a mess. He'd obviously washed it once, but there was still blood pouring from a cut under his eye. With his free hand-the one that wasn't scratching-he was holding a gauze pad to the cut, but it had already become blood-soaked.
The two men looked at each other without smiling. "You hurt?" Dumbrowski asked levelly.
"Yeah." Drake pointed at his nose. "Slightly busted," he lied. "You?"
Dumbrowski removed the pad, and blood poured from an inch-long cut directly over his cheekbone. "I'm bleedin' to death, you butcher."
Drake walked over and looked at the wound. "I'll put a tourniquet around your neck."
"You would."
Drake took antiseptics and healing agents from his bag and did things with them. Dumbrowski sat stolidly through it all. Finally, the doctor sprayed dermiseal over the cut and pinched it together while the proteinoid plastic polymerized, sealing the edges of the wound.
The eye was badly swollen and purpling. Drake took a hypogun out of his case and fired three minuscule shots into the tissue around the eye and then stood back.
"You'll live," he said.
"Thanks, Doc." He turned to MacDonald. "Mac, go down and get Pete, and you two put that Section Six peegee unit back together. We'll have to work on the main generator coils instead."
When MacDonald had gone, Dumbrowski got up and walked over to his foot locker, from which he extracted a one-liter bottle of amber fluid. "I hope you like Irish," he said. "It's as good for settling a brawl as it is for starting one." He poured two and added ice water. Then he said: "We've got to figure out how we're going to handle these ducks."
He never mentioned the fight again.
"I really don't think I can stand this much longer," Devris said. "I've gone along this far just for the gag, but I have almost reached my limit."
The heat was oppressive. The air was so wet that it seemed to splash as they slogged through it. And at one and a half gravities, even the effort to lift a foot was annoying and tiring.
Drake took a scoopful of duckling food from a fifty-kilo drum and dumped it into the feeding troughs near the brooder.
"Wakwakwak!"chortled a hundred little balls of feathers as they scrambled around the heating unit of the brooder.
Devris poured water into the drinking pans. It ran abnormally fast and splashed queerly under the extra pseudogravitational acceleration. "Yes, sir ," he repeated, "just about reached my limit."
"What are you griping about?" Drake asked.
"Oh, nothing, nothing. It's just that for the past two weeks, I have been bumbling around under a gee pull that makes me feel like I was made of lead. I seem to have spent all my life feeding ducklings stuff that acts like bird shot and pouring them drinks that flow like mercury."
"There's not that much difference," Drake objected. "In addition," the navigator went on, ignoring the interruption, "I have to lug this grossly heavy corpse of mine around through a fever-swamp atmosphere that is gradually driving me to the verge of acute claustrophobia." He wiped at his forehead. "And, as I said, I have just about reached my limit."
"What are you going to do when you reach it?"
"Take a taxi and go home," Devris said, with an air of finality.
Drake finished filling the feeder and dusted off his hands.
"That's the last one for today ," he said. "Let's go up to your place; I want to look up something in that book of regulations of yours."
Devris set down his bucket of water. "How did you know I had a reg book?"
"Simple deduction."
"He can't even use a word without 'duck' in it," Devris whispered in a hoarse aside. "O.K. How?"
"I reasoned that no one would be able to quote from regulations the way you do without having studied them extensively. Whence, it follows that you must own a copy of your own, since it would be inconvenient for you to borrow the captain's all the time—and bad politics, besides."
"Marvelous, Holmes! Absolutely marvelous! You figured it out with only those few clues?"
"Almost," Drake admitted modestly. "Of course, there was one additional bit of evidence."
"Which was?"
"I saw the book in your room."
"Holmes, you are phenomenal; let's go."
The two men plodded their way up the stairs. The entire ship was under one hundred and fifty per cent of a standard gee now; the power coils had had to be rebuilt, but it was easier than redoing each floor singly.
They finally pushed their way into Devris' cabin and sat down.
"Whooo!" Devris said. "At least it's cooler in here."
MacDonald had rigged up individual air-conditioners for the sleeping rooms, but nothing could be done about increased pressure and gravity. The air was cooler and less humid, that was all.
Drake took the copy of the Interstellar Commission Regulations and began leafing through it.
