Pitstop
by Stephen Burns
Illustrations by Alan M. Clark
Their marriage was widely believed to be one of convenience, the contract renewable on a year-to-year basis. Every year they surprised their colleagues by signing on for another stint.
“Dammit, will you take it easy, Claire! You spilled my bloody coffee!”
Claire Alvarez-Linstrom turned her head and grinned at her husband from the blindship’s piloting station, a console and chair bolted to the blue shag carpeted floor near the bay window. “We’re making a planetfall, Arthur dear, not doing brunch. You should expect a little turbulence.”
As if to back up her assertion, the craft shied violently. The gravdampers could have compensated, but she insisted on leaving them on at the bare minimum needed to keep the place from coming apart at the seams. Can’t fly by the seat of your pants when you’ve got your butt parked on a pile of fluffy cushions, she always said. That did give her more feedback, but then again she was one of the few surviving practitioners of the inexplicable fad sport of broken-cord bungee jumping.
Professor Arthur Linstrom tried to make himself ignore the look on his wife’s face. In repose her wide coffee-and-cream features, shaped by her unknown part-Latino parentage, could show a timeless and demure beauty that took his breath away. But other times, like now, one look into her dark eyes and words like pure stone crazy sprang to mind, and bladder control became the issue. He reminded himself that no matter how many times her driving had scared him to death, she hadn’t killed them yet. Yet being the operative word.
“If the air is that rough,” he replied with a poor imitation of patient tolerance, “Then swop over to auto. This trip doesn’t have to be a blasted roller coaster ride.”
She gave him a look like he’d just suggested that they get out and walk. “This is quite possibly a rescue mission, remember? Which means we’re in a hurry. Auto’s just too slow and cautious.”
“For you, maybe,” he grumbled half under his breath as he swiveled his chair back toward the science station’s main board. Groping blindly behind him he snagged whatever it was draped over the back of his chair to use for mopping up the spilled coffee. A mean-spirited grin appeared on his long Nordic face when he realized it was her sweatshirt. Serves her right; he thought as he blotted up the puddle.
“Besides, I need to practice my piloting,” Claire continued blithely as the craft suddenly plummeted at least two hundred meters in less than four seconds. “Yahoo!” she cried, wrenching on the yoke and executing a maneuver which might have made a kamikaze break toilet training.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” Arthur moaned as he tried to peel his stomach back off his tonsils and empty his mind of thoughts of what hitting the unforgiving ground below at just over Mach 2 would be like. Theoretically the sfhere, the bubble-shaped stasis field wrapped around their craft, would protect them. He remembered the time back on Glacia IV when she had broken up the ice jam which had flooded an ancient city by playing human cannonball, ramming into the keystone berg at somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 kph—her only warning a somewhat inadequate and rather gratuitous Hang on! He still got the shivers thinking about it.
The only ice on the planet below was a thin frosting at its polar caps. Given the working name of Pitstop, it was fourth from the sun in a system of fourteen planets and sixty-one moons. A small, dense, metal-rich world, its surface bore a vague resemblance to the caps of the morel mushrooms he d picked as a boy in southern Ontario: high, barren and nearly airless rock ridges separating deep, roughly conical valleys—the pits which had inspired its name. Planetologists and geologists were scheduled to begin studying how it got that way sometime next week.
However it had formed, there was enough atmosphere and water to support even human life at the bottom of these pits, and a somewhat limited but quite robust variety of life abounded in a broad band of them circling the planet at its equatorial temperate zone, each pit an apparently self-con-tained ecosystem. A sentient species inhabited this niche, one of the three the Expedition had found in the system, and the most primitive.
There were almost four hundred people on this Expedition, and so far only one professor studying Pitstop—partly because the initial survey had pegged it on the ho-hum side when compared to some of the other places, and partly because no one would work with the aforementioned and legendarily disagreeable professor.
A professor who now seemed to be missing.
“Any sign of old Whaletits?” Claire called, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes and squinting out the bay window as if looking for someone to dogfight.
“No. I’m reading indigenes and the usual flora and fauna in each pit we pass over, but no sign of Professor Whalsitz.”
“Well, be sure to sing out Thar she blows! if you spot her! Otherwise we’ll just continue on down to where her blindship is parked and start from there.”
Getting out of the sky and onto solid ground sounded like an exceptionally good idea to Arthur. “How long until we get there?”
“Splashdown in five minutes.”
His broad forehead furrowed in a warning scowl. “Will you stop calling it that, Claire! We are going to alight, gently as a settling thistledown. Right? Right?”
She snickered. “Whatever you say, my rooster.”
The craft suddenly sideslipped and began plunging downward. Arthur’s cup went skidding across the board and off the edge, tumbling to the shag-carpeted floor.
“That’s it, we’re getting a divorce on our next anniversary,” he growled darkly as he tightened the straps of his crash harness. On the biggest science station screen before him a jagged rocky scarp flashed beneath them with what appeared to be only a whisker to spare and they began descending into the pit.
Their landing was not, as Arthur had feared, a reenactment of Dorothy’s famous filmic house-drop into Oz, This was an especially apt image considering their craft’s appearance.
Much as he hated to, he had to give Claire credit. When she wanted to, she could settle a blindship in with as close to zero disturbance as could be expected from landing what was essentially a two-bedroom, one-bath, single-story modular house wrapped in a Whugg sfhere. When she wanted to. Today she did. Next time, who knew?
“We’re down,” she announced, a faint vibration passing through the building as it settled in. “Welcome to Pitstop.” She punched in a command for automatic shutdown, stood and stretched her tall, chunky body. “How’re we looking?”
“Seriously not here.” The spytes had deployed while they were descending, and, site integration complete, four had arrayed themselves to relay a blindage check. Claire sauntered over to stand behind her husband and look over his shoulder at the display.
Seen from the outside their ungainly vinyl-sided craft was effectively invisible. The spytes had scanned the landing site down to the micron level. Now a virtual copy of the unoccupied site was being projected by holo-cloak, the ship’s Whugg computer constantly adjusting the image to compensate for changing light levels, wind and other environmental factors. Nor was the visible light spectrum the only band covered. Any creature that used radar, sonar, charge-sense, magnetic imaging or other perceptive method would likewise be fooled. Like most Whugg technology, humans had only the vaguest idea how the damned stuff worked and even less compunction about using it.
Still, placement of a blindship was critical. Invisible or not, if you parked it dead square across the alien equivalent of a footpath an indigene was bound to walk right into the repeller field, thumping its alien equivalent of a head and going What the hell was that?—or the alien equivalent thereof. Although the incommunicado and quite possibly missing Professor Maud Whalsitz was an exothropologist and ostensibly studying the indigenes, she had parked her blindship at the edge of a clearing well over a kilometer away from their sprawling village. Claire had put their brown-roofed craft down among some bushes and trees directly across the bare red ground from the other vessel.