He also had to cut his way through the inner lock door and then he was in the Mule's lower area. The blink generator was dead. No flicker of energy showed on the instruments. The ship's atmosphere matched the thin one of the ice world. There wasn't enough free oxygen to allow a gnat to breathe.
He moved forward. A rime of frost covered everything, including an irregular heap of—something— on the deck near the external tools control panel. He started to step over, halted with one booted foot in the air, felt his heart hammer, his gorge rise, for through the coating of clear ice he saw a face, or what was left of a face. The liquid inside the eyeballs had frozen, shattering everything like glass. On the face and neck blood veins had expanded with the cold, thrusting cords of red through splits in the gray, frozen skin.
"Stay back," he said, but it was too late. Ruth was by his side looking down. Her cry was not a scream of horror. It was almost soft, a hair-raising expression of grief that lanced through him.
Ruth knelt, touched the frozen forms. David knelt beside her.
Dan Webster had managed to get his arms around his wife and there they had stayed so that they were locked together in a glacial embrace.
Ruth was sobbing quietly. David said, "Well, they were together. They would have wanted to be together."
She turned her helmeted face to glare at him. "They would have wanted to live."
"Yes, of course." He looked around. Everything seemed to be in order.
Aboard a ship there is a place for everything and everything had better be in its place if you wanted to have room to move. He left Ruth weeping beside the frozen corpses and walked into the control room. Old Folks was as dead as a ship could be. He used his gloved hand to wipe the rime off the covering of an instrument and the glass powdered under the pressure.
Damned odd. And a lance of cold came through the insulated glove with painful intensity.
"What the hell?" he muttered. He walked back to the auxiliary control panel, lifted Ruth to her feet. "We're going."
"What about them?"
"Something's very wrong here, Ruth. We're going. We're going to go back to the Fran Webster and then we're going to get the hell out of here."
"What about them?" she repeated, desperation in her voice.
"Ruth, they're not going anywhere."
"We can't just leave them here."
"Come on."
"No," she said, jerking away. She fell against the control panel. Glass and metals powdered. He had to catch her to keep her from falling through the once solid panel.
"What?" she asked, her eyes wide.
"Let's go."
She made no further objection, followed him into the sun. Her feet were cold. Where she had touched the bodies of her mother and father with her gloved hands the flesh felt numb, painfully cold. She was shivering when David helped her strip out of the suit.
"You were quite worried over there," she said.
"Damned right."
"What killed them?"
"The cold."
"The sun is hot. It made the suit coolers work."
"Tell me about it," he said, placing his suit on the rack carefully. He moved swiftly to the control room, activated the ship's flux drive, started to push the button that would have sent the Fran Webster soaring away from the planet's icy grip. Ruth's appearance on the bridge stopped him.
The transformation was instantaneous. Hot lances of overwhelming desire brought him to his feet. He could no longer remember who or where he was, or what he had been about to do. She moved to meet his lunge and they were together, lips hot and wet and hungry. He lifted her and carried her, a soft, hot, lovely burden, to his quarters and the big bed, peeled away the unisuit. He was aware only of need, a need so vast, so consuming that there was room for nothing else in his consciousness. It was not sister and brother who coupled, gasping, clutching, moaning in extreme passion, but two sexual animals from whose minds all else had been sucked away.
CHAPTER FIVE
Delicate, transparent angel sails extended backward from her shoulders. Her body was humanoid, and shapely. Wing muscles wrapped around her torso, giving the impression of breasts under a filmy garment that took its color from the short, sable fur that covered her. She was as beautiful as a butterfly with her regal stance, her protruding, multifaceted eyes, her delicate face and nose. She stood alone in an alien forest of shifting, whispering, oddly shaped trees.
"Goddamnit, Frank," she called out, "I'm going to break a leg in here. I can't see a damned thing through these freaking bug eyes."
Frank, the director of the largest and biggest ever production of The Legend of Miaree, sighed wearily.
"Frank, I'm an actress, not one of those Old Earth seers who doesn't need eyes," the whimsically delightful female said. "I'm supposed to be contemplating the possible destruction of my world, of everything that I know and love. I'm supposed to be helplessly enthralled by the maleness of a man from Delan, the constellation of the mythical beast. I'm supposed to smell like flowers because I've got the hots and all I can do is stumble over my feet because I see six of everything through these motherless bug eyes."
"All right, everybody," Frank said, "take five." He pointed a long-nailed finger at a technician. "You, Big Brain," he shouted. "It's costing just over four thousand credits per minute whether this crew is working or not. If we were paying you enough, I'd take this lost time out of your salary."
"I wouldn't turn down a raise." The speaker was young, tall, and he was often mistaken by visitors for one of the holostars in the expedition that had come to a frontier planet whose distance from U.P. center was measured in parsecs of four figures.
"Don't give me lip," the director said. "Just do something about those Goddamned bug eyes."
The young man made his way carefully onto the artfully forested holostage, approached the winged female. "I'm sorry, Miss Webster," he said. "Let me have a look."
He put his face close to hers. His heart pounded as he was submerged in the sweet scent of her breath.
"Sorry, Vinn," she said. "The eyes always worked before. Something just went wrong."
The perfection of her form was evident through the skintight garment that simulated the Artunee fur of the alien female, Miaree. The protruding eyes could not hide the classic symmetry of her face. Vinn Stern had never seen a woman who was as nearly ideal as Sheba Webster. He was grateful for the opportunity to be near her. Every day he thanked his lucky stars that he'd stumbled into his job as scientific adviser to the producer of Miaree.
"Well, that's it," he said after having stood very, very close to Sheba Webster for a full half-minute although he had seen the reason for her difficulty immediately.
"Perhaps, Mr. Stern," the director said impatiently, "you will see fit, sometime today, to tell us what it is."
"Makeup put the eyes on upside down," Vinn said.
"Oh, hell," Frank said. He made his way through Vinn Stern's version of a grove of Artunee pleele trees. "Can't you manage to do the scene, darling, without having to redo the eyes?"
"Frank," Sheba said patiently, "I'm supposed to be an alien female. I'm supposed to cease being Sheba Webster and become a being that metamorphosizes from some horrid sluglike leaf-eating creature into a sensitive entity. I'm encapsulated in fur. I'm sweating my buns off. This stuff makes me itch all over, and I'm supposed to be able to feel love for some macho alien male? I'm supposed to be able to project that I'm a lovely, doomed butterfly when I risk breaking a leg each time I move?"
Frank sighed again. It took well over an hour for makeup to prepare Sheba's face and hair. He turned away, lifted his arms toward heaven in supplication. "All right, everybody, power down. We'll have an early lunch.