"What's the trouble?" the navigator asked.
"Space," Drake said. "We haven't got enough floor area on the ship to take care of the ducks unless we jettison some of the cargo. This is a pretty big ship, but it's not big enough."
"Cargo?" Devris put a finger to his chin and stared at the ceiling. "You want to get rid of non-perishable cargo. Hm-m-m." He rubbed his chin with the finger. "Try Section XIX, Paragraph...uh...seven, I think."
Drake turned to that section and began reading.
"The cargo officer shall be responsible for all damage to the ship due to shifting cargo, since it shall—"
"Nope," Devris interrupted, "that's for bigger ships, with four or five men in the crew. Wrong paragraph. Try Seventeen."
Drake flipped over several pages. "If, in case of emergency, it shall become necessary to jettison cargo, such cargo shall be that which is the least—"
"I can boil that down for you," Devris said. "There are orders of precedence. The idea is to junk the cheapest, most useless cargo first, and work your way up. Suppose you have a hundred kilos of oxygen and a hundred kilos of diamonds, and you have to get rid of a hundred kilos of something. What do you get rid of?
"Well, if it's space you need, you get rid of the oxy, because a hundred kilos of diamonds can be broken up and stashed here and there in out-of-the-way places. Even if they couldn't, they'd be kept because they're a bit more expensive than oxy.
"On the other hand, if the ship is low on oxy, you jettison the diamonds. See?"
"Who decides which to drop?" Drake asked.
"The captain, always—even if there's a cargo officer aboard. It's the captain's decision, because his job is to protect life first and property afterwards."
Drake nodded. "That's what I wanted; I'm going up to see Dumbrowski."
As he was toiling his way up the stairs, he met Dumbrowski toiling his way down.
"Oh, there you are," the captain said. "I wanted to know if you needed that incubator any more."
"Just what I was going to talk to you about. I was looking things up in the regulations, and I found we can toss out a lot of stuff—a lot of the cheaper cargo."
Dumbrowski nodded slowly. "You looked it up, eh? That's good. But, you know, I hate to throw anything away—and I don't think I will."
"But, captain—"
"Will you kindly go back down those stairs? I'm getting tired of just standing here. Let's go to Devris' room."
Drake retreated obediently. They went to the navigator's compartment, and Dumbrowski knocked resoundingly on the door. "Pete! It's me."
"Come on in, skipper," Devris said.
Dumbrowski looked at the doctor. "I wouldn't want to open the door while he was cleaning lenses," he said. "It might get dust on them if I opened the door too suddenly."
"I see," said Drake.
They pushed the door open and sat down.
"Now, about this jettisoning cargo," Dumbrowski began. "I don't think it's necessary. Besides, we just couldn't dump all the stuff we'll need. We couldn't get rid of all your duck food, could we?"
"No-o-o; we couldn't."
"But we'll need that space. So, I have an idea. Look; we're a good long way from the nearest large gravitational body. Is that right, Pete?"
"I haven't detected anything in the past five weeks. We're nine light-years from the nearest star. It's a blue-white; you can't miss it if you look out the ports."
Dumbrowski nodded and looked back at Drake. "So here's what we do: We take all the stuff we can and cart it outside and attach it to the hull with magnaclamps. That includes all those drums of duck food, and everything else. The brooders, too, when you're through with 'em.
"Then, if we need anything, all we have to do is go out and get it. Follow?"
Devris just nodded, but Drake felt rather dazed. It had never occurred to him that it was possible to throw something overboard without throwing it away.
I'm just not used to thinking in terms like that, he thought. I keep thinking of aircraft. Then he thought of something else. "What do we do when the rescue ship comes?"
"Well, they'll be able to take part of the cargo, and we'll haul back in the rest. Those ducks can be crowded for a couple of days, can't they?"
"Sure; two days won't matter." After all, he decided, it wouldn't really crowd them much. By that time, all the feed would be gone—or at least most of it would.
"Good," said Dumbrowski. "Good. There's one other problem. Who's going to clean up after the ducks?"
Drake smiled a sickly smile. "I guess we'll all have to work at it. It'll all have to be carted to the disposal."
