"Boy, I think there was something wrong with the gin I got on Dittersdorf," Yerby said. He closed his eyes, shuddered at whatever he saw inside his head, and opened them again. "The top of my skull feels like it's going to pop off."
"You drank more than two quarts of liquor immediately before we got into our sleep capsules," Mark said, trying not to scold. "I was afraid you might have poisoned yourself drinking so much."
Yerby shrugged and winced at the motion. "Oh," he said, "I always do that before transit to keep from scrambling my brains. The doc's got a machine but it never worked for me. I just get drunked up before I go under, and I come through okay."
Yerby didn't look okay, but Mark wasn't in perfect shape himself. Nobody was at his best following days of electronically induced suspended animation. Mark knew how to bring his brain waves in line with the induction apparatus instead of fighting it, but sleep travel still wasn't his idea of a fun time.
The alternative was to stay awake during transit between bubble universes, where all physical laws changed and life itself was an unnatural intrusion. Starship crews had to do that, and by the time a voyage was over they were virtually psychotic.
The flight crew had disembarked before ground personnel brought the passengers out of their sleep capsules. The navigator stood near the ship, punching violently at nothing at all. Two crewmen sat catatonic at the edge of the field, their eyes focused a thousand miles away. The chief cargo handler was sobbing uncontrollably in the cargo hatch; three stevedores waited to unload the ship, but they knew that if they disturbed the crying woman she might claw them like a wounded leopard.
The captain plaited grass blades into a chain. As his fingers formed the chain from the bottom, he swallowed the other end.
There were worse things than Mark's wooziness, or even than Yerby's hangover.
The landing site was a rough plain. A dozen winch points-bollards set down to bedrock-ringed the field three hundred yards out. A ship could skid itself off the magnetic mass to allow another vessel to land. Two ships similar to the freighter Mark stood in were on the margins of the field now.
Most of the hills surrounding the field were heavily forested. " Greenwood " wouldn't have been a bad name for the planet even if the Protector of Hestia had been a Mr. Smith. On the knoll five hundred yards to the east sprawled a complex of stone and concrete buildings. Several brightly colored dirigibles bobbed on tethers above the courtyard wall; winged flyers, seemingly too delicate to be machines, lifted toward the ship.
"There's the Spiker, lad," Yerby said. He pointed toward the buildings with the care his throbbing hangover demanded. "Blaney's Tavern to the ship crews, but all the folk on Greenwood call it… See the critter there at the front gate?"
Mark squinted. "I thought it was a truck," he said. "Or a tank."
"The critter" was thirty feet long, ten feet broad, and ten more feet high. It stood on six stumpy legs and appeared to have neither a neck nor a tail. The huge head was jagged with scores of spines a foot or two long; rows of similar projections ran down the backbone and the flank Mark could see from this angle.
"A spiker," Yerby said. "Ain't very many of them. Guess there couldn't be or they'd eat the place down to the rock. That one charged a bulldozer while they were building the field. Would've flipped the dozer over, too, if old Blaney hadn't finally managed to burn through the hide."
The freighter's winch hummed, tracking the first load of cargo out of the hold. Much of it was Amy's luggage. "Guess I'm ready to do some work," Yerby said. To Mark he didn't look ready for anything but embalming, but it wasn't Mark's place to judge.
Ground personnel had extended the hatch steps when the ship arrived; in the grip of transit psychosis, the flight crew had simply jumped or fallen out of the vessel. There was no railing. Mark led Yerby gingerly down to the hot soil.
"Hope Desiree's here with a blimp," Yerby said. "My wife," he added with an apologetic grimace. "Damned if I know why I ever married her. Drunk, I suppose."
Mark's lips pursed. It wasn't his place to comment on Yerby's attitudes or domestic arrangements, either.
Amy appeared at the hatch above them, gray-faced. She moved with short, shuffling steps like a mummy whose feet were still wrapped together. She started to walk out into space.
"Amy!" Mark shouted as he bounded up the ten steps a lot faster than he'd have bet he could manage in the aftermath of suspended animation. He caught Amy by the shoulders an instant before she went off the edge of the top step.
"Something hurts," Amy said in a tiny voice. Her eyes didn't point in quite the same direction. "I think my head hurts."
"Here, lad, I got her," Yerby said. He reached past from the step below Mark. "Jump clear and I'll lift her down. Didn't the little gadget work for you neither, darling? The doc showed me the best one and I bought it."
"Do you think-" Mark said. Do you think you're in shape to carry jour sister, Yerby? he'd have continued, but obviously Yerby did think that and nothing anybody else said was likely to change his mind.
Mark jumped the six feet to the ground. Yerby lifted his sister and carried her as delicately as porcelain down the unrailed steps. He must still have the hangover, but Mark supposed Yerby had a lot of experience doing things hungover. And probably dead drunk, too.
"I don't know," Amy said. "If it worked, then I'm never going to travel anywhere again. Oh, Yerby, I hurt."
She was still wearing a net of fine wires with a lead to the pocket of her jacket. Mark removed the net and pulled a flat, four-inch square metal box from the pocket.
"My goodness," he said in horror. "You were using this? No wonder you've got a headache. My goodness, this is worse than nothing!"
"The doc said it was the best kind," Yerby said doubtfully. "It sure cost enough, I'll tell you that."
A dirigible had lifted from the Spiker's courtyard. Three individual flyers were circling closer. The upper surfaces of the flyers' thin, rigid wings were covered with solar cells. A small electric motor drove a propeller above the central spine, and the tubular frame beneath would hold two people if they were good friends.
"Twenty years ago," Mark said, "they thought you could lock your own brain patterns over those imposed by the ship's mechanism. Some people thought that. What really happened is the two systems set up harmonics that changed every time the ship transited to another bubble universe."
He glared at the device in his hand. "Look," he said, "I can teach you both how to bring your patterns into synch with the ship instead of fighting it. When the ship changes universes, you'll stay under but you'll shift too. That's what the newer electronics try to do, but none of them are really subtle enough and you don't need a machine."
"Guess we don't need this one," Yerby said. He took the device, crushed it in his right hand, and dropped the remains on the hard soil. He stroked his sister's hair very gently. "You teach Amy if you would, lad," he said. "Me, well, the booze works well enough for me."
He looked up at the hatch and called, "Hello, Doc-"
Dr. Jesilind walked into the hatch coaming. He spun counterclockwise at the impact and pitched out of the hatchway. Jesilind hit the ground flat and lay there on his back. His face bore a dazed smile.
Mark walked over to Jesilind.
"Oh, don't worry about the doc," Yerby said. "When he comes out of the capsule, it's like he's been tying one on for a week. You know a drunk never hurts himself falling."
"I didn't know that," Mark said. He didn't believe it, either. "But I can't say I was terribly worried."