“It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”
Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”
“What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”
There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy was hiding it would be no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.
Then our questions were answered for us.
Jimmy said, “What was that?”
“What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time — a horrible retching sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.
“Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t see him,” I said.
Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance, perhaps forty feet or more and then down. He landed lightly. But then he said, “I couldn’t see him at all. I couldn’t see a thing. Mia, go out about one hundred or a hundred and fifty feet toward the middle one of those big tubes and look for Riggy. I’ll go in the other direction. We’ll both make a half-circle clockwise.”
I stumbled away over the rocks toward the scout bay tubes, bouncing unevenly, slipping a couple of times, and not helped at all by the sound of Riggy and his vomiturition. I wanted to turn him off, but I didn’t because then I couldn’t hear Jimmy. When I was about the right distance from the pylon, I started making my half-circle.
Then Jimmy said, “Are you ready, Mia?”
“I’ve already started,” I said.
“Riggy,” Jimmy said. “If you don’t want to be left out here, you’d better get to your feet and do your best to be found.”
What I wanted most was to shut my eyes against the silver, just sit down and try to ease my spinning head (my eyes were beginning to ache and my ears to ring) and concentrate on quelling the nausea I felt. It reminded me of my sailing experience, but this was much worse. It was all I could do to keep walking and my feet were not going where I wanted them to. I didn’t go exactly in a half-circle, either. I tried to check on my position, to look for Riggy, and just to keep going, and I wasn’t doing very well at any of them. I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a puddled heap and puke. It would probably destroy the concept of heroics for all time.
As light as the gravity was here, I had some trouble with my traction. In jumping from one rock to another, my foot slipped, my feet tangled, and then there wasn’t a rock where I thought there was, and I took a header. Under normal gravity and without the protection of a suit, I would probably have been pretty badly hurt. As it was, I just fell. Unless you did some quiet practice first, without the distraction of this unsettling dizziness, I doubted the tremendous bounds that would be possible out here would be worth making. I lay there, fetched up against a rock that resembled nothing so much as a particularly hideous sculpture my mother once made — a distorted bust of old Lemuel Carpentier himself. The only thing that was in proper proportion was his nose, and that was his worst feature. He hadn’t been pleased. Lying still, my head didn’t clear, so I forced myself to stand up again.
Then I saw Riggy. He was on his knees, if not on his feet. He was hidden completely from the pylon by a tent-like conglomeration of rocks which had pitched together to form a sheltered area. He was still retching.
I said to Jimmy, “I’ve found him.” Then, because it didn’t matter anymore and I wanted to save my stomach if I could, I shut off my receive line.
I hardly looked at Riggy. I didn’t want to. I got him on his feet and then found that if I was careful about where I put my own feet as I walked, I could carry him. I kept my mind on reaching the pylon and then Jimmy was beside us and helping me.
We set Riggy down by the lock and Jimmy pushed the lock controls on the pylon so that we could make our way inside.
I said, “Go on through. I’ll push him inside to you.”
Jimmy went ahead. He went head first down the hole and then was gone. I waited a minute and then I fed Riggy down the hole, too. I held him by the ankles. For a moment there was a feeling exactly like that feeling of invisible force when you push the similar poles of two magnets together and Riggy was neither here nor there, but then Jimmy had him and pulled him through. I went through after.
When we were in the lock, Jimmy fed the air in. When the air was all in, the door to the lock room opened. By that time I had the headpiece of my suit off. Just in time, too. When the door opened, I took two steps forward and then threw up. It was, in a way, a considerable relief.
Jimmy and I had been outside for twenty minutes, Riggy for forty. We recovered our equilibrium in a bare few minutes, but Riggy could do nothing but sit and look miserable and hold his head.
When I threw up, Venie looked down at it and then up at me. “You’re going to have to clean that up,” she said. “I’m not.” Apparently she felt she’d had enough of the dirty work on this little adventure. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t have the strength. All I did was just sit down and close my eyes and give blessings that I was back in the real world again, even including Venie.
Jimmy and Riggy and I just sat around and the other three threw questions at us. Jimmy told them how it was.
Riggy said weakly, “If anybody wants to go, I’ll give them this suit.”
“It’s hardly in shape for anybody to wear,” Helen said, and that was true. For all that he had stopped being racked by heaves, Riggy and the inside of his suit were in impossible shape.
Jimmy said, “We’d best get these things cleaned up and returned.”
We got Riggy out of his suit and Venie was delegated to see that he got home. Helen and Att took Riggy’s suit off to clean it up, and Jimmy and I cleaned up the lock room. I don’t know how Jimmy was able to keep his stomach from first to last, but he did. His iron constitution, I guess.
When everything was cleaned up, we left Att and Helen to close the lock room and go home. I had never realized before that adventures took so much doing, so much preparation and so much cleaning up afterward. That’s something you don’t see in stories. Who buys the food and cooks it, washes the dishes, minds the baby, rubs down the horses, swabs out the guns, buries the bodies, mends the clothes, ties that rope in place so the hero can conveniently find it there to swing from, blows fanfares, polishes medals, and dies beautifully, all so that the hero can be a hero? Who finances him? I’m not saying I don’t believe in heroes — I’m just saying that they are either parasites or they spend the bulk of their time in making their little adventures possible, not in enjoying them.
Cleaning up after ourselves coupled with the lefthanded direction everything had gone took the sparkle out of us. Jimmy and I just tossed the suits over our arms and said goodbye to Helen and Att and went off toward Salvage. Things had gone so unswimmingly that I suppose I should have expected that they would continue that way. On our way, we ran into George Fuhonin. It was again a case of coming around a corner and not being able to avoid someone, though in this case we didn’t stumble over him. We simply turned the corner and found him close enough that we couldn’t ditch the suits or manage to go unseen.