"Three cheers." Dumbrowski stood up. "Well, MacDonald and I will start hauling stuff outside." And with that, he heaved himself up and walked out.
"You know," Drake said, looking at the closed door, "that guy worries me. For the past couple of weeks, I thought that... well—" He stood up and looked at his hands, frowning. "I thought we'd arrived at an understanding." He looked up at Devris. "But he still seems worried about something."
"Well, sure he is," Devris said. "He's not going to be in the best of odor with the Commission."
"Why not?"
"You mean you don't know?" Devris sat down again on a nearby chair. "Why, man, he's in trouble. So am I, and so is MacDonald—although neither of us is in as bad a jam as the skipper is."
"Why?"
"Because the ship has been disabled. We don't have any reasonable explanation for it. I'm in a jam because he had the control panels open when the duck walked in. But Dumbrowski is in a jam because he's captain, and all this is his fault. He's directly responsible for the whole thing."
Devris wasn't looking at Drake now; he was looking at his fingernails. "Maybe you wondered," he said, "why the skipper was so sore at you after the accident. Maybe I should have told you before this, but here it is.
"The Constanza is Dumbrowski's whole life. Sure, his little wife is a nice gal, but she's not something you can anchor your life to. Dumbrowski's pinned his life to Constanza."
Drake chewed at his lower lip. "I can see that. Sure. But what did I do?"
Devris looked up from his fingernails. "It isn't something you did. It's something you can't be held responsible for.
"The ship has been wrecked. For the first time in his career, Dumbrowski has had to call for help because his ship was out of commission. His ship. The Constanza.
"I'm responsible because I brought the duck up. And Mac, as I said, is responsible because he shouldn't have let the duck get in. But Dumbrowski may never get another promotion—it's his ship that was wrecked."
"I see," Drake said slowly. "And I'm not responsible at all?"
"Not as far as the Commission is concerned. It couldn't be shifted on to you, even if you wanted it to be." Devris smiled a little. "And I know you well enough after all these weeks to know that you'd take responsibility if you could. But it won't wash. It can't be done. We've had it—that's all."
Heat. Damp, soggy, broiling heat. Unpleasant, miserable heat, from which there was no escape. And a great burden of weight that sapped the strength rapidly in the hot, wet air.
MacDonald lifted another shovelful and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. He was stripped to the waist, clad only in a pair of sport shorts and his boots, and the perspiration ran down his neck and chest and back, soaked into the shorts, ran on down his legs, and collected in soggy pools in his boots. His hands were slippery on the handle of the improvised shovel, making it difficult to work.
Across the room, Drake was surrounded by hundreds of awkward little birds who chorused their monotonous wakwakwak .
MacDonald stopped shoveling for a moment and said: "I'm glad I'm not the feed man around here; I'm perfectly happy to handle the other end of the operation."
"I don't follow you," said Drake.
"No, but the ducks follow you," the engineer pointed out. "It would drive me nuts to have them underfoot all the time."
Drake put more feed in the pans. "You mean you think they follow me around just because I feed 'em?"
"Well, don't they? You give 'em their goodies; I just clean up after 'em."
"It isn't that," Drake said. "Even if you fed them, they'd still follow me; I'm the first moving thing they saw after they hatched. It's a built-in reflex. They think I'm their mother."
MacDonald plied his shovel again. "In that case, I am gladder than ever. Imagine being mama to thousands of ducks." He lifted the scoop and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. "Imagine. Thousands and thousands of ducks. Following you. Loving you. 'Mama! I stubbed my little webby foot, Mama. Kiss it and make it well.'"
"Stop!" Drake said. "You make it sound nauseating."
"It smells nauseating!" boomed a voice from the door. "This whole ship is beginning to smell like a chicken coop!"
"Duck coop," MacDonald corrected as Captain Dumbrowski came on in.
"Where are you taking that?" Dumbrowski asked, pointing at the wheelbarrow.
"To the disposal. Why?"
"Well, we can stop that right now! You're an engineer, it says here; you ought to be able to figure it out."
MacDonald stopped and wiped his forearm over his dripping brow. "You mean clogging the disposal? Nah. There isn't that much.
"There will be; there will be. Drake! Are these figures you gave me on feeding correct?"
