The two ships merged their force fields into a common net and after half an hour the living cloud, tightly grasped by the two ships, lay on the grass not far from us. We all ran over to them. I have to admit that I was the first tor each the scene; after all, I understood what a service Ella had done for biology.
The living nebula was…. well, interesting. In interstellar space once it had expanded to fill several million cubic kilometers the effect must have been overpowering, but here on the grass, confined by the occasionally glittering force scene, it really looked like a thick, grey, pulsing cloud.
The air lock to Ella’s ship slid wide and she ran down the extending steps. Her husband, the First Captain, ran to meet her. He stretched out strong arms and Ella jumped up to meet him. The Captain held her in the air a moment and carefully let her down to the ground.
“You’re not injured?” He asked.
“No.” Ella answered, laughing. “And anyway none of that was really important.
Ella was breathtakingly beautiful and all the men fell in love with her at once. Even the empathicator had become transparent from the feelings that filled it.
“Nothing else matters.” Ella repeated, shaking her long blond hair. “The gas cloud is captured, and now all that remains is to get it to Earth to convince the skeptics that it really does exist.
I kept my silence, in as much as under skeptics she, naturally, would include me. I even remembered our last meeting of sorts at the conference and had ridiculed her for chasing after Science Fiction. There exist in the universe so many real, perfectly natural and ordinary animals the study of which costs time and effort, such as the Dragonette minor, wander bushes, and empathicator, that the very concept of a living gas cloud struck me as a fantasy. And I had said so at the time.
“Where have you been hiding?” Ella exclaimed when she saw the Second Captain. “I haven’t seen you for several years. How are you getting on? Are you still flying?”
“No.” The Second Captain answered, “basically I’ve been sitting in one spot.”
“That’s perfectly fine.” Ella supported him. “You can get an enormous amount of work done sitting in one spot. And whose is this charming little girl.”
“I’m called Alice.” The charming little girl answered.
“Alice. What an unusual name.”
“It’s perfectly ordinary. Alice Selezneva.”
“Wait a moment. Does your father not work in the Moscow Zoo?”
“He does.” Alice answered. She knew nothing about our scientific disagreements.
“That’s great, Alice; when you see your father I’d like you to tell him that living gas clouds are not biological nonsense, they’re not fantasies or fairy tale imaginings as he likes to say, but totally real.”
“You can tell him yourself.” Alice said. “My father is here. There he is.”
No escape was possible for me now; I stepped forward and introduced myself.
“I beg your pardon.” I said. “Rather clearly I must acknowledge my error.”
“This is marvelous.” Ella answered. “Now you can help me study the cloud.”
“With pleasure.”
Then Ella turned toward her husband.
“And how did you happen to be here?”
“The Second got into trouble,” Seva answered briefly, “and we had to get him out of it. And we did, with the help of our new friends.”
“And just what sort of trouble did you get into, Captain?”
“I was held captive by pirates.”
“By pirates. I thought you defeated them long ago.”
“We did, but they came back. You know what happens if you leave one weed in the ground.”
“Well, I really don’t understand it.” Ella threw up her hands. “Who in our day and age ever has to spend four years in jail?”
Ella had come to us from another world, the world we were familiar with but from which we had been gone for the last few days. And, in fact, she should it difficult to believe when we told her about torture, caverns, and treachery. For the nonce no one bothered to argue with her.
“And what have you done with the pirates?” Ella asked.
“One’s in a cage. Two are in the hold. The fattest and worst was just here a moment ago.” The Second Captain answered. “Where has he gotten to?”
The Fat Man had vanished. A moment ago he had been sitting on the grass, laughing timidly. Then he was gone.
We hunted through the surrounding underbrush, looked under and behind every bush; he could not have gotten very far. The Blabberyap bird would have raised an alarm.
“This is a fine mess.” Ella said with reproach. “You can’t keep a lone pirate locked up! Really, what sort of weeding are you doing?”
And then I noticed that the cloud was pushing against the restraining force screen stronger than it had before. I looked closer. There were footprints…
“I know where he is!” Alice shouted. She had run from behind me to the net. “He crawled into the cloud.”
“Are you here, Veselchak U?” Verkhovtseff said, leaning against the cloud.
The cloud started to shake, like a pile of hay where a wandering dog is hiding out.
“Let’s let the cloud go and see.” Seva said cheerfully.
“Not on your life!” Ella objected. “I’d never find another one.”
But the fat man’s nerves could take it no longer and his head popped out of the side of the gas cloud and through the force screen, which was only really strong enough to contain molecules of gas. His eyes were puffy and he was gasping for breath; evidently the composition of the gas in the cloud was unbreathable.
Suddenly the Fat Man cut from the cloud and threw himself running across the field.
“Where are you going?” The Second Captain called after him. “We’ll catch you in the end. If you keep running like that your heart will give out!”
But the Fat Man was not listening. He rushed between the bushes, jumped over pits, stumbled and was back on his feet again waving his arms up and down.
And so the Crockadee, lazily cruising the heights, spotted the Fat Man from above, and darted for him like a vulture fixed on a baby rabbit.
Another second and the Fat Man was waddling on air, and the bird carried him high so quickly that when the Second Captain had puled out his pistol the bird was almost half a kilometer above the ground.
“Don’t shoot.” The First Captain stopped him. “If he falls from that height he’ll be smithereens…”
No sooner had the fatal words been uttered than the fat man managed to twist around in the bird’s claws and strike at his captor with his hands. The bird let go. The fat man fell to earth like a rag doll. He vanished on the other side of the hill.
We were all silent. Then Zeleny said:
“He chose his own punishment. He couldn’t have thought of anything better.”
All of us had to agree with him.
While we had been looking at the sky the gas cloud gad silently oozed its way through the net. It had condensed itself until it had flowed between the energy strands like jam, running every which way, and when we had opened our eyes what we saw was that we stood up to our knees in grey jam.
“Grab it!” Ella shouted. “It’s getting away.
And the mist did get away. It changed phase again and surrounded us with an impenetrable mist, and when the mist dissipated an enormous grey cloud floated over our heads.
“We were planning to leave here anyway.” The second Captain said. “I suggest we make haste.”
We quickly herded the Skliss aboard the Pegasus and took off. The remaining three ships rose to follow right after us, and all of us, forming a net with our ship’s force fields, chased after the living cloud.