They opened their mouths in protesting squawks at the same instant. I listened to them for a while, then said, “One at a time!”
“If you’re implying that one of us deliberately sabotaged the ship,” Holdreth said, “I want you to know—”
“I’m not implying anything. But the way it looks to me, you two decided you’d like to stay here a while longer to continue your investigations, and figured the easiest way of getting me to agree was to wreck the drive.” I glared hotly at them. “Well, I’ve got news for you. I can fix this, and I can fix it in a couple of days. So go on—get about your business! Get all the zoologizing you can in, while you still have time. I—”
Davison laid a hand gently on my arm. “Gus,” he said quietly, “we didn’t do it. Neither of us.”
Suddenly all the anger drained out of me and was replaced by raw fear. I could see that Davison meant it.
“If you didn’t do it, and Holdreth didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it—then who did?”
Davison shrugged.
“Maybe it’s one of us who doesn’t know he’s doing it,” I suggested. “Maybe—” I stopped. “Oh, that’s nonsense. Hand me that tool-kit, will you, Lee?”
They left to tend to the animals, and I set to work on the repair job, dismissing all further speculations and suspicions from my mind, concentrating solely on joining Lead A to Input A and Transistor F to Potentiometer K, as indicated. It was slow, nerve-harrowing work, and by mealtime I had accomplished only the barest preliminaries. My fingers were starting to quiver from the strain of small-scale work, and I decided to give up the job for the day and get back to it tomorrow.
I slept uneasily, my nightmares punctuated by the moaning of the accursed anteaters and the occasional squeals, chuckles, bleats, and hisses of the various other creatures in the hold. It must have been four in the morning before I dropped off into a really sound sleep, and what was left of the night passed swiftly. The next thing I knew, hands were shaking me, and I was looking up into the pale, tense faces of Holdreth and Davison.
I pushed my sleep-stuck eyes open and blinked. “Huh? What’s going on?”
Holdreth leaned down and shook me savagely. “Get up, Gus!”
I struggled to my feet slowly. “Hell of a thing to do, wake a fellow up in the middle of the—”
I found myself being propelled from my cabin and led down the corridor to the control room. Blearily, I followed where Holdreth pointed, and then I woke up in a hurry.
The drive was battered again. Someone—or something—had completely undone my repair job of the night before.
If there had been bickering among us, it stopped. This was past the category of a joke now; it couldn’t be laughed off, and we found ourselves working together as a tight unit again, trying desperately to solve the puzzle before it was too late.
“Let’s review the situation,” Holdreth said, pacing nervously up and down the control cabin. “The drive has been sabotaged twice. None of us knows who did it, and on a conscious level each of us is convinced he didn’t do it.”
He paused. “That leaves us with two possibilities. Either, as Gus suggested, one of us is doing it unaware of it even himself, or someone else is doing it while we’re not looking. Neither possibility is a very cheerful one.”
“We can stay on guard, though,” I said. “Here’s what I propose: first, have one of us awake at all times—sleep in shifts, that is, with somebody guarding the drive until I get it fixed. Two—jettison all the animals aboard ship.”
“What?”
“He’s right,” Davison said. “We don’t know what we may have brought aboard. They don’t seem to be intelligent, but we can’t be sure. That purple-eyed baby giraffe, for instance—suppose he’s been hypnotizing us into damaging the drive ourselves? How can we tell?”
“Oh, but—” Holdreth started to protest, then stopped and frowned soberly. “I suppose we’ll have to admit the possibility,” he said, obviously unhappy about the prospect of freeing our captives. “We’ll empty out the hold, and you see if you can get the drive fixed. Maybe later we’ll recapture them all, if nothing further develops.”
We agreed to that, and Holdreth and Davison cleared the ship of its animal cargo while I set to work determinedly at the drive mechanism. By nightfall, I had managed to accomplish as much as I had the day before.
I sat up as watch the first shift, aboard the strangely quiet ship. I paced around the drive cabin, fighting the great temptation to doze off, and managed to last through until the time Holdreth arrived to relieve me.
Only—when he showed up, he gasped and pointed at the drive. It had been ripped apart a third time.
Now we had no excuse, no explanation. The expedition had turned into a nightmare.
I could only protest that I had remained awake my entire spell on duty, and that I had seen no one and no thing approach the drive panel. But that was hardly a satisfactory explanation, since it either cast guilt on me as the saboteur or implied that some unseen external power was repeatedly wrecking the drive. Neither hypothesis made sense, at least to me.
By now we had spent four days on the planet, and food was getting to be a major problem. My carefully budgeted flight schedule called for us to be two days out on our return journey to Earth by now. But we still were no closer to departure than we had been four days ago.
The animals continued to wander around outside, nosing up against the ship, examining it, almost fondling it, with those damned pseudo-giraffes staring soulfully at us always. The beasts were as friendly as ever, little knowing how the tension was growing within the hull. The three of us walked around like zombies, eyes bright and lips clamped. We were scared—all of us.
Something was keeping us from fixing the drive.
Something didn’t want us to leave this planet.
I looked at the bland face of the purple-eyed giraffe staring through the viewport, and it stared mildly back at me. Around it was grouped the rest of the local fauna, the same incredible hodgepodge of improbable genera and species.
That night, the three of us stood guard in the control-room together. The drive was smashed anyway. The wires were soldered in so many places by now that the control panel was a mass of shining alloy, and I knew that a few more such sabotagings and it would be impossible to patch it together any more—if it wasn’t so already.
The next night, I just didn’t knock off. I continued soldering right on after dinner (and a pretty skimpy dinner it was, now that we were on close rations) and far on into the night.
By morning, it was as if I hadn’t done a thing.
“I give up,” I announced, surveying the damage. “I don’t see any sense in ruining my nerves trying to fix a thing that won’t stay fixed.”
Holdreth nodded. He looked terribly pale. “We’ll have to find some new approach.”
“Yeah. Some new approach.”
I yanked open the food closet and examined our stock. Even figuring in the synthetics we would have fed to the animals if we hadn’t released them, we were low on food. We had overstayed even the safety margin. It would be a hungry trip back—if we ever did get back.
I clambered through the hatch and sprawled down on a big rock near the ship. One of the furless dogs came over and nuzzled in my shirt. Davison stepped to the hatch and called down to me.
“What are you doing out there, Gus?”
“Just getting a little fresh air. I’m sick of living aboard that ship.” I scratched the dog behind his pointed ears, and looked around.
The animals had lost most of their curiosity about us, and didn’t congregate the way they used to. They were meandering all over the plain, nibbling at little deposits of a white doughy substance. It precipitated every night. “Manna,” we called it. All the animals seemed to live on it.