Drake dusted crumbs of feed from his fingers, and walked toward Dumbrowski. "I'm pretty sure they are—why?" As he walked, the ducklings followed lovingly.
"According to this, each one of those ducks will eat approximately seventeen kilos of feed in the next fourteen weeks. At the end of that time, they'll mass about four kilos each."
"That's right."
MacDonald dropped his shovel. "By the Seven Purple Hells of Palain! Nearly sixty-five thousand kilograms! The disposal won't take it-not by a long shot!"
Drake said: "Well, I'll admit there'll be more per day as the ducks grow, but—" Then he stopped. "What can we do?"
"Do? There's only one thing we can do. Dehydrate the stuff and dump it overboard!"
Drake looked down at the ducklings clustered around his feet. "But we can't do that! We've got to reclaim the grit!"
"Grit? What do you mean grit?" Dumbrowski asked.
"Sand and gravel. Ducks don't have any teeth, so they have to eat a certain amount of grit to grind up the food in their crops. Without it, they'll die. But there isn't enough on board. We were going to hatch these birds on Okeefenokee, where there'd be plenty of it, so we didn't bother to bring any along."
"Then what the devil have you been doing?"
"Re-using what we have. It isn't digested, of course, so I've been reclaiming it as fast as it's eliminated, sterilizing it, and giving it back to them."
Dumbrowski put a hand over his eyes. "Let me think."
MacDonald and Drake stood there silently while the captain cerebrated. Finally, he took his damp hand away from his eyes and looked at MacDonald. "The A stage will have to be disconnected and used separately. We can dehydrate the stuff and take the sand out, but the organic section—well, that simply can't be overloaded. It'll have to go outside."
"I can do it," said MacDonald. "But it'll mean we'll have to dump it out the air lock at least once a day."
"You can do it when we go out to get new cans of food. Make it all one operation," said Drake.
"Yeah," said Dumbrowski. "You know," he went on, with a touch of bitterness in his voice, "this isn't a spaceship—it's a sea anemone!"
"I see what you mean," said Drake.
Overhead, two ducks flapped by.
Two men stood in the decompression room of the air lock while the pumps labored to reduce the pressure to zero. Their spacesuits swelled a little as the air left the room, and between them, a box of grayish powder churned softly as the atmospheric gases between the particles of powder worked their way out,
"Are you sure you'll be all right, Doc?" MacDonald asked.
"I think so. With this nylon rope to anchor me, if I get nauseated again, you can pull me back."
"Well, it will be easier with two of us, but Devris could have gone instead."
"He's got to keep shoveling. I can't scrape up the stuff from the floors," he explained.
"Oh? Why not?"
"Because I can't keep the ducks away from me. Every time I lift up a scoopful, I get three or four ducks with it!"
MacDonald shook his head inside the bubble of his space helmet. "Poor mama duck. Or should I say Papa Drake?"
"You should say nothing of the kind," the doctor said.
The "all clear" light winked on, and MacDonald opened the outer door.
"You go out first, Doc. Ease yourself past the barrier field slowly. Keep a hand on the edge of the door. And remember, you're not falling. Just keep your eyes open."
Drake did as he was told, and, in a few seconds, he was outside the ship and outside the paragravity field.
"How do you feel?" MacDonald's voice came over the phone.
"All right. A little confused, but I'm not sick. And everything isn't spinning around."
"O.K.; I'll be right with you." He came out, dragging the heavy box with him. "Now, can you clamp your boots onto the hull? They'll come on automatically; all you have to do is put them flat on the metal." He demonstrated, and Drake followed suit.
"I'm O.K., now," he said. "Here—let me carry the box while you get the food."
"Fine." MacDonald raised a gloved finger and pointed. "The dumping ground is right back there near the tail."
Drake looked around him. Here and there, spread over the outer hull of the ship, were fantastic-looking shapes—various pieces of the cargo which had had to be taken outside. He could see the incubator looming queerly in the dim illumination of the far-off stars.
MacDonald was making his way toward a jungle of steel drums which held the duck food. Drake watched him for a moment, then started walking toward the tail of the ship.
