The pilots agreed. Slowly the two ships reeled in cable, pulling themselves closer to the cradle and each other.
Wind shook the cradle. The cables hummed. So far, so good, Orem thought.
Suddenly Ivan’s shuttle swung sideways. Ivan shouted over the comm. “Malfunction! Riena, blast west. Thruster failure, thruster failure.”
Horrified, Orem watched helplessly as Ivan’s ship rolled over and smashed into Riena’s. Flame burst into the air, then streamed back in the wind. The ships crashed into the ground not a hundred meters from the cradle.
Ivan screamed, then Riena. Orem’s stomach turned, the taste of copper in his mouth. The screaming went on until he turned the comm volume off.
That night Jason died. Mara stabilized the others by large injections of serum and the last-ditch idea of deepfreezing the bodies. Orem reprogrammed the oxygenator to produce dry ice. Carbon dioxide was one thing Amaterasu had plenty of. Suze stopped breathing, her life dangling from a few wires and a plastic tube half the size of a drinking straw.
At last the wind dropped.
When the sun came out, needle bugs covered the dome. Hundreds hopped and crawled, sometimes in twos and threes, sometimes in hundreds, over the huge trees lying flat on the ground.
Orem guessed the female bugs captured the males, mated, then left the dead males as food for their maggots, or whatever needle bugs had. Other animals either left or became bug fodder. No doubt the expedition had managed to settle right in the middle of the mating grounds. Orem hoped the trees would soon right themselves, but none of them did. Hell, who knew? Maybe they hibernated in bug season.
Orem watched the bugs crawl on the transparent dome, their sucker feet leaving tiny damp circles. They had to get off the damned ground. Sooner or later the bugs would break through the cradle fabric. His temporary lash-up of a power line had already lived longer than he expected; without power they hadn’t a hope. Not that it made much difference if Suze died.
Suze. He remembered her just the other night—god, was it really just three days ago?—sitting naked on the edge of the bunk, the overhead lamp gleaming red on her brown hair, her fingers running over his bare chest. She laughed at how his chest hair curled around her little finger, calling him “Teddy Bear.”
Now Suze slept in a cocoon of white plastic foam with the dry ice misting her face plate.
Next week, they’d have help. The other shuttles and the pressure pod should be fixed. One of the four other habitats might come in overland, though they were equipped for mountains or desert, not jungle. Too slow. They needed something which could fly. What did they have?
The dipper could fly. A robot winged rocket, it dipped down into the atmosphere and oceans to gather air and water which the orbiting solar panels upstairs converted to hydrogen and oxygen, shuttle fuel.
Could he convert the dipper to a rescue craft? It could take twelve passengers, but hardly the cradle. It couldn’t hover, and had no landing gear. No hope. So they’d have to wait a week for a shuttle. Yeah. In another week, Suze will be dead. All four of them will be dead, his friends and shipmates. He needed to do something now, not next week.
The mistake they’d made from the beginning was thinking that since Amaterasu was like Earth in most things, it was like Earth in everything. Who’d have thought that trees would lie down, or that the needle bugs would take to the air? Amaterasu was not conventional.
He was conventional, too damned much so. He’d prepared for the wrong emergencies. Conventional thinking would kill him, and Suze, and Mara, and everyone. Now he had to break out of conventional thinking because nothing conventional would save them.
What was he overlooking? What resource did he have?
He glanced out of the transparent panels. The two shuttles had crumpled into a hopeless mass of wreckage. He could see their enormous fuel tanks through the shattered hull. Good thing those didn’t blow.
Automatically his mind registered that there was enough oxygen there for months. Hydrogen too. Maybe he could make a torch and bum out the damned bugs.
Hydrogen. Unbidden, a picture from a history vid came into his mind, the Graf Zeppelin, an enormous airship, a sky whale cruising over continents and oceans at a time when the average airplane could barely cross a state.
A great idea. But he would have to do a hell of a lot of work.
“You’re going to pump the entire cradle full of carbon dioxide?” Mara said. Her armored suit made her look enormous, buggy, like everything else on Amaterasu. Behind her, Orem could see four cocoons lying on metal shelves. One was Suze. “Why, may I ask?”
“To force out all the oxygen,” Orem said. “Carbon dioxide’s heavier. It will push the air out through the top of the dome. Then I’ll seal the dome, and pump in hydrogen, which is lighter, and it will push the carbon dioxide down out the bottom. Presto. We have the cradle full of pure hydrogen. No oxygen, no explosions. Trust me.”
“So you think we will fly?”
“We’ll float, like a balloon. I’ve done the calculations. Then the dipper’s going to come down and pick us up. Upstairs are already working on the reprogramming and modifications.
“So how do we transfer from here to the dipper?”
“That’s tricky.”
She sighed. “What’s Plan B?”
“We stay here and become nutrient for baby needle bugs.”
For the next few hours, the surviving crew worked as if their lives depended on it, which they did. With a great whooshing rush, the cradle filled with carbon dioxide, the air whistling out a hole in the dome. Standing at the hole, Orem monitored the flow, torch in hand in case of needle bugs.
Hearing a sudden scurrying, he turned. Needle bug, on the floor behind him, flipping over and over. He aimed the torch, then paused. What was the matter with it? Oh, obviously. Suffocating. Not even needle bugs could breath pure carbon dioxide. He torched it. Another, legs twitching, dropped from the ceiling. He torched it. They were everywhere, and he thought they’d all been driven outside. At least suffocating bugs didn’t sneak up on you, and as the expanding carbon dioxide chilled the fabric, the bugs on the outside dropped off. An unexpected bonus.
By afternoon, hydrogen had replaced the carbon dioxide. The cradle bulged upward like a mattress thrown over a barrel, tugging at the restraining cables with enough lift to spare. The balloon idea worked. But the midair transfer—he didn’t want to think about it.
“OK, upstairs. Launch the dipper. We’re coming up.”
“Got you. But about this midair thing. We’re wondering. We see favorable winds for maybe two days. Once in the air, you could drift towards the mountains. No needle bugs there. In about five days, we could pick you up with a shuttle.”
“Yes, and we’d have four people dead.” Orem’s mouth felt dry. “Mara says their condition is growing worse. Besides, the cradle is air-tight, but not hydrogen-tight. I doubt we’ll have that much time in the air. We’ve talked it over. We’ll risk the transfer. Besides, we’ve heard your weather predictions before.”
“OK. Good luck.”
Orem flipped on the intercom to warn Mara. “All full go up here.”
“Full go down here.”
“OK, hang on.” What was it they had said in the old Graf Zeppelin movie? “Up ship!”
Orem hit the controls to drop the restraining cables. The ground fell away. Strange. He felt little sense of movement. Things just got small. In minutes the leaning trees looked no bigger than his fingers, and soon they became an undifferentiated mass of grey green. Rivers gleamed like silver ribbons against the dark mass.