It was an eerie feeling; the ship was big, but it wasn't big enough to make one feel one was walking on a planet. The horizon was much too close. His boots were a little difficult to handle at first; the magnetic soles stuck tenaciously to the hull and had to be pulled off with each step. Finally, he found it easier to shuffle along, sliding the magnets over the hull.
Ahead of him, he saw a huge white patch on the hull. His helmet light gleamed off its surface. The dumping ground. He shuffled into the area, his boots raising clouds of the stuff, which only settled very slowly under the feeble pull of the ship's orthogravitational mass.
When he reached a spot near the middle of the heap, he turned the box upside down to dump it.
Nothing happened. The stuff just stayed in the box.
Sure, he thought to himself, grinning; not enough pull to make it fallout of the box.
Well, that was easily solved. With the box still held upside down, he shoved down hard, and then stopped the box. The powder, with its inertia undiminished, went on out, moving toward the hull. It hit—and splashed!
Like a liquid, the powder sprayed out in all directions, enveloping Drake in a white cloud.
He tried to back away from it, but instead of backing, he jumped. His boots came loose from the hull. He was drifting, weightless, in a cloud that was as impenetrable as heavy fog. His helmet light illuminated the particles a few feet in front of his face, but beyond that, there was nothing.
For a moment, nausea threatened to further complicate matters, but he forced it down. "Mac," he said steadily into his phone, "I think I'll need a little help."
"Yeah? What happened?"
Drake told him.
"Have you still got the box?" MacDonald asked.
"Yes."
"O.K." There was a feeling of stifled laughter in MacDonald's tone. "I'll go back to the lock and pull you in on the nylon rope."
A minute or so later, Drake felt a slight tug on his rope. And that was all. Just the first slight tug, then nothing. Had his rope broken?
"Mac!" he yelled frantically. "I think my rope broke! I'm lost!"
"Take it easy, Doc; take it easy. You're O.K. I just gave enough pull on the rope to get you started in this direction. You'll drift on in. I'm taking up slack now."
Drake didn't feel as though he were moving. "Taking up slack? Are you sure? Why don't you keep pulling?" His voice sounded strained, and it boomed loudly inside the helmet.
"If I kept pulling, I'd accelerate you. I don't want to brain you or something. Ahhh! Here you come!"
The white cloud was thinning, now, soon Drake could see that he was, indeed, drifting toward the air lock.
He moved in near MacDonald. The engineer reached out, grabbed his legs and pushed them down toward the hull. The boot magnets grabbed hold.
"Let's get inside," MacDonald said. "This suit is beginning to itch."
"Itch? Hell, this is the first time I've been comfortable in five weeks!"
"Yeah? Well, I itch. Say—how come you walked out into the middle of that to dump the box? That won't settle for days."
"It looked higher out in the middle—I thought that's what you had been doing."
"Naw! I walk up to the edge and give the box a shove. The stuff slides along the hull plates and piles up in just about the middle. Didn't you see the drift marks?"
Drake nodded. "Sure, but I thought it was just the wind—" He stopped and felt his face going a bright red.
How stupid can you get? Wind? In space?
But MacDonald only said: "Boy, will I be glad to get this suit off and scratch."
The next day, MacDonald was sick. His eyes were swelled almost shut, and his skin was covered with red, blotchy patches that itched like fire.
While Dumbrowski and Devris labored over the feeding and the cleaning, Drake labored over MacDonald. The man was feverish and miserable. The high temperature and the humidity hadn't helped any.
Dumbrowski, worried, got the ducks fed in short order and hurried up to MacDonald's cabin as fast as a one-point-five gee would let him.
Drake had pumped several shots into the engineer's blood system, and sprayed his skin with a soothing semi-anaesthetic lotion. The swelling was beginning to go down a little.
Dumbrowski stood at the door, waiting for him to finish; when he was, the captain motioned with his hand.
"What's the matter with him? Is it contagious?"
Drake shook his head. "No. Simple allergy reaction, that's all. He'll be all right."
"Something he ate?"
"No—he's allergic to duck feathers."
Dumbrowski leaned against the wall, and said nothing for a long moment. "I think I could cry," he said after a bit. "I honestly think I could cry. Can't cure him, I suppose?"
"Not with what I have on board. All I can do is keep the reaction down. He'll have to stay away from the ducks from now on."
Dumbrowski looked at Drake. "You know," he said philosophically, "when this trip is over, I think I shall apply for a vacation in the Martian uranium mines. I understand it's very pleasant."
Drake listened to the scrape, scrape, scrape of the shovel as Dumbrowski pushed it over the deck. It was a good thing the decks were covered with plastic; it would have been impossible to keep bare steel clean by scraping alone.
The doctor had put a small amount of the sterilized grit into a test tube and added hydrochloric acid. He held it up to look at it. Behind him, he could hear Dumbrowski's heavy breathing.
"No bubbles," Drake said. "No lime."
"What?" the captain asked wheezily.
Drake turned around. "There's no lime left in the grit. It's supplied in the form of crushed oyster shell; the birds need it for bone formation now and egg formation later. It dissolves slowly, so most of the oyster shell is excreted intact. But this grit has been reprocessed so many times that there's no lime left."
Devris pushed open the door and trundled in a can of feed on the improvised wheelbarrow. He listened for a moment to the gasping breath of the captain and watched the worried look on Drake's face. "How much of this can the human system stand?" he asked, of no one in particular. "Mac has eczema, the skipper is coming down with asthma, Drake has ducks, and I have the galloping heebie-jeebies."
Dumbrowski ignored him. "What about this lime, Doc? Can they do without it?"
"Not at this stage of the game; it'd kill them to go without it for very long."
"I will gladly sacrifice my useless bones to be ground up for duck food," Devris volunteered. "Or, if that seems drastic, we can all pull each other's teeth."
"Very funny," said Drake sarcastically.
"It isn't so funny, at that," Dumbrowski told him. "We haven't got any lime on board. Why didn't you think of this before?"
"It's never come up before," Drake said, irritated. "We know how much oyster shell to give them, but the amount that's actually absorbed has never been computed because there's no necessity for it, usually."
"Well, you still should have mentioned it before now." Dumbrowski's voice was tight.
"Hey! Hey!" Devris interrupted. "Don't go flying off the handle, you two! That fire hose, you know, still works." He set the can of feed gently on the floor, shooing ducks out of the way.
"You know the trouble with you two guys?" he continued. "You, Doc, know everything about ducks and nothing about spaceships. And the skipper knows everything about spaceships and nothing about ducks. And neither of you knows which bit of information is vitally necessary for the other. And you both think the other is playing it dirty by withholding information."
"You're right," said Dumbrowski, cooling perceptibly. "I'm sorry, Doc; now, let's think about this.
"Lime, you say. I'm not much of a chemist; isn't that calcium oxide?"
"Not in this case. 'Lime' can be calcium oxide, or calcium hydroxide, or calcium phosphate, or calcium carbonate, depending on who's doing the talking. In this case, it's the carbonate."
"You couldn't use calcium chloride, I suppose. We've got plenty of that in the emergency air purifiers."
"I'm afraid not. It'd have to be the carbonate."
"Hey!" Devris said suddenly. "I'm no chemist, either, but couldn't we add carbon dioxide to it or something?"
"Not unless we had plenty of sodium hydroxide or the like—"
"We do!" said Dumbrowski. "We've got that in the air purifiers, too! It takes the CO2 out!"
"Then we've got it!" Drake was excited. "We run enough carbon dioxide through it to make sodium carbonate; then we mix the calcium chloride with it! The calcium carbonate formed will drop to the bottom because it's insoluble, leaving sodium chloride in solution! It's perfect!"
Then his face fell. "But we can't tamper with the air purifiers, can we?"
Devris and Dumbrowski both grinned. The navigator said: "That proves my point—you don't know enough about spaceships."
Dumbrowski said: "These are the emergency purifiers. As long as the electronic purifiers work, we don't use the chemicals—too inefficient. We only have 'em aboard in case the electronics go out—and they're in good condition. Besides, we shouldn't have to use all the chemicals. About how much would you need?"
"I'll have to figure it out from the lime removed from the grit, but it shouldn't be too much."
"Good! We're all set, then."
More weeks passed. The brooders were taken outside to make more room as the birds increased in size and need for living space. By the end of the sixteenth week, the Constanza was full of ducks. From engine room to control dome, there were nothing but ducks-ducks that waddled and quacked and flapped their way freely through the huge ship. All the doors were left open now, except those which sealed off the engines and the control rooms and the sleeping compartments. Everywhere else, there were ducks. Thousands of ducks.
It had been hard work, but the pressure was beginning to let up a little as the hour of their rescue approached. None of the men had had too much sleep, and all had lost weight. Even Dumbrowski was beginning to look hollow-cheeked.
To Drake, everything was fine; his ducks were in fine fettle, all of them. The tanks that had been built and flooded for swimming purposes were being used as the older ducks taught the young ones to swim. Everything was fine except for one thing—he still didn't understand the odd aloofness that concealed Dumbrowski's anger. Why should the captain be sore at Drake before the accident happened? The remark about "Drake and his harem of ducks" still rankled.
He didn't understand it until one evening when Devris broke into song. Durnbrowski was not in the little common room when it happened; he was in his own cabin.
Devris was singing: "Old MacDonald had a ship, E,I,E,I,O! And on this ship, he had some ducks, E,I,E,I,O! With a Quack! Quack! here and a Quack! Quack! there, here a Quack! there a Quack! everywhere a Quack! Quack! Old MacDonald had a ship, E,I,E,I,O-O-O-O!"
When he'd reached the part where he said "here a Quack!" he'd indicated Drake with a thumb. The doctor grinned good-humoredly. MacDonald was laughing uproariously.
Devris had started with the second verse: "Old MacDonald got the itch, E,I,E,I,O!"
"That's a lie!" bellowed Dumbrowski's voice from the door. They all stopped and looked at him. It was quite obvious that he had been hitting the Irish bottle.
"No it isn't, skipper," Devris said. "He does have the itch."
"I mean about the ship! This is my ship! It ain't Old MacDonald's ship, or Drake's ship, or the ducks' ship! It's my ship, and I'm captain here!" He swung around to Drake. "You understand that, Quack?"
Drake didn't mind Devris calling him that, but when Dumbrowski did, it made him see red. He stood up. "What makes you think I care who runs this dirty tub?"
"Dirty tub! Who made it dirty? You! You and your carte blanche orders from the Commission!"
MacDonald and Devris were both on their feet, moving to block off the captain.
But Drake said: "Wait a minute! What's all this about? What carte blanche? I don't know what you're talking about!"
Dumbrowski said something foul. Then he added: "And I don't care what the Commission does, either! I'm captain here! See!" He turned back into his cabin and came out again with two sheets of flimsy. "Here!" He threw them at Drake. Then he slammed the door, leaving the three men alone.
Drake picked up the papers and read them.
"What does it say, Doc?" MacDonald asked.
Drake looked up slowly. "He must have got this before takeoff. It says that Dr. Rouen Drake is entirely responsible for the cargo, and that any orders pertaining to the cargo should be obeyed."
Devris whistled softly. "Wow!"
"No wonder he's been sore!" MacDonald said.
Drake swore, borrowing some of Dumbrowski's vocabulary. "How stupid can they get! I swear to you, I didn't ask for any such thing. I thought I was just bucking the skipper's bullheadedness. I wonder why he didn't say something about this before?"
"He probably assumed you knew," Devris said. "He should have said something about it though."
"I'm glad he didn't," Drake said softly. "I've learned a lot in the past eight and a half months."
"What do you mean?"
"I was so stupid then that I might have tried to give orders." Drake's voice was very low.
The captain of the cargo ship Stramaglia looked out of his control blister at the mass ahead.
"It most certainly does not look like the Constanza ," he said, "I wonder what those things are sticking out allover it? And why is it painted white?"
"May as well find out," said his engineer. He held his helmet globe under his arm. "Jones and I will go over and take a look."
Captain Dumbrowski and his crew were waiting for the men from the Stramaglia as soon as they came in from the air lock, their spacesuits coated with white powder.
Martin, the engineer, and Jones, the navigator of the rescue ship, were confronted by three tired-looking, almost emaciated men. The newcomers found one-point-five gees difficult to bear, but the men from the Constanza seemed to be used to it.
"Don't take your helmets off just yet," Dumbrowski said. "The air pressure in here is pretty high. Let it leak in".
"O.K.," said Martin. "By the way, what is that white stuff we got all over us. ?" At the same moment he cracked his helmet just a little, and a hissing jet of the ship's atmosphere hit him in the face. He flinched. "And what's that smell?"
"Duck excrement," said Dumbrowski, answering two questions with two syllables.
"These two men are Lieutenant Devris, my navigator, and Dr. Drake, in charge of ducks. My engineer, MacDonald, is confined to quarters for being allergic to ducks."
"Uh...I...uh, yeah. Sure. Are you ready to start work on the control systems?"
"Let's go," said Dumbrowski. "And mind the ducks."
"Huh?"
"Never mind—come along."
"This place isn't so bad," said Devris. "It isn't nearly as hot as I thought."
Dumbrowski looked around him at the scenery of Okeefenokee. Overhead hung drifts of clouds, through which a bright yellow sun blazed. "It isn't as hot as it was on the ship. This is in the southern hemisphere; the ducks are to be set free farther north, nearer the equator."
"Have they got the ducks unloaded yet?"
"Yeah," said Dumbrowski. "Now they're airing it out and washing it down."
The Constanza and the Stramaglia towered high over the little cluster of buildings around the planet's one small spaceport. So far, the planet only had a population of eighty, and these were mostly ecologists and biologists studying the planet. It wouldn't be fit to really colonize for a while yet.
They had been on the planet less than twenty-four hours, but they had been ordered to return to Earth as soon as practicable—which meant immediately.
MacDonald was walking toward Dumbrowski and Devris, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. "Communication from Earth," he said, handing the sheet to the captain.
Dumbrowski read it and said: "What the devil? Listen to this: 'Excellent job on preserving shipment to Okeefenokee. Citation is being placed in your promotion file for job above and beyond call of duty. Congratulations.'" He looked wonderingly at MacDonald and Devris. "How could that be?"
"Devris—tell him," said MacDonald. "Drake worked it out," Devris explained. "That stupid order wasn't his idea. He didn't even know anything about it. So he wrote a report that ought to keep the top brass from ever pulling a stunt like that again."
"But...but...how?"
"They'd put him in charge of the cargo, hadn't they? Well, remember Section XIX, Paragraph Seven?"
"No."
"Well, Drake did after seeing it once. It says that the cargo officer is responsible for all damage due to shifting cargo, because it's his job to make sure it doesn't shift—follow? Well, technically, a duck is cargo in this case, and if it shifted—or walked, or flew—in such a way as to damage the ship, it's the cargo officer's fault. And that message you got from the Commission technically appointed him cargo officer. And that's against regs, because the Constanza only rates a three-man crew. Drake tied 'em up good."
"But what will they do to him?" MacDonald asked.
Dumbrowski grinned. "Nothing. What can they do? He's not a member of the Space Service."
"They could give him a commission and then bust him," Devris said helpfully.
The voyage home would be pure vacation. It would be cool and comfortable, and a one-gee pull all the way. Nothing to do but loaf and get soft after eighteen weeks of hell.
The Constanza lifted comfortably from the surface of Okeefenokee and speared Earthwards at ten thousand light speeds.
"Ahhhh!" said Dumbrowski. "Feel that air! Smell that air! Deelightfull! Open another beer."
"Glad to," said Drake. "I am going to enjoy this trip." Dumbrowski hadn't apologized, and Drake hadn't even worried about it. Each knew how the other felt.
"I'm going to have to juggle my books," Drake said, sipping at his beer. "Otherwise, I'll get hell when we get home."
"How's that?" Devris asked interestedly.
"Evidently my egg count was off. I know how many ducks died en route—about average. But I must have miscounted the number of eggs that didn't hatch. I was one short."
"What'll they do? Charge you two thousand bucks for it?"
"Nope. I'll just add one to my bad egg count, that's all."
"Damn!" said MacDonald. "I itch?" He scratched furiously at his arm.
"Maybe there's a duck feather around," said Devris.
Then they heard a far-off sound, and all four men stared at each other in horror. They knew, then, why MacDonald itched, and what had happened to the extra duck.
The sound came again.
Somewhere a duck quacked.